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Comedian Adrienne Truscott Talks About Nudity and Moving on from the Rape Joke

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Adrienne Truscott in her debut show 'Asking For It: A One Lady Rape About Comedy'

Stand-up comedy is, by its very nature, an exposing thing. Getting up in front of a room full of (most likely pissed) strangers and trying to make them laugh with the jokes that you made up in your head can really show one's true character. But few comedians know the meaning of "exposing" as well as Adrienne Truscott, who really, literally, laid herself bare with her debut stand-up effort, Asking For It: A One Lady Rape About Comedy (or, as Truscott calls it "the rape show") back in 2013.

As debuts go, it was one you could consider a certified success—the comedian and performance artist (Truscott is one half of "neo vaudeville" act the Wau Wau Sisters) took home a Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award for it, which led onto a sellout global tour. For those that didn't get a chance to see it—and you'd remember it if you had—then you've probably already a got a fair idea of the subject matter from the title. But this wasn't a case of one comedian cracking hackneyed jokes about sexual abuse, nor was it a woman making light of her own tale of rape. Wearing a blonde wig and denim jacket—and nothing else until you get to the shoes—Truscott confronted the rape joke genre, turning it on its head and ripping it apart until there was nothing left that was worth saying by anyone else.

But that was two years ago. Now she's back—slightly less naked, but not entirely clothed—for her second show in Edinburgh. VICE caught up with her in between sets to talk about nudity and how you make a comeback when you're the woman best known for performing without your pants on.

VICE: The title One Trick Pony hints at what the show might be about. Would you describe it as the "difficult second album"?
Adrienne Truscott: I would describe it as the second album in that I came out with a very bold show and this is the second show. And this one feels a lot bumpier. A few more fences to jump, if I use the vernacular of the show. I think that's partly because my first show was about a topic and not about me. It was about something bigger and I had a real bee in my bonnet and I was super clear on what I wanted to say—I wanted to make a provocative show that provoked in the right way. With this one I'm sort of calling myself out, as I don't know how I do a second show. That's what I'm sort of investigating on stage. And I'm having highs and lows, some of which were designed to be in the show and some where I'm like, "What the fuck is this?"

With Asking For It, you had a very clear message. Did the idea find you? Or did you search for the idea?
I had been working on the show in the back of my head for a year or so, not even knowing I was making it in a way. I was just going, "Could I...?" I didn't even do stand-up, but I was intrigued to see if I could you use this thing that I love—comedy—to talk about this thing that I don't love—rape. It's not exactly an immediate go-to for a comedy. Then came this onslaught of conversation about rape jokes and comedy which hit it's obvious zenith with the Daniel Tosh situation and once that happened, then it really hit me. I was still writing material but something about that made me go "Fuck it, I think I make it right now." It may be the only time in my life that I've known what I'm doing really, really clearly. I had a gut instinct that I was going about it in a way that was worthwhile.

The last show raised biographical questions, with people asking if it was about your experiences. Are you anticipating a similar reaction to this show because it's more about you?
It's not so much that this show is autobiographical, but it doesn't feel like it's about a topic per se. The thing with Asking For It was that really it was just an hour of observational comedy, narrowed down to one very specific topic for a specific reason, with a bit of absurdism thrown in. But I feel like sometimes women's material is treated as only subjective and personal. While it was understood as stand-up, it was also understood as a performance of stand-up and I was labeled with the dreaded term "feminist performance artist." I definitely am that, but it's also funny to me because I was like "Wait, I just got up and told jokes for an hour. I thought that makes you a stand-up." The show has all the structures of stand-up and I was struck by the fact that because I was a woman and because it was political and talking about bodies and because I used a bit of multimedia and nudity it was much harder to see it as stand-up.


Related: Broadly meets French author Virginie Despentes to talk feminism and writing about rape


Did you think the "performance art" label is a result of you deciding to the show naked from the waist down?
I do. In our culture, we're taught to look at a woman's body before her brain and so the minute you disrobe that comes into the foreground. I was aware of that and because of the topic I felt like it was really worthwhile way to play it that way. I wanted the audience to deal with the woman's physical body while I was saying what I was saying. In a much more generic way, if a woman takes off her clothes I think it becomes about her body or feminist, political art. Whereas if a man gets their jocks off for a laugh they're not called performance artists.

Yes. It's funny if a man exposes himself, but if a woman does it, people worry for her.
Right, people think "what's happened to her, she's vulnerable." That's why it was important for me for the show to be lighthearted, not just to make the difficult material palatable, but so you couldn't do that with my pussy. I was like, "This pussy's going to be funny, you just watch."

Why do you think nakedness is still so powerful for a woman? Not just in comedy, but in political protest too?
I think that in a nutshell most women are smart enough to know that getting naked grabs media attention. And that in spite of huge and exciting advances in roles women are playing around the world—in art and in politics and everything—there's still a rampant problem with sexism and sexual violence against women's bodies. Minute in and minute out.

What's so confronting to people, and empowering for the women doing it, is that the world is still shocked by a woman inhabiting the agency of her own body and saying "No, no no—you can't see my body like the Victoria's Secret ad, you can't see it murdered on the cop show, you can't see it raped in the provocative theater show: You can see it like this, on my terms." Whether that's me using it in my art, or a woman walking down the street with her breasts out. I get the call that it's gimmicky—which is something I discuss in my show this year. Is having your vagina out gimmicky? My answer is yes. But you can make use of that gimmick.

Do you get a gendered reaction to your material? Do men and women act in surprising ways?
I've really found the reaction has been so positive and intelligent and thoughtful. If you treat the audience with intelligence they will respond in kind by really paying attention. But I haven't found that the breakdown has been particularly gendered. I certainly have a lot of women come up to me and say "That was a rad show, I'm so glad you did it," but I get that from men, too. I also love it when someone says that show was hilarious—that means just as much to me. When it comes from a woman I'm just really glad that we shared that sense of humor about experiences in the world. And when it comes from a guy and they say, "That's funny, I get it," I'm also glad they found it funny and that they could share my experience even if it's not theirs. I'm not saying I don't have wankers, not literally (well, probably) in the crowd who act like real dickheads. I do. And likewise I've had a woman or two who have said, "I don't like the way you did that" and challenged my right to do it. And those are pretty interesting, too.

Adrienne Truscott performs One Trick Pony at Edinburgh's Gilded Balloon until August 17.

Follow Olivia Marks on Twitter.


Internet of Islands

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Internet of Islands

The VICE Guide to Right Now: There Might Actually Be a 'Deadwood' Movie in the Works, Maybe

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On Wednesday night, in response to a Tweet from actor Garret Dillahunt, HBO announced that there had been "very preliminary conversations" about making a movie out of a slow-paced western show that had been unceremoniously cancelled nearly a decade ago. This made a lot of people on the internet very, very excited.

To understand why those people were so excited, you have to understand that Deadwood was no ordinary slow-paced western. It was a profane, complex—sometimes almost Shakespearean—dirt-encrusted, incredibly brutal beast of a show, an ensemble drama about a small South Dakota town in the bloody grips of a gold rush during the 1870s. In the early episodes the drama centered around the conflict between Timothy Olyphant's Seth Bullock, a painfully upright sheriff, and Ian McShane's Al Swearengen, a gleefully profane, amoral, scheming brothel proprietor. The plot expanded to include more and more characters over the course of the show's three seasons, but you can summarize it by saying it was a show about desperate people with horrible flaws trying to build something on rocky soil and sort of succeeding, even if there was a lot of blood and death and lies involved in that process.

In the third season, which first aired in 2006, more characters arrived in town, more subplots were set in motion, and a lot of changes seemed to be in the works—but nothing was ever resolved, because HBO cancelled the series, and some talked-about TV movies to give fans some sense of resolution never materialized. Since then, more and more people have been discovering it through DVDs and streaming services, then going, "This is great! Why isn't there more of this?" while series creator David Milch went on to make the even shorter-lived (and less-loved) series John from Cincinnati and Luck.

Obviously the HBO announcement doesn't mean we'll ever actually see a new Deadwood thing come into being, but it can at least serve as an excuse to look back through the many, many fan-made compilations of Deadwood characters cursing:

Meet the Girls Behind São Paulo's Female-Only Tattoo Shop

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Clockwise from bottom left: Jéssica Coqueiro, Julia Bicudo, Ingryd Guimarães, Juliana Chislu, Samantha Sam (center). All photos by Felipe Larozza

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

Located on Rua Augusta, São Paulo's legendary party street, Sampa Tattoo is an all-girl tattoo parlor run by a woman named Samantha Sam. The idea behind the shop was to create a solid workplace for promising female artists because, according to Samantha, there's "a lot of struggling girls in the business."

Sampa Tattoo has barely been open a month but already has customers flooding in. So much so that Samantha is hatching plans to expand and employ even more ladies. We met up with the shop's five artists for a quick chat about how they got started, jealousy from male peers, and their love of permanently marking people's bodies.

Juliana Chislu, 22

"I've always liked tattoos. I started tattooing my classmates with Indian ink when I was 13. One day, I just thought, Fuck, this is what I want to do with my life. Right before I turned 18, I made an appointment to get my first real one. My dad was angry because he hated tattoos and told me, 'Juliana, this is the first and last one you'll get.' Which is funny because I'm actually tattooing his arm at the moment. My grandparents basically disowned me after I got my face and hands done.

One time, I went to a shop to show them my portfolio. The guy laughed, saying it wasn't my work and that chicks don't have the balls to do tattoos. I told him to hop onto the bed and I'd tattoo him right there. He kicked me out."

Julia Bicudo, 26

"It all started when my husband and I bought a machine to tattoo each other at home. Back then, I thought it'd be really difficult. I thought tattooing was something that only super-humans could do, something out of this world.

Anyway, I liked it so much that I decided it was something I wanted to take seriously. I fell in love with Sampa as soon as I heard about it. What's cooler than tattooing with a bunch of awesome chicks?"

Ingryd Guimarães, 18

"My first tattoo was this hideous rose that I had done when I was 15 years old. Thankfully, I found a guy who could cover it up. I accidentally dropped my sketchbook in front of him while paying. He said, 'Wow, you can draw' and encouraged me to start tattooing till I got really into it.

I remember not being able to sleep after doing my first one. I could feel that machine buzzing around in my head. I was trying to study psychology at the time. I'd still like to try that one day, even though I can't imagine myself ever being a psychologist. After doing my first tattoo, I quit my office job, dropped out of college, and went for it."

Samantha Sam, 23

"I moved to Sorocaba to learn how to tattoo. I spent six months as an apprentice there, doing everything in the shop: the drawing, the cleaning, the tidying. I was all by myself and living in a city where I didn't know anyone. I had all the odds against me, but I'm stubborn and really love what I do.

One time, a male colleague took my drawings and threw them out. I guess it was some sort of sabotage. I think some male tattoo artists kind of feel like, 'Man, how can some new chick be doing the same thing as me?' They feel as if we're getting in their way."

Jéssica Coqueiro, 23

"I started tattooing after I dropped out of Plastic Arts college. I took the last of my savings and bought a starter kit. I'd go to people's homes or have them come over to mine. Tattooing was a way for me to be independent and to live off my art.

I love doing lines and black work. I get a lot of my inspiration from books about biology, anatomy, and technical drawing. Working at this shop was the first time I ever really felt like I was part of a sorority. We talk a lot about how women can empower themselves at work. We all get along really well and try to appreciate each other's strengths."

Scroll down for more pictures.

The Emerging Fetish of Laying Alien Eggs Inside Yourself

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All images via Primal Hardwere

Recently, while on the internet looking at weird sex things, I came upon the gushing testimony of a young woman who had just discovered Primal Hardwere's patented Ovipositor; one of the most unusual and confronting sex toys I've ever heard of. The Ovipositor is basically a big dildo that lays goopy eggs molded from gelatin in the body cavity of your choice. Fans of the Ovipositor say that the sensation of mushy extraterrestrial ovum slopping back out of them is a real treat.

The owner of Primal Hardwere is a man who insisted I refer to him only as LoneWolf. A Native American of indeterminate age, he apparently worked as a builder, fast food dude, fashion model, church organist, butcher, and pursued veterinary medicine at the University of New Hampshire before deciding: I want to make enormous egg-laying alien dicks.

VICE: Hey, Lone Wolf. Most readers probably aren't familiar with how ovipositors function. How do you explain them to people?
Lone Wolf: The idea is to replicate the act of being impregnated with eggs. Usually from an alien or insect. If you've seen the Aliens movies, you'll get the picture. Many people find this sort of thing very arousing. The toys are simply phallic-shaped hollow tubes that can be used to insert gelatin eggs into oneself. There is a funnel-shaped hole in the bottom to receive the eggs, which are inserted one by one, forcing them up the tube and out the top.

The Ovipositor replicates the feeling of being impregnated with eggs.

How did you get involved in all this stuff?
I had tried everything else: I had owned a restaurant and managed many other businesses and had many successes. However, in all of my jobs I would work my way up to the top only to find a wall waiting for me there. I'm ambitious, and though I don't consider myself greedy, I always wanted to push myself for more independence and freedom to do the things I wanted to do.

And freedom is helping people insert eggs into themselves for sexual gratification?
Let's face it, there are three things that will always sell: Food, death, and sex. I tried food service and decided after managing three restaurants and owning one that it was the same thing, day in and day out, and it didn't look like that was going to change much. Death didn't really interest me. I wanted something more fun. Something that breaks the monotony of people's days and makes them spit out their coffee when you tell them what you do.

I think you've comfortably managed that.
I wanted to push the boundaries of people's comfort levels, make them question their own erections and wet panties, and let them know their fantasies do not have to go unrealized.

The Ovipositor in action

What's the demand for this thing like?
Before Primal Hardwere, I was creating one-off custom commissions for people who couldn't find what they were looking for elsewhere. Ovipositors were requested several times, and when I posted YouTube videos demonstrating them, the response was impressive. Tons of people wanted them—and while this is not a fetish of my own, I saw potential for a unique product line.

Is there any danger in putting gelatin eggs up in your butt or vagina?
Everything in moderation. We are not doctors, and we're not about to comment on what is safe or unsafe to do to one's body as it varies from person to person. I can say that I have used them many times without hurting myself, but frankly it is up to the person using it to know their own limits. For instance, if you are allergic to gelatin. If made properly, the eggs are firm, but rubbery, similar to the consistency of gummy bears. They dissolve with body heat rather quickly.

Can you describe a typical customer?
Well, the real answer here is simply "people." I truly can't say that it's strictly one group or mindset or any other kind of convenient stereotype that like these sorts of things. People get turned on by many things beyond what our respective societies would deem "normal." We are niche in the sense that we're catering to some of the lesser catered-to fetishes. We send our products all over the world to many different races, creeds, and cultures.

I consider myself pretty open minded, but I'm honestly still struggling to see the appeal in this. Can you try one last sales pitch?
There are different perspectives of everything, and Ovipositors are no exception. Many like to envision an alien creature that wants its eggs inside you. It can be a little intimidating or off-putting to those who do not fantasize about being the willing or unwilling host of alien beings inside them. It blurs the line of our own humanity to find sexual pleasure with something that is so far from human, and for some, just talking about it gets them wet.

Follow Toby on Twitter.

'Only Unity:' The Haunting Photos of Serbia in the Aftermath of Yugoslavia

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An amusement park in the center of Pristina, Kosovo. June 2008.

Matt Lutton is an award-winning Seattle based photographer and member of the Boreal Collective. Matt will be speaking this Sunday August 16 in Toronto as part of the annual Boreal Bash.

This photo series has emerged from six years of living and working in the Balkans; it's my personal response to the confounding atmosphere of the region. I moved to Belgrade in February 2009, and was based there until this year, and this project shows one perspective of what I saw and learned there.

I photographed details of society that both reflect and undermine the popular Serbian creation myths. Many of these issues are rooted in the complicated phrase "Only Unity Saves the Serbs" which was popular in the narrative of mass political manipulation during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the wars that took place in its vacuum. Serbia is still recovering from the post-traumatic stress of those years, leading to a national confusion about their identity and a productive path forward.

I focused on diverse subjects within the Serbian landscape, which are far removed from any reality espoused by politicians. Young men and women are being raised in a divided, uncertain atmosphere and I wanted to capture that essence so that we can further consider the implications of a Balkan region that will be led by this generation. It is impossible to analyze or understand any event in this region without first considering its historical roots. I am interested in exploring and understanding the parts of today's Balkan society that the next generation will read about in their history textbooks. What is happening now in the streets and in political negotiations will have profound impact on regional stability in the future.

There are many elements that contribute to a hostile and sometimes desperate atmosphere in Serbia today. But there are also moments that show healing and a glimpse at a different future than many have seen for themselves in the last decade. The growing pains of this developing democracy must continue to be carefully documented and explored, as the battles of the 1990s have yet to be finally played out. I've experienced alarming apathy and lack of compassion from many youth across the Balkans, and I hope to confront them directly with a different picture of the countries and history they will inherit.

See more of Matt's photography on his website or follow him on Instagram.

We Spoke to the Toronto Politician Who Wants to Ban Drake's OVO Fest Afterparty

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We Spoke to the Toronto Politician Who Wants to Ban Drake's OVO Fest Afterparty

Ann Coulter Is a Human Being

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Ann Coulter Is a Human Being

VICE Vs Video Games: VICE Goes to Gamescom 2015, Part Three: The Virtual Reality Games

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A screenshot from 'EVE Valkyrie'

Check out more of our Gamescom 2015 coverage:

The Big Games

The Indie Games

Prior to Gamescom, I was firmly in the camp that felt virtual reality remained more of a very expensive gaming gimmick than a platform destined for future industry dominance. Everything I'd played had been brief, exciting, but ultimately quite shallow and short-form: nothing that you'd want right up against your face for longer than the forthcoming features reel at your local multiplex. Capcom's Kitchen showed me that VR horror can be properly pants-shitting of intensity, but I'm not sure how that genre would work over sessions lasting a few hours. Tammeka's Radial-G: Racing Revolved, meanwhile, is a terrific Wipeout-like racer that locks you into its gravity-disrupting competition for a few laps, but it's unlikely you'd be able to stand after a couple of circuits played back to back, due to its brain-sloshing speed.

And after Gamescom, I feel the same way—at least, for the time being, as the conference made it clear to me that there are developers out there attempting to do more with VR than produce experiences that pin you against a wall, be that a physical one in the room you can no longer see or a strictly digital one that's stopping your avatar's head from being left behind that weirdly stiff body beneath you. One such company is nDreams, a small British studio whose forthcoming The Assembly promises several hours of free-roaming, explorative gameplay. It casts you as two separate characters, both of whom find themselves in a secret underground bunker somewhere in the American wilds, where science had a free reign to go wild and crazy far away from the prying, critical, censoring eyes of any government.

A screenshot from 'The Assembly'

My demo begins on a gurney, as the female character of the two, Madeline Stone, something of a famous doctor in this fiction, is wheeled into the facility in question, the headquarters of the shady organization of experimental shenanigans that gives the game its title. She's meant to be sedated. She's not, which means we can look around us and hear everything our kidnappers are saying, which provides backstory on who we are and also points to some seriously bad shit going on in the outside world: birds are dropping out of the sky, dead, for one thing. It's all very X-Files-y, and that's just fine with me.

It's not the shiniest VR game visually, not in this preview build anyway, but The Assembly—once you're off the on-rails opening—permits great freedom of movement via a control scheme that lets you look at where you want to be and flick a stick back and forth to go there. It takes a second to get used to, but that's all—soon enough you're poking your face into all kinds of secretive nooks and classified crannies, tapping X to investigate what's in front of you. And what you're seeing won't appear the same way for the other playable character, veteran Assembly "employee" Cal Pearson. nDreams is aiming to have the game finished in time for it to launch beside Sony's Project Morpheus, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Steam VR—find out more on its official website.

New on Motherboard: This Man Has Been Trying to Live His Life as a Goat

A screenshot from 'Back to Dinosaur Island 2'

Much shorter, and not really much of a game at all, more a holding-stuff-simulator, is Crytek's impressive tech demo Back to Dinosaur Island 2. I get my hands on it, and face in it, first thing after rushing into the Koelnmesse, and given that its main challenge is to scale a sheer cliff face—tilt the headset down, looking beneath your feet, and there's just the most acrophobia-rushing abyss imaginable—while winged beasts (a kind of large pterosaur, perhaps, looking at the crests, something from the azhdarchidae family) do their best to prevent you from getting too near their nests, it proves quite the knee-trembler.

All I need to do is use the pad's triggers to activate my hands' grip—left for left, right for right, with the direction of my gaze controlling where I want to place a hand once I release it. Powered pulleys carry me up the cliff, so long as I don't let go and meet my maker somewhere down there. I'm told to look behind me as I near its summit, and the view is, frankly, stunning: this demo, which serves as an impression of what Crytek will produce with their forthcoming CryEngine-powered VR game proper, Robinson: The Journey. As I haul myself up and get some dirt underneath me, gigantic sauropods bend their necks to bid me welcome. In the distance I see some kind of life-support unit, and my HUD locks onto a source of water—this is either the prehistoric Earth being visited by time travelers, or a planet much like our own, perhaps a parallel world, as there's plenty of evidence of man leaving a mark—I spin around and there's a crashed spaceship across the gorge. Also: someone must have put all of these lines into this rock, right? I don't suppose these squawking flapping things are handy with a hammer.

Article continues after the video below


Related: Watch VICE's new film on Thailand's meth epidemic and vomit rehab


I stagger away from the encounter impressed, but wary, as I'm unsure how this kind of thing will work as a full game. There's no doubt that Crytek knows how to make amazing VR worlds, full of life that you can (almost literally) reach out and touch, but if Robinson—which doesn't have a release date, yet—features many sections like the Dinosaur Island ascent, delivered in succession, people are going to lose their breakfasts. One VR game on show, though, totally understands the value in a short-play, maximum-explosions-for-minimum-exposure experience. Gunjack is a petite but perfectly formed arcade shooter set within CCP's EVE universe, designed for the Samsung Gear VR. It places you in a turret on the side of a mining rig, and you have to repel enemies that come small, in Space Harrier-like waves, and massive, filling the screen and firing bloody great laser beams at your comfy little cockpit.

Gunjack's great fun, and will release alongside the official commercial launch of the Gear VR (hopefully later in 2015), but it's really just a teaser for EVE's bigger VR game, the spaceships-everywhere dogfighting thriller of Valkyrie. Now, I know nothing about EVE Online, and have zero interest in learning about its vast lore, but I know what I like when I'm playing it, and Valkyrie is brilliant. The chap who slips the headset on me mentions that the shoulder buttons are for "advanced flying"—they'll roll my ship, barrel style. So naturally, the first thing I do when the enemies emerge is turn myself upside down and gun straight for the nearest thing to blow up.

A screenshot from 'Gunjack'

And there's a lot of stuff to blow up—the downside being that it's moving mighty fast, and can shoot you back. It's spectacular, just the most fantastically "real" feeling space combat I've ever experienced, and I immediately want another turn when I'm finally blasted to pieces by the bad guys. Unfortunately, Gamescom's a pretty heaving place, and as soon as I'm done there's someone else stepping across my shadow to have a go.

There's a lot more VR on show at Gamescom 2015, with Oculus occupying a large booth on the public-accessible show floor. Secret Shop VR, based on Valve's Dota 2, was demoing on the HTC Vive, while Oculus hosted both an impressive-looking, first-person ice hockey simulator and Edge of Nowhere, which placed its player in an icy environment full of creepy, tentacled threats. But my four hands-on bookings are enough to get a feel for where developers are taking the possibilities presented by virtual reality. The emphasis remains on showy but slight experiences, and I'm not sure that VR is destined for home popularity—I can imagine it being great in bars and arcades, though. But there's some shifting in the tide, signs that, maybe, fuller experiences of complete immersion are almost upon us. And when they are, do not begin playing while the oven's on. "I was obliterating aliens," is not the kind of excuse you want to be giving a fire crew after your kitchen's been gutted.

Check out more of our Gamescom 2015 coverage:
The Big Games
The Indie Games

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Big Bird and Elmo Are Moving to HBO

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Photo via

Read: I Got Drunk at the Sesame Street Gala and Met Cookie Monster

After spending 45 years as the star of kids' programming on PBS, Big Bird is flying over to a new home on TV this fall, the New York Times reports. Well, maybe not flying—more like awkwardly flapping his wings up and down while he speedwalks into the offices of HBO and walks out with a bunch of money.

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit group that makes Sesame Street, just signed a deal that'll bring the next five seasons of their show to HBO and enable them to produce 35 episodes a year instead of the usual 18.

If you find it sort of odd that the beloved educational children's show is moving from public television to a paid premium channel, you may be cheered by news that nine months after Sesame Street episodes air on HBO and its streaming outlets they'll be available on PBS free of charge.

The deal apparently made financial sense for the show: As Sesame Street generated less and less funding from DVD sales and other forms of licensing—which is how it makes most of its money—it had been forced to cut back on the number of episodes it made for PBS. Now, according to Sesame Workshop head Jeffrey Dunn, the organization will be freed up financially not only to make more Sesame Street, but also to work on new series and spinoffs.

"The partnership is really a great thing for kids," Dunn told the Times. "We're getting revenues we otherwise would not have gotten, and with this we can do even more content for kids."

It's unclear how much money is changing hands in the deal, but we can assume HBO is probably dishing out enough cash to give Count von Count a heart attack. Oscar the Grouch may finally be able to afford to trade in his old, metal trash can for one of those fancy plastic guys.

The Real Reason Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President

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Watching the 2016 race is like we're watching an outlandishly madcap absurdist film mocking the presidential process, something akin to Bulworth 2: Making America Great Again . It just doesn't seem real? Trump is a candidate more boorish, more buffoonish, more rude, vapid, and self-righteous than any who has ever sat atop the polls. As the Washington Post's Jon Capehart tweeted recently, "The 2012 Republican presidential field was derided as a clown car. The 2016 car is being driven by the clown."

But in an political era so concerned with rising inequality, perhaps Trump is what we deserve: a billionaire at the center of the presidential contest, spewing a wealthy man's privilege all over the place. He's like Thomas Piketty's nightmare, the embodiment of what happens when so much wealth is concentrated in one person for so long that he no longer has any need for decency, so his heart shrivels up like the Grinch's and all of the empty space in his body is filled with ego.

More on Donald Trump:
Getting Trumped: How Donald Trump Explains America
Donald Trump's Long, Strange Relationship with MMA
The Noisey Editorial Board Is Proud to Endorse Donald Trump for President
Wait, What Would Happen If Donald Trump Actually Became President

Trump's appearance under the presidential microscope reveals him to be what New Yorkers have long known him to be: arrogant, obnoxious, full of himself, and lacking restraint or an adult's sense of avoiding needlessly hurting others. He's careened from denigrating Mexican immigrants to denigrating Senator John McCain's military service to denigrating Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle, using his words to pee all over the race, like an alpha animal establishing its dominance.

Yet despite having the real freedom to say whatever he pleases, Trump hasn't got a serious thought in his head. It doesn't seem possible that he could be leading the Republican field. But it is real. Donald Trump is beating these guys. Despite uttering an election season's worth of disqualifying comments, Teflon Don remains high atop the polls, apparently immune to himself. An online NBC News/Survey Monkey poll conducted after the GOP debate found Trump at 23 percent, far ahead of his next closest competitor, Texas Senator Ted Cruz at 13 percent. And 54 percent of those polled said they'd vote for Trump as an independent.

Now I don't know what exactly Trump supporters are rallying behind. Perhaps it's some combination of persona, bluster, wealth, plus a lack of filter, a rejection of government, a rejection of traditional politicking, and the supposedly angry id of the far right. But it's certainly not his positions on the issues—Trump has no serious policy positions. The man seems allergic to specifics. Does he really want to build a literal wall between the US and Mexico? Is that a serious idea? On the question of how to deal with ISIS, he's said when he's president, "They're gonna be in so much trouble." Okay. How? Why? When? What?!?

But even as some in the pundit class begin wondering if maybe we should stop writing Trump's political obituary, those who prefer a dose of reality with their politics should feel free to continue to not take Trump seriously. We should absolutely continue writing Trump's political obit because the man continues to have no chance to win. As Nate Silver pointed out last week, Trump's high polling numbers are fueled in large part by his name recognition and media coverage: there's a near perfect correlation between the amount of media coverage a candidate gets and how they rank in the polls.

Silver also reminds us that national polling of a massive field of candidates is not the strongest indicator of how the race will turn out. After several candidates drop out, Trump's lead will likely shrink—his unfavorability rating is about 60 percent, far higher than anyone else in the race.

A Trump presidency would almost certainly be catastrophic for America. But there's still something a bit sad about the fact that a candidate who is so popular could have no actual shot to get his party's nomination. Because the real reason why Trump won't win is because the American people don't really choose their presidential nominees, any more than the audience in a figure skating contest chooses who wins.

So who actually decides? This is broken down in a fascinating 2008 book called The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, written by four political science professors, led by Marty Cohen of James Madison University and David Karol of the University of Maryland. The book debunks the notion that the presidential nomination process is some Hollywood romance, where a Richard Gere-style candidate magically seduces his party's voters, who are the Julia Roberts' of this scenario. In reality, it is the Party Elites who choose the presidential nominee, shaping the menu in a way that leads the rank-and-file to vote for their selection. You don't think that Washington elites and the cream of the donor classes reached their lofty status only to leave it to the masses to make the most important decision a party can make—choosing their presidential nominee?

According to The Party Decides, the clearest way that elites influence and effectively control nominations is through endorsements which the authors argue are probably the most significant factor in determining who will win presidential primaries. The authors examined which candidates were endorsed by sitting governors in presidential nominating contests between 1976 and 2004, and found that in all but one race, the man who got the highest percentage of gubernatorial endorsements before the Iowa caucuses won the nomination.

"In the past quarter century," the authors write, "the Democratic and Republican parties have always influenced and often controlled the choice of their presidential nominees." Later, they liken this environment to Olympic figure skating:

"The skaters are at the center of everyone's attention as they glide and leap and occasionally crash across the ice. To judge by the television accounts... the competition is dominated by the skaters. Yet the skaters do not determine the number and kinds of jumps and spins they must perform. Nor do they determine the standards of performance. Nor, above all, do they choose the judges, who are selected by the larger figure skating community to implement the community's rules of competition and standards of judgment. Skaters win not by pleasing themselves or their coaches or even the crowd in the arena, but by pleasing the judges and the insider community they represent."

Americans are told that their country is a democracy—in reality, though, what the United States have is, at best, a weak democracy, in which the Establishment elite exercise an outsized amount of power, while the masses are made to think they have a large say. And in a game controlled by political elites who care deeply about electability, Trump has no chance.

So for once in Trump's long, luck-filled life, the game is rigged against him. Because Trump, unlike most of his Republican rivals, has not spent years winning the loyalty of political elites, in an arena where that's essential. The irony, of course, is that Trump has more in common with the elites who will lie down on the tracks to stop his candidacy than with the voters who profess to love him. If this is a game, Trump is not supposed to be on the field—he's supposed to be in the owners' box, deciding who gets to play. National politics is like smash mouth football and Trump was not built to be a player. There's a reason why you never see the owners on the gridiron.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Turkish Hotel Staff Pranked Some Tourists with a Fake Terrorist Attack

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The Grand Yazici Mares hotel. Image via

Read: Food Pranking by Male Chef

Vacationers in İçmeler, Turkey, collectively lost their shit last Thursday when the hotel staff faked a poolside terrorist attack—just six weeks after the massacre on a Tunisian beach which left 38 people dead.

A group of staff dressed in what the Sun describe as "Arab clothing" appeared by the pool at the five-star Grand Yazici Mares hotel with fake rifles. Tourists lying by the pool understandably panicked, with many screaming and running for safety.

One British vacationer even had a mystery liquid labeled "fuel" poured over him by a guy with a crudely drawn-on beard and an improvised headdress. The "terrorist" then proceeded to whip out a lighter, as if he were about to set the tourist on fire.

Jason Pythian from Fallowfield, England, told the Sun "it was the hotel's idea of entertainment for the day. They thought it was funny to run around the pool dressed as terrorists." After guests complained to the hotel's management, they were told it was just a joke, and to raise any further concerns with their tourism companies.

Jason and his family had paid the tour operator Jet2holidays more than $5,500 for a 12-night stay at the Grand Yazici Mares. The company has since apologized, saying, "This was a Hollywood-themed poolside show, which included the characters Rambo and Superman, and is always well received by the hotel's residents. The management now understands some of the costumes may have caused offense and will no longer use these in their shows."

In March, Turkey closed its border with Syria due to fears of a terrorist attack, as ISIS militants fought Kurdish forces in the border town of Kobane. On Wednesday, US fighter jets launched their first strikes on ISIS targets from a base in Turkey. With the country on such a heightened state of alert, it's not hard to see why a badly-judged prank with questionable costumes got out of hand.

VICE Vs Video Games: How 'Skyrim' Comforted a Man While His Wife Was in the Hospital

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The cover of 'Death by Video Game'

Published August 13 through Serpent's Tail, Death by Video Game is writer Simon Parkin's collection of stories of obsession, escape, addiction, and ultimately, either defeat or salvation depending on the situation—every tale framed by the culture of video gaming. It sets out to present the truths behind headlines, the realities of gamers who use their digital adventures as life support, for guidance, and who come out the other side of the experiences changed one way or another.

The book opens and ends in East Asia, with Parkin investigating the tragic fates of people who played themselves to death, in the real world and their virtual one of choice. One such gamer was Chen Rong-yu, a 20-something who in early 2012 sat down at an internet café in Taipei City and launched League of Legends. He played and passed out, only to awaken and play more. Except one time when he closed his eyes, he never opened them again—his dead body was found, slumped in front of the screen, by a member of the café's staff. He'd been dead for nine hours.

"A few years ago I noticed that there was a fairly regular rhythm of news reports arriving, usually from Taiwan or South Korea, about people who were dying at the computer after video game binges," Parkin tells me, when I ask about the inspiration behind his book, and its title. "These reports were usually presented in the Western media as a kind of cautionary tale, one that either warned of the danger of playing games for prolonged amounts of time without breaks or, depending on the outlet, a sharper critique on the general dangers of all video game playing.

"But there has been very little reporting on why people are dying from video games. As someone who spends a great deal of time playing games, sometimes for hours on end, I wanted to investigate that question more thoroughly. Of course, a physical autopsy only provides a surface understanding what's going on here. There's also the broader, deeper question of why video games inspire us to give ourselves so fully to their realities, even to the point of physical harm. What appears to make games different from other media in that regard?"

While there are sad stories to be found within the pages of Death by Video Game, there's hope, too, woven through some very personal, intimate recollections of how gaming has steered Parkin's subjects back onto a path of positive progress. It's also a book that highlights that gaming really isn't (just) for kids, and that it's not a medium entirely obsessed with guns and scantily clad girls and murder and driving really recklessly fast. It paints Parkin's generation—my generation—as the one that is going to make a difference in gaming, that will be responsible for turning a pastime demonized by naïve tabloid hacks and politicians looking to score cheap points from intimidated parents into an art form every bit as culturally relevant as any other.

"I think that change is well underway," Parkin says. "Obama was often photographed with a Pac-Man sticker on his laptop while mounting his presidential campaign. The stigma around video games has changed, especially in the last five years, as increasingly people who grew up playing games have moved into senior positions as writers, editors, educators, and politicians. The old tabloid story about the video game nasty—which was, notably, planted in the media by Max Clifford around the launch of the second Grand Theft Auto, as a marketing technique—has almost disappeared. At the very least it's become a cliché—even though, it's worth noting, many game players still feel as though they are misunderstood and looked down upon for their hobby.

"I believe that video games have this amazing, shimmering potential and that they are often wonderful miracles painted across our screens." –Simon Parkin

"As someone who has dedicated a great deal of time and energy to writing and thinking about gaming, my hope is that we're moving to a time of more nuanced discussion. Rather than a polarized debate between the generally young, who love games, and the generally old, who distrust them, perhaps we are approaching a time where we can hold two conflicting ideas in mind simultaneously. I believe that video games have this amazing, shimmering potential and that they are often wonderful miracles painted across our screens. But I also believe that this potential is often squandered, and that many games are troublesome or, at very least, tiresome."

It's true enough that games makers can be easily swayed towards what the commercial market expects over creating experiences that genuinely sing with originality, but I agree that change is afoot. We've seen it in the indie sector for a fair few years now, and even triple-A developers and publishers are beginning to take relative risks—for example, I don't think that a company as massive as Square Enix would have supported a project of such quiet introspection as Life Is Strange prior to indies having moderate success with that style of game.

"In the book I look at some of the psychological things that video games provide us with," Parkin says. "For example, the tremendous sense of belonging, the triumphant and sports-like sense of dominance and mastery games can provide, and the sense of comfort and even, in some cases, space for healing that this form of escapism uniquely offers." The chapter "Hiding Place," which you can read an edited excerpt from below, examines the case of Chris Ferguson, who turned to Skyrim for comfort when his wife was in hospital. You can find out more about Death by Video Game, and order a copy, on the Serpent's Tail website.

"Hidden Place" begins after the video below


Related: Watch VICE's five-part documentary on eSports


Chris Ferguson had almost given up on video games when he first visited Skyrim.

"The power fantasies had worn me out," he tells me. "Whether it was pretending to be the perfect sportsman or a man changing the world through the power of guns, I was bored of the fantasy. As I began to adjust to the idea of fatherhood, I was more or less ready to leave all that behind."

Ferguson and his wife, Sarah, had been married for seven years and, during that time, had "never not been trying for a baby." In that sense, the news that the pair was expecting a baby wasn't unexpected, but it was still a surprise.

Like many who hear the news for the first time in their lives, the pair began to try on the idea of being parents. They bought a red and blue Babygro that said "Just Like Daddy" across the chest and a pair of those implausibly tiny infant socks. They celebrated their final Christmas as two.

On New Year's Day, Sarah was taken to hospital, where she underwent an operation to remove the ectopic pregnancy that threatened her life. If caught early enough, it's treatable with few side effects. If left undetected, it can cause the tube to rupture, causing life-threatening internal bleeding and often resulting in the loss of one of the woman's fallopian tubes. Sarah's tube had ruptured.

"It felt like a miracle to get pregnant at all, and then to have that taken away..." Ferguson says. "But it was never a viable pregnancy at all. That's a funny thing to have to get over. Because in your head it's been your baby, but in truth it was never something that had a chance to become a baby. You then have to come to terms with the fact that it might have been your only chance to have a baby. The human body does make some allowances for only having one fallopian tube, but it was still devastating."

After the operation Ferguson wasn't allowed into the ward to see Sarah, who needed rest. In the chaos of the emergency, no one had taken a moment to explain to him why, as he puts it, he wasn't going to be a dad any longer. Instead, they sent him home.

"I couldn't sleep," he says. "I was dazed. I'm not someone who can sit and watch a film. I have the patience to read a book or refresh Twitter all day, but I can't watch a film. But video games... I can do that."

Ferguson had been given a video game for Christmas. He put the disc into the drive and began to play.

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Skyrim is the name of a vast region set in the northern part of the fictional land of Tamriel after which the 2011 game is named. It's a hardy, unforgiving place, home to the Nords, a people toughened by decades spent battling frost. Lines of coniferous trees, defiant, and snow-dusted, surround its ice lakes. Grey mountains rise and fall in the distance, clouds draped around their necks. The wind whips up angrily, lifting with it white, swirling powder.

It is a world shared by beasts both mythical and real. Elk canter. Rabbits bound, then lift quivering noses to sniff for threats before returning to the whisper and scurry of their busy work. Clicking, overgrown crabs patrol the shoreline. Woolly mammoths tread heavily through the snow. At night you're just as likely to run into a cruel giant as a fox. Freeze the frame and you have a picture postcard: Iceland with the contrast turned up. Dig a little deeper and you find Iceland with a cave-troll infestation. There are friends to be made here, in the nooks and valleys, but generally Skyrim regards you as an unwanted visitor: the land and its people try to expel you.

This place of virtual cold and grim scarcity is not a typical refuge.


In Skyrim you can choose to bring peace or turmoil to the land. The native Nord race wants to free their land from Imperial interference, to become independent. The Imperial Legion, the military of the Empire, seeks instead to reunite and pacify the province. To a certain degree, you are free to choose with whom to side.

One of Ferguson's frustrations with video games at the time was his own tendency to race towards the goal, rather than take time to explore and enjoy the journey.

"Something that I've learned about myself is that, if a game's story is based on saving the world, I will concentrate all of my attention on that goal," he says. "Other characters in the game might implore me to carry out side-quests, helping them with this and that, but I usually never engage in that because... well, because the world needs saving and that seems more important."

This time, however, was different. Ferguson spent his time roaming Skyrim's world, wandering and, as he puts it, exploring for exploration's sake. For Ferguson, this freedom to set his pace and manage his destiny was key to being able to escape the turmoil in his mind and in his home.

"If it had been a shooter or something, I'm not sure I would have fallen into it in the same way," he says. "It's not constantly intense. There's room to wander. It also gets the power fantasy thing right. You have power to change things while none of the missions you're given are particularly taxing."

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A few days later Sarah returned home.

"I remember when I took her back from the hospital I was scared that I'd never bring her back to life," says Ferguson. "She was empty and broken. I brought her tea and beans on toast and when she slept I played. Sometimes, when the loading screens went on too long, I'd start crying. She would call to me and I would pause the game and go and sit with her and tell her that the important thing was that she was well and safe and that she would get better."

Sarah remained in bed for a week. She needed drugs every four hours, which Ferguson administered. He spent the rest of the time cooking, cleaning, or retreating into Skryim.

"I flitted between these few rooms, these two realities," he recalls.


Then one day, a few weeks after he started his journey in Skyrim, Ferguson was finished.

"When Sarah started to recover that's when I started to become emotional for the first time," he says. "I stopped playing. I had a realization that this just wasn't where I wanted to be any more."

A few weeks later he was able to say goodbye to the time spent in the game in a more definitive way when a friend visited.

"He mentioned that he wanted to play Skyrim but couldn't afford a copy," he recalls. "So I gave him mine. It felt good to have something to give that someone wanted. But there was something else, I guess. A sense of closure."

Follow Mike Diver, Simon Parkin, and Serpents Tail on Twitter.

Why America Needs an FDA For Recreational Drugs

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Photo via Flickr user Kurtis Garbutt

American cops and journalists have recently rediscovered Spice, one of the brand names for the assortment of shady chemical concoctions now being sold online and at convenience stores as legal highs. But as we contend with the real dangers of this stuff, it's all too easy to descend into the same kind of moral panic that brought us the war on drugs.

At a press conference on August 4, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton called Spice—also known as "K2" and technically best described as synthetic cannabinoids—"weaponized marijuana." He said the drug can produce superhuman strength in users and cited health department statistics showing that nearly 2,000 people had been admitted to New York emergency rooms between April and June alone after using it. To illustrate the danger, Bratton showed a video of a naked, bloody man fighting with police.

Of course, it's not quite as easy as it used to be to stir up a full-fledged drug freakout. As Gothamist quickly reported, the video was actually from an old episode of COPS. It was from 2002, not 2015, and was shot in Des Moines, Iowa. Also, it's not even clear if the suspect was actually on drugs at all, though the show's producers blamed PCP.

Read: How Synthetic Weed Is Ravaging Brooklyn's Homeless Population

What is obvious, however, is that the same claims—This drug will make you crazy or violent—are being made about Spice as have been made about marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, LSD, PCP, coffee, tobacco, "bath salts," and nearly every other new drug, probably since alcohol first began upsetting the elders in caveman days. And what's even more apparent is that our drug laws actually led to the rise of these new psychoactive substances, since they are largely taken as substitutes for illegal drugs.

Because of the way they dodge regulation, the rise of legal highs reveals the bare truth about the inevitable failure of global prohibition—and why the only way forward is to regulate psychoactive substance rather than reflexively criminalize them.

To deal with Spice and similar drugs, new thinking is needed. Stale rhetoric, demonizing and stigmatizing users by passing legislation in a frenzy of fear is what caused this problem—not its solution. To do better, we need to have a rational discussion about which substances should be legal and which should not, based on science rather than historical accident and prejudice.

In fact, to properly assess risks and benefits, we need to create the equivalent of a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for non-medical drugs.

One small country has already taken steps in this direction. As I reported in Pacific Standard last year, New Zealand was one of the first nations to face an onslaught of "legal highs" because of its isolation from major drug trafficking routes. By 2006, 40 percent of Kiwis aged 18–24 admitted to having taken what became known as "party pills" at least once in the past year. The pills typically contained a stimulant known as BZP, but after a media panic, BZP was banned—even though there were no reports of death or lasting harm from it. And that just set off a cycle in which a replacement was marketed, prohibited, and once again replaced.

Here's the problem: There isn't any logical or scientific rationale for international drug law. Marijuana is illegal and alcohol is legal because of the cultures that dominated the world when the drug laws were made—not because marijuana is more harmful. The same is true for many other illicit drugs. Consequently, without any clear framework to determine a substance's legal status, if someone creates a new chemical that's fun—or at least interesting—to take, it sits in a legal gray area.

And in these days of widespread internet access, on-demand manufacturing and globalized supply chains, lots of people are making chemicals—often simply ordering up interesting molecules from China or India and then selling them as legal alternatives to illicit drugs. It's so easy that a British reporter was able to order a company to make a new version of the type of speed first taken by the Beatles in the 1960s. The market is now like the pharmaceutical industry before the advent of the FDA—a wild west with no rules on testing for safety and purity, let alone efficacy.

In New Zealand, the BZP craze was started by a steampunk guitarist and psychedelic aficionado. Matt Bowden scoured the scientific literature, found an antidepressant that failed clinical trials because it was attractive to stimulant users, and decided to use and it and sell it as a safer alternative to methamphetamine, which was then ripping through the local rave scene. But he didn't really want to be an illegal or even quasi-legal drug dealer, so he pushed the government to create a way of regulating these new drugs.

Since banning one drug after another was obviously failing, Bowden's call for a system to test and approve the safest and least risky substances began to seem less and less crazy. As more and more drugs were sold over the counter at thousands of corner stores and gas stations and even to kids with no restrictions, in fact, it began to seem like the only responsible approach.

In 2013, the Kiwi Parliament passed a law to create a system of clinical trials, licensed outlets and regulations for use—the world's first-ever recreational drug regulator. For almost a year, a group of products that had been sold before the law passed without reported problems was sold fully legally.

Meanwhile, regulators considered questions both philosophical and practical.
For example, how do you determine what "low risk" means for a recreational drug? Does it have to be as safe as marijuana—or can it be as risky as cigarettes? Must it be safer than driving? Or football? What about extreme sports? And how do you design a clinical trial for a recreational drug? The New Zealand law demanded only safety from products—not efficacy—but manufacturers would probably want to sell something that was stronger than placebo. So what "benefits" should they measure, and how?

Before officials could fully wrestle with these issues, however, New Zealand's system ran into a snag. Local media spotlighted unhealthy and homeless users who could be found hanging out near legal high shops (the healthy users got high at home or in clubs). This resulted in an election year revision in the law that banned all of the products that were then legal. Now it's not clear if regulators will let any new substances win approval, even if a manufacturer spends the money for trials and manages to get around a ban on animal testing in New Zealand that was inserted as a further hurdle. However, the laws for trials and plans for store sites are still going forward.

Meanwhile, the total ban hasn't eliminated the market, just driven it underground. New chemicals are being introduced, just like Spice in the US. The same problems the country saw before the law— like use by young people and overdoses— are popping up again.

In America, the situation is similar. By 2012, 11 percent of high school seniors reported having tried a legal high. While a 1986 law automatically prohibits all "analogs" of known recreational drugs, it isn't particularly effective because the term is hard to define. Is an analog a drug that chemically looks like the active ingredient in marijuana? Well, pharmacologically, it might have the opposite effect—and, indeed, Spice produces effects many pot users want nothing to do with. What about a drug that acts similarly? Molecularly, it might look entirely different. Moreover, banning substances willy nilly poses a real risk to pharmaceutical development—what if the cure for cancer turns out to be a substance some chemist creates as a marijuana substitute? Once a drug is banned, pharmaceutical companies tend to lose interest because of increased regulatory and cost barriers.


Watch our documentary about synthetic cannabinoids in the UK:


The UK is currently debating an extreme response: a law that would criminalize all psychoactive substances other than those specifically exempted in advance, like alcohol, caffeine and tobacco. This has already prompted protests from drug experts and scientists, who say that it will be impossible to enforce, will harm research, and won't work anyway.

While it may take governments decades to recognize it, prohibition is not the answer. People actually prefer tried and true drugs like marijuana, which has been used for thousands of years and is now more thoroughly studied than most approved medical drugs. They resort to unknown chemicals to avoid drug testing or because they actually don't want to break the law.

Every human culture has created technologies to alter consciousness; even animals like cats seek out highs. We can either accept this and try to regulate a natural impulse in a way that minimizes harm—or else we can continue to act based on media panics and leave millions of people to the mercy of an infinitely creative black market.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Photos of LGBT Pride in the Australian Outback

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Photos by Grouse Party

The Alice Springs Pride Carnival is Australia's most remote celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, and sistergirl/brotherboy communities. Established in 2013 as a way to promote gender diversity and social inclusion in regional areas, it now attracts people from all around Australia.

Held next to the Todd River in Snow Kenna Park, the festival is part of a tradition of queer culture in Central Australia. The local scene was largely born in the late 80s through the presence of the Central Australian Gay Men's Network. In 1987 they held their first gay dance party on Lindsay Street and local walking group Desert Devils entered the Sydney Mardi Gras the following year. Entering the 90s, several LGBT-focused newsletters like Hot Gossip and Desert Dykes flourished.

Today the carnival aims to create a safe environment for members of the LGBTIQ community to meet, seek advice, and take part in local activities while promoting tourism to the area. See photos from this year's Carnival below.


We Asked Some Male VICE Writers to Tell Us About Their Worst Break-Ups

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Illustration by George Heaven

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Earlier this week, it was revealed that adult men are all really a bunch of cry-baby pansies who can't get over break-ups. A study by researchers at New York's Binghamton University found that while women might be hit hardest right after a relationship comes to an end, it's men who feel it more in the long-term, with some apparently never truly coming to terms with a split.

This, supposedly, is because of our old friend, biology. Women, say the team at Binghamton, have more to lose by dating a loser—"a brief romantic encounter could lead to nine months of pregnancy," as research assistant Craig Morris put it—so are more adept at accepting someone's not right for them and moving on.

Men, however, suffer for longer, as the shock of what's just happened gradually "sinks in" to their little pea brains, before they finally come to the realization of what's just happened to them. Then they have to "compete" all over again for a new partner; and because men are naturally more competitive than women, so the study says, losing what they deem a "good catch" will hurt that little bit more.

We weren't sure that this theory necessarily holds true with every man to have ever been dumped in the history of men. So, to see whether or not all men are terrible at getting over break-ups, we asked some of our male writers to dredge up everything they remember about the most damaging split they've ever gone through, and share it with the internet.

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DAVID WHELAN

My relationship was great. You know, like very relaxing. A long summer's holiday on the beach somewhere nice, with a seemingly endless supply of reading material, alcohol, and sex. But then it ended one day, and I had to wake up to the fact I was a pretty average bloke, back in an ocean of pretty average blokes: a bit chubby, terrible facial hair, José González on shuffle; I probably wore a pair of Toms at all times; I may have—at one point—known all the lyrics to a John Mayer album.

The break-up itself was clean. There were no tears (except for a few, from me, in bed, alone) and no arguments. It quite simply ended. Credits rolled. I woke up the next morning in a slightly low-budget sequel to my life, where certain characters, like my ex, had to be cut due to funding restrictions.

This is what I've done in the meantime: I go to the bar more. I play Football Manager. But I've discussed all this.

Of course, I've also been on Tinder. When I wake up, before I go to sleep, when I'm sober, and, of course, when I'm drunk. It's a horrible habit. (I also tried Happn, but found it a bit weird that I crossed paths with the same woman eight times a day without seeing her once. Was she stalking me? Was I stalking her?) I now have more matches on Tinder than Facebook friends, which is a really good way to emphasize loneliness.

When worms mate, they line themselves up like a sausage link and fire sperm into each other. Relationships are a bit like that: Before single people join up to create one double-sized worm, they are two smaller worms, blind and tiny, wriggling about with no idea their potential other half is busy churning subsoil somewhere in a plant pot nearby.

A break-up is simply going back to that state. There's no point crying over it. Once you've gotten over the emotional shock of having your big worm body ripped in two, you just go back to wallowing in the mud for a bit. Because one day soon—who knows when—you will find another worm to wriggle with.

Illustration by Dan Evans

CHRIS MANDLE

My first relationship with a guy was an intense, physical, clandestine thing. I was 18, at university, and my encounters with this rugby-playing dreamboat played out like some kind of sexual espionage—making sure we weren't caught, carefully constructing alibis, double-checking I wasn't wearing any of his clothes.

We went through the first phase of questioning your sexuality together. We felt like we could take on the world, but only because we'd formed our own world under the sheets. In no time at all, I understood him—not by the things he said, but by the things he didn't, or couldn't; and our time spent together was like navigating a weird, euphoric minefield. Everything from happiness to shame was laced with gunpowder, making it bigger, louder, and more dangerous.

The relationship lasted until graduation, but by that point the happy landscape we'd carelessly skipped across felt barren and hostile. I'd come out, but he took comfort in people assuming he was straight. By the summer of 2010, he'd embraced it, and wore it like armor so nobody would try to hurt him. I could see he wasn't going to change, not even for me.

Our break-up was smooth and pragmatic, but it was the aftermath that became difficult. I moved to London, and he ended up taking a job that meant he moved country every two years. Through time I grew accustomed to the idea that he'd come back to me, because he was too scared to connect with another man. I'd be patient, and I'd wait, and he'd return, I thought, and we could go back to smoking by the window, looking down on our kingdom and feeling proud of being ourselves.

But that moment never came. One night, when we Skyped for a long-overdue catchup, he confessed he'd been seeing a girl casually. I felt my face sag, my chest tighten. I didn't understand.

It was just a fling, he said. A year later, he took that back, but he admitted it wasn't serious. A year after that, he took that back, but said it wasn't like they were going to get married.

Eventually, a gilded envelope landed on my doormat.

I wanted to wait for him to leave her. Or her to leave him. Then, in my lonelier hours, I stopped trying to figure him out; whether he was gay or straight, he'd stopped orbiting my world a long time ago.

That was nearly five years ago, and it was the worst break-up I ever experienced. Connecting with someone who was as bruised and lost as I was felt incredible. But when he went back in the closet, I suddenly felt alone. I felt like that friend I'd gone on such a long, arduous journey with might have been in my head the whole time. It took years to get over him, but that wedding invitation sealed the deal. Like him, a man who refused to be put in a box, I left both options unchecked and returned it to him: he'd know what it meant.

So I guess, in my experience, it's true that it takes a long time to get over an ex. You can feel the pang of rejection and abject misery in powerful, convulsing waves, so clinging onto the memory of a relationship is helpful. First as a coping mechanism, but later, when they're buying a house and ~apparently~ enjoying the company of a vagina, it's nice to know that, for a brief period, someone who resembled a Disney prince used to gaze at me with nothing but lust, too.


You know who doesn't have to deal with heartbreak, or at least not as much as everyone else does? People who live in Japan, which has the fastest growing negative population in the world because people are too busy to fall in love with each other:


JAMES NOLAN

I'm 28 but have only ever had one real break-up because that relationship lasted six years. Every other one I've had seems puny by comparison. There were still tears, still drunk texts sent weeks and months later, but when somebody leaves your life after such a long period, you're inclined to look on that heartbreak as special; as having the qualities that, over the history of humanity, have led to the creation of some of the best (and worst) poems, songs, and novels.

I met my ex when I was 21. Like many guys that age, I was an idiot—ego-driven, socially-retarded, and scared. My idea of what relationships were came from films like Sideways, where men like the one I was becoming were "saved" by smart, coincidentally attractive women. It didn't occur to me that I'd ever have to do anything in a relationship (or in life) other than exist in all my flawed, bedraggled genius. Surely that was enough to build a stable, healthy relationship around.

That my relationship lasted so long—and was so relatively stable—is a testament to both my ex and her gluttony for punishment. I can't say I brought nothing to the table, but certainly last November, when she came home from work one evening and confessed that she'd had enough, I could only hold my hands up and agree. We knew each other too well at that point to think anything could change—six years in, you know what you're getting, and if that isn't good enough, then the delusion required to stay together is just too monumental; or at least it was for us.

The past nine months have been the hardest time of my life. Deaths of family members have been easier to navigate, which is neither beneficial to admit—try picking up women with this stuff out there!—nor acceptable: People don't want to hear how badly you're doing; they want you to "cheer up" and "move on," which is fair enough, but if the past nine months have taught me anything, it's that, in order to get over someone, you first need to accept the pain.

For a while there, I went into denial mode, telling myself that I didn't actually miss this woman at all. But it wasn't long before the pain became so overwhelmingly obvious that, in order to keep denying it, I would've had to have done something a lot more drastic than what I eventually did, which was just admit that I'd fucked things up, and that it sucked, but that if I took responsibility for changing, I could meet somebody in the future and not fuck things up there.

Am I over my break-up? Absolutely not. But when I think about part of this heartbreak lasting forever, I can't help but feel there's a positive to it. As I'm learning now, the pain of a break-up pushes you forward; it improves you. Maybe, in the end—once all the tears have been shed and drunk texts —I'll even be grateful.

JOE STONE

According to this recent study, men are more likely to suffer the adverse effects of a break-up because of their biological drive to compete for a significant other. Factor in that—for gay men—you're not only competing to be the one who doesn't die alone, but also for the same prospective partners, and perhaps it's no surprise that my first break-up was such a grade-A shit-show. Faced with the same dating pool as my recent ex in 2009, I did the sensible thing and methodically slept with boys I knew he fancied, and then made sure to tell him about it "so he wouldn't have to hear from anyone else." If that makes me a psycho (spoiler: it definitely does) he was no better, memorably bringing back a boy to the flat I shared with a mutual friend because his place was too far away (we are no longer flatmates). Living in the same postcode, and frequenting the same scene, we'd regularly bump into each other. This either resulted in fighting or fucking, usually both. Obviously, whenever he stayed at mine during this period, I'd wait until he fell asleep and then do a rigorous sweep of his Grindr to find out who he was messaging and confront him about it. Looking back, it's a surprise that nobody was murdered. There were definitely threats.

Am I over my ex? Yes, but it took a while, and there's a chance I'm still suffering from PTSD. We were only together for just over a year, but the fallout was so horrendous that I delayed making it official with my next (and current) boyfriend for a good two years afterward. In retrospect, I think the break-up was symptomatic of problems in our relationship—resentments, insecurities, one-upmanship—that only really bubbled to the surface once we'd called it a day. Hopefully age and experience will mean I'm never in the same position again, and I'd definitely never behave the way I did then now. I don't think he would either, and we're finally friends five years later. It probably helps that we're both in happy relationships now. And that he never found out I had sex with his dad (LOL JK).

Follow David, Chris, James, and Joe on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: Unnamed Toronto Man Hands Over Massive Illegal Reptile Collection to Animal Sanctuary

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Crocodile pile. Photo via Flickr user Spiterman

Read: The Emerging Fetish of Laying Alien Eggs Inside Yourself

There are all kinds of people in the world: some people like to have a dog or cat waiting for them at home, for example, while others prefer a pet-free existence. Still others keep whole menageries around, furry and winged and otherwise.

Then there are people like the mysterious Toronto resident who recently called an animal sanctuary for help and was discovered to have been keeping around 150 full-grown crocodiles, alligators, and caimans in his home. The man had understandably had too much after about ten years of tending to the animals, and called the zoo to remove them from his home.

Bry Loyst, who works with the Indian River Reptile Zoo and helped pick up the reptiles, said none of them were smaller than one metre, and many were more than three metres long.

"I could not believe that somebody had that many crocodilians and raised them to adulthood. These were not baby little crocodiles," he told CBC's Metro Morning. "They were adults."

Apparently, while it contravenes a Toronto city bylaw, it's not altogether uncommon for people to keep babies from the crocodile/alligator/caiman trifecta as pets, though they often become overwhelmed by the time the animals reach maturity. Enterprising citizens often raise babies to sell as pets, as well; Loyst guessed that the man in question had begun with that intention and then "fell in love with the crocodiles" and decided to keep them. That he managed to keep them into their adulthood is why this mysterious pet collector's brood was so remarkable (well, that and the sheer volume of his living reptile collection).

It took 20 people, four 26-foot trucks, and dozens of construction-grade cardboard tubes to move the reptiles, but despite the hard work it entailed, Loyst said everyone involved was ready and willing to participate.

"Everyone was just excited and enthusiastic to be involved, because it's such an unusual situation," said Loyst. "It was a lot of fun and tiring."

The Toronto man "did the right thing" by calling to have them taken to an animal sanctuary, Loyst said. And he did it at the right time, as well. The zoo is currently constructing a million-dollar building to house large reptiles, of which it already has more than 400.

Meanwhile, a single (non-poisonous) ball python was seen in Metro Vancouver this week, near Simon Fraser University. It's still on the loose, but come on, Vancouver: just one python? Really?

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

David Lynch Is on a Beautiful Trip Toward Enlightenment (And You Can Be, Too)

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David Lynch Is on a Beautiful Trip Toward Enlightenment (And You Can Be, Too)

VICE Vs Video Games: Bittersweet Victory: On the Void Left Behind When Your Favorite Game Is Completed

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Lead imagery from 'Xenoblade Chronicles'

Two weeks ago, my climax was stolen.

Now, I'm not talking about a parent's hand on the doorknob, or the image of a naked grandparent wandering through an otherwise intricately woven fantasy. I mean that a moment of triumph was taken from me. I'd come to the end of a grand adventure, and although I had faced down the final boss and restored peace, I wasn't happy. In fact, I was kind of gutted. It's a feeling I'd had before, but this time I was more aware of it, and I felt the new gap in my life a little more keenly.

Xenoblade Chronicles was a game I'd played a little bit of before, enjoying the combat and the exploration, but up until recently it had sat mostly unloved and unplayed in my 3DS. Then I took a trip down to Manchester, from my home in Glasgow, and the car journey quickly became full of high drama and shocking voice acting. Over the course of the next two weeks I funneled all my spare time into the game and, after 60 hours, which is pretty conservative for Xenoblade, I had seen the last cutscene and made my final save.

Usually I would go onto the next game, so I should have been trying to finish The Witcher 3; but I was listless, unable to play CD Projekt RED's game for any length of time, sometimes failing to find the enthusiasm to even turn it on. I missed Xenoblade. I missed the characters, the world, the music, and even the English dub. For the first time, in a long time, I was pining for a game; I'd saved the world, but in doing so I was also severing my link to it, and it was a bitter feeling.

This has made me think more about how we deal with reaching the end of a game, and the sense of loss that we either have to embrace and deal with, or the lengths we might go to so that we don't have to say goodbye. (I'm quite deliberately stalling with The Witcher 3, so as to not have it end too soon—Ed.) With this in mind, I reached out to some writers that I knew invested a lot of time into individual games, with the view to finding out how they have experienced both the intimate bond games can have and the lasting impression they can leave.

Screenshot from 'Oblivion' expansion, 'Shivering Isles'

In the world of games, RPGs are like the great big thick books you see people struggling to lift on the train and usually require you to invest a lot of your time in to really get the most out of. When I posed the question of missing a game when it was over, Holly Nielsen (the Guardian, Sky News) came back with an amazing look at her first playthrough of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which clocked in at over 500 hours.

"I used to self-impose things I could or couldn't do in an effort to make the game last longer," she tells me. "Like not using fast travel, collecting every item of clothing, doing long journeys, and visiting every town."

This idea fascinated me: that the world of the game had become so important, such a part of Holly's life that she wouldn't leave until she had seen and done absolutely everything it could offer. There's something lovely about the idea of ignoring some of the features, like fast travel, to explore the game more organically and really be part of the place, its people, and the surrounding fiction. Finding ways to extend the game for her wasn't just about completing it or getting her money's worth; it was because she had formed a bond with her character and the world that she had to save, and instead of leaving it all behind, she took the time to almost be a tourist and savor it before moving on.

Screenshot from 'The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword'

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I learned about the time Chris Schilling (Edge, VICE) had to complete and review The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword to meet an extremely tight deadline—he got only three hours' sleep over the course of two days.

"It's such an elegiac game, with one of the most moving soundtracks of the series, especially 'Fi's Lament,'" he tells me. "At the end, you have a number of goodbyes, and that heightens that feeling of an imminent parting. When the credits roll on a Zelda game, it feels like a farewell. Another Zelda game is another generation; the player's character another Hero of Time. So you won't see these folk again, just different versions of them."

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This is an extreme example of when, either through choice or deadline, we put too much time into a game and spend more hours within it than than we do the real world. Over the course of two days, Chris spent more time flying the skies of Hyrule than he did sleeping, or doing pretty much anything else. In many ways, playing a game in such an intense manner makes it even harder to let go because you've concentrated so hard on doing only one thing over all that time.

At university, a flatmate did this exact same thing with Kingdom Hearts 2. After waiting three years for the sequel to one of his favorite games, it was bought and completed over the course of a single weekend, and afterwards he very much felt its absence. He was going through a form of withdrawal from the focus he'd had on a single objective. Instead of a sense of accomplishment, he'd been rewarded with something closer to regret than a final victory.

Sometimes we don't want a game to end for more personal reasons. The response I receive from Jim Trinca (VideoGamer) about his time playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim shows that trying to avoid finishing a game can have a wider impact on your personal life.

Screenshot from 'Skyrim'

"When Skyrim was done, that was really hard, because I then had to face reality. I don't think I've ever felt more devastated about finishing a game. Now, I can't really play it. I bought the PC version recently and planned to fall in love with it all over again, but it just reminded me of the worst time in my life, and also made me realize that I might have been able to solve some issues back then had I not spent 300 hours playing a stupid video game about dragons and horses."

I'll be honest, what Jim's talking about here is something that hadn't even occurred to me when I planned this article. I'm sure at some point we've all thought that the time we're putting into a game could be better spent elsewhere, and here that is being strongly felt—but living within the world of Skyrim means that the negative stuff going on around you in the real world can at least be blinkered, if not completely ignored, and for some people that's an essential relief from their everyday. Ending a relationship with a game isn't easy, but maybe it is important to know when to say goodbye, if it risks entirely mucking up what really matters once the credits roll.

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Screenshot from 'Dragon Age: Origins'

Life is full of saying goodbye, and although it's easy to dismiss a game as just another distraction from the world around us, it's never as simple as that. Ria Jenkins (the Guardian, Indie Haven) put it well in an email to me when she talked about finishing Dragon Age: Origins for the first time: "Knowing that as soon as I stopped playing, the cast of characters who had convinced me of their life would cease to exist, filled me with a thick melancholy."

The time we invest in playing games is real—hours and days that we'll never get back—and the profound sense of loss we can feel once they've ended is real, too. Just like finishing a book that you wish had a dozen more chapters, or a TV series that wraps up way too soon, the feelings they evoke within us and the bonds they create are tangible.

This doesn't all mean that we should avoid playing games that involve such a grand investment of time. Indeed, I think we should seek out these games, ones that are worthy of taking up what little spare time any of us have in our adult lives. This is how we can honor the hard work and dedication that goes into creating these expansive and beautiful worlds. And if that means we feel restless or almost incomplete when the game is over, maybe that's a sign that video games can transcend being just another diversion from reality. As for me, I guess it's time I went and visited an old friend I left back in Novigrad. Maybe I'll spend a few weeks there, before moving on again.

Follow Scott Craig White on Twitter.

We Downed Beers in Chinatown with Former Pavement Bassist Mark Ibold

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We Downed Beers in Chinatown with Former Pavement Bassist Mark Ibold
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