There was a time when the release of a new Call of Duty multiplayer was a guarded affair. You could almost set your watch to the initial solo campaign reveal at the start of Microsoft's E3 conference, followed by playable multiplayer for those who could afford a trip to Gamescom. Everyone else simply had to wait until the inevitable November release to get to grips with Activision's latest.

Which is a bit odd in hindsight, don't you think? I mean, these games are 60FPS twitch shooters, with pacing firmly set to "lit rocket in the arse." Such speed demands stability, and as any seasoned Call of Duty player will tell you, the series has definitely suffered from glitches, lag issues, and questionable balancing over the years.

Many CoD players complain about lag and annually roll out the, "I shot him first, but he still killed me!" argument when, really, they were just shit. But as a regular attendee of Activision's franchise, I've definitely seen some questionable banter going on server side, as well as some truly bizarre glitches. Is that what we're paying $60-plus a pop for?

Well, I'm a huge fan of the series and I've always found Treyarch, active on the series since 2005, to be the most responsive, transparent and caring developer involved with the franchise—although to be fair, the newer team at Sledgehammer handled last year's Advanced Warfare with great care and respect, too. For first-timers in a lead role (they co-developed 2011's Modern Warfare 3) they really did put together a solid online package that kicked Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Ghosts of 2013 to the kerb with ease.

But all said and done, David Vonderhaar and the Treyarch team in Santa Monica have consistently displayed limitless patience for listening to us complain about their labour of love, speak with us openly about bugs, roll out patches regularly, and quickly weed out the guff. Last week's beta for their newest CoD game, the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops III, was confidently a triumph, and further evidence that the developer can get things done like no other.

The game itself needs little introduction, and to uninitiated probably looks like "just another Call of Duty." That snarky, snide crap needs to stop though, really. Millions of gamers play annual franchises and happily shell out more cash for incremental updates—and not because they're idiots who don't know what Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or Monument Valley is. They just like coming back because it's dependable, like when you watch another season of Game of Thrones. But wait, isn't it largely the same characters, in the same world? See? It's not hard to understand why people love this series, and in Black Ops III Treyarch has given them lots to get excited about.

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First up, the balancing. For a stripped-back beta, this was almost without fault. Headshots now reliably kill on one hit, depending on range; it takes two melee hits to kill enemies; and player health is generous enough to allow enough time to retreat before reacting. In short, it doesn't feel like your average CoD game—it feels like a Black Ops game. Treyarch's balancing has proven peerless in this (sub-)series, and the same is true here.

The only things the studio could stand to tweak are maybe the Outrider character's Sparrow weapon, an explosive bow that can only be used once her skill is charged. It kills on one hit regardless of where it lands, and doesn't require the precision of, say, Modern Warfare's throwing knife. As such, it's perhaps a bit too over-powered for now, but Treyarch will likely address that in time—same goes for the Reaper's Scythe minigun, which shreds foes in milliseconds. That needs to be nerfed a little.

My list of complaints isn't much longer than that, not counting Treyarch's server issues, but reports have suggested it was a PSN problem rather than one with the game, so we can let it slide for now. The game itself just exudes its studio's penchant for the ludicrous—including the introduction of wall running.

What I really loved about the kinetic moves was that wall running isn't a core element like it was in Respawn's 2014 title Titanfall, but a sublime risk-reward mechanic that can go horribly wrong. One example is on African map Hunted, which features a long bridge over a valley. Now, you could run over it and use the toppled truck in the center as cover from all the enemy vantage points nearby, or you could wall run along the side of the bridge itself.

Not only does the bridge's structure keep you hidden, it's also a faster way to traverse to the other side. But one wrong move and your backside, and the rest of you, is falling down into that valley. You also leave yourself open to other people who have the same idea, because while you can shoot while wall running, it's less accurate than on solid ground. I love these parkour sections, because they remind me of shortcuts in racing games—faster yes, but with higher risk attached.

I even saw one guy, playing as a Reaper class, wall running pretty much the length of the map Combine by leaping from wall to wall down what is commonly a long-range corridor of death. But off he went, running and hopping over the whole battle without a care in the world. These moments make Black Ops III feel like Quake III: Arena or Unreal Tournament—which is a brilliant thing, indeed.

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'Call of Duty: Black Ops III' multiplayer reveal trailer

The "Pick Ten" load-out system Treyarch invented is back, and it's as brilliant and balanced as ever. The guns feel chunky and sensibly powered, while none of the score-streaks punish players too severely. Nightmares of Modern Warfare 2's AC-130 are firmly put to bed here, so rest assured: You won't be hiding from score rewards on most of the maps in Black Ops III.

But enough about how the game feels to play—I was also very impressed with how often Treyarch updated the beta while it was live. Initially, players could only access a few specialist classes and level up to 35, but then the extras started rolling out.

Each day of the beta, Treyarch would surprise participants with additions like perilous new snow map Stronghold, additional specialist classes like the grenade-launcher toting Battery, revolver-slinger Seraph, and the fully mechanized Reaper. Then, the icing on the cake came when the beta opened up to every PS4 player—pre-order or no pre-order. That was awesome.

Rather than keep the meat of multiplayer from fans until launch, Treyarch gave the loyal millions who pay to play a new Call of Duty each year access to the toy box early. Not only did their beta help tide players over until the game's November launch, but the data collected will help the developer sort out any anomalies or imperfections before its release proper.

That's the service and forward-thinking Treyarch has been getting increasingly good at since 2008's World at War, and has recently been knocking out of the park. When Black Ops III releases, we can look forward to one of the most stable CoD multiplayer set-ups to date, and something truly worth laying down the cash for, again. All that's left to hope for is that nobody from Lizard Squad reads this.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is released on November 6 for current- and previous-generation PlayStations and Xboxes, and PC. Jeff Goldblum is in its awesomely noir-looking Zombie mode, which is pretty rad, no?

Follow Dave on Twitter.

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Dan Bilzerian is one of those celebrities whose fame is difficult to comprehend. The best way to "get" him is to join his nearly 12 million million Instagram followers and dive into photos of the bearded, barrel-chested man debarking private jets with topless women, sitting on a throne next to a lion, diving into a pristine sea while a yacht can be seen in the background, and walking pensively through the woods with an assault rifle. And that's just in one scroll.

His feed is basically lifestyle porn for dudes who measure success in terms of women, weapons, and wealth—men who fantasize about racing fast cars, playing poker professionally, and working as a stuntman, all of which Bilzerian has done. He's the kind of guy who books himself a nightclub appearance and says it's part of his (fake) campaign for president. He's the kind of guy who claims to have partied so hard that he's had two heart attacks before the age of 35. He's the kind of guy who tries to trademark his own face—literally, he filled out an application to trademark "a portrait of Dan Bilzerian in a rectangular frame, with the stylized wording 'GOAT' located in the bottom portion of the rectangular frame below," on June 19.

Except that's not precisely accurate. The trademark was actually applied for by Blitz NV, a limited liability corporation (LLC) registered in Las Vegas. According to public records, Blitz NV, LLC, is owned by Goat Works, LLC, which is located in Montana and is owned by Dan Bilzerian (view a screen grab of the company's listing in Montana here). Which is to say that Dan Bilzerian is the kind of guy who owns a company that owns another company that trademarks its owner's owner's face.

Image via Dan Bilzerian's Instagram

In short, Bilzerian's public image is based on the fact that he has a lot of money and spends that money the way a badass 14-year-old might. In his world, or at least on his Instagram, first you get the money, then you get the things, then you get famous for having the things, then you turn that fame into more money. It is, essentially, a perpetual status machine that is probably very, very fun to own and operate.

But how did that perpetual status machine get jump-started?

If you ask Bilzerian, the short answer is poker. In a 2013 interview with the Daily Dot, Bilzerian said he started playing the game seriously in college. "I went broke after sophomore year, gambled away all my money, sold some guns, turned $750 into $10,000, flew to Vegas, turned ten thou into $187,000," he explained. That same year, the Daily Mail described him as a "poker champion worth $100m," a figure that has echoed around the internet ever since.

But there's at least one other reason Dan Bilzerian has made so much money: He had a ton of it to begin with. And that money wasn't exactly clean. Public records reveal that Dan Bilzerian has been a party to a byzantine network of corporations, companies, and other business formulations designed to protect the assets of his white-collar criminal father Paul Bilzerian from the government, and that the 34-year-old Instagram star has been a beneficiary of trusts established by his old man in the 90s—at a time when dad owed tens of millions of dollars to the feds.

The American dream, more or less, right?

Image via Dan Bilzerian's Instagram

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Dan Bilzerian acknowledged that he did inherit some money in a trust from his father—a corporate raider and felon who in 1993 was slapped with $62 million in fines by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraud and as of 2014 had only paid back $3.7 million of it. But Dan "decline[d] to say how much or what role it had in kick-starting his career." In that same interview, he claimed to have made $50 million from poker in a little over a year.

Speaking toALL IN magazine, Bilzerian—who, through a representative, declined to comment for this article—repeated this statistic. "If you look at poker as a sport like baseball," he said, "then I'd be maybe a minor league or high school ballplayer. But I play with T-ballers. If you look at poker like a business, I'd say I'm fuckin' Bill Gates. I've won over 50 million dollars playing poker. Who the fuck else has done that?"

Paul Bilzerian certainly didn't. The man made his fortune in the 1980s as a corporate raider, engaging in various tactics to artificially drive up the price of companies in which he had a stake and raking in a tremendous profit in the process. In 1989, he was convicted of fraud and served 13 months in federal prison.

In 1991, the elder Bilzerian filed for bankruptcy in the state of Florida. Two years later, the SEC told him he owed $62 million, which he claimed he couldn't pay because he didn't have any cash. Over the following two decades, the SEC has continued to chase Paul Bilzerian in a maddening game of financial and legal cat-and-mouse in which the mouse is always a step—or five—ahead. At its most extreme, this dance found Paul Bilzerian declaring bankruptcy and then going to jail for refusing to admit he was lying about his finances.

Deborah Meshulam, the receiver in the SEC's case against Paul Bilzerian, declined to comment on the status of the agency's quest to recover its money, and an SEC spokesperson also declined to comment, citing the fact that all investigations are private.

Still, as a Florida judge put it in 2001, "Between 1994 and 1999, Bilzerian transferred his substantial assets into a complex ownership structure of off-shore trusts and family-owned companies and partnerships. It is clear that he did this purposefully to insulate his assets from the reach of his creditors."

The web of assets that Paul Bilzerian wove in the 90s is extremely intricate. If you're inclined, you can look at numerous SEC filings, like this one or this one, which are complicated to the point of essentially being written in code. If you manage to decipher them, you can find stuff out like this: In 1995, Paul Bilzerian and his wife, Terri Steffen, established the Paul A. Bilzerian and Terri L. Steffen Family Trust of 1995, which was the limited partner of Overseas Holdings Limited Partnership, which was owned by another entity called Overseas Holding Company. Overseas Holdings Limited Partnership owned stake in Cimetrix, a Utah software company of which Bilzerian was once president. So Bilzerian could move the money he technically didn't have around, like when Overseas Holding Company "borrowed" $90,000 from Bicoastal Holding Company, whose sole stockholder was... Terri Steffen.

Meanwhile, Cimetrix's SEC filings note that in 1999, the company paid Paul Bilzerian a salary of $10,000 per month. He was paid through Bicoastal, and provided with a rent-free apartment, a monthly $1,500 allowance, as well as "reimbursement for reasonable travel expenses." Meanwhile, Bicoastal would often sell its shares of Cimetrix stock, generating funds for Steffen.

When I reached out to Cimetrix about the Bilzerian family's involvement in the company, a spokesperson told me they had no idea who Paul Bilzerian was.

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SEC filings also show that Paul Bilzerian established an irrevocable trust for his two children, Dan and his younger brother Adam (who is also a well-known poker player). In 2001, a judge noted that this trust was one of many means through which Paul "appear[ed] to be attempting to hide his assets." A Paul Bilzerian bankruptcy judgment, also from 2001, indicated that in 1997, the Bilzerian sons' trust was worth roughly $11.96 million in Cimetrix stock. Dan was entitled to half of that.

It's hard to definitively prove that Dan Bilzerian's trust fund is made up of money that belongs to the SEC, but all signs point to that.

"Transfers of assets to family members for well less than their market value have, for centuries, been marked as 'badges of fraud,'" said Brad Miller, a former US congressman from North Carolina who worked on financial reform in Congress after shit hit the fan in 2008. "When the guy who has all the assets is suddenly poor but his wife and kids are suddenly rich and he says, 'I don't have a pot to pee in, but I have a very generous wife and sons who will keep me from sleeping under a bridge,'" Miller explained, there's probably something sketchy going on. In this case, Paul Bilzerian was likely hiding money he didn't want to pay the SEC by giving some of it to his wife and putting the rest of it in a bunch of companies and trusts and whatnot.

Though Dan and Adam's trust was eventually forced to surrender roughly 30 percent of its assets to the SEC, in February 2014, a judge granted Dan Bilzerian permission to sell 1.7 million Cimetrix shares (view a screen grab of the court document's relevant information here). Shortly before that, he posted an Instagram photo with the caption, "I bought this house in Montana yesterday, I haven't seen it yet, but the pics look sick."

From April 2007 until this past January, Dan Bilzerian was listed as the president, secretary, treasurer, and director of Caligula Corporation, which was subject to administrative dissolution by the Florida Secretary of State in 2013 for failing to file an annual report. Caligula was formed in 2005 by Terri Steffen, who according to corporate filings, handed the role of principal over to Adam, the brother, in 2006. A year later, Adam gave the corporation to Dan. According to its Florida corporate profile, at no point did it belong to their father, Paul. However, a 2009 bankruptcy filing by National Gold Exchange—a company with which Paul Bilzerian did business—referred to Caligula as being "controlled by Paul Bilzerian." Meanwhile, a 2010 lawsuit filed by a former Bilzerian family lawyer against them alleged that by 2007, Caligula was "owned by Dan (but operated by [Paul] Bilzerian)." The implication was that Paul Bilzerian was using Caligula as a vessel through which he could safely conduct business.

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According to a ruling in a 2009 civil suit filed by the SEC against Paul Bilzerian, "[Paul] Bilzerian does appear to have some involvement in Caligula" and the agency had suspicions he'd spurred a lawsuit on Caligula's part against National Gold Exchange. This would have been a violation of a 2001 ruling barring Paul from taking legal action without the court's approval. Additionally, the judge noted that Caligula had listed "either Bilzerian's wife... or his sons Adam or Dan Bilzerian as the President, Secretary, Treasurer, and registered agents of the Caligula Corporation at various times."

During that time, Dan, Paul Bilzerian's former lawyer David Hammer, and Caligula entered into a partnership called Haircut Partners, LLP, in an attempt to collect debts from Bicoastal Holding Company, one of Paul Bilzerian's companies, by forcing it into involuntary bankruptcy. (Remember, they were one of the entities involved in Cimetrix.) In 2010, a judge wrote in a Florida court decision regarding Bilzerian's misuse of Haircut, "the fact that Haircut was formed by Bilzerian's son, his son's corporation, and his former attorney raises the Court's suspicion that Haircut is in active concert or participation with Bilzerian." When I called Hammer asking to discuss the Bilzerian family finances, he vehemently declined to comment.

It's alleged schemes like this—along with the trust and the vast, confusing interconnected network of Bilzerian financial affairs—that led one lawyer to write that the family's finances were "like an onion, the more layers you peel down, the more it stinks and makes you cry."

It should be said that the Bilzerian family's financial trickery is less a testament to some unique evil on their part and more to their taking advantage of the convoluted and often unenforceable rules and regulations governing the financial world. "Even with highly public figures, it's virtually impossible to figure out where their money is," said Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer who now works as a private financial investigator. "Wall Street has moved to an unprecedented level of secrecy."

But the role of Dan Bilzerian in this thicket of deception is important. It turns the myth of Dan Bilzerian, the self-made, independent playboy who lives the way you want to live, into just that: a myth.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

This article was originally published on VICE Netherlands

Brussels isn't known as the friendliest city in the Benelux. Yet photographer Ulrike Biets, who's been living there for the past 15 years, loves it so much she never wants to leave. "Brussels is the only 'big city' in Belgium," she says. "People tend to associate it with loneliness and a certain roughness, but if you spend some time here you discover that in reality there is a soft, quiet side to Brussels. "

Indeed, there's so much more to Brussels than boring European government buildings and technocrats. Just look at these photos of bleeding limbs, mating mice, and steaks in formaldehyde.

Photo via Instagram



Imagine suffering seizures and being told they are caused not by epilepsy or any of its cousins, but by your own mind. Imagine being paralyzed and told that all the tests prove clear and your brain and nerves are normal, that the only possible cause for your illness has come from your head. Imagine waking up blind, and no one knowing why.

It is these stories of psychosomatic illness that make up Suzanne O'Sullivan's new book, It's All in Your Head. A neurologist for 20 years, O'Sullivan looks at real-life cases of paralysis, blindness, seizures, and urinary tract infections that have occurred because of psychological causes, rather than physical.

Last week, O'Sullivan spoke about her book at the Edinburgh Book Festival where I had traveled to meet her. During her talk, it became apparent that she is a nervous speaker—her voice shook and she moved her hands a lot. Like tears, or laughter—the two physical responses to emotion we recognize best, and the ones O'Sullivan chose as chapter headings to bookend her case studies—shaking is a physiological response to a psychological trigger. It is not one that we doubt, or question the cause of.

But in the fields of diseases, or medical conditions without a clear root, the longing for answers is even greater. In looking for physiological answers for their ailments, patients with psychosomatic disorders are focusing their attention away from the true issue, says O'Sullivan. This is something she hopes to change with the help of other doctors. And she hopes that this change might begin with her book.


VICE: The title It's All in Your Head is rather controversial. What was behind it?
Suzanne O'Sullivan: It is controversial, but if you separate it into the title and the subtitle, which is "True Stories of Imaginary Illness," then I think it explains it a little more.

What we're trying to do now in neurology is to move away from the brain and mind as being separate things. They're all one organ, and they're all in your head. That's what is behind the book: the brain and mind are not separate.

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Yes, I see it symbolizes that, but also in being controversial does it lead people to pick it up?

I don't think we had any desire to make it controversial at all. You find these things out afterwards. Our feeling was, 'Brain, mind, it's all in your head.' I see it's been taken in a different way to that—I've had that reaction a lot, and it's very reasonable, but controversy was not our intention at all.


You've spoken about the stigma surrounding these illnesses—even within the medical community where practitioners fear labelling an illness as dissociative [the word doctors use for psychosomatic illnesses]. You recount one incident where you were sure a patient's seizure was dissociative, but when you proposed this a fellow doctor was angry, shouting, "No way is that child faking her seizures."

We never say "faking." No one's faking anything. It's subconsciously generated so it's never faked, except once in a blue moon.

I gave this diagnosis to Pauline, a girl who had 12 years of illness from the age of 15, beginning with urinary tract infections, turning to joint pain and limb weakness and leading to paralysis and seizures. When I say, "Have you considered the possibility that this physical illness is not all physical in nature?" people like Pauline get extremely angry.

But if another doctor avoids this diagnosis so as not to anger or upset the patient, or because they think it is insulting, that has big implications.
 Doctors are more worried about getting, for example, a diagnosis of epilepsy wrong than of getting dissociative seizures wrong, because they don't realize the harm in that. But they need to. If you miss a diagnosis of dissociative seizures the person will probably end up taking toxic drugs they don't need.
 There is great difficulty in giving up the diagnosis of an organic disorder and replacing it with a psychosomatic disorder.

How do you cope with making people angry?
I have to be very careful because I know I'm giving them news that is very difficult to take. If I give the news badly or if I don't prepare the patient adequately, sometimes they get angry and they leave, which is exactly what I don't want them to do because the minute they leave then nobody can help them any further.

People have difficulty accepting [that their illness is dissociative] and the problem then is to get them to consider whoever it is who could actually help them; this could be a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a physiotherapist.

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You say the power of suggestion is strong, almost something which feeds these illnesses. With that in mind, I wondered if people googling their symptoms added to this?
I don't think the internet has changed things enormously. The problem was always there. Before the internet you learned about medical things from watching something on television or reading it in the newspaper, so I do think that the power of suggestion is important.

For example, there was that Cryptosporidium outbreak in Lancashire. Once people know there's a bug in the water, and you need to boil it, there will be an increase in people going to their GPs thinking that they are sick because of this.

Illnesses are culturally influenced. I was talking to someone earlier about Morgellons—a disease where people think there are little fibers growing inside their skin—which is an illness not many people have heard of in the UK. However, in the States it is more common, and is something we'd call a culturally influenced syndrome. Because it's better known there, I am surmising it's on television shows and in the media and things and people read about it and that leads to people thinking they might have it. Once upon a time Morgellons would have stayed in the States, but now, because of the internet, it will probably come over here.

You mention psychiatry and psychology a lot. Do you think coming at this topic from a neurologist's point of view is different?
Traditionally, psychiatrists are the people who are trained in managing mental problems, but the patients don't believe they have a psychiatric problem; they're having seizures or not being able to move their legs. That's where the problem with treating them arises. We need more cooperation and integration between psychology and neurology in the same way we need to stop thinking of the mind and brain as separate organs.

So we need a new specialism which overlaps the two?
Something like that is appearing. For example, my particular field within neurology is epilepsy. In my opinion, dissociative disorders should be a subset of neurology in the way epilepsy is, so that you have specialist doctors who are trained specifically in this and therefore develop the psychiatric expertise.
 That's happened in a couple of places in London, Sheffield, and Edinburgh, but it's bad news if you can literally name the people. They should be in every city. There should be so many people I couldn't name them all.

So how does this book fit into the history of psychosomatic illness? I mean, you refer to Freud, Charcot, Janet, even the Ancient Greeks...

Until we were able to look at anatomy under microscopes, which was only from the end of the 19th century, everything was a guess; people knew so little about anatomy and physiology they were merely guessing what happened inside the body, so they had no way of dividing things up into hysterical or otherwise.


Everything changed at the end of the 19th century when doctors began understanding pathology and looking at things that happened within nerves, rather than guessing. This was where we began separating diseases into organic and psychological. Unfortunately, this big change happened and then there were no changes in understanding and for the next hundred years we didn't make any progress in these disorders.

That's what I'm trying to change. But it's not just me, there are other doctors interested in this.
 
What's greatly helped has been the advent of MRI scans, so that now we can look at people's brains when they're trying to move and think and feel. Only in the past ten years have we been looking properly at what's happening inside the brain.


I'm trying to help to de-stigmatize the condition, because part of the problem is, if you do not accept that this exists and do not accept it could be happening to you, you do not get to be part of a study—so we're have to de-stigmatize if we're going to move research into the mind-body connection forward.

Thanks, Suzanne.

It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness is out now in the UK.

Follow Hope Whitmore on Twitter.

El Tío's table. Photo by author

This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico.

"How I started selling drugs? It actually came to me rather naturally. Before becoming a dealer, I used to commit another kind of crime and eventually I suffered the consequences. Look," El Tío said as he rolled up his sweatpants to reveal three huge scars on his right leg.

He had spent 15 years robbing banks until he was shot by the police during a robbery in 1993. "The cops shot me a couple of times and I never fully recovered. I wasn't sure what to do so I asked a friend to help me out. The guy pulled out two bags of cocaine and handed them to me. 'Start selling, that's all you can do,' he said," Tio recalled. "Robbing banks was lucrative, but selling drugs is way less dangerous."

It was just after 9 AM and we were sat in a small apartment in one of the housing units that the Mexican government built in the capital city after the earthquake of 1985. A bag full of small white packages and some cash lay on a messy table. El Tío grabbed the money and took it to his bedroom. It was then that I managed to get a photo of the cocaine and debris—as soon as he came back he told me to cool it with the pictures.

"Robbing a bank gives you an adrenaline rush, man. You need to have a clear head to do it. Bank robbers are never high on drugs—well, maybe the ones that steal at night. You need a strategy to get the job done. You need to observe the patrol cars, calculate exactly how long it takes the police to get to the bank, and what kind of access you can have to the bank teller's windows," he continued.

"Back in my time, all you needed to rob a bank was a team of four. One person went for the manager, one kept an eye on the tellers, a third watched the customers, and the last person stood guard outside. There always needs to be one outside," he said. "Cops and security guards will help you if you pay them. They'll give up their car, their badge or even their gun; they'll just hand over the businesses they are supposed to be watching. The biggest loot I ever got my hands on was the equivalent of $600 million at the time. We shared it between seven of us."

When I asked whether or not he had ever considered leading a life without crime, he laughed and shook his head. "Of course not. Why would I do that? After my first heist, I had like $10 million. You get so high on the adrenaline which comes with putting your life at risk, that greed takes over. If you make friends with criminals it's usually because you want to commit crimes, too. When you go to jail, you get asked why you got involved—you might as well just be honest and say it was jealousy. You see how easily people earn their money and think: 'Why not me?' That's how everyone starts—you envy the trainers, the jewelry, the cars, the furs, the women. You know you're going to get killed but at least you'll have lived.

"I was self-sufficient by the age of 15, thanks to petty crime. I went to parties; I could afford to buy my own clothes. I already knew all about this," he said, pointing at the cocaine that littered the table. (During the interview, he snorted a couple of lines.) "But it was a luxury," he continued.

"When I was younger, you had to go to the barrio to buy weed. Getting your hands on a blunt was pretty tricky because you needed to go into the rough areas to get it. If the dealers didn't know you, they'd rip you off. It's the same in Tepito these days—if the dealers don't know you, they'll beat you up. Selling cocaine wasn't so dangerous because it happened at a higher level; you'd buy it in a nice neighborhood called Cuauhtémoc. It was only for posh kids, artists and the upper-class. Thanks to Salinas de Gortari and his brother Raúl, the prices dropped; he was the one that let the drug into Tepito and that was it. Everyone in the area became addicted because of him. Since then, cocaine has been everywhere," he said referring to the former President of Mexico whose entire run in office was plagued with allegations and convictions for corruption.

El Tío's business grew and he quickly became famous. As he says: "You don't inherit a business like this. You build it. That's how you earn respect." It's also a business that's landed him in jail five times, with the longest sentence lasting from 2008 to 2014.

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"In 1988, I received a two-year sentence. It was a tough trial, but I got lucky. I never paid the full price for what I did. There were 23 charges against me—including murder. But, I won. In this business, you will never be hungry or left to die. It's a faithful business but it's resentful. Back in the day, if someone set up shop next to you, you'd just leave them alone. You didn't want to end up in a fight. After I got out of jail, it was different: Some people were like, 'You can't be here, it's my turf. I pay for it.' A dealer even threatened to kill me recently for working in his turf. I just told him that I had no interest in fighting, that I just wanted to work. What was his problem anyway? I was there before; I just went on holidays."

El Tío is 57 now and will soon have to leave the business. Looking closely at him, he is 5'7" tall and weighs a little less than 155 pounds—a dark-skinned man with frizzy hair. He'd just gotten out of bed and was wearing blue sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and sandals. He seemed humble and lowered his voice every time he talked about things like the death of family members or fear. In many ways, he seemed like to be both an honest and a wise man.

"My body isn't as strong as it used to be; after a point, you begin to slow down. Age forces you to retire. I have four or five years left, at most."

I couldn't help but wonder how a retired drug dealer makes a living. "I learned a few things in prison. Maybe I'll become a lawyer. Before I got involved in crime, that's what I wanted to do. I actually worked at a law firm—that's where I learned about life and how to defend myself. And ethics, because in crime you need ethics too; you need to respect yourself and others."

"And how do you sleep at night?" I asked.

"Calmly. Life made me this way. I'm too old to regret anything. My wife left me last year; she couldn't take my lifestyle anymore. It was in prison where I learned to embrace change. That's just how life is, you know? One day, someone is going to shoot me in the back. People will say: 'He didn't mess with anybody and still got killed.' Actually, to be fair, I probably did a lot of harm to a lot of people."

Follow Octavio Cárdenas on Twitter.

Photos by Emma Cosgrove

Blink 182's self-titled album is blaring and I'm feelin' it. I take of sip of a Molson Canadian and pass it to my partner Nathan as we head towards the Northern Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie in the back seat of a beat-up silver sedan. Helena rides shotgun and is drinking Wild Vines out of the bottle. She is 32 and her boyfriend/the driver Larry has a beer in his cup holder—it's his first of the day, he says. He works in a slaughterhouse and says it's hard because "you're killing things all day." An hour ago, Helena and Larry took a pit stop to have sex in the washroom of a Tim Hortons and now they're all giggly.

Helena and Larry are ride number 11 of the 45 vehicles who pay heed to the outstretched thumbs of Nathan and myself on our month-long 9,000 km journey from Toronto to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia and back. We're curious, we're sick of the city, we lack the requisite fear that would prevent us from attempting to hitchhike anywhere.

Our route is straightforward because Canada is so goddamn barren. There's only one way to cross it: the country-spanning Trans Canada Highway. Our cardboard sign simply says "WEST."

We carry tools for survival: sleeping bags, tent, camp stove, fuel canister, dry food, water purification tablets, insect repellent, first aid kit, clothing, duct tape, multiple tarps, massive amounts of rope, and massive amounts of weed.

Ontario is a wet, slow-moving, mosquito orgy. We bypass the hitchhiker graveyard known as Wawa but hit roadblocks in Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay. Ontarians are ruthless. It takes us five days to get out of the most populated province in Canada, yet it will only take five more days to cross the rest of the country. (The first seven are showerless. After ten years of Lady Speed Sticking my odour into oblivion, I accept my natural homo sapien-y scent.)

There are specific techniques vital to hitchhiking. Much of our time is spent in search of the Best Place to Stand, the criteria being a shoulder wide enough for vehicles to pull over onto, which is located on the edge of town before the traffic gets too fast. Anything after a stoplight or under 60 km/h is golden. I stand in front of Nathan so drivers make a split-second decision based on a woman, not a heavily bearded man. If our driver is a lady by herself—which is rare, but happens a handful of times—I ride shotgun.

Truck stops, contrary to popular belief, are fruitless hitching territory. Drivers there don't want other truckers to see them picking up hitchhikers—it's against company/insurance policy. But on the open road, some say fuck it; four different transport trucks travelling 100 km/h pull over for us. I feel the safest in their spacious cabs, being driven by experienced professionals who can't risk doing any weird shit because their job is on the line. Except Delroy, the sweet Jamaican man who stops three times to smoke three full joints.

As a rule, we never stray far from the road. Each night, we stumble around in the dark behind motels and at the edge of the treeline, probing for a place to pitch our tent—always within earshot of the highway. We look for somewhere dry with level ground and adequate cover.

We eat out of our backpacks as much as possible: oatmeal for breakfast, beans and rice for dinner, trail mix to fill the gaps in our bellies. But sometimes it seems that A&W has effectively annexed the country and we are unable to walk five feet without absently entering one in search of burgers, breakfast sandwiches, and/or root beer floats. We forage for wild blackberries (which are everywhere in BC and considered a weed) and strawberries whenever they're around. In Calgary we strut into a Comfort Inn like we're on the guest list, stash our bags in the unlocked pool room and gorge ourselves on hot breakfast.

On average, 60 percent of our drivers are successful, middle-aged white dads; they buy us meals and tell us about hard work. Many of them hitchhiked in their youth and can't bear passing by a reasonable-looking thumber.

We quickly become aware of our privilege as a couple of white, able-bodied, "straight," clean-looking young folks on the road. People call us cute even though our skin is caked with dirt and we have knives in our pockets. They shower us with Subway, midnight truck-stop breakfasts, cookies, money, bottled water, beers, ice cream, drugs, home-cooked meals, canned luncheon meat. To them, we aren't sketchy—we're travellers. Single men by themselves, especially those of colour, have a visibly harder time than us. They dot the roads where drivers skip over them to pick us up, even if they're first in line.

Nearly as jarring as our privilege is the array of randomly generated humans we're forced to interact with for extended periods of time. We have minimal control over the people who pick us up and are consequently exposed to a mixed bag of characters.

I keep a cumulative list of drivers in my notebook, each with a nickname. Boat Rich, Kush Grandpa, John the Racist, Four Divorces, Nice Mike, Mtl Sk8 Hippies, Goat Cheese People, etc.

One of our first drivers is a huge Bill O'Reilly fan; he's listening to the Fox News personality on the radio when we get in his truck. A heated political debate about race relations ensues—we hold our tongues so he doesn't kick us out of his vehicle. Shitty people are really good at letting you know they're shitty people. We encounter at least two more—one guy who tells us to stay out of northern Winnipeg because it's filled with "natives," and another who says hitchhiking was banned because women in the '70s would cry rape, sue, win, and take all the money of innocent men.

Other drivers are beautifully eccentric. A truck driver named Robert, hauling a load of produce to Thunder Bay, defies the trucker archetype in every way. He brings Lunchables with him on his journeys and makes painted wood cutouts of Disney princesses for his friends.

Two more unconventional folks are Glen and Tammy, who pick us up in Golden, BC. The inside of their car is covered in stickers, plastic flowers and smiley-face knick knacks. They were unofficially married this year on 4/20—their ceremony included bubbles. Glen runs a scam website ("Do You Want to Make $3,000 a Day from Home?") and he tells us to visit it as a payment for the ride. Tammy is roughly 50 but looks 75 and is the happiest person I have ever met. She talks non-stop for two hours, smokes lots of weed, and turns around at one point to say, "I'm so happy you guys are here with us."

We meet many more outstanding people. Sam, a First Nations community leader, is kind and wise. He tells us it costs people on his reserve an $85 cab fare to get to and from the nearest grocery store, which is 45 minutes away. Primary school teachers are hard to keep because the reserve can't afford to pay them well, and high schools are so far away that students are forced to board out of pocket. He talks about his spirituality and his hobbies and his family. I sit in the back seat, scribbling down everything he says.

Just outside Winnipeg, a "chillout electronic" band from Toronto picks us up in their DIY ice cream truck-style tour bus. They stop for every hitchhiker—we're the third and fourth people to sign their hitch wall. Inside the bus is a PS3, five beds, gear, and a familiar dank. We bond and they give us rope friendship bracelets. After parting ways in Regina, we bump into them again in Revelstoke, BC by accident, where we watch their powerful chillout tunes flood a deserted pub. They are very happy to see us. "We have road friends," Nathan says.

It's on our ninth day that we exit the prairies and enter the mountains, cross the border from Alberta to BC, and time slows down 200 percent. In Field, BC, a mountain town of 169 humans, we float on our backs in a glacial swimming hole. The mountains hug us. Our trek is now worth it.

After spending the next ten days hitching around BC, the land of kush and the home of the vibes, swimming in the ocean off Salt Spring Island and talking with friendly strangers in parks, it's time to leave.

We give ourselves ten days to hitchhike back to Toronto/Ottawa/reality in time for work and responsibilities. Our "EAST" sign pulls in an overnight ride from Vancouver to Calgary, then a straight shot across the prairies with two pot-smoking grandparents and their grandkid, then a ride from Winnipeg to Sudbury, and somehow we are back in Southern Ontario in the span of five days, way ahead of schedule.

We're so close to home we can practically smell that city stench as we stand on the shoulder of Highway 400 just north of Barrie with our thumbs out. Soon we're in our very last ride, a shiny car with a rifle-holder in the trunk and an OPP officer at the wheel, because it's illegal to be pedestrian on a 400-series highway, silly!

The officer doesn't buy us milkshakes, but she does what we ask. "To the Barrie bus terminal, please."

Photo by Jamie Fullerton.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The UK Government have recently announced that any free porn websites which do not enforce strict age restraints could face being shut down or blocked. It has been suggested that current age restrictions are not stringent enough and that sites should force their users to go through a paywall to ensure they're over 18. If this doesn't happen, then legislation could be introduced to make it "an offense in the UK to publish pornography online without age verification controls, possibly with a regulator to oversee and enforce controls." A government spokesperson said that this regulator would have the power to tell ISPs to block websites that do not comply to the age restraints.

This comes at the end of a long line of government efforts to protect children from porn. By 2013, the UK's four major internet service providers (ISPs) had adopted a government-enforced system, with new customers having to "opt-out" of the ISPs' content filters to gain access to a wide range of blocked content, including pornography. BT, TalkTalk, and Virgin have since given all of their customers an "unavoidable choice" to opt in or out. In January 2015, Sky took it even further, blocking all material deemed unsuitable for children under the age of 13 for any of its 5 million customers who had not already opted out.

Nobody wants their kids exposed to some of the pornographic monstrosities on the internet, but—if a blanket ban is enforced on sites without age restrictions—these measures could affect the Average Joe too, ruining our precious wanking time. And, boy, are we fond of wanking time; according to government stats, the top ten porn sites represent 52 percent of all internet views in the UK. Internet porn in the UK receives more traffic than social networks, shopping, news and media, email, finance, and travel put together.

So, how will our viewing habits change if the obligatory paywall comes into fruition? It's estimated that 80–90 percent of internet porn users only watch free online material, so what will we do when that's taken away? How will the ban affect the quality and cost of the porn we're watching, and the wellbeing of the people starring in it? In order to give you a breakdown of how the future of wanking might change, we talked to some porn stars and industry experts to get their insight.

A picture of Michelle from her site

HIGH-DEFINITION PORN
If you do opt to pay for your porn, it looks like it could be the start of a premium porn age. Pornhub—one of the most popular and largest porn websites in the world, receiving over 1.68 million visits per hour—has launched a new streaming service called "Pornhub Premium," which boasts ad-free streaming, HD quality, faster playback, and some exclusive, titillating content. Could this be what all porn sites begin to look like?

People do pay extra for HD porn now—even if you cheapskates don't. Michelle Thorne, former glamor model and popular porn star, says that having a paywall on her site helps her afford the best equipment. "I try and make mine a bit more glamorous rather than amateur looking, to make sure people get what they pay for." She and her husband, her producer, use three different cameras including a 4K camera and a GoPro. 4K cameras first became commercially available in 2003 and are widely respected by the film industry for their horizontal resolution on the order of 4,000 pixels. Basically, they allow you to see every little detail. Maybe more porn sites would go HD in the event of a porn ban, to offer a "premium" experience and attempt to give you what you're paying for.

WATCH: Searching for Spitman

BLOCKBUSTER PORN
About seven years ago, global porn revenues were estimated at $20 billion, but revenue has decreased by 50 percent since the advent of free porn sites in 2011. Porn, as an industry, will always have enormous monetary potential, and if more sites introduce paywalls and free sites are blocked in the UK, this revenue is likely to blow up in size. The more money there is in porn, the more porn sites can afford to buy the best state-of-the-art cameras, outfits, props—whatever your heart desires.

Some porn already seems to be reaching blockbuster status. Anna Arrowsmith, porn director and former Lib Dem candidate in the 2010 general election, has won six awards for her films, which she put a lot of money and time into: "I had a reality style; I would go and get the real policeman's outfits rather than just having one from Ann Summers, and I'd go to castings and get good-looking guys."

However, if you're a fan of that "home grown," as-if-you-hid-a-camera-in-the-corner-of-the-room, #nofilter kind of porn, the UK market for that doesn't seem to be dying out any time soon. Anna tells me that half of the porn market is amateur and that there is always real demand for it. Plenty of companies, like "Amateurs Fun Studio" based in Surrey and "Mature Amateur Productions" based in London, thrive on this "authentic" vibe. A vibe that you'd still have to fork out for, unless Dave shuts them down altogether.

SOFTER PORN
It's no secret that, if you venture into the deep, dark, depths of online porn, there's some pretty aggressive stuff. According to stoppornculture.org, 88.2 percent of top-rated porn scenes contain aggressive acts. Michelle told me that a lot of the free sites contain a lot harder stuff because they're filmed outside of the UK, mostly in Europe or Japan. But if the government stay true to their word and the ISPs are asked to block every site without a paywall or decent age restricting policy, then this could mean tighter monitoring on porn sites (think Sky's aforementioned censorship) and perhaps even an end to the vast swathes of misogynistic, violent, and frankly disgusting porn that lives out there. Not such a bad thing, but whether it's our government's place to do so is a separate question.

A picture of Michelle Thorne from her site

FAIRTRADE PORN
Since the advent of free sites in 2008, the porn world has struggled. It's fair to say that porn stars and producers hate the free sites, so much so that they even wrote to the government about four years ago, asking that they be shut down.

As Michelle puts it, "No one wants to give anything away for nothing, why would they, that's their job?" The free sites often contain a lot of copyright stuff that users upload, or small clips from porn stars' videos, which they give away for advertising. They're supposed to be teasers—not the main basis for your daily wank. As a result of the free porn, Anna says that a lot of people in the UK, including herself, have gone out of business: "The whole industry just took a complete nosedive in 2009 and genuinely lost 90 percent of the profits. It just became completely unfeasible to do it. Everybody suffered, the television companies suffered, the DVDs suffered."

Porn producers have a number of costs to cover, including the equipment, the props and the STD checks, which cost £150 [$230] a month. Anna explains: "When there's no money, porn stars are going to take more risks with their health. The first time I saw someone in the UK fake a health certificate was in 2008, when it started to get difficult in the porn industry."

If people who are watching porn aren't paying for it, this will inevitably make porn stars take more risks. Anna had to quit because it just wasn't profitable enough for her. She tells me: "If you want quality to be held up, if you want porn stars to be safe, and if you want variety for the future, you've got to pay for it, there's no other model." Nobody wants to watch an unhappy, under-paid, STD-ridden porn star have sex, do they? Do they?

SUBSCRIPTIONS VERSUS PAY AS YOU GO
Announcing itself as the "Netflix of porn," Pornhub Premium offers a seven-day free trial. Something tells me that there will be lots of people who do the cheeky sign-up-a few-times-with-different-cards to get more than their fair share of free fucking. Depending on their security, you can also bet on thousands of teenage boys sharing the same login and calling each other up in an angry rage at being kicked out of their accounts just at the point of climax due to too many people using it at one time.

Currently, Pornhub Premium charges a modest $9.99 a month. Michelle's site charges $30 a month and $80 for three months. Another porn star, Angel Longs, charges $35 per month for one month, and $22 per month for a year if you buy the whole year. So, you're looking at a cheaper package if you buy for the long term. Or some sites charge by the hour, which could work out a bit more expensive.

So far the cheapest we've seen for sale is $2.50 for ten minutes on "Big Breasts," or, if you're really tight on money and it doesn't take you long, "Lustomic" offers 28p [50 cents] for one minute. Bargain! If the free sites do enforce pay walls, they could look like Pornhub's and undercut as a slightly cheaper option. However, these could be shut down or blocked, leaving the costs even higher. And if free porn is banned, there's always the chance that porn will become a very precious commodity and prices will be jacked up.

WATCH: An interview with Rashida Jones about her porn documentary, 'Hot Girls Wanted':

SO, WILL PEOPLE DIG INTO THEIR POCKETS?
The stats suggest otherwise—primarily the fact that 80 percent of porn viewed currently is free. The webcam industry is absolutely booming, with Michelle saying she can earn £150 [$230] an hour from a webcam session, so people are willing to pay. But then that's webcam, that's one step closer to being with the actual person. Michelle's husband and producer, Dean, tells me that they once gave away a small clip of Michelle's content to RedTube as a way of advertising and that day Michelle got 40,000 more visitors to her site but the day's takings were the same. With 40,000 more visitors, you'd expect to make more money, but there was a clear unwillingness to pay.

BUT THERE'S ALWAYS A WAY...
Because I knew that you might not believe any sort of network porn block could go ahead, I spoke to one of the heads of one of the top four ISPs who, wishing to remain anonymous, told me that they had been having various discussions with the government, and that if the major porn sites don't respond in the desired way, the government will legislate. They are currently looking at how a network block on free porn sites could work in practice. They tell me that such a block would be possible to enforce but that "particularly sophisticated people could circumnavigate the block."

Before you start swatting up, you should know that the government's announcement is just the beginning of a long process; if the main porn sites do not comply, a law and then a court order would have to be passed for the ISPs to block all the free porn out there. And there's a reason why it's been dubbed a money wasting, lazy, and stupid plan, because it would be so easy to circumvent.

Most people I've spoken to (including the ISPs) confirm that we don't need a blanket ban, what we do need is education. The "opt-out" system seemed far more consensual and was effective for one network, namely TalkTalk, with a 36 percent take-up. Anna tells me she thinks "there's a great deal of hypocrisy, it's like, 'I'm OK to watch porn but the poor people, the young people will be damaged by it'—that's the mentality and it's quite classist and sexist."

Considering there were 250,000 attempts to access pornography from inside parliament last year, something tells me these MPs are shooting themselves in the foot.

Follow Amber on Twitter.

All screens of 'Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse,' like the one above, taken from the PlayStation 4 version, due out on September 4.

The narrative power of adventure games is something of a hot ticket right now. Critics have written about the topic at great length, while gamers and award bodies alike have heaped a metric ton of praise on the shoulders of Telltale Games for the studio's ability to grip and engross players, or even reduce them to tears, with their episodic, licensed releases like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us.

What's weird is that if you look back at 2010, the same critics were filling their pages with think pieces about what the games industry could learn from film, and making some damn fine cases for why developers could do better—partly because of Heavy Rain's release that year.

It was something of a bumper year actually, that saw such releases as Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Metro 2033, and Fallout: New Vegas join our piles of shame. Each received praise for its immersive story, narrative choices, and freedom to sculpt personal tales out in its game world. Heavy Rain was perhaps one of the most-debated titles of that year, though, simply because it was an anomaly in the console world.

A screenshot from 2010's 'Heavy Rain,' by French studio Quantic Dream

For years the press and players yearned for the day when video game narratives would overtake those found in film, and usher in a new era of interactive storytelling. But once the initial hype for Heavy Rain had receded, the backlash began. Was this a game or, basically, a movie? Some argued it was a great blend of the two; others felt there wasn't enough player-directed control; and more still complained that the whole thing felt like one long, quick-time-event-laden cutscene.

It's funny to look at Telltale's popularity today, always growing with its Game of Thrones series and the forthcoming Minecraft: Story Mode, as the DNA of these games has much in common with Quantic Dream's PS3 debut, widely criticized for its lack of Actual Gameplay. So, where have those complaints gone?

A screenshot from 2006's 'Dreamfall: The Longest Journey'

It's a curious one, and there are plenty of people out there who still feel that Telltale's format should not be classed as "classic" adventure at all. Many still feel that titles like Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and the (first couple of) Monkey Island games (at least), each of which is considered a certifiable adventure game, are very different propositions compared to The Walking Dead et al, chiefly because of their emphasis on puzzle-solving.

Charles Cecil is the co-founder of Revolution Software, a studio that's put out a series of acclaimed adventure games, beginning with 1992's Lure of the Temptress. 1996's Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars kickstarted a tremendously popular franchise for the company—the game was a clear influence on Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, too—which has now reached its fifth installment with The Serpent's Curse. Naturally, he has plenty to say on the state of adventure games, and the revival of their mainstream appeal.

Article continues after the video below

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"As the commercial success of adventures declined from the late 1990s, developers started looking for ways to evolve the genre in the hope of regaining the original audience," he tells me. "We did the same. Our game In Cold Blood mixed action with adventure, and still has quite a cult following.

"But to the mainstream market, the game was confusing—it was neither an adventure nor an action game. Likewise the excellent Heavy Rain confuses audiences—it is clearly an adventure, but requires the player to have manual dexterity, and in doing so breaks a core rule of the adventure genre that the interface should be primarily cerebral.

"Telltale's adventure games are excellent—but the lack of cerebral challenge makes them more like interactive movie experiences. I think that their approach has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary—I do wonder whether they are going down a cul-de-sac, or whether their approach can evolve further to ultimately create a more rounded gameplay experience."

Could it be that Telltale's format has proven so engrossing chiefly because of the lack of gameplay? Granted, we've all felt exhausted by explosions and ceaseless action at some point in our gaming lives, and when that happens, you tend to reach for something more passive that requires less brainpower. I love the Call of Duty series, but I also enjoy sitting down to play the next Tales From the Borderlands episode while my partner watches.

We recently did the same with Broken Sword 5 on Xbox One and enjoyed tackling the puzzles together, suggesting the right object to use, and conferring on what to do next. Likewise, I'm sure many of you reading this have reached a truly painful narrative branch in games series like Mass Effect or The Elder Scrolls, and discussed it to reach a consensus on which choice to make.

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Quite recently, Deus Ex director Warren Spector penned an opinion piece for Gamasutra about why narrative choices in games don't really matter—which might feel a bit odd considering his work history. "The interesting aspect of player choice isn't the choice itself," he writes. "The interesting thing—the only interesting thing, really—is the revelation of consequences. Choice without consequence is a waste of time, effort, and money."

But he also says that choices shouldn't lean so heavily on punishing or praising players, and I think that's why modern—you might call them "passive"—adventure games appear to have become so popular. The lack of karma meters telling you how good or evil your character is means that the consequences of your choices are constantly lingering.

Whenever you see an alert that a certain character will "remember" your choice, you instantly start to wonder if you've done the right thing, and that's it—there are no other crumb trails to follow, only a nagging sense of guilt that makes your moral compass spin like crazy. It's engrossing and involving at the same time, and in some ways places you as the story's director—doubly so if there's another person in the room watching.

That's where I personally think games have started to overtake film in terms of storytelling power. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a linear narrative when done well, and award-winning talent like Uncharted writer Amy Hennig proves that the games industry is growing up fast in this regard.

Developers have been watching the film industry closely for years now and they've learned a lot, and it's worth stressing that filmmakers can still knock it out of the park with exemplary scripts that provoke real, genuine feelings of emotion or dread in the viewer—from the touching scenes in Pixar's Inside Out, to the claustrophobic stress of last year's multi-Oscar-winning Birdman.

'Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse' trailer for PS4 and Xbox One

As Cecil puts it, "cerebral" adventure games are quite a different prospect to Telltale's "passive" formula—and indeed movies as a whole—but certainly no less engaging. They simply offer a different flavor of appeal that can really pull people into the narrative. Like The Walking Dead, point-and-click games are still enjoyable as a local play experience with partners or friends.

"A lot of people tell us about meeting their partner through playing our adventure games," Cecil reveals. "Several wrote very moving messages about memories of playing Broken Sword with loved ones—and in the cases where those loved ones have since passed away, how their relationship is defined by the memories of playing Broken Sword together.

"This is humbling. The intensity of this shared experience is unique to the interactive medium—similar sustained, shared experiences could not be said of watching a film or television together."

So where next for narrative evolution in games? Have narrative choices in games like Mass Effect become too obvious with their Paragon and Renegade markers to really trigger the same kind of response that rather greyer options have in Telltale's adventures? What about emergent stories that the user creates for themselves in games like Skyrim and, assuredly, Fallout 4 when it comes out later this year?

A screenshot from this year's 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture,' by Brighton-based studio The Chinese Room

I'd argue that we're already in the next wave of evolved storytelling in games, thanks to titles like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Betrayer. Sorry to end on a worn point, but the "imprinting" effect of these games goes right back to whole concept of players applying themselves on mute characters like Half-Life's Gordon Freeman. You own their personality, and their surrounding world offers just the basics, allowing you to fill the gaps.

These games don't have an outright lack of narrative, but they do deliberately leave the player alone with their thoughts for long enough that the mind starts to wander, and all sorts of theories and personal musings occur. In fact, you're sort of dancing to the developer's tune when this happens.

But that's entirely the intention of their creators, and I'm sure many of you agree that it works a treat by giving you a new level of control over your story that many other titles—and most certainly the movie industry—simply cannot match. That's devilishly clever and immeasurably powerful indeed. More games like these, then, please.

The complete Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse is released for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on September 4, and the game's already available on other platforms. Check the Revolution website for more information.

Follow Dave Cook on Twitter.

More on New Orleans Post-Katrina:
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As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, news outlets from around the country are descending upon New Orleans to find out how it is faring. The Lower Ninth Ward has become the poster child of the slow recovery—only about 37 percent of pre-Katrina households have returned to the neighborhood, in comparison with more than 90 percent of households throughout the city, according to Postal Service data. Some residents, who have already seen the fifth anniversary come and go, wonder: Will the national attention make a difference, or will their struggles merely make headlines for the day?

Ten years after the storm, the Lower Ninth Ward is a tapestry of hope and despair. It is a shadow of what it once was, but the residents who have returned have an enduring sense of community and civic pride. There are rows of empty homes, but the neighbors who are back almost all know one another. There's a lot more rebuilding to be done, but nonprofits in the area say they're not giving up anytime soon, even if the media shifts its attention away from the city after the storm's anniversary.

Before Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward was a neighborhood of predominantly African-American families. Families who knew every other family on the block, who had cookouts in the front yard and waved hello from the porch, who paraded to booming brass bands and the spiritual chanting of Mardi Gras Indians, and who swore they would never leave the place they were born and raised. Now, lot after lot sits neglected with overgrown weeds and rotting wooden frames.

"People are not back because they didn't get the money they needed to do what they needed to do," 55-year-old Alison Robinson said.

Before Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward had one of the highest rates of black homeownership in Louisiana.

Robinson is one of 15 children who grew up in a three-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward. Her brother, sister, and two of her sister's children were living there when Hurricane Katrina hit. Like the rest of the block, it was all but wiped away by more than ten feet of water.

Most of the Browns live within blocks of each other, just like they always have. Robinson's nephew Nevles Brown lives across the street from the family house. "For us, it's a landmark," he said, fondly recalling how they all used to try and squeeze onto the porch together.

After a decade of community fundraisers, it has four Easter-egg yellow walls, half a roof, and a wooden skeleton for an interior. Robinson's family, the Browns, faced the same red tape that befell many of the 15,000 residents who were living in the Lower Ninth Ward before the storm.

"There's no reason to believe someone in the Lower Ninth Ward would want to come back less than someone in Lakeview," said Caroline Heldman, the co-founder of the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum. "I think the fact that people did come back elsewhere when they could speaks to the fact that there were some structural issues in the Lower Ninth Ward."

The Browns did not receive any aid for their family house from Road Home, a federal program intended to help Louisianans rebuild or sell their homes after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Robinson says they were denied because the home is in too many names. All 15 of the Brown children, seven of whom are no longer alive, are on the property deed.

This was a common challenge faced by residents in the Lower Ninth Ward. Before Katrina, a section of the neighborhood had the highest rate of black homeownership in New Orleans. According to local housing advocates Delia King, Laura Paul, and M. A. Sheehan, many of these properties had been passed down through the generations, but never formally transferred to their inheritors.

This created a host of problems for families attempting to become eligible for aid. The government provided services to help people get their paperwork in order, but amidst the bureaucracy and confusion, many never did.

The Lower Ninth Ward, August 25, 2015. Photograph by Caitlin Faw

"Owning your home outright affords you a measure of security that none of these people will be able to get back somewhere else. If you go and work a minimum-wage job, full-time, anywhere in this country, you can't buy a home," said Laura Paul, the executive director of Lowernine.org, a nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding the neighborhood. "You can't take out a mortgage, so a lot of people are holding onto their properties here, and in some cases, their flood-damaged homes, waiting for help."

No one knows how many families who lived here still want to return. According to the House the 9 Program, an initiative started by the Lower 9th Ward Homeownership Association, there are about 700 Lower Ninth Ward households who initially signed up for government aid through Road Home and have not come back. M. A. Sheehan, the director of the program, estimates about half of them would move home if they had the chance.

Homes and vacant lots stand in the Lower Ninth Ward (bottom) in front of the Industrial Canal (center) and downtown New Orleans (top left) on August 24, 2015, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images

The program has helped tens of thousands of property owners get back in their homes, but it's also been the subject of much criticism; in 2010, a federal judge ruled that Road Home had distributed money based on a formula that was biased against black recipients. The problem was that Road Home allocated grants based on market values rather than the cost of construction, and many black residents lived in areas where property values were low. This means people living, for example, in the predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood of Lakeview received more money than Lower Ninth Ward residents thanks to their higher property values, even if their rebuilding costs were the same.

Though the Brown family home never became eligible for Road Home funding, Robinson and some of her siblings, who all lived in the Lower Ninth, also applied for grants to rebuild their personal residences—and, they say, received only a fraction of the money they needed.

It took Robinson three years to move back into her house, and she says she was only able to afford it because her husband has a decent paying job. It's livable, but she's still doing basic repairs and her deck is simply gone. "They gave us like $53,000," she said. "How can you build a house for $53,000? A whole home! I had to tear the whole thing down."

Road Home has given out many additional grants to make up for underfunding the first time around, but the program currently doesn't take into consideration how much money people spent while waiting to rebuild. Some residents who had mortgages on their homes were forced to pay them immediately in full after the storm. In addition, many grant recipients ended up using the sum they received on rent while they were trying to return home. Even though their properties were unlivable, they had to continue to pay insurance and taxes on them. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is currently discussing how to provide more aid to homeowners who were forced to spend their grants on basic necessities other than rebuilding.

"That is a really important issue that we have heard about from all sides. From homeowner activists, from elected officials, from the mayor of New Orleans and others," said Marion McFadden, deputy assistant secretary for grant programs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds Road Home. "We are looking at other possibilities for relief. We're very far along in our consideration and hoping that we'll be able to resolve the matter very soon."

The Lower Ninth Ward, August 25, 2015. Photograph by Caitlin Faw

These additional funds likely won't be able to make up for all the money fraudsters swindled from residents. Phony contractors swooped in after the storm, offering low prices to families then providing shoddy work that needed to be redone—or simply taking off with the money.

Sarah Curtis, an elderly neighbor and longtime family friend of the Browns, lost so much money she had to give up her home. She's now living across the street with Gaynell Andrews, another Brown sibling. "I paid $76,000 to the first one and $37,000 to the second. They told me to buy all the materials, and then they left," Curtis said.

Road Home dedicated millions of dollars for victims who could provide receipts proving fraud. Some Lower Ninth Ward residents like Curtis don't qualify because they paid in cash or don't have proper receipts.

When asked how it's going one of the brothers, Irvin Brown, answered: "Slow, very slow, much too slow." Why? "Money. Money. Money. Money."

"We're doing everything we can within the flexibility we have to provide options to demonstrate how money was spent. But I'm just not sure that we'll be able to substantiate just with what someone told me as adequate proof of how federal funds were spent," McFadden said.

Representatives from the Department of Housing and Urban Development said it's a tough situation. They want to be able to provide assistance to victims of fraud, but they need to be able to account for the funds they give out, particularly because all the money spent on Katrina is potentially less money that can be spent on future disasters in other parts of the country.

Nonprofits that have been tirelessly working since the storm to rebuild homes say they will continue to serve the community until they run out of money. "The fear is that after [the ten-year anniversary of Katrina] nobody is going to remember us anymore," Sheehan said.

Donations to all the most well-known nonprofits in the Lower Ninth Ward have been steadily declining over the last ten years.

The Lower Ninth Ward, August 25, 2015. Photograph by Caitlin Faw

Volunteers from Lowernine.org started rebuilding Robinson's family home three years ago. The family is grateful for the help, but when asked how the house is coming along one of the brothers, Irvin Brown, answered: "Slow, very slow, much too slow." Why? "Money. Money. Money. Money," he repeated. Lowernine.org provides unlimited volunteer labor, but homeowners must find the funds for the materials. The Browns have been hosting community fundraisers and saving up to buy the items they need since the storm.

City Councilmember James Gray, whose district includes the Ninth Ward, estimated there are about 7,000 lots in the neighborhood that homeowners have not been able to repair. "I am also unhappy about the rate of recovery. Especially if you measure from the ten years since the hurricane," he said. "Things haven't been happening nearly as fast as they should have."

Gray said he foresees development accelerating, however. A $20.5 million community center with music and exercise classes, a senior center, and a health clinic opened in May. A new fire station was put in last year. The revamped Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Science and Technology is set to open this fall for the first time since the storm.

A woman walks along the rebuilt Industrial Canal levee wall in the Lower Ninth Ward on May 18, 2015, in New Orleans. Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images

"We are all very upset about the rate of progress. But if we look at the things that have happened in the recent past and the things that are happening in the near future, we are at least moving in the right direction," Gray said.

For residents and volunteers working on the ground to rebuild, the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is wrought with contradictory emotions: pride in their accomplishments, disappointment from the numerous setbacks, hope for the future, and a daunting commitment to finally finish the task so many thought would already be done.

"I do feel hopeful that we're starting to put the pieces together, that we're going to have enough people living there that the neighborhood will be able to become a functioning community again," Sheehan said. "The people that are living there are committed. There are a lot of empty lots, but anywhere where there is a home there's someone saying hi. That's a lot to build on."

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Fearless Vampire Killers at a fan meet-up, next to a bunch of fan artwork. Photo courtesy of the band

Fearless Vampire Killers (FVK) are a band from Beccles, a little market town in Suffolk, England. They're made up of a pilot, a thief, a mechanist, a vigilante, and a prince, all of whom are from a city called Grandomina in the world of Convonia, a fantastical, fictional Medieval planet devised by Laurence Beveridge, the band's black-fringed lead singer.

Aside from being their conceptual home, Grandomina is also the main inspiration for the band's music—which falls somewhere between Muse's poppy stuff and the more recent My Chemical Romance releases—as well as the subject of a number of band-related novels and comics.

FVK have been around for seven years; they were the first band to be invited to London's Comicon; they have over 100,000 likes on Facebook; they sell out shows throughout the UK and overseas; they've got their own record label, Goremount Records (named after a district in Grandomina); and they created an entire online social network, The Obsidian Bond (OB), exclusively for their fans.

However, chances are you've never heard of FVK unless you're getting them confused with some imaginary Blade spin-off. Not that this really matters, of course; the bond between the band and their hordes of faithful followers is almost unprecedented, creating a self-sufficient world that doesn't have to rely on mainstream attention.

Laurence conceived Grandomina before the band was founded, mapping out a 1,000-year timeline in his bedroom in East Anglia.

"I visited York as a kid and fell in love with the place," he told me. "When I left, I created an idea of it in my head as some magical place. Then, when I went back as a 17-year-old, it wasn't as big and grand as I'd remembered, so I created this fictional world around my memories and imaginations as a child."

Laurence's two books—Ruple & Evelyn and Militia of the Lost—have sold out every time they've been restocked, with fans presumably enthused that the singer decided to write the band members into the stories. "I took their personalities and worked them into the characters within the world," he told me. "On our first EP, we all wrote a song each about our character."

What struck me about all this was that bands often wait until their third or fourth album—until they have a solid fan base who aren't going to be weirded out by "punk rock operas" about the Iraq war—before they go conceptual. However, FVK went for it straight out the gates, releasing their first EP, In Grandomina..., as a package deal with the first novel, Ruple & Evelyn.

A homemade thank-you card to the band from fans. Photo by Will Coutts

What was it that attracted all these diehard fans to a band that was complicated and abstract from the get-go? And how have they managed to build such a sprawling, committed fan base under the nose of the British mainstream?

"We moved to London thinking it would be easy, but it really wasn't. We were playing two shitty gigs a week to barely anyone and not getting anywhere," said Laurence, adding that the unforgiving nature of London's music scene—the thousands of bands doing very similar things in very similar venues—eventually drove them to rethink their approach.

"Growing up, the closest place we could go and watch a gig was a place called Lowestoft," he said. "Some good hardcore bands pass through, like Your Demise and This Is Colour, and we'd love it as kids, because not much else happened there. So we dug into our savings, bought an old LDV Convoy and decided to go to smaller towns, youth clubs, anywhere that would have us. Basingstoke, Caterham, Brentwood... then we picked up fans that were really into it. We were signing T-shirts and getting photos outside gigs in Stevenage five years ago. It was like we were famous, but nobody knew who we were."

READ ON NOISEY: Loads of Huge UK Rock Bands Still Have Day Jobs

This slogging around the country, reaching kids who—like the band members in their youth—didn't have the best access to the kind of music they were actually into, went on for months. A recruitment tour, if you like, bringing the FVK world to teenagers who had previously been looking for an escape, and not finding it in what was offered to them locally.

On their return to London, the disciples they had picked up around the country flocked in their droves to the band's homecoming gig at the Camden Barfly. The venue was nearly at capacity, and with every member of the audience singing every lyric, Kerrang! magazine gave them a full page review in its following issue.

The band's theatrical and gothic leanings—from their dress sense to the prose in Laurence's novels—are clearly part of the appeal to FVK devotees. The fans I met at a recent gig may belong more to the Monster Energy brand of goth, as opposed to the types who spend their free time taking solemn walks alone in graveyards, but they all clearly had an infatuation with the darker elements of life and art.

FVK fans. Photo by Will Coutts

Another driving force behind the band's popularity, I realized, is the fact they provide a ready-made escape network. Fans can express themselves through not just the love of FVK's music, but also the stories, art, and community that come part and parcel with the band. "We wanted a place where our fans could go and not feel embarrassed," Laurence explained. "Some would be apprehensive about sending us pictures they'd drawn, or things they'd written, on Twitter or Facebook in case they got the piss taken out of them. Now, they can share them with each other and with us on OB."

A basic membership to The Obsidian Bond is £2.99 [$4.50] a month, followed by a "Gold" membership at £14.99 [$23] for six months, and an "Obsidian" membership at £29.99 [$46] a year. While the fee awards you freebies and "heaps of exclusive content," I wondered whether this wasn't a little avaricious—a calculated money-earner on the band's part. So I put my thoughts to Kier Kemp, guitarist and second vocalist.

"We were all super-fans of certain books, films, and bands growing up—we still are—so we understand our core fan base," he said. "We massively appreciate them because, at times, when we've been really broke, they literally kept us alive by buying stuff and supporting us. When you realize the power of your fan base, you make sure you nurture it."

To see what £2.99 a month got me, I set up my own account and was instantly blown away by the acceptance and love I was shown. Fan clubs, from my own personal experience, can veer towards slightly exclusive and catty, but in this case I was sent a barrage of friend requests and daily messages asking how I was.

A fan with an FVK tattoo. Photo by Will Coutts

"Everyone on this site makes it a wonderful place to be, and to be who you are without fear of judgement," wrote one user. "The thing I love about FVK fans is they never make you feel inferior. There's no competition," wrote another.

Away from Lawrence's mythical world of Grandomina, the fans have developed a mythical world of their own; the world of the fandom that they inhabit, a safe haven from the judgmental eyes of the general public. It's a place where they can be fearlessly and entirely themselves, exposing their eccentricities and vulnerabilities. It's something to be admired and envied, especially when I think back to how it was for similar types from my generation and older, who—pre-internet, or even during the advent of sites like Myspace—only really had a couple of likeminded mates to lean on, not a huge central database of people just like them.

The community around FVK is a demonstration of music at its most powerful, when fans are swallowed whole by the alternate universe a band or artist can create. A universe where they can be who they want to be without fear of someone shouting "grebo" at them, or an older kid with a Disclosure haircut laughing at their nail polish; where they can be artists, poets, an ancient queen from Grandomina, or simply just a happy person with a network of friends.

In 2015, where burgeoning subcultures are crushed by over-exposure online before they can really develop into something tangible, FVK fans have managed to create a subculture entirely their own with the help of the internet. And while the music and the dress sense might not be to your tastes, you've at least got to commend them for that.

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Illustrations by Alex Jenkins

We didn't think it would be that big of a deal. We didn't even board up the windows. Living in New Orleans, we were used to hurricane warnings. We considered them empty threats, as they invariably turned out to be 99 percent sound, 1 percent fury. The last time a storm had done any significant damage to the Gulf Coast, it was Hurricane Camille in 1969. It was, at the time, 2005. Staunch elder Louisianans bragged about how they lived through Camille, refusing to leave their deluged homes and becoming sturdier for it. Neither of us had read the 2002 Times Picayune article that described, in detail, the structural weakness of the levees that surrounded us. It appears, in retrospect, that no one had.

We didn't grow up with disaster films outlining the devastation that would unfold if the levees broke. The Mississippi River wasn't the San Andreas Fault. A product of California, I was raised to fear my state's own particular "Big One." Native Louisianans, for whatever reason, were not.

We woke up early and turned on the television. There, we saw the harried visage of then-Mayor Ray Nagin informing us we were to mandatorily evacuate the city. If we had a choice, we wouldn't have chosen to do so. In retrospect, it was odd we were up so early. We usually slept in.

We were always hot and cold. On again, off again. We had broken up and got back together shortly before we were, by fate, mandatorily removed from our home for a month. Circumstances could have been different. I'd been planning on renting my own place, owned by my co-worker's husband; she and I worked together at the federal Food and Drug Administration office I had somehow conned my way into becoming employed by.

My job entailed relabeling files—an enormous, endless mass of them, which I used a motorized apparatus to retrieve from the bowels of the building. I was not a particularly hard worker. I'd take three-hour lunches at Popeyes and spend afternoons doing push-ups in the staircase. When Katrina hit, the entire building was completely submerged in water, ruining the minimal amount of work I had done and turning the place into a total loss. All the FDA employees who were considered worthwhile to the organization were subsequently relocated to Nashville. I was not.

But I digress. I didn't end up renting the apartment. Rather, after a couple tense days I spent occupying our guest bedroom, my boyfriend and I reconciled. We got muffalettas at the Central Grocery and, instead of apologizing, silently agreed to remain complacently coupled. A couple days later we attended a taping of Wheel of Fortune at the soon-to-be-decimated Convention Center. The next day, we evacuated.

Traffic on the Pontchartrain Expressway on the way out of town was a stand still, which made sense. Over 1.5 million people from Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi were evacuating. People got out of their cars to stretch their legs. No one seemed particularly upset; we were being forced to leave town, sure, but we collectively assumed we would return when the storm pissed out a few inches of rain.

The sky above us was bright, cloudless. Slowly we crept. To Baton Rouge. Past Baton Rouge. Beyond. As we drove, we listened to the news on the radio—the more we traveled, the bleaker it became. It was a Category 3 hurricane. Then a Category 4. Then a Category 5. I became nervous. He was characteristically, sociopathically, unflappable.

We drove down the interstate. There was, no matter where we stopped, no room at the proverbial inn. After driving all night, we found one in Atlanta—the last, the clerk behind the counter told me, in the state. As he told me this, I watched on television as the Target in Metairie, my Target, drowned in a rapidly increasing pool of water. It was then I realized the whole affair was a big deal.

Those who hadn't left, naturally, had a rough go of things. I saw them stand in line on the news, waiting for hours for Red Cross relief funds.

We, instead, waltzed into a Red Cross office in Minneapolis, where we were temporarily gaining refuge at his sister's condo. The same condo where we'd watch Kanye West tell the country, the world, that George Bush doesn't care about black people, knowing it to be the case because we were in an air-conditioned condo in Minneapolis while black people in New Orleans were stranded on roofs, desperate, starving. (That's not to say black people were the only ones who stayed behind—they did, however, comprise the vast majority of strandees.)

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We immediately took the Red Cross debit cards we received and drove to the Mall of America. My boyfriend bought a Slayer shirt. I bought size 00 pants. I was very proud, at the time, of being less than zero.

We couldn't go home but it didn't matter. We spent the month we were adrift circling the country, alternating between fighting and fucking. The television would tell us how bleak things were back home. I'd occasionally cry, wondering if my cat had survived the storm—I had, both stupidly and selfishly, left him behind, thinking I'd be back soon and not wanting to deal with the inconvenience of a caged, howling feline in the interim. Meanwhile, the human death count mounted. My cat, for the record, survived.

Instead of character, all I got out of Katrina was a party-friendly anecdote.

We were homeless, sure, but not entirely. We knew that, when we returned, we'd have a home. And even if the goddamned thing had been pulled asunder from the sandy earth beneath it, it was insured, so fuck it, who cared? We slept fitfully, but comparatively blissfully, in motel rooms paid for by FEMA relief funds while we waited to reenter the city. While the agency's overall incompetence fucked over thousands and led to the deaths of God knows how many people, FEMA, frankly, never gave us even the slightest modicum of guff, ponying up four grand to cover travel expenses with little teeth-pulling.

I didn't know what FEMA did, exactly, for the people who hadn't evacuated; the nightly news made it seem like little to nothing. I didn't know what was happening in New Orleans in general—the news was riddled with rumor and conjecture, making it impossible to get the straight story. Was our house destroyed? Were people really raping and robbing each other in the Superdome? When, if ever, would the National Guard rescue all those goddamned people off those goddamned roofs?

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After a month of getting free nachos from waitresses who saw our license plate and pitied us because of it, we were amongst the first group of people who returned to New Orleans when given the all clear. The all clear, of course, wasn't entirely clear, but this was, given the circumstances, to be expected. We were told not to drink the water. Hummers filled with men in uniform, holding enormous semi-automatics, slowly drove down our street at all hours of the day and night. Helicopters circled incessantly. We ate the MREs they gave us, more out of perverse fascination than necessity. We were in a police state, yes, but cognizant of the fact that said state was policing on our behalf. They were there to protect us, two temporarily inconvenienced white homeowners. They were protecting us against all those who had actually suffered and were sore about it.

Nothing had happened to our home. We were close enough to the French Quarter, to privilege, that we were protected. In spite of the fact that we hadn't boarded our windows, none were shattered. Everything we had DVRed was still on the DVR.

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The low-income housing complex immediately next door to us, however, had collapsed into a pile of rubbish, one was one of over 200,000 residences destroyed by the hurricane. Looking at it, and then at our white devil's paradise, I felt a tidal wave of nihilism. There was no such thing, I realized, as karma. If karma existed, we'd be out of house and home. We were the antithesis of church-going people. We did not volunteer. We did not give back to our community. The idea of "paying it forward" was the subject of derision. Half of our two-person household didn't even vote. There was no justice, I learned, in the world. Which is why, instead of character, all I got out of Katrina was a party-friendly anecdote.

The weeks after we returned were apocalyptic, but tolerable. I remember the smell of mold enveloping me whenever I disaster-tourismed my way into abandoned houses that would never be rebuilt. I remember seeing overturned boats that had drifted into intersections and laid there, waiting to be removed. I remember driving through the Ninth Ward, and it feeling as though I were driving through a mass grave. I remember a lot. But memories are all I have. I moved shortly thereafter, not to Houston, where up to 100,000 former New Orleanians relocated, but to Los Angeles, and into a world where Obama, from what I'm told, cares about all people. Compared to the last administration's, his benevolence could be considered saintly.

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Read: British Gamers Are Buying SEGA's Long-Dead Dreamcast Again

Usain Bolt, if you've seen him run—actually, if you've seen the man walk, with the sort of coltish premium swagger only elite sportspeople seem to possess, the sort of calm comfort visible in those who inhabit bodies capable of extreme, impossible things, a lower center of peace and gravity that comes from knowing you are not only at your own physical peak but, arguably, you are at the physical peak of every single human on earth—is basically something More Than Human now, a record demolishing dynamo, a one-man army marching imperviously over all previous athletic highs, a robot rendered out of marble-like muscle and flesh, an anomaly. He just ran 200 meters in 19.58 seconds, and did the last 15 meters or so at his version of a casual jog. He's a freak, a one-off, a masterpiece. He's a literal living legend.

Seriously though, lol—he just got run over by a cameraman on a Segway:

This is the great tragedy of the modern age: that such epochal events can be eclipsed in six little seconds by one perfect moment of high farce. Dude just ran 200m in less than 20 seconds, but a chubby middle-aged guy in a polo shirt and a red high-vis vest just made you forget that instantly. Usain Bolt, high on the pulsing adrenalin of victory, punching his torso where his Puma-sponsored Lycra says "Jamaica," double-footed from behind by some sort of next level robo-klutz.

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Watching the Segway snap inwards, on collision course with the most expensive legs in the universe, you can see on his face already that he knows he's going to hit Bolt in the worst way—from behind, suddenly, pushing him forward and yanking him back, rolling over the Achilles and snapping at the hamstrings. The cameraman's world stops for an instant as he imagines stern tellings off and P45s, crying over a bleak formica kitchen table at his wife, saying, "Nobody will hire me, Linda," saying, "not since I ran the world's most unstoppable athlete over with an absurd machine."

And then they drop, together and entwined in their confusion, the camera clonking him latter directly on the head, him looking back at the camera as if to say, "Are you OK?"—because somehow his priority is the camera and not Usain actual Bolt—and then he holds out a hand to Bolt, as if to say, "Please," as if to say, "Forgive me," a finger reaching out across the void between man and god, Michelangelo's The Creation Of Adam rendered in real life for the Vine generation.

Also lol, you should see it at high speed from the reverse angle:

Sometimes we have to choose what side we are on. Sometimes we just have to face reality and know. Are we Usain Bolts, beautiful athletes with wending limbs and taut muscles, bodies as brands, bodies as machines built to go short distances at immense speed, bodies sponsored for millions of pounds and insured for millions more? Or are we a slightly flubby cameraman in khakis on a Segway, devastating all before us, tangled up in our own lanyard? Watch the man toil on the asphalt in despair, look at him desperately reach one clumsy hand forward through the evolution of man towards Bolt—a superhuman, a person and then some, a man born 250, 300 years before his time—and you will immediately know what you are. Sometimes, the closest you ever get to greatness is running it over with a hands-free Segway.

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The author playing music with his baby

I don't fuck with music made explicitly for children. Some random fool singing "The Wheels on the Bus" over some garbage ass beat made by some loser producer? No dude, I don't want to hear that trash. "Pop Goes the Weasel"? Fuck that, bruh. I see some educational value in the Alphabet Song but I'm not trying to bump that in the whip.

I don't even think babies really like that shit either. The baby will go on your phone and play Thugger. The baby will cry when Drake comes on. The baby gets it. The baby will have a working link to the next Yeezy album leak before you. The baby will put you on to at least three new obscure SoundCloud producers a week.

Get some of those tiny baby-size noise-canceling headphones and bring it to an underground rap show so it can see what struggle rap looks like.

Music is as primal as it is complex, which is maybe what makes babies connect with it so hard. Your baby understands Sketches of Spain. It can sing along, teach you how to hear it like Davis intended. Jazz, dude, I'm telling you, they fucks widdit. Dog, Ornette Coleman? That's top tier music for the kids.

Get some of those tiny baby-size noise-canceling headphones and bring it to an underground rap show so it can see what struggle rap looks like. Take the baby to a hardcore show so that when it's older it can be one of those assholes who's "been going to hardcore shows since I was a baby." Take the thing to a wine bar where old people are covering jazz standards so it can recognize a bad first date when it sees one later. Take the baby to a festival, teach it how to pickpocket shirtless EDM bros passed out from too much Molly—you'll clean up.

But don't just let them listen to the shit, get the baby some musical instruments. Babies can shred. It's almost as if it's what they were born to do. They do some real mind expanding stuff, on some Cecil Taylor super out, out, jazz shit, daddio. Babies are very good musicians, very avant-garde. Philip Glass stuff going on. Highly recommend a kid if you're into fiercely experimental music. Like Uncle 40 Water says, "You can learn from a baby."

Maybe the baby is first chair viola in a major municipal philharmonic.

Get the baby a major label record deal early and from there on out it will be smooth sailing. Or maybe it can be more of a warehouse party darling who eschews major labels and has an indie deal. Or maybe the baby is in a local, politically involved, fiercely DIY vegan straightedge hardcore band. Maybe the baby does the Chitlin' Circuit. Maybe the baby is a traditional dancehall serenader roving the land. Maybe the baby is first chair viola in a major municipal philharmonic. Maybe the baby sells drugs and does brief paid appearances at the club to promote its most recent mixtape. Maybe the baby is more in a backpacker type lane. Maybe the baby mostly plays drone music in heroin dens. Maybe the baby understands the world as one sustained chord in an endless song, a single orchestral moment that is forever and never.

So in conclusion, babies are some real Egberto Gismontis, man, they really do they thing. Kick back, relax, and enjoy some sweet, chill tunes with your bb. I think I mentioned in an earlier column that babies enjoy "sick tunes" and I would like to now reiterate that notion.

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