Photo by Flickr user Sylvar

I grew up with a hot sauce inferiority complex.

My Korean family had a hierarchy of hot: My mother and father could eat the mouth-flaying kimchi, with my Seoul-born brother near behind them, and then, haplessly Westernized, there was American-born me.

I'd get teased at church picnics by the aunties. They'd offer their kimchi, then retract it, teasing, "Oh, but you don't eat the hot stuff!" They'd say this while furrowing their brows and clucking their tongues at me as if they weren't sure I was authentically Korean, since I couldn't handle it spicy.

There are very few Korean dishes to which you couldn't acceptably add a dash or eight of Korean chili pepper powder ( gochugaru); raw crab is served spicy hot, and stews boil fiery red. Growing up, I desperately wanted to clean my church potluck plate—if only I could take the heat.

If this is indicative at all of my family's irrational pride in eating spicy food, I have a very clear memory of a time I dared my father to eat an entire bottle of yellow Amazon peppers at a restaurant, and he did so almost casually. My jaw dropped when I ate one squeamishly—and I gained newfound respect for his brain and taste buds. I remember that he didn't even seem fazed. He was just laughing across the table at me because I had underestimated him. That was the turning point of my obsession with "how hot can you go"—he'd thrown down the gauntlet.

And so, from the first time I set foot in a hot sauce shop, I've wanted to taste every variety available. I've always had something to prove. Eventually, I started going to hot sauce tastings in New York City, where I'd spend hours sipping the hottest ones I could handle.

Nowadays, I like it all—fruit-based, chipotle, spicy barbecue sauce, Reaper. But it's not only a familial habit. I've started to get high on hot sauce. I love capsaicin-tripping on the adrenaline and fervor that shoot through me like liquid fire, even more so with concentrated hot sauces than with any Korean stew. Just one small spoonful of hot sauce with my eggs in the morning gives me an endorphin high.

Because I've been to so many hot sauce tastings, I've started to notice that the same players run, attend, judge, and compete in all the events. There are hot sauce legends.

Photo by Siobhan Wallace

Once a year, the NYC Hot Sauce Expo hosts an epic hot sauce tasting for the judges of its Screaming Mi Mi Awards. One table is holy—the "Extreme Heat" table—where the biggest gluttons for pain squirm, licking up scorpion pepper and Carolina Reaper sauces and wiping the sweat from their reddened cheeks. Tasters come from all walks of the food world; there are restauranteurs, food writers, media personalities, and chefs.

Tears are shed, beer is drunk, sliders are consumed, and milk and whipped cream are used like Pepto Bismol. Eventually, sauces are ranked in various categories, including habanero, jalapeño, XXX hot sauce, Louisiana-style, fruit-based, fruit-based hot, and even best label artwork.

"In truth, capsaicin is essentially poison," hot sauce addict Craig Bundy told me. "When you eat it in a concentrated way, your body reacts like you just got lit up with something you should never be around. It's like a EpiPen. Your heart rate jumps, endorphins spike like you just finished a serious work out. It's an amazing feeling. Eating hot, hot, hot peppers is like a eight minute ride. You gotta hold on."

My whole stomach shut down. "I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see, and I thought I should call an ambulance." - Matt Timms

Matt Timms, creator of The Brooklyn Hot Sauce Takedown is one of the more passionate members of the tasting community. But even he's met his match. Once, at an event called The Guinness Book of Records Smoking Ed's Carolina Reaper Eating Contest (named after Puckerbutt hot sauce maker Ed Currie, who bred the Carolina Reaper), Timms nearly went to the hospital.

"I thought I was fine. Then my whole stomach shut down at my poker game after the competition," Timms said. "I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see, and I thought I should call an ambulance. People thought I was an insane person or drunk from the way I was walking."

But like most addicts, Timms scaled up quickly. "Forty minutes later, I was back in my poker game and I won," he said. "Then I went home and threw up red lava." He was eating hot sauce again later that night.

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Not every consumer who plunks down five bucks for a bottle of tabasco on their breakfast tacos wants to go to hot sauce tastings like The Brooklyn Hot Sauce Takedown, NYC Hot Sauce Expo, The National Fiery Foods & Barbecue Show, or the California Hot Sauce Expo. It takes a particular kind of masochist to love hot sauce this much.

According to a study from Penn State, "individuals who enjoy spicy foods exhibit higher sensation seeking and sensitivity to reward traits. Rather than merely showing reduced response to the irritating qualities of capsaicin as might be expected under the chronic desensitization hypothesis, these findings support the hypothesis that personality differences may drive differences in spicy food liking and intake."

In other words, hot sauce lovers feel the same pain as anyone else eating hot sauce—they just happen to like it.

The study also noted those with a taste for hot sauce are likelier to be thrill seekers. Jimi Daly, a hot sauce aficionado from Brooklyn, agrees. "People with a favorite hot sauce tend to have a favorite roller coaster," Daly said. "Sure, you could eat scrambled eggs with ketchup, but wouldn't you rather eat your eggs while riding a rocketship to the outer flavorsphere?"

Daly started young with Frank's Red Hot and "had to keep moving on to harder stuff to get my fix, like Tabasco and Dave's Insanity."

"I actually remember exactly where I was when I first tried hot sauce," Daly told me. "I was eight or nine at my friend's house eating chips salsa when his mom put Frank's Red Hot on the table. It blew my mind apart—my mouth was on fire but I just kept going back for more. It's funny to think about now, because Frank's is about as mild as hot sauces get, but at the time I'd never experienced anything like it. I was hooked from the start."

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Like any addiction, those on the sauce have to keep getting hotter. It's this kind of commitment to heat that brings the hot sauce community together—and it is a community.

Deirdre Kamber-Todd and Russel Todd—a couple who call themselves "The Hottest Duo on Earth"—host competitions for the Kempton Pepper Jam, and say that it's the people that bring them back.

"Whether spicy food circuiters or the regular foodies, the community is awesome," Kamber-Todd said. " A lot of the people—the professionals, the competitors, the vendors, and the like—are regulars, and are just terrific to get to know."

The couple attends and competes in hot sauce challenges together, including a super spicy sushi competition in San Jose, California, scorpion pepper pizza in Calgary, and spicy wings in Texas and Ohio. Russ is the two-time Guinness Book winner for the Carolina Reaper challenges at the NYC Hot Sauce Expo, but Ed Currie, inventor of the Reaper, maintains that "Deirdre is actually the extreme hot sauce eater of the family. She is absolutely a beast and can eat anything I can without hesitation. I have made her cry a time or two, but she is the only one I've ever not been able to get to tap out."

You see some folks walking around in pain, like a ghost is dragging them by their tongue. But then they keep going back for more. – Jimi Daly

One of Kamber-Todd's favorite events is Timms's Brooklyn Hot Sauce Takedown, which draws around 300 rabid hot sauce fans from the community, all chomping at the bit to try 20 to 30 competitors' hot sauces.

"The Hot Sauce Takedown was a blast and the audience is great. They get super rowdy and yell and cheer," Kamber-Todd said. "It really does improve performance when people are chanting your name."

Each competitor brings a half gallon of hot sauce to hose down the fans with (actually, to thrust at them on a nacho chip). First, second, and third places are awarded for audience and judge favorites, and glory is achieved in front of the cheering crowd to the sound of heavy metal.

"Trying ten different sauces is like playing Russian Roulette in your mouth," Daly said of the event. "Some people can just handle it better than others. You see some folks walking around in pain, like a ghost is dragging them by their tongue. But then they keep going back for more."

Photo by Siobhan Wallace

Communities of like-minded pepperheads gather not just at events but also at the new breed of hot sauce tasting shops, from Heat Hot Sauce Shop in Berkeley to Heatonist in Williamsburg, where dozens of new sauces can be tried every week in just a few minutes. These shops are not just emporia to purchase from, but communities to connect through and hang out with.

"There's a sense of family right off the bat due to hot sauce being a bit extreme in nature," musician and Heatonist regular Aaron Liao said. "There are locals that make their own sauce that come by Heatonist with samples."

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Matt Snider, a fan of Heat Hot Sauce Shop, loves "that hot sauce that has enough of a kick that gets you going back for more." A Berkeley graduate student, Snider goes to Heat regularly to taste from the 50 or so available sauces.

"I've honestly been amazed about how eclectic the community is. We've had kids 11 or 12 years old, then older folks," Heat owner Dylan Keenen said. "The stereotype is young guys in their mid-20s, but that doesn't always hold true. A lot of times girls can handle hotter stuff than guys can, and there was recently a study on that."

The hot sauce community's strength and eclecticism can be seen in Timms's Takedown events. "These are the eaters of the underground scene, and there are all kinds of people, but they all like the really fucking hot food," Timms said. "Some people do it once and it's a pain in the ass, [but] this is my life. I'm always going to be doing this."

Follow Dakota Kim on Twitter.

Some art made using an algorithm: "Octopod" by Mikael Hvidtfeldt

Writers seem to have an ingrained fear of the idea that books might be written by machines. In Orwell's 1984, books are produced in a novel-writing machine "like jam or bootlaces." Meanwhile, the glut of recent films in which human men are shown wanting to fuck what is in effect a sexy lady toaster ( Her, Ex Machina, Chappie, etc, etc) all at one point or another raise a question that's taken to be some kind of mind-blowing blasphemy: could a machine ever create a poem, or a film, or a piece of beautiful music? While it speaks to a certain anxiety surrounding the increasing automation of all areas of life, the question is actually profoundly stupid. Machines are already creating our art for us. The real question is whether it's too late for any of that art to be any good.

Take, for instance, Amazon's recent announcement that it will start paying royalties to authors based on the precise number of pages that are actually being read. As several frothing commenters on news reports have pointed out, this move isn't entirely what it's been made out to be. The switch only applies to self-published authors whose ebooks are available on the site's monthly subscription service, and it's meant to correct a previous system which was felt to unfairly penalize longer texts (before, royalties were simply paid whenever 10 percent of any book had been read). Like all pedantic objections, this one doesn't really matter. The precedent's been set, and the global rollout of pay-per-page is now a looming, monstrous inevitability.

This should worry you, even if most of your income doesn't happen to come from your series of self-published erotic Bigfoot tales. Some people might find it disquieting that Amazon is tracking exactly what they're reading and exactly how much of it they finish, at once fulfilling the roles of a paternalistic school-teacher and a terrifying, blank-faced secret policeman—but, to be honest, what did you expect? Everything we do now is added to the vast reams of data that's slowly suffocating our planet with its ever-increasing weight.

None of this information belongs to the person that it's ostensibly about. When you die, bailiffs will probably show up to your funeral to collect your body for some awful tech startup, brutally referring the mourners to a clause hidden in a licence agreement you never bothered to read. There's nothing you can do about this, and you may as well accept it. The privacy concern in the end reveals a deep narcissism: the horrible truth is that as an individual you don't really matter at all, and nobody really cares what books you've been reading.

What we should be worrying about is what all this will do to literature. For centuries, great texts have been almost entirely subsidized by people who buy them out of a vague sense of intellectual guilt, read exactly one half of the first chapter, and then never touch them again. Nobody in all of human history, for instance, has ever actually read Finnegans Wake. Only madmen and ministers have read all the near-identical Synoptic Gospels from end to end. Really important books are not the ones that whisk you off into some escapist fantasy where your greased attention slips from paragraph to paragraph as you grin like an idiot child on a playground slide. They bear down on you with the solemn, ugly weight of duty.

Under the pay-per-page model, a vast spider's-web algorithm will eventually collect all the details of every ebook reader on the planet. It will know, for every book ever written, exactly where most readers gave up, how long they took to try again, and where they finally abandoned it forever. It'll know which chapters were read and reread, and which ones a hyperactive, screen-dazed public shamefully skipped over. And, when the difference between fame and starvation rests on how long you can grab an increasingly distracted population, eventually someone will come up with a mathematical formula to create the most profitable possible book. When that happens, there'll be no more writers. Computers and algorithms will be the ones actually writing books; human beings will just arrange the words. It's possible that these books might even be good. But it's very, very unlikely.

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In fact, something much like this has already happened. When it created its remake of House of Cards, Netflix scripted the show according to its vast bank of user data. The company collects over 30 million data points a day—it records exactly when in a show you choose to take a toilet break; it can work out, based on timestamps, if you've ended your box-set binge out of actual boredom or because the sun's coming up and the gentle pong of stale pizza has become almost tangible.

As far as Nextflix is concerned, you're not just a passive consumer, but you are essentially a moron. This is why the emergence of "Netflix and chill" as the 21st century's go-to euphemism for sex doesn't bode well for the next generation's chances. It was on the basis of all this data that House of Cards was created, intended to be the best, most compulsively watchable TV show ever.

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You can like House of Cards if you want; for the time being at least, you're still (just about) entitled to your own opinions. But it's not very good. The show is a cretinous and ungodly chimera, full of spiralling, pointless subplots, desperate to impress on the viewer what an unpleasant person its main character is, and bafflingly over-reliant on weird nautical metaphors ("It's how you devour a whale, one bite at a time," or "I love that woman more than sharks love blood"). In recent seasons it's whittled away any of the moral complexity it once feigned, turning itself into something like the West Wing with an even duller opening sequence—presumably at the behest of the machines.

The algorithmic novel can only be something similar: a big disjointed mess of genre clichés and patronising bitesize bit-words, where every chapter ends in a cliffhanger and everything is utterly, hideously homogeneous. A book of averages for a reader without qualities.

It's not that books written by machines are necessarily bad. In the early 20th century, the dada and surrealist movements experimented with automatic writing. They thought that by writing without thinking, as a purely mechanical exercise, the unconscious mind would reveal itself on the page. Gertrude Stein took things further. Her experiments in motor autonomism weren't designed to reveal anything, but to produce a pure writing free of meaning. Revolutionary composers following Schoenberg have used mathematical set theory to compose orchestral pieces. They thought they were creating something liberatory and avant-garde. It's not the machines' fault that we prefer worthless pap.

The problem lies with us, the humans. The robot poet of the movies first needs to be programmed with an understanding of what a poem is before it can write one, and that understanding is usually based on what filmgoers read. That's why when these fictional machines do create something, it's usually a boring representative watercolor, or music full of the stupid sweeping violins that people think of as being "beautiful." Technology just creates an average; the nature of that average is down to us. The only way anything could be salvaged is if enough people get rid of their e-readers and go back to blind, dumb paper. In other words, we're doomed.

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LNG containership components. Photo via Flickr user Port of San Diego

A final investment decision has yet to be made for Chevron's Kitimat LNG project, but that hasn't stopped the company from getting work started on clearing the way for the Pacific Trail Pipeline over the summer, despite fervent opposition from First Nations Hereditary Chiefs along the proposed route.

Chevron will be establishing a field office in Houston, BC for the summer to carry out pre-construction activities for the proposed pipeline that would run 480 kilometres between Summit Lake, near Prince George and Kitimat, transporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the province's shale gas operations to a port on the west coast.

The company received approval for the pre-construction activities from the BC Oil and Gas Commission in April. The temporary office will serve as headquarters for contractors doing environmental and archaeological field studies, road maintenance, clearing right of ways, and surveying and flagging boundaries.

Chevron spokespeople say they have the "full support" of First Nations to get started.

"The Pacific Trail Pipeline is the only proposed natural gas pipeline project with the support of all First Nations Bands whose traditional territory encompasses the proposed Pacific Trail Pipeline route," said Gillian Robinson of Chevron-Kitimat LNG.

According to the company, the pre-construction work will be carried out by a First Nations–owned company, Shas PTP Ltd., which was previously contracted to build access roads and clear the way for the western section of the pipeline over the last two summers.

"First Nations are not only involved, but are partners in the Pacific Trail Pipeline," Robinson told VICE. "They are supportive of this work beginning in order to see the benefits of the First Nations Limited Partnership Agreement. This agreement is unique in that it does not affect First Nations Rights and Title but is a business partnership with benefits that continue throughout the lifetime of the project."

While the Pacific Trail Pipeline is unique in that it has a limited partnership agreement supplying benefits to 16 First Nations signatories, that support does not stretch everywhere along the pipeline route, according to dissenting First Nations.

The Wet'suwet'en, who have traditional government model of clans and houses with Hereditary Chiefs, say they will do whatever it takes to stop the pipeline from being built across their traditional territory.

"We have stated many times before, we will use any and all means necessary to protect our lands, whether it be through the courts or like people who are presently on the territory living on that pipeline route who stand in opposition to those pipelines," said Dinï ze' Na'Moks, or John Ridsdale, Hereditary Chief of the Tsayu (Beaver) Clan. "As per our law, we have the right to protect our territory as we see fit."

The proposed pipeline route crosses BC's two largest rivers, the Fraser and the Skeena, both major spawning areas that provide water and salmon essential to Wet'suwet'en way of life, Ridsdale said.

"We have a responsibility to ensure those rivers remain clean," he said. "Whether it be natural gas or oil, any construction along those rivers are a detriment to the river itself, and affects our rights and freedoms to access our territories, because we'd be restricted by the construction. If actually constructed, they would control the access; they'd have the pipeline, their own roads and, for liability reasons, people like ourselves would not be allowed to cross."

While the Wet'suwet'en are not "opposed to progress," Ridsdale said the chiefs have a responsibility to protect the integrity of the land and quality of life for future generations, and to consider the impacts of their decisions on peoples elsewhere, like the Haida and Heiltsuk Nations along the coast, who would be impacted by tanker traffic and possible marine spills, and First Nations in northeastern BC where the LNG would come from.

"Any decisions we make affect everybody upstream, downstream and all around us," Ridsdale said. "For hereditary chiefs, we don't look at the dollar figure. We have to look at now, we have to look at tomorrow and we have to look at a hundred years from now, what are we leaving behind as a legacy? Will it be a fractured land? Will it be a loss of our authority on the land? Will our culture be dissipated? We can't allow that, not in our lifetimes."

Ridsdale said the 16 First Nations in a limited partnership with Chevron are elected band councils who do not have jurisdiction off their reserve lands. The traditional Wet'suwet'en government, on the other hand, exists on unceded land, having never signed a treaty with the Crown, and therefore holds true jurisdiction over the area, he said.

Since signing the agreement, some of the First Nations have changed their tune on LNG development. Some of the 16 First Nations are not based along the pipeline route.

Supreme Court decisions have recognized the authority of Hereditary Chiefs and indigenous title over unceded territories, including the most recent precedent-setting victory by the neighbouring Tsilhqot'in Nation. Ridsdale said the Wet'suwet'en will take the pipeline to court if required, but discredited the work happening this summer as company "propaganda" for investors.

"They're doing a media blitz and saying things are a go when in actual fact, they're not," he said. "We are in strong opposition to the route they've chosen and we have Tsilhqot'in and non-Tsilhqot'in people on our side."

The Kitimat LNG facility received environmental approval in 2006 and has obtained an export licence, while the pipeline received regulatory approval in 2008. Still, there has been no commitment from overseas LNG customers that would allow the $4.5-billion project to get off the ground.

"A Final Investment Decision for Kitimat LNG is still contingent on completion of the project's Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) to gain greater project cost and execution certainty, establishing a clear, competitive and stable fiscal framework with Government, gaining additional First Nations support and having LNG contracts in place," Robinson said.

The eventuality of the project was thrown into uncertainty last summer when 50 percent partner Apache—who was to produce the LNG for the project—pulled out, highlighting global gas market uncertainty. Woodside Petroleum purchased Apache's stake in December 2014, adding some financial stability to the project.

If green-lit, the pipeline and LNG facility would transport 10 million tonnes of LNG each year, mainly to Asia. The gas would be sourced in the Liard and Horn River basins in the northeastern corner of BC where extensive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations are underway.

Follow Meagan Wohlberg on Twitter.

Via Flickr user Jeff Kubina

Today the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in a 5-4 decision, thus overturning all state bans. Obergefell vs. Hodges was named for a 40-year-old plaintiff named Jim Obergefell from Ohio. He and his partner, John Arthur, flew from Maryland to Ohio in order to marry before Arthur died from ALS. Obergefell was fighting for the right to have the union recognized in his own state. His case was combined with three others from Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee.

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest idea of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. "In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves."

This story will be updated throughout the day.

Jonathan Blake in his garden, standing next to a sculpture by the artist Lesley Hilling. Photo by the author.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Jonathan Blake has been living with HIV for 33 years. One of the first people in the UK to be diagnosed with the virus, he later got involved with the campaign group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of gay-rights activists aiding the striking Welsh miners in 1984 because of their mutual hatred of Thatcher and the tabloids.

LGSM helped to raise thousands of dollars for the cause, and a bond was struck between the two groups. At London's Gay Pride march in 1985, the miners came up from South Wales by the busload, and the mining union later used its block vote to help enshrine gay rights in British law. Pride, a film about the whole saga, was released last year, and Dominic West plays Jonathan.

Three decades later, Jonathan, now 66, has been given Attitude magazine's Pride award for all the work he's done for the LGBT community. I recently met with him at the Brixton home he shares with his partner, Nigel, for a chat about HIV, his activism, and his garden.

VICE: You must be so happy about being given the award after all these years.
Jonathan Blake: I think: Gosh, isn't this wonderful, to live long enough that they give you a gong. Dominic West got cast as me, so I am "AKA Dominic West," and everybody wants a piece of him. I'm very honored.

Why is Pride such an important weekend?
It's difficult, because it's changed. I come from the days where there were demonstrations and we were still considered to be "illegal, vile, faggots, burn 'em,' and what have you. The reason it's on this date is because of when the police raided the Stonewall pub in New York, and the drag queens fought back. So really, that is what gay pride is about: it's remembering that we had to fight for our rights and we still have to fight for them.

But for LGSM, this year is a really important one, because it's the 30th anniversary of when the miners came and they marched with us.

Photo by Colin Clews. Click to enlarge.

[ He shows me the above picture and points at the two people wearing tartan trousers.]

That's 1985, and that's me in trousers I made myself, and that's Nigel, my partner, in trousers he made himself. Because we went to this trouser-making class.

You look fantastic. What are you most proud of having achieved?
It's so difficult. One is—and this was the gift of the South Wales miners—the miners' union used their block vote to get gay rights on to the Labour Party agenda. Now, who would have thought that? The miners, who were considered homophobic.

When were you diagnosed with HIV?
In October, 1982. My number was L1 at the Middlesex [hospital]. All hospitals had different numbering systems, so it wasn't like I was the first one, but I was the first person at the Middlesex. I was really fortunate, because there was a trial where they were using AZT, which is a horrible failed chemotherapy drug. I kind of got belligerent and refused. I didn't care if I lived or died. I tried to commit suicide that December.

What happened?
I was going to do the Roman thing of get pissed, warm bath, slit my wrists. But I am appalled at the thought of someone having to come in and clean up after me... I couldn't do it. So then I thought, If you can't do it, get out and live. It wasn't straightforward, because you've got this virus in you and you feel like a real leper. But then, I saw there was a group called Gays for a Nuclear-Free Future who were going to leave for a march from the bookshop Gay's The Word on April 1, 1983. I arrived full of trepidation and I saw this guy wearing these extraordinary pantaloons, wellington boots, a shock of black curly hair, and we just connected. And his name was Nigel, and we're still together 33 years later. From that, my whole life just turned around. Nigel suggested we moved in together. I was going to be dead next week, so it didn't matter what I did.

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It sounds like the HIV diagnosis was almost strangely freeing.
Yeah, it is. Because you've got no responsibilities—you've got no consequences, because you'll be dead. So that's taken care of; it's everybody else who has to watch out!

Did that attitude help you through the early stages?
Yes. The main thing was always a displacement activity. Having a garden, there is always something happening. Whatever the time of day, there was something living—and something dying. But, you know?

You get a lot pleasure out of it?
Yeah. I worked at the English National Opera as a tailor. But the stress was crazy and I got shingles on the phrenic nerve. My immune system was down—if you're stressed when you're HIV positive, you get things. I was medically retired and thought: What am I going to do? So I laid a patio.

Jonathan and his partner, Nigel, planting the first thing in their garden.

Does the political climate of today remind you of the 80s?
[Cameron] is the son of Thatcher, as was Tony Blair, so yeah. What is also so different from the 80s is that we now live in this very atomized society. You can be sitting at your computer at home and you can be signing these petitions and feeling you're doing something, but you're an individual. What we wanted to do was support the miners and break Thatcher's hold on wanting to decimate trade unions. And that's what Cameron's trying to do now.

A lot of young people are too disillusioned to really mobilize—what's your advice?
One needs to always be on one's guard and challenge your supposed superiors, because often it's just a way of divide and rule.

Do you think people's attitude to HIV has changed enough?
No, there's still a huge amount to do in terms of stigma. And this is what I thought was really great about the film, and why I'm happy to be "out" about my status, is that Dominic West never portrayed a character who was a victim. HIV was just part of his DNA—it was a fact. It wasn't a huge deal. That's really important.

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As you mentioned, you were diagnosed very early on—HIV wasn't even clinically observed until 1983, the year afterwards—so treatment at the time was still very much in its infant stage.
I've had terrible times. I must have a fairly good constitution, surviving as long as I did. The AZT I refused ended up killing people [the doses prescribed were too high at the time, causing severe side effects in some patients]. I was very angry about the drugs, and I got to the late 1980s without medication, and at that point it was considered an AIDS diagnosis and I freaked. Because I'd been a difficult patient and not taken part in the trial, I never saw the same doctor twice, and people just wanted to put me on drugs. But I hated the drug companies, so I resisted. Eventually, I was put in touch with a great doctor who put me on the initial medication that would stop the pneumonia, which was the big killer, and we went from there.

Later, I developed such pain in my feet and in the supermarket when I was shopping that I used to hang off the trolley so my feet wouldn't go on the ground. But the drugs I was taking were [what was] giving me the pain—there was nothing you could do. You could amputate your foot and it would still hurt—it was the nerve endings. I was feeling wretched, but I was able to keep it all hidden from Nigel.

What do you hope the legacy of LGSM is?
I hope that people will remember the work we did, and also remember that it is not, sadly, a given that one has rights. They've been hard-fought for. To me, socialism is about society, and it's about people, and it's about communities. And when communities come together, we're strong. When we went to join the Welsh miners, there was this amazing bond that was created. But there was such strength they gave us; we gave them. And they repaid it a thousand-fold, so the most important thing is for people to believe in stuff, get involved, work for it.

Follow Helen Nianias on Twitter.

"Everything we're taught in school about the Civil War is wrong," asserts Erik Ernst, commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) at the Col. Isaac William Smith Camp #458 in Portland, Oregon.

We'd arranged to meet this SCV group in the great Northwest to discuss their use of the Confederate flag and what it means to them living thousands of miles from the Southern states. Little did we know, a few days later, debate over the flag's meaning would envelop the nation.

As we drove down Interstate 5 toward Portland, the radio spewed a blow-by-blow update on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shootings in Charleston, South Carolina. Shortly before we arrived, the police apprehended 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof —who'd fled the scene in a car sporting a Confederate flag license plate.

We met the SCV at a local Portland seafood restaurant, the walls of its reserved seating area plastered in wooden boat boards and deck rigging. As we ordered fish and chips, they related to us the "actual history" of the Civil War, why they view political correctness as distracting from the real story, and the meaning of the Confederate flag as they see it.

"This [the Civil War] was really the beginning of the communist infiltration of America," announced Jay Willis, the camp's lieutenant commander. Willis, a former constitutional law teacher who spent many years educating people on the South's "true history," then went on to explain how Abraham Lincoln corresponded regularly with Karl Marx, and how many of his generals were, in fact, radical socialists.

Portland, with its hipster-centric breweries and organic cafes may seem a strange place to explore Southern culture. But the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy isn't just a Southern story.

'Lincoln was a total racist," replied Willis. 'There was actually a really good article in Ebony about it.'

The camp's namesake Isaac William Smith was a Virginia-born Mexican American war veteran working in the Northwest Territories as a surveyor before the war. When Virginia seceded, he returned to the South to fight for the Confederacy. After the war, Smith went back to the Pacific Northwest where he's credited with helping establish water systems and natural gas lines throughout the region.

Many southerners both black and white went west to start new lives after the Civil War, and former Confederate soldiers were among those pioneers. In some cases veterans from both sides used their weapons experience out west as both lawmen and outlaws—notably the James Gang. In Oregon, some former Confederates even lent their military experience to the US Army during the Indian wars.

"Even if we don't live in the South, our ancestors are from there," explained Ernst, informing us that the fraternal organization has members all around the world, including the UK, Australia, and Brazil.

Since its beginnings in 1896, the group's mission has been genealogical, admitting members with traceable family histories to Confederate soldiers. It's also helped to maintain historic sites and Confederate veterans' graves for over a century.

The SCV say grace with their "Confederate Charge"

As we found our seats around the table, the light began to fall and a few more people showed up. We took the opportunity to talk to Erik about his own personal ties to the Confederacy. Growing up in Portland, he had little knowledge of his family's ties to the Civil War. It wasn't until he was 21, when a relative mentioned an ancestor who'd fought for the Confederacy, that he began digging and studying the Confederacy with increasing zeal. A full member since 2003, he and others in the group view the cause of the Civil War as one of states' rights and the preservation of individual liberty. The group says they have nothing in common with hate groups, and insist they have no interest in promoting extremist agendas. According to Ernst, if they feel any members are promoting a "racist or militant" agenda, they're expelled instantly.

"A lot of bad groups use our symbol for the wrong reasons," he said.

Recent years have seen accusations that the organization has taken a more activist direction, with critics lambasting their initiatives to display Confederate flags on public property and license plates. This led to an internal struggle within the SCV in the early 2000s and a short-lived dissident movement that feared the group was radicalizing.

"What we're objecting to is turning the mission of the SCV away from the guardianship of Confederate heritage toward 21st-century activism," North Carolinian Walter C. Hilderman, III told the Mountain Xpress in 2003. "That makes Confederate heritage a political pawn and gains us 21st-century political enemies."

On VICE Sports: The Case Against the Confederate Flag Is Also the Case Against the Washington NFL Team's Nickname

In 2011, the SCV's Mississippi Division launched a campaign to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest—the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and perpetrator of the Fort Pillow Massacre —with a specialty license plate. In the massacre, Confederates led by Forrest killed more than 300 African-American soldiers, despite the fact they had surrendered and should have been taken as prisoners of war. The same year, the SCV awarded Arizona's controversial sheriff Joe Arpaios its "Law and Order" award. Arpaios is known for his anti-immigration policies, and his list of heinous activities include assaulting a pregnant woman and forcing her to give birth in shackles and the widespread harassment of Latino women, which resulted in a lawsuit for his unconstitutional and unlawful actions by the Department of Justice in 2012.

In 2013, the license-plate debate reared its head in Texas. Over a lengthy series of legal battles culminating in a US Supreme Court hearing in the Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans case, it was ruled that Texas could refuse the right to sport customized Confederate flag license plates. As we talked the case over with Ernst and Willis, our food arriving at the table, it was clear they were unhappy with the verdict.

"That's a real shame," Willis said as he dipped a french fry. "It's not the end, though." He and Ernst told us how they were lobbying for Confederate flag plates in Oregon. It's this flag, planted at the center of our table, surrounded by condiments, which occupies the eye of a national media storm.

"This is the actual flag of the Confederacy," Ernst said, proudly pointing to the red and white flag, a small version of the battle flag with its blue criss-cross and white stars sitting in the upper corner. "The flag that most people know, that people get so upset about, was never even the official flag of the Confederacy... It was only the battle flag."

John Feaster Hooper, Jr.'s official membership certificate to the PNW SCV

Many flying the battle flag insist it's an apolitical symbol of Southern heritage and the Southerners who died; that it recalls the soldiers' bravery and dedication—not necessarily the government of the Confederacy. But Ernst chose the national flag because of his dedication to the Confederacy's political ideals.

"A lot of guys are really into military history and reenactments, and historically accurate weapons," he said. "That's all fine and good, but it gets a bit banal after a while. It's the cause they fought for that's really important."

As they see it, the war was about resisting Lincoln's totalitarian dictatorship that was using the Union to consolidate power, invade neighboring countries, and over-tax and exploit Southern ports. And it was Lincoln's expansion of the federal government, attempting to turn the Union into a nation that finally led to the South's secession. Slavery, in their view, seems to play but a footnote. To them, Lincoln and his generals were power-hungry war criminals.

"That's why Hitler copied so much of Lincoln," Willis exclaimed. "He was his hero!"

To the SCV, the flag represents the Confederacy's struggle against Northern tyranny. But for many Americans, the flag's meaning is rooted in slavery and opposition to the Civil Rights movement : to bygone horrors of a rusted age.

'Slavery wasn't racial,' said Ernst. 'It was just slavery.'

"The war was never about slavery," Willis continued, an assertion commonly made amongst supporters despite Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens's Cornerstone Speech in 1861, in which he said that "African slavery as it exists among us [is] the proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization" and attributed it as the "immediate cause" of secession.

"Only the one percent had slaves. If the war was really about slavery, what were the other 99 percent fighting for?" Willis asked. His numbers were a bit off—there were 347,525 parties reporting to be slaveowners according to the 1850 US census, or roughly 4.8 percent of Southern whites—but it was true that slaveowners were the affluent class.

After a few drinks, and while Ernst was busy catching up with other members, we pressed the question of slavery. We asked Willis if he could see why African-Americans may be skeptical of the self-determination narrative, particularly if their ancestors' only experience with the antebellum South was as slaves. "Well, if that's what they've been taught," he replied flatly.

"Slavery wasn't racial—it was just slavery," Ernst interjected.

Jay Willis showing future plans for commemorative Confederate license plates

"Lincoln was a total racist," replied Willis. "There was actually a really good article in Ebony about it."

Willis also insisted Union troops were viciously racist and violent against blacks, when Confederates merely tried to protect them. "[Union troops] would take two-hour rape breaks," he said. "They'd rape all the black women and then move onto the white ones."

Rape amongst Union troops was indeed common, and although only 450 cases were processed through Union courts, its existence led to the establishment of Lincoln's Lieber Code, established in 1863 outlawing unsoldierly conduct on the battlefield.

Col. Isaac W. Smith, SCV Camp 458 commander Erik Ernst (pictured right) with lieutenant commander Jay Willis

Another surreal layer to the flag's narrative is the Native American experience during the war. There were two native American members present at the meeting, and as we began to move around and chat, Joseph Bailey, an SCV member with Cherokee roots, explained their stance.

"You had a lot of the southern civilized tribes that fought. You had the Seminoles, the Chickasaw, Choctaw, obviously the Cherokee," Bailey said. "And when people talk about, 'Oh, the Confederate flag is a racist flag,' then we look at them with their perception [and say], 'Really? Why it is the American flag is not called the genocidal flag?"

"It was dealing with the treaties," Bailey continued. "The Confederacy was really a big stickler about treaties compared to the Union. To this day, the treaties are a joke in the United States."

"The Cherokee Nation over in the western band wanted to distance themselves from [the debate] because of the modern brainwashing of the Southern Confederacy [being] about slavery."

In 1983, Cherokee leaders moved to block Cherokee freedmen with slave roots from voting within the tribe, refusing to acknowledge their citizenship as tribal members. This resulted in a series of grinding legal battles that still continue today.

Joseph Bailey, Cherokee supporter of the SCV

As everyone began to loosen up a little more, we pulled the conversation back to slavery. Ernst ordered an iced tea, and he and Willis began to engage with us. The mainstay of the SCV's defense veered toward the "thousands" of black Confederate soldiers fighting on the side of the Confederacy. The assertion leads Willis to blame pop culture on what he believes is a warped view of slavery held by modern Americans. Although the exact number of black Confederates is unknown, according to the 1860 US Census, they made up less than one percent of the 800,000 black men of military age (17–50) in the Confederate states.

"Southern slavery wasn't like you see in the movies—that's all Hollywood," he scoffed. He told us that in reality slaves were "treated well," and that most of them "loved" their masters. "Beatings, whippings, all of that is fantasy... They were too valuable to damage."

"I mean, it's messed up. The whole slavery thing is messed up," said Ernst—insisting the South wasn't unique, and would have shortly abolished slavery on its own terms. "It was on the outs."

Watch our documentary on Triple Hate, on the KKK in Memphis, Tennessee:

But Article I Section 9(4) of the Confederate Constitution states: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed." This would have prevented any legislation outlawing slavery in the Confederate States.

Nevertheless, it's actually true that there were some black Confederates and black slaveowners—though numbers are almost impossible to verify. For instance, shortly after Louisiana seceded in 1861, the state militia formed the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, made up of free black and Creole volunteers. Significantly, it was the first North American military unit of any kind to have black officers within its ranks.

Ultimately, though, it was short lived. In 1862, the unit was disbanded after Louisiana State Legislature passed a law calling for the militia to be made up of "free white males capable of bearing arms." When Union general Benjamin F. Butler took control of Louisiana, he reactivated the 1st Louisiana Native Guard as a Union unit, though only a handful of its original members returned. The unit fought on the side of the Union during the Siege of Port Hudson.

Later that same year, Jefferson Davis signed a proclamation that called for any black troops to be executed—along with any white officers serving alongside them. He specifically named Butler for execution in the order as well.

Dinner with the SCV

"[The Confederate flag] is a symbol around the world against totalitarianism," Willis said. "It's only the libs in this country that have a problem with it."

"You shouldn't even have to talk about slavery," he continued with annoyance. "For some reason people always want to bring it back to that. I don't understand the obsession."

And he really didn't seem to understand. Unlike Ernst, slavery to Willis seemed such a small part of the overall picture that it wasn't worth discussing. As we ate, he bemoaned the stifling atmosphere of political correctness that he believes is not just threatening the South's history, but the whole country's future.

"It's hard to know what these PC extremists want—it seems like it's to destroy all history, destroy family values, and destroy Christianity," he said. "This country was built on Christian values, and that's what the South fought for."

According to him, the South had "diversity of thought" before the federal government forced public education on the masses. He cited the Klan's push to help establish public schools in Oregon. "Liberals will kill, murder, and lie to get their way. Conservatives—we have rules, we're just different kinds of people."

As dinner ended, we walked back to the car foggier than ever about the SCV's motives as an organization. To some, it seemed political. To some, utterly personal.

The SCV charge

But with Dylann Roof's images sweeping the internet, a ban on the sale of flags at Walmart, Sears, and Amazon, and legislative calls to remove the symbol from South Carolina's statehouse grounds and from Mississippi's state flag, the Confederate flag is under intense scrutiny once more. So we followed up with Ernst earlier this week to hear his views on the firestorm.

"It's just truly frustrating to see history being erased," he said over the phone. "People just really don't understand what the Confederate flag really means and what the real history is."

"This tragedy, it's absolutely atrocious what happened there and we give our heartfelt prayers and concerns to the families there. And if they need anything they can contact our organization and we'd gladly help them out," he added.

"[Dylann Roof] was looking at a very skewed look at history... He was coming up with his own ideas and turning it into something it's not."

But regardless of mounting public opinion against the Confederate flag, Ernst won't back down.

"Someone has to stand up for our heritage," he said. "And I guess that's me."

Follow Kevin Knodell and James Rippingale on Twitter.

Young Pappy. Photo courtesy of the family of Shaquon Thomas

Young Pappy was one of two things, depending on whom you believe, and maybe a bit of both. The police say he was a gangbanger who rapped about his gun-toting lifestyle only to have it finally catch up with him in late May in the form of two bullets in the back. But his mother says her son was no gangster. Instead, Ingrid Thomas insists, her son Shaquon adopted the name Young Pappy and the violent lyrics he spat out of necessity.

In other words, it was persona as protection.

"That wasn't who he was," Ingrid said recently. "It's a mode of survival."

Shaquon grew up in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, where he was killed by an unknown assassin early on the morning of May 29. The stretch of street that marks his murder scene isn't exactly the city's roughest territory; last Friday, kids at an elementary school on that block bought snow cones from a street vendor while a homeless woman gave away extra food she'd acquired. Meanwhile, a young woman read a book on her front stoop. Just down the street sits the Aragon Ballroom.

The area is about a ten-minute drive from my own place in one of the safest (and whitest) neighborhoods in the city.

"It's not as dangerous as they painted it to be," said Ingrid.

When Ingrid says "they," she's talking about the media, but at other times, "they" means the police. In describing Shaquon's death, and many deaths of young men in the city, Chicago outlets—like those in New York and plenty of other cities—sometimes rely solely on police versions of events. For Ingrid's son, this meant the rapper was labelled a Gangster Disciple, and that his death was at least partially attributable to a "long-running feud" between that gang, the Conservative Vice Lords and the Black P-Stones. (The latter two have deep roots in Chicago, with the Conservative Vice Lords tracing their heritage back to the infamous Henry Horner Homes projects.)

But to say that Thomas's death was directly linked to a gang beef is an "oversimplification," the rapper's friend Morocco Vaughn told me. And to point to a video in which Shaquon allegedly calls out rival gang members for their poor shooting ability (the rapper had been the target of gunfire at least twice before, bullets that claimed the life of a friend and a photographer who was following the rapper), was flat out wrong, according to Vaughn and others.

"They act like he made a video taunting a rival gang and the rival gang came and killed him. That's not what happened. That's what happened with Lil Jojo," said Vaughn, referencing the murder of a rapper who supposedly called out the Black Disciples, a gang associated with Chief Keef, and, some say, was killed for it.

"So they tried to replicate the story," Vaughn said of some media reports. "Violence in the City of Chicago is a hot topic, so they try to make things neatly fit into that box. This don't fit into that box."

Shaquon's friends pointed to jealousy over his music career as motive for the shooting. It wasn't part of a gang war, and it didn't have to do with Shaquon's supposed gun-toting ways, they say, but instead was pure, unadulterated jealousy: Pappy was on his way out, and the people who were about to be left behind didn't like that.

But Shaquon wasn't exactly a stranger to local police and, indeed, had his fair share of troubles with the law. Ingrid said her son was "no angel," and recounted how he began slipping away into the streets during his teenage years.

"He started smoking marijuana, going with the wrong crowd and getting in and out of juvenile detention," Ingrid told me.

Shaquon's troubles got worse from there. By the time of his death, the 20-year-old had racked up 11 misdemeanor cases and one felony, a gun possession charge to which he pleaded guilty and served a year in prison, according to the Cook County Circuit Clerk's Office. (The circumstances of that crime weren't immediately available, and Ingrid said she wasn't sure exactly what happened, either.)

Shaquon's problems began in eighth grade, Ingrid said, when he was picked up at school for having weed on him. A battle of wills ensued, with school authorities wanting to kick Shaquon out and his mother insisting he remain enrolled. More minor troubles followed, prompting Shaquon's entry into the juvenile justice system, which Ingrid holds partly responsible for her son's wayward path.

"If he did something wrong, then he should have been punished for it," she said.

I asked if perhaps the authorities were taking a rehabilitative route, the kind of criminal justice reform many are clamoring for as youths rack up lengthy rap sheets over bunk charges like minor weed possession and disorderly conduct. She said that's possible, but that there was no rehabilitation.

"You're not punishing him, you're not rehabilitating him, you're putting him back on the streets," she said of those who handled Shaquon's case as a minor.

When her marriage to Shaquon's father began falling apart, Ingrid said, the young man became less manageable.

"When they get to be older teenagers, it's hard to reel them back in when they get a taste of what's going on, and want to be a part of it," she told me. "He got mesmerized by how they sensationalize crime, rap, all of that."

So Shaquon became Young Pappy, and Young Pappy began to become a star. "Killa" got a half million views. "Shooters," where he called out other gangs, garnered more than a quarter million, and "Homicide" pulled over 400,000.

On the 14th floor of a Chicago hotel room, I met the rapper's friends to talk about his death. Among them was Vaughn, a hulking but friendly guy with close cropped hair who downed a plastic container full of barbecue teetering on a bedside table as he spoke. Shaquon's manager, who arranged the meeting, was there, and so was a man with long dreads and a silent demeanor who was referred to only as "The Guv." Eventually Shaquon's brothers, Budd and Trey, showed up.

"We had him to a certain plateau, but we couldn't keep him in the studio because he kept getting locked up every time he step outside." -Morocco Vaughn

They all painted a picture of a rapper on the rise, gunned down just before he was able to break away from the streets.

"We had him to a certain plateau, but we couldn't keep him in the studio because he kept getting locked up every time he step outside," said Vaughn.

According to Ingrid, all her son had hoped to accomplish when he transformed into Young Pappy was to find a path away from violence. Rap was supposed to be a ticket out of the streets, not to the morgue.

"That wasn't him," she repeated over and over again during our conversation.

But whatever Shaquon's actual identity, it was enough to grab the cops' attention. And bullets—like the ones that killed Shaquon's friend Markeyo Carr and an unlucky photographer, Will Lewis—kept whizzing by. Just weeks before Shaquon's death, police raided a mixtape release party. Initially, cops said they were fired upon by someone in an apartment located in the same building where Shaquon's father lived and where the party took place. They later changed their story, suggesting the shots came from the back of the building and weren't directed at police. Eventually, cops busted down the door of an apartment and arrested 33 people, most of whom were booked on minor charges. "They all beat they cases," Vaughn remarked during our meeting.

Ingrid speculated that police kept picking Shaquon up to send a message to other youths who might become similarly mesmerized by the gangster glories in Young Pappy's songs. He wasn't a bad guy, she insisted, despite his troubles with the law and songs that evoke images of guns, murder, and mayhem. The police contend otherwise, with one former commander dubbing his music "technological kerosene" that made an already smoldering gang feud leap into four-alarm flames.

Regardless, there's no denying Shaquon was just doing what scores of others have done before him. It began long ago, Ingrid said, back when rapping about guns and street life gave a jolt of reality to mainstream America, when guys who now make millions at the box office in family comedies had jheri curls and held Uzis out the side of drop top '63 Impalas.

"When did that ever become something new in the rap game? They lie, they build up a persona to get people to buy into the image so they can make money." -Ingrid Thomas

"When did that ever become something new in the rap game?" Ingrid asked of her son's alternate musical identity. "They lie, they build up a persona to get people to buy into the image so they can make money."

Eazy E. Ice Cube. Dre. Snoop—there's even a Hollywood biopic out about them this summer.

"They rapped about killing police and now people kiss they feet 'cause they filthy rich," Ingrid said.

Maybe Budd will get in on the action. Throughout our meeting, he didn't say much about his fallen brother, except that Shaquon was a "dynamic," funny and outspoken person, a talented rapper, and a loyal brother and friend. Budd recently dropped a new track, a tribute to Shaquon, that he hopes will be just the first of many steps in carrying on his brother's musical legacy.

While he didn't really open up about Shaquon and the feelings he must possess regarding his brother's death, he did express his mentality going forward.

"One thing about our family and one thing about Pappy is we don't fear nothing," Budd said. "We don't believe in that. Nah, we don't."

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

Can you see even a shred of fucking happiness anywhere in this picture? Welcome to the world of office work! Photo by Alan Cleaver via Flickr.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's summer, and there are a lot of recent graduates floating around who are on the lookout for work. Maybe it's you: standing there, diploma in hand, ready to launch yourself into the career of your dreams. But here's a quick update on your dreams: They are dead now. They have been killed. You are not going to be a philosopher or an art historian. You are not going to be a human rights activist or a charity fund manager. Your dreams died. Your dreams were drowned on the banks of the river in the weak blue light of the morning sun.

And so you find yourself like so many others in summer 2015 on the wrong side of three-plus years of jumping through bureaucratic college hoops like a Crufts agility champion, finding that the only going job you're qualified for is low-level admin. Admin, in case you are unfamiliar, is essentially the fine art of "sorting unimportant things out," and there are swathes of it—rivers, oceans, entire distant water planets of it—that need doing. And guess who is going to do it?

So you've been to a temping agency and your mom made you dress slightly too smartly for what was an informal chat with some dude with a funny haircut named Craig, and you have submitted your single sheet of A4 CV that still has your GCSE grades on them and your Duke of Edinburgh Award classification, and you have put a tie on and you have got a job where you basically just have to look at a computer for a bit. Cool. Here's what's going to happen from there:

YOU WILL HAVE TO ENDURE BAD KITCHEN BANTER

No office kitchen on Earth was ever designed to be a kitchen. It was just designed as a spare space that someone arbitrarily decided to put a big fridge and a tiny sink in. So, because of that, every single time you go there to make a cup of coffee, someone is going to come in, squeeze past you to get to the fridge, and make some fucking joke about it. "So badly designed in here!" they are joking, a fun joke. "Who made this kitchen!" An avalanche of carefully marked tupperware filled with shit pasta barrels out of the fridge and onto the floor. A stack of teabags crumbles into the sink. And then they spot the only clean teaspoon, in a tiny crevice of the kitchen between you and them, and then say this immortal office kitchen portmanteau: canijust—?

Canijust is a question without an answer. Canijust is a question without weight. It's not a question, it just has the inflection of one. "Sorry, canijust—?" It says: I just need to nudge past you. It says: There is a very slight chance our elbows will touch in the next second and a half. There is urgency to canijust. It says: You are taking too long to drain that teabag. Office kitchen banter. The worst.

SOMEONE WILL GET REALLY AGGY ABOUT TIMEKEEPING, AS THOUGH ANY OF THIS MATTERS

"Oh, long lunch, was it?" someone will say. It's probably Sandra. Fucking Sandra: Sandra, how many fucking pictures of your kids do you need on your desk? If anything, it's insulting to your children that they are only deemed inspirational enough to inspire, say, a cost-keeping spreadsheet, or a complex HR form to request new and less brittle plastic yogurt spoons. Do you hate your children, Sandra?

Anyway, Sandra's clucking like a hen because you're ten minutes late back from lunch. What can you say: You ended up at Boots doing a big shop. "Must be nice not to have anything pressing at work." This is a woman who, you know, is trying to sell her house at the moment from the comfort of her desk. She hasn't taken a non-property related phone call or sent a non-property related email for weeks. Until: One unread message. "Hi," Sandra is saying, to the entire office. "Just a punctuality reminder. We're meant to be in at 9.30 AM and we have an hour for lunch. All of your colleagues respect these rules. Please be mindful." This is the woman who keeps making complex excuses to go pick her kids up at school. This is the woman who starts slowly and fussily packing her handbag at ten minutes to six and leaves as soon as the second hand clicks around. Be mindful.

The thing is, once you care about the precise amount of time you are giving to your job, you are caring too much. We have a finite number of hours, minutes, and seconds on this Earth. Should we really waste ten or 12 of them sitting at our desks refreshing our emails and giving an impression of doing work? Should we really care if we're stealing a tiny sliver of time out from under our bosses and back unto ourselves? We all live and we all die. Our hearts only have a certain number of beats in them. Fuck good timekeeping, and fuck you, Sandra.

Bored at work? Look at these photos from New York's Puppy Prom. Tbh, Sandra will probably love them if you pop the link in an all-office.

YOU LEARN HOW TO TURN A LUNCH HOUR INTO A LUNCH AFTERNOON

That said, you know you can turn a lunch hour into a three-hour break, right? Here's the thing, nobody does any work in that precious, golden hour after they've had their lunch. Everybody goes out, eats a meal deal, then has a bit of an hour-long food coma, and a little look at popular websites such as VICE dot com. You do this. And you think you're the only one, but you're not—your boss is doing it, your colleagues are doing it, and Fucking Sandra is doing it.

So here's how you turn your lunch hour into a three-hour break: You take it at 12 PM. You have a sandwich, trawl some shops, then settle back at your desk at 1 PM, when everyone else goes on lunch. With them out the way, you can doss off to your heart's content for an hour, and then when they come back and do their hour-long doss, you can also doss because you're not being policed. By 3PM the working day is basically over anyway, so you can just coast your way to 6PM. "Why is Britain dying, Joel?" people ask me. "Why is the economy dying?" I do not know.

No way is he meant to be drawing an eagle. He is definitely on the doss here. Photo via Startup Stock Photos.

YOU DEVELOP A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH THE TESCO MEAL DEAL BECAUSE IT'S THE ONLY THING YOU CAN CONSISTENTLY AFFORD ON YOUR SHITTY, SHITTY WAGES

At some point, you will lose your shit because the Tesco that you walk to every day stops doing the chicken and chorizo square wrap and instead does the "Meat Feast" baguette instead. You'll lose your mind. You got married to that chorizo-chicken square wrap. You made promises to it of unsavory things. And now look at you, on your knees, crying in the side snack section, hoping a tuna cucumber sandwich is going to fill the yawning void, knowing that it won't. Try and run away from the dark and simple love of the $5 Tesco Meal Deal. You can't.

That said, on MUNCHIES: A Store-Bought Lunch Is Stupid and Wasteful

THERE WILL BE PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE NOTES IN THE KITCHEN THAT RAPIDLY AND NEAR-INSTANTLY ESCALATE TO ALL-OFFICE EMAIL CHAINS ABOUT THE KITCHEN, BECAUSE THAT ONE PERSON WHO BRINGS THEIR LUNCH IN FROM HOME EVERY DAY—WITH A FUCKING NOTE ON THE TUPPERWARE, WITH A FUCKING BOILED EGG IN THE MIX—HAS MISPLACED THEIR LUNCH, AND THEY ASSUME SOMEONE ELSE STOLE THEIR SWEATY-ASS TUPPERWARE HOME LUNCH, AND THEY LEAVE A LAMINATED A4 SHEET ON THE FRIDGE LIKE, 'GUYS, PLEASE RESPECT OTHER PEOPLE'S LUNCHES,' OR, WORSE, THEY WILL LEAVE A LAMINATED A4 IN THE SINK—THUS RENDERING THE SINK, A SHARED SINK, UNUSABLE, BECAUSE THEY HAVE FUCKING FIXED IT IN PLACE WITH A VAST WEB OF SELLOTAPE—BECAUSE THERE ARE EXACTLY THREE SPOONS WITH PEANUT BUTTER IN THERE, AS THOUGH PEANUT BUTTER ABSOLUTELY CANNOT EASILY BE RINSED OFF A SPOON

I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that everyone who works in offices for more than five years goes deranged and mad and becomes a boring turd-person and thinks that anything like this even matters.

YOU HAVE TO ANSWER THE PHONE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON

Don't know about you, but having grown up as an Internet Baby, I basically find any communication more complex than MSN Messenger to be wholly unnecessary and appalling. But do you know how often the phones go in offices? These people are just asking questions that could be done over email, but instead, they call you, all forceful perk, and you kind of mess up saying your own name, and you have that panicky moment when it's near to 12 PM and you don't know whether to say "good morning" or "good afternoon," and you start sweating, and the phone is slipping in your hands, and it's not even for you anyway, and you write a note saying who it was and what it was about, and the person it was for comes back from lunch and says, "Ew, what, phone them? Yuck. No. I'll just email them instead." Ban phones.

On Motherboard: This Device Reads Your Mind and Types Your Thoughts

YOU WILL PARTICIPATE IN SHIT OFFICE JOKES THAT GO ON FOR TOO LONG AND BECOME THESE SORT OF AWFUL REAL LIFE MEMES

Thing about working in an office—four grey walls and some partitions, the minimum amount of fluorescent lights, and some weak desk fans, a hundred gunmetal grey computers that run Citrix because you cannot apparently be trusted with a normal version of Windows so you have to use some hamstrung OS expressly designed to prevent you from downloading porn—is it's about the bleakest existence that can possibly be thrust upon you. So those few small cracks of daylight in your horrible working day/existence grow huge and sun-like in hindsight, and so every time someone falls over while holding two cardboard cups of tea and spills it all down themselves becomes about the funniest thing in the world, a thing you will collectively still joke about eight months later, a thing that will dominate your post-work pub chat.

Here are some office jokes I have shared, which—when you squint at them in the cold light of day—aren't actually funny, but that I have repeatedly enjoyed over the years because there has been nothing better to do:

— There was a dude who pissed himself once at a Christmas party while doing an impression of Apocalypse Now, an impression that saw him lie on a bench—pissing himself, remember—while twirling one finger in the air and pretending to be a helicopter, and so we kept mentioning that.

— Someone in the office said he played Bungle on Rainbow but did not actually play Bungle on Rainbow, but we called him Bungle as a nickname anyway even though it was a joke.

— Someone in the office, who I want it on record that I hated, had a stupid cartoon idiot voice and kept saying these stupid catchphrases and everyone repeated his stupid Muppet voice back to him whenever he said his stupid catchphrases. Goddammit Josh I hated you so much.

— I once got a verbal warning for asking sarcastically where I might get a lanyard, which became a bit of a thing.

— [Various PCC cases against me that it is not legally advisable to reopen but we had some laughs about at the time].

So, essentially, offices are where jokes go to die, and then be revived by desperate paramedics, and then die again, forever, for years at a time.

This is where dreams go to die, or, "your desk." Photo by David Marsh via Flickr.

YOU STOP CARING EVEN REMOTELY

Did you ever? Not especially. But in your first week you at least came in wearing the full and exact office uniform as detailed in your HR intro, before you noticed nobody else dressed smart and ditched the tie and undid a few buttons. And now you shuffle in hungover and basically play Minesweeper on the sly until 5 PM. And then you are stuck: too unmotivated to give even one atom of a shit about the job, stuck doing nothing because you're not impressing enough to get ahead. A purgatory of waste paper baskets and people who are really obsessed with hand sanitizer. An infinity of inexplicably broken printers and people opening Jiffy Bags really carefully so they can reuse them in future. That's the world of entry-level office work. Welcome.

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SOMEONE WHOSE MAIN PERSONALITY TRAIT IS THE FACT THAT THEY LIKE COFFEE AND/OR TEA IN A VERY PARTICULAR WAY, AND IF YOU DEVIATE FROM THAT IN ANY WAY WHEN YOU ARE DOING A TEA AND/OR COFFEE AROUND THEM, THEY WILL TALK TO YOU FOR A FULL FIVE MINUTES ABOUT HOW your TEA AND OR COFFEE IS WRONG

I blame Starbucks for this, because ever since Starbucks happened—with all its choice, with all its frothed milk and tax loopholes and infinite choice—every office fucker is like: "Oh no, but can you take this little thing of soy milk?" Everyone is like: "I need this brewed very carefully in a special see-through teapot mug, and then I need you to add the agave."

You only offered to do the tea run as an excuse to get up from your desk and use your legs, and now you're weighed down like a pack mule with sweeteners and rooibos and a special portable milk frother. And now some dickhead with an "I [COFFEE BEAN ALMOST IN THE SHAPE OF A LOVE HEART] COFFEE" mug is asking you to do something complicated with his weekly Pact sachet because "I can't get a thing done without my coffee!"

Essentially, if you take anything other than grey depressing tea or terrible instant coffee at your desk, then your opinion of yourself is too high and you need to peg it down a bit.

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A WHITEBOARD

There is always a whiteboard and you are never allowed to draw a dick on it.

SOMEONE ACCIDENTALLY DOES AN ALL-OFFICE AND YOU REPLY TO THE ALL-OFFICE WITH A JOKE, AND THEN THE ALL-OFFICE POLICE SEND AN ALL-OFFICE TELLING YOU NOT TO ABUSE THE ALL-OFFICE, AND YOUR MANAGER HOOKS YOU INTO A SIDE ROOM AND GIVES YOU A FORMAL VERBAL WARNING FOR ABUSING THE ALL-OFFICE

Because it is sacred, the all-office, a sacred email chain for flagging up lost items found in the pissy work bathrooms ("One gold necklace, please claim at reception"; "Entire wedding ring found in toilet pan. No questions asked, just collect at reception"; "For some reason there was a holdall full of toilet paper in the gents', please collect at reception") and telling people that two assessors from a local gym are coming in on Tuesday and can someone please come and at least meet them. The all-office email chain is not for jokes. It is not for banter. Do not abuse the all-office email chain.

YOU GET INVOLVED IN SOME AFTER-WORK FOOTBALL LEAGUE OR SOME SHIT AND YOU REALIzE THAT YOU SPEND THE MAJORITY OF THE HOURS AND MINUTES OF THE DAY WITH THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE

I mean, this can be any sleeper post-office activity designed to get you to hang out with the people you work with for just a little bit longer—wordless drinks down the pub, weirdly organized trip to the theater, silent house warming—but football is the most common one. Because football is fun, isn't it? Bit of banter, bit of five-a-side. Not for that lad who got his legs broken by Ian from accounts, obviously. But otherwise, it's alright, isn't it?

There's always one hyper-organized bloke—always a utility defender, always has an extensive collection of pristine football kits from the 90s, a pair of prescription goggles so his glasses don't get damaged when he's artlessly heading a ball—who sends a big email at the start of the week ("Need a steer on numbers, lads. One white shirt, one colored alternate. Bring your astro boots, it's $10 each for the field.") to get it all going, and then before you know it, you're there week after week. And there are pints after, of course, and then someone suggests a pizza, and then you all go for pizza, and then you find yourself at the tube station at 12 AM going: "Yeah, see you again in... eight-and-a-half hours?"

And then you know you've been suckered in, suckered by the casual threat of fun extra-curricular activity, that you've actually made friends at work, that you've organized to see one of them on a Saturday, that your life is now ruled by interacting with the same six people on a loop that HR decided you should sit and work with, that you have no friends or personality of your own. Football is the needle that pumps your withered arm full of workplace heroin. Do not fall for this scam. Do not get involved with the football.

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SOMEONE GAINS A TINY AMOUNT OF POWER AT WORK AND IMMEDIATELY GOES FULL STALIN

"Hi Joel, I noticed you printed that document three times there, because the first time it somehow came out on A3, and then the second it came out A5 size but printed on A4, and as you know, I was bumped up to paper and recycling monitor at my recent pay review—no, there's no salary increase involved, but it's more responsibility, and as part of my 15-year plan to actually get a promotion here that is very important—and anyway, yes, just a verbal to say that I will have to flag this up to HR and, combined with your lates, this could turn into a formal warning, so sorry to do this to you."

Fuck off, Tim. I helped you move, you dick.

Bit perturbed by the lotion on that desk. Photo by Jeffrey Beall via Flickr.

YOU WILL HAVE A VERY SHIT AWAY DAY

Once a year, someone in some lofty upper management echelon will decide you all need to do a work away day on scientifically the least convenient day for you to be out of the office, so you all turn up to some hotel seminar room where two actors-turned-personnel-gurus perkily tell you about "thinking outside the box," before enacting some horrible activity where you all have to stride around the room in bare feet making silent eye contact with each other and smiling.

Then someone you vaguely remember from a disciplinary meeting will come in and read a 20-minute speech about the future of the company, before you all get to wrestle over a wilting tray of Pret sandwiches. You do get to bunk off at 4 PM, though. So on the whole, this is one of the greatest working days of your life.

Never thought it'd turn out like this, did you? Genuine excitement at the threat of getting home in time for Hollyoaks. Turns out being an adult is actually quite underwhelming.

THAT ONE OTHER PERSON WITH DREAMS MAKES YOU SPEND SOME OF YOUR PRECIOUS NON-OFFICE TIME SUPPORTING THEM

Because you have dreams, don't you? You want to be someone or do something. I don't know, a... I don't know. I don't know what dreams people have. Guitar? Guitarist? Something about a guitar. "How's the guitar thing going?" people ask you in the office, because you mentioned in the interview that this job was just a stop-gap until the guitar thing took off. "Yeah," you say. "Good." You haven't touched a guitar in a calendar year. Actually, where is your guitar? Did you... fuck, did you leave it at the old flat?

Irrelevant now, because you're not the only young buck in the office with dreams: there, in the corner, younger and sharper than you, is Michael, who's in a band. "My band's playing tonight," he says, sheepishly, with those heartthrob good looks of his. He's rubbing the back of his hair and looking at the floor. "If anyone fancies it. Free entry." So you find yourself in some dive bar with Sheila from accounts ("Had to get my neighbor in to look after the kid," she says, "I love bopping, me. Love a bop."), sat there in your fucking shirt and slacks, watching as Michael the Fucking Temp warms up. And his band is really good. They are the exact kind of music you like and hoped to one day play professionally. They even do a sort of mixed up cover of one of your favorite obscure white label dance songs. And you suck down beer after beer, Sheila's warm bobbing body winding ever closer to yours, wondering where it all went wrong. Fuck you, Michael. Fuck you and your dreams.

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YOU FINALLY GET ANOTHER JOB

I mean, caveat: This might never happen. You might be locked in the tomb-like office that you are currently reading this in on the sly forever. You could die here. Do you know how many people die at their desks? It's way more than you think. Just slump over head first into their keyboard. And, with the work you do and the amount of it you actually get done, how long will it be before anyone notices? An hour? A day? It's possible, if you sit low and in a corner, that you could die and be there for up to a week before someone notices your post piling up. The person who discovers you will have to check your pass card because they do not know your name. IT is angry because your dead face planting into the computer somehow managed to log you out, and they don't have access to the password database, so they just straight up have to throw the hardware out. This is your legacy. A Dell in a skip. That's you.

But no, you'll find another job, definitely. Thing is, it's quite hard to look for stuff when the day-to-day tedium of your shitty office job is grinding you down smooth like a pebble, isn't it? And it's harder still if they bump up your hourly rate and you're in this weird purgatory—hating your job, yes, utterly unfulfilled, always on the precipice of infinite boredom—but also stuck, because you're just about making $31,500 and you're scared to jump in case you fall and drown. This is how they get you, a weight around your neck—an 80-cent-per-hour pay bump and you're suddenly there for another year, then another, then you actually wake up one morning and think, 'Oh, I've got to send that email today.' Then, before you know it, you're getting in early and leaving late, checking your work inbox on the bus, then you wake up, slap bang in the middle of your twenties, actually caring about your shitty job. No. This can't happen. No.

How do you find a real job? I don't know. But I do know that every semi-decent career jump I've ever had has been through knowing people and talking to them and subtly moaning about how I don't like my job and I'm looking for something else, and not by filling in infinitely long and horrible-to-complete e-applications for jobs I don't fully want, and then pinging them into the digital abyss. LinkedIn is fundamentally for wankers and estate agents, yes, but the central idea behind it—actual people are better for making career connections than just fumbling around blindly in the alleyways of Monster.com—is pretty sound.

So make some friends, I guess. Make some friends and drop hints about how good you are at photocopying to-do lists. Make some friends and say things like, "Oof, can't get a round in today: I've been on the same shitty salary for three fucking years and could really do with switching it up a bit." They'll get the hint. Maybe ceremonially murder a temp agency support worker, something like that. A message of intent, you know. Pin their head on a spike and put one of those sandwich boards on your body and go to a train station and scream, "I REALLY FUCKING MEAN IT, I COULD DO WITH A DECENT SECOND JOB NOW." Be creative. Think outside the box. Do it for you.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Rosario Dawson in 'Kids' (1995). Photo courtesy of Vidmark Entertainment/Photofest

Twenty years on and the teens that populate Harmony Korine's Kids still seem as nihilistic, violent, troubling, funny, and astonishingly clever as ever. Shot in a cinema-vérité style, Korine's movie follows a group of friends over the course of one day as they wander Manhattan boozing, smoking, and skating. The teens spend much of the film traveling in a pack, forever in search of the next great party, or at least the next great hangout.

In one of Kids's most iconic shots, they walk casually down the median of a busy street, drinking malt liquor in brown paper bags. Written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark, the film launched Rosario Dawson, Chloë Sevigny, and Leo Fitzpatrick to indie fame. Dawson was cast at 15. Fitzpatrick was discovered skating in Washington Square Park. And Korine was 19 years old when he wrote the script, and spent most of his appearance on Letterman, meant to promote Kids, talking more about his own wild antics than the film itself.

Fitzpatrick plays the film's arguable villain, Telly, a late teen hell-bent on virginal conquests ("Virgins, I love 'em," he says in a voiceover. "No diseases. No loosey-goose pussy. No skank. No nothin'. Just pure pleasure.") In Kids' opening scene, Telly and a girl who looks barely 13 sloppily make out in the girl's bedroom, before Telly says, "I like you. I think you're beautiful, and I think if we fuck, you would love it. You wouldn't believe it." It's a line he'll repeat almost verbatim later that night to another virgin, also barely a teenager. Neither girl loves it. The previous summer, Telly slept with Jennie (Sevigny), also a virgin, unwittingly giving her HIV. After getting the results of an STD test, Jennie spends the movie searching for Telly to confront him and warn his next conquest.

Encapsulating the teens' extremely different philosophies toward sex is a scene that intercuts conversations between the boys and the girls about what each respectively expects and enjoys. Before Jennie and Ruby (Dawson) go to the clinic to get their test results, they sit around a cramped bedroom with their friends, most chain smoking, sharing tales of their sexual experiences. And it's Dawson's character Ruby that's the brightest flame. Even among her friends, Ruby has a little swagger; she teases. When Jennie laments that she won't ever speak to Telly after what he did (sleeping with her and never acknowledging her again), Ruby announces to the room, "He stole her virginity. He took it away, and now it's gone. Forever!" It's Ruby who wants to get tested at the clinic in the first place, having had sex with eight or nine men (she can't remember), several of those instances unprotected. It's Ruby who, as a clinic nurse asks her questions ("Have you ever had anal intercourse? With how many partners?"), shifts in her seat, distracted by the anatomy posters in the room.

I spoke over the phone to actress Rosario Dawson about getting cast in Kids, watching her peers normalize sex at such a profoundly young age, and the film's legacy now, 20 years later.

VICE: How old were you when you were cast in Kids? How was this even pitched to you?
Rosario Dawson: I had just turned 15, and I was hanging out on my stoop. My dad had actually told me to go downstairs and get discovered because they were shooting a commercial on the block and they were looking for people to dance. And me, I'm not dancing, I kind of just hovered around for the weekend downstairs while they were shooting. That's when Larry (Clark), Harmony, and the VP, and a few other crew members spotted me. They were scouting for locations in the neighborhood.

I was talking to someone, and I guess I was so loud that the whole crew of people all turned and looked at me. I remembered in that moment that they had said they were recording sound that day. I was like, "Aw, man, I'm going to get in trouble. They're going to tell me to be quiet." Instead they all said, "Oh my god! I'm making this movie, we're trying to scout locations right now, you're perfect"—literally jumping up and down going—"We wrote this role for you, you're perfect for this role. I haven't even seen you or know you, but you're perfect for this role, I wrote it for you." And [Harmony] kind of just told me all about it. I leaned over and was like, "Daaad, people are talking to me about quote-on-quote making a movie." I was in shorts and a T-shirt like, Why are you talking to me?

'Kids' (1995). Photo courtesy of Miramax/Photofest

I went over to their office with my dad and auditioned. They had given me the script to read and my family was OK with it, excepting the fact that my character would be smoking. Otherwise, it resonated with them and they thought it worked and it was really well-written. I grew up among a lot of artists, so we appreciated the opportunity and what it meant. We didn't think much of it, considering they were picking people off the street, but we still thought it was a really good script and a really interesting world and very honest. I wasn't even remotely like that girl, but I knew that girl, I grew up with that girl. My mom was a teenage mom, so I knew so much about the vulnerabilities of this girl and the situation she's putting herself into.

I grew up around a bunch of girls, who at 13 or 14 were having sex with their boyfriends, who were usually drug dealers, and they were usually not using condoms, because the boyfriend preferred to do it "raw dog" because it felt better.

When Ruby and Jennie and their friends are just sitting around smoking and talking, there is so much posturing. The girls are so young and naïve, and yet they claim to have all this knowledge about being able to differentiate between what constitutes "sex" and "making love" and "fucking." What kinds of conversations were you really having with your female friends in real life about what sex really even was like?
I didn't even have sex until I was 20, so for me it was very far away from most of the reality of what I was talking about. I grew up around a bunch of girls, who at 13 or 14 were having sex with their boyfriends, who were usually drug dealers, and they were usually not using condoms, because the boyfriend preferred to do it "raw dog" because it felt better. I was just looking at these girls, going, "You are literally setting yourself up for the same cycle of violence and poverty that you're growing up in and that you're saying you want to be away from." The reality was really interesting because these girls went from 13 to 14 and after that summer break all of a sudden those girls went from liking TV shows and stickers to suddenly only wanting to talk about the sex that they were having. It wasn't that they had wanted to do these things, per se; it was sort of a by-product of the fact that they just developed too quickly, and I was a slow bloomer kind-of-thing. These girls suddenly had breasts and full tits. When they were walking down the street, even though they were young teenage girls, everyone treated them like they were women, and they were trying to acclimate to that. They were trying to normalize what was happening around them and the fact that grown men were giving them attention.

That's when I felt like Kids was worth doing. There were just all these girls around me normalizing the environment that they were in and posturing because of it. They were trying to be cool with what was around them and it was not necessarily resonating with them because they were co-opting what the other teens around them were doing. These were all kids coming from parents who worked really hard and weren't able to pay attention. That's what kids will do with idle hands.

My grandmother was watching it, going, 'Rosario, you know, I wish you had warned be before I went in,' and I said, 'Sorry, if I offended you.' She responded, 'You didn't offend me. There's not anything that's in this that anyone who's being honest can't connect to. I just wish you would have told me before I told all my church friends to go.'

A conversation that the girls in Kids aren't having at all is about the line between what is consensual and what isn't. We can look at someone like Telly, who preys on these pubescent virgins, and we know these girls haven't though about consent.
Even the girls I knew at the time who were having sex, it was because they were really pressuring each other because they all wanted to stay in the crew. It was as if because your body changed you had to change with it. There was so much attention that was being given to them, and they had to strut, they had to be tough, they had to be cool. They were giving hand-jobs in homeroom and blowjobs and I would think, What are you getting out of that? You're just being completely used and manipulated. Do you even know these guys? Do you even like this person? Do you like the way that they treat you? You could ask these questions and they'd get like a deer in headlights, like they'd never even considered it.

Watch Harmony Korine's 'The Legend of Cambo':

When you first saw the film in its entirety, how surprised were you when you saw the conversations that the boys were having about their sexual experiences versus what the girls were talking about?
Regardless of the fact that it was scripted and that a lot of people were non-actors, it just felt so raw. It was seamless between anything that was improv and anything that was scripted, because we were all just non-actors.

But I think both the girls and boys have aspects of posturing by a lot, and kind of being pushed. You've got kids teaching kids. They think they're never going to die, they're always going to stay young forever, they fight and they bounce back up after each scar. That's how fallible they are. Both were just really misleading in the fact that they sounded like they had a lot of experience or they sounded like they knew what they were talking about, and they really didn't.

In that particular scene, my character kind of drives the energy. Larry (Clark) would keep reminding me to be more forceful, be more aggressive. I was just so mesmerized by the process. Chloë was just playing this really interesting guy-ish kind of girl. She was way more advanced, she was older than I was, and she was this really cool it-girl street kid in comparison to myself. Even though I grew up on the Lower East Side, I was very sheltered. I just remember trying to talk to her about my different experiences and she just kind of looked at me and realized how opposite I was playing to myself. Most of the kids were really playing to themselves, and I think that's what Larry caught. Harmony, being 19 years old when he wrote it, made the language and everything feel so familiar, like a documentary. My grandmother was watching it, going, "Rosario, you know, I wish you had warned be before I went in," and I said, "Sorry, if I offended you." She responded, "You didn't offend me. I had to have children for a reason. There's not anything that's in this that anyone who's being honest can't connect to. I just wish you would have told me before I told all my church friends to go."

On i-D: Where Are Larry Clark's 'Kids' Now?

I think that's what makes the film still hold up today, regardless of how outdated it is. We used a payphone at one point. There were no cell phones in the movie. The premise doesn't even work today, considering how connected everybody is. Everybody's got a geo-locator on them. The whole idea of having to spend the entire day to look for someone doesn't even really work feasibly.

But there's a real connection to that moment in time, when you're trying to explore and figure out that next phase of life. You don't necessarily have the best mentors around you. You've got kids teaching kids. It's a moment in your life when you think you're never going to die, you're always going to stay young forever, you fought and you bounced back up after each scar, but that's actually not the reality—you can get pregnant, you can die, you can get a disease. That's how fallible and vulnerable we really are. I'm sharing that with my kids now. They can [bring up the sex conversation] whenever they want to. There's still just a lot of ignorance, silliness, provocation, curiosity, and adventure. It's just a lot of hormones.

BAM will be hosting a screening of Kids followed by a Q+A with director Larry Clark, co-writer Harmony Korine, actors Rosario Dawson, Chloë Sevigny, and Leo Fitzpatrick on Thursday, June 25, at 7 PM, and an additional screening at 8 PM, without special guests.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter.

Police outside the factory. Screen shot via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

For the third time this year, France is reeling from an Islamist terror attack.

Five months after the shootings at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris—in which 11 staff members were killed—and two months after a suspected Algerian jihadist allegedly shot and killed a woman in the Paris suburbs, a gas factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, outside Lyon, was attacked this morning, leaving one dead.

The BBC reports that a man was found decapitated, his head left on a wire fence next to his body and his face covered in Arabic writing. Local media has said that an Islamist black flag was found at the site.

French paper Dauphiné Libéré has identified the victim as the manager of a transport company who they say was at the factory for a delivery, though they haven't given his name. This has yet to be confirmed by official sources.

The plant, belonging to a US-owned company named Air Products, is a producer of industrial gases and chemicals for a variety of industries, including agriculture and medicine. According to police, a pick-up truck driven by two men crashed into a collection of gas cylinders, causing an explosion at around 9:50 AM local time that injured two people.

The first suspect, named as Yassine Sali by French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, has reportedly been arrested. In a statement, Cazeneuve said that Sali was known by French security services: "He had been noted for his radicalization, but was not known to have any links to terrorist figures."

Reuters, spelling his name Yassin Sahli, reported that the suspect is a 35-year-old professional driver who lived in the Lyon suburbs, but added that there is not yet official confirmation of this.

According to the Dauphiné Libéré, a second suspect has been arrested at his home nearby.

Air Products released a statement confirming that the victim wasn't one of their employees shortly after the news broke:

"We can confirm that an incident occurred at our facility in L'Isle-d'Abeau, France this morning.

"Our priority at this stage is to take care of our employees, who have been evacuated from the site and all accounted for.

"Emergency services are on site and have contained the situation. The site is secure. Our crisis and emergency response teams have been activated and are working closely with all relevant authorities.

"Further information will be released as soon as it becomes available."

French paper Le Monde reports that the plant may have been chosen as a target due to the fact it contains a large amount of harmful gases and potentially explosive materials.

Eyewitness Thierry Gricourt, who works near the factory, told French TV what he saw:

"We heard a fairly loud noise shortly before 10 o'clock. We didn't get too concerned as we're not far from the airport Saint Exupery, so we thought it was an airplane passing by lower than usual.

"And then several minutes later we saw a very large deployment of security forces—the police and fire engines, with lots of trucks deployed around our road. We can see that several roads are blocked with police officers at the corner of every road."

French President Francois Hollande, who was attending a summit in Brussels, attended a press conference giving what details he knew of the attack. He condemned it as a "pure terrorist attack," and said "there is no doubt the intention was to provoke an attack, an explosion."

AFP reports that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the attack was an act of "Islamist terrorism" that "shows the jihadist threat remains very high."

In Tunisia, at least 27 people have been killed on a beach by two gunmen. There are no details as yet about the nationalities of the victims, but during the holy month of Ramadan those sunbathing tend to be tourists. That would make this the second major attack on tourists in Tunisia this year, following an attack three months ago on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, which killed 21 people, also mainly tourists. Read more on VICE News.

This story will be updated periodically.

Fishing from a community centre indoor swimming pool is weird. Last week, Scadding Court Community Centre in Toronto offered the chance to catch your own rainbow trout—no cottage, camp or nature required. For three dollars, you could grab a rod and dip worms into the deep end hoping that a fish is dumb enough to fall for the bait. When you finally reel one in, it flops against the pastel deck tiles and leaves a smear of blood that looks like a question mark, as if the dying fish is asking, "Why the fuck are you fishing in a swimming pool?"

It certainly feels weird, but is it unethical? What's the difference between yanking a fish out of a grocery store aquarium or luring them from a location usually populated with peeing kids in water wings? Even if you're fishing in the great outdoors, there's a good chance that the river or lake was stocked by the government. Nothing is real anymore, guys. Those trouts, salmons, and splakes were planted in the water like a conspiracy theory Easter egg hunt for dudes that need to get away from their wives.

Photos by Jess Bloom

Scadding Court's annual "Gone Fishin'" program was spearheaded by the community centre's executive director, Kevin Lee. He was inspired thirteen years ago by a similar initiative in College Station, Texas. The Texans stock their pool with 1,000 pounds of trout and let the town have at 'er.

"We drove down, 26 hours straight, and had a meeting. We saw how they did it and drove back to Toronto," he said. "Then we contacted the Ministry of Natural Resources, Guelph University and different fishing associations. Everyone has so helpful. The people from Guelph showed us how to unbind the hard chlorine in the water and how to use an aerator to keep the trout happy and thriving."

Until they die. This is a sticking point for PETA. "It's not a very family-friendly activity," said PETA representative Melissa Karpel. "Children have to see the poor fish flopping around, gasping for air, having hooks put through their sensitive mouths."

As an alternative, PETA provided plastic fish that kids could collect with a net in the wadding pool. They also sent fishless filets and vegan tartar sauce that sat next to the registration table cash box on your way into the pool. But when I was there, no one was in the wading pool and no one was eating the breaded soy chunks.

Everyone fishing around the pool deck was pretty gung ho for the real deal. The air was thick with anticipation and trimethylaminuria, as the diverse crowd waited patiently for a fish. Surprisingly, it's quite difficult to catch a fish in a pool. In an hour, only a dozen fish were reeled in. Most people left empty-handed.

Douglas and Tim Hodge were the father-son duo that helped untangle rods and provided fishing expertise. They live in the community and support the cause wholeheartedly. "It's good for the kids," Douglas said. "A lot of kids don't get the chance to go to camp or the cottage."

"We've been doing this for thirteen years," Tim, a 40-ish-year-old man wearing a shirt reading "I love women's hearts. Their big, bouncy hearts," told VICE. "Every year there are protesters outside of the community centre from PETA. They called a group of kindergarteners 'fish killers.' I had to walk away but I was so mad."

PETA responded that they don't agree with the "fish killers" message and would prefer to come from a place of positivity. They do not consider children on field trips to be aquatic life murderers. In so many words, they explained that they're not accountable for the words and actions of a few diehard protesters.

Their objection with Scadding Court's fish pool is one note: it's wrong because fish get hurt. There's no room for nuance. Is it good for kids to see the circle of life played out on a pool deck? No, Karpel says. They don't need to see violence to learn compassion. Because the leftover fish is donated to food banks, could this be a unique way to provide low income families with fresh food? Again, no. There's plenty of other food that people in need can eat.

On the other hand, Lee was comfortable discussing both PETA's involvement and the fishing pool's cultural impact. He believes in providing literature from both sides of the issue for community members to read. In the main atrium of the centre, you can find animal rights pamphlets alongside pro-fishing bristol boards. "Fishing brings people together. Whether you're from Vietnam, the Philippines or Sri Lanka, people fish," said Lee. "Families can share good times together and I'm quite sure that it will be in the memories of many children for a long time."

In a back room, outside of the pool area, a teenager in latex gloves was waiting to kill and clean your fish for an extra dollar. For anyone who's been enjoying fish tacos without giving the gutting process a second thought, the crunch of a fish throat being ripped out might be your lasting memory. A hundred percent more blood, a hundred percent less guacamole. Until next year, Scadding Court fishing pool.

Follow Jess Bloom on Twitter.

Photos courtesy of the author, except where indicated

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Ever caught yourself on the Monday morning 134, head resting against the vibrating window as the rain rips across the glass, listening to a score of disillusioned strangers thrashing their Metros beneath the wittering, ringtones, and the rattling engine, and thought, There has to be more than this? What about when you're standing there in the kitchen doing the dishes and staring out the window as the sky turns grey on Sunday evening, the suds, cups, and bits of manky old fishcake colliding with soggy thuds in the plastic tub? Or when you're staring at an abandoned cucumber, still in its cellophane wrapping, leaning against the camo-green telephone exchange unit down the road and wrinkling in the sun? Someone? Anyone?

In early June I received a welcome invitation to escape the ennui and abject misery of modern existence, and experience "nine virtual reality projects in a space where art and interactivity rub shoulders." According to the email, I'd wander a mystical forest, fall witness to an incident of fatal domestic violence, soar over the polar ice caps, hang out with Grayson Perry, and more. Sceptical but ultimately up for it, to be honest I couldn't get my pale, bony backside on the 8:26 to Sheffield fast enough.

This was Doc/Fest. Six days of documentary screenings, panels, master classes, and, of course, the virtual reality arcade. Essentially, it's a documentary festival with a leaning towards interactive experiences and storytelling innovation. The day I was there, ex-Rockstar creative Navid Khonsari was showing off the visceral 1979 Revolution in an area which also featured the melancholy That Dragon, Cancer and Karen Palmer's parkour breathe 'em up Syncself 2. It's a friendly festival which celebrates real stories—it's recently been referred by Indiewire to as "Cannes for documentary people," and looking at the line up—which included an opening night screening of the Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer's disquieting sequel to the utterly harrowing Act of Killing—it's not hard to see why.

And, after popping into a cramped WHSmith for a pouch of baccy and a Snickers as a group of kids played Moonlight Sonata on one of the nation's curious and now-commonplace train station pianos, I was ushered from the school bus, across the impressive metallic waterfall, over to collect my pass, meet the guys, and start the insanity of the festival's most recent addition—the virtual reality arcade.

Peering around the corner of the installation for the first time, watching ten or so people ambling around, their arms cautiously reaching out for invisible objects and occasionally for a supportive wall, a ceiling-mounted playground swing rocking in the back of the room, I remembered the last time I'd wrapped an Oculus Rift unit around my head. It was at 2013's Eurogamer Expo after queuing for over an hour. The title on show then was an eerie rowboat simulator, where you splashed about on a creepy lake under the cover of moonlight, a somber violin soundtrack lilting its way around the headphones. It made me feel sick and I had to go outside for a little sit down. Gulping down any sense of scepticism here in Sheffield, I joined the end of the queue for the first experience: Vincent Morisset's Way to Go. Billed as both "a walk in the woods" and "an interactive experience for human beings between five and 105 years old," it's controlled using a Wii nunchuk and is more of a massively beautiful headfuck than its purposefully obscure descriptions allow.

'Way To Go' image, via itsnicethat.com

You follow a square-headed entity through a woodland passage. "Go on," a caption whispers when the sequence loads. "Make your way. Stop to see the smallest things. No one's keeping score." And you do just that, following the avatar through open fields, tight passages of foliage, and wide-open expanses of land. You can stop at any point during the journey and inspect areas of the forest, which result in movie close ups of insects wriggling, or squirrels scurrying. As one of the traditionally interactive exhibits in the arcade, pressing buttons on the nunchuk causes the route in front of you to illuminate and chime with a different musical note each time.

The experience lasted around eight minutes, and there were moments—particularly when looking towards a washed out sky as the avatar soars overhead—when it felt genuinely majestic and otherworldly. When the colors starting pumping in and the buttons start to do more, it felt like living inside a scene from Oddsac, and I nearly stacked it in front of everyone when the camera moved to examine a reflection in the lake. Way to Go is very unusual, unexpectedly pleasant, and perfectly suited to the medium—charge through the web version on your lunch break if you like, but it's well worth saving for when you can don a full VR set.

Trippy and wholesome "dreamlike" experiences are one thing, but what if VR could convincingly place you on the scene of a brutal crime? To find out, I wandered over to former Newsweek reporter Nonny de la Peña's troubling piece of immersive journalism Kiya, the only experience in the room with an age restriction.

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A harrowing insight into the grim realities of domestic violence, Kiya tells the suburban story of three sisters—one of whom, Kiya, is shot to death during a dispute with her maniacal ex-boyfriend. You're dragged from driveway to lounge, listening to snippets of the actual emergency calls that took place on the day. Standing in the lounge watching helplessly as some dude threatens three women with a loaded gun was actually pretty horrifying. In an uncharacteristically heroic move, I found myself genuinely wanting to intervene, crack him round the back of the head, or jump on his back. Other times, you're standing on the heat of the driveway impatiently waiting for the police to arrive, or in the kitchen looking the perfectly normal table and the fridge, and in moments like these it was impossible not to reach out and try to physically interact with the environment. Despite the fact that it looks only marginally better than a Dreamcast game's intro movie, the sense of place and sweaty domestic horror was surprisingly convincing. Experiencing Kiya for the first time, I couldn't help but wonder where this form of immersive journalism will take us next, and how many of us will have the balls to go there.

Time for something light hearted, so I ducked out of the main hall to chuckle at the hand-flailing attendees who were currently experiencing Oscar Raby's Hola World—tropical, psychedelic comment on humanity's waste problem that had its own dark room lit by green lasers. Despite the comic actions of the participants as I was standing there queuing, I was disappointed to learn that the actual experience was a bit broken. Basically you stand there on a beach, upbeat dance music plays and a conveyor belt starts pouring iPhones and HDTVs all over you. You're supposed to be able to grab them and throw them around, but personally I couldn't get it to work properly, a problem no amount of shameless air-grabbing would rectify.

Anyway, I had more pressing matters to attend to—the moment had come to see what that fucking swing was all about. Brendan Walker's Oscillate is designed to simultaneously stimulate both the vestibular system and the visual cortex, and places the user on a virtual swing in a roofless concrete room floating in the void of space.

The way it works is that the projected image moves at a different speed and angle to those that you're actually swinging in real life, which, as you can imagine, is seriously, seriously disorientating. You could only be swinging at the speed of a frightened toddler in real life, but the headset has you threatening to crash through the roof and into space. I tried desperately not to fall off in front of a giggling queue, but I slowed the swing to a halt about two minutes in due to the insides-going-grey feeling that can only be recognized as intense nausea. Off for a quick cigarette and coffee to get my bearings straight and wait for the pukey period to pass, which it did, thankfully rather quickly.

Surprisingly, after my experience at EGX, Oscillate was the only exhibit that caused me to set off bags packed for Chundersville during my trip to the arcade, but I'll be very interested to see whether the leading VR makers can effectively combat the threat of motion sickness nonetheless. With the busiest attractions and narrowly avoided pale-faced puke episode out of the way, it was time to explore a few of the more short-form and subtle experiences.

On Motherboard: Dawn of the Killer Robots

One of the more surreal house tours I'll doubtless take in my lifetime, A House for Essex is a virtual tour of Grayson Perry's latest art installation—a house dedicated to the "Essex everywoman." Hosted by his female alter ego Claire, it was dreamy and amusing, with some typically cloudy-headed commentary by Perry ("what is this weird spaceship?"), and one of the most terrifying bedrooms I've ever seen. Hovering over the balcony was pretty cool.

From Essex to the icecaps with Polar Sea 360, a majestic, panoramic four-minute flight over the Arctic landscape hosted on cardboard VR. The feeling of flight was impressive given the fact that it was one of the few attractions not to use either Oculus or Samsung Gear VR units, and coupled with the giddying and vertigo-inducing Walking New York—in which you fly over the skyscrapers of Manhattan—made for some powerful and unforgettable viewing.

Screenshot of 'Clouds Over Sidra', by Scott Stein, via CNet

The sky was turning grey, and St. Pancras was calling. However, there was just enough time to explore Chris Milk and Gabo Arora's (award-winning) Clouds Over Sidra, which takes place in a Syrian refugee camp and follows the life of 12-year-old Sidra as she takes you on a gentle, impeccably observed tour of her surroundings. Standing there as rows of displaced kids walk past staring at you, or in the tarpaulin covered "kitchen" of Sidra's family, or in the makeshift youth wrestling ring ("despite everything they've seen, they still like to fight"), or watching a group of guys hugging each other during a session of Counter-Strike, or in the film's closing moments, when a smiling group of kids make a loving circle around you, it was impossible not to feel a lump in the throat.

As I made my way back across Sheffield's waterfall passageway, reality looming with its washing up bowls, chummy ASOS emails, and rain-swept car parks, I looked back on my experiences with disbelief. For one afternoon, I jogged through a psychedelic wood with square headed ghosts, stood awkwardly in the kitchen of a recent murder scene, sat dewy-eyed with a refugee as she told me her story, and nearly puked up on a swing in space—all in an alarmingly convincing and fully immersive fashion. It's really pretty astounding and simultaneously terrifying what humankind is doing with technology at the moment, and the artists with exhibits in Doc/Fest's VR arcade are a massive part of the continuing story. I can only imagine where Sheffield will take us in a year's time.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

An embroidered uterus. Photo via Flickr user Hey Paul Studios

Women have been menstruating for, like, ever. Despite this, there have only been four imperfect products to staunch our collective oceans of menstrual blood: pads, tampons, menstrual cups, and period-proof underwear. All have their pros, whether it's convenience, eco-consciousness, or the ability to be worn for 12 hours straight. But let's not sugar-coat the industry. There is no perfect period product. Pads are bulky, underwear leak, many tampons are scarily synthetic, and menstrual cups have an ick factor that we just can't scrub away.

Sure, people are occasionally throwing money at the problem. A 2001 patent for a tampon applicator with a lubricated tip seems promising, until you realize that lubricated tampon applicators came and went in the 70s. Is there nothing new under the bloody sun?

The period is having a bit of a "moment" these days, whether it's a history of tampons in The Atlantic or a controversy over visible menstrual blood on Instagram. Are we entering a new era where period technology catches up to the rest of the world? Where tampons grow sensors that tell us when to change them; where scientists take a closer look at nature's most absorbent materials; where billions of dollars are funneled into finding the perfect alternative to the pad? Or will feminine hygiene remain in the dark ages for decades to come?

The future of your period could come in many forms. Here are some of them.

The Diva Cup. Photo via Flickr user menstruationstasse

A World Where Menstrual Cups Are the Norm

Reusable menstrual cups have been struggling with one big PR issue for a couple of decades now: People think they're gross. A woman who uses a menstrual cup will engage directly with her blood—like, she'll have to dump it out of the cup and into the toilet. She'll also have to touch herself to insert the cup, which is something that the original tampon applicator was actually designed to prevent. This idea of grossness is such a thing in the menstrual cup biz that the DivaCup, the best-selling reusable menstrual cup in North America, even includes a section on their website under Frequently Asked Questions called "The 'Ick' Factor."

The first patented menstrual cup came around in the 1930s, at the same time as the first commercial tampon. Unlike the tampon, though, the menstrual cup was patented by a woman, who appeared in advertisements claiming she had "found the solution to a problem as old as Eve." It was mailed out in plain packaging and given coy, diminutive names, like the Tassette, the Foldene, and the Daintette (manufactured by The Dainty Maid, Inc.). It did not sell well at all. Even a very diffident billboard—featuring a flower and a few drops of water (get it?)—was slammed for being "in bad taste."

Today's menstrual cups are much more popular than those early models. Most are made of soft, medical-grade silicone, and sometimes they're even sold alongside sex toys, giving the whole industry a feel that's more sensual-woman-in-charge-of-her-flow and less medieval-torture-device. There are even innovations happening in the field, and the field seems happy to accommodate them: Last fall, a Kickstarter for the first-ever collapsible menstrual cup earned more than 4,000 percent of its goal funds.

Instagram Is Sorry It Accidentally Removed a Photo of Menstrual Blood. Twice.

The ladies who work at Diva International, which launched the DivaCup in 2003, believe that the menstrual tides are changing. "What may have started out as an eco-friendly niche product ten years ago is now becoming mainstream," says Daniela Masaro, the company's brand marketing manager.

Sophie Zivku, their communications and education manager, agrees. "The reusables industry is growing in double digits every year, which is insane," she says. "We're sold at CVS, at Whole Foods." They couldn't provide specific numbers, but over the past year, they've seen a 50 percent increase in questions, testimonials, and other inquiries coming from their customers. The cup is also being used in both the medical market, where nurses are learning about menstrual cup usage, as well as the educational one, where Sophie fields inquiries from junior high teachers hoping to add DivaCup to their sex ed classes. "I would argue that [menstrual cups] are common," she says. "They're no longer this revolution."

A world where everyone uses menstrual cups would be a world where women treat their cycles with familiarity, not fear. "We're seeing a shift in mindset," says Sophie. "We're seeing consumers become more opinionated and aware about their menstrual health in general because of the cup. A woman realizes, I had no idea what's going on with my cycle and because of this [cup] I now do."

She says that even men are joining the conversation, "which never happened ten years ago." They call in and ask her what's best for their daughters, girlfriends, and wives. And then there's the ecological factor to consider—no more throwing away thousands of tampons in a lifetime! The whole thing smacks of utopia, but why not?

Speaking of blood: VICE visits the vampire community of Louisiana, where would-be Draculas sip blood and party at vampire balls.

A World Where We All Use Organic, 100 Percent Cotton Tampons

Dr. Philip Tierno has been quoted in almost every article about tampons and Toxic Shock Syndrome on the internet, and for good reason: He's been researching the two for decades. He's still one of the only (expert) voices openly connecting the synthetic ingredients in tampons—particularly viscose rayon—to TSS, but he's insistent about the link between the two. In a study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases in Obstetrics and Gynecology, he found that all-cotton tampons did not produce the TSS toxin from Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and concluded that they "lower the risk for tampon-associated TSS." For many, that's more than enough reason to buy the slightly more expensive hippie stuff.

But big tampon brands—who aren't required to disclose the ingredients present in their tampons, since they're classified as "medical devices"—take care to stock their FAQ sections with reassurances about the safety of synthetics, presenting studies that totally contradict Tierno's. From the FAQ section of U by Kotex: "These studies refute the notion that all-cotton tampons are safer than tampons containing rayon." So perhaps it's not surprising that indie organic cotton tampon manufacturers are still getting the side-eye from the general public.

Music for menstruation: Tacocat's music video for "Crimson Wave" will make having your period seem like a day at the beach.

Take Rebecca Alvandi, the "Chief Flow Rider" of Maxim Hygiene Products, seller of organic, chlorine free, hypoallergenic, biodegradable, 100 percent cotton tampons. Her father founded the company eight years ago, and Rebecca, a staunch feminist, soon hopped on board. There wasn't much of a demand for organic tampons at the time, she says—Maxim was the first US brand with a full range of 100 percent cotton tampons and pads. And people thought they were crazy.

"Eight years ago, my dad and I presented our line to some mass market retail store giants that looked at us like we had two heads," says Rebecca. "Those same retailers are now developing and stocking their own private label brand copies of our Maxim brand! Now we just have to get Congress to stop looking at us like we have two heads."

Rebecca says that she's witnessed more dialogue about menstruation and feminine hygiene products during the last six months than she has during the rest of her time in the industry. She sees organic cotton tampons and pads as a grassroots movement that is finally coming to fruition. "The feminine hygiene industry in the US alone is a multi-billion dollar industry. Organic cotton tampon sales in the US hover well below that in the double-digit millions," she says. "But the momentum is building for all that has yet to come." Today, Maxim Hygiene is joined by brands like Seventh Generation, Natracare, and Dr. Mercola.

The irony is that while organic cotton tampons may be a growing trend now, they're really more of a throwback. The first commercial tampon was made of cotton, inspired by the cotton plugs used in surgery at the time. And while the material has changed, conventional tampons still strive for a cotton-esque look and feel. A U by Kotex tampon may be composed of 100 percent elemental chlorine-free bleached rayon with a polyethylene/polyester cover, but it's still white and fluffy.

Even though cotton tampons are more of a return than a revolution, they still have the capability to radicalize the industry—if we start buying them en masse. A global demand for 100 percent cotton organic tampons would mean that the three major tampon brands—Kotex, Playtex, and Tampax—would have to change the way they manufacturer their product, or risk being trumped by the indie brands. The numbers aren't even remotely there yet, but the idea is pretty futuristic.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A World Where the Robin Danielson Act Finally Passes

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has been fighting the impossible fight for years: pushing a menstruation-related bill in a largely male Congress. Her bill, the Robin Danielson Act, would like to "amend the Public Health Service Act to establish a program of research regarding the risks posed by the presence of dioxin, synthetic fibers, chemical fragrances, and other components of feminine hygiene products."

The FDA has historically relied on data that is self-reported by feminine hygiene products manufacturers, which is obviously not the most transparent or ethical way to research tampons. The Robin Danielson act hopes to throw some independent, peer-reviewed research into the mix. Despite this seemingly reasonable request, the bill has been killed nine times before coming to a vote. Maloney says she knows why: "We have a Congress that is 80 percent male, and the safety of tampons is not something that is on the minds of most Representatives."

Maloney wants to emphasize that the Act does not make "pre-judgments about products." There will be no tampon-burning when the Robin Danielson Act passes, nor will Kotex be thrown into a fiery pit. "We're just asking the National Institutes of Health to conduct an independent review to help women make the best health decisions for themselves and hopefully inspire the industry to take a close look at the materials they use for feminine hygiene products," says Maloney. In short, it gives women the most radical thing of all: more information.

If the Robin Danielson Act passes, Maloney anticipates a shift in the feminine hygiene marketplace. "[The market] will adapt to address women's concerns," she says, "and publishing research about any health risks posed by feminine hygiene products will drive the discussion." And yes, maybe a product or two will hit the chopping block. "I think we'll begin to learn what risks are out there," says Maloney.

Photo via Flickr user gaelx

A World Where Everyone Wears Period Underwear

Identical twins Miki and Radha Agrawal came up with the idea for THINX, or "period-proof underwear," when they were literally washing period blood out of Radha's swimsuit bottoms. Cue two identical "there has to be a better way!" infomercial faces. But the two became hyper-aware of the real lack of innovation in the feminine hygiene industry when Miki traveled to South Africa for the World Cup in 2010. There, she met a girl who was missing a week of school because she didn't have the means to deal with her period.

"Over 100 million girls [in developing countries] are using unimaginable things to try and stop their blood," says Miki. "You look at the feminine hygiene industry—in the 1930s, the tampon was invented by a man. You're telling me that in 80 years, the tampon product hasn't changed? The last real innovation in pads was in 1969, when they put the adhesive strip at the bottom of the pad. That's crazy."

THINX is not the first period underwear on the market—"Lunapanties" are an alternative—but they're so high-tech that they certainly feel like a product of the future. Each pair has four built-in layers, designed to wick away moisture, fight bacteria with an "invisible silver treatment," absorb up to two tampons' worth of liquid, and prevent leaks, respectively. And for every pair sold, THINX sends money to Afripads, a company that provides reusable cloth pads to girls in Uganda.

Click around on the THINX site and you'll find a tiny section titled " Sound Gross?" (Why yes, yes it does.) This miniature block of text illuminates something key about the feminine hygiene industry: Women are still reluctant about the idea of sitting down and straight-up dealing with their period. This will always be the appeal of the tampon—it makes your period as invisible as possible.

Both THINX and menstrual cups use cute, sassy copy to combat their respective ick factors. "No, you don't have to change them during the day, no, they don't feel like diapers, and no, it's not like sitting in your own blood," runs the THINX website. "Boom." But by even admitting that the ick factor is there ("sitting in your own blood" is not a phrase most consumers expect to encounter online), the reusables industry is forced to start out on the defensive. For them, marketing is already an uphill battle—not just against the big commercial players, but against women themselves.

"Yes, hello? It's your period calling." Photo via Flickr user Garry Knight

A World Where Tampons Could Save Your Life

Plug the word "tampon" into Google's patent search, and the first result is a patent by one Kevin B. Larkin, filed on August 16, 2010. Larkin's " Cell Phone Based Tampon Monitoring System" dreams of inserting sensors into tampons, thus making the tampon able to communicate with the tampon-wearer's cell phone. Using this "wireless tampon signal," the tampon-wearer will receive an alert like when the first spot of blood hits the tampon, as well as subsequent alerts marking the "tampon saturation progress," "tampon leakage," the "tampon full forecast," and "tampon full." The resulting information—cycle durations, cycle regularity, cycle intensity, blood conductivity, and fertility periods—can be shared with relevant third parties, like doctors.

Larkin's tampon may not be in existence, but a March 2015 report on the tampon industry, released by Global Industry Analysts, shows that the tampon-as-medical-device is already on the minds of the biggest players in the tampon game.

The report details potential future iterations of the tampon that will do far more than just sop up blood. Some help adjust the vagina's pH, some can be used to detect ovarian cancer. One even takes the form of a dissolvable tampon that, once inserted, turns into a gel that releases HIV-prevention medication. The idea is that this tampon-like medicine can be used to protect women against otherwise unprotected sex.

There's also something in there about turning jellyfish into super absorbent tampons. The jellyfish population is booming , but jellyfish tampons? Talk about "ick factor."

None of these futuristic tampons are currently available at the grocery store, of course, but the general idea makes so much sense. Why not turn it into a proactive tool rather than just a passive sponge? I mean, it's in there anyway. It might as well do some good.

Follow Tori Telfer on Twitter.

A participant in '#onvacation' at the Venice Biennale

Don't worry about the people detained in a sprawling art complex in Donetsk, Ukraine: Their captors aren't the military, just a bunch of folks on holiday. Or so the Russian government would have the public believe. Over the past year of pro-Russian separatist occupation of Ukraine, Kremlin mouthpieces have claimed that Russian soldiers were merely "on vacation" in Ukraine or there "by accident."

However, this isn't the case. At the complex in Donetsk, previously home to the arts foundation Izolyatsia, captives are being detained on flimsy grounds, and artworks are being blown up. According to Izolyatsia spokesperson Maureen Sullivan, "People are held for any and all reasons, from breaking curfew to graffiti." "There is not even a procedure of court trial, so there is no procedure of acquittal," said writer Dmytro Potehin, who was imprisoned at the space and witnessed several hundred prisoners over the course of his 48 days there. "The prisoners are men, women, young, old, working men, businessmen—very different."

Izolyatsia was where New York City-based artist Clemens Poole was headed one year ago to consult with the organization on their printmaking facilities. But the day after he arrived in Ukraine, the space was seized by mercenaries of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic. (See a video here of DPR special committee head Leonid Baranov displaying "pornographic" art found at Izolyatsia.) Poole was diverted to the organization's temporary base in Kiev, where he had the idea to take to the streets—or, more specifically, the pavilions and paths of the Venice Biennale—in a four-week-long "occupation" of the international art show, handing out lightweight camo jackets and totes emblazoned with the phrase "#onvacation."

Check out this exclusive clip of Clemens Poole and '#onvacation':

Poole and a team of Izolyatsia staff gave more than 1,560 coats and bags starting on May 6, the first day of the press preview of the Biennale. Recipients were asked to post selfies with the tag "#onvacation" as they stood in the Biennale pavilion of any country with a history of occupying other countries, which was petty much every pavilion at the global art exhibition. In fact, more than a few—including Russia, the US, and Israel—are occupying other countries right now. By promoting the hashtag, the faux-soldiers had a chance to win a holiday to Balaklava, a beach town on the Crimean coast of Ukraine, joining the Russian military who are still "vacationing" there. By the project's conclusion, people from all over the world posted some 500 selfies from the various pavilions of the Biennale.

I happened upon the ragtag crew at the Russian pavilion when I was in Venice last month, and spoke to Poole last week (from Varna, Bulgaria, where he was traveling for another project) just after the winner of the sweepstakes had been announced, Latvian artist Katrīna Ģelze.

At the time of this writing, Ģelze had yet to decide whether to actually go #onvacation herself—needless to say, it's not exactly a great time to travel to that part of Ukraine. Over Skype, Poole and I discussed impromptu imprisonment, Instagram, and which Biennale pavilions really didn't want to go #onvacation.

VICE: Where did the idea for #onvacation came from?
Clemens Poole: I did another project for Izolyatsia last fall, about the seizure of public space, which involved nine different artists, or artists' groups, doing temporary occupations of public space around Kiev. All the projects were intended to address the idea of our relationship to space, and how our relationship to space functions in a way as a mutual consensus. Someone can say, [as they have with Izolyatsia], "Oh, this is an insulation factory" at one moment, and then everyone says, "No, I imagine this to be an art center," and then five years later someone can say, "No, I imagine this to be a prison, a place to store stolen cars, a place to promote my cultural agenda."

But during the course of that first project, while working in Kiev, I was becoming increasingly aware of the details of the overall conflict. Izolyatsia was approached to help curate the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, so the idea of the Biennale as a platform was already being discussed. In the end, we opted not to be involved. Actually, VICE ran a great thing about the complications of the Biennale. There were reasons why Izolyatsia didn't want to be involved. I floated this idea that maybe we didn't need to be involved with it as part of the system, maybe instead we could be a comment on the system, maybe we could do something guerrilla that would be a lot more effective and, in my mind, more compelling, in a contemporary art sense. We started to develop this idea of #onvacation. What I really was interested in, and what I really like to do in the work of mine that I'm most satisfied with, is follow out the logic. An absurdist logic would say, "OK, you're going to tell me that everything's fine," and trace this logic, and push it farther. That's what the project turned into: Tracing this absurdist logic of the Russian media.

Speaking of soldiers "on vacation," watch Selfie Soldiers: Russia Checks in on Ukraine on VICE News

The title #onvacation is tongue-in-cheek, it's funny, and it really raises awareness of the ridiculousness of the smokescreen. The fact that I came across you guys in the Russian Pavilion seemed perfect. Did you go to other pavilions, too, or did you just occupy the Russian one?
We made the rounds. I was there for six weeks in total. The project ran for four weeks and a couple of days, but I was there from April 25, and I saw almost every pavilion. As we got into the rhythm of the way the Biennale worked, we figured out ways to be more effective. We also had different people all the time. People would come for four days and help us out, so the question usually was, "Where can we go to be the most effective?" But also, "How do we develop this image of what we're doing online?" And that meant going to all the different pavilions and being like, "Hey, look. We're everywhere," in this digital sense. On the slow days, like Tuesday and Wednesday, we'd go to the different pavilions that were in the city, or the ones that were sort of far-flung, and then on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, we'd usually try to go to Arsenale and Giardini, with emphasis on the Giardini, because I think the national pavilion structure is more apparent there.

Did I just run across #onvacation at the Russian pavilion coincidentally, or was there a particular presence at the Russian Pavilion?
Our longest presence, consolidated, was at the Russian Pavilion on the first day. They called the police the first time we did it on May 6th, so we left, and we handed out things around there, but we didn't go back again and actually hand out uniforms in the pavilion until May 8th.

Participants in '#onvacation' at the Venice Biennale

What about the other four weeks? What was the response of security and the Biennale staff?
It was really interesting. It was like they didn't want to look. They just turned away. We were thrown out on the Friday before we left, so that would've been June 6th or something. This guy from the visual-arts office at the Biennale told us we had to leave. That was the first time we had an actual confrontation with Biennale staff. We said, "What's the problem?" and he said, "This is not a space for you. This is for the artists who are officially here." But he even sounded like he didn't want to do it, almost like he was obliged to do it, because we actually walked up and tried to engage him. For the most part, we encountered more hostility in the Russian pavilion, but on a sort of temperate level.

Irina Nakhova, the Russian pavilion artist, and I had an extended conversation at one point, and she was really interested and liked the project. And the director of the pavilion also engaged some of our people and had several discussions. Overall, my sense in the Russian pavilion was that it was an annoyance, but they realized that it was probably smarter just to let it go and indulge us, because any confrontation would be suddenly newsworthy.

The one place where we were explicitly told to leave numerous times was the Israeli pavilion. The Israelis didn't like us. Well, the people working in there were not Israeli—they were largely Italian, and specifically one woman who was from Croatia. But they were the docents, the gallery attendants. Someone had told them that we weren't allowed to be there, that we weren't allowed to do this action, we weren't allowed to distribute uniforms. They were pretty vigilant about keeping us out.

On VICE News: The All-Girl Soldier Club: Child Warriors of Donetsk:

So you had the police called the first day, and you had the security run-in on almost the last day, but that was the extent of your admonishment?
Yeah.

Maybe the powers that be were secretly enjoying it?
I can't speak for whether people enjoyed it or if that influenced how they addressed us. This problem was a consideration when we were structuring the project, and that's why the occupations weren't intended to be flash mobs. It was about giving it to the public. Even though the sellable press image of the project is everybody in the Russian pavilion wearing the uniforms, in my mind, the project really functions on the website, with all of the Instagram selfies. That's the most powerful thing: The fact that Israel can kick us out continuously, but they couldn't guarantee that people wouldn't go there and take pictures. The thing that I find most compelling about the project is the engagement of the public, rather than the creation of a spectacle in an organized way.

You encouraged people to take selfies in pavilions of any countries that had occupied other countries.
Exactly. But we also encouraged people to interpret it loosely. I really wanted people to use it for anything they wanted. I was really interested in the politics of different pavilions, in their representations of artists from the country. The Kenyan pavilion got a lot of press for having all these Chinese artists. And the Syrian pavilion, which had a bunch of artists that weren't from there. The idea of occupation can be extended to a lot of different things. It can be geopolitical, but it can also be cultural, and it was important to me that people were free to interpret it in other contexts.

A participant in '#onvacation' at the Venice Biennale

What was it like to be in Ukraine during all of this? Did you feel like you could wind up in the Izolyatsia prison yourself? What was the climate like there?
It's been changing the whole time I've been working with Izolyatsia. I've met quite a few journalists in Kiev, and I know a number of guys who go to Donetsk regularly. I talked at one point with a journalist about going there. I would be interested to see what's happening, and I think, posing as a foreign journalist, you wouldn't have a lot of problems. But this fluctuates. We talked about it last November, and now I heard it's a whole different pass system, it's a whole different way that they do it. It's chaotic. You never know when you're going to hit a checkpoint.

In the end, was this something that raised media awareness? Have there been results?
This is a valid question, but it's also such a tricky question. How can I say that an artwork has results? You can see the press that we got, and you can also see that most of the press reports on it in the standard "look, this thing happened" way. Maybe that doesn't get us that far, but I think there was a substantial amount of reporting that tried to look at what it was, and approached it with a certain respect for it as an action, but also as something that was dealing with questions that were not as pat as other similar actions.

There's no way that we can say, "Oh, yeah, we did this and now the separatists who occupy Izolyatsia are in talks with us." It's not just improbable—it's also misunderstanding the entire conflict to think that way. It's much more complicated. It's tricky to even understand what's going on. That's why we wanted it to be open-ended. I don't know what's right. I know certain things happened there, and I have a very close ear to this conflict, because all the people I work with are from Donetsk. I hear stories. They go back to visit their families. And one day you hear a story that someone's mom is listening to too much Russian radio, and she's getting worried again that they'll be forced to speak Ukrainian when the Ukrainian army takes over again. And then the next day, you hear about the Ukrainian army blowing up some car because it tried to pass a roadblock without being extorted by the guards. It's really a strange situation, and for me, #onvacation is about not knowing this stuff more than it is about knowing this stuff.

Find more information on #onvacation here.

Bibi Deitz lives and writes in Brooklyn. Recent work has appeared in Marie Claire, Bustle, Bookforum, the Rumpus, and BOMB. Follow her on Twitter.