Photo via the Putnam County Sheriff's Dept

Read: Why I Quit Smoking Weed

Boyd Gene Wiley, a 47-year-old Florida man who apparently really loves him some weed, marched into a local sheriff's office Monday and accused detectives of stealing his massive crop of marijuana plants, police said. Wiley wanted to complain to a supervisor that he was growing medical marijuana, but since that's still totally illegal in Florida, the man was arrested on the spot.

A housing code enforcement officer spotted a few plants during a routine inspection of Wiley's property last Friday, according to the sheriff's office. When a group of detectives drove over to see what was up, they found 91 marijuana plants, and spent the next few hours "eradicating" them.

The detectives had been trying to track down who owned the property for a few days when Wiley walked into the sheriff's office to complain about his stolen weed, and pegged the blame on the cops. He was arrested on production of marijuana charges, which is a felony, and was released on a $1004 bond later that night.

Somehow, the fiasco didn't end there. On Thursday, Wiley was arrested for the second time after he allegedly slammed a neighbor who owed him money over the head with a shovel. He called the cops again, this time to let them know he had been hit in the face during the brawl. Wiley was arrested for aggravated battery, and again released on bail.

Check out Esther Pearl Watson's website, Instagram, and get her books from Fantagraphics.

A self-portrait, by Cory Schmitz via his website

A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good logo is a promise. Graphic design should be functional, in an accessible form. It also influences the games and industry we love in ways that ideally blend seamlessly into the fabric and that we often overlook: the iconic perspective of the PlayStation logo, open-world mini-maps (if they're lucky), and HUDs, for example.

Games are simultaneously function and form, and people like Cory Schmitz are very important to them. You may not recognize his name, but you've seen his work. He's done a lot of work for PlayStation. The Polygon logo: that's his. The menus and UI in Double Fine's Broken Age: his. Logos for the recently released Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and mobile stealth-hit Republiqué: once again, Cory's. If you've ever visited the Indie MegaBooth at PAX, you'll definitely have seen imagery by him. Oh, and maybe you've noticed the new logo for a weird little tech start-up called Oculus, too?

Rebranding for Oculus, by Cory in collaboration with Mackey Saturday, Nicolause Taylor, and John Malkemus via Cory's website

It's abundantly clear from his success and output (along with his unguarded, giddy Twitter feed) that Schmitz is a die-hard geek with an enduring love for music, games, and film. Each of his works delightfully evokes the feel of the studio, game, or otherwise, whilst remaining elegantly understated and gimmick free. Herein lies the oft-ignored importance and power of branding in the video game space; after all, as Schmitz says with characteristic, straight-talking modesty, "It's almost always the first impression. It's the face of Whatever You're Doing—it's what people see!"

With games like Metrico and Line Rider quite literally applying gameplay to bar charts and typography, is graphic design in general breaking through to the gaming mainstream? "I'd love to see more cases of games actually letting you create these elements as part of the gameplay," Schmitz says, suggesting, audaciously, that perhaps even applying trendy design concepts to games has limits. "Not necessarily graphic design-y type stuff, any opportunity to give the player more creativity is good in my opinion."

Related: Watch our video about design of a different kind, The Sacred Art of the Japanese Tattoo

The superlative mobile game Monument Valley, whose studio ustwo is actually more of a design consultancy, and even the paint/graffiti mechanic of Schmitz favorite Splatoon offer subtle glimpses of how this might happen. With that in mind, what does the 20-something visual identity designer tend to gravitate towards most in his own work? "I design things I think look cool. I like stuff that's relatively simple with a clear concept." Sounds straightforward enough.

In a world of overcrowded app store thumbnails, the blindingly diverse digital shopfront of Steam and the low barrier to marketplace entry, it's probably more important than ever that your branding is on point. Physical releases are hardly knocking it out of the tastefully geometric park, either. "Most of the time it's just the logo above some key art," observes Cory. Worse still, bad box-art can be misleading or offensively non-inclusive; we all remember the Bioshock Infinite debacle, and the well of gruff, weathered white-male protagonists walking intently towards the frame has been plumbed aplenty. "Look at movie posters," Cory continues, another of his passions and an area some of his contemporaries such as Olly Moss developed their minimalist design chops in. "I'd love to see more bold, weird stuff that could potentially strike a chord with people, rather than stuff that's been focus-tested to death."

Cory's logo art for forthcoming indie game 'Below.' Image via Cory's website

Such is the problem with boardrooms of middle-aged execs paying hundreds of thousands to prestigious agencies and group-thinking their ideas down into mush. "The cover of Kanye West's Yeezus was just a clear CD case with a blank red sticker...I'm not saying something that extreme would work for game box art, but it goes to show there's a lot of room left for creativity."

If you want something doing, do it yourself, right? "It's a big goal to be the creative director for a game, create a game world and fill it with cool designs, basically oversee all the creative elements," Cory says. "It'd be challenging, but super-rewarding." While he's reticent to give the game away (so to speak), Schmitz's vision is more advanced than a vague desire to make a cool-looking title. A Tumblr he created a while ago as an inspiration dump already holds the key to his aspirations, a hyper-cool, neo-futuristic vision for a game world that you can already imagine loving to get lost in.

Cory's cartridge design for the My Famicase Exhibition. Image via Cory's website

One project in particular, the aptly named My Famicase Exhibition in 2014, for which artists create actual Famicom cartridge art for their hypothetical game jump-started Schmitz's imagination. "After I made the Children design, I started thinking about it as a real game. I made a mood video (complete with a Cornelius/MF Doom mix I made in GarageBand) and designed a character." Although character design isn't (yet) Schmitz's modus operandi, he took it upon himself to jump in at the deep end and create one a day. Reassuringly for those of us not quite as prolific and prone to plenty of procrast-creation, "that was last July, and I still just have the one. I will make more eventually, once my schedule clears up... Someday."

Essentially, the premise of the game is this: "While the grown-ups are hooked up to their VR machines, the children sneak outside and The City becomes their playground. Create your character, explore the decaying mysteries of The City, and watch out for rival gangs." It would be an open-world game in a detailed, futuristic city full of rad graphic design.

Cory's box art for the forthcoming indie title 'ADR1FT.' Image via Cory's website

New on The Creators Project: How to Shoot a 'True Detective' Gunfight

Mining Cory for further inspiration reveals rich veins of angular retro-futurism. "The example I always go back to is the Wipeout series, Wip3out in particular," he states. "I'm a massive fan of The Designers Republic—everything from the in-game menus, team logos, and billboards, to the cover art, manual, and advertisements. All these things work together to make Anti-Gravity Racing feel like a real racing league from the future." Hopefully we can expect Formula Fusion, the recently Kickstarted spiritual successor to Wipeout, to live up to that vision, more than 15 years on.

Like any artist worth their salt however, Cory's top picks span generations, styles, and include indie and triple-A games alike. "Electroplankton, Vib-Ribbon, R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, Rez, NEOTOKYO°, the Colin McRae Rally series, Mirror's Edge, FEZ, and more recently Destiny, Alien: Isolation, and Splatoon."

Cory's logo art for 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.' Image via Cory's website

Say what we (often) will about the slew of copycat games, but it's clear even from the above list that we're spoiled for great graphic design in games right now. In his modesty, Cory is equally keen to share—or shift—the spotlight onto some of his contemporaries always producing stellar work. There's Elliott Gray at Bungie, Alex Griendling, and Matthew Kenyon in particular, and for those looking to follow in their neon footsteps Cory advises that "it's mostly about getting your work out there for people to see, making connections with folks... show off your work!"

In between "looking at different console boxes online—a couple of my favorites are the PS2 box and the Japanese Dreamcast box with Hidekazu Yukawa on it," Cory is likely helping improve the entire outward facing image of games and their creators as we speak. He is a reminder of the quiet talent in the games industry, whose clients take center stage; but if a logo really is a promise, he and that neo-city full of rad design can't remain in the tasteful drop-shadows for long.

Follow Danny Wadeson on Twitter.

A screenshot from 'Selfie: Sister of Amniotic Lens'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

The Steam store page for Selfie: Sister of Amniotic Lens classifies it as a massively multiplayer online game (MMO for short), but it's nothing like what you'd think the genre would imply. It is oppressively lonesome. When I "log in" (I don't have credentials to log in with), I'm greeted with a short message: "You have been condemned by user Stranger on 2015-05-13 20:59:05, meaning your score has been reset. Try changing your personal response." The score is measured in pounds, but doesn't matter. Not as far as I know. It's a penalty nonetheless. My personal message, my typed response, wasn't personal enough. It was something to the effect of, "I'm fine."

Selfie is a predominantly single-player game. You begin in a garishly decorated room, infested by flies and inundated by the blinding rays of a sunset you can't see. There's a TV and what I think is a turntable. You highlight the flies around the room for seconds at a time, and they begin to power the turntable with their magnetic energy (your guess as to how this happens is as good as mine). The TV turns on, you flip through a few channels, and suddenly you're flying through outer space to the sound of ex-Swans singer Jarboe crooning over a theme evoking a version of the Twin Peaks theme with a little more ennui. You seek out and shoot red dots as they fly among wheeled mannequins, then finally to another space platform littered with more flies. You blast them as well, to escape outer space, and land back where you began, in the TV room.

It's a simple loop, with each repetition capped off by a screen of text espousing an anecdote of mental strife or from some biblical verse (it directly mentions Hebrews 4, the connection to which I have a loose grasp on). It's all a bit melodramatic. Hammy, at times. The title screen plays back videos of a news report clearly filmed in someone's apartment, telling of a cult (the titular Sisters of the Amniotic Lens) in several languages. Again, hammy. But intensely personal. And vulnerable.

The game is a weird trip, but the most impactful thing about it is that message system. Selfie prides itself on the idea of digital intimacy. It takes its personal message system very seriously. These messages are confessions, and defying the tribe of confession, by not confessing, by writing "I'm fine" like I did, is punishable with the death of your virtual cash. Not that you buy anything with that money. It's the principle of the thing. I am not "fine."

But these messages let you enter other people's minds, to hear their thoughts and think like them, and in that sense it's one of the most pure distillations of intimacy through multiplayer around. All multiplayer gaming is a conversation with someone else through gameplay. Selfie just simplifies a lot of those aspects.

Take fighting games, for example. You can learn to execute Street Fighter IV's combos from memory until your fingers cramp, but you won't be good at the game until you play someone else. You can learn to react to fireballs when you see them coming, but you're still not really playing the game. Good players know that the hard part isn't controlling your own character—it's controlling your opponent's. The only way to overcome some strategies in high-level play is to predict them in advance. Predictions are called reads, and the best Street Fighters read their opponents constantly. They enter their minds.

Watch: VICE's film on the card game phenomenon, The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering':

The world's best players aren't the ones who go all in the first round—they're the ones who learn their opponent. There's a term in the fighting game community: downloading. It refers to how many pro players will play a round not to win, but to learn. Initially, they're testing moves and seeing how their opponent responds to them. Every reaction their opponent makes is a confession: "If you perform that move, here's what I will do. This is what I've learned to do. This is how I play. This is what I'm afraid of. This is who I am."

Daigo Umehara is the world's most famous Street Fighter player (you've probably seen his greatest moment). Among several other things, he's famous for the Ume Shoryu. If predictions are reads, the Ume Shoryu is a very well-read uppercut, a Shoryuken that no other player would have thrown out, but lands because Daigo's Daigo. When it lands, it's the perfect counter to just about anything. It's a powerful, awe-inspiring maneuver, precisely because of the risk it involves. On the rare occasion it doesn't land, it's devastating, and it's lost him rounds.

But Daigo's Daigo, and he lands Ume Shoryus. He learns his opponents better than anyone else. Other players have defeated and taken titles from him, but few stand against him in longer sets. It's a testament to how devoted he is to the game, but also to how well he can read people. You confess your Street Fighter sins to him with every faulty punch you throw out, every offense he dismantles. Still, those uppercuts are risky. Intensely personal. And vulnerable.

Back in Selfie, I change my personal message, my confession. It now reads as follows.

Selfie is a short game. Perhaps not all that fulfilling, either, if you put nothing of yourself in it. In order to "win" you must let others read you. It is an inverted fighting game. But it's not that simple. The game straddles a line with the intimacy it asks players for. It warns players against using the information they learn about others, to not spread and exploit it. This is because it expects people to fully confess their sins. And at the same time, you tend to question players submitting confessions anonymously. Are any of them genuine? Am I alone in putting myself out there? Will someone condemn my confession because it wasn't enough? Because it was too much?

That Selfie is not a very popular game works in its favor. The game's all-time high concurrent player count, according to Steamcharts.com, is six people. Knowing that makes the intimacy all the more powerful. Perfect, in a way. You can be confident the world won't find out your secret, but you're still sharing it. And you can use this opportunity to unload. Talk about what you're dreading most right now. Your biggest fear about life. The big mistake you made but can't admit to the person who needs to hear your confession most. Let it out.

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The ending of the game is another video. This time it features Dylan Barry, the designer and writer of the game. He explains his game to you, where he got the inspiration for it and how it came to be. He rambles, moralizing about what he hoped the player got from the game. He reveals this is his final game. Do I believe him? Is he genuine? It's all bit hammy. Intensely personal. And vulnerable.

It works. It's not perfect, but it works. Because it's just another confession. Captured on video and given importance, no doubt, but another confession nonetheless. It works because Selfie is about having other people read you, but for that aspect to work, you have to read other people yourself. You have to condemn them if you don't think they're genuine, because saying "I'm fine" won't cut it. For the game's creator to unload his own confession is fitting because nobody should be exempt from being vulnerable here, in this safe space. You confess because you expect the same in return, and it's devastating if someone doesn't reciprocate.

Or, if you're like me: you risk confessing to gain a better understanding. You hope, by confessing your biggest fears, that you're ultimately contributing to some sort of karmic pool, and that you playing along will somehow cause someone else to add their own confession to the pool. You risk the confession for a better outcome, knowing you could very well set yourself up to get exposed, be condemned, and "fail" by the game's standards. But you do it because the payoff, getting someone else to confess, to increase every other player's understanding of other people even slightly, is worth the risk. Your own personal Ume Shoryu, committed to in confidence.

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Garland Tyree's home at 15 Destiny Court on Staten Island. Photo via Google Street View

A local leader of the Bloods gang was killed during a shootout with New York City police on Friday after a six-hour standoff on Staten Island, DNAInfo reports. By the time the dust settled, the man had shot a firefighter in the leg, detonated a smoke grenade in his home, and unleashed a barrage of bullets with an assault rifle, cops said.

Thirty-eight-year-old Garland Tyree first barricaded himself inside his home early Friday morning when a group of NYPD officers and US Marshals tried to arrest him on a federal warrant for violating the terms of his probation. After police entered the home, Tyree set off a smoke grenade, which drove them out.

When the New York Fire Department's Lieutenant James Hayes went inside to investigate the source of the smoke, Tyree fired at him, striking him twice. Hayes was transported to a local hospital and is currently in stable condition, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro told reporters. This was the first shooting of an NYC firefighter in the line of duty in over two decades.

An hours-long standoff followed during which hostage negotiators tried and failed to lure out Tyree, who spoke on the phone to DNAInfo and also posted an eerie forecast of his own demise on Facebook. He eventually emerged in a bulletproof vest and unloaded dozens of rounds from an AK-47, shooting police cars and houses before cops returned fire and killed him.

Prior his death, Tyree had been arrested 18 times, and was suspected by the FBI to have risen to the rank of Godfather in the Bloods' local Nine Trey Gang.

Photos by Meredith Jenks

Related: Powdered Alcohol Got Me Drunk the Worst Way Possible

Looks like teenagers in New York will just have keep sneaking alcohol from their parents' liquor cabinets the old-fashioned way.

On Friday, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation that outlaws the sale of powdered alcohol—a.k.a. Palcohol—in the state of New York. Even though the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved food labels for Palcohol back in March, New York is joining roughly half the states in the Union in outlawing the powdered booze.

The New York law, which prohibits the sale of any "powdered or crystalline alcohol products," deems them "dangerous and completely unnecessary items." The legislation also argues that in its powdered form, alcohol is easily concealed, making it dangerously simple for underaged kids to get their hands on it and smuggle the stuff into venues where drinking is prohibited. The stealth aspect also worried lawmakers concerned about teens measuring out appropriate doses—which has been an issue in states like Colorado, where marijuana edibles are all over the place.

One packet of Palcohol, which comes in five flavors—including rum, vodka, and a "powderita" flavor—is equal to about one shot of liquid alcohol when mixed with water. While supporters of the product argue that it has potential applications in medicine and select outdoor activities, manufacturers have faced an uphill battle finding shelf space in commercial stores.

"I've got 10,000 records here," Tony Mignone boasted, as he surveyed the crates of vinyl in their faded cardboard sleeves under the shadowy light of Fifth Avenue Record and Tape. A former mailman, Tony opened up his store in his native Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1972. He had dreamed of running a record shop since he was a kid, collecting the latest 45s from the country and western greats of the era. Their names still come rolling off his tongue—"Webb Pierce, Hank Snow, Slim Whitman..."—though a stroke has given his Brooklyn accent a bit of a slur. Now, he tells me, it's too expensive to continue operating the shop.

"Yuppies took over Fifth Avenue," he said, describing how the once-working-class neighborhood has changed. Forty-three years ago, Tony's rent was $250 a month. Today it's $3,300. "Imagine if that's what I had to pay now?" he asked with a rueful smile. Since his lease expired last year he's been renting his storefront on a month-by-month basis. Unable to afford to keep up with costs he's put his entire stock up on Craigslist, and the future does not seem bright. "I wanted to sell the store but I don't have a lease," he told me.

Shops like Tony's are endangered habitats in New York City.

"I've lost a hundred places that I love," Josh Alan Friedman, author of Tales of Times Square, a look back at the days when 42nd Street was full of hustlers and weirdos. "Why couldn't they leave a few blocks alone and let it be a red light district?" He insisted he isn't "mourning the old days of graffiti and crime." Rather, it's places like Cafe Edison that he misses most. Opened by Holocaust survivors from Poland in 1980, the diner shut its doors last fall despite a campaign by patrons to rescue it from plans by the building's owners, the Edison Hotel, to turn the space into a upscale restaurant.

"I'd been going there since it opened 35 years ago," said Friedman. "It was the only restaurant left in Times Square for local folks where you could sit down and talk for two or three hours with a group of friends over a pot of coffee."

"There are a lot of people who think, Oh, it's the real-estate market, there's nothing that can be done. No, there are things we can do." –Jeremiah Moss

Friedman, who now lives in Texas, is far from the only person mourning the increasing homogenization and gentrification of New York. In recent years a number of activists, writers, and general busybodies have begun calling attention to the ways rising rents have not just squeezed out poor minority populations from neighborhoods they've traditionally occupied, but also forced out the greasy spoons, dives, and dusty shops which have traditionally given this city its character. Last year, Jeremiah Moss, the pseudonymous author of the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, put a list of potentially at-risk established establishments; since then, several of them have been forced to close by circumstance or edged closer to shutting down.

Moss, who got attention in major publications this spring for his anti-gentrification crusade, has also begun crowdsourcing video testimonials from New Yorkers documenting their beloved mom-and-pop operations that are under threat of closure. That's part of the Save NYC campaign he launched this year in the hope of pressuring the City Council to finally pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act (SBJSA), a bill that has been a kind of unattainable holy grail for activists for three decades.

Though the complexities of lease regulation seem like an unlikely topic to inspire much passion, in New York City at least these debates can become extremely heated.

"For a business to last 100 years in New York, even 50 years, is probably harder than lasting two millennia in Damascus or Constantinople," Josh Friedman pontificated in a video at the SaveNYC.nyc website that rivals Spike Lee's famous anti-gentrification monologue in its vitriol. "So when I say they've destroyed New York's old stores, bars, restaurants, hangouts, I'm saying the real estate market has destroyed the sacred watering holes and gathering places of the 20th century."

Mercantile rents in America's urban centers are on the rise nationally, up 4 percent since 2011, but in New York City, where space is finite and every square inch comes with a price tag, they have risen astronomically. In Manhattan, the average retail rents have gone from $103 to $153 per square foot rent is 34 percent higher than it was ten years ago, according to the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY). As small businesses have been priced out, chains have moved in. There were 7,473 national chain locations in New York City in 2014, the Center of Urban Futures noted in it's annual "State of the Chains" report, and these franchises were expanding at a rate five times that of the previous year.

Big retailers and rising real estate prices aren't just erasing the hideouts of a bygone bohemian New York. The city lost 75 bodegas (local slang for "corner store," basically) last year and hundreds more of these predominately minority-run businesses are under threat of closure. Facing a near 150 percent rent hike when its lease expired in June, Jesse's Deli, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, began posting signs for "Artisanal Roach Bombs" at $15.99 and "Dickson's Farm Condoms" for $24.99 in its windows—a pointed jab at the gentrification process pricing them out.

While Moss admits that New York City is always in flux, he argues that it is currently undergoing a process he calls hyper-gentrification and defined in a lengthy blog post last year:

What I and many New Yorkers had become aware of was not the birth of a new process, but its full flowering. A new form of gentrification had been at work for years by that time—planted in the 1980s, tended and protected through the 1990s, it was now blossoming into a terrible, unstoppable garden of choking vines. Its presence, previously felt, was now unmistakably apparent. To mix metaphors, it was like we were witnessing the sudden, dramatic collapse of an ancient glacier after years of quiet, steady melting. All around us, the great city crumbled.

"We're getting a city filled with this incredibly boring monoculture," Moss told VICE. "There are a lot of people feeling this crisis we have in the city but they think, Oh it's the real estate market, there's nothing that can be done. No, there are things we can do."

Moss said SBJSA will help reverse this trend by leveling the playing field between landlords and the business owners who rent from them. Similar to residential rent stabilization laws, it would give commercial tenants the option to automatically renew leases for up to ten years once they expire and, when disputes over lease negotiations arise, contains a legal mechanism that sends both parties into into binding arbitration, making it harder for landlords to raise rents.

Take a walk through this dying city with Karl Ove Knaussgaard:

SBJSA is almost as old as some of the establishments it could help save. It was first proposed in 1986 but has languished ever since, due, Moss insists, to opposition from the real estate lobby.(REBNY and its members spent $43.9 million on local and statewide candidates between 2005 and the most recent citywide elections in 2013, according to the government watchdog group Common Cause.)

REBNY did not respond to inquiries from VICE, but the board's president, Steve Spinola, told the New York Post's Lois Weiss last that SBJSA would "send a terrible message to the business community," is beyond the power the City Council to enforce, and if enacted would be mired in legal challenges—presumably from REBNY. Weiss herself likened the bill to communism.

"We don't know what people are going to love in the future. But I bet it won't be a chain store." –Josh Friedman

Other critics of SBJSA, such as Crain's New York's Greg David, have cautioned the legislation will eliminate the incentive small businesses have to risk expanding to larger locations and would depress real estate values, in turn shrinking the city's budget because property tax revenues would shrink. David also contends SBJSA would make it harder for businesses to come to New York—and not all new chain stores are necessarily evil. "Does anyone really think New York would be a better place without Home Depot or Target or Whole Foods?" he asked in one 2010 article.

Manhattan Borough president Gale Breweropposes SBJSA, citing concerns that it could infringe on property rights and arguing that since the bill applies to all commercial tenants it could just as easily give large retail chains squatters rights as it would preserve local businesses. She's instead proposed less sweeping she contends are more practical, like instituting a one-year lease extension with a maximum 15 percent rent hike when tenants and landlords fail to reach a renewal agreement.

But not all business interests oppose the SBJSA. The idea is supported by members of the New York City chapter of the Real Estate Investors Association, which unlike REBNY represents small building owners and landlords rather than large corporate developers.

"We want to be responsible," Paul Bodley, who serves on the trade organization's advisory board, told VICE. "We're concerned with longevity. If we keep raising the rent we're eventually going to price out the people who would actually rent our properties. We'll price ourselves out of competition. That's the catch-22. When you have a big-box tenant whose corporate office is in another part of the country you loose that neighborhood flavor. You don't establish that back-and-forth relationship you have with a small business in the neighborhood. That's what SBJSA is trying to preserve."

According to Take Back NYC, a group which is circulating an online petition in support of SBJSA, small businesses employ some 185,000 New Yorkers.

Of course, when mom-and-pop stores and restaurants close, it's not always the fault of a tyrannical landlord—keeping a small business alive is a difficult art.

For instance, B&H Dairy Kosher Restaurant, a 73-year-old institution in Manhattan, was closed for months after failing a gas inspection following a massive explosion in the neighborhood. It fired up its kitchen again Friday, but if patrons hadn't raised nearly $50,000 online to pay its expenses while its doors were locked, it could have become another abandoned New York landmark.

In other cases, small businesses actually own the roofs over their heads, meaning that gentrification can be at least a financial boon for them. Pepe Montero, who inherited Montero Bar and Grill from his parents, signed an agreement with Brick Real Estate and his neighbors this summer to sell the old longshoremen's haunt on Atlantic Avenue for a collective $56 million.

But while Friedman and other anti-gentrification advocates generally mourn the loss of each hole in the wall bar or restaurant, they're seemingly more concerned about the future—without SBJSA, they say, there won't be any way to stop New York from turning into a giant strip mall.

"We don't know what little shop just opened in Brooklyn that in 40 years will be an iconic place," Friedman told me. "We don't know what people are going to love in the future. But I bet it won't be a chain store."

Follow Peter on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user gageskidmore

The race for the Republican nomination has been a wild source of entertainment (and consistent source of terror) over the past months—and the fun is just getting started. There's a reason they call it the Grand Ol' Party! As it stands, there's a real possibility that we're going to have a Republican president next year; and while we're pretty sure it won't be Donald Trump, at this point, anything could happen. So, in anticipation of what's sure to be an emotional roller coaster of an election season—replete with all the name-calling, racial slurs, sexist gaffs, and cold hard cash that we've come to associate with American politics—VICE decided to ask our international offices what they think about the Republican Party.

COLOMBIA

The Terminator: the epitome of the Republican Party. Image via Hemdale Film Corporation

What can you say about the political party that gotThe Terminator elected governor of the richest state in the second richest country in the world?

The thing about Republicans is they remind me of that bigot uncle we all have but can't manage to hate as much as we feel obliged to. Yes, their stances on issues like immigration and foreign policy is kind of a slap in the face to all of us south of the Rio Grande, but they are also a great reality check, especially for us millennials.

The Republican Party reminds us that not everyone is down with gay marriage, open borders, legalization of drugs, and a redistribution of wealth. And in a world where most conversations with your liberal "we are the 99%'' friends end in an agreement about how much the current world order sucks and how corporations, the military, and "The Man" are to blame for it all, the Republican's "let Uncle Sam and the free market handle it" agenda is a welcome challenge.

Republicans are also a great example of what being a world power really means: I mean, what's the point of getting up there if you're not going to remind the rest of the world that you've got them by the balls from time to time?

GERMANY

Image via Comedy Central

The Republican Party is a bit tricky. For us, it stands for a lot of things that many Germans loathe about the US: moronic gun laws, homophobia, and a foreign policy that combines heavy weaponry, extreme paranoia, and a blissful ignorance of what people in other countries actually think. A lot of the time, the Republican Party reminds us of Eric Cartman, and we would not like to live in a country run by Eric Cartman. Sometimes it's actually quite hard to understand why you'd even need a Republican Party when even your Democrats are fans of the downright scary NSA surveillance program, support fracking, and think assassinating people in foreign countries with drones is cool.

On the other hand, the Republicans also stand for a lot of things that are great about the US: corn dogs, getting drunk, and shooting guns in the woods (I know this directly contradicts what I said earlier about the gun laws, but it does sound really fun), big pickup trucks, and Britney Spears. At least, I hope that's what they stand for. Those things certainly sound more Republican than Democrat.

But yeah, mostly, the Republican Party seems completely nuts from where we stand. Like, whenever someone says something really wacky, misogynist or dangerous, it's either a Republican politician or Putin.

UNITED KINGDOM

Republicans love this shit. Photo via Flickr user Zack Repko

The Republican Party is one of those organizations that never fails to reaffirm my identity as a European lefty. If I ever feel my faith in socialized healthcare, economic redistribution, or exotic brands of hummus weakening, I know that all I have to do is read about the latest Republican plan to give assault weapons to teachers or privatize American oxygen and I'll be OK again.

The party didn't always seem quite as insane as it does now. When I was growing up, we looked across the Atlantic and saw country club Republicans: old white guys who didn't like paying taxes, called their wives "Mother," and locked up minorities "for their own good." They were a bit like the Conservatives we had then. Now it seems as though those guys are moderates staring in open-mouthed disbelief at an army of shock jocks, Christian fundamentalists, and oil company stooges.

Perhaps in Britain we've always been comforted by the thought that our right-wing guys aren't quite as right wing as your right-wing guys. And as our right-wing guys have become more right wing, so too have your right-wing guys, and so the balance is preserved. The emergence of Donald Trump somehow seems like the inevitable next step in this process. The Republicans may as well have someone who doesn't believe government can or should do anything as their leader. Does the party even care about the presidency anymore? Or are they just happy to win Congress and fuck shit up from there?

I once went—for this magazine—to see Trump talk alongside motivational guru Tony Robbins. One of his key lines was: "I always hang around with people who aren't successful because it makes me feel better." The rest of the show was full of lazy platitudes and clichés about how to exploit people to make money. The whole thing lasted about an hour before he hopped back on a private jet with a fat check in his pocket. It seems like that's what the Republican Party has become: a nightmare collection of lazy, thieving bastards who just want to cash the check and clock out. Our Conservatives aren't too dissimilar, to be honest. It almost makes me miss George W. Bush. But then again, it's probably all his fault.

NETHERLANDS

Just some old white guys chattin' about ovaries. Photo via Flickr user donkeyhoty

The Republican Party is like that racist, sexist uncle you see three times a year at family gatherings—you expect him to turn polite conversation about that new apple pie recipe your mom tried out into a rant about how civilization as we know it is going to end "because IMMIGRANTS," but it never fails to shock you when it actually happens.

Except the Republican Party is not your sweaty uncle, but half of your governing body.

It's a delight to see the GOP struggling to appear sane while all the individual crazies try to out-crazy each other in its name. But, all glee aside, why, for the love of all that is holy are you people still letting all these old white guys decide on what women get to do with their uteruses? There is no excuse. Please get it together and either ignore them, or start policing their penises. Honestly, these people wouldn't recognise a uterus if it slapped them in the face and told them it was pregnant. They aren't equipped to make any decisions on the matter by themselves.

The problem isn't the Republicans though, it's your two-party system. If there's only two options, it's not really a choice. You can't choose between your racist uncle and your whiny, ailing aunt. The more options the better. Having a system with more parties weeds out the worst kind of crazy, because people have to work together to make things happen. It's amazing. You should try it.

ROMANIA

Photo via Flickr user oddsock

American politics is probably the last thing Romanians care about, but that doesn't mean Romanians don't know who Donald Trump is. As a matter of fact, we had our own Trump for a while. His name is Gigi Becali. He used to be a shepherd, then he got rich, bought his own political party, and was even chosen as a European MP. And, just like Trump, he also used to make stupid jokes and idiotic remarks. The main difference is that Becali went to jail for corruption.

Fortunately for us, as popular as Becali was, he never reached a popularity rating as far as 24 percent, as Trump did a month ago, so we're kinda worried. Populism is a menace to a democracy and we learned this firsthand. Remember, we had communism, we know what propaganda, false promises, and charismatic idiots look like. If you want a better example, look at Russia. They have Putin, the mother and father of all populists nowadays. Plus, he's insane.

On a serious note, looking at the geostrategic landscape and Romania being one of Russia's targets—especially because we're a NATO member, a US-trusted partner, and one of the countries that host the anti-missile defense shield—you have to recognize one fact: the Republicans are the bellicose ones in American politics.

Look back at history. During the Obama-McCain race, the latter couldn't wait to go to war. Before him, another Republican, George Bush Jr., went to war with Iraq and got Saddam Hussein killed. His father, George Bush Sr., had his own fight with Hussein, while his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan also had his own issues in the Middle East. Plus, he bombed the hell out of Libya.

With regards to the Russian menace, we hope you don't get Trump as president and we also hope Jeb Bush would not be an exponent of his family legacy unless it's really, really needed. Hopefully, whoever the next American president will be, he'll be wise enough to act responsibly and try to keep everyone safe. A war with a mad Russian president is the last thing the world needs today.

CANADA

Tea Party picketers. Photo via Flickr user calistan

What do people outside America think of the hulking beast that is the Republican Party? Obviously, the quick and easy (and accurate!) response is that the party's dedication to opposing science and logic would be laughable if it weren't so disastrous, and that sometimes someone in the GOP says something so ludicrous that it does, for a brief moment, become funny again.

But it's impossible to have just one opinion about the Republican Party. Decades of faux-populist and real-bigoted campaign strategies have empowered the most extreme wings of the party to the point that they are now capable of bending the party proper to their will, as the Tea Party movement demonstrated. For the moment, Donald Trump is a legitimate presidential candidate who will push out any number of more qualified candidates before he finally fizzles out, and his main appeal is his anti-establishment posturing. During the recent GOP candidates' debate, Marco Rubio was forced to say he doesn't support a rape-or-incest exception for abortion bans, which is contrary to his former position.

The institution of the Republican Party is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. It's just a bunch of politicians being handed truckloads of cash and encouraged by both donors and voters to engage in a mad dash to the bottom, espousing ever more radical anti-immigrant, anti-woman, racist, just-plain-nonsense opinions and policies. It looks like the most powerful Republican Party structure is Fox News, and even that is falling apart. Trump won his brief feud with Fox CEO Roger Ailes, refusing to apologize for offensive remarks about Fox correspondent Megyn Kelly.

The Republican Party is, in short, a distillation of everything that's wrong with American politics: an obsession with individualism that borders on religious zealotry, obscene amounts of money being allowed to influence people and policy without accountability, and the most powerful people and groups holding tight to baffling persecution complexes.

Good luck with all that, though.

MEXICO

Photo via Flickr user gageskidmore

In Mexico, US politics tend to be judged through the prism of what Mexican politics mean to Mexican citizens. Republicans and Democrats are summarized and usually wrongfully understood based on which tends to be on the left, center, or right political wing. For Mexicans, Republicans are almost always identified with what we call the right: nationalism, liberal economics, opposition to a welfare state and equal sexual rights, supported by religious groups. But what distinguishes American Republicans from the right in Mexico is that the GOP is mainly a white and Protestant homogenous group that will always fight for their status quo, at any cost. Even if this cost is denying international realities that have already happened.

Take immigration, for example, and the Republicans' recurrent (frankly racist) response, like Donald's recent episode and what he thinks of us a nation. It's worrying that this is probably a result of a programmed agenda to win the vote of a large part of the electorate in the US. That means there are actually people who think it's a good strategy to deny a natural economic process with the country's second most important economic partner, the country that supports the largest increase of jobs inside the US associated with exports.

AUSTRALIA

Photo via Flickr user 401K2012

It might not be totally accurate anymore, but to non-Yanks, America still stands for guns, big cars, tycoons, trailer parks, fast food, and not believing in evolution. And to us, these are all Republican things. The GOP seems to represent America much more than the democrats ever could. Everything over there exists either because or in spite of them. To hate republicans therefore feels like hating America, and that's the opposite of what we want to do. But your crazy conservatives don't make it easy.

I guess the most confounding thing about Republicans is their stance on guns. We really don't get the right to bear arms argument. Surely the right to not get shot takes precedence. People can have guns in Australia, they just can't walk around with them and I believe we have fewer people being killed with them because of that.

Also, why do poor people love Republican presidents so much? Don't they know that the poor are the first people to get screwed by rich conservatives acting in their own interests? What kind of person would try and vote themselves out of affordable healthcare and education or improvements to minimum wage? That's insane.

To be fair, we have conservatives here too and one of them is running the country as we speak. It sucks.

SERBIA

Good ol' Ronny. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In the same way as our feelings for America seem to be a mixture of love and hate, the way we see the Republicans goes from the party we like to loath to the one we adore: It is a bunch of old geeks in cashmere sweaters who mysteriously decide on New World Order and global dominance. But hey, it was not them who sent warplanes and bombs on us, it was Clinton, that Democrat. The Republicans are all family-loving and respect traditional values, which is great when confronted with so much sin and dirt. Reagan was a two-bit actor, a proof that anyone can become a president, but he did help "tear down this (Berlin) wall."

It was also the Republican administration (Reagan's and George Bush Senior's) that had their hands and brains in dissolving the former Yugoslavia. We like the Republicans' toughness and obsession with military, but not when it's our skin in question.

But if Donald Trump gets the nomination, we have several tips for you. We had our own tycoon presidential candidate, multimillionaire Bogoljub Karic, who gained stars with his freaky slogan "I will ban imports of lettuce," which no one understood, but as he was incredibly rich, he had to know something, didn't he? But we can proudly say that he has a better haircut.

When I die I want my body used as fertilizer for cannabis so my friends can smoke me. Please plant me in a calming Indica plant so I may reduce the anxiety I caused while I was alive: Sophie Saint Kush. Plus, it'd be good for the environment. Green funerals are on the rise as an environmentally-conscious generation starts thinking about our wills. And with good reason: Traditional burial methods can take a serious toll on Mother Earth.

"Modern burial—by which I mean the burial of an embalmed body in a metal casket, which is then set into a concrete burial vault, essentially the standard funeral home send off—consumes vast amounts of resources and leaves a trail of environmental damage in its wake," Mark Harris, former environmental columnist for the Los Angeles Times, author of the book on green burial Grave Matters, and co-founder of Green Meadow Natural Burial Ground, told VICE. "A typical 10-acre cemetery contains enough coffin wood to build more than 40 homes and enough toxic embalming fluid to fill a small backyard swimming pool. Additionally, every year we divert enough concrete to burial vaults to create a two-lane highway running halfway across the country, and enough metal for caskets to annually rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge. Given those statistics, I've come to see cemeteries less as bucolic resting grounds for the dead than as landfills of largely non-biodegradable and hazardous materials."

"Green burials are a healthy start to nipping our pollution issues in the bud. Also, you save money on not purchasing a casket or a casket," said Amber Carvaly, a mortician and family advocate who has spent the last year helping build Undertaking LA, an alternative funeral service in Los Angeles.

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Not to mention, embalming is disgusting. "During the conventional embalming process that happens in the United States every day, spiked caps are placed in the eyes to keep them closed, mouths are wired shut, blood and abdominal cavities are vacuumed out and all (I mean ALL) holes get plugged up with cotton to prevent "leakage," Theresa Purcell, natural burial advocate and former president of the Trust for Natural Legacies, told VICE. "People spend so much money on these air tight Tupperware-like caskets trying so hard to keep nature out, but in that type of environment you are trapping the body with anaerobic bacteria and as the body naturally decomposes, gasses are released. The body then bloats and putrefies, sometimes causing the coffin to explode!"

Yikes. In search of a better way of decaying, VICE sought out some more peaceful, planet-friendly alternatives to exploding in a toxin-filled casket. (Some of our ideas were better than others.)

Use your body as plant fertilizer

"I think this is a great idea," said Carvaly. "If you cremate your body all that is left is dry calcium phosphates, salts of sodium and potassium. It's not really much in the way of nutrients. Once you are cremated you burn off most of what would be beneficial. However, you can choose a green burial and your body will absolutely benefit the surrounding plants and animals." Some environmentally-friendly companies are already capitalizing on this idea. "I would definitely use a "tree urn" a new way that your body can literally help grow a forest," said Albe Zakes, Global VP of Communications for recycling company TerraCycle and co-author of Make Garbage Great: The Terracycle Family Guide to a Zero-Waste Lifestyle. "It's much greener than being pumped full of formaldehyde and stuffed into a wood box treated with even more chemicals," he told VICE. "Plus who knows if reincarnation actually exists, but you know for sure you will live on as a tree, providing shade, purifying the air and water, and maybe even making a home for a nice bird family!" Of my weed idea, Theresa reminds me: "How dank your death gets depends on if you can legally grow weed in your area."

Photo via Flickr user Deanna Ward

Get cremated and mixed into tattoo ink

What if your "I heart Mom" tattoo could actually contain your dead mom? "It's been requested before. It's a symbolic gesture," tattoo artist JK5 told VICE. Some tattoo-lovers hope to have their cremated ashes mixed with tattoo ink so their loved ones can be tattooed with their body. "I've heard of this and it sounds awesome! I don't personally know if this increases the risk of infection or anything like that, but if you can find an artist that can do it safely I say go for it," says Purcell. Unfortunately, cremation may not actually be so green after all. "Cremation is a valuable option and absolutely better for the environment than modern burial practices, but the process of cremation requires a significant amount of non-renewable energy and emits toxins, like mercury, into our atmosphere. Still, it's a good choice for you and yours. Just not as great for the environment as sometimes portrayed."

Freeze-dry yourself like astronaut food

A choice better than cremation is promession. I learned about this method from my friend Grant, who once took me on a date in a cemetery. Promession is freeze drying—you more or less turn your body into astronaut food. "Promession rules," agreed Purcell. "I first found out about this idea by reading STIFF by Mary Roach. Promession is the process of freeze-drying a body with liquid nitrogen and exposing it to ultrasonic vibrations until it disintegrates into particles and you are left with a dry powder about 30% of the original weight. Basically a form of compost that's way more environmentally friendly than conventional burial." Unfortunately, promession is not yet legal in the United States.

Use yourself as kitty litter

My friend Brooke wants to be cremated and used as kitty litter. "To achieve this you would need to fill out a Disposition of Cremated Remains form with your funeral home/crematory that says you plan on taking the cremated remains home and then doing NOTHING with them," advises Carvaly. "Then you can do whatever you want with them after that. Wink wink. Legally you cannot put the remains in the litter, but... I doubt you'll ever get caught."

Photo by Cody Orrell for Broadly

Get turned into a nice piece of jewelry

If human bones are already being made into art, why not make a cameo in the afterlife as bone jewelry? "My dream would be that when my time was drawing to a close I could go out into the woods, curl up under the trees, and let nature take it from there," says bone jeweler Kaya Tinsman. "If I could find an artist or jeweler familiar with cleaning bones whose work I felt a connection to, I would love to have my bones used as art as a memento mori for loved ones left behind. Unfortunately, all of this is highly illegal right now." The idea of "mourning jewelry" is one that goes back centuries. "For hundreds of years now the hair of deceased loved ones have been woven, twirled, and set behind a clear stone, such as quartz. I've thought about using my final living years making jewelry incorporating my own hair for the people I love," Tinsman said.

Mourning jewelry is similar to Aboriginal mortuary rites, Purcell's personal favorite burial ritual. "Bodies were placed on a raised platform, covered with leaves and branches, to decompose for months until just bones remained," Purcell explained. "Those bones were then painted with red ochre and placed in a cave or worn by their family members."

Get broken down into chemicals

One of the newest and coolest ways of body decomposition is alkaline hydrolysis. "This is where the body is placed in a chamber that is then filled with a mixture of water and lye. It is then heated to 160 °C, but at a high pressure, which prevents boiling," explained Carvaly. "The body is broken down into its chemical components (amino acids, peptides, salt, sugar) in liquid form. The process takes about three hours. This is not legal in all states yet but I am sure that one day it will be."

Donate your body to necrophilia...?

Some people would rather go out with a bang. My friend Marty says he wants his body donated to a necrophiliac. Would that work? "Oddly enough this would be the only one that would be difficult in accomplishing," said Carvaly. "You could temporarily donate it, but you would really need to make sure that whoever has control over your body at the end of your life is onboard with it. It's likely they could temporarily let your favorite necrophiliac have a go and then give the body back. Because at some point the state needs to know where that dead body went. I don't really know of any bodies that slipped through the cracks and were never buried, cremated, or donated to science." None of the death babes were into this idea. "Yeah, no. Sorry, Marty," says Purcell. "Gonna have to try and visit the bone zone while you're still alive."

For more information about funeral rights and options visit the Funeral Consumers Alliance and the Green Burial Council.

Follow Sophie on Twitter.

Current methods for improving your mood are wildly inefficient. Recreational drugs can make you crazy, pharmaceuticals can erase your personality and damage your organs. Sugar and alcohol make you fat and depressed. Caffeine stresses you out, and cigarettes fill your lungs with death. We don't welcome these side effects, but we deal with them because these substances have the potential to alter our emotional thermostat.

It would be so much easier if we could bypass the body altogether and go straight to the source: Our brain. What if there were a better way than shoving something in our mouth, forcing it to travel all over our bloodstream, and blindly showering our brains with thousands of chemicals? What if we could, with the push of a button, make microscopic alterations of a few neurons, causing the happy chemicals to ring out in a jackpot celebration, with no side effects? Would we be ready to handle such complete control over our emotional reality?

The possibilities of direct brain alteration are no longer the realm of dystopian novelists. A recent collaboration between researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, University of Illinois, and University of Colorado Boulder has resulted in the creation of a brain implant as small as a human hair that can alter a subject's brain chemistry via wireless remote control.

"We were able to engage the motor circuitry and reward circuitry [of a lab mouse]," explained Michael Bruchas, Associate Professor of Neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine, in an interview with VICE. "Going forward, we're definitely interested in applications related to depression and anxiety, and learning more about how the brain is encoding information."

Bruchas is very excited about the research potential of the device. In the past, electroshock therapy stimulated large portions of the brain; oral pharmaceuticals do much the same. The researchers' creation uses a combination of light stimulation and direct application of pharmaceuticals into the brain. Bruchas succeeded with this method in a 2013 study, but only when the test subject was strapped into a machine. Now that a wireless method has been developed, the subject can be observed in all kinds of activities while its brain chemistry is being altered.

"Our brains are full of wires, like a Jackson Pollock painting, and it's been hard to tease out the wiring diagram of the brain [observing patients on drugs via the stomach]," Bruchas told VICE. With this new method, "we can target specific cells, turning them off and on, and so we're able to really see how this is all wired up."

You could create your own reality, instead of having your emotions be subject to the external world around you. This, essentially, is the essence of addiction.

In addition to its potential to teach us volumes about how the brain works, Bruchas is optimistic that, years down the road, this direct access to brain networks could be used to treat epilepsy, mental illness, chronic pain, and brain cancer with few to no side effects.

Yet as with most forms of medical research involving the brain's pleasure center, the potential for abuse from patients—and exploitation of that abuse from big business—is incredibly high.

Anyone with even the most casual sci-fi imagination can conjure up some pretty nefarious uses for a brain implant that controls your body and emotions. Films like Universal Soldier, The Matrix, and The Manchurian Candidate have given us a healthy fear of authoritarian biotechnology. And pulp fiction like Larry Niven's Known Space stories—where addicts known as "wireheads" starve to death when they're able to control their own neural pleasure centers—illustrate the danger of having too much access to our feel-good chemistry.

"That's an important point with any technology, but particularly with technology that engages with biology," Bruchas cautioned. "We consider and discuss ethical issues all the time. It's important to remember that there are still a lot of steps that need to take place before this technology could be put into a human. If it is to go into humans, we see it as something that can deliver discrete drugs to a diseased portion of the brain. So we're looking at it as leading to very positive medicinal benefits."

Compared to other parts of the body, we know relatively little about the human brain, which is the most complex structure in the known universe.

In the last few years the field of neuro-prosthetics has seen some very promising advances, including hearing aids that beam audio signals directly into the auditory nerve, with no need of the ear, allowing a person to receive phone calls or listen to MP3 files within their own brain circuits.

"Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago," The Wall Street Journal argued last year, in a story that envisioned a future where brain implants allowed humans to absorb libraries of information at the touch of a button. The Journal cautioned that those who mastered the new technology might "outperform others in the everyday contest for jobs and mates, in science, on the athletic field and in armed conflict."

There are ethical arguments over whether it is "right" for a person to be able to learn French or become an expert golfer by simply uploading a file into their heads, or if they should have to earn it via effort and determination. But when it comes to being entrusted with your own emotional thermostat, there is more than just right and wrong to consider.

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Knowing what we do about our difficulties handling substances like sugar, booze, drugs, or experiences like sex or television, in spite of all the problems that come with them, how much trouble could we get into when there isn't the disincentive of side effects?

Humans learn through experience. As children, our emotions explode wildly, but most of us eventually learn to control our behavior by regulating those emotions, accepting momentary discomfort in exchange for meeting long term goals (i.e., resisting the impulse to punch your boss in the face or reveal how much you like someone on the first date).

This regulation is performed by an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which acts as the grown-up of your thought process, explaining to the more impulsive, childish characters in your head why you should do this and not that.

But if, many years down the road, we were able to artificially regulate our emotions, the prefrontal cortex could potentially stop being an influence on our thought process, and therefore stop growing, or begin shrinking. After all, if there's no consequence for our actions ("feeling bad" about doing wrong), our behavior could change drastically. We'd be dependent on the device to regulate our emotions, and become dangerous children if it ever malfunctioned.

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Versions of this nightmare have played out in studies where patients are given a hand-held dial that adjusts stimulating electrodes within their brain. In 1986, a 48-year-old woman experienced "erotic sensations" from an electrode in her thalamus, and developed "compulsive use of the stimulator."

"At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments," the authors of the study wrote.

When the reward systems of our brain become divorced from the actions they're intended to inspire (food, sex, sleep, personal accomplishments), the incentive to go out and do anything would likely disappear. You could create your own reality, instead of having your emotions be subject to the external world around you. This, essentially, is the essence of addiction.

Bruchas and his collaborators have nothing but the most altruistic of intentions in mind when it comes to their work, and their device may do a world of good in treating disease and furthering our understanding of the human brain. But like nuclear power, once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't control the intentions of everyone who uses your invention, and it's easy to imagine someone seeing the extreme money-making potential of a device that allowed us sophisticated access to our own neurological reward systems.

"Technology in the wrong hands always has potentially negative consequences," Bruchas said.

It's possible the wrong hands may be our own.

Follow Josiah on Twitter.