"Children are born neither good nor bad," writes Joel Peterson in his haunting new book, Dreams of My Mother, "but simply are born." The biographical novel chronicles Peterson's life as a biracial adoptee. The author was seen as an outcast from birth thanks to his green eyes (inherited from his American GI biological father, who conveniently disappeared during the eighth month of pregnancy). He suffered numerous tragedies as a frail child in postwar Korea in the 1960s, including abject poverty, an accident that nearly killed him as a baby when he fell into a pot of boiling water unattended, and witnessing the sex acts of his prostitute mother. Traumatized and confused by his birth mother's decision to place him for adoption at age six, he attempted suicide before being adopted by a Lutheran couple from rural Minnesota. Peterson grew to love his new family, including his four blonde, blue-eyed siblings, and later flourished as a Naval officer, high-level telecommunications executive, CEO, and entrepreneur. He's currently a PhD pre-doc in Education Policy and Reform at Claremont Graduate School.

Over the past six decades, families in more than 15 countries have adopted some 200,000 Korean children, with the majority of adoptees living in the US. Since a child born to a Korean mother and American father was not recognized as a Korean or American citizen at the time, Peterson had no government benefits, right to attend school, or future, really. The first-time author deftly writes about Korea's patriarchal culture, its obsession with purity of bloodlines, and how unmarried women (then and now) are shunned by Korean society. He also shines an unflinching lens on the well-meaning white people who may believe "love is enough," but can't really fathom the experiences of the kids they are adopting. At its heart, Dreams of My Mothers is a story about identity, sacrifice, perseverance, and what it really means to be American.

VICE spoke to Peterson about Korea, Minnesota, culture shock, and the value of fiction.

VICE: What led you to write biographical fiction instead of a straight memoir?
Joel Peterson: I felt that a memoir required a level of accuracy and corroboration akin to journalistic standards that I may not have been able to achieve, as I lacked many documents. I wrote the book after the death of both of my mothers. I was also concerned about overly focusing on myself, when I thought the true protagonists were my mothers. A fictionalized approach allowed me to enhance conversations, thoughts, and feelings that may better portray the truth. Finally, a fictional biography, where all names are changed, offers more legal protection against anyone taking exception.

Joel with his family in Minnesota. Photo courtesy of Joel Peterson

Most adoptees do not remember their actual adoption, but you have vivid recollections. What was the culture shock like arriving in Minnesota?
I was shocked by the abundance of everything, from the grocery store to JCPenney. I also was struck by the technology since I'd essentially been living in the 19th century with no plumbing, no running water, sanitation, bathrooms, electricity, air-conditioning, refrigeration, or electric lights. To suddenly have hot and cold running water coming out of faucets, electricity, radios, television, telephones, cars, toothpaste—it was culture shock and future shock. I could not believe how huge everyone's noses were or the amount of facial and body hair people had. I thought blue eyes just looked alien. And the body odors were pretty amazing.

You write about not fitting in in Korea or Minnesota. What did it feel like to always be the "other"?
It was extremely lonely and isolating. People who are only children talk of being lonely sometimes, but they still had parents who they resembled. I differed from even my closest family, both biological and adoptive. I was an individual of one. There was no place, even in my childhood home, where I felt that I belonged.

As a baby, you suffered an accident that left you disfigured and scarred. How did this incident further affect you?
It added to and reinforced my differentness and otherness. There is not usually a physical revulsion or repulsion based on racial features, but deformity and disfigurement can cause these involuntary reactions in people. Plus, people always asked what happened and that would serve as a constant reminder of not only the incident, but also everything surrounding my circumstances and life that I had as a child in Korea.

My mixed racial makeup and my experience living in different cultures allowed me to better fit in across the world.

After moving to America, how did traveling overseas change or expand your own personal identity?
When I started traveling, living, and working internationally, I found that I didn't feel as isolated, because there was no expectation of fitting in. I was by definition a foreigner, and so people accepted and expected that I was different, but that wasn't pejorative. It also underscored how I was viewed in the world as an American first and last. My mixed racial makeup and my experience living in different cultures allowed me to better fit in across the world.

How did the presence of American troops throughout your childhood in Korea influence your own decision to become a Naval officer?
I saw US troops as a protection against the violence that surrounded me. All my interactions with soldiers were always positive. I remember getting handouts such as my first taste of white bread, my first banana, and my first chewing gum, from US troops through the barbed wire surrounding their camps. But also the fact that my adoptive father enlisted in WWII, as did my mother's brother, who served in the Navy and made it a career. In my family, the obligation to serve your community was simply a given, so I always thought of military service as a possible option.

Joel today

Korean adoptees are now using DNA databases and online groups to reunite with family members. Is this something you have ever considered?
No. I don't see family as being driven exclusively or even primarily by biology. I can't see the benefit for me to attempt to connect with someone who is a total stranger, simply because I share genetics. The potential for disrupting his life and mine, and the unknown outcomes, seems filled with possible negative scenarios for very little positive gain. I have a wonderful father who served as about as perfect a male role model as I could have hoped for. Based on my biological father's name and rank, which my birth mother remembered, I was able to track down the likely individual and his Army career and post-Army residence. This person died in 2003.

South Korea now has the lowest birth rate of any developed country, and some adoptee groups are advocating ending all adoption from the country. What are your feelings about transracial adoption in general?
Adoptees have all suffered a negative life circumstance. But adoption is not itself the malady, it's relinquishment. Adoption is the single most successful social intervention, much more successful than interventions for alcoholism, depression, violent behavior, criminality, or learning disabilities. The "success rate" for adopted people, meaning they become functioning, independent, contributing, healthy members of society is 87 percent. This compares with 90 percent for biologically-raised children.

But just because it is so successful doesn't mean that adoption doesn't cause issues, pain, suffering, and long-term consequences. But to eliminate it as an option, when we know that institutionalization or foster care are proven to be so much less successful, would seem morally reprehensible. We should absolutely do more to prevent relinquishment, to support single parents, to let parents be able to choose to keep their children. In a perfect world, no child would ever be relinquished, abandoned, or orphaned, but parents are simply frail and faulty human beings, and sometimes even die. Because of this, we will always have children of all races who will suffer the malady of relinquishment—voluntary or otherwise.

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Prion diseases are terrifying. A rare, yet aggressive and mostly fatal class of neurodegenerative maladies popularized by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), but including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), scrapie, and wasting diseases in elk and mink, these illnesses eat away at our brains, causing dementia, motion disorders, and eventually a slow, horrid death.

Perhaps more terrifying than the symptoms is the fact that prion diseases aren't caused by your standard viral or bacterial infection. Instead, they're spread by the abnormal folding of naturally occurring and normal prion proteins in our brains. Once a misfolded prion hits a normal prion, it transforms that healthy entity into an agent of its infection. It's basically a zombie pathogen.

Fortunately, these diseases are rare in humans. They're only sometimes caused by random mutations within us. More often they stem from the consumption of the spinal tissue of creatures afflicted with a prion disorder. And that's something that we've gotten quite good at avoiding—despite paranoid claims to the contrary—since the mad cow scares of the late 80s and early 90s.

Yet there has been one major outbreak of prion disease in humans in recent history. For ages, this outbreak has served as a curiosity and a cautionary, even moralistic, tale. But some researchers have long looked at this exceptional epidemic as a means to better understand prion diseases and how to fend against them in the future. Recently, a team of British academics made a big discovery in the genetic code of the survivors of the disease: a whole new type of genetic resistance not just against the peculiar strain of illness that hit them, but potentially against every form of prion disease imaginable. Yet the means by which this resistance developed, it turns out, are unexpected and a little ghastly. Just how we can use this isolated genetic quirk to similarly protect the wider world against similar maladies remains a bit fuzzy.

The outbreak in question was kuru. In the tongue of Papua New Guinea's southern Fore people, whom it struck, kuru means "the shaking death," a reference to its symptoms. During the 50s and 60s, a massive kuru epidemic hit the Fore, at its height killing two percent of the population every year. Although initially regional investigators thought it was some kind of mass psychosomatic illness or genetic disorder, eventually they linked it to prion disease. And when they did, they discovered that the origins of kuru weren't infected cattle, sheep, or even mink.

Kuru spread through the Fore thanks to ritual cannibalism. The Fore's recently deceased were consumed, mainly by women and small children. Researchers suspect that sometime in the 1950s, a member of a Fore community contracted CJD or some variant, maybe thanks to a random mutation. Then his consumption spread the disease to others, who were themselves consumed, even after colonial officials tried to outlaw the practice.

"[An old expert] told me that... everyone who sat down to a mortuary feast where the person had died of kuru would ultimately succumb to kuru," Professor John Collinge, head of the University College London Institute of Neurology team behind the new discovery, told VICE.

Because of the compositions of the feasts, the epidemic's victims were overwhelmingly women and children. And for a time, some feared that the disease would basically wipe out all Fore of child-bearing age and capabilities, leaving the entire culture to slowly, brutally die off.

But that didn't happen. The Fore survived, for the most part presumably because the practice of cannibalism dropped off. The disease, on the other hand, faded into the realm of historical medical curiosities—and, of course, cautionary tales about the evils of cannibalism.

But a few people, like Collinge, kept boots on the ground with the Fore into the modern era. Prion diseases, it turns out, have an insane potential for dormancy, surviving for years or decades before kicking into gear and ravaging our bodies. So every now and then a new case would pop up amongst the Fore, ready for study. And even just examining the histories and remaining populations of the disease's survivors, it was thought, could teach us about how to handle another prion outbreak in the wider world if one ever were to arise.

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It was while collecting such medical reference data that Collinge and his team started to realize that the old assumption about everyone who ate kuru flesh eventually dying of kuru wasn't true. In fact, they found hundreds of survivors of the epidemic who'd been exposed to kuru-tainted flesh and had not manifested any signs of the disease whatsoever. That's when Collinge realized that he might have found a population with some natural resistance to the disease worth exploring.

"We knew from some studies originally published in Nature back in 1991 that there was a common variation in the human [genetic code for the] prion protein at position 129 [that could lead to resistance to CJD]," says Collinge. This variation occurs worldwide, dating back 500,000 years ago, probably to an era when widespread cannibalism amongst early humans caused a number of kuru-like epidemics, selecting for those with this genetic booster to their defenses. So when he first examined the DNA of kuru-resistant Fore, that's what he expected to see.

But when his team looked at the results, they realized that while many of the survivors did have the protective mutation at position 129, they also displayed a totally distinct genetic anomaly at position 127 on the prion gene, unlike anything they'd seen in 20 years of research on populations all over the world. And it was most densely distributed at the very center of the kuru epidemic, where the disease had otherwise done the most damage and probably began.

"Our initial thought was that maybe... it might cause the disease," says Collinge. After all, he adds, the mutation showed up on a bit of DNA that hadn't changed for millions of years, suggesting that it served some important function. Maybe that was tamping down rogue prions.

Yet when Collinge's assistants went to collect medical histories from the families of those with this mutation, instead of finding infirmity, they found them to be in unexpectedly good shape.

If cannibalism hadn't stopped at the end of the 1950s, that population may have regenerated from the survivors and created an entirely [prion disease]-resistant population. —Professor John Collinge

"In fact," says Collinge, "there wasn't much history of kuru. Indeed, in about a dozen families that they looked at, I think there was only one person in one family that had died of kuru. In the other families, everyone had relatives that had died of kuru—multiple people."

This mutation didn't cause kuru, the team realized. It was preventing it. After a little jiggering around in genetically modified mice, they realized that while one copy of the gene offered resistance to kuru and limited resistance to mad cow disease, two copies of the gene offered total resistance against any form of prion horror the team could throw at their long-suffering vermin.

And given the distribution of the mutation, it seemed that the resistance wasn't just some complete fluke of nature. It spread through the population because of the cannibalistic outbreak.

That's not to say that kuru caused its own resistance. The mutation appears to be about ten generations (or a couple hundred years) old, whereas the oldest oral historical records of kuru only go back to the early 20th century. But under the pressure of kuru, this mutation, which elsewhere might have faded away, was favored to an insane degree, until, Collinge estimates, about 12 percent of the region at the heart of the epidemic was carrying one variant gene copy.

"If cannibalism hadn't stopped at the end of the 1950s," enthuses Collinge, "that population may have regenerated from the survivors and created an entirely [prion disease]-resistant population. It's an amazing example of human evolution—probably the most powerful example that's ever been demonstrated of resistance to lethal infection."

Yet while this genetic discovery is eye-popping for suggesting that humanity may have genetically benefitted from cannibalism, Collinge and his colleagues are still working out how to weaponize it in the fight against prion disease. (And the fight is real: While kuru has faded and mad cow is contained, the number of people exposed to prion contamination over the years, who may now be dormant carriers, suggests we're headed down a road of pain and confusion in the future for which we have few medical tools.)

"One possible thing you could do is conceive of some sort of gene therapy where you deliberately express the mutant protein in individuals as an inhibitor of prions," muses Collinge. "[But] I don't think that's a realistic approach to take. Gene therapy for brain diseases, I don't think is close to possible [at the moment]."

At the moment, when it comes to treatments, Collinge and his compatriots are focusing on an unrelated antibody, which basically sticks to healthy prions and prevents zombie monster prions from infecting and refolding them. They've even had some success in curing mice of existing disease and are on their way to developing a trial for human patients.

But even if it can't immediately translate into the premiere knock-out blow against prion disease, the kuru-bred resistance will help us in our understanding of the disease.

"I think understanding what the [mutation] does is going to be absolutely fascinating in terms of the molecular understanding of these diseases," says Collinge. "[And] these diseases are incredibly aggressive, invariably fatal. In reality it's probably going to take more than one drug working in combination to actually cure them. So although we have high hopes for our antibody, that doesn't mean that we're not looking for other things as well to knock them out."

Some of those other things could stem from the discoveries gifted to us by Fore cannibalism and the disease it triggered. But even if we don't get anything tangible out of the position 127 mutation, it's still a profound message about the speed, power, and efficiency of evolution, and the potential for human survival even against zombies. Zombie pathogens, that is.

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The dog of 'Fallout 4', playability possibilities, TBC

Yes, I'm serious, and no, it's not just that I'm rubbish at balancing a human hero. For the uninitiated, one of the first things you do in a Fallout game is assign points to various traits, like strength or intelligence, sowing the seeds of the wild-eyed Gibson-alike or dour Costner-ish post-apocalyptic legend you hope one day to become. I can never make my mind up about which development path I want my character to follow, and the franchise's taste for open-endedness doesn't exactly help. Take a wrong turn at the outset, and your budding petty thief might stumble into a shootout with foes she hasn't a gnat's chance in hell of ever hitting, let alone wounding.

But that's all surface stuff. The real reason I want to play a dog in Fallout 4 is that, well, people expect less of dogs, right? You don't have a moralising Liam Neeson (the third game's big celeb cameo) standing over you as you test your legs. You aren't called on to decide which of a given world's factions most deserve a rocket to the gonads, or sternly handed a bag of negative karma points when you saunter away from a person in need. Dogs have it made. They're creatures of abandon, cruising through life on a whim. And if the occasional urge to guzzle something's vomit is the price I have to pay for that pressure-free existence, well – Fallout is already a game in which you can drink from toilets. At least this way you can do that without compromising your dignity.

Geralt is rarely the core around which the world of 'The Witcher 3' turns

OK, so perhaps I'm not being completely serious. But lately I've really fallen out of love with playing the hero – by which I here mean a character who is the centre of a world's narrative, and the means of its destruction or salvation – in video games. That's thanks in part to Jake Muncy's excellent piece for VICE on The Witcher 3's leading man Geralt of Rivia, a reviled half-mutant who scrapes out a living on the fringes of society, rather than serving, like one of BioWare's protagonists, as its fulcrum.

As Muncy notes, the character's "odd mix of empowered and powerless" changes the tenor of what are functionally the same old role-playing fetch quests and monster-slaying missions. Villagers regard you with mistrust, even after you've taken care of the local Grave Hag problem. Kings and generals see you as naught but a handy instrument for work that's too sordid for a "proper" human being. Geralt's second-class citizenship ought, on paper, to be irksome and deflating, but in practice it's liberating. You aren't expected to save The Witcher's universe, even if that's what you end up doing, and the result is that you're more at leisure to attend to less momentous, more sympathetic things, people and events. A domestic squabble that spills out onto the street; a dwarf's attempts to rebuild following an arson attack; a bartender's gratitude when you talk your way through a confrontation with local toughs, rather than starting a brawl.

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For my money, developer CD Projekt RED could have gone further. Much as I enjoy whipping the head off a ghoul with a flick of my silver sword, I'd absolutely love to play the game as a simple travelling chronicler, paid to mosey through and soak up gossip without seeking to intervene. Or, if more focus is required, how about the role of a biographer? I completed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter recently, a game that sees you poking around a majestic yet eerie valley for clues about the title character's disappearance. Imagine if you had to do the same for old Geralt, with his taciturn manner, recurrent bouts of amnesia and professional interest in the haunts of trolls and werewolves.

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In many ways, the industry's fixation with capital-H heroes is a mark of creative adolescence. There's nothing wrong with wanting to play as a potent, influential personality in a video game – certainly, The Witcher 3 is as close as I'll ever get to being Viggo Mortensen – but it's a little damning that so many games revolve around characters who only ever deal with the matters at hand in the broadest, most binary of ways.

Smaller roles may be no less gripping, and rather more enlightening. Look at Sunset from Tale of Tales, in which you play housekeeper to a man swept up in political revolution, or Warco, which casts you as a cameraman dogging the heels of troops on a contemporary battlefield. These are "niche", "arty" indie titles, of course; one mainstream parallel is the elderly Halo 3: ODST, which offers up its fair share of gunplay but also casts you as more of a witness than a protagonist. Where Halo's original poster boy Master Chief is your classic knight in shining armour, forever yanking our fat from the fire at the very last minute, ODST's Rookie always arrives after the last minute. He's there to reflect and take stock, rather than just to drive the plot forward. As in The Witcher 3, the game cultivates a sense of investment that's carefully tied to feelings of insignificance.

If nothing else, playing a bit part in a game is a ripe opportunity for comedy. Ever wondered how it feels to play the banter-dispensing ally in a shooter series like Uncharted or Gears of War? It'd be like walking a bellicose hamster through an obstacle course. You'd have to help the "hero" just enough in a firefight that they don't crumble for want of basic hand-eye coordination, while dishing out wisecracks and striving to draw your comrade's eye to story-relevant chunks of scenery. You'd also have to put up with a generous amount of friendly fire. On the flipside, you'd get to revenge yourself on the "protagonist" by standing in doorways, or innocently nicking off with loot and ammo. (This sounds like me thinking aloud – in fact, a few Dark Souls players have taken to modelling their antics in PvP on AI-controlled characters, purely for the lulz. This extends to wearing the same armour and mimicking gaps in computerised attack patterns.)

'Sunset' sees you playing the role of a housekeeper, as a war rages outside the window

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There is a larger moral at stake here (sorry). The trappings of heroism aren't culturally neutral. It's common for those in positions of power to apply the "hero" label as a bulletproof shield, heading off critique of the people concerned and by extension, the political narratives they may represent. Call soldiers to account for their actions, or question the legitimacy of the conflict itself, and you're taking a pop at "our heroes" rather than merely objecting to unnecessary bloodshed. Moreover, the role of hero tends to denote a certain calibre of individual – white, male, heterosexual and hyper-aggressive. In refusing to invoke the term, developers might have an easier time pitching, or finding an audience for characters who don't conform to the Modern Warfare stereotype, with a view to collapsing the "hero" moniker's ideological baggage in the long run.

Or, you know, it could just be an excuse to play Fallout as a dog. There's a lively YouTube Let's Play tradition of assuming the role of a nobody – VICE contributor Andy Kelly is well-known for his Olaf series, for example, wherein he dons the sackcloth of a peasant eking out a pittance in the valleys of Skyrim. The popularity of such coverage suggests that video game narrative is to some degree playing catch-up to video game world design. What's the point of an environment of The Witcher 3's scale and splendour, after all, if all you're going to do is lord over it from on high? Perhaps sniffing at pools of sick isn't the most appealing angle, but I could certainly do with some time away from the spotlight.

@dirigiblebill

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Some of the cast of 'Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson'

While the rest of the world, judging by my Twitter feed, has been putting in the hours on Metal Gear Solid V – which is pretty bloody great, for the most part – I've been busying myself with a few other interactive distractions. I'm easing myself back into the beautiful wastes of Mad Max, having already played and enjoyed a decent slice of it earlier this year, and I'm having a lot of fun with Super Mario Maker, the level-creation tool for Nintendo's Wii U that so easily stirs the latent game designer in all of us.

And then there's Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson, which I downloaded onto my 3DS a couple of weeks ago. I've played maybe an hour of Tamsoft's latest side-on, 2.5D brawler; and if that name's familiar, it's probably because the same Japanese studio made the Toshinden games in the 1990s before moving onto, let's say, rather more exploitative fare. I've picked at it, across five or six brief sessions now, always moving proceedings onwards to the next scenario and fresh waves of enemies. Yet 60 minutes is enough to know what it's all about. Breasts. Boobs. Tits. Baps. Knockers. Bosoms. Norks. Melons. Insert your own local, colloquial variation, here.

Seriously. That's it. Breasts. This is a game about breasts. Oh, sure, there's fighting too, and a storyline I cannot even begin to fathom on account of it directly following the events of its preceding game, Senran Kagura Burst, which I'd not even heard of prior to picking this up. (There's an extremely long, context-setting intro, but I fell asleep halfway through it.) The combat is a long way from comprehensive, briefly entertaining combos achievable (at one point I racked up 600 straight hits, somehow) but the inputs as basic as a light and heavy attacks plus the occasional special move. The winning tactic in any boss confrontation is generally to run around and jump a lot, avoiding attacks, and then, when a window in their defence opens, mash the Y and X buttons on your 3DS as quickly as possible. But mainly: boobs. Big, bouncing cartoon boobs, grotesquely proportioned, hanging off the front of a range of saucer-eyed and schoolgirl-aged anime characters who are all training to be (good or evil) ninjas because... video games?

Each level – at least, each of the ones I have seen so far, and I'm unlikely to see any more – comprises a Dynasty Warriors-like/lite melee section where the player-controlled character, each of whom has their own weapons, from swords to bovver boots to guns to, um, umbrellas, clears out waves of identikit enemies before facing off against a boss. As these drone types are struck, their clothes fall off – and guess what? They're almost entirely girls, early on. Teenage girls, schoolgirls, just like your controllable characters. And that stripping mechanic works both ways – while you'll start each stage relatively well covered, barring the odd underwear-revealing rather-too-short skirt (but then, with all the leaping about the place, I suppose I can understand the practical side of such attire), take damage enough and your own garments will begin to fall apart. You can easily finish a stage with your shinobi wearing nothing more than what is, basically, a barely-keeping-everything-in-place bikini. Whether you win or lose against the boss, the screen freezes on your character come the battle's end for you to move the 3DS around and gawp at their, um, well, y'know... Oh fuck it. The game invites you to ogle their assets. It positively demands it.

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It gets worse outside of the core mission structure. A "hub" house, where all the playable girls can be found, allows you to check your stats, alter your settings and so forth – and also to dress the characters up in the outfits you've unlocked by completing stages, and then posing at them using a number of pre-sets which range from cheery V-signs to them squatting or actually straddling the invisible you. Quite what the point of this is, I don't know. If altering costumes and striking certain poses gives the girls advantageous stat boosts to use in upcoming challenges, I missed that particular memo. To me it simply seems to be a shamelessly outright option to leer at exaggerated, entirely fantastical female forms. At girls drawn like hyper-sexualised young adults, underage and oversized.

That a game like this can come out in 2015 is ridiculous. It's brazenly, unapologetically sexist. And it's all as arousing as a dinner date with Des O'Connor, where Des is dressed up like Prince Harry that time he went to that party in that terrifically inappropriate gear and will only speak to you in broken Brummie, which as we all know is the least sexy accent in the whole of the British Isles. The thin waists and titanic whimwhams might represent wank fantasy material for teenage boys who, for some reason, can't bring themselves to find actual pornography on the internet, but to a grown adult, a married man, a father of two, this is just the dullest, most tired tripe masquerading as titillation. I get more excited making toast.

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And yet this is a game – a series, which has spawned its own manga and anime offshoots – with so many fans. Sales of the games to date have passed the million mark, and coverage elsewhere has emphasised the gameplay improvements made to Deep Crimson, compared to its predecessor. And, you know, I'm absolutely fine with people playing this game, and enjoying it (be fair, most likely in the privacy of their own homes, despite the portability of the platform), and claiming that they're primarily in it for everything but what's inside all those fancy blouses.

'Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson', extended launch trailer

Of course, they're fucking lying, as this is a game about breasts. Only about breasts. Funbags. Jugs. Et cetera. Even a big boss dragon thing in it has breasts. It's not like publisher Marvellous has shied away from that fact, either, releasing a special edition of the game with an oppai mouse mat ("with 3D boobs!") and naming the next-level-down set the "Happy Boobs" edition. Milk bombs, muffins, cha-chas – it's all about the fun dumplings.

And nothing else, so stop kidding yourself. You're not playing Deep Crimson for its multi-layered gameplay, for its sole playable male, its pair battles or its tangled tale of... sorry, again, no idea, but I get that the baddies aren't all that bad in the big scheme of things. You're playing it because misshapen cartoon girls with weirdly massive eyes, piss-poorly made outfits and ginormous gazongas do it for you. And that's okay, I suppose. Better that you feel up fictional girls on your 3DS screen rather than grope a stranger on the bus. But I'm not playing any more of it. I don't have any more time to waste on stuff like this when so many genuinely excellent games are just out, or imminent; so I'll be belatedly starting Metal Gear Solid V instead, because that definitely doesn't have any problems regarding its representation of female characters. Absolutely not.

Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson is out now, exclusive to the 3DS.

@MikeDiver

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Activists loading the cars in Vienna

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps

This weekend, a group of Austrian activists travelled to the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen to deliver relief and aid goods to the thousands of refugees stranded there. Initially, the activists had planned to help refugees stuck in Hungary cross the border into Austria; however, the plan got flipped on its head towards the end of the week.

On Thursday, Hungarian authorities lured many refugees onto trains with false promises – instead of transporting them across the border into Austria, they were simply shuttled to nearby camps. On Friday, right-wing hooligans ganged up outside Budapest station to throw rocks at refugees gathered there. Fed up, some 1,200 asylum seekers later decided to take matters into their own hands, and simply started walking towards Vienna. At this point, the Hungarian government realised exactly how close they were to a humanitarian catastrophe. After about 23 hours, Austrian officials announced that they would be opening the borders and letting refugees pass through on their way to Germany.

The unfolding events forced the activists to shift their goals, instead aiming to deliver humanitarian aid to the thousands of refugees stuck in eastern Hungary – a part of the country that's not exactly known for it solidarity or self-organised help initiatives, let alone any official support for the refugees.

I decided to tag along on the convoy to see how it worked. The group I would accompany was a colourful bunch of people from all over Austria. One of the young men involved, Dominik Paireder, said he had received massive support after telling his friends about the initiative. Another convoy participant, Ako Pire – a member of the activist alliance Offensive Against the Right Wing – told me how angry he was with the way officials had been handling things. "The Austrian federal government could've done way more, way sooner," he said. "They didn't actively tackle the situation until things really began to escalate. It was only then they reluctantly opened the borders."

At the station, we began loading water, food and sleeping bags onto the trucks. People brought everything from infant food to clothing to sanitary goods. The support was so massive that those arriving had to queue to have their donations taken. As we left Vienna at 10AM, I asked two women, Maria Fraißler and Marla Berger, why they were taking part in all of this. Their answer was blunt: "The time for candles, silent vigils and online petitions is over. For us, it's all about concrete help."

Our first stop was Budapest, where we delivered some of the donations to Age of Hope – an NGO whose main goal is to support refugee families. Ákos Tóth, a member of the group, told me: "The nights are getting pretty cold already. Thousands of refugees are here without any help or support. We have a lot of work ahead of us."

Tóth said there had also been numerous physical confrontations with right-wing hooligans. However, he wasn't too concerned about the neo-Nazis. "Those guys are nothing more than online heroes," he said. "They're only strong when they have an audience." In actual fact, he was far more worried about everyday discrimination: "I don't have any confidence in either the Hungarian government or the EU. My only confidence is in the people and their solidarity."

The convoy on the way to Hungary

Before long, we started our drive farther east. It was quite late in the evening when we finally arrived at Debrecen train station. The city, close to both Romania and Ukraine, is also a border town. It was dark and freezing when we got there, but, just like in Budapest, people were waiting to welcome us and offer their assistance. Everyone began hurriedly unloading the trucks and distributing the goods among the countless refugees sleeping scattered throughout the train station. Most of them, I was told, were from Afghanistan.

One little boy – who must have been about five years old – was handed a teddy bear from some Hungarian helpers. He smiled and laid it down next to his two sisters, who were sleeping on the ground in front of the station.

The refugees we spoke to told us it was pretty common to get robbed by Bulgarian police. At first, I wasn't sure I understood what they were saying – perhaps something had been lost in translation. But they said I'd understood them just right: that police were allegedly robbing refugees, beating them up and asking for bribes, all before they'd even arrived in Hungary. Those at the station were desperate to leave, but – even though the borders had been opened – couldn't catch a train without tickets, a luxury they couldn't afford after having their money taken from them, they said.

The author (left) speaking to Ákos Tóth

One man from Afghanistan told me that he'd been kicked off of four different trains. He said that he had tickets, but they kept expiring because of officials questioning him and delaying his departure. He also said that a lot of transport companies refused to even let refugees onboard city buses. According to him, people were reluctant to resort to the refugee camps because they were scared of getting stuck there and being given a hard time from police.

Aida Elsaghi – a doctor who's been at the station every day since the refugees started to pour in – told us: "There's no official help, but we have around 20 people who've been coming here all week to give a hand. Some of the refugees haven't eaten for days. We have women and children here, too. Even if these people get picked up by officials, they'll only get transported to camps. They aren't given any water or food or medical attention."

READ ON VICE NEWS: An Egyptian Billionaire Says He's Shopping for a Private Island for Refugees

Local activists had plenty of stories about threats from right-wing groups, but they also had anecdotes about the community's solidarity and kindness. A local baker – originally a refugee from Kosovo himself – had been providing bread for people, and some medical students had been by to help where they could. While driving to the camp to offload the last of the goods, Ako Pire from the Offensive Against the Right Wing emphasised how important all of this was: "It's calls-to-action like this that we need to fight fortress Europe," he said.

On our way back to Vienna, we overheard some activists discussing which of the border crossings were open, and which would be the easiest to use when taking refugees across. The car we were travelling in was already packed, so we couldn't take anyone, but others offered places to some of those who were trying to reach Germany. One of the girls from the convoy, Maria Fraißler, told us that she didn't think judicial boundaries should stop people from helping. "If laws are unjust, it should be more than OK, from a moral standpoint, to circumvent them," she said.

Watch our documentary on the refugee crisis, 'Europe or Die':

Arriving at Vienna's Western Railway Station at about 2AM, aid supplies were still piling up in front of the building, with volunteers still sorting them out. Only a week ago, the Austrian media had been flooded with reports of racist attacks and the unbearable situation at the Traiskirchen refugee camp, which was branded "shameful" by Amnesty International. A handful of outlets claimed that Amnesty didn't know what they were talking about and that the refugees should be more grateful – but they aren't any more.

Since Monday evening last week, the prevailing attitude has been one of compassion. Over 25,000 came out in support of the refugees and the opening of Austria's borders, and people are now lining up to help at Austria's train stations. Even in Hungary, which has made its rigid position on migration and refugees very clear, citizens are showing solidarity and actively helping Syrian and Afghan survivors get across the borders.

There seems to be something in the air. And thankfully, it's not just the rocks hurled by right-wing hooligans.

Scroll down for more photos.

Afghan refugees in Debrecen

Refugees line the streets of Debrecen

A van full of aid materials

The convoy on the way home

'P.T.' is gone, forever (screenshot via Gamespot)

Sorting through a box of ancient junk, I found my bounty: Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World and Ecks vs Sever on Game Boy cartridges.

I don't have the hardware to bring them to life anymore, but it's comforting to think that if I had the right Game Boy (Advance) I could still play these games that I'd enjoyed so much as a teenager. It made me think: as video games come to rely more on digital distribution, online servers and rolling patches, will I be able to play the games I enjoy now in another 15 years?

Every one of the 604 games I own on Steam is incorporeal. Steam does allow offline backups, but I don't have the storage capacity to download and archive each of my games and, unless Steam went under, I'd still need their permission to access most of them anyway. It's a similar situation with my other consoles. Very few disks are likely to tumble out of that box in the coming years.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain recently caused a fuss when it was discovered that the boxed PC version is merely a Steam key for the game, with Steam's 8MB installer on a disk. It's useful for nothing more than a coaster once it's been in the once, from gateway to adventure to sideboard accoutrement on launch day.

This causes problems. With an increasing number of games now solely available as a digital product, this means they can and will vanish, eventually – and when that happens, it can be forever. We've seen this happened to Konami's P.T., the free playable teaser for the Silent Hill reboot we'll never see, which was purged from the PlayStation store. Not only can you can no longer acquire it through the store, for the first time, but also those who previously downloaded the title only to later free up hard drive space by deleting it can't re-download it. And this is merely the most recent example of a high-profile game being lost to the ages.

We're already starting to see countless MMOs blink out of existence, quietly shutting down and taking years of work with them. Writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Alec Meer manages to perfectly encapsulate the feeling when a game you've invested so much time in has its plug pulled, relating a tale of loss following the deletion of his character as part of the death of superhero RPG City of Heroes. There's no way to preserve a world that vast with so many players contributions – regardless of best intentions, these characters and stories will never be visible again.

A screenshot from 'APB: All Points Bulletin'

My own story of woe is tied to APB: All Points Bulletin, a doomed MMO take on the Grand Theft Auto formula, which launched amid great hype in July 2010 with a review embargo of one week after launch. Perhaps unsurprisingly it wasn't all that good, and its developers Realtime Worlds collapsed into administration in August, barely a month on from the game's release. The servers went offline in November, rendering the game unplayable. While APB: Reloaded brought the game back to life as a free-to-play title in 2011, it just wasn't the same. The core mechanics had changed to accommodate the microtransactions that'd been shoved in by new developers Reloaded Productions, and there wasn't any going back.

Nicoll Hunt worked on the avatar and customisation options within APB and is concerned about the future of the medium as the market starts to shift towards games as a service. "What worries me is that we will lose the ability to replay games in the future," he tells me, "and older games will start to degrade as publishers lose the rights to music and other aspects."

"It would be nice if publishers voluntarily released the source code to server-based games when they decommission them," Nicoll continues. "It's a big ask, but a game becoming impossible to play just because it's not financially profitable seems somewhat short sighted."

The revisionist history of video gaming means that even if you have the disk or game data stowed somewhere, you might not be able to play the same game you remember. Patches rebalance and alter games after release, and this means the experience that you wanted to recapture, the one in your head, now only exists between your ears.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's documentary on competitive gaming, eSports

Competitive online games, those powering eSports leagues, can issue a major patch once or twice a year. The version of Dota 2 played at this year's International is an entirely different game to the one played in 2013. The strategies, heroes and even the flow of the game have been changed.

Sometimes these changes are viewed positively – like World of Warcraft's total reinvention of its world with the Cataclysm update – and sometimes it angers the fans, as was the case when the powers behind Star Wars Galaxies made the strange decision to tear out everything interesting about their game and replace it with a tale of bounty hunters versus Jedi. I was a Star Wars Galaxies player. I'm not bitter. But if I wanted to play Dota 2 from 2013 or Star Wars Galaxies before its retooling, I can't. Those games don't exist anymore.

Even games dependent on their single-player experience aren't immune. Assassin's Creed: Unity released on consoles with a host of problems that required patches to fix. If the service to distribute these patches was to go down, and you didn't already have the patches on your console, then you're stuck with the buggy launch version. And the really sad part is that in most of these cases there's nothing you can do about it. You can't stop progress.

'Assassin's Creed: Unity' required post-release patching to prevent characters bugging out, like this

Video game archiving and preservation is becoming increasingly popular as we wake up to the fact that our games and their history risk being lost. As the medium gets older, the big designers that made many of the industry's classics are starting to pass away, and the stories behind the games are being lost too, something emphasised by the tragic passing of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in July 2015. It's a movement I firmly support: we have a chance to avoid the mistakes of literature, television and film by remembering the history of video games, by properly documenting it, and we should take it.

Yet with games moving to an internet-enabled digital realm, this is becoming increasingly difficult. GameSpy's collapse last year took a swathe of games offline when the servers were switched off, and while many publishers stepped in to try to keep their products functioning, many were left stranded, likewise their players. With the recent surge in multiplayer-only games, these decisions are ultimately at the whims of publishers: you can preserve as much or as little data as you want, but when those who own the game in question decide its multiplayer is over, it's over.

As games move further towards a regular walled-garden infrastructure, and we see more cases of always-online or games requiring central servers to even work at all, it's going to get harder to maintain final, functional copies of games. With Kickstarter and similar crowd-funding sites giving supporters previews of what they've pledged for, and early access growing in popularity across the industry, it's becoming increasingly difficult to determine where development ends and the final game, ready for preservation, begins. Games are now fleeting, their experiences relative.

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A screenshot from 'Droplitz', via Blitz Games

James Parker was the designer behind Blitz Arcade's puzzler Droplitz. When Blitz Arcade and publisher Atlus went "tits up", to use his own words, the game was pulled from online stores in 2013. While James is now working on his own titles, he still misses Droplitz: "I feel sad that one of the games that I'm genuinely most proud of in my career is no longer available."

"More than ever, we live with all these transient digital things," he continues. "I have a room at home full of games that I've bought over the last 30 years which I can still play. I doubt that kids today are going to be in the same position 30 years from now."

Video gaming is at an important juncture. It's important to catalogue the strides forwards that are being made in development right now, but as the results become harder to archive we're also seeing more releases than ever before. Hundreds of games are fired out to the public, only to vanish without a trace after just a few months. But unless something is done to counter this saturation and the subsequent disappearing of so much software, "retro gaming" from this era, in the future, will be impossible. We could be looking at a lost age of video games.

@_JakeTucker

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A veiled Muslim woman in London. Woman wearing the veil are said to be popular targets of violence (via)

Read: Shockingly, a Porno Featuring Hijabis and Niqabis Is Not Very Sensitive Toward Islam

Figures from London's Metropolitan Police show that anti-Muslim hate crimes have risen by over 70 percent in the last year.

The Guardian reports that there were 816 offences recorded in the capital in the last year, compared with 478 the year previously. In the London borough of Merton, hate crimes rose by 262 percent.

Women in hijab or a headscarf are the most at risk, with the face covering said to be the most popular target for violence.

The shocking reality of the attacks has been underlined in a video released today which shows a woman in hijab being knocked unconscious on a London street. Meanwhile, youth group British Muslim Youth has received ongoing racist abuse on their Facebook page. The abuse was highlighted by Tell MAMA, a service which measures anti-Muslim attacks.

Joni Clarke, a 22-year-old Muslim from Penge, told her story on YouTube, via the charity Fixers: "I experience discrimination on a day-to-day basis. I get called names, I've had cigarettes thrown at me and nearly been run over on several occasions."

Joni said the abuse intensified after soldier Lee Rigby was murdered by two Islamic converts on a Woolwich street in 2013. "After that the abuse got worse. People seem to think that because I'm dressed this way and I'm Muslim, I'm associating myself with these people... I've been called a terrorist in the street, just because I'm wearing the niqab."

Some magic mushrooms (Photo by Zinnmann via)

When Sue* greets me, she's all sparkly eyes and smiles. Beaming, she shakes my hand firmly and, as she sits, talks animatedly about her dash from the office to our meeting. "I haven't had this much energy in years," she says. "In fact, it was the polar opposite. But now – my mood, my energy, my outlook on life has changed for the better. And all thanks to magic mushrooms? It feels too remarkable to be true, but that appears to be the case."

When 35-year-old Sue was 25, she experienced her first serious depression. At the time, she was flummoxed as to why the "black dog" had descended. "I'd known low mood since my teens," says Sue, "but that was nothing compared to the blast of this new and unexpected pain. It's very difficult to explain how depression feels, but I felt dead – nothing but blackness." Sue stopped sleeping, and struggled with her work as a research analyst. "I use to cry in the toilets, hopeless and broken," she tells me.

Sue's first bout of real depression lasted a year, and once the initial chronic period lifted, she still felt low most of the time: "I could put a face on, and didn't tell anyone apart from my doctor," she says. Like millions of others, Sue was given anti-depressants: "They stopped me crying, made me numb and I could just paper over the cracks easier with SSRIs [a type of medication commonly used in the treatment of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders]."

At the beginning of this year, despite taking a higher dose of SSRI, Sue's depression deepened. "I was thinking obsessively and negatively, constantly," she says, adding that she tried mindfulness and therapy – which both helped a little – but that the pain "was still there".

However, a chance find on the internet led Sue to some fledgling yet pioneering research around "micro-dosing", the taking of small amounts of psilocybin to relieve depression – psilocybin being the active hallucinogen in magic mushrooms. "I'd read an article about research using MDMA for depression, and my raving years meant I wasn't adverse to recreational drugs, but I'd not touched magic mushrooms for years," says Sue.

Dr James Fadiman, Ph.D

The forums Sue was visiting were full of people talking about micro-dosing, and it was here that she came upon Jim Fadiman. Dr James Fadiman, Ph.D. has a vast and varied CV; he's been a business consultant, an author of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide and co-founder of the Sofia University in California. Now 76, his younger years were spent as part of Menlo Park, a California-based team of researchers who studied the use of psychedelics in the 1960s.

"We were giving high doses of LSD to people for therapeutic reasons and creative problem solving, which was very successful with a lower dose of LSD," he tells me. "People had been very excited about LSD, in part because it looks a lot like the serotonin molecule, which regulates mood."

Indeed, at the time, LSD was the most researched psychiatric drug in the world, with over a thousand studies conducted on it. However, in 1968, when the US government made LSD Schedule 1 – meaning they believed it to have no medical use and a high risk of abuse, and therefore made it illegal – they halted 60 different projects, and the Menlo Park team's research was effectively outlawed.

Four decades later, Fadiman's interest in the therapeutic uses of psychedelics has remained.

"Around five years ago, a friend said he'd been micro-dosing," Fadiman tells me, referring to the ingestion of a psychedelic substance in a minute quantity. "Albert Hoffman, the Swedish chemist who discovered LSD, was a proponent and suggested he try it, but I had no idea what he was talking about.The psychedelic research I'd been involved in was full of psychedelic flashes and spiritual experiences, and here was this micro – or sub-perceptual – dose, and I got curious. I don't do 'research' now; I do 'search', and this isn't about a peer-reviewed scientific paper – I simply asked people I knew who had access to psychedelics if they'd be interested in taking this very small amount, and eventually came up with my method."

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Fadiman's protocol consists of a suggestion that participants who already have their own psychedelic materials micro-dose every fourth day for a month and make notes of how they are feeling. A micro-dose ranges from a tenth to a twentieth of a usual dose. "If people say they're noticing [the psychedelic effects], I advised them to lower their dose. The rocks [shouldn't] glitter, even a little," says Jim.

The word spread and people started asking Fadiman for information on micro-dosing. "People write in and say they're interested. One young man wanted to find out if it would help him stutter less; it has," says Fadiman. "Another stopped smoking."

So far, Fadiman has collected around a hundred reports, and the results are coming in daily. "I then follow it up after another month," he says. "What people say is that micro-dosing appears to improve practically everything you do, just a little bit. One report called it an 'all chakra enhancer' – people say things just seemed to work really well, and because it's such a small dose, it impacts on mood without changing behaviour."

Although he wasn't specifically studying depression, per se, several research participants told Fadiman that micro-dosing had alleviated their low mood. The forums were full of these kind of accounts, which is how Sue chanced upon Fadiman. "I wrote to Jim, and he sent me the protocol. Intrigued, I asked a friend who had some mushrooms if I could have a small amount," she says.

One of Sue's micro-doses

Sue ground the mushrooms up and started with a quarter of a teaspoon on day one. "I felt a marginal effect – just a slight up, but nothing more," she recalls. "I had energy and stayed awake into the afternoon, which, with my low energy, was unusual."

It was the effect on day two that really struck Sue: "I was amazed – my obsessive negative thinking literally just stopped. Even when I tried to find the negative thoughts, they weren't there; they had just disappeared"

Sue isn't the only participant to experience marked effects. One subject, a Parkinson's disease sufferer, reported that after a month of micro-dosing LSD, his Parkinson's symptoms weren't improved, but his underlying depression was. "I had a report from one person who was so clinically depressed, he'd been on disability," says Fadiman. "He started micro-dosing and, for several weeks, said he felt functional, able to manage his life. Then he ran out and regressed. We know it helps with mild depression, but this person is also saying something more."

While the research thus far seems to indicate that micro-dosing can be beneficial, a few of Fadiman's subjects have reported unpleasant side-effects, and he warns it's not for everyone. Indeed, Sue has had one experience that she says will make her more careful with dosing: "I tried a new batch and took the same amount, but it was stronger, and I felt trippy and unpleasant," she says. "This isn't about taking drugs for pleasure."

While psychedelics aren't known for their addictive properties, I ask Fadiman if there's any danger in that respect when it comes to people regularly micro-dosing. "It's unlikely that anyone will become physically dependent on compounds that are inherently anti-addictive," he explains. "If you take the same psychedelic every day, it stops working."

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Fadiman isn't alone in his interest in the therapeutic properties of psilocybin, and as the cultural restrictions have begun to be lifted, a few new studies have been launched into larger doses and depression. One study showed that brains affected by psilocybin had different connectivity between some cortical regions, which might chemically short circuit patterns of negative thinking. A team at Imperial College London, under Professor David Nutt, is currently studying the effects psilocybin can have on treatment-resistant depression.

So might micro-dosing be as effective a depression reliever in the long-term as it appears in the short-term? Fadiman won't be able to know with the data currently available to him; more formal scientific studies are going to have to be done on micro-dosing before anyone can deduce anything for certain. But just as a friend recommends a home remedy for more straightforward medical issues, so micro-dosing joins the tradition when it comes to matters of the mind.

Sue, who's just finished her first month of micro-dosing, says she's already telling friends who suffer from depression about her experience. "I've really been helped," says Sue, who says she'll continue to use micro-dosing as long as she can.

"There's no comparison between micro-dosing and taking anti-depressants," she says, adding that while she won't stop taking her SSRIs until she's discussed it with her GP, she's resolute in feeling that: "Anti-depressants have never worked for me, and micro-dosing does. I can't explain it, and to be honest I don't care, because I feel like me – a whole, content me – for the first time in years."

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity.

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, talk to Mind on 0300 123 3393 or at their website, here.

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(Image via)

Portents of death take many forms, but an Australian doctor in a Hawaiian shirt is probably not one you'd immediately expect. However, with his "Deliverance Machine" in tow and a lab coat over his floral prints, Dr Philip Nitschke is as real a harbinger as any scythe-wielder.

Nitschke, a voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide activist from Australia, has become known as one of the "Dr Deaths": licensed medical professionals who support what Nitschke describes as "rational suicide" – the freedom to end your own life if you want to. Controversy surrounded Nitschke – as it has every Dr Death – following the suspension, and then return, of his medical license after the death of Nigel Brayley. But he has maintained his medical license and his strong beliefs in the ideas he teaches through his group Exit International and their series of public workshops. This August, Nitschke decided to try something slightly different to his normal international seminars: he wrote a comedy show.

"Dicing With Dr Death" had the sort of media frenzy around it any other Edinburgh Fringe stand-up would kill a man for. The show received a wide spectrum of reviews, being called "about as funny as an undertaker's convention" by The Times and "engaging and highly thought-provoking" by Threeweeks. Nitschke's controversial subject matter, and the council's attempts to prevent parts of his act, earned articles in major news outlets. Katie Hopkins even attended and volunteered to be strapped into the Deliverance Machine, a contraption designed to kill users with a cocktail of nitrogen and carbon monoxide after a series of death-affirming questions. And as MPs get set to debate the Assisted Dying Bill – which would allow doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives in some circumstances – in the House of Commons this week, Nitschke's show couldn't have been more timely.

This isn't your standard comedy show, and Dr Nitschke was the first to say it when I sat down with him in a small, neat flat with a small, neat lawn just off Edinburgh's Botanical Gardens, before his 12th performance. "I don't know how it rates in terms of laughs-per-minute in pure comedy terms," he says. "It's about giving people information in an entertaining way." He's right: it's not a show designed to keep you laughing until you cry. Although there are some deeply funny anecdotes, such as the woman who used her affair with a vet to secure fatal medication for her dying husband, Nitschke is far more at home putting an intelligent and witty spin on the taboo of death rather than cracking gag after gag.

It's a technique, Nitschke says, that began in Exit International's workshops. "What I noticed was it's a much more successful event if one can introduce humour. And it seems to work – audiences respond well to humour about this somewhat dark issue."

Exit International have held workshops all over the world, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, and can be attended by upwards of 300 people. Another was planned for the end of the month, but has been delayed. At these workshops, according to the Exit website, the first hour-and-a-half is a discussion of the history of voluntary euthanasia. This is followed by a closed workshop for a more detailed look at how best to go about finding the right resources for ending your life.

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These crowds seem to match a rise in the number of people travelling abroad to seek help with dying in facilities like Dignitas in Switzerland. A study released last year in the Journal of Medical Ethics revealed that not only have the numbers doubled from 2009 to 2012, but that only Germans are more active in seeking assistance to die than Brits. It is, however, worth noting that Dignitas is only one of the options Nitschke suggests for ending your life, alongside the lethal barbiturates Nembutal or Lethabarb. Nitschke's teachings have a particular focus on nations like Britain, America and Australia, because he wants to dispel the idea he considers central to Western medicinal practice: that, as he says, "the holy grail is, in effect, immortality".

"The groups of people I've been talking to in these workshops over the years have a certain cynicism towards medicine and this idea of prolonging life at all costs," explained Nitschke, who takes exception to the idea death should be something so feared. "We partition [death] away from children, and the age at which somebody sees their first dead body goes up every year," he said, comparing it to his experiences working with Australian aboriginal communities, where death is far more mundane.

Although he has sometimes done talks in places that are not entirely in the Western medical tradition – one in Hong Kong, screened in China, and discussions in Singapore and the UAE – his audiences even then are Westernised. "If you move [my workshops] into aboriginal culture, say," Nitschke said, "there would be no interest."

The Deliverance Machine

The move to comedy was partially inspired by talks with Mel Moon, a comedian with an incurable illness who previously approached Exit International, and a discussion she and Nitschke had about a collaboration. It ended, she said, because "he wanted to focus on the death side of things, but [Nitschke and his partner] didn't want to focus on life". Although she believes no nationality escapes a morbid fascination with death, Britons might be particularly tightly-laced when it comes to rational suicide. That said, discussions in the House of Lords concerning Lord Falconer's assisted suicide bill in 2014 showed an even amount of support and opposition, and surveys in the last five years show the majority of people support legalisation.

Moon says she chose to do her biographical show her way because she wanted to provide "something personal to make it more palatable for people", versus Nitschke's more lecture-like format, which she respects but thinks lacks warmth.

That's the fine balancing act Nitschke attempts: humour as not just a sugaring of the peaceful pill, but as a way of deconstructing Western medicinal notions. The Fringe means a younger, perhaps less invested audience, but he still thinks it's worth dispelling the gloom for this younger demographic. "The whole effort of Western society is to distance itself from the concept of death," he said. "Even getting 20-year-olds thinking about their own deaths is not an easy matter. But when they get to thinking about it at the end of the show, at least it's crossed their minds."

@DJFLevesley

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Selhurst Arms, Selhurst, SE25

How well do you know London's pubs? Sure, you might know a decent place to get a pint around the corner from Victoria train station. But what about if you find yourself stranded and thirsty in Chingford or Neasden? Most people don't really know London's pubs. At least, not like Ewan Munro.

For the past seven years, Ewan has been painstakingly researching London's pubs, both past and present, cataloguing them and taking photos before uploading details to his online database Pubology. He also posts them on Flickr where they're available for anyone to use for free. His mission is to photograph every pub in London – although, as he tells me, it's difficult to know just how close he is to that goal. Nevertheless, the thousands of photos he's taken so far represent an invaluable record of an aspect of British culture which feels at an increasing risk of being lost. I sat down for a pint with him at the Cock Tavern in Hackney to ask him about his work.

VICE: Hi Ewan. What made you decide to start taking photos of pubs?
Ewan Munro: I've been doing this for about seven years now. It's difficult to say why exactly. I guess because I like them and I find them interesting and I enjoy spending time in them. I'd started taking photos of pubs and at a certain point I just started to take photos of every pub. I can't say the idea was part of some conscious plan to make an amazing database and collection of historical photos of pubs. But I guess I have that obsessive streak in me to catalogue things.

Bar 2 Far, Tooting SW17

How did you get started?
I have a group of friends who did walks along the tube line. We'd go to tube stations and walk from that station to the next tube station along the line. It gets you out to places you would never go to. So I'd go on walks with my friends and take photos of things that I thought were interesting and sometimes that thing was an old pub.

It's a romantic thing, the idea of these buildings that used to be so important just sitting there decaying. Once I'd decided to take photos of every pub I had to create a database to keep them in so I knew which ones I'd taken photos of and which ones I still had to take photos of. That's when I started getting a bit serious about it.

Three Johns, Islington, N1

How many pubs are there in London?
It depends on several different things. One is how you define London. Let's say you define it as Greater London, the borough boundaries. Then you've got to decide what you count as a pub, and that's an even more contentious question. It's impossible to say. What's the difference between a bar and a pub? There's a lot of blurring going on. It's my database so I feel I can be idiosyncratic if I want to be... Off the top of my head it's at least 5,000. But that might be a massive overestimate.

The Steam Engine, Lambeth North, SE1

Is it something you think you'll ever finish?
I can finish doing the research. Then I could, in theory, get a photo of every building that is or was a pub. But pubs change a lot, the names change, they get repainted. I can't keep up with that. I can barely keep up with the changes on my website, let alone getting a photo of every one. There's almost a bottomless amount of research I could do into historical pubs.

Royal Oak, North Woolwich, E16

Do you see yourself as a pub historian?
My wife tries to introduce me as a pub historian. But I've studied history, I feel like I know what it is to be a historian and I'm not a historian. I'm at best a pub witness, or an archivist. I don't really do research that places pubs in a historical context. All I'm doing is finding out where they existed and when they existed and then taking a photo of them if they're still there.

Do you see your work as important?
I wouldn't use the word "important" but I do see the value of having a record of the changes. Even in the time I've been doing it, the buildings that I've taken photos of have been knocked down and rebuilt, often not as pubs. So I think it's been useful to see all those changes over time. The longer I do it I think the more value it has. Now I've taken so many thousands of photos I think, maybe it does have some value. In 100 years' time maybe people will say, "look at this bunch of photos that guy took back then". Maybe it could be of interest.

Prince Alfred, Limehouse, E14

On a personal level, what do you think makes a good pub?
It's such a strange alchemy to get all the things lined up. No pub is going to do everything right. There are plenty of places I know that have a good selection of beer but I don't want to spend time in. It's about creating a pleasant environment for drinking. Sometimes you can do that without having any good beers. There are plenty of nice pubs, little community locals, which are friendly and welcoming but have absolutely nothing decent to drink.

Sir Robert Peel, Kilburn, NW6

Do you have any favourites architecturally?
I love looking at and taking photos of, if not always going into, estate pubs. Your classic flat roofed, concrete buildings at the edge of estates. I think those are fascinating and those are the ones that are going to disappear. A lot of them are these places that are just hanging on for dear life and no-one really loves them and when the last local has died and they close up they'll be earmarked for demolition. I find that sad.

Victoria, Barking, IG11

We hear about pubs closing all the time. Are you optimistic about the future for London pubs?
I don't share all of the pessimism that a lot of people have. Demographics change, the way that people engage changes, the way people socialise changes. If pubs are closing, other things are coming up in their place. Bars, restaurants... they aren't pubs but they're places where people socialise and drink. Like a lot of people, I share certain concerns about the way that London is more and more becoming impossible to afford to live in. But there are always going to be places to drink.

Thanks Ewan.

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