I was 13 years old when I got my first computer. As I hopped between Livejournal, Napster chatrooms, anarchist forums, and MSN Messenger, I discovered something darker than anything I'd ever seen before: Neil Swaab's Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles comics.

While Mr. Wiggles wasn't the internet's first webcomic, it was my first webcomic, and the overwhelming incongruity between the strips in the Saturday paper and Swaab's deviant panels about a drunken teddy bear on the screen before me delighted my tween-aged mind. I dropped shocking and hilarious links into chat windows and Hotmail threads as pals and I shook in hushed, secret giggles to comics both relatively innocent, decidedly un-parent friendly, and shockingly inappropriate. Over the years, Mr. Wiggles somehow made its way into major newspapers and magazines across the world, and also released a number of trade paperback collections.

Images from The Secrets to Ruling School (Without Even Trying) unless otherwise noted. Top image, of Neil Swaab, courtesy Neil Swaab

After over a decade, Swaab laid Mr. Wiggles to rest on comic number 666 (hail Satan) after the movie Ted pretty much killed Swaab's Hollywood negotiations for the feature film or animated series fans were hoping for. While he tells me there's no chance of a reboot for the much nastier, much funnier Wiggles bear, Swaab isn't bitter: "I don't think Seth MacFarlene stole my idea or anything, I'm not one of those crackpots" (apparently the conspiracy theories are real).

When Swaab announced this spring that his new book—The Secrets to Ruling School (Without Even Trying)—would be intended for middle schoolers, I wasn't surprised, since those were the years was when I was first thrilled by Swaab's weird and terrible world (which has since coloured animated series like SuperJail, Ugly Americans, and Annoying Orange). But I was curious how someone could let this happen.

The Secrets to Ruling School is almost a choose-your-own-adventure–style journey—except that you, the new kid in school, are helpless, and your only choice is to follow middle-school survivalist Max Corrigan as he introduces you to school cliques and tries to make you cool, or possibly ruin your life. Secrets isn't a comic book—it's actually a pretty handy guide. Tweens learn different types of comedy, how to fake genius—"Just go about your regular day like always, but tell everyone it's performance art!"—plus how to forge a signature, hack email, lie to the principal, or skip class.

Some of those might be a little troubling to parents, but this isn't for parents—this is for kids to pass around gleefully. Dids who, in Swaab's/Corrigan's words, "just want to make their horrible lives a little better."

Swaab himself seems unsurprised by his own leap from the world of shock humour to teen-lit, which I find comforting: why should there be a gap at all, when the tweenage years are often life's most brutal? I chatted with Swaab over Skype about his second chance at adolescence as the creator of Max Corrigan's Middle School Services, and the guidebook we both wish we'd had at thirteen.

VICE: Is The Secrets to Ruling the School really just for middle schoolers?
Swaab: It's pretty much for middle schoolers or kids entering middle school—but obviously there are adults who could enjoy it. I tried to write it for everybody, but the target audience is kids in middle school.

Do you wish you had this guide when you were a kid?
Yeah, definitely. It's funny and interesting, and I liked thinking about how to game the system, so that experience would have been a very cool thing for me. In terms of if there was anything I actually would have used, probably not, because I was such a goody-goody little nerdy kid. This would have blown my mind, even to read it; when I was that age, the idea of even doing something wrong would have blown my mind.

What was middle school like for you? I picture you in the "class clown" clique.
Oh god, no. I was painfully quiet, awkward, kind of heavy, and had a mullet. Definitely nerdy: I was in all the smart classes but didn't have a lot of friends, didn't know how to talk to people. Middle school was definitely awful. It was really terrifying. It's the worst time because it's when kids are at their cruelest, because they're so focused on fitting in and identifying anything about you that's different or weird, and pulling it apart as much as they can. And that's what you're obsessed with too: you don't have any idea who you are, and all you want it to have some friends, get through the day, and not get made fun of or embarrassed. And it's constant embarrassment and getting made fun of and feeling like an outsider.

Where did the idea for writing a guidebook for middle school, of all things, come from?
I've had this idea for a long time: I used to work as an art director at a big publisher, and had been working for publishers for many years, and was reading tons of these middle grade books. I had this idea for doing something like a guide book for kids that would be a cool "here's how to get through life" thing—not so specialized as "middle school," but just a general guide that wasn't fiction.

Eventually I started wrapping my head around the idea of doing something fun and comical for it. I had two connections who really liked my work: my editor Charlie Kochman who did Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and then my friend Chad Beckerman who had also moved over to Abrams. We kept running into each other—I think we ran into each other at a MOCCA convention a few years back—and finally, that idea I'd had years ago clicked. We had this idea of mixing a fictional story with a how-to guide. So that's how the idea evolved.

I have to remind myself that you're not the guy from Mr. Wiggles, you're just a nice man who can draw. Where did those two characters come from?
The character of Neil really was based around me: a bald guy who looks kinda like me. He was me but a much more extreme version—a caricature. Much in the same way Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm isn't the real Larry David, it's just a strained caricature of who he sees himself as.

So that character was definitely me, but Mr. Wiggles—I mean, they're all me in some way, as a writer it's always some aspect of your personality. Mr. Wiggles was really the id unchecked, like what you think about in your worst thoughts if nobody said "hey, that's bad, don't think that." So I gave freedom to that and put an image on it.

That character started with a drawing first. I'd drawn—it looked kind of like a teddy bear, but I think it was an alien or something. It was cute and cuddly, and then there was this grotesque alien it was friends with, and the joke in the comic was that the evil character was the adorable one. The comic was for my school paper, and when the deadline came, at the very last minute I swapped out the monster character for myself.

Mr. Wiggles ended up in some pretty huge papers. How did that happen?
The climate was a little different back then. When I graduated college, I started sending it out to all these newspapers. There used to be alternative weeklies in every major metropolitan weekly—they've died off, which is part of why I don't do the comic anymore—and immediately got picked up by one in my hometown in Detroit, and one in New York, where I'd just moved. That really helped me get picked up, and every year it was growing more.

I launched the comic in 1999 and it was on the web by 2000, and there weren't a lot of webcomics back then. You still had to know HTML and FTP to get stuff onto the web. So that was great too, because I got a very large web presence, and as the web picked up more people were reading my comic. I think at some point—I can't trust those web stats, but it seemed like I was getting 200,000 people on the website every week just to read the comic. At some point I was on the front page of Digg.

It just grew organically as my name got out there. The biggest one was this magazine in Italy called Internazionale, almost the equivalent of the New Yorker here. I have no idea how or why, but the strip became one of the most popular things in that very smart literary magazine, and that really took my comic to a whole other level too because it became an international thing—I got flown out to Italy and had books there and stuff.

If you had to pick one Mr. Wiggles comic, out of all 666 of them, which would be your favourite?
I can tell you the most popular one—the one that got on Digg—it was about atheism, about how atheism is better than other religions. That was an interesting one.

Comic via Mr. Wiggles Loves You

But as raw as they were, my first book has some of my favourite things. I was experiencing so many new, different, and crazy things at that point in my life—college, maturing, figuring out who you are, dating for the first time since I was such a loser in high school—all of those things got wrapped up into those first 100 comics. Even though I can't even bear to look at the drawings because they're so ugly, and the writing... it's so raw. I hadn't quite figured out how to be a cartoonist yet. But when I revisit them there's something visceral: I can relive every experience I had. I can tell you where I was and what was happening in my life.

Do you think you've chilled out since Wiggles?
Yeah, definitely... yes and no. I definitely feel a lot more confident than I was. A lot of Mr. Wiggles stuff was fuelled by neurosis and lack of confidence: emotional instability. I definitely feel a lot more stable and like, I have less problems, which doesn't mean that I'm doing less interesting work—I think some of the work now is more interesting. With the new stuff I feel more connected with narrative work and trying to tell a story and weave a lot of those feelings I had into newer things.

Eventually when I have kids—and I'm getting married next year—I'm told you get much worse, because you start looking at the world as "this is the thing that could kill my kids" and "my kids are going to grow up in this" and all those things that got pushed aside come back even worse and you probably start crying at commercials.

So the next book will be dark?
Not the next book—maybe the third book.

Are you worried parents will buy Secrets to Ruling the School for their kids, find out about Mr. Wiggles, and rally against you?
It's a concern. I do have to be honest about it. It's something I expressed to my editor very early on. He said I didn't have to be too concerned—there are other cartoonists who are doing stuff for kids, like Johnny Ryan: there are a lot of adults who have done really out there stuff who are now doing things for kids, and I think people know to separate the two.

I stand by almost every Mr. Wiggles comic I ever did: there are some I read and I'm like "uhh, maybe that one was a little much"—but I was 22, 23, until my early 30s doing that strip, and I can stand by that stuff. It was funny then, and I still find stuff funny, but I have a weird sense of humour. I also know what stuff is for adults and what stuff is for kids.

At some point they put "Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles" in the author bio for the [new] book, and I was like, "you maybe want to cut that," and my editor realized... [now] we just say I've done a comic strip—we don't want kids googling it.

I started reading Mr. Wiggles in middle school—it was shocking for us—like, "whoa, this exists."
That's the thing—we think kids are innocent, but they're not. We're living in the internet age where kids are downloading god-knows-what every day. There are parental controls but kids are smart enough to know their parents write the password down somewhere where they can easily see it.

That's one thing with this book: I don't want to talk down to kids or pretend they don't know what's up.

You always need something as a kid that is kind of too much for you to handle, that makes you say, "I hope we don't get caught with this." If you don't have that then what is growing up? It's really safe and boring.

Do you see the guide as a potential cartoon, or feature film in the future?
I do: I think there's a story and an interesting character here. I have a Hollywood agent and I just sent them a copy of the book and an outline on how I would treat it as a live action movie or a TV show.

If you could give one more piece of advice for middle schoolers—like, actual middle schoolers—what would it be?
None of it matters. When you're that age you think every little thing is so incredibly significant and deep—if I was doing middle school all over again now, I would just let everything roll off my back so easily. "Ah, so what, this kid's a jerk. Who cares. I'm never going to see this kid again after I'm 18 years old and move away. So I hate this teacher—who cares, just get through the day, it doesn't matter." It's hard because you don't have that life experience at 12 years old.

Follow Kristel Jax on Twitter.

Manus Shannon photo via Chicago Police

Read: This American Bro

A beer pong player in Chicago pulled the ultimate party foul last Saturday when he took out a gun to distract his opponent at a Fourth of July party and wound up accidentally shooting two people, DNAinfo reports.

The shooter, Manus Shannon, waved his 9mm semiautomatic in his opponent's face, hoping he would miss the next beer pong shot, police said. When the guy pushed Shannon away, the gun discharged, sending a bullet through the opponent's finger before lodging in another poor bastard's shoulder. The second victim wasn't even playing beer pong—he was sitting down and texting, Assistant State's Attorney Erin Antonietti said during Shannon's bond hearing on Monday.

Shannon was arrested on charges of reckless discharge of a firearm on Saturday night. He had permits to own, carry, and conceal a firearm in Arkansas, but didn't update his paperwork when he moved to Illinois in February. He's being held on a $100,000 bond.

At least things worked out for him on the beer pong table—Shannon's opponent left for the hospital mid-game, and a forfeit counts as a win.

Pussy Riot at the Toronto Gay Pride parade. Photo via Toronto Pride

Imagine if the world reacted to Putin's aggression in Ukraine as it did to the American aggression in Vietnam. If European and American artists, filmmakers, and activists joined Russian and Ukrainian antiwar protesters in sharply condemning Putin's aggression, culture would have won. Screening now would be modern versions of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, and next to Book of Mormon on Broadway, something like Hair would be playing, but about a Russian soldier secretly sent to his death in eastern Ukraine (and some kind of Russian hooligan like Pussy Riot would kidnap him from his military unit). Imagine.

The Kubricks and Coppolas go to work when a topic becomes unavoidable. These unavoidable topics come to life via activists, students, office workers, and schoolteachers, who at some point take war personally, very personally. The subject then becomes acute, and is then made legendary through art. It is only then that citizens actually—not only on paper or in protest chants—will have a voice and the power to force the government to end war.

Only then will I be proud to say, "We are the power."

Right now I utter these words embarrassed, insecure. What kind of power are we when not only Russian but also European and American students,say to me that they are "not interested in politics because it's boring"? Who, if not you, should make it more fun? We can hardly expect Jeb Bush to throw a drag-queen party during a rally. So go into politics and organize a campaign, just so you can throw a victory party starring drag queens and feminist DJs. Politics, after all, isn't just Bushes and Clintons but also Harvey Milks and Hunter S. Thompsons.

One night at a bar I tried to persuade Quentin Tarantino to shoot a film about the future Russian revolution. One where Putin is overthrown and the conflict in Ukraine ends. After Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, I have no doubt that Tarantino could shoot an awesome film about overthrowing Putin. And if we were all as involved in politics as during the antiwar movement in the 60s and 70s, then Tarantino would definitely make a fucking awesome film about some female superheroes who tunnel under the Kremlin and swap Putin for Lenin's mummy (in the end Putin paces around the Mausoleum, not knowing how to escape), capture the television tower, and stop the war in Ukraine.

And while there isn't a Putin in the Unite States, this country still has its problems. Fox News is the most popular news channel in America. There is the death of Eric Garner. There are countless victims of police brutality. In the US, abortion is still a question—in the minds of Russians, the right to abortion is undeniable, not even a topic for discussion. If God ever took me out of Russia and said that from now on I have to make political art in the US, I would have found a thousand topics for art. Learn to love politics and politics will love you back. Raise hell with political art actions. Help Pussy Riot in our antiwar mission.

Pussy Riot's Maria Vladimirovna Alyokhina and Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova perform at the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, Pilton, on June 26, 2015, in Glastonbury, England. Photo by Danny Martindale/WireImage

On June 26, Pussy Riot stormed the Glastonbury music festival in Britain, bursting onto the scene in a tank, which was parked by the stage. А few minutes after the Pussy Riot performance began, a militant in a black mask and military uniform brandishing an AK-47 burst out of the hatch: "We are founding the People's Republic of Glastonbury! No more Pussy Riot with their rotten liberal beliefs! No more gay parades in the territory of our republic!" he said. "Booooo," the crowd began to heckle. Then two of the Pussy Riot grrrlz angrily tied up the militant, pulling a rainbow balaclava over his black mask before taking away his gun and wrapping his mouth in tape. Then they proclaimed the "Ten Commandments of Pussy Riot," including "Do Not Read the News, Make News," "Have a Break, Have a Riot," "Stay Queer," and "Think Different, Think Feminist."

"I admire Eve," shouted a woman from the tank in a pink balaclava. "While Adam—not a very bright person—just hung out in Paradise and obeyed all the divine orders, Eve hustled and found an apple. In accordance with the Bible it was the apple of knowledge. So, generally, we have Eve to thank for science, space shuttles, iPhones, recording studios, coffee machines, and the internet. They told us that men invent everything, but without Eve man couldn't even start to think and to acquire knowledge about the world. Is it better to take a bite from the fucking Tree of Knowledge, of good and evil, than to sit like a blissful idiot on the shoulders of the Lord? Eve is the first feminist and a generally cool gal."

Charlotte Church talks to Pussy Riot, Maria Vladimirovna Alyokhina, and Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova at the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, Pilton, on June 26, 2015, in Glastonbury, England. Photo by Danny Martindale/WireImage

The girl in the pink balaclava was me, and I stood on that tank because I believe that we—you and I—have to take back arms from our governments. We have to occupy military equipment. And I'm pretty fucking sure that we can use that stuff in much more interesting ways than our governments—we can use it in art, for example, or as stages at music festivals.

The antiwar movement is in the past, and the true tragedy is that war didn't end with it. Our generation watched movies and grew up with the notion that rights have already been won, that they are given to us by default. Conservatives will continue to win power damn easily, that we will assume for now. That's why David Cameron wins elections in England and cuts social benefits. That's why the right wing grows increasingly popular in France. That's why in Hungary Viktor Orban is in power, glad-handing Putin.

If you take your rights and freedom for granted, they will flow out through your fingers. Expand your rights. Conquer new ones. Sometimes, like Alice in Wonderland, we have to run with all our might just to stay in one place. But freedom is worth it.

Pussy Riot at the Toronto Gay Pride parade. Photo via Toronto Pride

On June 28, Pussy Riot led the Gay Pride celebration in Toronto, marching through the city on a huge red rocket (or penis). The ballistic missile was a Topol-M, the same type that flows by the hundreds in the streets of Moscow during a military parade, and symbolizes the hundreds of dickish politicians like Putin, who stand only for destruction and war. The male-dominated world of politics tends to measure their penises by the extent of their power. "Look, my cock is huge!" Putin tells you by the wars he starts. Pussy Riot prefers to use cocks for love, not war, which is why we stole one of Putin's rockets and brought it with us to use in a gay pride parade. Now, it's our Pussy Riot Queer Rocket. I'm a woman, but I also have a cock and it's bigger than Putin's. Every woman has a cock.


Putin is telling the world that Russia is a conservative, backward country that is not ready for gay rights, that it is a place where children need to be protected from gays. Well, let me tell you, Mr. Putin, that's a lie. Russia is one of the most progressive countries on Earth—Russian women gained suffrage and other rights before their counterparts in the US. Russia is the birthplace of the avant-garde, not the conservative swamp that Putin is trying to make it resemble. LGBTQ rights are my family values, not their so-called traditional values, which turn out to be oppression and violence.

We don't need no wars, we don't need no gender roles, we don't need no thought control.

Russians want to see more acts of disobedience, like those of the magnificent Yes Men. I don't mean to seem immodest, but after public performances, people come up to us and say that they are very inspired by Pussy Riot's art and activism. Remember, we also want to be inspired, as we once were by the wild, crazy, and sexy riot grrrlz.

Let me be inspired by you!

Translation by Brendan Mulvihill

Naomi Klein. Photo via Flickr user Justine Warrington

Around 10,000 people—from Indigenous groups to labour unions—filled the streets of Toronto on Sunday for the first Jobs, Justice, and the Climate march, which activists are calling the most diverse climate mobilization in Canadian history.

Big names in the climate movement, including David Suzuki and Jane Fonda, showed up to lend support (although Fonda bolted right before the actual march began).

I sat down with Naomi Klein in Allan Gardens after the march to talk about why all these people came together now and her controversial new partnership with the Vatican.

VICE: What's the point of this march?
Klein: The overall message is that our politicians are not treating climate change like the emergency that it is. They are also not treating action on climate change like the opportunity that it is. Because if we take this crisis seriously, if we stop denying it, then we would be making huge investments in our energy economy, our transportation economy, that would create massive numbers of jobs. We could make sure they were well-paying jobs and we could make sure that the people who got those investments were the ones who needed it most. And that's why the framing of this march is jobs, justice, and climate action. Because we've been told we need to choose between these things, between jobs and the environment. And that's just not true. We can create jobs by responding to climate change in a way that our current economy is failing to do.

With all these groups here today, especially the labour unions, which aren't typically involved in these kinds of events, does this mean that the climate movement is changing?
Look, I think it is changing. And it's changing because we have an economic system that is failing us on so many fronts. You look at what's happening in Europe right now: a huge uprising against austerity and the endless squeezing of healthcare, education, salaries. That same logic is also squeezing the planet. So it's obvious that if we take climate change seriously, the logic of austerity has to go. We have to invest in the public sphere. One of the things you're seeing is that people who have been involved in protecting education, healthcare, working with the homeless, working on the frontline of agencies that depend on there being public funding for social services are realizing this is all part of the same fight. And we have to work together. The thing about climate change is it puts us on a deadline and it says we have to win, we have to win in the next five years.

The crowd at the March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate. Photo courtesy Jobsjusticeclimate.ca

Pope Francis recently invited you to take part in a climate change conference at the Vatican. Why did you accept that invitation?
It's not that I didn't deliberate over the decision. Obviously I did deliberate because I disagree with the Catholic church on so many issues: reproductive rights, gay marriage, colonialism. I mean, it's a pretty long list. But I also think that what this Pope is doing is extraordinarily courageous within the Catholic church. His encyclical represents [what] I would have to believe [is] a power struggle that's taking place within the Vatican. And I certainly met people while I was there who were not at all pleased that the Pope has waded into these waters. There are very conservative elements in the Catholic church in Europe and North America that would really like him to stick to talking about abortion and gay marriage.

So, to me it seemed absolutely worth engaging, but also making it clear that this is an alliance, it's a strategic alliance, it's not a merger. It doesn't mean that we agree on everything by any means.

Was it difficult for you to reconcile your own views on feminism on women's rights with working with the Pope on climate change?
Not once I read his encyclical. I really do believe the encyclical is an extraordinary document. And the most extraordinary part of it is that it challenges the dominance-based worldview, this idea that we have the right to dominate all of nature. That God gave us nature in order for us to subjugate it. It explicitly challenges that, and the central theme of the encyclical is that we are in community and in relationships of interconnection with the natural world. That's something all Indigenous people believe, it's something most people in the world used to believe, but this strain of Christianity came to dominate that said the world is ours to use up. So I think if you're challenging that idea, in a sense you're challenging everything, because so much of the way we dominate people flows from that original sense of entitlement.

I went to the Vatican for the same reasons people are here today. Yes, we have disagreements on all kinds of things, but we agree on something really big, that this is an emergency and we need to treat it as such.

One Guardian writer, Giles Fraser, said Pope Francis is "a bit like Naomi Klein in a cassock (priest's robes)." What do you make of that comparison?
I mean, it's just silly. He was just being provocative, obviously. But the point he was making is that this Pope, on several different fronts, is challenging the logic of capitalism. Not just on climate change, he's been very strong taking on the financial institutions and the cult of money, as he calls it. I really do feel like this is unprecedented and utterly unexpected that such a powerful and conservative institution would be stepping up and leading in the way that it is. But I really don't think we have much in common, but we both see some big problems in capitalism, yeah.

What can Canadians do right now to combat climate change?
Well it depends on what level we're talking about. Federally, I think it's pretty important that we have a different government representing us in Paris at the United Nations conference in December. Our election is in October, and the Harper government has made it absolutely clear that it's not taking climate change seriously. So that's one thing Canadians can do, however they choose to do that. It's not the end of the story, but that's the baseline of what we need in order to get the justice-based transition in our society that this march is all about. If there is going to be a change in government, and it looks like there will be, it's really important for social movements to have a coherent vision, to push the government on what we want. We want to tackle poverty and inequality and climate change at the same time, we don't want those issues pitted against each other.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

Is there anything better than a headline combining the name of an exceptionally hyped new video game and a meme so ubiquitous that it's a wonder nobody's named their kid after it yet? No, there really is not.

I've been looking forward to No Man's Sky ever since the first footage of the (Guildford-based) Hello Games-developed, procedurally generated "open-universe" affair went public in 2014. At E3 last year, it was as good as best in show, leaving jaws floored across the web—but here we are, over a year later, and we've spent much of that time wondering what it is that the game actually wants us to do. But now we have some idea, courtesy of an 18-minute IGN First playthrough in the hands of the game's director and studio founder Sean Murray.

It turns out, No Man's Sky wants us to do whatever we like, and that can range from slaying (rather than simply scanning) alien goats and attracting the local (rather aggressive, actually) authorities within seconds, basically embarking on a Grand Theft Auto-style rampage as seen through the lens of Arthur C Clarke, to buying low and selling high across the galaxy like Gordon Gekko in a space suit. Or, just drift from space station to space station, never stepping foot on a planet ripe for exploration. It's up to the player, completely. Watch the video, below.

Mine a planet's resources too heavily and yes, it'll lead to advantages at trading posts, but it's going to go down badly with its indigenous population. Get violent in the company of newly discovered species and, while you'll get to name the critters for some "units" (the game's currency), it's unlikely they'll want to hang with you in the future. You murderer. Murray only shows gameplay for one planet and a few of its moons, dropping back to a map menu and adding: "Every one of these points of light is a sun that has its own set of planets, that have creatures and everything else."

The watching journalist from IGN, Ryan McCaffery, is fairly impressed—and yes, that's an understatement. "I've never seen anything like this in a video game before. I'm... I'm having a bit of trouble comprehending what's going on, because this is incredible."

It certainly does look special, and now that it's clear that No Man's Sky isn't just a pretty safari in space, pointing the camera at weird-looking creatures and taking in impossible sunsets, we're beginning to see the game beneath the gorgeousness. And it's looking, well, fairly game-y—which will help connect its grand ambitions with the wants and needs of mainstream players. Of course there are (totally upgradable) laser guns – there were always going to be laser guns, right? And the wanted level mechanic has us imagining dramatic escapes from pursing forces, jet-packing into our (highly customisable) ship and hyper-driving the shit out of (a completely sexy-maths-generated interpretation of) Dodge.

Gotta be honest, though, it's the look and feel of the game over what you can and can't shoot in it that still holds its greatest appeal, for me. I can't wait to get lost in it when it's released in... nope, we've still no confirmed date, but we're thinking sometime in late 2015, with PlayStation 4 and PC versions confirmed to come out on the same day. Just book the whole of December off now, to be safe.

@MikeDiver

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This bird is so high right now. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

I recently found out that some species of birds are known to have a drug habit. Before you nod off into some daydream about birds railing lines in a bar toilet, let me explain.

A while back, I stumbled across a 65-year-old scientific paper produced by American entomologist and ornithologist Horace Groskin. There was one particular sentence in the essay that really caught my attention: "Birds use the ants to anoint themselves with the formic acid excretions of the ant to give tone to the muscles and also for the general agreeable effect."

An agreeable effect, eh? Apparently, this behavior is called "anting" and involves grabbing a bunch of ants and rubbing them under your wings. As a means of defense, ants omit formic acid—an organic insecticide—which then gets absorbed by the bird's body. People have reported seeing birds dancing around with their wings stretched out and their beak wide open, right after having covered themselves with this gross ant spray. A sort of ornithological gurning, if you will. This has led many smart professor types to believe that the act of anting is a vice and that birds do it to get, well, mad-out-of-it.

I decided to ask an expert from the Romanian Ornithological Society about the phenomenon. Ornithologist Stefan Emanuel Baltag told me that anting was quite common amongst several species of birds—namely, the hoopoe, the common starling, the mockingjay, the kestrel, the raven, the crow, and the chaffinch.

This bird has been hitting the ants hard. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

"Some birds fly up on top of an anthill, sit down still, and then patiently wait for the ants to crawl up into their feathers. This is called 'passive anting.' Other species pick the ants up with their beaks and actively wipe their excretion all over themselves. This is known as 'active anting.' One explanation for this is that birds use the ants' formic acid as a stimulant, much like people smoking or taking drugs," he explained to me.

The ants accumulate this acid in a gland and save it to spray at a predator if they feel threatened. Formic acid actually gets its name from the Latin word for ant, "formica." When active anting, the birds repeatedly flap their wings so the excretion is evenly distributed all the way to the bottom of their feathers.

It's quite easy to examine formic acid—all you need to do is place your hand over an anthill and you'll end up with a layer of stinking secretion on your palm.

Baltag added that there have been cases of birds rubbing themselves in the secretion of other species like centipedes, snails, caterpillars, and wasps, too. One can only imagine what that's good for.

Watch VICE correspondent Hamilton Morris get high by licking toads:

Even though it's widely accepted that birds engage in anting for kicks, there's a bunch of other theories also floating about. "There's no definitive answer as to why birds engage in this kind of behavior. Depending on their species, birds can use anting to get rid of parasites, to sooth irritation, or as a way to reach a euphoric state," Baltag concluded.

Unsurprisingly, it's still unclear whether rubbing ants into your armpits has any effect on humans.

Photo via Flickr user TBEC Review

Ray Yeates always assumed he would die a smoker. An adherent of Alcoholics Anonymous with over 35 years hard-fought sobriety, the 66-year-old says that when he found out that Bill W., one of AA's founders, had continued to smoke through emphysema and dependence on an oxygen tank, he became certain that his life would end the same way.

Although he tried to quit many times, as Yeates' health failed it seemed as if he'd be proven correct.

On New Year's Day 2013, Yeates was sitting in the kitchen of his home in Rhodes Corner, Nova Scotia when he began to feel ill. He lay down and stayed down for days, until his children called an ambulance.

On Jan. 4, the day before his youngest daughter's 16th birthday, Yeates was admitted to the hospital and spent the next five days fighting for his life against a bad case of pneumonia. He survived and returned home with his own diagnosis of late-stage emphysema and a new determination to stay off cigarettes.

He held off for five days.

After several months and follow-up tests, Yeates' doctor told him he had lung cancer and, at best, a few years to live. He still couldn't stop smoking.

Yeates hasn't beaten his nicotine addiction, but he also hasn't touched tobacco since September 1, 2013, the day he first tried an electronic cigarette.

Today, Yeates is using his remaining time and waning strength to advocate for vaping as a safer alternative to cigarettes. He sees it as a crusade to save other smokers from the slow death that he's suffering.

Yeates' fight comes at a time when governments around the world are grappling with how to regulate e-cigarettes.

Last February, the European Union revised the Tobacco Products Directive, adopting a restrictive policy around e-cigarettes and in the United States, after many legislative battles, the Food and Drug Administration is readying to introduce its own regulations.

The Canadian federal government has been slow to develop policy around vaping and Ottawa is continuing to study how to legislate the use and sale of e-cigarettes. In May, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 45, the Making Healthier Choices Act, which, among other things, bars the sale of e-cigarettes to people under 19, prohibits their use in spaces where smoking is not allowed, and restricts their display and advertisement. British Columbia and Quebec are expected to follow Ontario's lead in the coming months and many municipalities have already passed bylaws governing e-cigarettes.

Much of the legislation developing around e-cigarettes is the product of an abundance of caution from anti-tobacco advocates and policymakers who are wary of vaping and worry that, like light cigarettes before them, e-cigarettes are merely a rebranding of the same old poison, a ploy to get another generation hooked. But while there are serious and unanswered public health questions around e-cigarettes, some proponents warn that overly strict regulations may discourage smokers from making the switch to a product that leading medical experts and a wealth of scientific research is coming to support as a much less dangerous alternative to smoking and a potential boon in the fight against tobacco.

One such experts is Dr. Mark Eisenberg, a professor of medicine at McGill University and the director of the Cardiovascular Health Services Research Group and Montreal's Jewish General Hospital.

Eisenberg studies the effectiveness of smoking cessation medications, or quit-aids, and is leading a team conducting a study examining whether e-cigarettes are generally effective in helping people quit tobacco. Eisenberg says that the science is still out on this point, but that the question of how the health effects of vaping compare to those of smoking is largely settled.

"There is no question that the typical contents of e-cigarettes are less harmful than those found in tobacco cigarettes," Eisenberg wrote in an email to VICE. "E-cigarettes have no tobacco combustion, unlike regular strength or light cigarettes, which makes them much safer to use.

"Although we can't yet say for sure whether they are effective tools for smoking cessation, they are at least safer alternatives to cigarette smoking, which makes them useful tools for harm reduction."

E-cigs versus cigarettes. Photo via Flickr user Ecig click

"Orders of Magnitude Safer"
In name and nicotine content, e-cigarettes are very much like their combustible counterparts. Beyond that, however, chemical analyses show the two to be very different.

The components generally found in the liquids used in e-cigarettes are propylene glycol, glycerin, nicotine, and a flavouring agent, which is in turn a compound with multiple components.

Propylene glycol and glycerin are common food and pharmaceutical additives and are generally recognized as safe by the United States Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada. Nicotine is highly addictive and dangerous to ingest, but it does not cause cancer and is widely used as a medicine to assist smokers in quitting.

The flavouring agents used in e-cigarettes vary widely and some, most commonly sweet flavours, have been found to contain harmful chemicals.

When compared to breathing fresh air, vaping is risky. But comparing it with smoking tobacco is another story.

Cigarette smoke is an odious mix of gases, vapours, and solids containing hundreds of toxic chemicals, 70 of which are known to cause cancer. The carcinogenic potency of this mix comes mostly from tar, the solid byproduct of burning tobacco, but many of the chemicals in the gases also do significant damage to the body, especially the lungs.

An estimated 59.2 million North Americans smoke, and cigarettes contribute to more than 500,000 deaths on the continent annually. Globally, they kill about six million people each year.

Although they do it slowly, on average, cigarettes kill one in two smokers.

Many toxic chemical compounds are created through the combustion of the solid components of cigarettes, and the same is true of vaporizing an e-liquid. But with e-cigarettes, the chemicals produced are generally either present in amounts dramatically lower than those found in cigarette smoke or in amounts so small as to be insignificant.

As one 2014 study published in the journal Tobacco Control concludes, "The vapor generated from e-cigarettes contains potentially toxic compounds. However, the levels of potentially toxic compounds in e-cigarette vapor is from 9 to 450-fold lower than those in the smoke from conventional cigarettes, and in many cases comparable to the trace amounts present in pharmaceutical preparation. Our findings are support [for] the idea that substituting tobacco cigarettes with electronic cigarettes may substantially reduce exposure to tobacco-specific toxicants."

This is not the controversial conclusion of one test. It is representative of the consensus finding of many studies and is born out by a meta analysis of the existing scientific literature.

Dr. Peter Selby, chief and clinician scientist in the addictions division of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and professor in the departments of Family and Community Medicine and Psychiatry at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, says that the reasons for this difference are fairly simply: vaping doesn't combust tobacco nor produce tar.

"From a product-to-product comparison, common sense will tell us that the e-cigarette is likely to be orders of magnitude safer," Selby told VICE. "Some of the research suggests 85 percent safer."

However, Selby says that the low standard of quality control under which many e-liquids are produced creates variability in their content, not just between brands, but between different batches of the same brand's liquid.

Some e-liquids producers employ high standards for product testing and consumer protection, but the proliferation of mom-and-pop vape shops and the common practice of "home-brewing" e-liquids has resulted in some dangerous chemicals finding their way into liquids without the producer's knowledge.

One such chemical is diacetyl. A flavouring agent linked to a potentially fatal respiratory disease, diacetyl was found to be present in as many as 74.2 percent of sweet e-liquids in 2014. Producers responded promptly to this finding, and the levels of diacetyl found in e-cigarette vapours were significantly lower than those found in tobacco smoke.

Selby warns that without better quality control throughout the industry, vapers face potential risks.

Selby also cautioned that although propylene glycol and glycerin are non-toxic and safe in the short-run, until there is epidemiological research looking at the effects of inhaling a high volume of these substances over decades, uncertainties will remain.

A product-to-product, ingredient-to-ingredient comparison clearly shows that e-cigarette are substantially less harmful than tobacco cigarettes, but the calculus of public health is more complex than this simple equation and some of the important variables remain unknown. One of these is addiction.

Ray Yeates. Photo courtesy Ray Yeates

Won't Stop? Can't Stop
Ray Yeates started smoking in Dorchester Penitentiary, but not until his second stay in 1968.

"I'll never forget my first cigarette," said Yeates. "My uncle in Dorchester gave it to me. I took a drag off it and, you know, I had to be one of the tough guys, one of the Yeates, not show any sign of weakness. But you know what? I turned fucking white."

Yeates grew up around crime. His father—to whom he is not biologically related—was a car mechanic in Spryfield, Nova Scotia who occasionally stole booze from the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation to slake his alcoholism. Yeates' many uncles were of another calibre and bounced in and out of federal prison.

Working in his father's garage, Yeates got really good at hotwiring cars. In 1965, at the age of 16, he landed in prison for the first time after stealing a maroon '61 Chevy.

In March of 1968, Yeates and a couple friends smashed the window of a service station and made off with the cash box. They were caught and Yeates landed back in Dorchester, where he spent most of the next seven years. This time, he picked up smoking in earnest.

"In jail [smoking] was just constant. It was part of it. I used to work out with weights and all that kind of stuff, and even then it was just constant."

Yeates was released from prison in 1975 smoking about a pack a day. His preference was for Player's Lights, but when money was tight he'd smoke the slightly-cheaper Canadian Classics.

Determined to get out of the environment that had helped turn him to crime, Yeates fled Atlantic Canada for Thunder Bay, Ontario. He spent much of the next five years there drinking.

As a skinny kid with an alcoholic father and a cadre of uncles with serious criminal record, Yeates says that he turned to booze early as a way to look tough, an elixir for courage in the face of stress and confrontation.

In Thunder Bay, Yeates was a partier, not the type of drunk to always have a bottle in hand. But when he did drink it was often until his memory became a dark pool that he'd slog out of hours or days later, unsure of how bad decisions were made.

"That was my problem with alcohol," said Yeates. "I blacked out a lot, an awful lot. My drinking ended up being mostly weekends. I loved to party. I loved music, Bob Marley and all that kind of stuff, pretending I was a peaceful guy when inside I was boiling over. I had a lot of hate."

"May 20, 1980" is a phrase that Yeates speaks with the grim conviction common among recovering people. It's the day he went to his first AA meeting.

Yeates hasn't had a drink or used drugs since, and spent several years working at a halfway house, helping other alcoholics and drug addicts take the first steps towards recovery. But despite his knowledge of addiction and having strength enough to help other addicts back to their feet, Yeates couldn't stop smoking.

Asked how many times he tried to quit over his three-and-a-half decades of sobriety, Yeates responded with shame at the high number: "Oh, God! I don't want to tell you. I stopped stopping because I was a failure. And sober I'm still a failure; I can't do it."

Quitting is incredibly difficult. At least half of American smokers have tried to quit within the last year. Of those who go at it cold-turkey, 95 to 97 percent fail, most within the first eight days. Smokers who use nicotine replacement therapies like the patch and support groups do a bit better, but after a year 85 percent of them are back to using cigarettes.

"At about two hours, the withdrawal is so severe that all a smoker can think about is getting to a cigarette," said Kellie Forbes, a nurse who works in acute and palliative care in Westlock, Alberta and smoked for almost 35 years before picking up an e-cigarette in May, 2013. "It's horrible. You're an absolute slave to it."

For days after an attempt to quit, as the person goes deeper into withdrawal, they will be irritable, prone to picking fights and snapping at people around them. For Yeates, this part of quitting posed a special difficulty.

As a recovering person who drank in part as a way to deal with confrontation and conflict, Yeates worried that the ill-temper that results from nicotine withdrawal might create a situation where he'd be tempted to have a drink.

"The irritability that comes with it is just extreme. You want to jump down people's throats," said Yeates. "Obviously we [recovering people] don't want the confrontation. We look at it and we can't handle confrontation."

Forbes did not have this same added barrier that Yates experienced, but despite her work— caring for people dying horribly from smoking related illnesses—she was just as unable to stop.

"I've done patches, gum, LifeSign, which was this little handheld computer. I did the Canadian Cancer Society's quitting smoking program twice. I've been on Zyban a multitude of times. I tried hypnosis, acupuncture. I tried cold turkey. I've been on Chantix four times, with horrible, horrible side effects. The side effects got worse every time I went on that drug, but I was so desperate to quit because I hated smoking. I absolutely hated it."

For Yeates and Forbes, vaping allowed them to put down cigarettes when nearly everything else had failed, and there is significant evidence that thousands of other smokers are using e-cigarettes as a way reduce or eliminate their tobacco consumption.

One survey published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that out of 5,939 current and former smokers who vape in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia 79.8 percent used e-cigarettes because they were less harmful, 75.4 percent said they used them to help reduce smoking and 85.1 percent said they used the devices to help them quit altogether.

The wide acceptance of vaping among smokers and the close similarity between the experience of using an e-cigarette and smoking are cited by medical professionals as reasons to be optimistic about the potential of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation.

However, both Selby and Eisenberg caution that there is not yet enough scientific data to say whether or not e-cigarettes can serve as an effective quit-aid at the population level. While surveys might be suggestive and stories like those of Yeates and Forbes are moving, the doctors say that what is needed are studies with long timeframes and randomized control groups comparing the effect of e-cigarettes to those of placebos and established smoking cessation therapies.

Because e-cigarettes are a new technology, there have only been a few studies that fit these criteria. The best of them, according to a literature review performed by Eisenberg's research team in preparation for their own study, is a 2013 randomized control trial that compared the effect of an e-cigarettes with nicotine, e-cigarettes without nicotine, and a nicotine patch, on 657 smokers, motivated to quit. Over six months, the study found that 7.3 percent of the nicotine e-cigarette group managed to continuously abstain from smoking, compared to 5.8 percent of those with the patch and 4.1 percent of those with the placebo.

Selby and Eisenberg said that while this study is suggestive, methodological issues with how its analysis was performed make it far from definitive and the nascency of the evidence must shape how healthcare professionals deal with vaping.

"Health practitioners, including myself, are routinely asked by patients if they should try e-cigarettes to quit smoking," Eisenberg told VICE. "Given that we don't yet know whether they are as effective as proven smoking cessation therapies (nicotine replacement, bupropion, varenicline), I typically recommend these first-line smoking therapies if a patient wants to quit smoking. However, if that patient has tried these therapies unsuccessfully, does not want to use them, or is not trying to quit smoking, I would tell them that using an e-cigarette is less harmful than smoking tobacco cigarettes."

Because the data presently available about how e-cigarettes are being used and who is using them only offer snapshots of behaviour at a particular moment, rather than tracking it over an extended period of time, there remain many other unknowns about e-cigarettes.

Two of the most important, according to Selby, are how frequently people vape as compared to smoking and whether, at the population level, e-cigarettes are a way in which people transition away from using cigarettes or if they lead people to start smoking. On these points, the technology is simply too new to know for sure.

Ultimately, Selby says, looking at e-cigarettes the way we look at medical devices is a deeply misguided approach.

"When I look at e-cigarettes as a quit-aid, I think it's probably the wrong headed way for society to go... the question we really need to ask is, how well do e-cigarettes replace combustible cigarettes in the market so that you essentially don't need to have combustibles in the market anymore."

"I think we'll see the Remington effect," said Selby, answering his own question with a reference to what computer word processing did to typewriters. "That's what you want. It's replaced. Gone."

E-cig materials assembled. Photo via Flickr user TBEC Review

"Easy on Harm"?
Yeates can walk across his living room or he can talk on the phone, but to do both is a struggle that leaves him coughing and reaching for the albuterol inhaler he uses to cope with emphysema.

According to Forbes, these symptoms are common among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, whose bodies gradually shut down as their organs starve for oxygen.

"At that point, what exactly kills them? Well, disease. Which one? Pick one," Forbes told VICE. "It's usually a very slow death, and it's very hard on the family, and I'm sure in the back of everyone's mind is, 'If Dad only just quit smoking... '"

In May, Yeates had wanted to travel to Toronto as part of the Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, the vaping advocacy group of which he and Forbes are members, protest of Ontario's Bill 45. However, his poor health didn't allow him to make the trip.

Yeates says that he understands the need to prohibit vaping in places like provincial buildings and the areas around schools, but he and many other e-cigarette users opposed Bill 45 because they believe that some of provisions, like the ban on displaying and giving potential users information about e-cigarettes, will discourage people from making the switch from tobacco.

Bill 45 passed overwhelmingly into law, but there is no implementation date for the e-cigarette regulations. Politicians who supported the bill say that they are waiting for more evidence to determine how the restrictions on the display and marketing of e-cigarettes should be brought into effect.

From 1997 to 2003 Clive Bates was the director of the United Kingdom anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health. After a period as a public servant, Bates returned to his former field, citing "unfinished business" with tobacco harm reduction. He now runs a private consultancy.

Bates, who receives no money from tobacco, pharmaceutical, or e-cigarette companies, is a proponent of e-cigarettes as a means to stopping the damage done by smoking. He is also a supporter of the regulation of e-cigarette, especially provisions that provide consumer protections in the form of manufacturing quality controls, childproof packaging, truthful advertising, accurate labeling and other thing.

Looking at the present and developing legislation in North America and Europe, Bates is concerned that policymakers are striking the wrong balance, not focusing enough on quality control and too much on restricting e-cigarettes, something Bates believes is ultimately a service to the tobacco industry.

"If you're tough on harm reduction, it's not a big leap of logic to suggest that you are being easy on harm," Bates told VICE.

Yeates also worries that too much of the debate over e-cigarettes focuses on the unknowns about vaping rather than on what is known about how it compares to smoking.

"The ideology of 'quit or die' is just not the right one, because six million people a year are affected by this, plus the families," said Yeates. "That's what this has got to be about, bringing out the real effects of smoking versus the effects of the electronic cigarette."

Follow Jake Bleiberg on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Ian D. Keating

Read: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Selfie Sticks

Today, the Russian interior ministry has announced a new "safe selfie" campaign, after a slew of young people in the country have been injured or killed taking photos of themselves. The BBC reports that the campaign includes "selfie-safety" trainings at schools and an illustrated booklet warning young people of all the ways you can die from selfies.

About 100 people in the country have been killed or injured from taking "high-risk selfies," according to Al Jazeera. Among them are a 21-year-old woman who accidentally shot herself in the head while taking a selfie with a gun, and a 13-year-old boy who fell off the roof of a train trying to take an action shot. There are similar accounts from other countries: Last summer, a 21-year-old in Mexico posed for a selfie with a loaded pistol, which went off, killing him, and a 16-year-old fell off a seaside cliff in Italy while taking selfies on a school trip. In January, a trio of 20-somethings in India were killed when, according to the Telegraph, "they saw a train approaching and decided to take selfie photographs with the train in the background." The train slammed into all three of them.

The Russian safe selfie booklet covers many of these scenarios, as well as taking selfies with wild animals and on top of tall buildings. The campaign's slogan pretty much sums it up: "Even a million 'likes' on social media are not worth your life and well-being."

Images via DB Export Brewtroleum.

New Zealand just took one step closer to becoming a complete utopia, where smiles function as money and drinking beer counts as environmental activism. Starting today, drivers can fill their cars with DB Export Brewtroleum, a biofuel made with the yeast leftover from brewing beer.

Simon Smith, a spokesman for DB Export—the New Zealand brewery that created the biofuel—told VICE it's actually pretty easy to turn beer into something that can run a car. So easy that "a few guys having a few beers" came up with the idea back in February. Six months later, the biofuel is being pumped at Gull Petrol Stations across New Zealand.

Here's how the process works. When brewing beer, there's always a bit of sediment left once the drink has fermented. It's mainly made up of inactive yeast, and people in the brewing business call it slurry. Usually, as Simon explains, "The yeast slurry is passed on to farmers for stock feed, but sometimes it can go to waste."

Beer, fueling your car and your social life since 2015.

The DB Export folks realized the slurry could still be used to produce ethanol; a key ingredient in biofuel. So instead of dumping it, they sent 15,300 gallons of slurry to a refinery. There, the ethanol from the yeast was refined until it was pure enough to start mixing with petrol. Simon explains "Brewtroleum is 10 percent ethanol from our yeast, and 90 percent petrol." That's the same ratio as the E10 at your local service station, which almost all modern cars can run on.

DB Export made 79,250 gallons of biofuel, which Simon expects to last about six weeks, but he says a second batch might be on the cards. "It's gone off with a bang, so we'll just see how people enjoy it." In fact, one of Gull's Auckland employees reported people turning out in droves for Brewtroleum's launch, making it their "busiest day of the year, so far."

Trending on Munchies: Global Warming Is Making Our Food Taste Terrible

Despite the hype, biofuel itself isn't always the holy grail of sustainability, so there's a little bit more to consider. As Professor Peter Scales from the University of Melbourne warns, not all biofuels are created equal.

Related: Interested in the environment? Check out our video on air pollution in Canada

Scientists break biofuel down into two categories, "generation one" and "generation two." Both are made with ethanol, just like Brewtroleum, but it's the source of that ethanol that makes all the difference.

Generation two biofuels source ethanol from waste products—like DB Export's slurry—and materials that would otherwise be thrown away. On the other hand, generation one biofuel is made from crops grown specifically to make ethanol. As Peter explains, this creates a catch-22. "Generation one biofuel is sustainable in one way, in that it's coming from a bio-source not a crude oil, but it is taking up farming land." When countries rely too heavily on generation one biofuels, practices like deforestation become more frequent.

Put simply, biofuel is sustainable as long as it's made using stuff that would otherwise go to waste. Because the process of making you a nice cold brew creates so much potential waste, beer isn't just a novel ethanol source for biofuel, it's also a smart one. Cheers to that.

Follow Isabelle on Twitter.

Screen shot from episode two of 'Life is Strange,' via YouTube.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's a fallacy, utterly, to say that summertime means no new video games, because there is a handful of potential greatness coming up in the next couple of months. Volume arrives on the August 18, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture just a week before that, both Sony console exclusives; the Rare Replay collection (so excited, but I'm old) will be released on August 4 for Xbox One, and The Flame in the Flood at the end of July; and good-looking isolated-cabin horror Until Dawn is finally out on August 26.

But given that a great many gamers won't be rushing to these niche delights (compared to what comes in September, anyway, with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Mad Max, FIFA 16, LEGO Dimensions, and Super Mario Maker), it does make sense to use this period of relative commercial calm to remind everyone of the games of 2015 so far that have been really special. Not necessarily the best the year's had to offer so far, but favourites, certainly.

I asked Twitter a very simple question: What 2015 game would you recommend to a friend? I read the replies, and this is what I've been left with: five brilliant games from the past six months that you should pick up now.

Life is Strange

(Recommended by games journalist Jem Alexander and video games PR Robbie Paterson, who doesn't work this game so shush it, you)

Parisian studio Dontnod's five-part episodic adventure game puts you in the shoes of teenager Max, back on her childhood stamping ground of Arcadia Bay, Oregon after time away in Seattle. She reconnects with old friends, gets on with her education at Blackwell Academy, and discovers she has the ability to rewind time. Which is ever so useful for avoiding falling lighthouses, changing her mind about the best means to intervene between argumentative supporting characters, and pulling loved ones out of the way of oncoming trains. It's a leisurely paced, somewhat meditative experience, now three episodes deep, full of wonderful licensed music (including Bright Eyes, Mogwai, and Sparklehorse) and atmospheric lighting. Gentle puzzles, little fetch quests, and lots of dialogue give Life is Strange a point-and-click accessibility, and the affecting relationship between Max and best friend Chloe keeps the player locked in for the full five installments—the next will be out soon.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

(Recommended by Videogamer.com's Jamie Trinca and Unwinnable managing editor Owen R. Smith)

Polish developers CD Projekt RED have delivered a fantasy role-playing game of amazing scale with the third main entry in their Witcher series, which sees the player assume the role of a professional monster hunter whose usual quarries take a back seat to the pursuit of his adopted daughter. If you've ever yearned for a Red Dead Redemption-style open-world adventure, but with a Game of Thrones-recalling aesthetic draped across its epic landscapes, this is the game for you. I'm on my second playthrough, and I'm regularly finding previously unseen extras—absorbing side-quests, new dialogue with shady might-be allies, shiny armor, and lethal blades that I'd missed first time around. The depth of this game is unreal. The Witcher 3 is where I go to when I need picking up, its world of magic and menace utterly entrancing, completely escapist, and yours to explore almost however you see fit. If you stopped the year right now, this would be my favourite game of 2015.

Related: VICE's documentary on eSports

Or for something very different: The New Era of Canadian Sex Work

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

(Recommended by games journalists Chris Schilling and Sayem Ahmed)

Capcom's portable behemoth is like The Witcher 3 in the sense that your avatar has a penchant for tracking and slaying foul beasts, but its design is based around much shorter sessions, its maps compact but varied of terrain. Pick your contract, scoff a meal to activate perks, armor up as best as you can afford, and hit the plains, caves, and deserts in search of guts-spilling glory. 4 Ultimate is the first 3DS Monster Hunter to support online multiplayer, so there's fun to be had stalking and stabbing in the company of friends, ganging up on creatures that one player alone would struggle to beat. (Although it's still best played in local co-op, so you can shout instructions at your wingmen.) It looks sharp on the 3DS screen, with fewer rough edges than expected; the 3D doesn't make you vomit up your breakfast on the train to work; the music is completely charming, likewise cat-like Felyne companions; and improved movement, including the ability to scale rock faces and jump-attack enemies, makes this an addictive commute companion.

Bloodborne

(Recommended by games journalists Rich McCormick and PJ O'Reilly)

I've never truly got along with either Dark Souls game, despite my best attempts, and Demon's Souls remains in my ever-growing pile of shame, untouched. But Bloodborne has at least eased my stress with From Software's series somewhat, showing that with a little dedication I can just about crack video games that are, basically, really bloody difficult. Hands up, I've not progressed super far in this meticulous hack-and-slasher, personally—to say that other distractions have come along is an understatement—but its gloom-kissed environments and bestiary of grotesque enemies to slaughter are beautiful in their grimness, and once I had perfected the counter attack (and you really do need to master it, as soon as possible, or else face a near-vertical struggle), I was doing away with Yharnam's horrors left, right, and center. Assuming I get the chance for any catching up myself this summer, this is the game I'll be turning to – once LEGO Jurassic World's polished off, of course. The cleric beast's got nothing on a blocky indominus rex.

On Motherboard: Original Gamer

Splatoon

(Recommended by me)

Last year, Mario Kart 8 was my I've-got-15-minutes-I'll-just-have-a-quick-spin go-to game. This spring, it's been Splatoon, Nintendo's frantic, funny, sometimes infuriating (but only ever for a few seconds) multiplayer shooter/decorator where the objective isn't the annihilation of the opposition team (of anthropomorphic squids in snapbacks and hi-tops, obviously), but the coating of the map in more of your squad's paint than your rivals. It's paintball meets de Blob meets Quake III meets Jet Set Radio meets everything you've always loved about Nintendo: quirky, colorful, instant to click, and effortless in its just-one-more-go addictiveness. Catchy music, too, from Zelda series composer Toru Minegishi and Shiho Fujii, who last worked on MK8—the kind that's still rattling around your head three hours after you've put down the GamePad. It won't keep you glued to your telly like The Witcher 3, for several hours in a single sitting, but if it's pick-me-up gaming for sizzling short-play sessions you're after, for crying out loud buy a Wii U already.

Look, yes, lots of good games have come out in 2015, so far. These are just five of them, as suggested by people on Twitter. If your favourite isn't here, it doesn't mean I think any less of you. You're just lovely, and you've got great taste in games. We can definitely be pals.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Classic internet image originally by Maureen Ravelo

North Korea's state-run TV channel KCTV has a news program called Today's World that occasionally winds up getting posted on YouTube. A recent episode spotlighting the relative prosperity of dogs and humans in the United States, was—get this—kinda weird.

That's in part because it used the internet's favorite stoned, birthday-celebrating, bichon-poodle mix to illustrate how American dogs are showered with expensive creature comforts, while American humans sometimes live in squalor and misery.

Here's the segment. Obviously, it's in Korean. The famous image of Riley shows up at the 4:48 mark:

A North Korean dissident named Kim Heung-kwang told The Guardian "I have heard of cases where DPRK media producers used the wrong pictures on a movie or newspaper, but this is the first time seeing it on the internet."

That paper's translation of what the North Korean pundit, Lee Chung-song, was saying is that billionaires waste money on $15,000 collars, and pay for their dogs to stay in lavish hotels, while there's a whole underclass of marginalized homeless people in America who get none of those things. In some ways, Lee is understating the case. But at the same time, he's not saying much we haven't heard before.

What's more, Lee completely misses the whole point about the weed that Riley's owner has denied is in that birthday cake. As far as we can tell, there's no mention at all of our country's budding fascination with blowing bong hits in our dogs' faces, and our attempts to establish a legal framework for doing so.

In addition to our new tendency to waste weed, Lee might want to get hip to the propaganda value of other dog-related internet phenomena that could be used to trash America. For instance, Mr. Lee, have you heard that Deep Dream, Google's new mindfuck of an image filter, has just been used to prove conclusively that dogs did 9/11?

Want Some In-Depth Stories About North Korea?

1. Kim Jong-un's Weight Gain Sparks Health Fears
2. Seoul Asylum: The Brutal Existence of North Korean Defectors
3. The North Korean Haircut Mandate Is Totally on Brand
4. Where Was the North Korean Outrage Over 'Team America: World Police'?

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