Angry Mario gets ready to kick balls. Imagery from 'Super Mario Strikers'

Sports! They're great, aren't they? With the people who were dickheads at school being rewarded and praised and loved by the general public because they can run faster, kick harder, or lift heavier weights than all the other people around them. Who doesn't love sports?

Still, there are some shitty sports out there—sports that make you wonder why Gareth Sport invented sports back in 1935. Fortunately, there's a counter to this mundanity in the form of video games, which is handy because this is the gaming section of VICE, and not the bit about sports.

There are plenty of real life sports I have no love for, like golf. I mean, I played it once and was awful. And while crazy golf is clearly brilliant, it's not the kind of thing, umm, Nick Faldo plays. Is that a contemporary reference? Probably.

'Everybody's Golf' is immeasurably better than the real thing. Image via NowGamer

Still, even with my rabid, intense apathy towards the sport of club-ball-thwacking by over-privileged people, I adore Everybody's Golf. Seriously. Adore. If I could marry it, it would already have divorced me for being an awful and boring human being. That's how deep my adoration goes.

Replacing dullness with fun seems to be a simple case of making everything brighter, louder, and more coated in fire—the way I wish real golf were. I would love to see a homing shot from, I guess, Jack Nicklaus, or whoever it is the kids love these days. But instead, I'll just keep on beavering away at getting that platinum trophy on the Vita version.

It doesn't end there. I'm an Everton fan, meaning watching football on TV in Britain is a painful experience as 97.5 percent of pundits are ex-Liverpool players and make me want to vomit out of my eyes. As a result, I turn to video games, but I don't want them to recreate the bland, corporate world of professional soccer.

I want Mario Strikers. Or Inazuma Eleven. Or even whatever the hell this is that I definitely used to play in an arcade in Scarborough.

I'm an advocate for the fact that games can literally have anything in them, the limit only being a creator's imagination or an overzealous producer. But I'm also a fan of games because they can make the mundane marvelous, and my sporting examples don't stop with those two competitive pursuits.

See, Formula One is, frankly, one of the worst things in the world. It's boring, even though these plane-like cars shuttle around at 200 miles an hour. It goes on for fucking ever. It's riddled with dodgy practices. The only people who compete are those who think golf is too much of a pauper's sport.

Shouldn't this sort of thing be more exciting? Image via Codemasters

And yet, I find myself actively enjoying the F1 parts of driving games, even if I do have to play them with every single assist in the world turned on. In fact, the Formula One thing stretches to all driving sports—they're all shit in real life and often great in game form, where you actually get to participate in them and nobody dies when you hilariously drive off a cliff.

Granted, this theory falls apart when you switch on spodaggeddon, aka Project CARS with every tiny control set to manual, and subject yourself to some of the most accurate (read: dull) video game representations of driving yet.

Video games even save the not-so-dull sports that have been rendered boring by silly (absolutely necessary) rule changes. The WWE—shut up, it is a sport—no longer does the whole bleeding everywhere thing, nor does it allow chair shots to the head. Apparently concussions aren't a good thing.

Related: Watch VICE's documentary on eSports that are sports, like, for real.

So it is that we return to the games, where we can gleefully make The Miz spurt claret all over the ring after waffling him a dozen times with a fold up chair. The TV show might be dull, the recent games might be absolute dogshit, but at least I can always get a giggle from beating up a virtual representation of a man I'm clearly just jealous of.

It's a theme that's run for years: the magic of gaming saving us all from a life of sitting through shit sports with your brother as he tries to convince you that, actually, cricket isn't the least fun thing in the world to choose to watch. No, Paul, I would rather play Brian Lara Cricket, thank you very much.

New on VICE Sports, where we cover real sports: The Beauty and the Bollocks of Football Songs

Similarly, I don't care how good Stephen Hendry is or how Ronnie O'Sullivan started playing left-handed because he was bored of winning everything right-handedly—I'd rather wait for the idle animations on Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker. And no, I will never watch a full baseball match because even I have limits, but I've found myself playing a fair bit of Super Mega Baseball recently.

The list goes on, and on, and on. The power of gaming goes well beyond just being an infinite melting pot for every imagination that has ever and will ever exist—it's something that actually makes the hammer throw interesting.

Basically, what I'm saying is: All sports are shit, let's go get drunk and play video games instead.

Follow Ian Dransfield on Twitter.

Stephen Harper shakes a small child's hand on the campaign trail. Photo via Stephen Harper's Twitter

"Hey, so will we be getting media advisories about Harper's events in the future?"

"Yes," the senior Conservative staffer told me.

"Oh, okay, cool. It's just that we didn't get one today. Any reason for that?"

Senior Conservative Staffer mostly ignored me for a few beats. Then I repeated my question. He sighed. "Well you're here, aren't you? You figured it out."

And that is a pretty good summary of day one.

The opening act of a 78-day Kabuki theatre entitled 'Harper's Big Gamble.'

The head of the Conservative Party, the leader of the Best Country In the World™, walked into the Governor General's mansion at 9:55 a.m. Sunday. He emerged at 10:15. In the intervening 20 minutes, the country went from a sleepy summer day at the cottage to a non-stop pander fest that no ordinary human has the power to stop, temper, or even avoid.

The 42nd general election is afoot.

It's pretty easy to be cynical about the whole thing.

"Everybody knows the election date and the campaigns of the other parties, as near as I can tell, have already begun," Harper told media on Sunday morning. "I'm beginning our campaign today."

Imagine a sly grin on the prime minister's face as he says it. That's the sign he's putting you on.

Every party has been campaigning, in earnest, since the House of Commons rose in late June. In some ways, they've all been campaigning since they first walked into the place in 2011.

But now we all get to call it an election.

Harper, breaking with tradition he's set for himself, took five questions from media. They all centered around two ideas: how much will this election cost, and won't the extra-long campaign benefit you the most?

"A worthwhile amount," and "I wouldn't say so at all." Those were the answers.

Harper propped up each of the tent poles for his campaign: we need a steady hand on the cash register, we need a steady hand on the big red button, and we don't need inexperienced ideologues.

'Inexperienced ideologue,' by the way, was virtually what everyone called Harper when he was first elected. Now he's an experienced ideologue.

By the time I wandered away from the Governor General's abode, Thomas Mulcair was delivering a statement across the river, in Gatineau.

"Wages are falling, incomes are stagnant and household debt is skyrocketing," Mulcair told reporters. The first two, by the way, aren't particularly true. "Middle class families are working harder than ever but can't get ahead."

Mulcair refused to take questions from journalists. Because, hey, why bother?

Justin Trudeau picked up on that.

"Unlike the other guys, I tend to take a lot of questions," he boasted in Vancouver. He took an unending stream of questions before hopping off to the city's pride parade.

Harper closed out the first day's campaign trail with an event in Montreal. He stumped in the anglophone, predominantly Jewish riding of Mount Royal, where he's hoping to pick up a seat. He tuned his message to Quebec voters — fighting the Islamic State, promising a voice in cabinet for infrastructure funding, and banning women from wearing what they want at citizenship ceremonies — in hopes of getting picked up across the province. Party strategists are sure they can win a basket of seats in the rural parts of the province.

"Don't let them tell you Conservative values aren't Quebec values," Harper said in French.

But signs were clear that this election wasn't the same. Gaggles of anarchists, socialists, and nondescript activists assembled outside. (It's not quite clear how they got there, as the event wasn't made public.) They blocked the bus carrying Harper's media pool and slapped 'STOP HARPER' stickers all over it.

That campaign bus, by the way, is currently housing less than half a dozen journalists. (Five, at last count.) To be there, they're shelling out $3,000-a-day, $12,500-a-week, or $78,000 for the whole campaign (plus tax.) When Harper shows up at an event, media gaggle in tow, those paying journalists will get four-of-the-five questions Harper will answer. Local media will get one. Someone like me—travelling on my own, occasionally showing up at Harper's events—will get, ostensibly, none.

Inside the event, before Harper event took to the stage, a FEMEN protester managed to make it a step inside the door before being wrestled away. She was pinned to the floor as she screamed "Harper! Dictator!" on repeat. In their style, she managed to get her breasts out of her shirt while under arrest.

From the sounds of it, others tried to get in. Banging on the doors throughout the building had security scrambling all through the community centre where the event was being held.

Harper took no questions at the event. Two local reporters, genuinely confused, asked a Conservative staffer why. He shrugged.

I got a similar response while I tried to bicker with the senior staffer who refused to explain why we weren't actually told about this event beforehand.

There's some excitement around this election. This is the first election in five years. So many things are up for grabs: Senate abolition, pot legalization, the future of our fight against the Islamic State, the possibility we may finally afford trans people full human rights protections. To that end, it's like an interminable march towards Christmas Day.

On the other, this promises to be the mostly tight-regulated, neutorically-scripted, superficial, meaningless election in Canadian history. It may well be a stunning reaffirmation of everything wrong with our system and it may be met with frustration, followed by helplessness, followed by disinterest. The microtargeting of a small subsection of the population may deliver a victory for one party or another that, for all intents and purposes, is an empty mandate that should force us to question whether this election is even legitimate. If the majority of the country doesn't vote — not out of laziness, but disgust — what's the point?

If that sounds pessimistic, it is.

And it probably won't get any better. While in the first week I got scoffed at by Conservative staffers — people who carry more weight in our political system than the entire population of PEI combined — tomorrow it will be NDP staffers, and the day after it'll be Liberal tykes.

One way or the other, I'm loading up the car and heading cross-country, in the ill-begotten hope that I can find a reason to actually tell people to go out and vote. Because, right now, I don't have one.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter

Warren attacks Nathan in 'Life Is Strange'

Early warning: this article contains story spoilers for episode four of Life Is Strange

The turmoil of teenage life can be a pretty sobering experience, young minds constantly scrambling to find their own sense of identity and self. With new, immediately alien feelings adding themselves into the mix, and basically ruining everything, teenage life is hard—and portraying that well is something that not a lot of video games have gotten right.

Dontnod just might have, though. The Parisian studio's second game, Life Is Strange, is an episodically released point-and-click-like adventure, currently on its fourth episode of five, which mixes the drama and hormonal nightmare of being a teenager with a healthy dose of science fiction. It's set in the fictional Blackwell Academy, in the equally fictional Arcadia Bay, in the really-there-in-real-life (seriously-just-look-on-a-map) Oregon. It has me thinking back to my school days, and I see a lot of myself in the game's resident nerd, Warren Graham.

Warren's a secondary figure in the game's narrative, with Max and Chloe filling in the central protagonist positions, but he features in every episode and always leaves an impression. His cringe-worthy texts to Max, who he clearly lusts after, betray a general neediness that is something a lot of teenage boys (myself included) trap themselves in. Warren's behavior towards Max and his overall attitude to women is something that really piqued my interest: Is there more to Warren than we're being told? I asked Michel Koch, co-director of Life Is Strange.

"When we started to create every character, not only Warren, we really wanted to use known archetypes that people see in teenage drama and in movies." Koch tells me that Dontnod wrote episode one with the intention of introducing the typical high school stereotypes, before building upon them with every episode.

Maybe cool it there a little, Warren

"Warren started as the shy nerd who is in love with the main character. He has his issues and his feelings, and has to deal with things like the 'friend zone' and getting rejected. I think this appeals to a lot of players and gamers, as it's something we can relate to—we've all felt this way at some point. I see myself in Warren too, and a lot of people can also relate to his awkwardness. Like, his inviting of Max to see scary movies—that's maybe not a good thing to do, when you're trying to hit on a girl."

Especially given what Max is going through in Life Is Strange, not that anyone but those closest to her actually knows what that is. (Just Chloe, basically.) Warren's clearly into Max, but in true-to-life terrible nerd fashion, he struggles to express and deal with his feelings. I've seen comments amongst other Life Is Strange players saying that Warren is simply a "fuckboy that's trying to get into Max's pants," but I don't buy that. He's clearly besotted—check out his "Don't ignore this text" message in episode one, and some other pushiness—but I doubt that's the real deal, the whole Warren.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

"I think that he's a good guy," Koch says, "but, of course, a bit insecure with girls, so he tries to hide that underneath with some humor and bad jokes. He might seem a bit pushy, but he is in love with Max, and he cares about her. We didn't see [his actions] as a creepy way to hit on Max. But, yes there is this kind of awkwardness [to Warren]. He is really messing up sometimes because he isn't saying what he should say, but that's because he's shy and it's funny to see how he tries and sometimes doesn't get what he wants."

Warren's ham-fisted attempts at some sort of physical intimacy with Max did give me a bit of a chuckle. Koch tells me the inspiration behind the character. "I'm a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is why I like looking at archetypes, like, uh, Xander. He has this kind of awkwardness in him and is always saying the wrong things, but he's a good guy!"

Spoilers definitely follow for episode four of Life Is Strange

Max and Warren's bond is genuine, as little moments like this illustrate.

There's a large character moment for Warren in episode four. He comes face to face with local bully (and so much more, but even more spoilers) Nathan Prescott, who'd given him a black eye just a few days earlier. Warren steps in when Nathan get violent towards Max, and we see Warren in a completely different light as he beats Blackwell's resident terror into a bloody mess in the boys' dorms. You, as Max, can step in and pull Warren back—but, equally, you can just let Nathan get what's been coming to him for a few episodes. Koch is eager to share the team's reasoning behind this scene.

"If you choose not to step in on the fight with Nathan, we start to see something a little different, a darker side of Warren. It's very violent and gets a bit out of control. It shows us that, even if we're good characters, we all have a side of us that can go out of control. Everyone has shades of grey, bits of darkness."

New on Munchies: Sushi Like You've Never Seen It

As Life Is Strange has progressed, so its tone has darkened and its influences widened, now encompassing internet culture with Warren, still pumped from his show of aggression, labeling himself a "white knight" and how he's become an "alpha." "I think when you're insecure, it's normal to show ourselves to others as something else using people, characters, and words," Koch explains. "I mean, we are looking at memes, 4chan, Tumblr, and all that, and we are using Warren a lot for this."

To me, it seems like Warren is Dontnod's connection with online societies, and along with that comes the issues and problems that a lifestyle with web culture entails. He's not a weirdo, nor a woman hater who is simply hanging around Max to get his end away. He's merely going through his own changes, which might not be so life-or-death in design as Max's, but are traumatic nonetheless as all of these new emotions are stirred up. Warren, aged just 16, is a character who isn't black or white, but one that's a little bit more than the usual shy nerd stereotype.

Possibly the worst T-shirt I've ever seen

The fact that we can explore a supporting-role character in this much depth is a testament to how Dontnod has been writing Life Is Strange, to the studio's attention to detail in fleshing out their fantastical story with relatable real-life traits. And the series is only getting better with each episode, tackling some heavyweight themes and doing so with tact surprising for the games industry. The game's reception so far, and its commercial success, should be enough for its publishers, Square Enix, to give the green light on a second season.

"Well, that's up to them," is all Koch will give me. Assuming there's more story to tell come the climax of episode five, out later in 2015, they'd be crazy not to. Life Is Strange is building on the modern adventure format that Telltale helped to establish with The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but Dontnod is arguably doing it better than their Californian peers. This is a special game, and one that its fans are always going to want more of.

More information at the Life Is Strange website.

Follow Sayem Ahmed on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Cyril Caton

Read: This Guy Went on an All-Alcohol Diet for a Week

When someone becomes very, very old, people want to know how that person went so long without becoming a corpse, because we are all terrified of death and imagine that there is a secret to avoiding it that's not "Exercise and eat right and then just keep getting lucky." That's the price you pay for living past 100—everyone wants to know how you did it, like your continued blood flow is a magic trick.

Back in March, a 104-year-old Texan named Elizabeth Sullivan revealed—presumably in response to someone asking her what her secret to not dying was—that she drank three Dr. Peppers a day. And on Tuesday, an article about a 110-year-old New Jersey woman named Agnes Fenton contained this tidbit:

Her secret, according to an interview from 2005, is three Miller High Lifes and a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue Label each day. Fenton said she did that every day for more than 70 years.

Fenton apparently claims that a doctor told her to start drinking the High Lifes when Fenton was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor years ago, and while "pound more suds" seems like unlikely advice from a medical professional, there's an abundance of evidence that alcohol, when consumed in moderation, can help ward off heart disease. However, most people associate that kind of healthy drinking with a couple of glasses at wine at dinner.

When asked if her caretakers—who apparently don't like her to drink—would let her take a celebratory shot, Fenton apparently replied, "They better."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The summer may have ended somewhat prematurely, but the mixtape mania has not. This month I welcome a new name to my illustrious team of compilers, one Florian Grill, head of the excellent Dying Victims Productions label, and author of the biblically-sized annual zine, Thrash Attack.

We've been corresponding rather sporadically since meeting a few years back, but I always keep an eye on the stuff his label puts out, as he's always championing two things I love: forgotten 80s bands and new bands that raise the spirits of the ancient metal gods. So I asked him to compile some of his best stuff from this year and some forgotten gems. He did about the best job he could have done, showing some bands I hadn't even heard of.

Over to Florian:

Having played some of my material previously on the Midnite Madness radio show, Dylan suggested I should put together a small mixtape with some material from Dying Victims Productions. I chose the more recent releases, which came out in the last three to four months, but I also included a second lot of tracks. Basically, it's a mixture of killer bands from East Germany who have released—or are on the edge releasing—their debut albums, with the other half being American bands that never made it over the demo stage in the 80s, but easily tear apart many properly recorded albums. Enjoy!

TRACKLIST:

Recent releases on DVP:


1. Deathstorm - "Massgrave"
2. Bastardizer - "Demons Unleashed"
3. Poseidon - "Beyond the Seven Gates Of Hell"
4. Dresden - "Sound Of Silence"
5. Vigilance - "Tower of Black Sorcery"
6. Throaat - "Evil Dead"
7. Sanctifying Ritual - "Carved in Rotten Remains"
8. Satan's Cross - "Sumerian Night"
9. Witch Blade - "Ljusets Apostel"
10. Mion's Hill - "Eaten Alive"

New bands from East Germany and old overlooked demo stuff from the USA:

11. Fatal Violence - "Violence Is Golden"
12. Have Mercy - "Show Me Your Rage"
13. Schafott - "Total Cleansing"
14. Gargoyle - "Burning Marrow"
15. Hellhound - "Killing Spree"
16. Division Speed - "Blazing Heat"
17. Savage Death - "Evil Dead"
18. Chörnyj Woron - "V2 Over London"

A Fist in the Face of God Presents... DVP: Shredding the Iron Curtain by Mxnv on Mixcloud

I've also been keeping up my monthly radio show on NTS, where I play the finest in forgotten metal for two hours. The shows are chronicled here, for those not in the know.

More from Dylan: †ROCKWELL†

Image via Flickr user Televisione Streaming

More on True Detective:

The Real 'True Detective'?
'True Detective' Takes a Page from David Lynch and Finally Hints at a California Carcosa
Season Two of 'True Detective' Must Be Taken on Its Own Terms

Warning: light spoilers ahead.

The main thing that people seem to remember from the first season of True Detective is the aphorism "Time is a flat circle." This line, delivered by Matthew 's wizened Rust Cohle in a Louisiana interrogation room, essentially posits that in the context of the greater universe, everything that will ever happen to us has already happened, and we're just perceiving it in a linear fashion. In real life, this idea is useless to us. Regardless of the alinearity of time, we perceive it as moving in one direction.

In storytelling, however, the reminder that we as viewers perceive stories in the way they're presented to us is of paramount importance. When you read a book, the story is only going to turn out one way, and that's the way that the author has determined the story will go.

However, you can jump to any point in the book, and experience the story's events in any order you'd like. Scenes such as this one, in which Cohle almost seems to be aware that he's a character with a pre-determined arc and he's about to put the kibosh on the entire show and start yelling at showrunner Nic Pizzolatto to let him out of his cage, are why the first season of True Detective was such a brilliant deconstruction of the standard-issue cop procedural. Rust might have not been able to control his case, but you got the sense that that didn't matter to him: Why care about the case when you've got an intimate understanding of the fabric of the universe in which you reside?

If I had to guess, this was a ploy on the showrunner Pizzolatto's part to establish his characters as complex, tortured souls with deep-seated motivations that would inevitably drive them towards some sort of dynamic resolution. However, as True Detective's second season wears on, very little is actually accomplished in solving the actual mystery. By episode six, we found out that Ben Caspere, a powerful city official, was killed because he was involved with a West Coast Illuminati sex-party ring, and that the entire fictional town of Vinci was creepy and corrupt. All this stuff, or at least a very general version of it, seems inevitable to pretty much anybody who's watched True Detective, participated in cultural conversations surrounding True Detective, or even heard the words true and detective in close proximity to one another.

A good murder mystery essentially asks the question, 'What happens when someone is forcibly removed from society, and what about this society mandated that this person had to be removed from it?'

This season's central mystery more or less falls in line with both the show's first season, as well as The Killing, an AMC show whose first season Pizzolatto helped write and is one of TD's spiritual forebears. That season involved a murder that served as a MacGuffin for exploring all of the crazy shit going on in its home city, including high-class prostitutes, crooked city officials, and a general sense the evil had infected an entire municipality. That show featured two detectives—one, Joel Kinnaman's Stephen Holder, was particularly True: a weird, philosophical recovering meth addict who smoked pot with teens and was probably in love with his partner Sarah. He was the show's proto-Rust Cohle, a fundamentally good person who seemed crushed by his horrible understanding of the nature of man.

This season's basic plot also contains slivers of Alan Moore's From Hell, in which a bunch of Freemasons get together to kill a group of prostitutes who possibly might have squealed on a member of the royal family for frequenting a fancy prostitute house vis-à-vis one of them having his kid. From Hell's central character John Gull, in addition to being generally creepy and terrifying, has a Rustian sense of temporality—whenever he commits a murder, he disassociates and suddenly understands that he's simply moving through time as he perceives it, and that the totality of human history has already happened.

While it's a weird bit of clarity for an Illuminati-sanctioned killer of women to have, it goes a long way in terms of plainly laying out the fact that in lots and lots of murder mysteries, the actual murder isn't all that interesting. Instead, it's the stuff swirling around the murder that's often so fascinating—a good murder mystery essentially asks the question, "What happens when someone is forcibly removed from society, and what about this society mandated that this person had to be removed from it?" Some people benefit from it, some get screwed over. Some people aren't affected at all.

This, the idea that the "what" of a story is less important than the greater "why's" surrounding it, remains True Detective's guiding theme. Which is fortunate, because as the show's second season has unfolded, it's become both increasingly harder to follow along with the show's actual plot, as well as sort of boring. Until last week's episode, the season's sixth, TD had settled into something of a holding pattern, involving tense conversations between characters, vaguely ominous shots of Los Angeles's labyrinthine highway system, and the occasional image of some sort of fruit tree just to really hammer home the fact that this is a California Noir we're dealing with here, punctuated by bursts of brutal, delicious violence.

Related: The Real 'True Detective'

While viewers were waiting for the show to progress in the "solving the mystery" department, lots of fun, horrible stuff happened in the personal lives of the show's principles. Vince Vaughn's Frank Semyon was slowly dragged back into the role of "generic underworld guy" after he found out the dead rich guy stole his money. Rachel McAdams's Ani Bezzerides got flagged for sexual harassment in the workplace. Colin Farrell's Ray Velcoro lost his kid, his career, and his mustache. Taylor Kitsch's Paul Woodrugh got his girlfriend pregnant, but also had sex with one of his old military buddies, who was a man. Meanwhile, these True Detectives (plus Vaughn, who is definitely True, and despite being a criminal, is trying to solve the mystery) hadn't really made much headway in the whole "solving the mystery" thing. It turns out that in addition to being sad, helpless people rendered semi-shitty by the brutal world around them, none of them are particularly great at solving crimes.

In the past two episodes of the show, however, all of the show's painful, semi-boring exposition has finally started to pay off. Vaughn, who at first felt like a black hole of suck from which nothing of quality could ever escape, is a lot more interesting now that he's regularly acting like a murderous psychopath, breaking glasses over people's faces and burning buildings down by spilling liquor everywhere and then setting stuff on fire. It turns out that Vaughn's total blankness throughout the entire season was serving the greater purpose of establishing that Frank Semyon was at his heart, a guy who was really adept at management, and he just so happened to have ended up being the manager of a criminal organization. It's chilling to watch what he's willing to do, simply as an extension of his devotion to his self-perceived station in life.

Bob Hope, the original True Detective. Image via Flickr user Patricia M

Meanwhile, now that the show's spent a few hours punching Ray Velcoro in the metaphorical dick, it's a lot easier to understand why he acts how he does. If he plays the character as a mumbler, it's because Ray's life seems to be nothing more than a series of perpetual rock-bottoms. Much like Tom Hardy's portrayal of Mad Max, Ray's been so shell-shocked by life that he seems almost confused at the sound of his own voice. What once seemed goofy and superfluous now seems essential to his character. He's emerged as something of a mentor to Ani and Paul, and through the power of teamwork, the trio's finally gotten a big scoop! Ani went undercover as a prostitute at a weird drug-and-sex party while Paul broke into said weird drug-and-sex party and stole some documents from a desk. Not to be outdone, Ani stabbed some guy a bazillion times and then rescued one of the prostitutes, whose information promises to blow the case wide open. Except, well, she doesn't want to testify. And now all the powerful people who were at the party are mad because Ani killed some generic tycoon. At this point, the True Detectives have ensconced themselves in a cabin somewhere while they try to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. But, in perhaps the billionth plot twist in the episode, Paul gets drawn back into the arms of the Blackwater-esque security organization he used to work for, who have since changed their name and started working solely for the organization that throws the weird orgies. Also, a bunch of diamonds appear to have suddenly started to play some sort of significant role.

I don't want to spoil the episode's ending if you haven't seen it, but let's just say that in the world of True Detective, life is hard, and if you want to survive you've got to smoke the cigarette of life down to the filter of mortality. And once the filter of mortality is bare, bare like the ass of a baby when it's born into the cold and unloving shit factory we call life, you smoke the filter of mortality down to nothingness. Which is to say that in the last ten minutes of this season's penultimate episode, every True Detective either fucks, dies, or kills someone in a dramatic and spectacular fashion.

On Motherboard: Jack the Ripper's Final Victim Is Being Exhumed

As the show's final hovers over us like a gray cloud that happens to rain extraneous plot details, True Detective has left us with more questions than it can possibly answer. Who killed Ben Caspere? What the hell's going on with the diamonds? Why did Ray shave his mustache? Who was the Rasputin-looking guy from Ani's childhood? Who was that guy wearing the bird mask back in episode two, and why? Are humans inherently evil, or has, through the fault of no one in particular, society morphed into a construct that makes us evil? And wouldn't spraying liquid MDMA into your mouth get you less high than if you just did it the normal way?

It might be that I'm actually a bad viewer and these questions have already been answered, and it's very possible that Nic Pizzolatto has a four-hour season finale that will answer all these questions and more, and tie the whole show up with a nice bow. Or, and this is what seems most likely to me, it might be that many of these questions were never meant to be answered. The actual mystery of the show is why these four characters, once they've had every last sad and intimate detail of their private lives laid bare to us, have acted the way they did throughout the entire season. We know how True Detective will end: The case will be solved in some form or another. But it's the people in the show's universe, slowly getting hip to the fact that they're being manipulated by forces larger than themselves, who serve as True Detective's ultimate mystery.

True Detective airs Sunday nights at 9 PM on HBO.

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Law school was supposed to be Erika Stallings' path to financial stability. The first in her family to attend college, Stallings earned a full ride to the University of North Carolina, and then chose to attend Georgetown Law because the school offered her a partial scholarship. But she graduated with $115,000 in student loans anyway, and today, the $1,000 monthly loan payment eats up a big chunk of her paycheck. So despite her white-collar job and fancy diplomas, she remains in a state of financial precariousness.

"I'm probably as well-off as someone age 30 can be," Stallings said in an interview. "But even I feel the panic of knowing if I lost my job today, because I've been trying to pay off as much debt as possible, I don't have the Suze Orman emergency fund. If I were unemployed for a while, trying to keep up with these $1,000 a month payments would be terrifying."

Of course, Stallings situation is not unique. Across the United States, women like Stallings are staring down piles of student debt—bigger piles, in fact, than the ones facing their former male classmates. They're also making less money with which to pay off that debt. The combination is making women poorer, more dependent, and setting them up for a more tenuous retirement. And it's creating a systematic gender wealth gap that persists for women's entire lives.

"I don't have a familial safety net," Stallings said. "If I didn't have this student loan debt, I could start building my own safety net. There would be more money for me to send home. I could switch careers. Last year I had major surgery—adding those bills onto the student loan debt is scary."

With more women attending college and graduate school than ever before, it naturally follows that more women are also racking up student debt. Women are more likely to take out student loans than men, in an economy where college costs significantly more than it did a generation ago. While it's a significant feminist achievement that women now account for 57 percent of graduates earning bachelor's degrees, those women are more likely than their male peers to start their careers in a financial hole: 68 percent of those female graduates are leaving school with some amount of student loan debt, compared to 63 percent of men.

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That happens for a few reasons. Women make up 62 percent of students at private and often pricey four-year institutions, where tuition costs are often in five-figure range; there are also a million more women than men in community colleges, which are more affordable, but have high drop-out rates – just one in five first-time full-time community college students graduates in five years, leaving the ones who don't with limited job prospects and accumulated debt.

Women also make up a larger number of first-generation college students than men, and students who are the first in their family to go to school are more likely to come from low-income families, more likely to take out loans, and more likely to drop out before completing a degree than students who have a parent with a bachelor's degree. Female college students are also more likely than men to be from poor families, whether they're first-generation students or not, and that financial disadvantage requires them to borrow more.

Once they graduate—if they graduate—women make less money than men , and so spend a greater proportion of their salaries to pay off their loans. So while their male peers have more money to play with – to put into a 401k, to invest, to save for a home, to put in an emergency fund, to use as a cushion when they take a big career risk – women throw much of their income down a student debt hole that often stretches on for decades.

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But while Democratic politicians have called attention to the gender pay gap, and proposed legislation to close it, there has been less of an emphasis on how student loans help turn the pay gap into life-long gender wealth disparities.

A 2013 study by the American Association of University Women found that women who graduated in college in 2008 saw an immediate gap in their earnings compared to their male classmates: One year out of college, women working full-time made just 82 percent of what men who graduated the same year made.

Some of that gap can be accounted for by factors like the number of hours worked, the kinds of occupations women tend to work in, and employment sector. But even when all else is equal, women still make 7 percent less than men one year out of college.

"Because women earn less, paying back their student loans is effectively more difficult for them because a higher proportion of their earnings is devoted to the student loan payment," said Catherine Hill, AAUW's vice president of research and one of the study's authors. "Because of the pay gap, the student debt is taking out a bigger chunk of their smaller paychecks, leaving them with less money to live on."

There is some degree of "choice" involved in the pay gap – insofar as women funneled into certain careers and men into others is a "choice." More women major in the humanities than in fields like business, engineering and the sciences, which usually lead to better-paying jobs after graduation. Within employment sectors, men gravitate toward high-paying specialties, while women may focus on areas that are more fulfilling or more flexible, but less remunerative.

But even when researchers account for those factors, women still make less than men when in the first year of their careers, even when doing the exact same jobs—a trend that persists throughout their careers. Gender discrimination, intentional or not, seems to be the only explanation.

Almost no industry is immune. In business and management jobs, women a year out of college make 86 cents to their male peers' dollar. If they work in sales, it's 77 cents. Among nurses, a field dominated by women, the handful of men in the industry make much more over the course of their careers—an average of $5,100 every year.

WATCH: VICE and Barack Obama Host a Roundtable on the Price of Education

This financial burden can impact every major decision a woman makes for the rest of life—from her career to her marriage to her children to caring for her aging parents to her retirement. Research shows that women who have student loans are less likely to marry—and the more in debt they are, the more their marriage prospects decrease—while the same doesn't hold true for men. According to the female-focused financial site LearnVest, nearly half of in-debt college graduates delayed buying a home because of their student loans, and nearly a quarter postponed having kids.

"You think about the expense of kids and it's like, how would I ever take that on and maintain the loan payments? It gives me pause," Stallings, the first-generation college student, said. She added that while she wants to be able to plan for children, the weight of her debt makes that difficult.

"I have a BRCA II mutation, so one consequence of that is I'm probably going to have my ovaries taken out when I'm 38," Stallings said. "If I had the money right now I would get my eggs frozen, but trying to find another $15,000 to do that is not easy."

"Then saving for an emergency fund," she said, describing her financial priorities. "Then a house or an apartment, not necessarily for myself -- I've thought of buying my mom property in North Carolina because it's cheaper, and that would stabilize her financial situation."

And unlike lots of women, Stallings has a well-paying job that allows her to make her monthly payments in full. For the many women who default or miss payments on their student loans, the hit to their credit scores can compromise their ability to buy a car or a house or even rent an apartment for years to come. For women with car payments or mortgages, piled-on student debt forces some hard choices.

When women spend higher proportions of their income on student debt—and 47 percent spend more than the recommended 8 percent, compared to just 39 percent of men—they're less able to make the kind of investments that build long-term wealth. There's less money to put into a 401k, to put toward emergency savings, to buy a home. And after a lifetime of shoveling money toward student loans, and getting paid less than their male counterparts, women entering retirement could be looking at years of financial stability, even poverty.

"I joke all the time that I'll pay off my house before I pay off my student loans," Suzanne Meyer, a 43-year-old high school English teacher in North Carolina, told me. "I'm going to be 87 years old in a nursing home and still paying off my student loans. That's my reality."

Meyer took out about $30,000 in loans to go to graduate school and get her teaching license. After consolidating, deferring, and missing payments, she now owes nearly $60,000.

"I pay my mortgage first, and we need electricity and food, so the student loans are always last to get paid, and a lot of times that means they don't get paid at all," she said. "Which sounds awful, and it's doing horrible things to my credit, but the reality is they aren't going to come take my licensure because I didn't pay my bill."

The $5,000 she's hoping to get from the federal loan forgiveness program will make a dent, Meyer said, but not a big enough one. She would like to see the government consider more innovative ways people with student loan debt could repay it—for example, by volunteering or tutoring in a state or federal educational program.

"It's unrealistic to say I want the whole loan to go away," Meyer said. "I did borrow the money. But I can give back in other ways that the government needs. It's a government loan and the government needs certain things – there are programs out there that need assistance and I would be capable of doing that. Let me pay it back in a different way."

While she's not making enough money to pay back her own student loans, Meyer has another one looming in the near future.

"I have a kid in high school. I don't have a college fund for her," she said. "I'm looking at the other side of student loans now for my child, and that scares me."

Follow Jill Filipovic on Twitter.

Ruth Garnett, Reverend Ken McKoy, Reverend Cornelius Brown, and Dr. Reynaldo Anderson in North St. Louis. Photo by the author

St. Louis is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. In the spring of 2013, the so-called North City—where much of the killing takes place—had two neighborhoods on the list of the "25 Most Dangerous"in the country. This part of St. Louis has been called one of the worst ghettos in America, where drugs, poverty, and violence reign supreme, and brutality, narcotics, and gangs are a way of life.

Unfortunately, the area has been making headlines again this summer with the murder rate reportedly on the rise. St. Louis may not have the same urgent grip on the cultural imagination as nearby Ferguson—the old stomping ground of former cop Darren Wilson and late teenager Michael Brown—but it's in a bad way. While local politicians and city officials bemoan the the effects of the drug trade, law enforcement is busy implementing various anticrime methods to stop the flow of heroin. Last month, a local man perched himself atop a billboard in protest, vowing not to come down until the city went a whole week without a murder (he finally came down on Sunday, even though the gap in killings was a few hours short of seven days). But despite all the discussion, posturing, and police tactics, the violence continues.

Enter Reverend Ken McKoy of the Progressive African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, who three months ago started organizing walks down the Hodiamont streetcar tracks that cut through the middle of North City. No longer occupied by street cars, the tracks now serve as the main strip where addicts, drug dealers, and gang bangers congregate—and where some of them die when disputes turn violent.

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"I did a funeral for a 17-year-old whom I had baptized when he was 14," Reverend McKoy told me. "He got caught up in some kind of little drug thing, he was beaten to death, rolled up in a rug, doused in bleach and thrown into a ravine. I remember how absolutely, I mean, I felt like a complete failure. He had called me and asked me to help him get a job, and I don't think I looked as hard as I should have, because at the time, I swear, I didn't know he was caught up like that. I don't think I worked hard enough. I should have done more. And at that point I decided I needed to do something, but what that something was I didn't know."

McKoy—whose own son is a Crip who was hit in the leg during a shooting—now journeys through the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 10:30 PM to 2 AM. As he told me, "That's when all the action occurs—it's a different world out there around midnight."

On Friday night, I drove down to North City and met the Reverend at the Burger King on Kingshighway and Delmar to see for myself. We were joined by three of his colleagues and set out on the walk down the Hodiamont tracks, armed with only matching yellow reflective vests as we started the sojourn into the night.

I didn't really know what to expect, though I recently lived in Dismas House—a halfway house just a couple of blocks away—when I first came home from prison. Still, it's one thing to pass through an area in a car and another to walk with the Reverend and his partners.

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"I wanted to feel like I was doing something more then just going and listening to a sermon and giving somebody some money," Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, a professor of communications at the city's Harris-Stowe State University, told me as we got on our way. "I just wanted to get out and walk around and meet people at night [because] that is when all the stuff as going on.I don't have to rely on the news to tell me what is going on in this neighborhood because I was here."

Anderson believes in getting his research in the field—not something many academics are inclined to do when the "field" is north St. Louis. We walked up Kingshighway, which is the main thoroughfare, and turned onto the Hodiamont tracks. Immediately after we walked past the barriers that blocks cars from the street, we were surrounded by a group of locals—older men, a couple of women, and a few younger guys. Reverend McKoy engaged them promptly.

"Hey, how you all doing?" he asked. "I'm looking for my friend Mario. Have you all seen him?"

A few of the gentlemen were friendly and shook hands with the Reverend and the others. A few even shook my hand, but I noticed a lot of the younger guys dispersed quickly. One older black man, who was clearly intoxicated, told the group, "Don't tell him nothing," referring to McKoy. He turned to the Reverend and said, "You can't come around here asking for people."

To his credit, Reverend McKoy just smiled.

"Mario is my friend. I haven't seen him. If you all see him, tell him I'm looking for him," he replied. We walked on down the track, the night becoming more complete as dilapidated houses towered over us ominously.

Ruth Garnett, an activist and writer on the African American experience, was with us on patrol. As the only woman in the group that night, she had her own reasons for walking the tracks. "We are hoping to engage the young people, and if they want to turn around what they are doing, we can give them hope. It's about providing them a sense of identity that doesn't culminate with self destruction," Garnett told me. "It's a mental health crisis—it's been this way for three decades or more, and the suicide rate and the despair and the drug cocktails that fuel this irrational behavior are basically coping mechanisms that are really deadly."

Still, I felt quite secure on the walk. The Reverend McKoy emanates a sense of confidence and warmth that seemed to infect those around us. We were accompanied by another reverend, Cornelius Brown, and together they went out of their way to engage the street walkers, addicts, drug dealers, alcoholics, gang bangers, and derelicts of the night. This isn't something I'd have been up for by myself, but in their presence, I felt pretty comfortable in the hoods of North City.

Of course, some don't receive the peaceful message too kindly. One group of three men we encountered were drinking beers and a whiff of pot smoke lingered in the air. The reverends engaged them. One was open to talk, one seemed nonchalant, but the third was a bit hostile, telling our group, "You need to move on... We're not trying to hear it."

Again the Reverend smiled and kept it moving. He wasn't there to argue or even to preach—just to encourage an end to the violence and help those looking for another way of life. We had a bunch of encounters, and the two reverends handled all the conversations with tremendous care and delicacy, even with those who were clearly out of their minds on drugs. But I was surprised how receptive a lot of the people were to their message.

We didn't witness anything too crazy that night, but Reverend Brown described some of the stickier situations he and McKoy had faced in the past.

"There was this one your man pacing back and forth, he was so geared up he wanted to kill someone," Reverend Brown said. "He kept raising up his shirt to show his gun, and Reverend McKoy grabbed him and said, 'Nah man. I don't want to lose you like that.' We continued to talk to him and convinced him to go home." It seems the denizens of the block just want to know that someone cares, and Reverend McKoy and his group offer that sense of community.

"I made up my mind this is what I need to do," McKoy explained. "Going out at night on a regular basis, just engaging and challenging people—I decided I need to get out in the streets and do this... Missouri has a real problem, not only when you talk about racial profiling and police brutality and militarization and all that stuff, but St. Louis has real problem when you talk about fratricide and social homicide."

This night's watch holds no illusions about the community of young gang-bangers and drug addicts they're trying to reach—or the enormity of the challenge.

"We know exactly who is doing the killing," McKoy told me. "A lot of these dudes are on prescription stuff—percocets... That's what a lot of the spontaneous crime is about. It's not necessarily something they sit down and plan. It's very spontaneous: They kill each other over that kind of stuff because they're tripping on those drugs.

"We have a major gang problem," he continues. "We have a lot of gang activity here, and you mix that with drugs, you combine that with very very few economic opportunities, failing public schools, the whole nine yards and it is a cocktail for disaster."

McKoy was a bit spooked the first night he went out on this patrol.

"Before I brought anybody out, I walked this whole track by myself to get a feel for it, to walk the whole area—Fountain Park, Wells Place, Lewis Place—all dangerous areas where people can't come outside because they are shooting so much," McKoy said. "The first night was very intense. There was like 15 to 20 addicts walking the track. It was like something out of the Night of the Living Dead to see them walking out of the mist. I was a little nervous."

As the murder rate in North City continues to draw headlines, one man with a small group of allies is out in the thick of it. McKoy has vowed to keep going out every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night at a time when many of the people out on the street are up to no good. The only question is whether the powers that be will match his urgency and deliver the resources St. Louis so desperately needs to break this cycle of violence.

Seth Ferranti is currently raising money for a comic series on the Supreme Team. Follow him on Twitter.

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An image from the Getaway games series, via PS4home.com

In the past I've lamented the death, or at least the falling out of fashion, of World War II games. Compared to the shooters of today, which bear only the slightest resemblance to the real world, when I play WW2 games, especially the early Medal of Honor titles, I get a real sense that I'm being educated, or at that the developers are at least trying to be educational.

Albeit to a lesser extent, I feel the same way about The Getaway, Team Soho's open-world gangster effort from late 2002. The writing is preposterous rubbish, the kind of Mockney hokum even Guy Ritchie would arraign, and it plays very badly, with enemy cars smashing endlessly into you during the driving sections and sluggish controls turning each shootout into a caracole.

But The Getaway, even if it is in a marginal or tangential sense, has an adherence to real-life that I wish existed in more mainstream video games. The devil's in the details. The fact that, in The Getaway, I can drive down Barbican tunnel, or walk past a Royal Mail delivery van, or shoot up a warehouse filled with pallets of Foster's lager, lends even the game's most ludicrous conceits some gravitas.

I admire the effort, basically. Even 13 years on, when The Getaway's digital recreation of W1 London looks more simplistic than ever, I can't help but be impressed when I round a corner and bump into a location or piece of set dressing that I'm familiar with from reality. Like Medal of Honor's historical re-telling, The Getaway's verisimilar backdrop gives a short, sharp connection to the game and its drama that I think is much harder to achieve – and feels inherently strained – when you're dealing with pure fantasy.

It's not a complete success. On the contrary, The Getaway was one of the first games, at least that I can recall, to take this kind of wholesale approach to photographic research, and try to render a 3D city as we would already recognise it. Post The Getaway, there was a lot to learn and finesse about this process – rather than a comprehensive report, this game might have been the start of something, a new discipline in regards to open-world design. So what happened?

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is what happened. Where The Getaway tried to take contemporary crime games, and by extension mainstream video gaming, into a real-world aesthetic, Vice City plundered for inspiration TV shows and movies. Miami Vice, Scarface and the music videos of Steve Barron were visual springboards for Vice City, and it formed a bricolage of other people's fantasies, a hyper unreality where you recognised everything not from real-life, but from media and entertainment.

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Step outside of Tony Montana's mansion in Vice City – wearing if you like the bank heist outfit from Heat, or the cop uniform from Cop Land – and you can drive the Ferrari that belonged to Crockett and Tubbs, or a taxi with "Kaufman" written on the side. Your friends are played by Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper, Lee Majors – you are voiced by Ray Liotta. Vice City is an obliteration room of cultural references, a tribute to mass-market dreams from the past and present.

And it's wacky. You can run over pedestrians in a golf cart, or don a hockey mask and go tearing around with a chainsaw. You can buzz around Vice City in a helicopter. You can shoot up a shopping mall. You can use a spotlight to project a giant pair of breasts against the side of a building. In the narrow, depressing, video game sense of the word, Vice City is fun. It's the progenitor for what we now understand as open-world games.

And it absolutely destroyed The Getaway. Despite launching late in October 2002, by NPD estimates Vice City became the best-selling game that year. It remained in the chart throughout 2003, outshining The Getaway even as it launched in two more territories, Japan and North America.

A trailer for American release of 'The Getaway'

Whatever The Getaway was trying to evince in regards to world design got lost amidst GTA's monumental success. In the short term, Vice City was the "better" game, bigger, cooler and more competently made, but nowadays it's The Getaway that feels like the real revolutionary. It took an approach to design that, to this day, belies what I'd expect from open-world games.

The central promise of video games is that they allow you to experience things you can't do in real-life, at least not from your armchair. And it seems that, in the echo of Grand Theft Auto's success, open-world designers have conflated that promise with exploration and fantasy – the more a sandbox game lets you do, and the less it ties you to the rules of the real-world, the closer, ostensibly, it adheres to principal gaming ideology.

But that idea is bunkum, because although I am unable to do the things I do in GTA, or Assassin's Creed, or Saints Row in real-life, I'm also unable to jump in a car and simply cruise around London. I don't have the money. I don't have the time. There are dozens of places – real places – that I wish I could visit and just see, but the myriad pressures of adult life prohibit expensive travel.

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And so, after repeatedly playing through the same sandbox paradigm – wackiness, "content", a location that's either entirely made up or merely based on reality – the idea of walking around, say, a comprehensively recreated Los Angeles sounds to me a very special and vivid experience, something which I can't readily do in real-life and that only video games can provide. I'm sure there are simulators for this kind of thing, dry technology showcases for virtual reality or haptic feedback, but those don't fulfil the other half of this wish: for games, specifically games, to aspire towards education, for them to teach me the physical and social geography not of a close approximation of a city, but a city itself.

The Getaway, quite often a bad game, and itself sadly bound to the idea that open worlds should be playgrounds for driving and shooting, is not a wholesale rebuttal to the kinds of sandbox games that exist today, but it could have been – should have been – the nexus point for a different strain of open-world design. Its defeat to Grand Theft Auto highlights how narrow the idea of a special experience is in video games, how made-up worlds are considered more vibrant than real ones, how fiction is considered more interesting than fact, how fantasy – childishly, tragically – is preferred to reality.

@mostsincerelyed

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The Lunada Bay Boys are not your stereotypical LA gang. For one thing, they're in their 40s and 50s. They're white. They come from old money. They're also surfers, and according to the residents of their posh community, they've been assaulting outsiders with the tacit approval of the police for decades, keeping tight control over one of the most coveted surf spots in Southern California.

The Bay Boys have been protecting their precious surf break since at least the 60s, by way of intimidation, threats, and even beatings. They've have slashed tires, graffitied cars, and thrown rocks at people who tried to visit the beach. In 1995, a schoolteacher who tried to surf the break got his pelvis broken by Bay Boys. In 1996, Bay Boy member Peter McCullom, who was 34 at the time and living on an inheritance, had to settle out of court for $15,000 after an altercation.

The ultra-rich claiming public beach property as their own is not a new thing in Southern California. In Malibu, the homeowners around Malibu's "Billionaire's Beach" illegally painted curbs red, erected giant walls in beach pathways, and put up fake tow signs, all to discourage outsiders. (After years of fighting, the community has finally opened up access to the public.) It's a more passive-aggressive approach than the one taken in Lunada Bay, but the rationale is the same: The moneyed locals believe they deserve private access to beachfront land that legally belongs to the public.

Yes, the "Bay Boys" aren't exactly the Crips or MS-13—and there's certainly something deeply silly about rich grown-ups pretending to be Anthony Kiedis in Point Break. But the violence they perpetuate is real. So why aren't they being treated like any of LA's other gangs?

The Lunada Bay surf break. Photo by Flickr usertiarescott

In many beach communities, local authorities tend to see localism-minded groups like the Bay Boys as an unfortunate but inevitable element of surf culture. In Lunada Bay's case, the gang of local "trust fund babies"—as they were called bySurfer Magazine's editor Steve Hawk—has the money to settle if things get too hairy. The gang's members are thoroughly entrenched in the affluent community, and their authority is rarely challenged.

The Palos Verdes Estates Police Department has long been criticized for failing to clamp down on the violent locals, although some officers have acknowledged that the Bay Boys are an organized, oppressive force in the area. In May 2015 an unnamed Palos Verdes police officer told reporters from the Guardian that the Lunada Bay Boys group is "literally is like a gang."

Being "literally like a gang" would make you think they are, in fact, literally a gang. But what to do about a gang that is literally is like a gang? If only there was some way to address the issue of people committing crimes who tend to congregate in a single area... Oh, wait! There is. It just isn't applied to gangs like the Bay Boys.

A group of protesters lined up at Lunada Bay in 1995. Photo courtesy of Geoff Hagins

In California, the primary course of action taken to combat gangs is issuing injunctions. These injunctions are sort of like the gang equivalent of a restraining order—they make it a crime for the gang members to congregate in public areas or even associate with one another. Injunctions are controversial, but they have been noted for being effective: A 2011 injunction issued against the Puente 13 and Bassett Grande gangs in the San Gabriel Valley, for example, was credited with a 32-percent drop in gang-related violence and homicides.

A 2010 report from the ACLU noted that there are over 150 gang injunctions currently in effect in California, but that zero of those apply to white gangs despite "documented evidence of their existence." The Lunada Bay Boys fit into that category.

In an interview on KPCC public radio last month, Palos Verdes Estates Police Chief Jeff Kepley explained that while his department has been aware for years about the Bay Boys problem, they have not made a concerted effort to address the issue as systemic, considering they've only received "four complaints in four years," and have not arrested a member for three years.

Still, Kepley admitted that he is aware that it is a "huge problem" for outsiders who unknowingly show up to surf a public beach only to be pelted with rocks and come back to their car to find it vandalized. He called the whole situation "embarrassing."

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Geoff Hagins, a local from nearby Torrance who's been surfing in the area since the early 60s, is all too familiar with the issues plaguing Lunada Bay: He was the person who was assaulted by Bay Boy Peter McCollum in the 90s.

"I first had an incident with those guys in '69, when I was a freshman in high school," Hagins told me. "I was friends with a guy from PV [Palos Verdes], and he took me surfing. I had no idea about localism. After we went surfing, they pelted us with rocks for half an hour."

Hagins said his experience with Lunada Bay came to a head in 1995, when members of the Bay Boys began hassling and threatening his 10-year-old nephew "just for wanting to catch some waves." He returned to the bay with a news crew in tow and was subsequently assaulted by Bay Boy McCollum, which resulted in the $15,000 settlement.

A newspaper clipping from the Daily Breeze, a newspaper in Torrance, California, circa 1995. Photo courtesy of Geoff Hagins

And Hagins believes the violence will only get worse, unless authorities step in. "They've hassled thousands of people over the years, slashing tires, scraping cars with keys, putting wax on windows, breaking off radio antennas," he said. "Throwing rocks at people. Threatening to kill people by throwing them off the cliffs."

"I think it's a bad omen for the future," Hagins added. "I think whether the Bay Boys throw someone off a cliff, or someone does it to them, there will be a tragedy that could have been avoided if the police had done their job earlier."

According to Kepley, there are two main problems with issuing an injunction against the Bay Boys. First, he claims the Bay Boys can't be identified as a singular group (although other reports claim there are only "six to ten" closely related individuals responsible for carrying out the enforcement of Lunada Bay localism). Second, although the Bay Boys throw rocks, yell threats, and assault individuals, Kepley said they're just not quite violent enough, since "there's not shooting and stabbings and things that you typically associate with street gangs."

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While many of the California gangs with injunctions are certainly very violent, not all of them have been accused of robbing and killing people, or even of committing violent felonies at all. This kind of violence isn't requisite for an injunction—the only thing a judge needs is evidence that the people named on the injunction are a "public nuisance."

In 2012, the eight members of the MTA (Metro Transit Assassins) in LA received a modified gang injunction, although they had not engaged in any violent activity. They weren't even a gang, but a group of graffiti artists. But after putting up a giant mural on the banks of the LA River protesting the city's Metro Transit Authority, which had made huge cuts to the regional bus system used predominantly by poor minority communities, while funneling money into a rail system for white-collar commuters, the activist taggers got the gang treatment, and were barred by the city from associating with each other.

In defining why injunctions exist, the LA City Attorney says that "criminal street gangs share one common trait: They lay claim to turf. The gangs take over neighborhoods... threatening outsiders who dare encroach on the turf, and, most importantly, threatening and intimidating the law-abiding residents of the area with their presence."

If using violence to keep the public from using a public space defines a gang, the Lunada Boys appear to be, by definition, a gang. The beach they guard is public property and anyone should be able to surf there. Especially since, as Hagins lamented, "the Bay Boys aren't even very good surfers."

Follow Jacob Harper on Twitter.

Trucks backed up along the M20 as part of Operation Stack

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

To pass the time, Stoian Georgel was watching the B-movie Operation Rogue on a laptop in the cab of his truck. Once he was done, the Romanian long-haul driver planned to clean the cab's living space again, browse the internet, and go for a short walk by the side of the M20 motorway—which was closed off to all non-freight traffic—to stretch his legs and chat with other marooned drivers.

Stoian was seven hours through what he estimated would be a 13-hour wait. Behind and in front of him, the same monotonous scene was repeated by thousands of other bored truck drivers, prevented from crossing into Europe because of what's happening across the Channel in Calais: ferry workers striking over 600 job losses, as well as blocking access to the port by setting fire to tires laid across the road; and migrants trying to cross into the UK by making their way onto the Channel Tunnel.

Over the last week, up to 2,000 people at a time have repeatedly rushed the port's fences, leaving one Sudanese man dead and a French police officer in the hospital. Ten other migrants have died attempting the journey since June, including a baby.

At its peak, the line—named "Operation Stack"—was 36 miles long and contained 7,000 trucks. All of the vehicles were being held on the motorway because there are only 550 parking spaces for HGVs in Kent, and delays to cross-Channel services mean these spots fill up fast.

To ensure the rest of the county's roads aren't blocked by trucks unable to get to France, a section of the M20 is closed to regular traffic, allowing the HGVs to stack up there instead. Though the M20 opened back up to normal traffic on Friday, a couple of days after I visited, Prime Minister David Cameron warned that the crisis would last all summer.

On the motorway last week, the drivers were bearing the delays—which, at their worst, were lasting up to 18 hours—the same way anyone stuck in traffic does: aimlessly. Among the bumper-to-bumper lines, which looked a bit like an attempt to create the world's biggest freight train, drivers paced, smoked, and talked.

"[The migrants] are a big problem in France. They get inside the trailers and the police do nothing about it. They are already in the EU, but for some reason they want to get here. Maybe the UK government needs to do something," said 36-year-old Polish driver Robert. "The ferry workers think they can make a change by striking. But setting fire to the roads achieves nothing, and their actions are very bad for all the people. As for me, I am tired and bored."

Stoian Georgel

Forty-year-old Stoian was more philosophical about the situation. Shrugging his shoulders, he said: "I'm too small to attack anybody. They're doing what they feel like they need to do, I guess. But my routine is messed around. I am used to driving, resting, and eating in an order. In this queue [line], I have to move when they tell me to move, and I'm thrown out."

Another Romanian driver, who did not want to be named, said that he was paid per kilometer and that waiting in line for so long was eating into his wages. Adding to the stress of those caught up in the jam were porta-potties that looked like they'd endured two weeks at Glastonbury.

'Disco Boy' dancing around in an M20 tunnel

Kent County Council and charities distributed thousands of water bottles and meals, though many long-haul lorry cabs are self-sufficient. The Sun was also handing out pizzas, but the most any driver could really hope for was a motorway services close enough to walk to. Canterbury-local Lee Marshall, a.k.a. "Disco Boy," did attempt to cheer up the stranded drivers last week, though not with hot food. Dressed in lycra shorts, sunglasses, and a hat, Marshall held a 40-minute mobile disco in an M20 tunnel, fist-pumping to "The Roof Is On Fire" in the way of oncoming traffic.

The mood of Kent's residents, facing a summer of congestion, also needs improving. Roads have been gridlocked, and there have been disruptions to public transport and refuse collection. Local businesses have also suffered because people were fearful of getting caught up in traffic; an estimated £1.5 million [$2.3 million] per day is wiped off Kent's economy when Operation Stack is in full swing.

The port of Dover

"The delays are getting more and more frequent," said 27-year-old dockworker George McMullan. "The lorries are starting to take short cuts through the town now. The traffic is literally imprisoning Dover. You can't go anywhere. I don't blame the migrants. If I came from a place that had nothing and there was the chance to come here and prosper, I'd do the same thing."

George also didn't blame the strikers, saying he "couldn't knock them for it—they're getting their point across, aren't they?"

He did, however, blame the authorities. "I don't think the government are making much of an effort to solve the problem in Calais," he said. "They need to do more to give the French a hand. They can't just throw money at the situation."

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In response to the delays, which have occurred on 27 of the past 40 days, the UK government has pledged £7 million [$10.9 million] for higher fences and more sniffer dogs at Calais. There are also plans to cut a £37-a-week living [$58] allowance for family members of failed asylum seekers still in the UK, and to allow fast track evictions of "illegal immigrants" from British properties.

There's debate as to whether these kick-em-out and keep-em-out policies will actually work. For many, the journey to reach Calais is incredibly dangerous and expensive—so why give up when you've already risked so much? Away from Westminster, there are vocal activists shouting about both sides of the argument in public. In Folkestone on Saturday, a solidarity demonstration for migrants was met by a counter-protest from right-wing groups Britain First and the EDL.

This month, Home Secretary Theresa May announced that a secure zone will be set up in Calais to prevent migrants from climbing onto lorries bound for the UK, after 8,000 attempts were made in three weeks. She also pledged to work more closely with French authorities in "returning people to West Africa," failing to mention that many of the Calais migrants are asylum seekers from war-torn countries, such as Syria and Iraq, where repatriation isn't possible.

David Cameron said he would "work hand in glove" with the French authorities to deter and prevent what he referred to as a "swarm" of migrants from trying to cross the Channel. Understandably, the comments drew criticism from the bishop of Dover, Rev Trevor Willmott, who said that when "we forget our humanity then we end up in these standoff positions."

The Swedish justice and migration minister, Morgan Johansson, reacted by declaring that if Britain took its fair share of asylum seekers the problems in Calais would be lessened—a call echoed by the European Commission.

Sweden allows anyone from Syria into the country. Last year it accepted 30,000 claims in total, compared to Britain's 10,000. According to the UNHCR, last year the UK received just 31,000 asylum claims, whereas Germany had 179,000. This year, German officials expect that number to more than double.

But none of this European altruism seems to have made much of a mark over here. To reiterate the government's anti-asylum seeker stance, Theresa May wrote a joint article for the Sunday Telegraph with her French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve over the weekend, announcing that "our streets are not paved with gold."

The British government is determined to make it as difficult as possible for asylum seekers and other migrants to enter the country, and is not prepared to discuss the possibility of a humanitarian imperative. Until that changes, it seems likely that massive interruptions to the running of Kent's transport infrastructure will remain a regular feature, as people willing to risk their lives to reach Britain continue their struggle for a way in.

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