Bance reaches for the cup. Screenshot via CBC

He was called in to repair a leaky dishwasher. Instead, service technician and now former federal Conservative candidate Jerry Bance took a leak inside a coffee mug in a homeowner's kitchen, later dumping the contents into her sink.

The incident was caught on a 2012 episode of CBC's Marketplace and resurfaced this weekend. The Scarborough–Rouge Park candidate was quickly retired from the campaign soon afterwards.

Footage shows Bance performing a quick fix on some piping underneath the sink. While kneeling behind the dishwasher, he grabs a mug from inside the kitchen sink and pisses into it. He then calmly dumps the pee into the sink, gives the cup a frighteningly quick, likely insufficient rinse, and puts it back down where he found it.

In light of the fallout, inevitably known as #peegate, Bance dropped out of the race.

"The footage from that day does not reflect who I am as a professional or a person," he said in a statement. "I deeply regret my actions on that day.

Apology aside, Bance has yet to offer an explanation for his behaviour other than mentioning a vague "health situation" that required an "emergency decision," so VICE came up with a few reasons a grown man might piss into a mug in a stranger's kitchen.

Medical problem
Let's start with Bance's claim that the sudden urge to relieve himself was indeed the sign of a medical problem.

Jacqueline Cahill, executive director of the Canadian Continence Foundation, told VICE his actions could point to overactive bladder (OAB).

"If you need to go to the bathroom you have to go immediately, like within seconds or a minute."

But, Cahill, said most people with OAB would be very aware of their condition, and would likely be sporting "absorbent products."

"People with incontinence are aware of where the toilets are," she added. "And to blame his dirty behaviour on incontinence is tarnishing the condition and the people who have it."

Ain't Got Time to Pee
Long drives are the enemy of a full bladder, which is likely why touring musicians and truck drivers are known to relieve themselves in 2L bottles, milk jugs, Ziploc bags, etc.

There's even a song about it.

Washington State reportedly had a "trucker bomb" epidemic, with cleaning crews collecting thousands of jugs of urine along the roadside a year, prompting authorities to up fines for "littering."

Just as truck drivers and touring punk bands are pissing in containers to save time, maybe Bance is such a a sink-repairing machine and he has no time for regular people bullshit like using the toilet. You know what is not happening when you walk to a bathroom and pee in a toilet? Kitchen fixin'. If he charges by the hour, he's actually saving the homeowner money by not taking that long walk in the hallway.

Diss
Did Bance drop trou and unload in an act of passive aggression?

Stranger things have happened. An Ohio postal worker, who was reportedly jealous of his colleagues, was sentenced to six months in jail in 2006 and fined $1,200 for regularly pissing in his office coffee pot and watching others down the unsavoury brew.

And just last year, a Virginia man was ordered to pay $5,000 for pissing in the coffee pot of a co-worker he disliked.

"I done something I am very much ashamed of to a co-worker for [reasons, which are] stress-related [and] things going on in my life on and off the job," the latter, a waste water plant employee, told the court. "I am very much ashamed of my stupid and childlike behaviour."

You spend a day on your knees fixing other people's shit and try not to piss in their cup.

Plumbing trick
This theory is a little far-fetched (editor's note: Nah), but perhaps this was one of Bance's old plumbing tricks.

I mean, prior to making the repair, he asks the homeowner: "It doesn't drain? Does it leak or anything?"

So maybe, pouring a warm mug of urine down the drain was just his unconventional way of finding an answer to those questions.

Apparently, baking soda, boiled water and vinegar can be used as a DIY version of Drano. Who's to say pee doesn't work just as well?

When we called a plumber to ask this very question, he hung up, so it could be an industry secret.

Sleepwalking
A friend of mine is a well-known sleep-pisser, though only when he's wasted. One time, he woke up and peed all over a pile of his girlfriend's clothes thinking it was the toilet. Another friend ended one of her birthdays trying to collect her sleepwalking boyfriend's urine in a basin.

People can essentially do anything in their sleep—fuck, murder, or get into dangerous accidents.

Going by that scale, if Bance was actually asleep when the video was taken, he's actually kind of a hero for still managing to fix the drain.

Confusing layout
Did the homeowner not give him a tour of the place beforehand? Maybe this was one of those strange houses where there's no ground floor bathroom. Out of respect for the homeowner, maybe he did not want to intrude by going upstairs to use a bathroom there. The baby was sleeping or there was a scary dog up there, perhaps. The poor man may have been out of options.

The Long Con
After years of budget cuts at the hands of the Conservatives, who is to say that Bance wasn't actually a CBC double agent, and that they were saving the footage for a long weekend three years later so that people would have something to talk about when they were stuck in traffic on the way home from the cottage.

Can't you just picture Peter Mansbridge twirling his moustache (he has one when he's being evil) and saying, "You piss on the CBC, we piss on your campaign!"

We can.

MacGyver Move
He is so good at his job he turned a coffee mug into a toilet.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

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Last week, Kim Davis was put in jail for refusing to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses as part of her duties as the Rowan County Clerk. On Tuesday she has been freed, reports the New York Times.

When US District Judge David Bunning sentenced the 49-year-old Apostolic Christian, he ruled that she stay in jail until she complied with federal law. The case had become a national media circus, with hundreds of pro- and anti-Davis protestors gathered outside the courthouse. Meanwhile, five out of six of the other Rowan County clerks agreed to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Kentucky. (Allegedly, Davis' son was the only one who didn't budge.)

From theTimes:

Judge Bunning ordered that Ms. Davis "shall not interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples." He said any such action would be regarded as "a violation" of his release order.

Several GOP candidates for president had voiced their support of Davis, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal saying that it was OK with him if a government official wanted to ignore federal laws in favor of right-wing Christian doctrine. "I think you should be able to keep your job and follow your conscience," he said.

Screencap from The Westport Independent

Swedish independent game developers Pontus Lundén and Kristian Brodal are stoking a conversation about ethics in journalism—and (thankfully) it has nothing to do with Gamergate. The pair created The Westport Independent, "a game about censorship, corruption, and newspapers," where you play a newspaper editor confronted with difficult choices: How do you produce a paper in the face of a corrupt government? Do you tinker with stories in order to keep them at bay? Do you run headlines that please the rebels rising up against the regime? Or do you say fuck it, print the truth, and hope you don't get shot in the head by government goons or nutso anarchists?

It's a game that forces your hand, and proves a point about the media: There is no such thing as true objectivity. There are always choices about what gets printed, what gets left out, and how stories get edited based off who you're trying to please.

After learning about Westport Independent last month from PAX Prime, Seattle's gaming convention, I tested out the beta version (the full version will be available by the end of the year). I decided that no story should be edited and the truth would prevail. Soon enough, my writers were in jail and my paper was shut down.

Having failed to keep my imaginary newspaper afloat, I got on the phone with Lundén to talk about the game, journalistic objectivity, media cynicism, and why I will never, ever get far very far in Westport Independent.

VICE: Why create a game about media bias?
Pontus Lundén: There is a game called Papers Please. It's a game where you play a border control guard, basically. The tagline is a "dystopian document thriller." It's a very depressing story, but a really, really good game. What it showed was in games you can have very boring and mundane tasks that become interesting because of the context. So even though all you're doing is just checking papers, because you're in this really oppressive state, for the guys that come to the border patrol you control their lives. You basically decide the fate of their lives and it becomes a really, really heavy story.

We liked that concept. There is something that's called a game jam—it's a thing that basically you develop a game on a limited amount of time. We were doing this game jam where we had 72 hours to make a game. We tried to make a game about hiding information, and that's what ended up being our game.

I saw in an interview with PC Gamer where you said that "the loyalist government is a problem that the rebels are not a good solution to." Why create something with such a heavy undertone where you kind of can't win?
[Laughs] I suppose it has something to do with that we're pretentious douchebags?

Obviously I feel that censorship, the way you twist the news, or the way that journalism still today works—it's very much driven by an agenda. I think that's something everyone has experienced. It's really easy to say, 'Oh, it only happens in these dictatorship countries.' But, no, it happens here as well. Like I just need to send people to Fox News to get an extreme example of that. It's a very interesting subject and that's not really something that's been handled in a game before.

Is this something you're seeing in Sweden? This agenda-driven news?
It's really inspired by British and American society. It's here as well. I get this question a lot: People sort of think because we make a game like this, that it's a big thing in Sweden. But it's like, no, it's a big thing everywhere. It's a thing in Sweden also. You can see very easily that the press is driven by an agenda and most of all that they have a political opinion. And I think that's OK, because I don't think you can be completely objective anyways.

"In games you can have very boring and mundane tasks that become interesting because of the context." - Pontus Lundén

I had an editor once who I remember saying that there's no such thing as objective journalism.
No, there's really not.

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When I saw that there was a game about journalism ethics, I wasn't sure if that was great or really scary. Why is this something that we really need right now? A game to teach us how to be ethical?
There has been stuff like this before. We usually say with our game, 'You can't lie, you can only not tell the entire truth.' Which is a point we're trying to make sure is there. It's very rare for media to out and out lie. That mostly never happens. It's just that you only report on one side and you only show one context, which of course gives it a very strong angle. That's the critical thinking we want people to understand. We do not only want to make sure that people understand the power that media has, but also the pressure they have on them, and ask why do media write what they write?

What do you think the strongest pressures are?
I think it depends on what paper you're working on. I think most papers have, if nothing else, they have some sort of image. So for example, here in Sweden, we have plenty of papers that have editorials. And of course these editorials are political usually. Editorials are quite subjective. That's the point of them.

In Sweden, most of the newspapers are decently open with what political angle they have. They say if they are right-wing or left-wing. So, of course, the news that are reported there are angled in that sort of way.

"You don't really want it to be the news that people read, but that sells." - Pontus Lundén

You're a journalist. Journalism is a business. Let's face it: It means journalists need money. I'm going to sound super anti-capitalist, but no matter how you see it there will always be something giving you some sort of pressure. If it's like, 'I need to write an article this way so it's popular enough so my paper sells enough.' That will be a pressure and it will make you write populist articles.

Right, but I want to believe media isn't all like that.
Here's the deal: I don't think it's a problem that people are not objective. I think it's good that people are subjective and very open with their subjectiveness. Always disclosing is not always possible either. I think the thing that I hope people understand with our game is that because there are so many things called "news," you shouldn't really rely on one source.

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I was showing your game to some of my journalist friends that work for different papers, and we really were laughing about how much you guys really believe in the power of newspapers. Maybe more than we do! As journalists, we do wonder, Are people reading the thoughtful journalism that people put out, or are they only reading clickbait and watching Fox news?
Well, if you look at how the game is made, the articles that are the most clickbait-y are the ones that have the most effect.

I did notice that. I was terrible at your game because I couldn't edit these articles to please either side. Everyone at my paper got arrested.
Yeah, that'll happen. It's a game. You need to do some things that make it more of a representation than real life.

That's actually a good point, though, that you can just print everything. If you print everything, you'll either get taken away or you can actually end up ending in the same situation that you started.

Right, and when I put celebrity stuff in, my paper did amazing.
Yup, that's what i mean with the pressures. You don't really want it to be the news that people read, but that sells. It's a very cynical look at things.

I was surprised that you could lay out the paper and edit the articles and choose where it was distributed, but that advertising didn't come into play.
We did do some thinking about it. It's a thing with limited time and money to develop the game. Gameplay-wise, it became very similar anyways: Different articles catered to different districts. You would have to write your articles in a certain way to please advertising firms. Which is real life, unfortunately.

Yeah. In real life, I haven't come up against an oppressive governmental regimes, but I have pissed off advertisers.
You have different districts, so you still have to choose what articles to print so you sell [papers].

Have you guys ever worked in media?
No.

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Have you created games in the past that aim to do a public service?
We do like to make games that force people into uncomfortable situations. Not all of them are socio-political, but we do like to work with that when we can.

We have done two more games—they are both games about where people are forced to do things that are not so nice. We have one game where you're playing a field surgeon. The concept is you're at war and you get new soldiers sent to you all the time, but you need to send soldiers back to the front lines, otherwise your camp will be taken over as well.

Whoa. That's heavy.
You have to balance healing people as fast as possible ... As the game progresses, you get patients faster and faster so you need to do all this stressful stuff faster.

And then we made a game about starvation in a post-apocalypse. You basically have been elected the chief of a camp in the post-apocalypse through the democratic process that you had a rifle. What you're trying to do is make sure that rations are enough for everyone and that people scavenge for more food. But of course there is not enough food and people get angry and in order to maintain order you are forced to do not-nice things to people who are about to do not-nice things.

So you make games about people making horrible choices.
There's no good choice, but you're forced to make one. I think it's more interesting when you pressure people actually to do them—to make the choice. If they're under pressure, people will find out interesting things about themselves.

Follow Leah Sottile on Twitter.

Above: promotional imagery for 'Red Dead Redemption'

This November, the Xbox 360 celebrates its tenth anniversary. It joins a small club of home consoles to meet said milestone, while remaining (relatively) relevant. The PlayStation 2 was only officially discontinued globally in 2013, over 13 years after its spring 2000 launch. Production of the original PlayStation didn't stop until 2006, 11 years after its release in the West; and the Super Nintendo remained on sale in Japan until 2003, having debuted in its home nation back in 1990.

The 360's closest rival, the PS3, won't toast its first ten until late 2016, assuming Sony still considers it a worthwhile commercial venture in another year, given the ever-rising sales of the PS4. Microsoft's second home console, the white-and-green filling between the chunky black beast that was the first Xbox and the sleeker, though no less massive Xbox One that represents the company's current-gen concern, is a format that continues to impress at the tills, though—the majority of physical Disney Infinity 3.0 first-week sales in the UK were on 360, showing that even when older brothers and sisters upgrade to newer machines, their younger siblings keep the older consoles rattling and humming beneath bedroom televisions.

But Microsoft's big 360 drive this year now has nothing to do with the machine itself, new (UK) sales of which have fallen way behind the Xbone since 2014, and everything to do with making its massive library of games playable on its current-gen console. Microsoft dedicated a substantial chunk of its E3 2015 presentation to revealing backwards compatibility for the Xbone—the games won't run from the original discs, but when a supported physical-format title is inserted into the system, a copy of it will be downloaded to the hard drive from Xbox Live.

The initial lineup of backwards-compatible titles isn't exactly massive, but Microsoft is aiming for far more, and expects the list to grow significantly over the next few years. Over 1,000 games have been released for the 360 since 2005, though, so it's unlikely that every single one will become playable on the system's successor. That said, if any of the games highlighted become available on the program—and I suspect that all of them will—do the right thing and play them immediately, because they most definitely do not suck when played today.

In other words, I suppose, these are the dozen 360 games that I think you need to be playing when they become backwards compatible on the Xbone—or on your actual 360, if you're yet to take them for a spin. Now, a quick caveat: If a game is already available for the Xbox One, in a remastered guise, then it's not included here. Hence the absence of Gears of War, anything from the Halo series, Dishonored, Grand Theft Auto V, and Sleeping Dogs. Yeah, I said it. Sleeping Dogs is great, and if you're a firm fan of the GTA formula then you need it in your life. So go and buy it. Like, right now. And then, play some of these...

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'Remember Me,' launch trailer

Remember Me (2013)

One of the best games of 2015 has been the episodic teens-and-time-travel adventure Life Is Strange, currently on part four of five with the climax coming any week now. It's not the first game by its French makers Dontnod, though. That would be this Capcom-published third-person brawler, which casts the player as Nilin, an "errorist" of 2084's Neo-Paris whose rebellious ways have been tamed courtesy of having her memory wiped. The plot is pretty good, something of a critique on how giving ourselves over to science can lead to incredibly harmful situations, especially when a single organization has the monopoly on that technology, and the game's memory remix sections—essentially forerunners to the time-rewind feature seen in Life Is Strange—are excellent, if sparingly used puzzles. The main gameplay goes for the Arkham series-style approach to melee combat, with the bonus of Nilin's moves being editable in the Combo Lab.

Remember Me showcases a host of neat ideas, wrapped up in some beautiful visuals; but the impression it left on critics was slight at best. It's a game that players who choose not to commit themselves will forever remain cold to; but dive into its fiction, its colorful slums, and sumptuous soundtrack, and it quickly becomes an addictive distraction unlikely to be forgotten soon.

'Blur' launch trailer

Blur (2010)

Mario Kart 8 is just about the best multiplayer racer money can buy on current-gen consoles—but if you've a Microsoft-branded machine in your living room, or a Sony one for that matter, you're not going to be getting hands on with the Wii U exclusive whenever you feel like it. Which is where the Bizarre Creations-developed Blur, published by the titans at Activision, comes in. This is weapons-based racing but with real cars and locations. So if the idea of blowing the shit out of the vehicle in front with a homing missile as you speed around Brighton's seafront, the streets of Barcelona and hills of California appeals, you know what to do. And you should, really, as Blur excels both as a straight racer and a gleefully chaotic battler.

'Skyrim,' official trailer

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)

You might have heard of this one. Previous-generation role-playing games simply didn't come any bigger than Bethesda's Skyrim. People are still playing it today, as they have been since its launch. Twenty million sales can't be wrong. And yes, I could have gone for Dark Souls here, in the fantasy RPG slot, but y'know, I just never got that into it. I suppose it comes down to what you want out of your dragons and dungeons sort of adventure: punishing difficulty, which no doubt leads to immense satisfaction, or the opportunity to explore an amazingly immersive world without the fear that the merest grunt of a goblin-thing could kill you should you mistime a thrust by a millisecond.

Article continues after the video below

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'El Shaddai,' launch trailer

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (2011)

While this one, perhaps you missed. It's definitely worth a look, though, as you simply won't find another game like it amongst the 360's library. A third-person fighting game, which is sometimes a 2D platformer, based loosely on the Book of Enoch, it mixes satisfying combat with visuals straight out of the most wonderfully surreal dream, colors rushing and mixing, the landscapes like a Roger Dean work popped into reality one moment and more akin to a Katsushika Hokusai painting the next. Designer Takeyasu Sawaki's previous credits include both the cel-shaded delight Ōkami and Devil May Cry, which goes some way to explaining both this game's aesthetic and combat mechanics. It's something of a niche attraction amongst the 360's many and varied fisticuffs affairs, but El Shaddai is worth investing in, exclusively for its uniqueness.

'Portal 2,' teaser trailer

Portal 2 (2011)

Come on, now. Valve's Portal 2 is just about the most ingenious, hilarious puzzle game ever made. It might even be best played with two, too. You already own it, I'm sure. Play it again today, with a friend or all on your own, and cry a little because Half-Life 3 is never, ever happening. Probably.

'Spec Ops: The Line,' launch trailer

Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

Yager's Dubai-set shooter is not hilarious, at all. No spoilers, but it features one of the most harrowing scenes you'll ever witness in a video game, and you're its cause. Spec Ops looks for all the sand-whipped world like Just Another Shooty Bang game, but get into it a little, spend an hour in its company—in the company of Captain Walker (Nolan North on perhaps career-best form), Lieutenant Adams, and Staff Sergeant Lugo—and its black-as-midnight heart becomes apparent. This is no heroic venture, no saving-the-day mission of amazing odds overcome by amazing people. It's a nightmare, unfolding slowly, always getting darker as you press onwards, surrounding you and swallowing hope. It's less about bad versus good, and more the completely mad against those who are ever so slightly saner. This is Apocalypse Now: the game, essentially, and come its climax you definitely won't think of all shooters as possessing only generic potential.

'Red Dead Redemption,' launch trailer

Red Dead Redemption (2010)

Rockstar's greatest production to date, and I'm considering Grand Theft Auto V in that assessment, and so much more than simply the studio's (in)famous car-jacking-and-more series but "on horses." To play Red Dead is to live Red Dead, for as long as you can, but much like Spec Ops this isn't a story with a happy ending. Everything up to that moment is simply wonderful, though, the game's vast spaces the perfect tonic after the suffocating Liberty City streets of GTA IV. There's a reason that so many gamers are clamoring for a sequel to this cowboys and colonists open-world classic: it's amongst the best HD-era video games ever made.

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'Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony,' debut trailer

Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)

Still amazing, seven years on, Rockstar's first HD GTA game erects an amazing interpretation of New York City and invites you to use it as your own personal playground. Having recently been in the Big Apple myself, playing some of GTA IV's (highly recommended) expansion pack The Ballad of Gay Tony once home again, to compare its virtual neighborhoods with the real ones I walked around, really hammered home what an amazing job this game's makers did of capturing the unique atmosphere of its host city. Perhaps GTA V was your first experience of this records-smashing series—if so, you owe it to yourself to go back and spend some quality time with Niko Bellic and pals, as their small-time crimes expand into bigger and more dangerous deals before collapsing in on themselves with deadly results.

And if I didn't make it clear, just there, The Ballad of Gay Tony is a must, too, a main story-complementing, blindingly colorful spin-off that casts you as hustler-made-good Luis Fernando as he tries to balance his prison-time past with a life on the straight and narrow. Also, it features Omid Djalili dancing to Busta Rhymes's "Arab Money" in his tiger-fronted smalls. You don't get that in Call of Duty.

'BioShock', launch trailer

BioShock (2007)

Incredibly, there are people who've been playing video games since before they could finish a roast dinner out there that have never sat down properly with 2K's BioShock. Those people, weirdos though they so clearly are, still have the chance to make that situation right, though. You can buy this game for a couple of quid in just about any second-hand games trader on any British high street. It's everywhere, still. And it is the first-person shooter as poetry. Art? Perhaps not, but BioShock certainly forces gaming into some interesting new areas of self-questioning introspection. Not playing this game, and claiming to have a true affinity for the medium, is like claiming to support Manchester United with all of your heart yet you've never been north of Warwick. Oh, wait. There's a pretty amazing twist in it, too, which I previously detailed here.

'Mass Effect 2,' launch trailer

Mass Effect 2 (2010)

The middle game of BioWare's fairly essential sci-fi role-playing trilogy is the best of the three by far, losing the repetitive planet surface exploration of the first game and delivering an ending, while next-game-telegraphing in nature, that didn't have its fan base up in arms. Memorable supporting characters, terrific action, amazing locations, snappy dialogue, and just a little bit of inter-species sexytimes if that's what you're into: It's easy indeed to lose a few months to this game. (And I type from first-hand experience.) The plot perhaps won't immediately make sense to newcomers who skip its predecessor, but you're on the internet, so just look up what you need to and get on with stopping the Collectors by any means possible. Just be sure to do all the side missions first or else, well, spoilers.

'Catherine,' European trailer

Catherine (2011)

A puzzle game that's also a reflection of the crisis that rocks a man's mind when working out whether or not the time is right to commit to the person that might be their truest love, Catherine is a strange title straight out of the could-only-have-been-made-in-Japan file (it's by Atlus) which would be dismissed for its migraine-inducing difficulty late on if it wasn't for the compulsive story that surrounds the Actual Gameplay. You are Vincent Brooks, whose dreams turn to nightmares in which he must climb to the top of a stack of moveable blocks – some of which are lethal themselves – while being pursued by a horror constructed from his own psyche. During his waking hours, he spends time with his girlfriend, Katherine, who may or may not be pregnant, and Catherine, a too-good-to-be-true new love interest who just might have something to do with that shady dude running the bar at the Stray Sheep. And to write any more here is taking us into proper story spoiler territory. It can be hugely frustrating, but Catherine is another past-gen game that's worth playing for its inventiveness and individuality—and it'll probably remain a singular experience, too, as a sequel is unlikely.

'Vanquish,' launch trailer

Vanquish (2010)

The team at Osaka-based studio Platinum are the masters of action video games, and the SEGA-published Vanquish might be the company's pièce de résistance, to date. Incredibly fast, deafeningly loud, dazzlingly bright, Vanquish is Gears of War with a million more mechs and nuclear-powered rockets in its boots. There's a story, not that you'll notice amid the riveting bullet-hell gameplay, and the whole thing's over in a relative heartbeat, the solo campaign done and dusted in less time than it takes to sit through the credits your average Peter Jackson movie. (Okay, not quite, but you're looking at around five to six hours, assuming you're not dying the whole time or hiding behind cover like a coward.) It is so much fun though, that anyone put off the game by its short duration, claiming that it doesn't represent value for money, is a nincompoop who doesn't deserve their Xbox in the first place. Give it to someone who cares—about breathlessly brilliant releases like this, a title that is somehow frequently featured on "underrated games" lists everywhere despite everyone who's ever played it fancying its jet-propelled pants off.

I expect the official Xbox website will have all the information you need on Xbone backwards compatibility, going forwards.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

All stills courtesy of Shout! Factory.

Bloodsucking Bastards is such an easy sell, you don't need a full elevator ride to make the pitch. You only need the doors to open up just long enough to scream " Shaun of the Dead meets Office Space!" at the suit holding the money.

The flick—out now in select theaters and VOD—delivers on that promise in spades. It stars Fran Kranz (The Cabin in the Woods ), Joey Kern (Cabin Fever), and Emma Fitzpatrick (The Social Network) as three coworkers who discover their management team is soulless in a literal, vampiric sort of way. Its depiction of the mundane office-cubicle domain we all know too well is spot-on, and cathartically gory in how it dispatches said environment.

Watch this exclusive clip of 'Bloodsucking Bastards':

But this piece isn't about the movie, or whether or not it's worth seeing—it is—or even how this sucker was filmed. This is about how this film got sold. Because even the most salable pitches go thirsty in the barren landscape that is the Hollywood development process, and BSB was no different.

The original script was written in 2007 by Texas-based screenwriter Ryan Mitts, who pounded out his first draft in a few autumn months when he was 22 years old. (This, mind you, was before vampires were the go-to demonic device in cinema, and before Quentin Tarantino changed how "basterds" is spelled.) Pretty quickly afterward, a production company optioned it. And, just as quickly, the deal had a stake driven through its heart.

Even the most-salable pitches go thirsty in the barren landscape that is the Hollywood development process, and BSB was no different.

"It was a whirlwind," Mitts told the Daily Texan. "I really thought I would have that movie made that fast, and then, obviously, it kind of crumbled apart."

After lingering for years on the screenplay heap, it was finally optioned—after a hot tip from an intern—by Fortress Features and MTY Productions, who actually wanted to do something with it. And that's the point when it landed in the collective lap of LA-based comedy improv troupe Dr. God, which is made up of, in no specific order, Sean Cowhig, David Park, Brian James O'Connell, Neil Garguilo, and Justin Ware.

"We came on board whole hog with Brian as director, me as a producer, and the whole group writing and performing," said Ware. "The movie was already teed up. We didn't have time to beat it to death in development, which was probably a good thing."

With the production company coming to them, finding money was a headache-inducing part of the process gladly avoided. "We've done enough other projects where we raised money that I know how painful it is," said O'Connell. "You have to be careful with Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It can be an innovative way to get art made, but when I see that my money is going to buy you a state-of-the-art camera to shoot the movie with... it's just a morally ambiguous place for me, and it makes me uncomfortable on a certain level."

With funding taken care of, the guys took Mitts's original concept and honed the premise, splitting production and writing duties, while members chimed in with polishes throughout.

"One of the best things about Dr. God is we believe in a 'divide and conquer' philosophy," explained O'Connell. "Justin ran point on this one, but we'd split up the day with some of us writing in the morning, then Sean [Cowhig] and I would read that and give feedback and polish in the afternoon, back and forth like that."

The team wrote their first draft in a mere 18 days, leaving room for improvisation—Dr. God being an improv team and all—during the shooting, a strategy that informed the casting process.

After the shooting and the post-production came the actual sales pitch. This time to distribution companies who could get the movie in front of eyeballs. For this particular film, that meant going through the festival circuit.

Because festivals desperately want to be the one to premiere a desirable film, the team had to carefully choose where they submitted. When they got word they were selected as the opening-night feature for Slamdance, they pulled back invites to other festivals. "We wanted to blow that one out, and it had to be first," said Ware. And so, one year to the day after principal photography started, Bloodsucking Bastards premiered at Slamdance. Following the premiere, the team wasn't precious about which fests they submitted to. "The more the merrier," said Ware. "Every little bit helps. Especially the horror and genre festivals. Those cats are loyal and enthusiastic if they like you."

Most of the cast traveled to Park City, Utah, for the festival. "We were basically a big traveling band of drunken idiots," said Ware. The first screening went well, but the audience was a friendly one, made up of friends and cast members. So it wasn't until the second screening, without their faithful in the seats guffawing at all the right moments, that the team realized they made something that could find a home. "That let us know, 'Hey, maybe we actually have something here,'" said Ware. "You can't bullshit an audience full of strangers."

With the audience's vocal approval, distribution companies made the first move in the courting process. The team was now in the enviable, yet perhaps more stressful, position of debating the pros/cons of each pitch.

"Choosing a distributor is the worst kind of speed-dating," said Ware. "You can ask around, but everyone's experiences have been radically different even with the same companies. There's so much that goes into distributing a movie and so many different factors in a film's success that it's difficult to sift through the noise. Sometimes the best cash offer isn't the best home for your movie."

In the end, they went with Shout! Factory for the simple reason that they "instantly understood the movie." Assisting Shout's pitch was their background, that is, their track record of being able to "get the thing out there" as opposed to simply sitting on the property and letting it disappear under a mountain of archival dust. True to form, Shout! quickly decided to go the select theater/VOD route, releasing it through their horror/sci-fi-specific branch Scream Factory, a sort of "best of both worlds" strategy that's quickly becoming the norm when it comes to releasing independent, modestly-budgeted films.

On VICE Talks Film: Talking to the star and director of 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night':

"In the old days, you didn't have the internet immediately making up its mind on a movie and instant word-of-mouth, so you could roll a movie out from market to market and kind of control the dialogue around your film," said Ware. "So you can either fight that, or accept it and use it."

Plenty of box offices have been spoiled by premature bad press reporting a movie had "flopped," creating a weird self-fulfillment loop that keeps audiences away, thusly making it an actual "flop." (Hi, Waterworld.) The internet just injected the process with mainline hits of speed. The multi-platform release of utilizing select theaters and VOD, then, avoids possibly interested parties being put off by negative sentiment and low Rotten Tomatoes percentages, getting ahead of criticism, if there is any.

The VOD strategy also allows the film to find an audience it wouldn't necessarily locate through the normal route of "in select theaters" or even a wider distribution model.

"Some kid in Anchorage or Omaha who reads a horror blog is probably never going to get the movie in his town anyway so why not give him a chance to see it right when he's most interested?" said Ware.

In all, the whole process from production to premiere was less than two years—albeit six years after Mitts typed those first words on his screenwriting program. That's fast by Hollywood standards. And it sets up a hard act to follow.

"My last film I shot in 2011, and it came out on Hulu just last week," said O'Connell. "We sold BSB basically while we were still in Park City. I expect to sell the next one in a blink of an eye," he joked. "That's how this works, right?"

Follow Rick on Twitter.

Bloodsucking Bastards is out now in select theaters and VOD.

An early-season Arrested Development promo photo

I have watched the first three seasons of Arrested Development 35 times. That's a conservative guess, as it might actually be a lot more. Many, many nights I've had the show playing on my phone through an earbud as I try and fall asleep. I've watched it at work. I've also loaded it on my phone, and listened to it while walking around the city, or on long drives. It's a lot.

And while I've met people who've been to hundreds of Phish or Grateful Dead shows throughout their lives, or read about people like Steven Soderbergh who went to see Altered States 11 times in two weeks, or the guys who set a TV binge-watching world record, 35 watch-throughs of Arrested Development still feels like a lot.

For a while Arrested Development was just a show that I loved. And I really do love it. The second season especially, I'd argue, might be one of the most winningest streaks in TV history. Early on in my fandom, the show felt like a feat of engineering, something to be studied from a technical standpoint. I wanted to know every setup, double entendre, and hidden joke. As an aspiring writer, studying the ease with which it pulled off this depth was like its own version of film school.

But when does enjoyment become obsession? And when does obsession become a detriment?

I came upon the show at a time when everything was good. I was in college and had been living inside a pre-graduate bubble, with my youth and the endless potential of life on my side. At 20, I felt invincible, exceptional, and destined to succeed. But, of course, things rarely work out as planned. What followed were years of rejections, bad jobs, missed opportunities, anxiety, and self-sabotage. My mother was terribly sick. I bounced from job to job, never really progressing in any of them. I distanced myself from people I cared about. Depressions were regular, and awful (often accompanied by the guilt of self-indulgence, and a feeling of the depressions being somehow unearned). Some days it was hard to even get out of bed. My enjoyment of AD was tied up in all of it.

It was, ironically enough, a state of actual arrested development.

Arrested Development became a world to escape to when all else felt unwieldy. I've never found a closer match to my sense of humor in any single piece of media entertainment. I still can generate actual, physical laughter just thinking about certain lines from the show ("I always pictured him in a lighthouse"; "I did not find their buffoonery amusing"). But there was something more personal that signified my pull to the show. The heart of AD is about a family coming back together—or, put best by Ron Howard in the opening credits: "a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together." As I moved away from Ohio (where I grew up) and on to a series of bigger cities, I wasn't always "physically" there for my family. AD resonated so deeply because of this. It's not that my family didn't want me to go, either—they wanted me to follow my interests wherever they took me—but when things weren't going well while away from them, that pain was intensified. I envied, in a weird way, what the Bluths were able to achieve despite their dysfunctions, simply by virtue of their being together.

Often I'd doctor my Hulu or Netflix viewing history, so my friends and family—we shared accounts—would not know I was watching the show this often, in the same way an alcoholic will cover up the smell of liquor on their breath with some mints. Sometimes I found myself adding a few too many jokes and references to the show in everyday conversations, to the point where I'd have to consciously dial it down for fear of sounding like one of those middle aged dudes who've clung a bit too hard to a favorite band—say, Motherboy—from their high school days. I didn't want to be the guy who's seen talking about, and quoting AD, while oblivious to the fact that he's also wearing a Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand t-shirt (but, full disclosure, it's happened to me).

It sounds like a cliche, but within the Bluth family I saw flashes of myself. And not the self I try to maintain in my day-to-day encounters, but hints of a darker, more difficult self that, in my worst moments, I could see myself starting to become: Gob's truculent narcissism, insecurity, and need for validation; Tobias' oblivious self-delusion; Lindsay's vapid do-gooderism, George Michael's own self-sabotaging anxieties; Buster's infantile neuroses; Michael's false sense of superiority. The more I watched, the more of myself I saw in these people.

Someone I know in AA once told me it isn't necessarily the drink or the drug that's the problem, it's how and why a person uses it. And the way I was using this show, and others too (my usual lineup: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Parks & Rec, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, and the sitcoms of Graham Linehan), began to make me feel weird and deeply compulsive. Like a security blanket (or a pair of never-nude cut-offs) that, in times of high stress, I could always count on.

I tended to watch the show more often in times of stress. Every time I had a job interview, I'd be up half the night before watching AD. I'd push back making a phone call I dreaded with an episode or two. I'd wash down a hangover with an entire half season and a bottle of Gatorade.

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My compulsive viewing habits were a tactic for dealing with my anxiety. I'm someone with an extremely hyperactive mind, and when I'm put under stress I tend to get overloaded with a series of ping-ponging neuroses. The real problems begin when the anxieties compound and soon I'm fully convinced that every horrible thing that could possibly happen will not only happen but has already begun to happen. Such worry can be paralyzing. Sometimes the worry gets so bad that my mind will try and trick itself to be OK with "opting out" of something instead of actually trying. When I reached that point in the depths of my AD watching, that's when things would get a little sad, episodes of Arrested Development would get watched, and regrets would be created. If I could train my mind on a TV show that I knew and loved, it would distract, comfort, and re-focus it away from the stress. But that doesn't solve anything, it often makes it worse. Psychologically, it's a bit like Lindsay Bluth getting drunk "to celebrate" the night before her big audition and missing it the next morning.

There are worse things to be addicted to than Arrested Development. It can feel trivial to talk about—it's not as if I'd been using vodka (like Lucille), sex (like Kitty Sanchez), or meth (Barry Zuckerkorn, probably) to get outside of my sense of self when facing pressure. Nevertheless, my AD binge-watching was the manifestation of genuinely addictive behaviors. A recent study at the University of Texas at Austin concluded that binge-watching "allows (people who feel lonely or depressed) to escape from negative feelings." It also found a correlation "between binge-watching and loneliness, depression, and having self-regulation deficiency, which is an inability to control compulsions."

But eventually, things got better.

On Motherboard: How the Internet Ruined Arrested DevelopmentArrested Development

I don't remember the actual epiphany, but at some point about a year and a half ago, I began to ask why I was watching these same 53 episodes over and over. This slight pivot into self-awareness taught me that if I ever feel an need to watch the show, it's a red flag. I can now use this impulse to hack my emotional well-being: maybe there's a small, positive step I can take toward handling the things I need to take care of before I throw it on. Often, if I take this step, it turns out I don't end up watching Arrested Development at all. It's not that the anxiety is any better per se, or that certain aspects of my life are any less stressful, but this slight tweak in how I handle my anxiety has made a positive difference. It helps to try and step back and think about what it is that I'm actually worrying about. And I've found a new strength in not only knowing what it is but accepting it too.

I still watch AD all the time, but my appreciation for it has once again changed. It's satisfying to know something so fully and completely. It's more than that, too. Now, somewhere buried within my experience of watching AD, lies a chunk of my own formative "development" and the full range of unexpected emotions—pain, sadnesses, frustrations (some triumphs too)—of that time. It contains a small key of my own self-discovery. Now when I watch, I do so and reflect that Arrested Development has played a part of how I view the world and of who I am today.

More than anything, I've learned that it's perfectly OK to have anxiety. As Tobias Funke once said, "there are dozens of us... dozens!"

Follow David on Twitter.

A Boston police detective is facing charges for open and gross lewdness after he was allegedly spotted naked and masturbating in a hotel parking lot.

The incident occurred on August 19, a humid Wednesday afternoon, outside Spring Hill Suites in Andover, Massachusetts.

A passerby called local police to report that a balding white man about six feet tall was outside of Spring Hill Suites, standing next to a black SUV and pleasuring himself, according to an incident report obtained by VICE. It was just after 2:30 PM.

This wasn't the perp's first rodeo. The day before, a couple saw the same person jerking off on the hood of a red Volkswagen Golf, according to a witness who works at the Spring Hill Suites. The Golf belonged to that employee, who moved his car but did not call police.

Shortly after the call, Andover Officer Joseph Magliozzi spotted a black SUV driving quickly away from Minuteman Road, a quiet street that includes a couple other hotel franchises. When he pulled the SUV over, Magliozzi noticed the man pull up his tan pants and struggle to buckle his belt.

The driver was Seth Richard, 45, a 19-year veteran at the Boston Police department. He had a Glock, a detective badge, and court documents beside him on the front seat. Magliozzi asked Richard where he was going, and the cop replied that he was "on the job" and on his way back from court. Magliozzi asked why Richard was traveling in the opposite direction from his home in Boxford, a suburb about a 20-minute drive away. Richard reportedly responded, "Why not?"

Magliozzi noticed Richard's behavior was "nervous" and "odd," especially for a fellow member of law enforcement, according to the police report. When asked questions, Richard was apparently evasive and suggested he could "lose everything."

Officer Magliozzi, who was later joined by three other cops, called over a witness who had seen the naked guy masturbating. The witness told the officers he was "absolutely" sure Richard was their man, and later added, "I am 50 years old so I can not be 100 percent sure, but I am 95–99 percent with little doubt in my mind."

Richard was arraigned the next day at the Lawrence District Court and released without bail.

Officer Stephen McNulty, a spokesperson for the Boston Police Department, tells VICE Richard was put on paid administrative leave as of August 20. He says he is unable to comment extensively on the incident in Andover, or Richard's suspension, other to say that the department is worried about Richard's mental health.

"We are deeply concerned for his mental well-being and hope he gets the help he needs," McNulty says.

"Obviously in a case like this there is something wrong here," says Thomas Nolan, a 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department who's now a criminologist at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. According to Nolan, when people are charged with exhibition, they usually go through psychological evaluations first.

"Some police officers, like any other member of our community, have mental health issues," Nolan explains. "Unfortunately for the victims of this or whoever had to witness what he was doing, it could have been worse."

The American Psychiatric Association classifies exhibitionism under a group of disorders called paraphilic disorders. Often, people who suffer from paraphilic disorders get their kicks from fetishes that involve people who can't consent.

Though a black Toyota RAV4 SUV with the same license plate described in the police report was parked outside Richard's ranch-style home in Boxford Tuesday morning, no one answered the door. Lieutenant Robert Hazelwood of the Boxford Police Department told VICE that other than a few speeding tickets, Richard has "led a very quiet life here."

Richard's attorney, Kevin Mullen, did not respond to calls for comment in time for the publication of this article.

This isn't the first time Richard's conduct on the force has drawn scrutiny. In 2009, he allegedly beat then 19-year-old Maury Paulino of Dorchester after arresting him outside a Dorchester police station. Paulino says he went to the station to pay a friend's $40 bail, and that the incident started to escalate after his friend's release. Paulino claims that officers were mistreating his friend, so he started to record the verbal exchange with his cellphone.

"Richard got irritated, he got really upset that I was recording," Paulino tells VICE. "He reached for my phone. He told me you're going under arrest."

Soon, Paulino says, he found himself on the floor of the police station, held down by Richard and two other officers who came to his assistance. While he was down, Paulino says Richard punched him, kicked him, and sprayed pepper spray in his face.

"I was in shock," Paulino says. "He was like, 'Stop resisting,' and I was like, 'I'm not resisting, you just hit me.' He was like, 'Shut the fuck up, stop bullshitting.'"

The officers charged Paulino with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, illegal wiretapping, and assaulting a police officer. He was tried and found not guilty in April 2011, and the next year, Boston Police awarded him a $33,000 settlement. Paulino says he would have taken the case further, but the frequent court dates were taking away time he needed to be spending at school.

After the incident, Paulino claims that the Boston Police Department wrote him a letter explaining that because the case was settled, and Richard was never found guilty, he would not be disciplined by the department. BPD would not comment on Richard's disciplinary record or the incident with Paulino for this story

According to public records, Richard earned $114,189 in 2013.

When informed about Richard's arrest in Andover, Paulino told VICE he was "at a loss for words."

"I knew he was pretty power-trippy, I didn't know he would take it that far," Paulino says. "For him to end up naked in a parking lot pleasuring himself where there could be little kids that's pretty disturbing. I hope they discipline him and they take the gun away. You can't have someone walking around the streets thinking that he has all the power and able to be naked."

Richard's next court appearance is scheduled for October 14.

Follow Susan Zalkind on Twitter.

Freddie Gray protestors via Wikimedia Commons

The city of Baltimore is all but certain to pay $6.4 million to the family of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man whose spine was fatally severed while he was in police custody this April. The deal, which would settle civil claims but not acknowledge wrongdoing by individual cops, is expected to be finalized when the city's Board of Estimates—which controls spending—meets on Wednesday.

Born into a house with dangerous lead paint, Gray frequently missed school as a kid and later lived off structured government settlement checks. On April 12, he was picked up by Baltimore cops after reportedly making eye contact with one of them. A video emerged of Gray groaning before he was put inside a police van, but he was unconscious when he arrived at the station. Days later, Gray succumbed to his injuries and died, leading many to suggest that he'd been jostled inside the van on purpose as a cruel form of police punishment, sometimes called a "rough ride."

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The allegations were followed by protests and riots, a spate of gun violence, and, more recently, the firing of the city police commissioner. Six officers were charged and indicted in Gray's death, and last week a judge announced that each would get a separate criminal trial as a new wave of protests emerged to accompany the court proceedings. (In a statement, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake thanked residents for making them peaceful.)

The settlement unveiled Tuesday, which if approved will be paid out over two years, surpasses the one awarded to the survivors of both Eric Garner and Rodney King, as the Washington Post reported. (Those payouts were $5.9 million and $3.8 million, respectively.) The Gray settlement is also larger than the sum of the more than 120 payouts the Baltimore has made for alleged police brutality since 2011, according to the Baltimore Sun.

It's unclear why the money was paid out before a lawsuit was even filed, but the persistence of the Black Lives Matter movement and lingering concerns about local unrest almost certainly played role.

For her part, Mayor Rawlings-Blake said that any deal won't color the forthcoming trials.

"The proposed settlement agreement going before the Board of Estimates should not be interpreted as a judgment on the guilt or innocence of the officers facing trial," she said a statement, according to the Post. "This settlement is being proposed solely because it is in the best interest of the city, and avoids costly and protracted litigation that would only make it more difficult for our city to heal and potentially cost taxpayers many millions more in damages."

The criminal trials of the cops are expected to being in earnest next month, and a judge will rule Thursday on whether they'll be held in Baltimore or elsewhere.

David Jaros, an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, says that the mayor's statement about the settlement not affecting the legal process is "accurate on the whole," but that the six cops' attorneys will be much more concerned about where the trials will be held. For instance, if it's Baltimore, the jurors might have to weigh concerns about possible riots and property damage against their decision.

"This will be one more thing the defense will point to and say, 'Now there has been press about they city admitting wrong, and this could be mistaken by the jury pool," Jaros told me. "I wouldn't be surprised if this gets mentioned on Thursday, that it's tainted the Baltimore jury pool, even though it's national news."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Some freshers who've been drinking rather than playing "raveminton." Photo by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Consider every word of this sentence from an article in Sunday's Observer, titled "Students cut out the boozy nights as freshers' week sobers up," about how students are eschewing fun to instead do this shit:

Salsa classes, quiz nights, and raveminton—where students play badminton under UV lights with glow sticks attached to their rackets to the sound of rave music—are some of the events on offer to first-year Loughborough students who would rather not spend the next day nursing a hangover.

Rave-min-ton: A portmanteau so abrasive it wants me to shove both my arms down my throat and then pull them apart until I die. Rave. Badminton. The worst of both worlds: raveminton. The badminton game that is also a rave.

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At the heart of all this sadness is the Observer finding that more of these wretched young people—with their Snapchats, the young people, and their backwards baseball caps, and their memes; they like Amber Rose, the young people, don't they? Amber Rose and casual vaping—these young people, these students, now more than ever, are going teetotal.

Recent Office for National Statistics figures have found a 40 percent increase in young adults shunning alcohol between 2005 and 2013, and the proportion of 16-to-24-year-olds who drink has fallen two-thirds. As a result, student unions are organizing more wholesome freshers week activities, like sober dancing and sporting raves.

"Things are becoming less focused on going out," Loughborough University SU President Jess Excell told the paper. "There's been a shift in attitudes—students are focused on their studies and investing in their education; perhaps it's down to the rise in fees. People are also more conscious about spending lots of money, because everything is so much more expensive these days."

Watch our new documentary, 'Spitman,' about West London teenagers paid to piss on an older man.

Obviously, from my distant pulpit as a human whose freshers week was now a literal decade ago, the weight of age decaying my body down to dust, my enthusiasm for things evaporated like dirty water in the bottom of a hot well, I view this news with cynicism and contempt. Young people? Choosing not to blot out the doomed reality of their future with alcohol and drugs? And maybe some quite sloppy and inadvisable sex? Hotbox the Citroen Saxo their parents bought them for getting two Bs and a C and getting in through clearing? Is a badminton rave really better than that? Are salsa lessons—the dance lesson your mom does on Wednesday nights when she decides she's bored with life but not quite bored enough to divorce your dad—are salsa lessons really better than doing party drugs and spending your maintenance grant on a really big speaker? No.

I mean, again—and not to labor the point—but: Are we saying that nobody—not one student rugby player—will shit in a pint glass and make a fresher drink the beer that is left in the pint glass around the shit, the turd bobbing slightly in the beer, the turd bumping gently against their lips and teeth as they chug it? No. I refuse this.

But then this might be me relying on an outdated student stereotype. Students used to be sort of walking Pot Noodle adverts, the kind of people who would turn up to freshers week knowing that they could shed the skin of their old nerdy sixth-form selves and be an infinity of people, with a new name and a new personality and a new group of friends, and they would translate that excitement into "incorporating a hat into their look." They would drink into oblivion as some sort of metaphorical two fingers up to mom and dad, animals let off the leash and running instantly into a pub with a warm handful of bills. They would get really good at pool. They would spend a lot of time getting their Facebook profile just right, before non-students were allowed on. I am talking about myself.

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Eighteen-year-olds these days, though—with their Tumblrs and their Twitters and their self-awareness—already know hats look bad on them, already have their "About Me" page on lock. Maybe they know drinking isn't for them, either. Add in study abroad students who aren't as British-ly into drinking, as well as students who don't drink for religious reasons, and suddenly a massive amount of the student community can't really enjoy "£1-a-pint night followed by a cheeky little piss on a war memorial" like the rest of us can.

Raveminton isn't really the sad death of student drinking culture, is it? Student sobriety isn't new. As long as students have been drinking, there has been some RAG Week weirdoid in fancy dress standing outside a pub jangling a bucket of coins, a human "Keep Calm and Carry On!" fridge magnet come to life. For every one student who thinks an SU-organized coach trip to the theater is a good way to spend a Tuesday night, there are seven or eight who will spend that evening drinking until they vomit, and then drinking that vomit. The moral of the story is that all students are bad and how they decide to be awful is up to them. The moral of the story is that there is no way raveminton can be considered in any way good or fun.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

In the narrow confines of Rough Trade's backstage dressing room in Brooklyn, Jenny Hval and her trio of supporting performers, the Apocalypse Girls, slip on floral nightgowns that they bought earlier that day at the 99-cent store. "Are we doing blood with these?" one asks, looking down and smoothing her gown.

Hval is currently at the midpoint of a 20-date North American fall tour in support of her recent album Apocalypse, Girl, and the mood backstage falls somewhere between a slumber party and the early stages of a Wiccan ritual. The four women line up in front of a long steel-rimmed mirror as they apply makeup, and pull long, flowy wigs tight over their skulls. It's like being back in high school, watching the other girls primp in the restroom—only this time the makeup is smeared grotesquely, and there's a jar of calamine lotion and Dixie cups full of fake blood that are going to come into play, later onstage. At the center of it all is Hval herself, Norwegian with close-cropped pale hair dyed different shades of blue and green—an elfin woman with sharp Nordic features that look like they were sculpted by someone with a mathematically precise understanding of the human face. As she pulls a bright red wig of cascading curls from a plastic box, she brings it close and handles it gently, like an animal.

"A lot of people don't know I'm wearing a wig onstage," Hval told me earlier that day when we spoke over the phone. "I love when you take one off during the performance and people didn't really know that there was anything to take off. I like the idea of undressing, and of trying something on that's clearly awkward and wrong but still has a longing to it."

Hval fuses the language of self-help, corporate self-actualization, and heteronormative bliss to form a thick, sweet drink that's as compelling as it is repellent.

Hval's theatricality and willingness to engage the audience in strange and awkward intimacies is part of the 35-year-old's effort to "expand what a live performance is allowed to be in a musical context," to bring to it some of the conceptual heft and discomfort of performance art. She embraces the lushness and apparent health the wig projects, as well as its link with hair loss and illness.

For Hval, wearing the wig symbolizes participation in a stereotype of femininity that she feels conflicted about, but also finds fascinating. "I look more like a wholesome person with the wig I'm currently wearing," she admits. "I look much more feminine and true and real." She laughs. "Wigs are weird creatures."

The tour is Hval's first as a headliner in North America. In past weeks she's drawn crowds in the Northwest and the Midwest and Canada. After the Rough Trade show, she heads on to Philadelphia, DC, North Carolina—performing each night in front of an audience that may or may not have ever experienced a lovely wigged woman speaking to them gently yet commandingly about soft dicks, as she does on the first track to Apocalypse, Girl. In many of these shows Jenny has performed solo, accompanied on stage only by a man named Håvard, who told me that his role was to "play the music."

Apocalypse, Girl is Hval's third release, and boasts a more spacious, orchestral sound than her previous two albums, Viscera (2011) and Innocence is Kinky (2013). On Apocalypse, Hval's piercing and steely-sweet singing is punctuated by spoken-word passages that sound almost aggressively gentle, but conceal a barbed take on the sociocultural imperatives women internalize as they become feminized. "Oh, it's easy to take care of yourself!" Hval sings on the album's second track. In fragile, breathless voice she continues: "Getting paid, getting laid, getting married, getting pregnant, fighting for visibility in your market, realizing your potential, being healthy, being clean, not making a fool of yourself, not hurting yourself, shaving in all the right places..." Hval fuses the language of self-help, corporate self-actualization, and heteronormative bliss to form a thick, sweet drink that's as compelling as it is repellent.

Like Björk or Joanna Newsom, Jenny Hval's music packs an emotionally dense and textured punch, but Hval is also unafraid to be funny or to hold the listener at a distance. Like Laurie Anderson's Big Science, Apocalypse, Girl functions as a snapshot of a distinct moment within late capitalism. But Hval's snapshot is fleshier and more visceral, with more references to the bodies and cunts and flaccid penises missing from Anderson's album. Apocalypse, Girl borrows as much from pop music's playbooks as it does from minimalist, avant-garde electronica, with an intricate and choreographed sound that Hval says marks a different way of working and recording from her earlier albums. For this record, she spent more time than ever before in the studio tweaking vocals and backing tracks, working "with such detail, almost to the point of the detail which a writer has when they edit, with control over each word." Reproducing the full sonic texture of the album live seemed like a disappointing project until she realized that the very impossibility of the task offered her more room for spontaneity and play, "a much bigger palette to work from, an opening for including a lot of influences and thought, more spontaneous ideas."

VICE Meets Norwegian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

As Jenny Hval takes the stage at Rough Trade with Håvard and the Apocalypse Girls, it becomes clear that this will be very different from most rock shows. Hval sinks to the stage and begins speaking the first lines of "Kingsize," the album's opener. "Think big, girl. Like king. Think king-size," Hval says slowly, a smile in her voice. The words are soft but sound uncomfortably personal, overly close. Around her, the Girls rub calamine lotion over their bare faces, drape themselves on the stage surface, swig from tallboys of Brooklyn Lager. They look alternatively enticing and deranged, at one point they sing a twisted version of Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness." In them, the familiar clichés of feminine beauty—long hair, bare skin—are remade in an unfamiliar form. The girls hold one other around the waists and swing back and forth in slow-motion unison, bodies pressed tight together, long fake hair swinging around above real hair of a different color and texture, and it's hard not to feel moved by it, compelled by as if by a really dreamy tampon commercial or a fantastically glossy Instagram account.

But before you can dwell in that feeling, you see the bloody patches on their gowns, the socks on the bare stage. Standing up, Hval's voice rises to a heartbreaking pitch as she sings: "climbing the ladders just to fall uncontrollably to heaven." I look behind me at the intent, open faces of the people watching her, and it feels like I'm looking right inside them.

This is Hval's greatest strength as a musician and performer: her ability to make you open up more fully to hear her—and then, once your innards are accessible, to hit you with a phrase, a cry, an image that pierces you to your emotional core.

"I sing in several songs in my live performance about wanting everybody to cry together," Jenny Hval had told me earlier, over the phone. "It could be seen as something that's kind of funny and sad, but it's also a genuine wish—that music performance is a sort of way of coming together, a collective cry. And it's not just the sound of it, it's the openness, and these moments of being outside of yourself and really being yourself at the same time."

When I ask Hval what she hopes people feel when they listen to her album, she answers instantly: "Total destruction. Total destruction of the heart."

Follow Alexandra Kleeman on Twitter.

Jenny Hval performs at Boot and Saddle in Philadelphia on September 8; DC9 in Washington, DC, on September 9; and Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 10. More tour dates can be found here, and her album Apocalypse, Girl, can be bought here.

Children, and games. All photography by Alex Davis

"I'd stand in front of it when you tweet, otherwise people are just going to grab whatever comes out," an attendant advises me, while I stare at a vending machine which rewards hashtags with bags of meat.

I'm at London's Alexandra Palace, which is in the middle of being commandeered by the combined wallets of Production Company Endemol, Retail Chain GAME, and Processed Meat Supplier Mattessons. I'm at Legends of Gaming, a live event organized to show off seven of the UK's biggest gaming YouTube stars to an audience who've paid £21.99 [$33.85] each for the privilege. It's a One Day Only competitive gaming stage show, pitched with a few star names like Syndicate and Ali-A. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of them. They're doing fine.

Legends of Gaming is aimed at children. I don't wholly learn this until I'm lining up to go inside. I had the suspicion that the crowd would skew young, because it's the weekend before the British school holidays end and the event starts long before you absolutely have to leave the sofa you've stubbornly occupied the night before. But I am soon made certain that the age range of people who'd go to an event where you can see Minecraft YouTubers is the same as people who would have been extras on Byker Grove.

'Hollyoaks' lads on stage

Two lads from Hollyoaks are warming up the crowd. They're the MCs for the duration, appearing at once as if they're genuinely too talented to be here while earning probably the correct amount of money to set those intrusive thoughts aside. Big Names (trust me) Wroetoshaw and Calfreezy take the stage to massive applause. In collective scale, at least: the applause is produced solely from tiny hands.

These guys are independently known for producing videos where they open up packs of digital player cards in FIFA 15. Wroetoshaw's been riding around in a fucking Lamborghini recently. It's a rare video on his YouTube page that has received fewer than 2 million views. His work seems inconsequential, but people are obviously watching this stuff for a reason.

Cheer up, dads

American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel dipped his sack in hot broth last week when he dared to misunderstand the importance of Google's new YouTube Gaming service, a plucky competitor to Twitch's dominance over the streaming video market. Unlike Mr. Kimmel, I'm fully invested in this scene and have only ever dreamed about being completely mismatched in a relationship with Sarah Silverman. YouTube gaming channels are now inescapable, a crucial pillar in the appreciation of video games and no less valid an experience than play. Some people want to see reactions and criticism from amicable personalities, others want to lessen the financial stake in remaining current with the latest releases and are happy to get their experience vicariously.

Even channels where the majority of action is opening packs, like W2S and Calfreezy, make sense. The viewers are excited, sharing in the suspense, knowing the next moment in the video could be genuine (if overacted) delight out of a charming lad from Guernsey.

Neither of the two opens a FIFA pack. Not even one. They're invited on stage to play Super Smash Bros. with members of the audience. I'm unsure if the real delight from the fans is meeting their idols or getting to escape from the voluntary human battery pen.

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I try desperately hard to become entertained and invested, but I have my first worry that this entire event might have been completely misbooked. This part doesn't feel like it values the personalities of the collected Legends. If criticism of their entire profession is "no one wants to watch people play video games" I begin to feel as if, without a transformative element, there might be some validity. The boys are not given microphones. They are not able to inject even a modicum of personality. They are not permitted to tell a joke. Wroetoshaw wins the round. I think.

While the next Legends are being woken up I wander around the show floor, occupied by merch stalls and a few stands with playable game demos. The entire venue smells like meat. I suspect this is intentional, initially, as a part of Mattessons' portion of the co-branding venture. Get the olfactory systems all hankering for globs of reformed chicken scraps youngins can chow down on while they grind out engrams in Destiny. This is not the case; a hot dog cart is pumping out pork fumes in a large annex beside the main stage. It's beside rows of round tables where adults have been discarded, used as tokens for admission by kids who just want to see some funny lads from Minecraft videos. I scan the crowd. Anyone on the show floor between the ages of 24 and 35 is in PR or working security. Anyone over 35 has a child on their shoulders attempting to get a better look at the stage.

The theater bell for the second Segment is "FRHANK," a robot appearing on the Jumbotron and PA system. FRHANK is a mascot that Mattessons has created to be "The Ultimate Gaming And Snacking Buddy." An ad agency designed this and someone signed off on it. That's how it works. I wish I didn't know that's how it works.

The Hollyoafs reintroduce Calfreezy, now joined by Call of Duty YouTuber Twiinsane, Ashley Marie, and Dan TDM (who gets the biggest reaction from the crowd so far). Dan TDM is absurdly handsome. Dan TDM looks like he's the boyfriend of someone who'd never date you. His speciality, along with Ashley Marie, is Minecraft. Ashley Marie is given a brief moment on the mic to acknowledge the gaming community's noted hostility toward women and one of the Hollyoaks Boys asks the girls in the audience to make some noise if they love games.

It's the first time the event's appeared genuine and meaningful, like it has a purpose, like kids who've attended might reject sexism and go on to improve the world. Maybe I'm being swung back around here.

They're going to play Minecraft. Again with members of the audience. None of the Legends are given microphones. After a few minutes I can't be bothered. I wander off. I see a stall selling sweets right next to a stall engraving names onto bullets. The reverse side of both is a booth where people can get genuine military dog tags printed. I worry about how these three things are, by their proximity, implicitly rendered as innocuous as each other and that's somehow not a cause for concern. This isn't the time, I'm forced to tell myself.

Despite Mattessons' involvement, none of the concession stands actually appear to be serving any Fridge Raiders. I wonder if being presented with the reality of the product might diminish from the allure, like we might begin to suspect what a robot has to do with strips of animal. On my way back to the stage I spot a rectangle advertising that it will spit out food if you're prepared to engage in a cynical marketing ploy. I'm starving. I send out a tweet with the hashtag it wants and I delete the message instantly, as if that somehow absolves me of having ever done it. I actually do this twice, because, like the attendant says, someone rushed in and grabbed something that was probably mine. There wasn't really a way to tell. Fridge Raiders are terrible. If they were good then Mattessons wouldn't need this pomp and circumstance to sell any.

Some people, queuing to tweet at some meat

I realize, at once, this vending machine is the entire show. It is the promise of a unique experience, something once completely genuine, mismanaged by people with money and cynically exploited resulting in a terrible day out not worth the bother. Similar events are often a little cynical too, it is inescapable, the feeling that just being here is you entering into an agreement that it's fine to be exposed to ceaseless advertising. The pitch of seeing pre-release games comes with the fine print, that you are allowed access to this stuff because you might be incentivized to buy the full version and evangelize further about what you've seen.

This said, community can win out against the aforementioned pact or whatever distracting, poorly planned shit is happening on stage. People show up to these events because of other people. They want to feel as if their hobby is justified by the presence of similar minds with shared experiences.

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Do these people, these children, look excited to you?

But Legends of Gaming at no point felt like an event anyone actually wanted to be at—or if they did, they wanted to be at it for reasons it wasn't capable of providing. Few of the kids around seem like they're having fun. A few seem exhausted, even, like being here is actually draining their innate unbounded joy. I'm not sure they know why they aren't having fun. They're here to see Minecraft and they're here to see the people they like to see play Minecraft. It just wasn't very fun when it happened.

Before the next event there's a sideshow that begins without much fanfare.

Ryan Hart and R2K are brought onto the stage. Neither of these gentlemen makes YouTube videos primarily. Both are through-and-through competitive gamers. Hart is the UK's best Street Fighter player, a fixture at the World Street Fighter Championships every year at EVO, and a Guinness World Record holder for the largest amount of Street Fighter tournaments ever won. When I think about the phrase "Legends of Gaming" I'm thinking about Ryan Hart: a consummate professional with a chilled attitude who can ruin your entire life in a single round of Street Fighter.

More kids from the crowd are recruited, and this time they're going head-to-head, expected to spectacularly lose against the men. They do.

Someone just lost their 'Street Fighter IV' match, probably

The commentator Endemol has recruited for this segment admits he doesn't really know all that much about Street Fighter. This was presumably intentional in an effort to keep things from getting too technical, to remain accessible. Two screens above the stage show two different bouts happening concurrently, not allowing either one to provide the focus of your attention.

No one's here to see this, so it's not given the reverence it deserves. Street Fighter's not a YouTube game, really. Ryan Hart is immensely talented, but he's not a home brand like the people on the posters and the advertisements. The product that the Legends of Gaming provide is something that emphasizes and broadens their own celebrity. The product Ryan Hart provides is a loss, for you, that you should have seen coming.

This segment of the show makes me realize that nobody is here to see the Legends be good at games. A few of the Legends have quipped in their stage intros that they're actively terrible and don't expect to do well. I now properly question the validity of the "Legend" label attached to the YouTube stars. I'm happy enough with their achievements to call them celebrities. They've managed to justify renting out Alexandra Palace for an event I'm sure made a lot of money. I think the label's been designed to be contentious. To aid the confusion from adults. When questioned, like I'm doing, it helps to provoke the "you just don't get it" from kids who've never heard of Odysseus or Gilgamesh or Sun Wukong.

Ryan Hart, beside a box presumably containing meat

It's a fantastic trick. I bet it's worked, since these people from YouTube aren't even Legends in the way that your mate Dave is for picking up the breakfast tab at Wetherspoon when you're all hungover. "Legend" carries the weight of time and achievement. Hercules was a "Legend," y'know? These people aren't amazing at games, They aren't amazing presenters, they're just kind of charming and lucky. And this event leaned on absolutely none of their qualities other than their presence at an event on a random Saturday in 2015 people could pay to attend.

I'm bored. That's my biggest criticism. The stage show is uninteresting. I don't stick around for much longer. I think a few parents have cottoned on, too. Leaving, I hear a child say, "That was alright. It could have been better." And I know that this is shorthand, without having the proper perspective, to say: "This entire thing was put together with the expectation that if enough names and money were thrown at it, there'd be an entertaining show at the end." There wasn't. It was hashtags and bags of meat.

Follow Mathew Jones on Twitter.

You can't see much but those are my friends there in the mist. All photos by the author

The annual Brisbane Festival opened Saturday along with something called Fear and Delight, which is a sort of burlesque theater piece combined with experimental gastronomy. The goal of Fear and Delight, according to their website, is "to take you on a wild journey far outside the realms of reality." Probably the most interesting part about this wild journey is that it includes a bar filled with atomized gin and tonics.

The bar is part of the dinner and stage show, and it's the second of its kind after a place in London also called Alcoholic Architecture opened in July. The bar's deal is that rather than serving drinks, they pump an alcoholic mist into a room at a 1:3 spirit to mixer ratio. The result is 150 percent humidity, porno lighting, and the faint scent of gin and tonic, or whatever cocktail they happen to be misting at the time.

As you absorb the drink through your lungs, eyeballs, and various mucus membranes, the ethanol bypasses your stomach and heads straight for your bloodstream. In theory this makes it a top place to get bombed, but in reality makes it a soft target for conservative news outlets, which means a lot of what makes this interesting has been curtailed for OH&S [Occupational Health and Safety].

The Courier Mail reported that the bar had been "branded 'incredibly dangerous' by medical experts." While Channel Ten's The Project described it as being "slammed" by medical experts. In both cases these experts warned readers against attending, and one voiced his concern about brain damage, saying "you might as well just run into a brick wall."

This is my friend. He grins frequently but that doesn't reflect the experience.

All of this is to say I really wanted to go to this place. So after some time watching the show, we were brought to the entrance of the bar and asked to put on what looked like biohazard suits. "Well, that's ridiculous," announced a woman beside me. "Do we have to?" The girl handing out the suits responded no, we didn't have to, but reminded us that the suits were "kind of funny!"

Tiny feat vs. giant gumboots

Next came one-size-fits-all, non-negotiable gumboots, followed by a long list of rules and regulations, which included a 40-minute time limit in the bar.

Suiting up

Up until that point the whole thing had been a slightly comical experience, until we were asked to leave our drinks at the door. It was clear the patrons weren't exactly happy about leaving their $55 bottles of wine to warm outside. "If I had known that, I would have waited to buy this," said one of the guys.

Still grinning

A group of eight (which was the maximum allowed at any time) passed through a clear plastic curtain and into what we thought was a hallway. It wasn't a hallway. It was just a shipping container. No seats. No décor. Just you and seven other people and a lot of mist/sweat.

I watched one of the guys walk to the end of the container, put his hand out and attempt to push it open. Because, that couldn't be it... could it? Then music started to ooze out of a single speaker in a corner, which sounded a bit like the soundtrack from a haunted house.

Putting the light center-frame really highlights how little there was to look at

A women next to me mentioned how sweaty she was. I too was getting a bit fogged up when suddenly, after just 15 minutes, the organizer came in and told us our time was up. It definitely hadn't been 40 minutes, but no one even cared.

In terms of novelty value the "vapor bar" hit the mark. In terms of being actually cool, it was abysmal, and I wasn't the only one thinking this. It just so happened that one of the other seven people in the box was my doctor, and he was similarly underwhelmed. "I sure didn't smell any gin," he told me outside. "If you feel anything it is quite possibly a placebo effect."

The others agreed. One of the younger men, who had clearly had a few drinks earlier, voiced how we were all feeling, "I think I just sobered up."

We'd been told that our bodies would absorb a standard drink every 40 minutes. This meant you'd have to stay hours to get a buzz, which would be really boring as well as against the rules.

So for all the hoopla surrounding Fear and Delight in Australian media, it is a pretty worthless experience that doesn't even get you drunk. You're much better off absorbing G&Ts the old fashioned way, mouth to bloodstream, and avoiding the meteorological bullshit going on at the Brisbane Festival.

Just a big ole pile of 2C-E. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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Skeptics of alternative medicine may take perverse joy in the fact that 29 attendees of a holistic medicine conference in Germany may have accidentally taken an LSD-like drug. The "Heilpraktikers" were found on Friday in the hotel in Handeloh where they were holding their conference, "staggering around, rolling in a meadow, talking gibberish and suffering severe cramps."

The delegates were taken to hospital, where urine and blood tests revealed all 29 had ingested 2C-E, a synthetic hallucinogen described as having effects somewhere between LSD and ecstasy. It's been illegal in Germany since the end of 2015, and is known there (for some reason) as "Aquarust."

No one had recovered enough to speak to police until Monday, and the investigation is ongoing. A member of Germany's expert commission on narcotics, Torsten Passie, told The Independent that "it must have been a multiple overdose. That does not support the view that the people concerned took the hallucinogen knowingly."

The Association of German Healing Practitioners (VDH) represents homeopaths and other naturopaths, and could thus reasonably be seen as connected to this particular conference. Eager to separate itself from whatever happened in Handeloh, the VDH quickly said none of its representatives were involved in the mass drugging (or drug-taking) and claimed the conference at which it took place was "obscure," the organizers "unknown to [VDH]."

The association's spokesperson continued: "Unfortunately, the conference in Handeloh has severely damaged the image of the alternative medicine profession... and we have clarified that such acts are not in the spirit of natural therapy, and contradict our values both morally and legally.

"The Association of German Healing Practitioners (Heilpraktikers) detests such misdemeanours."

While it's understandable that VDH would want to distance itself from any appearance of frivolity—there's widespread skepticism over "natural medicine" and the lack of regulation of the discipline makes it easy for quacks to intermingle with legitimate practitioners—there is legitimate scientific research backing up the use of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD and the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms," to treat some mental illnesses. Who knows? Maybe the Handeloh homeopaths weren't dosed; maybe they were doing some real-deal, legitimate medicinal research.

Or then again, maybe they just wanted to do some Aquarust.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.