A tree, on a beach, with a face, obviously. Photo via Steam.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"An experiment in deconstructing an MMO."
"An incomplete, creatively bankrupt vacuum."
"I would start out swimmingvon (sic) land i though (sic) i was a majestic potato i loved it and i fell through the floor and clipped through every stair and rock i thought it was hilarious i love this game."

The game in question is Wander, a combat-free MMO for PlayStation 4 and PC with an average user score of 2.2 on Metacritic. It is, according to a couple of YouTube Let's Players, the worst game of this generation. Search for it on the video-sharing site and you'll find a plethora of clips showcasing debilitating graphical bugs, incredibly awkward communication, and generally lamenting how entirely broken the game is.

But that's not the whole story. Wander is the brainchild of travel-crazy Australian Loki Davison, and he, alongside a small team, is in no mood to give up on the game. Just like the globetrotting expeditions that have inspired it, Davison is going to continue putting one foot in front of the other until he finds the path to Wander's redemption.

Wander is, if absolutely nothing else, a refreshing and brave concept, an MMO centered on Journey-like, non-verbal communication between players using a runic language called Rozhda, shape shifting (you begin as a tree!) and a luscious open world full of natural wonders.

"I wanted to create a game that was soothing and calming, and allowed you to interact with players in a positive environment," Davison says, recalling his isolated childhood and his first thrill of large-scale digital interaction. "That was with Ancient Anguish, a text-based MUD, the precursor to MMOs. It was amazing, we could all be different things and explore and do stuff together." There have been plenty of games built to chill rather than thrill, including Proteus, Dear Esther, and Gone Home, but while we all have a favorite ambience-sim, few if any have been attempted on the scale of Wander.

While it's out there in the wild, it's still early days for Wander, and improvements are incoming. But how can any game, and its developers, possibly keep going after such a negative reception at launch? Making a game is a huge undertaking and an impressive commitment, and it's surely every developer's nightmare to see the brutally succinct "Mostly Negative" Steam review summary appear beneath their latest creation. Just how do you pick yourself back up?

I dunno, it looks pretty good in this official trailer.

"The great antidote is to read from the players who love it. One player bought Wander by accident and they have now spent 270 hours in it. It's also amazing and beautiful to see fan art and blogs dedicated to Wander." Thank goodness for small mercies, then—but what of the larger issue? When a journalist like Jim Sterling, with a massive profile and a shit-load of Twitter followers, calls your new game "creatively bankrupt" and "boring as fuck," that sends ripples throughout the wider community. (You can watch his video review of the game here.)

"Wander isn't for everyone, and I understand that," continues a seemingly sanguine Davison, who, to his credit, refuses to become defensive and accepts responsibility. "We had some nasty bugs at launch that I didn't find before releasing it—I should have worked out a way to test it better."

Anyone with a public-facing persona has dealt with trolls at some point, and it's easier said than done shrugging that off. "Myself and the whole team have invested themselves in the game, so it's hard not to take some of the feedback personally."

Related: Like traveling? Seeing the world? Check out VICE's documentary, 'Kingdom of the Little People'

And here are more videos from The VICE Guide to Travel

However, some gamers are more forgiving, and even a lot of the unfavorable reviews on Steam ameliorate the down-thumb with high praise for the team's ambition and community-minded approach. One review in particular sums up the feeling: "The Wander team is painfully kind, works tirelessly with the community, and is full of creative potential." It's a kind of booby prize moral sentiment echoed in many other user critiques.

That creative potential is rooted in Davison's dreams of a beautiful environment that encouraged the serendipitous sense of shared discovery of his mountain treks, where "players didn't just trash talk newbs, but shared experiences and skills... Where I can ride on air currents, then meet someone who wants to skydive from my back instead of leap from the roof and silently kill me with a knife." So, Wander is also a subtle indictment of the over-abundance of games that enforce twitch reflex aggression as the only form of interaction, but unfortunately one that hasn't mapped out a core gameplay loop to lure players away from the bloody alternatives.

Davison recounts an episode, when discussing with a friend what he loved about online multiplayer games, the satisfaction of "working as a team to accomplish a common goal." His friend asked why so much time is spent in these games shooting and stabbing other people. "After that I realized I could do something," Davison recalls, "something to play before bed, to remind me that no matter what the news told me that day, other people are actually pretty awesome."

Oh, dear, maybe not so good

Equating the digital enjoyment of a bit of the old ultraviolence with the humanity of the players engaging with it is something the mainstream media has been swift to spotlight in the past, usually when there's any kind of real-life violence that can be tenuously connected to a gaming background. But Wander is a reaction of the positive persuasion, a welcome diversion from the attitude that violence on screen can engender it in the player, and also sad proof that great intentions and inspirations from the real world don't necessarily translate into hands on pads. And Wander will need to bridge that gap, rapidly, if it wants to avoid being consigned to video game history as a trippy but unplayable druid-sim.

Of course, no MMO has a perfect launch, and Wander's only got a full team of three working on it. "It's great that people confuse us with a big-budget studio," Davison says sardonically, and he's on the case. "I'm fixing up the issues, then listening to what players want and [getting] them into the game, quickly." If you're keen, there's a public Wander roadmap on Trello wherein anyone can vote on the game's real, immediate future. Pre- and post-release crunch is still not a reality that every consumer understands.

On Noisey: The 123 Worst Musicians of All Time

"I'm not pulling 18-hour days every day any more," Loki recounts. Even developers have to live, and stay sane. With ambitions to keep adding stuff "a long way into the future," one can only hope that such a maligned but, underneath all the brokenness, brave game can retain enough of a player base to blossom, like the player-controlled tree avatar, into maturity.

It's clearly easy for people to turn Wander into a straw-tree argument against deconstructing the murder-craft of typical MMORPGs, but Davison's team and their debut game clearly have a spark that shines through the low-poly dirt. If they can survive and emerge stronger, who knows what this game will become or what its follow-up might accomplish. In the meantime it seems, at least, that not all who Wander are lost.

Follow Danny Wadeson on Twitter.

Examples of some of the questions asked on Tumblr

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you're feeling anxious or depressed, let somebody know. It's vital that you do, because human beings are generally pretty good sounding boards, and talking about it with somebody you trust is often the first step toward getting professional help.

Of course, that professional mental health treatment is severely lacking. Last year, the charity MIND revealed that, over the past two years in the UK, four in ten people who've tried to access therapy have had to wait more than three months after being referred by their GP, with one in ten waiting over a year. While waiting for treatment, four in ten people harmed themselves and one in six attempted suicide.

So people find alternatives. They go private, they subscribe to WebMD newsletters, they call the Samaritans. But some—mostly younger girls—have been turning, in their droves, to Tumblr. The social networking site hosts over 225 million blogs, covering everything from hypebeast fuckboys posting Young Thug videos and photos of Rick Owens Springblades, to people who've become agony aunts to a legion of followers. These bloggers raise awareness of mental health issues and offer advice to sufferers, who in turn have the blanket of online anonymity, allowing them to speak about issues they may not yet have the confidence to address IRL.

Problem is, many of these anonymous followers are suffering from legitimate mental health issues, and the majority of agony aunts are unqualified, doling out advice they're not necessarily in the best position to give. Online agony aunts are nothing new, but guidance given by untrained young people—most of the "advisers" on Tumblr are between 19 and 24—could potentially end up doing more harm than good. With many of the Tumblr blogs publishing queries on domestic violence, overcoming panic attacks, and rape support, replies should be provided with utmost care.

In the UK, we (just about) have the NHS, where we can access some mental health treatments for free, but it's clearly not enough: longer waiting times and generic answers are beginning to take their toll on those desperate for help, so can we really blame these young people for shying away from traditional methods and instead being drawn online?

I spoke to licensed chartered psychologist, Dr. Jane McCartney, who told me, "It's completely understandable to want to get help as soon as possible, but who the help is from is just as important." Registered with the British Psychological Society (BPS), McCartney has experience treating a range of mental health issues, including anxiety, eating disorders, anger management, and depression. "No one wants to feel like they're alone, and talking does help to 'normalize' a situation, but if a person is feeling unwell, talking to their GP is the best thing to do," she said. "There are also helplines, if a person needs an immediate response, because these people are also qualified."

Raevin, who runs sheabutterbitch.tumblr.com, is one of many agony aunts on Tumblr. In her early 20s, she usually withholds her age from askers. "I choose not to put my exact age out there because most people think I'm a lot older, so are more comfortable telling me things," she said. "People way older than me have said I'm like a big sister to them." Currently a psychology and sociology major in the US, Raevin's advice Tumblr picked up 20,000 followers after only five months. I spoke to her about offering advice online.

A picture Raevin sent of herself

VICE: Hey, Raevin. Why did you start your Tumblr advice blog?
Raevin: I genuinely love to help people, especially with psychology as one of my majors. I felt that once I incorporated that knowledge with my own personal experiences, I'd have a lot better insight on people's problems and going about creating a platform to help them.

What age are most of the people who ask for your advice?
The ages normally range from about 12 to 24, or the asker may just say they're in middle school, high school, or working. It's really interesting, because the older ages come to me about relationship problems and the younger askers inquire about feminism and racism.

And would you say the askers are mostly women and girls?
Generally, the askers are women or members of the LGBTQ community, who don't specify their pronouns/gender to me. Most of my followers are from the US, Canada, and the UK, that I know of, but I don't really make specifying their ASL [age, sex, and location] a requirement before coming to me.

Read On Motherboard: The Search for a Blood Test for Depression

Which subjects do you deal with most?
The subjects range from relationships and healthy living to social justice, but most of the questions I get relate to depression and suicide. It's mostly 13 to 15-year-olds [asking about these topics].

How do you respond to such sensitive questions? Are you not worried that you'll give the wrong advice?
I can relate, as that was the age I attempted suicide. I try to be as realistic as possible, as I know what it's like dealing with most of these situations, and I'll try not to give solutions that I'm sure they've already heard. I also try to put myself in—or back into—their position, because most of the time I've been there before.

Usually the askers are anonymous, so I try not to be ableist or assume this person's physical, emotional, or financial state. It's important to give as many options as possible and take into account almost every possible life scenario this person may be going through. I'll also try to be extremely detailed so nothing gets skewed, giving step-by-step directions, and sometimes even providing links to videos or web posts that may be able to assist them further.

Do you currently suffer from anything yourself?
Yes, I have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, bulimia, and anorexia. I also have fibromyalgia, among other less-severe physical illnesses.

Related: Watch our film 'Maisie,' about a mother who has to make a 113-mile round journey to visit her 13-year-old daughter, who's been sectioned under the UK's Mental Health Act.

Do you receive any professional help?
I have supportive friends and family, but I'm not very good at handling my own problems, sort of like the saying, "Who is the therapist's therapist?" I'm grateful for that, though, because I know what it's like to be extremely hopeless and not know what to do. So that gives me the incentive to go the extra mile. I don't receive professional help, but I have a friend—with benefits—who has been extremely supportive.

Do you think there are dangers to unqualified agony aunts giving advice on Tumblr?
Yeah, there is definitely a danger. After all, we're mostly young and unqualified. I don't diagnose, but I've seen people write that an asker has a certain illness. It's not their place to diagnose. I never tell people they have an illness. I feel like I'm here to listen and make the person feel better. Replies like, "People are dying, so be grateful for your life" are not helpful to someone who is suffering.

Why do you think people are so drawn to Tumblr advice blogs run by young people?
Tumblr advice is free, and you don't have to wait months to speak to someone. There are loads of psychiatrists who write off their patients' feelings to "being a teen," or "just normal feelings," when they're not. Then these people come online. Professional help isn't easily accessible to everyone, and most people feel like they can't wait. They just need to talk to someone who wants to listen.

Raevin clearly has the right intentions. Of the thousands of Tumblr agony aunts out there, she seems to have a handle on what kind of advice to offer, and, importantly, refuses to try to diagnose anyone. However, it's safe to say that not everyone will be as measured and pragmatic as her.

While Tumblr can act as an effective stop-gap between a referral and eventual treatment, it's imperative that if people are going to consult the site, they identify the right person to seek advice from—someone who can empathize and offer positive reinforcement—and also continue to seek professional help, instead of relying solely on the guidance of an untrained adviser.

Follow Mica Dublin and Raevin on Twitter

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

Taaaaxi on the run. Like the Wings song! Right? Photo via Flickr user Rodrigo Soldon 2

Police divisions all across the Great White North deal with some spectacular calls involving hosers every day. But these criminal masterminds, the ones taking their snowmobiles out in July for a rip, just don't get their due in the media. Here's a roundup of some pretty weird crimes from around the country over the past two weeks, which may lead you to reconsider drinking.

Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever a guy who smashes you in the face can
With great power comes great responsibility, and with smashing in someone's face with a skateboard comes an assault charge. Toronto police announced June 26 that they'd arrested and charged a 27-year-old man after a 16-year-old boy was jumped by someone wearing a plastic Spider-Man mask back in May. The unprovoked attack left the boy with serious facial trauma and the not-so-friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man had skated away from the scene.

Dude, where's my cab?
Cops from the Brandon Police Service in Manitoba were called on July 3 when a taxi driver innocently stepped out of his car near 34th St. and Victoria Ave. only to have some dude jump in and drive off. Not one to stand there and wring his hands, the determined cabbie jumped into another taxi and chased his stolen car until it crashed on Rosser Ave. and E Fotheringham Dr., at which point the two taxi drivers citizen-arrested a culprit to hand over to police. Cops arrested the 23-year-old man from Winnipeg who, surprise, blew double the legal limit when he gave a breath sample.

Winter is coming; Better test the snowmobile out
It was a nice summer afternoon in Thessalon on July 4 when some dude decided it was the perfect weather to drive a snowmobile down Main St. Naturally, someone called the OPP, who found the snowmobile on River St. and arrested a 24-year-old man. He's been charged with impaired driving (surprise!), failing to wear a proper helmet, driving with no insurance, and driving along a highway without a licence, among other things.

16, going on 200
Someone out east apparently thinks Furious 7 is a documentary, because on July 5, a local RCMP officer clocked a car going 199 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. The car, which was making its merry way down Highway 102, was pulled over in Lower Sackville and a 16-year-old newly licensed guy from Bedford with "several other teen passengers in his vehicle" was given a ticket and immediately had his licence suspended for a week. And if 199 km/h doesn't seem so bad to you, you should probably watch this video of what happens when your car crashes going just one kilometre faster.

Is that two tires in your pants or are you just thieving?
The RCMP in Burnaby announced on June 26 that they arrested a 39-year-old man after a local tire retailer complained that the business had been broken into by the same person at least seven times in the past month. More intriguing, though, is that the complainant says the same suspect stole around 80 tires from the store, which presents an interesting logistical question—seven break-ins with around 80 tires stolen in total works out to about 11 tires per break-in. How do you get away with 11 tires with no one noticing? It's not like you can stuff them under your shirt or something.

Ever get Port Elgin Drunk?
A woman in Port Elgin woke up the morning of July 4 to find a strange man sleeping on her couch. Naturally, she called the police. The cops woke up the sleeping beauty, who was "intoxicated and thought he was in a relative's apartment." The cops arrested him for unlawfully being in a dwelling, but he was still too drunk to be let out on his own so the police had to take the 27-year-old to his parents' house (and charged him with public intoxication along the way).

Apparently people in the area really know how to get fucked up, because I asked my friend from Port Elgin how one could possibly get so confused in a town that's barely seven square kilometres and he replied, "You've never been Port Elgin drunk."

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

Broadly is a women's interest channel coming soon from VICE. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

The concept of "pro-abortion Satanists" sounds like the deranged fantasy of a particularly unimaginative conservative politician. They do exist, though, and they have a political agenda: Two weeks ago members of the Satanic Temple filed a federal suit against Missouri's harsh abortion restrictions, claiming such laws violate their First Amendment right to religious expression.

The rhetoric around abortion in America is incredibly polarized, to put it mildly; anyone now trying to draw a parallel between "murdering unborn babies" and sacrificing innocent children to the Dark Overlord of Hell is far from the first. But the Satanic Temple's motivation is far less nefarious than the Satan association may make it seem: First of all, the group doesn't actually worship the devil. They bill their belief system as "non-supernatural," a cultural narrative centered on the literary figure of Satan, whom they see as a rebel angel in defiance of autocracy in all forms.

This is hardly news to any liberal-minded, relatively media-savvy person: Over the past few years, the Satanic Temple has grown notorious for making bold provocations that straddle the border between performance art and protest, many of them focused on exposing the hypocrisy of institutionalized religion. Each new stunt garners a lot of attention and provokes fairly predictable responses (typically: praise from the left and headshaking and performative non-surprise from conservatives). It helps that the Temple's previous opponents have tended to be obviously risible or absurd—most famously, the group protested a six-foot-tall statue of the Ten Commandments constructed on the Oklahoma State Capitol grounds by proposing a religious icon of their own, an eight-and-a-half-foot tall bronze sculpture of goat-headed deity Baphomet flanked by two adoring children. (Last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the Ten Commandments statute would have to be removed; the Oklahoma state constitution prohibits using public funds or property to promote religion. With Baphomet no longer necessary or permitted there, the Temple will unveil the statue in Detroit later this month.)

Anti-abortion legislation is perhaps a less obvious target than a looming physical testament to the collusion of Church and State, but Satanic Temple spokesperson and co-founder Lucien Greaves told Broadly that the group has planned for this fight since its inception. "People would be surprised how much of this we had in mind at the very outset," he said.

According to Greaves, he and a friend, who goes by Malcolm Jarry, founded the Satanic Temple in 2013. Later that year, they barreled into public view after performing a "Pink Mass" at the gravesite of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps's mother. The ceremony was understated yet effective: Gay couples kissed over the late Mrs. Phelps's tombstone, with the intention of changing her sexual orientation in the afterlife. Even before that, Greaves said he and Jarry gave a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "We laid out this plan [for the Satanic Temple], and I'm pretty sure we said we'd do exemption against abortion regulations," he recalled.

The seemingly unusual alliance between Satanism and abortion rights activism becomes far more plausible when you consider the Temple's central tenets: The first is that one's own body is inviolable, subject to one's will alone; another states that members' beliefs should conform to the best scientific understanding of the world and that no one should ever distort scientific facts to fit her own way of thinking. "It's very clear for us. When it's a question of bodily autonomy, don't encroach on the will of another person," said Greaves. "We think that a nonviable fetus is tissue that belongs to the woman, and it's her decision what becomes of that."

This, of course, directly contradicts the logic of the pro-life movement—which maintains that all life begins at conception and that terminating a pregnancy is equivalent to snuffing out the life of a child who has yet to be born. In the past five years alone, pro-life politicians have passed a startling 282 abortion restrictions, some of which dictate what kind of information doctors should provide their patients. Thirty-five states now require women to receive counseling before terminating an unwanted pregnancy; 28 of those stipulate that women must then undergo a waiting period—most often 24 hours—before going ahead with the procedure. And although legislation that defines life as starting at conception has consistently failed to pass, five states legally require abortion providers to tell their patients that a fetus is a separate, living human being.

Pro-life and pro-choice are typically framed as opposing political ideologies; as the Satanic Temple sees it, though, the pro-life movement is motivated by religious dogma. "The pro-choice movement seeks liberation from the religious underpinnings of the reproductive rights debate, as do we," said Jex Blackmore, the director of the Satanic Temple's Detroit chapter. "Our beliefs conform to the best scientific understanding of the world rather than the theological opinions of some."

"The argument that's presented to us [by pro-life groups] is that the fetus is another body," elaborated Greaves. "That is a religious opinion. The focus of our fight is that the state has no right to proselytize to a woman in any circumstance."

Because of the Satanic Temple's focus on individual autonomy and scientific understanding, members of the Satanic Temple hold that such state-sponsored proselytizing constitutes a violation of their religious liberty. In July 2014, the Satanic Temple launched a campaign in the hopes of helping women bypass state-mandated counseling, posting a waiver of exemption on the organization's website. The basic idea behind the waiver is that women can present it to abortion providers; it reads, in part, "I regard Political Information as a state sanctioned attempt to discourage abortion... The communication of Political Information to me imposes an unwanted and substantial burden on my religious beliefs."

Roughly one year after Greaves first posted the waiver on his organization's website, an anonymous member of the Satanic Temple from Missouri—referred to in the media as "Mary Doe"—became the first woman to present it at an abortion provider.

Missouri is one of the states to require pre-abortion counseling, plus a mandatory waiting period. And Missouri's legislation is particularly harsh: It's one of three states to require that a woman wait a full 72 hours between receiving "counseling" and returning for her abortion procedure. It's also one of the five states to demand that providers tell their patients life begins at conception. Plus, there's just one abortion clinic left in the entire state—a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis. Under Missouri law, any Planned Parenthood worker who refuses to tell a woman that a fetus is "a separate, unique, living human being" and then send her away to reflect on that for three days can be charged with a Class B felony.

When Doe presented the letter of exception to a doctor at the St. Louis Planned Parenthood, they complied with the state law and denied her request. Later that month, the Satanic Temple and Doe filed a lawsuit against Jay Nixon, the governor of Missouri, and Chris Koster, the state's attorney general, alleging that the waiting period law constitutes a violation of Doe's religious liberty. On June 22, Nixon and Koster filed a motion to dismiss the injunction, claiming there's no compelling evidence that Doe's religious beliefs had been violated.

But Greaves firmly maintains that getting an abortion can count as exercising one's religious beliefs under the central tenets of Satanism. On June 29, the Satanic Temple filed an opposition to Missouri's motion to dismiss, which was obtained by Broadly. In it, Satanic Temple lawyer W. James MacNaughton reaffirms that the act of getting an abortion, in Mary Doe's case, was motivated by her religious belief—meaning it constitutes "exercise of religion." MacNaughton further claims that forcing Doe to participate in counseling and the subsequent 72-hour waiting period is "no different than if Plaintiff had gone to attend a meeting of The Satanic Temple in St. Louis so she could meditate on its Tenets, only to find the state police had locked the Temple's doors and would not open them until three days after she acknowledged receipt of the State of Missouri's official written repudiation of the Tenets."

Claiming that abortion can constitute an expression of religious beliefs is hardly the most uncontroversial move, something Greaves is aware of. "Of course, we're not advocating for abortion in preference of live birth—it's the autonomy of the woman, her freedom to choose, that we hold sacred," he said. "Her choice, when informed by her adherence to our tenets, is legitimately construed as a religious activity."

A day after Missouri first filed the motion to dismiss the Satanic Temple's claim, the Temple and Mary Doe filed a federal lawsuit as well. Greaves is hopeful that he'll see a positive outcome, and he describes their case as strong. "I am very optimistic that we have constructed a solid, winnable case," he said. "For now, it's all we can do to demonstrate that religious exemption and privilege aren't the sole property of the Christian Right." If either court rules in the Satanic Temple's favor, Greaves said he hopes that other women will follow Mary Doe's lead in circumventing religiously motivated abortion restrictions. "No one in a secular position should have to suffer this religious material," he stated.

According to Blackmore, the Missouri case is "a huge step toward ensuring that... personal health care decisions are free from outrageous theocratic, state-mandated burdens." Hopefully, it will be the first of many. "We will challenge any abortion restriction that attempts to restrict our access to medical information and care," she said.

Callie is the executive editor of Broadly. Follow her on Twitter.

Derrick Snowdy and Hilary Beaumont discuss their newfound shared love of firearms. Still from Weird Guys

I first met gun-wielding private eye Derrick Snowdy when working on a top-secret story I can't tell you about for legal reasons. When I asked him to fill me in on the story, he texted back, "That's going to take a weekend, two bottles of vodka, an eight ball and a shotgun."

That's how I wound up at a gun range north of Toronto several weeks ago with Snowdy, a high-rolling private investigator with a dark sense of humour and connections to many a court case and political scandal. He was about to teach me how to shoot my first gun.

He said he brought "a smattering" of his firearms from home—as if we were attending a wine tasting instead of a gun range. He had laid them out with care, like presents on Christmas Eve. They ranged from little pistols to large rifles—including his prohibited and soon-to-be-illegal (but not if he gets his way) Swiss Arms Classic Green rifle. In a statement of claim filed in May 2014, he threatened to sue the Canadian government for an absurdly hilarious $65 million if they take his Swiss Arms away.

Weird Guys, episode one

He refused to tell me how many guns he actually owns, but did say he doesn't understand why people focus on his firearm collection when he owns just as much scuba gear.

Snowdy, who started firing guns at age seven and finds the activity relaxing, told me to pick one of the 20 or so freshly cleaned firearms on the table. I wanted to start small since it was my first time ever firing a gun.

I asked him which one a private eye in a classic film noir would choose, and he pointed to the smallest gun on the table, an all-black prohibited pistol not much longer than my hand.

He guided my sweaty palms to cup the handle and my pointer finger to sit along the side of the gun until I was ready to pull the trigger. Absolutely terrified, I leaned away from the weapon, but Snowdy directed me to straighten up. I took aim at a mean-looking cartoon zombie wielding a butcher knife and meat hook, and fired.

Though I expected the loud bang, I screamed a bit when it went off, startled by the sheer power of the weapon in my hands.

I was hooked and wanted more.

After a few more guns, I was getting the hang of it, and the generous private eye allowed me to shoot his personal fave, a silver 10-millimetre semi-automatic Smith and Wesson 1026 engraved with his name.

At first, Snowdy's off-colour jokes and hilarious anecdotes (for example, overhearing an iconic fashion designer's hotel room threesome) can lower your guard, but when you get to know him you realize he's a sippy-cup of privileged information: he doesn't spill.

Still, I insisted on asking him about a major scandal he was involved in, namely the so-called "busty hookers" affair, in which Conservative MP Helena Guergis was kicked out of cabinet following allegations she had snorted coke off a sex worker's boobs. The former MP was never charged, and the allegations against her have not been proven in court.

The scandal went off like one of the grenades I'm guessing Snowdy also owns.

It all started around 2009, when the private eye was investigating a scheme involving some sketchy folks who knew Guergis' husband, former Tory MP Rahim Jaffer. In the course of the investigation, he stumbled upon some very interesting information.

According to Snowdy's statement of defence when he was named in a Guergis lawsuit, he had a conversation with Kevin Donovan at the Toronto Star in which they discussed "curious facts," including allegations that Guergis was socializing with the person he was investigating while in the company of a sex worker.

Following explosive reports by Donovan for the Star, Snowdy says a Conservative Party lawyer called him on the evening of April 8, 2010 to confirm some of the information in the story.

Snowdy told VICE he believed Guergis was seated under a security camera at a restaurant at the time of the alleged incident and told the Conservative party lawyer he could not definitely say there was not photos of the alleged incident.

But he maintains he never alleged there was video of her doing such a thing.

The private eye was called before a parliamentary committee, leading to wide speculation by the press and the public. The scandal was so explosive that the Globe and Mail deemed Snowdy's bankruptcy and $13 million in liabilities newsworthy.

After Guergis was canned, she decided to sue everyone involved. Snowdy was originally named on the suit, but his name was later mysteriously dropped. "I think somebody gave her a bit of a reality check and she chose not to engage," he told me.

We went gun by gun, each a little bigger than the last, until we reached what looked like a long rifle with a scope, but was actually a gun-within-a-gun (I know, right?). By this point, my enthusiastic swearing had reached a level my grandmother would not tolerate.

"I'm going to kill this mother fucking zombie," I said, aiming the green laser point at his stomach. I squeezed the trigger.

The safety was on.

Snowdy clicked it off and I started pummeling bullets into that dickhole zombie's evil guts.

I could see the undead butcher shivering in his little paper hat. It was time to step up to the biggest guns and finish the maggot-filled bastard off.

Next I picked up Snowdy's Israeli Tavor, a heavy assault rifle with a scope and some major kick to it.

"You are stiff as a board," Snowdy told me as I tried to aim.

"'Cause I'm terrified, man," I replied.

"Loosen up," Snowdy directed me.

I aimed at the living dead again and showered him with bullets.

"I think this one's my favourite," I told him.

I squeezed off another magazine of five bullets, as rapid fire as I could manage, which wasn't fast at all—picture the way the first person to die in a zombie apocalypse would fire a gun.

"Know what this means? You can't vote Liberal anymore," Snowdy, a card-carrying Conservative, quipped.

"Oh, no. I'm a Conservative," I lamented.

To be clear, the private eye doesn't know how I vote.

Apparently Snowdy isn't a typical example of his ilk. The idea that private investigators carry guns and roll over cars is a fallacy, he told me. He also doesn't do a whole lot of surveillance work or cases for disgruntled ex-spouses. Actually, he's more of a paper trail guy.

By this point the bouquet of spent bullets filled the air.

Finally, we reached the Swiss Arms rifle. I was amped to shoot it.

"Are you sure? It's very prohibited," Snowdy joked dryly. "The RCMP says it's evil."

To be precise, according to a CBC report, the RCMP told Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney that the gun could potentially be converted into a fully-automatic weapon.

Following Blaney's public fit against the RCMP's reclassification, even though he knew well in advance it would be reclassified, the minister declared a two-year amnesty on owning the Swiss Arms rifle. Now, Snowdy's weapon is more than one year into its amnesty order—a document he calls "an odd duck piece of work."

Snowdy brought an Israeli Tavor and a restricted AR15 variant to demonstrate how similar the three giant guns were to each other. Despite his argument that the Swiss Arms rifle was just like the other two and in no way more dangerous, it was certainly the heaviest of the bunch, and took different magazines than the others.

As I shot the giant weapon, it kicked back into my shoulder and my weakling arms quickly buckled.

"It'll be illegal in a year," I told him.

"Ah, who knows," Snowdy replied. "Not if I have anything to say about it."

When we had finished shooting, we inspected the zombie target. To my horror, we had mainly blown up his belly, with no bullets through his brain. I'll have to practice more if I want to survive the zombie apocalypse.

At the end of our range outing, Snowdy gifted me a live bullet to take home as a souvenir. His personal rule is, you only haul ammo one way—to the range. He suggested I glue it to my desk for a laugh if someone tries to pick it up.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

Photo by Chris Brown

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In any sane or rational world, Tube strike day would be a day of public celebration across London. There would be street parties, and small glasses of Pimm's, and slightly strange old men would wave little red flags around. Children might traipse up to workers on the picket line to throw garlands of flowers over their heads. The desperate and unemployed, lurking around overpriced bars at three in the afternoon, would insist to anyone of the opposite sex within earshot that they were actually a striking train driver. Tube strikes are an incredible gift to all the people of London, and we ought to be grateful.

But we don't live in a sane or rational world; we live in a stinking, bubbling bog of meanness and misery, a viscous and never-ending sludge leaking out from our own failed imaginations and our fundamental lack of human decency. We thrash around in our own mire. And instead of celebrating the Tube strike, we have the gall to complain.

People complain about Tube strikes for any number of reasons, but they're all utterly idiotic. There are some who seem to resent the idea of collective industrial action altogether. Yes, the power of workers to strike might have given us such useful inventions as "the weekend" and "not being mangled into a splinter-strewn pulp by an industrial lathe at the age of 14," but we have those things now, and the idea that we should continue to fight for a minimally livable life is now an outmoded relic of a past age.

Others are very upset by the fact that it's Tube workers who are taking this kind of action. A wail rises up from across the city. "But they make $50,000 a year! They get decent pensions! How dare they keep going on strike?" For some reason, these people have a hard time connecting the fact that workers on the Tube haven't yet been reduced to outright penury with the fact that their unions are actually willing to take action when necessary. They seem to think that their comparatively decent compensation is down to some kind of magnanimity on the part of the bosses.

But the loudest complaint is also the most pathetic, escaping like a slow, squeaking fart from out one side of a scrunched-up, sphinctered face. "But I'll be late for wooooorrrrk!" The indignity, the sheer horror.

Watch: The Mexican Town That Fights to Summon the Rain:

Regardless of how you feel about industrial action, you should be supporting the Tube strike. Government figures are accusing the unions of striking out of "sour grapes" over the Conservative election victory and of "holding the city to ransom," which is for some reason supposed to be a bad thing.

In fact, the main factor contributing to the strike is the unions' concern over working hours once an all-night Tube service is introduced later this year. Taking frequent night shifts doesn't just lead to a medically significant decline in the quality of life, it can also adversely impact alertness and concentration on the job. For the people on strike, being tired at work won't just result in some slightly overcooked pie charts; it could result in dozens of bodies sizzling like prawns over a burning train carriage. This is a risk that management are willing to take, but the people on the picket lines are striking to save your life. And you hate them for it. Apparently, a significant portion of this city would rather turn up for work on time in a casket than alive and a few minutes late.

Generally it's not people whose livelihoods are actually under threat that complain about Tube strikes. It's the great bland middle, the office drones, furious at being held up on their way to a job that they hate and that they know is beneath them. The strikers have given you a wonderful gift, out of the goodness of their hearts: They've given you a rock-solid excuse for coming into the office as late as you like.

Over on VICE Sports: What England Can Learn from the US's World Cup Win

You could make a day of it. Have a lie-in, take a leisurely brunch, stand under the open air for a few minutes. Take the bus; pretend the windows are big high-definition screens if it'll make you feel better. Or walk, and watch the dim throbbing heart of this city slowly choke itself to extinction. But you're far too eager to safely bury yourself in a big ugly building with people you despise, so you can waste your day finding out what kind of pug BuzzFeed thinks you are, or hammering your frankly worthless opinions into the comment boxes below VICE articles.

You need to waste time in an office, rather than at home, or else you're no better than a scrounger. You hate the strikers because they terrify you; they're a nauseating reminder that it's still possible to have some freedom in your life, that there are things you could fight for. So you go on Twitter to say that they should all be sacked (or, preferably, shot), because you'd rather hide in a cubicle than look yourself squarely in the eye.

During the last round of industrial action on the Underground in 2014, there were some proposals for a "fare strike" to build public sympathy for the unions. The idea was that the Tube would go on running as normal, but all gates would be left open—management would lose their profits, and nobody would have to be late for work. The fare strike didn't take place, but it's obvious what would've happened. You would have tapped your Oyster card anyway, and pranced through the ticket gate with a smug little smile, because you're a good citizen. There's a kind of measly, pathetic ingratitude to all this that's absolutely unique to the British. In any other country they'd at least recognize that the inconvenience is worthwhile. Not here. The Tube strikers are trying to help you, and you spit in their faces. You don't deserve this strike.

Follow Sam on Twitter.

A shot-up Vladimir Lenin statue in Debaltseve, in eastern Ukraine. All photos by the author

A golden, faceless Vladimir Lenin statute glistened in the sun. The Ukrainian Army had shot up the statue for target practice during their time in this eastern city, called Debaltseve, which is now occupied by pro-Russia separatists under the auspices of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR). The head of another Lenin lay in a patch of sunlight inside what was once a theater in the city's House of Culture.

You can trace the path of the retreating Ukrainian Army by the trail of destroyed Lenins in their wake. The metal ones, I was told by DPR forces, were being melted down and turned into bombs by their enemies.

I flew into Ukraine's capital of Kiev in late April, and after a Kafka-esque paperwork nightmare, crossed the frontline between the Western-aligned central government and the self-declared DPR. War had broken out over a year earlier, but according to a couple of Russian journalists I spoke to, only since the previous month had the Ukrainian government started issuing exit stamps at the last checkpoint before no man's land—a tacit acknowledgment it had lost control of the territory.

I checked in at the mostly empty Donetsk Ramada, its windows crisscrossed with tape. Prices had plummeted, but caviar was still on the room service menu. The place seemed to be serving primarily as a hangout for the Night Wolves, a biker gang led by a mysterious former doctor known as "The Surgeon." They appeared to be escorting Ukrainian pop stars around the DPR, perhaps at the behest of the local government. Concerts were hurriedly arranged in town squares as part of some kind of morale-boosting exercise.

The next day's drive from Donetsk to Debaltseve took my translator and I alongside the frontline. We passed toppled electrical masts, blown bridges, and burned out vehicles before arriving in the city of Vuhlehirsk. DPR troops were still clearing the place of mines, and we toured a damaged tram depot, which was strewn with nail-like anti-personnel shrapnel that our escorts claimed violated the Geneva Conventions.

"It falls like metal rain," one soldier recalled of the shrapnel. "Doctors cannot find it in the body. If you survive, you will have much trouble getting through airport security."

In Debaltseve, the city's commander arranged a tour. Our leader was an officer known to us only as Spartag. He liked to speak in the third person.

"Step only where Spartag steps," he shouted over his shoulder.

Spartag strolled up a dirt path, bordered by concrete animals, leading to what used to be the Salute Children's Camp. More recently, it had been commandeered by the Ukrainian Army. They booby trapped the place as they retreated, DPR soldiers told me as we wound our way through a half-cleared minefield to the "Childrens' Disco"—a brightly-painted concrete pavilion that recently served as a munitions dump. As DPR forces had advanced on the camp, situated on the outskirts of Debaltseve, a shell had hit the munitions dump and blown a fireball through the dancehall, clearing it out completely.

As we picked through the rubble, I found a photograph of the Ukrainians posing with flags in the exact same location a few months prior. It had been Klitschko's battalion, the DPR soldiers told me, referring to the Heavy Weight Boxing Champion of the World who briefly ran for president during last year's political unrest. Like the children who had long-since fled, the Ukrainian troops had left the camp full of personal effects and graffiti.

On the door of a makeshift barracks someone had scrawled: Beware! There are evil soldiers in this room and one benevolent corporal.

A bullet-riddled helmet read: Putin is a bitch.

A pamphlet in a room full of bibles promised: If you die, you will go to heaven.

A wall of mostly blue and yellow children's crayon drawings fluttered in the breeze. The room had not yet been cleared of booby-traps, so I could only look through the window. Kids had drawn tanks and men with guns. The bullets came out as dotted lines. A DPR soldier snatched a drawing that had blown away from the ground, reading it with a grin: I'm proud of you, Ukrainian soldier.

"This doesn't look like a child's handwriting," he sneered as he tossed it onto a pile of empty vodka bottles."You see how much they drink?" he added.

The soldier stopped for a moment to free a drowning honey bee from a cup of rainwater before proceeding to clean his boots with an abandoned Ukrainian flag.

Spartag led us out back to the abandoned Ukrainian Army trenches. We crawled with flashlights down into deep earthen bunkers housing stoves made out of abandoned oil drums. There was a discarded Aspergillum that had been used by a priest to bless the troops with holy water. There were rolls of yellow tape that the irregularly dressed soldiers had used as armbands to differentiate sides during the fighting. (The DPR's armbands are white.)

We walked single file through another field until we reached a bridge. On the far side was the Children's Village, marked by a tall, conical tower that seemed to come straight out of a fairy tale. Spartag claimed that the Ukrainian Army had used the tower as a sniping platform—picking off anyone who came by to draw water from the river.

"End of tour," he announced unceremoniously.

Check out VICE News' Russian Roulette series on the conflict in Ukraine

We headed back to the bridge, where the DPR troops held a spontaneous target practice. Everyone aimed for a stick jutting up out of a nearby lake. The man next to me playfully handed me his AK-74.

"You shoot too," he encouraged.

He smiled and suggested that I join their ranks.

"We have many foreign fighters," he boasted. "There are French and Canadian, many Europeans. Anyone can join us. You just go to the office with your documents and they check your health. If you're healthy, they'll give you a uniform. You don't even have to speak Russian."

Follow Roc's project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

Photo by Olivia Richardson, from A Trip to the S&M Dentist

Dentistry is one area of medicine that seems permanently stuck in the Middle Ages. While other branches of health care have begun to grow penises in petri dishes or grapple with the ethics of robot doctors, dentistry hasn't really evolved beyond refining variations on cleaning, drilling, and yanking teeth as if this were all a painful game of human Bop-It. Yes, there certainly have been remarkable advances made in the field that has its roots in tooth keys and blood letting. But such progress is undercut by the truly horrific stories of things that can happen in the dentist's chair.

It's not that dentists are all bad people, and to be sure, quality dental care is essential to your overall health (if you don't get that annual check-up, your teeth might literally all fall out). But there's also something really spooky about the dentist's office, which is probably why dentistry has been the subject of horror films, horror musicals, and real-life horror stories.

One of the most terrifying stories is the case of "William," a British man who went under general anesthesia for some routine root canal surgery in 2005. When he woke up, he was trapped in a perpetual state of amnesia. To this day, William can remember everything up to the point of his anesthesia, but has been unable to form memories past the 90-minute mark in the ensuing decade. The details of his personal, Memento-themed hell remain a mystery to doctors, but his story raises the question: What are the worst things that have ever happened to patients at the dentist? We rounded up some of the worst horror stories from the dentist's chair.

Photo by Flickr user Zdenko Zivkovic

DENTISTS WHO OVERCHARGE

It's no secret that getting a tooth removed can cost you an arm and a leg. But some dentists have taken theft to the next level. Dr. Edward Bodek, a dentist in Encinitas, California, went the more high-tech route: Patient comes in for a $67 cleaning, and their card card gets charged with $8,000 of purchases—the perfect crime. In total, Bodek and his wife, who worked as his office manager, were charged with stealing $260,000 from their patients, who oddly kept coming back to see him because of "loyalty."

Bodek was able to pull off the scam in part because he performed dentistry in nursing homes and assisted-living centers, where older patients were presumably easier to steal from. Unsurprisingly, after racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges, some patients realized something was amiss.

Dr. Bodek and spouse were eventually raided by federal agents who found scores of shopping bags in their home as well as 30 storage lockers filled with furs, high fashion, and other luxurious goods. The couple pled guilty to both financial elder abuse and identity theft for more than 22 victims, and the Bodek DDS Yelp page was lowered to a one-star rating.

Photo by Flickr userAlex Barth

DENTISTS WHO PULL ALL YOUR TEETH

You know that common nightmare where all your teeth fall out? A painful, real-life iteration of that scenario happened when Christopher Crist showed up at Amazing Family Dental in Indianapolis. Crist, an autistic man, went to the facility with instructions from his mother to have just three particularly painful teeth removed, but after giving Christopher some pills to ease the pain, the dentist kept pulling and pulling until each and every one of Crist's teeth were gone.

"I am going to look like a freak now," said a toothless Crist, on the verge of tears, in a heartbreaking post-surgery interview with the Huffington Post.

Amazing Family Dental never released a substantive statement in 2013, when this unnecessary procedure occurred, citing HIPAA in an ironic claim of "protecting" the patient. However, this year, Amazing Family Dental is facing a disciplinary hearing for overcharging Medicaid for patient procedures in the time period when the assault on Mr. Crist occurred. When getting paid per tooth pulled, some less scrupulous dentists seemingly couldn't resist the opportunity to pluck a few more.

How about some nice, soothing Ambien to ease that painful trip to the dentist?

DENTISTS WHO AREN'T REALLY DENTISTS

Earlier this year, a White Plains office manager was arrested for pretending to be a dentist. Her charges included unauthorized practice of a profession, assault, and reckless endangerment. While shenanigans like this may be the fodder of many a comedy, in the real world, it's worth raising suspicions when the doctor starts explaining that they're going to pull "the pointy one." If that isn't enough to make your mouth clamp shut in horror, Valbona Yzeiraj, the accused faux-dentist, also performed root canal surgery and injected patients with syringes.

Yzeiraj, was allegedly running this little side business from the offices of Dr. Jeffrey Schoengold's Ultimate Dental Care of Riverdale in the Bronx right under the nose of the good doctor. Yzeiraj is still waiting for her trial, which could earn her up to seven years in prison. For the duration of her case, she's prohibited from going near any dental practices.

Worth the read: The DIY Dentists of YouTube

Photo by Flickr user Partha S. Sahana

DENTISTS WHO ARE RAPISTS

Don't google "dentist molests." You will see far too many articles pop up and it'll just ruin your day. Instead, take this one example as a token sacrifice of skeezy dentists everywhere: Compton dentist Dr. Mohammed Kader was arrested in May for allegedly molesting patients aged 12 and 17 According to the victims' parents, Dr. Kader forcefully kissed the two young girls on the lips as they sat in the chair—as if metal tools stabbing around your splayed mouth didn't leave you feeling vulnerable enough.

Some doctors have taken such abuses to their grim conclusion. Dr. David Fuster, a dentist in Bethesda, Maryland, gave his patient, a 15-year-old Bolivian girl, nitrous oxide before leading her to a couch in the basement of his office and raping her. Naturally, Fuster denied everything, despite the girl's vaginal fluids found all over the couch and a condom discovered in the office. Fuster also refused to address a police-recorded phone convo between Fuster and his victim where he plainly stated "This happened between you and me and no one else."

Fuster's hearing and 20-year sentence came after four years of being on the lam in Mexico. Hopefully this justice will serve as a modicum of peace for the victim, and a warning to perverted dentists elsewhere.

DENTISTS WHO ARE MURDERERS

Most dentists presumably do their job because they enjoy a mixture of helping their patients, the normal office hours, and the sizable paycheck. But one dentist, Tony Protopappas, was more into the opportunity to kill people in cold blood. Protopappas intentionally gave two women and one young girl lethal doses of anesthesia in the early 80s, for which he was convicted on three counts of second-degree murder in 1984.

Protopappas was released from prison in 2011, and though he'll never have a license to practice dentistry again, Tony had a number of job offers to work in dental labs at the time of his parole. Perhaps that crown on your back molar was crafted by a murderer. Perhaps I have a new screenplay idea.

Why does your mouth hurt so much? Motherboard explains the science behind toothaches.

Whether it's a routine teeth cleaning or a root canal, nobody enjoys the anxiety that comes with a trip to the dentist. Dental work can be painful, frightening, and then there's that dreadfully high deductible your shitty insurance makes you pay at the end. But after reading this list, hopefully you'll brush a little longer and actually floss more than once a month when you're trying to impress your overnight guest like it's actually part of your nightly routine—after all, your next trip to the dentist could be a whole lot worse than just getting a cavity filled.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

'GoldenEye 007' gameplay screencap (from a modified PC version, for sharpness) via YouTube

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In lieu of still owning an N64, and because I had a credit note from trading in Battlefield Hardline, I recently bought GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, Eurocom's re-imagining of Rare's classic 1997 first-person shooter. I'm dispirited by the homogeneous, post–Modern Warfare brand of FPS that currently predominates, and my hope when picking up the GoldenEye remake was to perhaps re-experience some of the old magic—the color, the vibrancy, and the naked experimentation that defined gun games during the 1990s. But it was such a bore, the mere skin of GoldenEye pulled taut over lifeless, joyless, humorless design, the kind we've gotten used to over the past decade.

When I think of the original GoldenEye, I think of the bright, garish greens of Facility's corridors. The goofy elevator muzak in Control and Caverns. The absurd comedy of DK Mode. Its contributions to how both single and multiplayer video games are structured have been well documented—you've likely heard how GoldenEye created the objective-based campaign mission, and broke ground with its split-screen competitive mode. But what stands out to me, especially now, several shooting game trends and almost 20 years on, is the character in GoldenEye. Aesthetically, it's instantly recognizable. And its various sounds, best showcased by this compilation, are what I hear in my mind whenever I talk to friends about old video games. I resist referring to "nostalgia" because it's a vaporous, meaningless idea. But GoldenEye, the way it looks and the way it sounds, puts a clear face and a strong voice to a part of my life which is now long over. This is as tangible, I think, as something like nostalgia can be.

Not that nostalgia should be confined only to clean memories, to things, like music and like video game graphics, which are twee. GoldenEye is a landmark in my own gaming history not simply because it's one of the few shooters, especially by today's standards, to possess unique, evocative personality. It's also very violent. I can't be certain, but given it was 1997, and the only games I recall playing before then were Rayman, Tekken, and Destruction Derby, GoldenEye may very well have been the first video game in which I shot somebody. That terrific wet smack noise the bullets make as they impact a target, the loose bloodstains which appear on enemy's clothes. These were the things that brought me into gaming. These were the sounds and sights that marked a change in me, from enjoying games that were made for kids to trying to convince my mom to let me have the first Grand Theft Auto.

Ever since, I've played and been fascinated by games that are violent—games that are filled with guns and that are markedly for people at least over the age of 15. GoldenEye was an N64 game, but it stole me away from the kind of titles for which Nintendo remains best loved: platformers, adventures, and RPGs. From GoldenEye onwards, my interest in video games orbited first-person shooters. And as much as the genre has in recent years suffered from lethargy and malaise, it remains to me the most fascinating.

Related: DIY Guns

Do also see: The Life of a Party Robot

There is nothing so interesting or so ugly, so exciting, or so grotesque as the first-person shooter. Whether designers intend it or not, killing somebody using a gun is the most politically charged interaction in all of video games—with that single, fleeting press of a button, innumerable questions are posed. Why did I do it? How do I feel? What does it say about me and the character I'm playing as, about my world and his? There's nothing in popular culture that I find as equally beguiling and repulsive as a first-person shooter. It was GoldenEye that sparked my fascination.

GoldenEye is bigger than me. It's more than an artifact of just my experience, so I'm reticent to describe it using personal, masturbatory language. At the same time, discussing it only within the boundaries of detached, unvarnished criticism feels wrong also—it's a thing of beauty, that game, a living, olfactive piece of work that can't be described using simply journalism. So what GoldenEye was, and what it remains today, is best communicated, I think, using a single example from its final level, Egyptian.

The Egyptian level of 'GoldenEye 007'

One of your objectives is to retrieve that most prized of in-game weapons, the one-shot, one-kill Golden Gun. It's contained inside a glass case, in the center of what appears to be a featureless room. But the floor tiles are actually pressure-sensitive—to unlock the box containing the gun, you must walk towards it in a specific pattern. Make a single wrong step, and four sentry turrets will appear from the walls and kill you.

It's an objective to be resolved, a concrete task for the player to visit and complete, and so it's emblematic of the revolution GoldenEye started in regards to how games are linearly structured. Today, whether a person is frustrated or thrilled by the roller coaster design of shooters, they have GoldenEye to thank. That's the game's basic legacy.

The Golden Gun room is also so colorful. It's the crystalline example of GoldenEye's strange, distinctive flavor, its capacity for both novelty and aesthetic flair. Like the paintball cheat, Natalya's AI, or the hilariously rigid karate chop attack, the Golden Gun sequence is a part of this game's incredibly strong but not always purposefully styled identity and character. As much as what was supposed to be there, this game's personality rings out because of its flaws.

Natalya and Bond, screencap via YouTube

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There are glitches, errors, and unfathomable moments, but over time—even at the time—they've become central to why I (and a lot of other people) remember GoldenEye fondly. This game is imperfect, but its imperfections are unique and amusing. You adore it not despite of its shortcomings but because of them. And to that extent, perhaps more than any other video game, it feels like a friend.

But finally, the Golden Gun room shows just how much both video games and I have aged. The solution to the floor puzzle isn't hinted at. In fact, the puzzle itself isn't telegraphed at all—it's only through sheer trial and error that you can ever get that glass case to open. Modern games no longer tolerate this kind of opaqueness. Everything today is intelligible, communicated, and fair, and the Golden Gun puzzle comes from an era of game design that for better or worse—probably better—has long since been abandoned. When I look at it, I wonder what we, the players and the game designers, were ever thinking. I wonder whether GoldenEye's legacy will endure just one more hardware generation. And I wonder where the hell my last 18 years have gone.

Follow Ed Smith on Twitter.

Photo of Femen protesting in London. Image via VICE.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Nipples. God they cause a lot of trouble, don't they? First they go and get themselves banned from Instagram (but only the female ones because they are more sexual and lewd, obviously), sparking an entire movement called "#freethenipple." You can't have failed to notice that for the last few months they've been popping out all over the place in the name of social activism, too.

A couple of days ago, the Mirror ran a story about Heather Varley, a 22-year-old British student who traveled to Spain to protest against animal cruelty during the Pamplona bull run, an event where loads of people run away from six ferocious bulls, the bulls trample on some of them, and then the bulls get punctured to death. It is a gruesome fiesta of sadness, especially if you happen to be a bull.

To draw attention to the animal murder at the heart of this bizarre tradition, Heather and the other protesters lay down in the streets of Pamplona and played dead. Some protesters smothered their bodies in red paint, but Heather was just... topless. I've got an inkling, just an inkling—largely due to the total disregard of the equally nearly-naked male protester next to Heather in the story—that yes, yes! Heather's nipples might have been what got this protest into the news.

Photo of the Pamplona bull run via Wikimedia.

Nudity might not have much to do with animal rights (apart from the fact that animals are usually naked?) but Heather understood that the way to get attention was to strip. Her decision to bare her body is powerful because a) she's showing she understands the power still carried by the image of a woman's naked body, and b) she's subverting it in a confident and political way to garner column inches.

And Heather is not alone. Over the past couple of years the idea of using female nudity to draw attention to social issues has gone mainstream. From PETA's anti-meat protest where (mostly) naked women (more than men) packaged themselves up like steaks, to Chelsea Handler giving it to Instagram by posing nude astride a horse, to topless anti-abortion demos in Cologne, the female body has become a useful tool of dissent. And why shouldn't it be? Women's bodies are so objectified that simply exposing them becomes an effective form of protest. Annoyed about Hermès crocodile bags? Lie on the streets of Bristol naked!

Stripping worked for Femen—up to a point, anyway. Their manifesto was spot on; they wanted to re-establish the naked female body as a powerful and potentially violent thing. Not just a vulnerable, fuckable, steadily aging receptacle. The problem is that their argument was entirely undermined when it turned out that the (kind of annoyingly) beautiful women (SO SORRY) who risked their lives to campaign against stifling sexism had apparently been auditioned on the basis of their attractiveness. Exploiting other women's confidence and trust on that level is pretty depressing.

Call me pernickety, but I do think if we're determined to use our nips in the name of social revolution we need to be certain we're not actually just falling further into the trap of a gender binary. Case in point being when you look at the media outlets gleefully reporting the topless protests and it turns out to be a list of the same tabloids that frequently push prehistoric gender stereotypes with sexist headlines and Page 3 stunts.

You have to wonder: Once you have the tabloids and/or oligarchs toasting to your naked protest, just how in control are you? Isn't the attention lavished on Heather's naked body actually just reinforcing the hackneyed concept that a woman is nothing more than the sum of her physical parts? I guess there isn't really a definitive answer, but this is bigger than just Heather now that the trend for naked protest is growing. I'm not a body policeman (I love all nipples and I get mine out quite often and have pubic hair smattered down my thighs like light rain on a summer's morning) but I'm not sure when something stops being a protest and becomes a misinformed publicity exercise.

Related: Our recent documentary about Femen's sextremism in Canada

At least in the case of #freethenipple, freeing the nipple actually makes sense. Even then though, is the exposure of nipples going to be enough to turn around an already pretty fucking sexist culture? Refinery 29 published an article last week called "Free The Nipple—Just Be Sure to Protect it First," the opening point of which reads: "If you want your breasts to look extra perky at the beach (bathing suit or not), working on your pecs is key." That is the hijacking of a social issue to fit an oppressive idea of femininity and youth if ever I saw it.

If we're going to use our bodies as a form of protest and publicity raising, let's at least not conform to the ideals of femininity peddled by tabloid newspapers and fashion magazines. We need to be more aggressive and original about it. We should understand that the mainstream media is full of a lot of people who want to co-opt our nudity and use it to their own gain, and while that's fucked up, it's also just fundamentally true. In response we need to totally alienate and challenge that mainstream, capitalized concept of femininity.

What I really want is to see Heather rub menstrual blood all over her calves while roaring and impersonating an injured bull. I want to see thick pubic-hair at austerity marches. I want to see someone take a piss in front of George Osborne. It's time to move forward from the idea that basic nudity is really shocking and controversial (when actually it just sells papers) and actually muster up the courage to do something hideous and frightening with our bodies. That, surely, would more powerfully get the message across, regardless of what the cause might be.

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Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I have a lot of friends who are freaking out about not being married yet. They appear to be channeling all of their existential anxiety into that one goal, perhaps because it is easier to have a container for one's anxiety than let it float freely. They seem to feel that if they could just put that piece of the puzzle together, then everything, in all areas of life, would be OK.

Romantic comedies often end with a wedding. But what about after? What do you do with a lifetime of longing, the forward motion of love-anxiety, once you've hit your target? Does it just become existential anxiety again?

I think the velocity of pursuit is an addictive state. It's often why the people who rejected us, or whom we perceive rejected us, are the hardest to get over. When we get rebuffed in the moment that occurs right before we touch the love object—or when we are spurned in the peak of an early-stage love high—we want to get back there forever. We might not even really miss the person. We might just miss the feeling.

The other day I saw my hot neighbor Edward making out with a woman by her car. Edward is an eternal boy—sun-kissed and scruffy. Rumor has it that the only furniture in his studio apartment is a futon bed. I've never seen him without a board of some kind—surf or skate. I totally want Edward. But more than anything, I think I want to be Edward.

It was very early Sunday morning, very postcoital, and I knew this woman wasn't his girlfriend. I knew it because Edward is in no way the type to have a girlfriend. Also, I've seen a lot of other women come and go from his apartment. But the way that he had his arm gently around her waist, and the electricity and spit between them, made it look to me—in that one moment—like they were each others' forever.

In the book The Evolution of Human Sexuality , Donald Symons writes, "The partner with the lesser emotional investment in a relationship controls the relationship." The woman had her arms wrapped tightly around Edward. I noticed that she was holding on just a little bit tighter than he was. I also noticed that he was the one who stopped kissing first. When she got in her car, she looked back to see if he was still looking at her. He wasn't.

All week, after witnessing the postcoital makeout, I pretended I was this woman. On Sunday night I felt the anxiety of wondering whether he would text or not. On Monday, I pictured her semi-hopeful for a text; Tuesday, growing impatient, checking her phone all day. Wednesday brought the reality that it might not ever happen, and the depression that comes with a rejection. I felt her wondering how he could not desire more of the sex that had led to that kissing moment, which seemed so beautiful and romantic. Thursday was empty and listless. Friday, like: Fuck him, he's an asshole. Saturday, nostalgic for the Saturday night before. Sunday, just saying "fuck it" and texting him.

I have no way of knowing whether or not this was her experience. I haven't seen either of them in a week, so maybe they are huddled together on his futon. Maybe he is texting her every day. But this is the narrative I projected on them, perhaps to ease the sadness I felt when the moment of beauty they shared was not mine.

Recently I made a list of every person I have ever kissed. Most of them were more than just kissing: oral sex, fucking, fingering, or at least rolling around in our undies. But I wanted to look at the full count of everyone I've ever engaged with romantically. I looked at the people on the list with whom I felt the most obsessed. I put an asterisk next to them. I then looked at the people whom I initially pined for, but then quickly grew lukewarm. Next to them I placed a dot. Then I looked at the people I have loved, but for whom I never longed, burned, or crushed in a dramatic or poetic way. Next to them I put an X.

The first thing I noticed was that everyone who got the asterisk of obsession had only been a brief fling: at most a three-night stand. I then noticed that the people who received a dot—those for whom I felt an initial longing, which quickly fizzled—were those whom I had admired from afar or felt uncertainty regarding their affections. Once they made their strong feelings for me clear, or we engaged in a relationship, I was like, eh. The weirdest part was that no one with whom I had been in a long-term relationship got the asterisk or the dot. They all got the X of companionate love—deep love, even—but not that butterflies feeling.

It probably says bad things about my capacity for intimacy that the people I have most desired are those I never got to know. I'm not talking about a gradual loss of attraction. I mean the dissipation of a fantasy. Once someone becomes real, it is hard to turn them into an escape. Once the forward motion of love-anxiety has dissipated, I am left again to grapple with death-anxiety, life-anxiety, and worst of all, myself.

The poet Octavio Paz writes, "Each minute is a knife blade of separation: How to trust our life to the blade that may slit our throat? The remedy lies in finding a balm that heals forever the wound inflicted upon us by time's hours and minutes... Almost from the moment of birth, humans flee from themselves. Where do they go? In endless search of themselves... is there no way out? Yes, there is: At certain moments time opens just a crack and allows us to glimpse the other side. These moments are experiences of the merging of subject and object, of I am and you are, of now and forever, here, and there."

I would love to live in the moment of a kiss goodbye, a beautiful makeout after a night of hot sex, with someone whom I like just a little bit more than they like me. I don't want to ever grapple with the knowledge that I like the person more than they like me. I don't want the pain of waiting for a text as days go by. I simply want to feel my own want of them on an electric level, feel it in that kiss, forever. I want everything to be that kiss. It seems unfair to me that a kiss like this is not sustainable or eternal. It seems unfair that fantasy isn't reality.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.

A different Confederate flag. Photo via Flickr user edward stojakovic

Read: The Dangerous Culture of White Possession in the Carolinas

Early Thursday morning, the South Carolina House of Representative voted 90-24 in favor of removing the Confederate flag from Capitol grounds. The state Senate already voted overwhelmingly in favor of taking down the flag, and with the House on board, the legislation just needs approval from Governor Nikki Haley to go through.

Haley, who led the initial push to take down the flag in the wake of last month's racially-motivated massacre at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, plans to sign the bill at a ceremony Thursday afternoon. The bill requires that it be taken down within 24 hours of her signature.

"Today, as the Senate did before them, the House of Representatives has served the State of South Carolina and her people with great dignity," Haley wrote in a statement on Facebook this morning. "It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of, a day that truly brings us all together as we continue to heal, as one people and one state."

Although a majority of House members supported taking down the flag, the legislation was subject to a prolonged debate this week, with defenders of the flag proposing dozens of amendments that would have stalled passage of the bill and kept the flag flying past Friday.

Republican Representative Mike Pitts led the charge, filing more than 20 amendments, including one that called for flying the American flag upside down. "I grew up with that flag, the current flag, being almost a symbol of reverence, because of my family's service in that war," Pitts told NBC News. "It was not a racial issue."

In response, Representative Jenny Horne, who is also a Republican, delivered an emotional appeal to take down the flag, pleading with her fellow lawmakers to end their stalling tactics and pass a clean bill.

"For the widow of Sen. (Clementa) Pinckney and his two young daughters, that would be adding insult to injury, and I will not be a part of it," Horne said. "If we amend this bill, we are telling the people of Charleston, we don't care about you."

Once removed from its pole, the flag, which has flown on South Carolina's state house grounds since 1962, will be moved to the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, along with several state legislators, probably.

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