Why is this called "Big Boss." Why. Just why. Photo courtesy funfactory.com (again, why?)

I've never been able to make myself orgasm.

Any attempts to get rid of blue balls, with my hand at least, inevitably results in more blue balls.

I remember hearing about the elusive "clitoris" in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (I was 12), but it would be a decade before I ever found the damn thing. I'm going to go ahead and generalize in saying that guys don't have this issue. They hit puberty, they figure out how to jerk it and from then on life's one big jizz fest.

What would've helped me a great deal, was having a vibrator.

This week, University College University College Literary and Athletics Society at the University of Toronto is including vibrators in its some of its frosh orientation kits, supplied by local boutique Love Shop.

"When the Love Shop provided this item we gave careful consideration as to whether or not it should be included in the kits. Ultimately we decided that it was appropriate for inclusion," frosh organizers said in an email obtained by VICE. "We believe that in order to create a safe campus where students feel comfortable discussing issues of safer sex, healthy relationships and consent we must create an environment where these issues can be discussed openly."

It's likely the school's orientation team debated whether or not it was controversial to greet incoming students with, among other things, sex toys. We can guess what the folks outside Thorncliffe school, angry that their kids will soon learn the anatomical names of their private parts, would have to say about it.

Haters gonna hate, but I think it's a brilliant idea. Vibrators are a life changer. The earlier they're introduced (within reason, voting age is good), I say, the better.

Vibrators have come a long way from their origins as a tool 19th-century Victorian doctors used to treat "hysteria," now known as sexual frustration. Docs, it seems, were tired of using their fingers to provide relief for female patients, so they created a device to do it for them. These "massagers" have taken many forms over the years with the most modern incarnations designed to look like anything from a bunny rabbit to lipstick. But, despite the fact that roughly 50 percent of women use vibrators, it's still rarely discussed.

I didn't purchase my first vibrator until I was 24. A quick survey of my girlfriends revealed that, give or take a couple years, they were the same. Most of us had been having sex for quite a while before we got acquainted with vibrators, and you know what, a lot of that sex was very, very shitty.

"If I knew how good a vibrator was, I wouldn't have dated my ex for so long," one of my friends told me.

Teenage boys know what feels good to them. Vibrators help girls figure out the same. Without that knowledge, we're kind of left to the mercy of the person we're sleeping with, who is likely taking cues from hardcore porn. The end result, from a heterosexual perspective, is a lot of awkward dirty talk and sex that often becomes an exercise in getting the man off.

My first relationship was a nightmare on every level, but the sex was particularly sloppy. He was drunk a lot of the time and had no concept of foreplay—one of those dudes who will just push your underwear to the side instead of taking it off. The closest I came to feeling pleasure was when it was over (mercifully that usually meant five to ten minutes). But the most tragic part is, because I had no frame of reference, I thought that was normal. I accepted that sex was overrated, and that we were all kind of in on this big lie together, singing its praises ad nauseam.

I went on to date much better men, but the sex still wasn't amazing, in part because I couldn't articulate what I liked. And that can be frustrating for both parties. Eventually, my libido dropped off. I went months, and even more than a year, without having sex. I wasn't loving it, so what was the point? But then, at the nagging of one of my more progressive friends, I got a vibrator. It was an education in getting off. And it made me want to get off more often, both alone and with others.

They say that women reach their sexual peak in their 30s, but I'm willing to bet it would be sooner with the help of a sex toy.

The first time I had an orgasm during intercourse, I was 22. Because I hadn't known the guy that long, I bit back my urge to run around the room screaming in elation.

At the time, I wondered when I would experience that again. These days, the answer is hidden in my sock drawer.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Brian White, one of the people who invented "freestyle walking," participates in his creation for the first time in 17 years. Photo courtesy of Jason Klamm

While most people might think sliding around on sneakers fitted with special grind plates is silly, there are some people who take soaping so seriously that they've built their entire lives around the fad. Take for example Ryan Jaunzemis, a 35-year-old man who eschewed college in the 90s to pursue a career based on the fledgling footwear and still makes time to use them despite his responsibilities as the head of a pick-up artist lair in Vegas.

But according to a completed but not-yet-released documentary, skateboarding without a skateboard started off as a prank perpetrated by teenagers in Illinois who wanted to get on TV. The world took these kids seriously, a company turned their idea into sportswear, and people spent millions of dollars on clunky sneakers.

Lords of Soaptown, a project that took comedian and filmmaker Jason Klamm about 14 years to put together, deigns to tell the crazy story of four founders of soaping who, variously, want to get an apology from Soap, move on from the ordeal entirely, or see the fad come back in full force.

"It's also about these kids whose childhoods were—oddly enough—shaped by Soap shoes," Klamm told me after I watched the trailer and called him up.

VICE: So, were you a soaper back in the day? What's your connection to this?
Jason Klamm: Well, first I saw the freestyle walking piece that was on MTV on a show called News Unfiltered. It was a show where you could submit your own stuff, and these kids said they started a sport called freestyle walking. And it was skateboarding without a skateboard. It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. Later, I saw Soap shoes, I knew they were associated with freestyle walking, and I thought they were the dumbest thing I had ever seen, too. And it took until college, like seven years later, until I kind of turned around on them like a full 360.

What caused you to change your mind?
I met one guy who told me that he had essentially invented Soap shoes. He was one of the kids I saw in the video on MTV. He and his friends pitched Soap shoes via MTV to the company they claimed was Soap shoes. They were a shoe with a grind plate in the middle that you could do tricks in while doing freestyle walking. I found that out and did a little more research and found out the timelines line up.

What did you find in your research?
These four kids that were on [the MTV show], they pitched it. But the only thing is, you can't draw any definitive links, because they don't have any of the original documents presented to them from the company. But I did speak to people who worked at MTV on Unfiltered and they do recall shortly after that piece aired, getting sample shoes in the mail. So, they definitely knew the company that was making Soap shoes. The connection seems pretty obvious.

So wait, they weren't using special shoes in the video, so how was the idea stolen?
Someone came to them from MTV and said they had a company interested in making sports equipment for freestyle walking—and I'm going off of what these guys tell me, of course. They did corroborate each other's stories, though... Anyway, they called them up and asked if they had any ideas for a shoe. Brandon, who's kind of the lead kid in the video, said he could come up with something. They made in their garage this shoe where they cut out the middle and put a piece of PVC in the center and glued it in. They said that's what they thought would work, because you could grind the same way you would on a skateboard. They didn't hear anything back, and then a few months later, they see Soaps on the shelves.

So how did you go from being a Soaps hater to committing to a huge project about them?
[The idea to make a film] was the first thing that occurred to me when he said, "We invented these shoes and they were stolen from us and turned into a multimillion-dollar idea." I had the idea in my head for seven years before I was even able to get a hold of this kid again. I actually found one of his friends through his aunt on YouTube and got a hold of him and interviewed them here in Los Angeles when one of them was visiting. I had that idea back in 2001, but didn't know what I was doing in terms of documentary, so in 2008, when I needed a new project, this was it.

What's the goal? Why hasn't there been a lawsuit if this is true?
There has never been a lawsuit. They were 15, they didn't sign anything. They signed the rights of their appearance to MTV, but they never got anything down on paper other than "thank you for your pitch" from this one company. It's more just they want credit for having created the shoes at this point. The first year [Soap] made $1 or $2 million, and by the fourth year they bumped up somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million.

I've read you describe this as a "comedy documentary." Why? This story sounds fucked up.
That's the other twist in the movie. This freestyle walking thing they said they made up when they were ten was just completely made up so that they could be on TV. They said, "Oh, our school won't let us do it, our town won't let us do it." But the school and the town were in on it, so they all pulled a prank on MTV. And that's kind of what that movie is about, the argument that you should be proud of this amazing prank that you pulled as a 14-year-old instead of being bitter about losing millions of dollars. Even though I can understand the bitterness.

I wanted to ask about the title, Lords of Soaptown, obviously an homage. Is Soaping a sport you feel is equivalent to skateboarding, or are you being cheeky?
I called it that because it sounded accessibly grandiose, because Soaps and freestyle walking are definitely silly. That doesn't mean they can't be taken seriously and there's no skill—because I've met a lot of really skilled Soapers. But I'm one of those people who doesn't take much seriously at all.

I think having fun with the idea that this is equivalent to the history of skateboarding is interesting. But at the same time, it does have just as interesting of a history, it's just not as serious or long-lasting, obviously. But I think it's a piece of history that's interesting, and I think people would be much more interested in it when they see the movie. I actually think that once they see it, they'll want the company that made Soaps to start making Soaps again.

How many times in the past decade have you had to explain to people what Soaps are?
That happens all the time. It's such a niche, but to a certain group of people. To me, I thought everyone knew about Soap shoes and also thought they were stupid. Most skateboarders have a lot of disdain for them. But I interviewed Tony Alva, one of the original Z-boys and his team, and they were all Soapers before they were skateboarders. So there is part of the culture that's aware of it. Some of them crap on it, but these kids are like, they were fun but I just upgraded to a skateboard. But if you're talking to an executive, you have to explain what Soaps are. They all assume it's parkour ahead of time, because that's what it sounds like.

Right. You're currently pitching this movie to distributors. How do you sell it to suits who have no nostalgic connection to the shoes?
Really, the thing that i tell them is four 14-year-old kids from the Chicago suburbs pulled the wool over MTV's eyes and launched a multi-million dollar company and didn't see a dime. They legitimately did a fuck-authority thing over the ultimate fuck-authority figure. MTV was trying to say, "screw authority," and these kids were trying to say, "screw MTV."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo via Brown's Liberal Party candidate page

Proving the worth of his extensive background in media, a federal Liberal party candidate is apologizing for a series of drunken tweets in which he degraded women.

Chris Brown, the Liberal hopeful in Alberta's Peace River-Westlock riding, who holds a degree in journalism and currently works in public relations, is the latest politician to fall victim to a less-than-pristine social media past.

In mostly incoherent tweets from 2009, Brown used the unfortunate phrases "fucking bitch" and "your mother was a whore."

When he was put on blast by a Twitter user this week, Brown issued an apology.

"These comments were inappropriate and do not reflect the level of professionalism exemplified by those running for office," he said. He then explained that the loss of his partner in a car crash led him to an alcohol dependency, and booze and Twitter make terrible bedfellows.

He's just the latest politician in Canada's federal election whose social media skeletons recently emerged from the closet and proceeded to fuck shit up:

Ontario Conservative riding association director Sue MacDonell was fired Tuesday after Facebook posts in which she said native people are "allowed to break every law we have and bankrupt the country" and described Mrs. Universe winner Ashley Burnham, a member of the Enoch Cree Nation, as a "monster."

Toronto Conservative candidate Tim Dutaud was also given the boot this week, when a Youtube video showing him faking an orgasm during a crank call to a woman, emerged.

No list of failed election hopefuls is complete without Jerry Bance, the Conservative repairman who peed into a mug in the kitchen of a homeowner whose sink he was fixing. Bance was secretly being filmed by CBC at the time, which, to be fair isn't really a social media blunder, but who can get enough of this story? Bance, who was running in Scarborough-Rouge River resigned Monday.

In August, Ala Buzreba, a young Liberal candidate from Calgary, dropped out of the race due to controversial tweets in which she characterized one person a "waste of sperm" and advised another that their mother "should have used that coat hanger."

With seven weeks to go, it seems unlikely that these candidates will be the last to have their past come back to haunt them.

So for all you war room bosses out there: Why bother with negative ad campaigns when getting someone drunk and handing them a keyboard seems to be working just as well.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo by Valentina Quintano

The situation never gets any easier. I meet a girl, for example. Questions are asked. Normal, innocuous questions most people answer with ease; childhood, upbringing, parents, family. The norm, for the majority.

Not for me.

It's when I finally pluck up the courage to open up that I see the familiar look from the poor recipient of my truth; the vague mask they don in the hope it will convey empathy and interest, when all it really does is highlight their awkwardness and unease. The mechanical nod of the head, when all they really want to do is shake it off and run away. Sometimes they do nothing at all; pretend nothing has been said and ask if I want another drink.

From as far back as I can remember my life revolved around violence and fear. For my entire childhood I was battered, beaten and abused by my dad, who sat red-faced and guilt-free at the helm of the family, blithely knocking back another cheap beer while his children cowered on the floor, bloodied, bruised, and fearful for their lives.

My innocence was ripped from me while still a baby, and a wall of lies erected from the earliest stages of adolescence to prevent anyone seeing the truth behind the scars.

Every evening without fail I'd stare out my bedroom window, shaking uncontrollably at the prospect of his return home. Cars, buses, and planes full of strangers would pass and honk and fly, and I'd wonder hopelessly why I wasn't a part of any of those worlds, rather than serving the prison sentence I'd been handed as an innocent. My sister and I were like soldiers under the vicious regime of a tyrant, scared to put even the slightest foot wrong through fear of sadistic retribution—yet suffering that very fate regardless. He was a monster who sought solace in our fear, while everyone outside of our world could see only charm, smiles, and wisecracks.

Following the first-ever National Lottery draw, at the age of 11, I cried hysterically for two hours. I'd dreamt about winning the lottery, but not because I wanted toys, bikes, and trips to Disney World. I figured that had we won the lottery that Saturday night, my dad wouldn't return from the pub and beat us relentlessly into the early hours of the following morning. How can anyone be angry at their children when they have £8 million in the bank?

We didn't win the lottery.

I can only talk from personal experience here, but I feel it's much harder to open up about abuse as a man, and, in turn, harder for others to understand or accept.

Men fight back, no?

Men who don't fight back need to man up, no?

No.

Over 40 percent of domestic violence cases involve male victims. How many adverts or campaigns or articles do you see that focus on this issue? That isn't to negate the attention paid to female victims of abuse, of course; there are very rightly a number of campaigns and charities and events set up purely to raise awareness around violence against women, a marked improvement on how things were even a couple of decades ago. But with an estimated 2.6 million male victims in the UK alone, it feels like there's still some catching up to do.

I hate to throw numbers and statistics at such a personal issue, but I do so to highlight my point; it's still considered inconceivable by many that this is a problem that needs addressing. Had there been more awareness and less stigma attached to male victims when my father was beating me, then maybe I'd have spoken out sooner. Maybe I'd have seen myself as the victim and him as the villain. Maybe I wouldn't have felt so helpless, to the point that I tried to throw myself in front of a bus at the age of 15, only to be pulled back by a stranger.

"Why didn't you go to the police, Carl?"

I did go to the police: 11/04/1998, three days after my 18th birthday.

READ ON BROADLY: When You Live With a Man Who Wants to Kill You, Where Can You Possibly Go?

Brian, my dad, told me that for my birthday he was taking me out for my first legal "drink" in Liverpool—his way of saying, "Happy birthday, son."

There were no other options, obviously; no alternative. "This is what I'm doing. You'll enjoy it. You're lucky to have such a caring dad."

We started in Widnes at 11 AM, a fairly normal time for Brian and his alcoholic mates. Not so much for a boy pretending to be a man just because April 8 had arrived. First venue: the Castle pub, a place oozing the acrid scent of broken homes, hearts, and livers. Sticky floor tiles and yellow smoky walls. A small battered portable telly showed horse racing on mute. In the far corner the tiles were further worn where many had danced on Sunday karaoke night. We kicked off with pints. I had to keep up. It would be suicide to embarrass Brian in front of his mates by declining a drink.

Immediately I look for the signs. That narrowing of the eyes. How he talks, enunciates and gesticulates. Every mannerism I calculate. I watch how his jaw clenches and tightens. Eighteen years of observing meant I could instantly weigh up the situation. But I also knew exactly when to look away, as there'd been many cases where he'd caught me sizing him up, resulting in nights that seemed to go on forever.

Taxis ordered. Backs slapped. Shots knocked back. Spilled outside. Midday sunshine. Jumped in our cab. Heading for Liverpool. The big glam city to Widnes's little featureless brother.

Pub.

Pint.

Shot.

Pub.

Pint.

Shot.

His eyes get narrower. The looks prolonged. The jaw clenches tighter.

Pub.

Pint.

Shot.

I feel sick. Partly down to the alcohol, but mostly because the inevitable had already been rolled out as clear as the April sky above. I knew where this day was heading. It was my 18th birthday, but it made no difference. That's the thing with inevitability: It doesn't discriminate.

"Drink up, yer little cunt!"

"Let's hit the vodka bar!"

Because that's exactly what your son needs when he hasn't been allowed to eat all day, as eating is for "fucking poofs."

Poofs eat, men drink.

READ ON VICE: Perpetrators of Domestic Abuse Are Using Arson as a Weapon

The vodka bar.

Cheap neon lighting. 3 PM. Empty. Dance music pumps out. Brian keeps staring at me. I avoid his eye. Pretend to smile. Gets hazy. Suddenly I'm on my knees in the toilet throwing up, but with the hand dryer on because Brian will fucking kill me if he hears me being sick.

Blackout.

I'm in a cab again.

Sat next to Brian. His jaw looks set to break. I sway back and forth. Motorway. Sign posts. Widnes. Heading home. Oh no. Not home. Ted's in the front seat. Oh please come back with us, Ted. He won't beat me til three in the morning if you're there, Ted.

Blackout.

Walking up the path to our house. No sign of Ted. Pavement zig-zags in front of me. His hand on my back. Not supporting. Not guiding; pushing, forcing.

Inside.

"Get inside, you little cunt."

Kitchen. Shards of dying sunlight cast shadows on the linoleum. The fridge opens. A beer comes out. His fists fly. I'm on the floor. I can't feel anything but it's definitely happening.

Hands.

Fists.

Feet.

His face in my face.

He spits at me.

Headbutts me.

Blackout.

I sit up. It's dark. My face feels weird, like it's a foot in front of me. Brian isn't there. Must have gone to the pub after painting his masterpiece. I try to stand, but my legs buckle. I cling to the kitchen work surface for support. I see dots and splashes of my own blood. I feel my face. Gnarly, bumpy and tender. My mouth bloated and sore. I suddenly think of my little sister. She's six years old—around the age he started on me. And, with that, I somehow, from somewhere, walk through the kitchen into the living room, through the front door and stagger down the path upon which I would never walk again.

My eye socket had been ruptured. My tooth punched out. My body blackened.

I stayed at my then-girlfriend's flat, as he didn't know where she lived. My older sister, who'd already fled a few months prior, came with her boyfriend and screamed when she saw me. I still had no idea how I looked. I wasn't allowed to look in the mirror. When I did, I punched it with such force it shattered into pieces and fell into the sink below.

I now looked like the monster.

The following day we went to Widnes police station and attempted to squeeze 18 years of daily abuse into a tape recorder.

Brian was arrested the following day. After a year on remand he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Brian died two years after getting out of prison.

You are not weak. You are not pathetic. You are not any less of a man for your suffering.

The reason I wanted to write this article was because there are many, many other men and boys out there who have gone through—or are currently going through—what I have suffered. I wanted them to hear an organic, honest account from someone who went through it all, the absolute worst of it, came out the other side and is now happy, strong, and fairly successful as an actor and writer.

Our voices have a right to be heard. You are not weak. You are not pathetic. You are not any less of a man for your suffering.

That is not what you are.

You've been brainwashed, bullied, and beaten to such an extent that that person—that man, that woman, that monster—in your mind becomes all-powerful; invincible.

But that is not what they are. That is what they make you believe. What they want you to believe.

You can get out. Your voice can be heard. And there are people out there who want to listen.

Follow Carl on Twitter.

If you, or a man you know, is suffering abuse, visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline website or call the hotline at 1−800−799−7233 or TTY 1−800−787−3224.

Image via Wiki Commons

Millions of people will tune in tonight as a new NFL season kicks off, but the transgressions of the past hang over the league like the hordes of White Walkers beyond the Wall. The long list of controversies threatens to overshadow the game, whether it's domestic abuse charges leveled against players and the league's ineffectual response to them or the fallout from Deflategate. Above all, there is the question of the toll football takes on its players: how the league deals with concussions, as well as its mishandling of the legions of players suffering from CTE, the subject of the upcoming Will Smith-vehicle Concussion. Nearly every major American publication has written about the sport's future; writer Steve Almond has questioned whether football will, or should, continue to exist. In March, San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, a budding star, stunned many when he announced his retirement at age 24, citing concerns over brain damage.

Years ago, author George R. R. Martin had different concerns for the sport he loved. In 1975, he published a science-fiction story titled, "The Last Super Bowl Game," chronicling the sad, unremarkable end of the NFL. He was still 20 years from finishing the first novel in his epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and another 15 years before its adaptation into the hit HBO series Game of Thrones.

Martin continues to blog about football from his Santa Fe home, sprinkling football references in his books—in 2011's A Dance with Dragons, he named a character after Patriots coach Bill Belichick (in the book, he gets eaten by giants, most likely a reference to Super Bowls past). GoT fans have expressed worry that the author's famed preoccupation with the NFL might impede him from actually finishing the book series.

Football fans, though, would find much to admire in "The Last Super Bowl Game." It's a prescient work of science fiction, showcasing the author's ability to construct alternative realities that are both entertaining and consequential. In the 40 years since writing it, Martin's bleak vision for football has in many ways come true—but in a surreal twist, has had the opposite impact on the game.

The story starts off in January 2016. The undefeated Green Bay Packers are heavy favorites in what will be the last Super Bowl. The Packers have a dominant defense expected to "grind [quarterbacks] into little bits and scatter [them] all over the field." Their opponents are the underdog Hoboken Jets, formerly of Jersey City, Newark, and New York. Their quarterback is Keith Lancer, the greatest to ever put on a helmet, say the 12 sportswriters who remain in business. Blessed with "great range" and "fantastic accuracy," Lancer is a brilliant field general with an infectious anger to his game—Jon Snow with a golden arm.

The Jets score first, but the Packers respond with 24 unanswered points after Lancer goes out with an injury. The Jets refuse to relent in the pounding mud and rain. In the fourth quarter, Lancer returns limping, "wobbly on his feet." The Jets rattle off 14 points and bring the score to 24-21. A massive and fortuitous swell of rain arrives just as the Jets attempt an onside kick. They recover, and Keith Lancer drives the Jets down to the three-yard line with seconds left.

Only "832 aging fans, 12 sportswriters, a Boy Scout troop, and the commissioner of the National Football League," who was also a scoutmaster, were there to witness the climax (which, lest you worry, we'll resolve later). Millions of Americans were tuning into something else—computer simulations of football, the very sport they'd abandoned.

Image via Flickr user Joe Haupt

To grasp the biting cynicism of Martin's vision of pro football in 1975, it's important to understand that the sport was in a transition period from the leather-helmet days to the modern era. "It was a lot more of a rough-and-tumble kind of a sport," said Kevin Cook, author of The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless 70s: The Era that Created Modern Sports (a book so rowdy and reckless it needed two colons ). Players weren't "getting rich. They're still working offseason jobs. Terry Bradshaw was selling cars in the offseason, and he's a number-one draft pick coming out of college."

The then-26-year-old Martin was himself working multiple jobs to pay the bills. Living in Chicago, he organized chess tournaments and did PR work while dabbling in the odd bit of journalism. Growing up in a Bayonne, New Jersey, housing project, he became a devout fan of the New York Giants and Jets. "My dream is to someday live long enough to see a subway Super Bowl," he said on his podcast back in 2006.

A few years before Martin wrote the story, the sport would be changed forever with the creation of Monday Night Football on ABC, which was an instant phenomenon. "What [Martin] must have responded to was the fact that the whole country is just glued to the television set to see this as a form of entertainment just as much as a sport. It really turned sports into TV programming," said Cook.

Cook read the story after I sent it to him. "I was really impressed. It was remarkable. He anticipates a lot of things that happened."

Related: Watch our documentary on eSports

Interwoven in the overly detailed play-by-by account of "The Last Super Bowl Game" is the good stuff: Martin's explanation of how the end of football came to be. The demise of all sport begins with the innocent question—who is the greatest heavyweight boxing champion ever? A computer runs a simulation factoring in such variables as "glass chins," "snappy jabs," and "dazzling footwork."

These simulations spread to football, the results of which are broadcast on the radio. They're deemed a sideshow by the "lords of sport"—team owners, many of whom are functional dynasties not unlike the clans of Westeros.

Radio broadcasts gave way to movie versions of the simulations, with actors playing the athletes. But this left fans uneasy, prompting an engineer to pitch an idea to the lone TV network without a sports broadcast deal: Replace the actors with virtual recreations of the athletes.

The show is called Unplayed Football Classics, which pits the best teams in history against each other. The simulations get more advanced, as do the computers running them. The inflection point happens in the 1994 Super Bowl, in which the Denver Broncos play in both the actual Super Bowl and the UFC simulation of the Super Bowl. In the actual game, the Broncos blow out the Giants. In the simulation, they win on a Hail Mary, beating a legendary Vince Lombardi–era Packers team.

Fans ultimately prefer to watch games featuring the best teams in history, and pack stadiums to watch "holoshow" simulations, eventually controlling their own customized ones from their couches. One by one the sports leagues go under. The NFL, "the richest, and the most arrogant sport of all," is the last to go.

George R.R. Martin. Image via Wiki Commons

Sports-based science-fiction has always been a rather narrow niche. For one, sci-fi typically emphasizes the advantages of intelligence over physicality. "Most of the (science fiction) writers I know disdain sports," said Mike Resnick, a Hugo Award–winning author who published a book of sports science fiction last year called Away Games.

Esteemed literary publications like The New Yorker have mostly shied away from publishing science fiction. Stalwarts of the genre call it snobbery, or claim that literary editors had little experience with sci-fi and how to read it. "[They] would find it incomprehensible, or by definition badly written, because it wasn't using metaphors correctly in the way that they were familiar," said David G. Hartwell, a Hugo Award-winning editor at Tor Books. "If you read a line like, 'An hour later he was singing a duet with his can opener,' that has to be metaphorical in a literary story. In a science-fiction story, it can be literal."

That's where porn, as usual, stepped in to save the day. "The Last Super Bowl Game" was first published in Gallery, a "less-classy imitator of Playboy" as Hartwell put it. The editors of men's magazines were often science-fiction writers themselves, or just fans. And the massive circulations of these rags meant they could afford to pay the writers more than the leading science-fiction magazines of the time, such as Analog or Galaxy. More importantly, the pages of men's magazines fit science fiction's style.

"The men's magazines were, to put it politely, very literal," says Hartwell. "You open a men's magazine and you see a naked lady and it's literally a naked lady. The fiction was like that."

Adult men playing fantasy football. Image via Flickr user Ryan Harvey

What Martin got right in the story was the role technology would ultimately play in supplanting the in-person viewing experience. While fans obviously don't pack stadiums to watch holoshow simulations, we do draft fantasy players, build our own super-teams, and enter virtual tournaments with massive amounts of prize money. We play Madden with virtual recreations of players, and watch eSports tournaments on ESPN, streamed on Twitch, or in actual stadiums like in South Korea.

"There's no reason to think that isn't going to happen here at some point," said Kevin Cook. "We might be ten years from the time when the best guy at Madden NFL is a celebrity in his own right, as big as Aaron Rodgers." As far back as a decade ago, ESPN launched Madden Nation, a reality show where the gamers were the stars, playing tournaments, and traveling across the country.

On Motherboard: The Weird, Text-Based Football Game for People Who Don't Like Football

What Martin got wrong was that technology hasn't made football obsolete. Rather, it's only expanded it to new platforms and grown the brand into a multibillion-dollar juggernaut. Martin predicted that technology would make football big and fake. Instead, it became massive and real. That's the beauty of speculative fiction—you can be spot-on and still shortsighted at the same time.

Humans will still be on the field in this year's Super Bowl, the 50th in league history. As for Martin's fictional Super Bowl in January 2016, the ending was fitting. With the Packers up 24-21 and the clock running down, Jets QB Keith Lancer lunges for the goal line to win the game. Sure, the Jets could've just kicked a field goal to tie it, but that's just too logical—it's what a computer would have done. Lancer, tragic hero that he is, goes for the win but comes up short. The players walk off the field for the last time. Lancer smiles to hide the tears. The stands are empty. The game of football is over.

Follow Nihar on Twitter.

My day-to-day is often mundane, filled with things that no other person would give a shit about: work, shopping, texting friends, and running random errands. If I wanted to, I might be able to spin my day into something interesting, but I'd need to come at it with some Cool Luke vibes or shake up how the story's told. By no means is it unfamiliar territory for filmmakers to address life's monotony or attempt naturalism in their work. Hell, there's an entire movement dedicated to it called mumblecore.

However, it's those rare films that transform the ordinary into extraordinary, whether it's through story or style, that make people want to talk about their life and dig in. I'm reminded of John Cassavetes and the Dardenne Brothers who shook up their stories with invigorating techniques. With his latest short film, Cutaway, filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tries to address those everyday moments in life and weave them into something revealing, potent, and true. He says he did this by going at the story "sideways" using, as the title implies, cutaway shots.

In film, a cutaway shot tends to not contribute anything substantial to the story, but rather is used by editors to piece together a scene that might not be working properly. Generally, the shot is of something routine that further illustrates what the main shot is trying to convey. However, in Radwanski's short, the entire story is comprised exclusively of cutaways. By doing this and filming only close-ups of a pair of male hands working construction, texting on his phone, perusing department-store aisles, taking whiskey shots, or playing video poker, a story begins to form. With no traditional reference points to this person's appearance, voice, or life, these small stitched together moments of hesitation, tenderness, and frustration allow us to build his story for ourselves. Cutaway succeeds by using one of the most pedestrian film-editing techniques to probe life's quotidian moments. In doing so, it shifts your perspective, showing how something usually overlooked can actually be worth watching.

Radwanski's now a seasoned short-film veteran with five under his belt, Cutaway being his latest. In 2012, he directed his first feature film Tower, which played at Locarno and Toronto International Film Festivals, as well as New Directors/New Films presented by MoMA. It's an aggressive black comedy about a 34-year-old balding loser who attempts to rid his parent's garage of a pesky raccoon. The film is intense, mesmerizing, and hard to deal with in the best ways. On September 13, his newest feature film How Heavy This Hammer will have its World Premiere at the 40^th Toronto International Film Festival.

With both Cutaway and his first feature Tower debuting online this week and his newest film premiering at TIFF, I thought I'd chat up director Kazik Radwanski about his work.

VICE: What came first, the idea for how you were going to shoot this film or the idea for the film?
Kazik Radwanski: I think what came first was a tone that I wanted to capture. I was in a weird headspace. I was about to make my second feature, and it was temporarily put on hiatus. There was a mood or feeling I was after, and I didn't want anything to disturb it. This lead to the film having such a narrow focus. I like giving myself rules or restraints. It's strangely liberating. It's like you give yourself an arena to experiment within. All of the dialogue, story, or things like that came later through the making of the film.

What was it about the "cutaway" shot that made you want to make a film employing only that technique?
It's a feeling I've always liked. I think it's in my other work. Quite often the camera will hold on the protagonist, and we'll only get a partial sense of other characters or surroundings. There's also a mysterious feeling of showing something but then implying that more is going on offscreen. I like the sensation of only grasping the content of a scene, but feeling an emotional weight. I think specifically with this film, I wanted to approach things sideways through cutaways. I couldn't look at the themes or content directly at first. I had to find my way in through close-ups of him working. Then more content and story started to bleed out. It's sort of like working with your head down.

Watch: VICE Talks Film with Kevin Bacon:

Your films typically go against the grain of traditional storytelling. What is it about difficult characters and different styles of storytelling that gets you off?
I always like to inject chaos into my films. I want my characters to be difficult or unpredictable because I think that's truer to life and more worthwhile. I don't want us to have the upper hand over the characters. I don't want people to be able to sit back and judge them. Or, for it to be too sympathetic. I want us to be unbalanced and constantly readjusting.

Are you ever going to make a straight comedy? Or is that boring to you?
Laughter is one of the most complex reactions. I love it when people laugh at certain moments in my films. I'm not sure if that will ever translate into me making a straight comedy, but I like comedies. Sometimes I feel like moments in my films aren't too far off from something like Curb Your Enthusiasm.

You've had three short films screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, your last feature played at TIFF, and now your newest feature is playing at TIFF on September 13. Are you as obsessed with Canada as they are with you?
I don't know if I'm obsessed with Canada. I don't set out to make Canadian films. I think it would be a mistake to do that because it's so hard to define what Canada is. I'm first-generation Canadian, and my parents are from England. I do instinctively make films about what I know. I want to make films in houses I recognize or about jobs I know. For instance, construction is my family's business. I definitely hope to keep making films here in Canada. More specifically, in the east end of Toronto, where I grew up.

What are you working on next?
I'm writing my third feature at the moment. Before that's done, I'll likely have made a short or two. I hope to keep making shorts regularly.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

The Pokémon Mini, screencap from aiRCoft's YouTube channel

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, VICE's science and tech channel Motherboard ran a great feature exploring "Nintendo's forgotten console," the Satellaview. This Super Nintendo add-on—if we're being supremely picky, more a peripheral than a console proper—was only released in Japan in 1995, and allowed users to unscramble signals broadcast from a partner company, St.GIGA, in order to play specially selected video games on specified dates. Many titles were made available to subscribers, some exclusive to the service and others simply SNES games given a novel means of distribution. Famous faces popped up: The original Harvest Moon was separated into broadcast-proportioned episodes, likewise A Link to the Past from the Zelda series.

It might sound a little like a humble brag, but I was well aware of the Satellaview prior to Motherboard's article, because I'm old. I did most of my formative gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and remember seeing this strange contraption, which sat beneath the SNES unit much in the same way as SEGA's Mega CD did the Mega Drive, on the pages of domestic games magazines, which I bought as regularly as possible (or simply soaked up in the newsagents for 20 minutes at a time before being kicked out for not buying anything). But the response to the piece proves that it certainly wasn't a widely known piece of Nintendo history: "Been gaming since the 1980s and this is the first time I've seen that," reads one response on Twitter; "Never really knew about this console," reads another. Job done, then: public, informed.

But when I turned to the editorial crew at Motherboard in the UK, who happen to sit right beside me, and mentioned the Pokémon Mini, my line of enquiry was met by blank faces. And I can completely understand that reaction, as while I've been an active gamer pretty much my entire life, and have owned my share of Nintendo consoles and even wrote a documentary for Radio 1 on mobile gaming not so many years ago, the Pokémon Mini had completely passed me by until around a month ago when I saw it in the pages of a Retro Gamer bookazine, the Videogames Hardware Handbook, covering the years 1977 to 2001.

The Pokémon Mini is, as the article in question states very firmly, "a fully fledged handheld gaming system." It's not a single game in a single shell, like the old-school Game & Watch releases. It's not some kind of virtual pet toy. The system, clearly featuring the famous Nintendo logo above its screen, uses cartridges. It wasn't a Japan-only system, like the Satellaview, going on sale in the East, America, and Europe between the winter of 2001 and spring of 2002. It was fairly short-lived, with only ten official games released—each of which, as the system's name might well imply, had a hefty degree of Pokémon branding attached. It's officially Nintendo's smallest-ever games console, no more than 74 mm in any direction (about half the size of the minuscule Game Boy Micro); it came in a variety of colors, like the Game Boy Pocket and most subsequent Ninty handhelds; and it ran for absolutely ages, around 60 hours, on just one AAA battery. It had a built-in rumble feature, infrared connectivity for local multiplayer, and even some primitive motion control technology in its shock detector.

Basically: How the bloody hell had I missed this until now? I have one, albeit rather feeble, excuse. In 2001 and 2002, I was at the business end of my degree, and gaming wasn't exactly something I could find a great deal of time for, nor reasonably afford given the many costs of university living: books, printing, horrendous bar bills from across the Greater Manchester area, the monthly ASDA binge. All I had with me at uni was my old Pocket-model Game Boy, Link's Awakening and Pokémon Blue alongside Tennis and Tetris, which rarely came out from under the bed, and for a term a battered Mega Drive with its dodgy-as-hell port of Premier Manager and, naturally, a cheap-night-in-saving copy of Sensible Soccer. Anything new—even when it looked old, as the visuals of the Pokémon Mini definitely did in 2001, more original 1989 Game Boy than anything more Advance(d)—simply didn't register on my radar. Believe it or not, studying became quite significant as I approached the end of my course.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film about Mr. Cherry, Japan's leading world record holder

To me, then, the Pokémon Mini is Nintendo's other forgotten console, the real rarity in the ranks—so obscure, in the UK at least, that I didn't know about it at all until 14 years after its introduction. But it's a system that's maintained a loyal audience, and the website Pokémon-Mini.net provides fans with occasional news updates as well as comprehensive lists of playable titles both official—just the ten, remember—and unofficial, homebrewed affairs, which massively outnumber the commercially sold cartridges.

Click your way to the list in question, and you'll find an admirable number of recognized franchises—thanks to reverse engineering, hackers have been able to use the Pokémon Mini to run a wide array of "playable" (some of these things are more tech demos than games proper) titles, and introduce emulation on other platforms. There's Zelda Mini, which is sort of self explanatory and mimics the graphical style of Link's Awakening, but falls into that demo category; Sonic Arena, which is a simple but complete game in which Dr. Robotnik's robot army must be destroyed; and even a concept mock-up of Elite. The demo scene has celebrated the work of Mini's hackers, with SHizZLE singled out for being "totally insane."

Regarding the official games, a few are noted as worthwhile distractions from the rather-more-impressive sights and sounds of contemporary consoles. The Retro Gamer piece highlights Pokémon Shock Tetris as a neat twist on the Russian original, where nailing four lines at once (that's what a "tetris" is, you know) allows you to capture a new monster, and Pokémon Race Mini is described as "one of the true jewels" of the Mini's limited catalogue, a side-scrolling racer where multiple routes keep the gameplay fresh. The somewhat shittier Pinball Mini is summarized as "nothing like pinball at all," so maybe steer clear of that, and the bundled Pokémon Party Mini is, as its title suggests, a party game collection with only a couple of half-decent attractions.

Over on Motherboard: Apple TV Brings the Nightmare of Mobile Games to Your Living Room

Look at how teeny this thing is, screencap from TweeterMan287's YouTube channel

And how much will it cost you to own one of these bizarre handhelds, today? What's the entry fee for properly checking out a strange slice of Nintendo history, a crossover console that even people employed as video game section editors managed to miss for over a decade? A brief fumble around eBay puts a unit at around the $90 mark for a complete, properly packaged model, but unboxed systems are listed for half that. And do I want one? Of course I do. I mean, look at this thing. You can fit three of them in the palm of your hand. It's the cutest console this side of SEGA's Pikachu-styled Pico, only way more interesting. It's the gaming equivalent of all those kitten photos you tweet so very often (seriously, stop that), and it makes me smile – which is something the Game Gear so very rarely did, dying on me like that right in the middle of Wonder Boy.

Is the Mini more obscure than the Satellaview? Maybe, maybe not. It might depend on your age—if you were madly into Nintendo in the early 2000s, no doubt you came across details of this diminutive device; whereas if you, like me, were already a teenager when the SNES was in its pomp, the Satellaview was well known as something incredibly exotic that you could only dream of seeing for real, one day. But buying a Satellaview now, with its vital broadcasts having shut down in 2000, will cost you a lot more money than picking up a Mini, and will be a waste of time in terms of actually using the thing. The handheld, meanwhile: the games still play (no patches, no always-online requirement, imagine!); there's a small but active community of users, and well-meaning hardware abusers, online; and it'll set you back relative small change versus the bigger peripheral.

But it's your money. You could go and splash it all on a completely ridiculous pre-order package for some forthcoming, sure-to-be-okay-I-guess modern game. I'm not judging you. Honest.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Zak Krevitt and Tim Schutsky

Photoville is an annual photography shindig that invites curators, publications, and pretty much everyone else in the industry to come together and fill repurposed shipping containers in Brooklyn with amazing visuals. It has quickly become one of New York's biggest and most widely attended photo festivals since it began in 2012, and always offers up a diverse showcase of the medium. Also, IT'S FREE!

Claire Christerson, who has contributed a bunch to VICE, curated one of Photoville's containers in conjunction with SVA alumni, so I decided to call her up and ask her about motivations for the show.

VICE: What made you want curate Objects & Subjects in 2015?
Claire Christerson: I was asked by [SVA photography professor] Stephen Frailey to curate the booth for Photoville with work of SVA alumni. He wanted me to work within the ideas of gender, identity, and body. It made me nervous at first, to have the responsibility of creating a narrative that felt like it was honoring the topics and bringing different views (hopefully) of how these ideas can be represented. I've never curated a show before, so this was an interesting new challenge.

Logan Jackson

What are some themes that sprouted up from the collection of artists you chose to highlight?
Each person's experience of body and identity is totally different in this show. Some similarities amongst the artists are the choices to go past the physical human form and explore what the body looks like through objects. What stays consistent in the show is the navigation of serious issues, but with a balance between playfulness and intensity.

What's some of your favorite work from the show?
That's a tough call because every work in the show is important to me. I'm really drawn to Logan Jackson's image Gel Test 1, of the people with prosthetics looking blankly at the camera because I love prosthetics and altering the body. Juniper Fleming's work is extremely conceptual and crafted. As part of a new project that she is developing, she has created an image of [serial killer] Aileen Wuornos and Medusa paired together, blending reality and myth. The photograph and her accompanying video emphasizes that Wuornos was persecuted so vigorously as a warning of what could happen to sex workers and other deviants. Zak Krevitt's photos become harsh and sincere human sculptures. Especially his image Atom-R, I love the way the bodies become so stoic and a balance occurs because one can't remain without the other. Ken Lavey's work is clever and puts humor into body relations. There's this moment of clarity once you are able to apply your own perverse thoughts to these objects that he's providing you with and invent new sexual objects that you never would even think to compare to a body. I mean the list goes on. This collection becomes little windows into many worlds and I feel lucky to know these people making work that I can relate to and appreciate.

Ken Lavey

A lot of the work of the work ties in very well to previous pieces you have done for VICE involving taking on fantastical identities and so on. Why do you think younger artists take on these different personas to express themselves in photo?
It's important and powerful to have outlets to allow yourself to shift from how others perceive you to how you see yourself and your community.

Ian Stoner

What are some past shows that inspired your curatorial direction for this show?
This summer while I was in San Francisco, Molly Matalon took me to a show at Fraenkel Gallery called The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, curated by: Katy Grannan. I enjoyed having to go through the show a few times to get all the information. I am not a minimal person, I like throwing a lot at people. Katy chose very different styles of work and made it all work together really well.

This show will be premiering at Photoville tonight and I can say a lot of it is some of the unique work I've previewed from the show thus far—what are your recommendations beyond this stellar collection?
I honestly haven't had a chance to preview much of the other work yet, but I saw a booth going up called National Geographic: Still Life. Its work by Rob Clark, images of taxidermy. I want to see those pictures. Taxidermy is interesting and gross to me.

Dana Davenport

>Molly Matalon

Logan Jackson

Signe Pierce

Michael Bailey-Gates

Jake Sigl

Zak Krevitt and Tim Schutsky

Ken Lavey

Molly Matalon

Claire Christerson is a multimedia artist living and working in New York City. See some of her previous work for VICE here.

Photoville is opening tomorrow (postponed due to rain), September 11th, at 7 PM and is located at the Uplands of Pier 5 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It runs through September 20.

It's been a wild week for Guatemala's political process, and there's no end in sight.

On Tuesday, former president Otto Pérez Molina was ordered to stand trial on corruption charges in a massive fraud and embezzlement case that's been racking up convictions since April. Word of Molina's pending trial came hot on the heels of his resignation on Thursday, September 3, capping capped a tumultuous stretch in which Molina saw many key allies desert him and the country's congress unanimously (and with the blessing of Molina's own political party) vote to strip him of political immunity. Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez then ordered Molina's immediate detention. (In an interview on Wednesday from prison, he blamed the US for his situation; he is also appealing his jailing.)

All the chaos emerged just days before Guatemala's elections this past Sunday, which failed to result in a decisive winner and will now go to a runoff. Although Molina did not run because of term limits, the hubbub of his case has shrouded the unfolding electoral process, and Guatemala's future in tremendous uncertainty.

On VICE News: An Eight-Year-Old Girl Just Became Mexico's First Medical Marijuana Patient

Even after the resolution of a 36-year civil war in 1996, Guatemala has retained a reputation for chaos and corruption. Its rampant gang violence, unchecked by a corrupt and ineffective law enforcement apparatus, has left the nation of 15.5 million with one of the highest murder rates in the world. In addition, a record of political complicity in criminal activities had Amnesty International calling Guatemala a "Corporate Mafia State" by 2002; the country is in the lowest rungs of corruption rankings year after year.

Given that status quo, it's no wonder that even a few months ago many locals and international observers alike would have thought it impossible to see a sitting president resign and face trial over a corruption scandal. Molina is a 64-year-old general who played a key role in negotiating the end of the civil war before retiring from the military, founding the conservative Patriot Party in 2001, and working his way up to a presidential win in 2011. Although he's been more moderate in office than some human rights advocates feared, making seemingly serious moves to crack down on drug trafficking and violence, he's still been implicated in all manner of shady dealings.

The equation for Molina and the Guatemalan political class changed when a massive scandal known as "La Linea" (or "The Line") emerged this April, centered around customs officials taking bribes from importers. Molina is far from the only official implicated in all this, but he's certainly the great, white whale of the whole affair right now—and prosecutors hope to charge him with customs fraud, illicit association, and taking bribes. Attorney General Thelma Albania has said he's being investigated for money laundering as well, a charge that could lead to the freezing of his assets.

La Linea came to light thanks to investigations conducted by the United Nations–backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Founded in 2007 in an agreement between the UN and Guatemalan political leaders, the CICIG exists to provide technical support and impartial outsider assistance in overcoming the entrenched political and social pressures holding up investigations into crime and corruption.

"What the scandal and the cases [that have followed it] have revealed is the positive effect of the [CICIG] on the Guatemalan judicial system," says Anita Isaacs, a professor at Haverford College who's spent the last several years researching the links between peace, justice, and democracy in Guatemala. "And the fact that we now have one of the four democratic institutions of Guatemala that, with the right leadership, can actually work."

Watch: A Good Day to Die: Fake Funerals in South Korea

The visibility and popular outrage around La Linea culminated in massive protests in Guatemala City in late April. The country is no stranger to protests, especially by indigenous farmers who often march to demand equal rights and political reforms. But these new protests, which are still drawing tens of thousands of people, are both some of the more enduring in the country's modern history, and the most unifying, bringing together disparate peasants, indigenous peoples, middle-class intellectuals, businesspeople, and even the often reticent and neutral Catholic clergy. Carlota McAllister, a professor at Canada's York University and an expert on violence in Guatemala who attended an anti-Molina protest in July, compares the uprising to the mass protests of 1944, which managed to overthrow the sitting dictator, Jorge Ubico, and install ten years of robust, democratic governance.

As protests and the investigations dragged on, pressure on Molina grew. In May, the president purged his cabinet to assuage criticisms. In August, his then-Vice President Roxana Baldetti was arrested and had her assets frozen for her alleged role in the conspiracy. And the Patriot Party's presidential candidate, Alejandro Sinibalid, defected, along with five congressmen, for fear of association with the increasingly toxic administration and especially with Molina himself.

The new president, 79-year-old Alejandro Maldonado, has asked for the resignation of all top government officials and promised to create a transitional government made up of young, fresh representatives promoted by all of the interest groups protesting in the streets. But for all the enthusiasm and hope surrounding Molina's resignation and the events that precipitated his arrest, there's plenty of reasons to be suspicious that this will lead to real change. First and foremost is the fact that this victory does not mean the judicial system is close to fixed.

"They have the technical capacity to conduct good, solid investigations," explains Professor Isaacs. "But the political will to do it depends on the leadership of these organizations. What has made this possible is a dogged chief [CICIG] commissioner... an attorney general who has decided to act in favor of the pursuit of justice, and, really, one courageous judge."

This reliance on strong-willed individuals means that future bids at rooting out the country's many remaining corrupt systems may not go so well. It's tempting to say that the massive grassroots activism of the past few months and political acquiescence to it will help promote judicial integrity. But this social movement is tenuous at best, some believe.

"I have serious reservations as to whether that coalition can hold together much longer," Isaacs says. "[All the parties involved] have very contrasting agendas when it comes to the substances of political, social, and economic reforms.

"And I don't see the congress's vote to strip Molina of his immunity as evidence of any newfound commitment to democracy. I see it almost as the opposite: With elections four days away and the massive political protests, and with the majority [of Congress] up for reelection, they were trying to save their own political skins and to salvage the status quo."

Ideally, according to Isaacs, if President Maldonado acts quickly, he can help hammer through much needed political and electoral reforms. But observers have their doubts that he has the time to make such moves, and his questionable rulings while he was a judge are leading some to suspect that he doesn't have the will to do more than make a show of solidarity with the populace.

"[Moldanado]'s a terrible figure to have in this position at this moment," McAllister says. "He's a historically right-wing, violent person."

While the roughly 70 percent of Guatemalans who went to the polls on Sunday favored an anti-establishment candidate—the politically inexperienced comedian Jimmy Morales—there are doubts that any new government will bring about sustained reforms. Morales could lose to a mainstream opponents, or could win and prove himself a woefully inefficient operator.

So long as the CICIG is intact, it will do its best to support continued moves to reform Guatemalan politics. But this dependency on international intervention is not a permanent solution. In the long term the outcome of the recent shakeups in Guatemala hinge upon whether strong, ethical forces continue to exercise power in the judiciary, what happens when a new government comes to power in January, and how long the current protest coalition can stay together and whether they can devise any concerned and constructive push for common reforms.

It's impossible to say whether we'll see true, lasting change in Guatemala on the heels of Molina's ouster, or a slow deflation back towards the status quo. But with Molina having gone from the most powerful man in the country to a prisoner in a matter of days, corrupt politicians across the region are almost certainly taking notice.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Quazie

Read: I Asked an Expert What Would Happen if I Just Stopped Paying My Student Loans

The total amount of America's student loan debt is now over $1 trillion. Student loans are a plague that has united an entire generation.

According to a survey from personal finance site MyBankTracker, almost a third of the people who have student debt would sell an organ to get rid of it. MyBankTracker surveyed 200 people, the median age for whom was 32 and the average debt for whom was $34,500. Forty-three percent also said they would sell half of their possessions and 55 percent said they would participate in a reality TV show if it would help pay off their debt.

Some quick economics: The average student debt among this year's class of graduates was just over $35K. Human organs go for upwards of $100K on the black market—but of course, selling your organs is illegal, which means you lose a huge portion of the sticker price to your organ broker. As a seller, you can only make about $5,000 for something like a kidney. If you had a small amount of debt, then you could probably pay it off by offloading some of your organs (you could also donate eggs for about $8,000 a pop). But if you had a lot of debt, you would probably die before you sold enough organs to get out of the hole.

If you wanted to go the legal-but-morally-degrading route, reality TV stars actually get paid more than black market kidney donors, but not by much (the cast of Vanderpump Rules only makes $5K per episode, according to TMZ). Those with heaps of grad school debt would have to become a Kardashian or one of the stars of Jersey Shore to really make bank.

In other words, there is no magic money-making scheme to make student loans go away. But if you're really panicking, we have a whole trove of articles (below) about how to stay afloat.

More Advice for Broke and Financially Desperate Millennials:

1. A Millennial's Guide to Planning for Retirement

2. What Would Happen If We All Stopped Paying Our Student Loans?

3. Here's What You Should Do if You're Buried Under Private Student-Loan Debt

4. How to Invest Money When You Don't Have Any

5. Dear Class of 2014, You're Fucked

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Photos by Bobby Viteri

If you're into fashion, chances are you know Nick Wooster. Or at least what he looks like. He's a street style fixture, thanks in no small part to his distinctive, adventurous personal style. Steel grey hair swept up in a modern day pompadour, tattoos covering his arms and legs, Wooster wears the kind of mash-up outfits—disparate elements like drop crotches, florals, tailoring, and high-tech sportswear, sometimes all at once—that could be ridiculous on someone else, but somehow, on him, look perfectly natural.

But that's not the only reason Wooster draws the lenses of fashion week photographers. The man doesn't just look the part; he lives it. The 30-year fashion industry vet has logged time everywhere from high-end department stores like Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman to major brands like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Now, he's a self-described "free agent," consulting for a stable of brands while racking up more than half-a-million followers on Instagram. Since we're in the midst of another New York Fashion Week—where Wooster is always omnipresent—we caught up with the tastemaker and style expert to talk about his rise to fame, how his career re-ignited at age 50, and the illusion that you can build a career out of social media.

VICE: You grew up in Selina, Kansas. What was that like? Did you stand out?
Nick Wooster: Sure. That's the reality when you're a gay kid in Selina, Kansas in the 1970s. I didn't necessarily know what it represented or meant, I just knew that I was a little bit of an alien there. And I knew I had to grow up fast and get out of there quickly. I viewed my adolescence as marking time. I was just waiting to leave.

When you were younger, did you have the same sort of interest in clothes that you do now?
Of course! I cared about how I dressed, and I wanted to wear the nicest clothes that I could get my hands on. I wanted cashmere sweaters, nice white shirts, chinos, topsiders. And I was concerned about quantity. I wanted to never wear the same thing twice. When I went into middle school and high school, I noticed the richer kids that had nicer clothes, and I was like, "I want that." And my mom said, "Great. Then go get a job and make money and buy that, because we're not buying it for you."

After that, you went to the University of Kansas, and then it was off to New York. But it took a few years before you started working in fashion.
Right. I studied advertising in college, so from '83 to '85 I worked at an advertising agency. In 1985 I started selling advertising space at New York Magazine. I got fired, because they diagnosed my drug problem long before I did. And I was not cut out to sell advertising space. You know, hats off to those who can, but that was not for me.

When did you become sober?
I just had my 20th anniversary last week. September 3rd of 1995 is when I actually stopped. But I knew in the summer of 1991 that I needed to. It was four years of a little bit of fact-finding before I could figure it out.

So you got let go from New York Magazine. Then you moved into fashion, working at Saks Fifth Avenue as an assistant department manager, after which you were a buyer at Barneys and then Bergdorf Goodman. Then it was retail at Calvin Klein, followed design at Polo before you moved on to be president at John Bartlett. That covers 1986 to 2001. So you're well versed on both sides of the business: the selling of clothes, and also the creation. How do you balance the two?
Editing, being able to look at things, trying to make a business out of something, that's what a good merchant does. But the idea of building something is the other part that's really fun when it comes to this world for me. I never thought of myself as a créateur in the way of people like Rick Owens or Thom Browne or Rei Kawakubo, who are truly doing something. But when it comes to ideas, that's the niche I see myself in: interpreting ideas. Making product is, for me, the missing half of my career.

At John Bartlett, what was great about those five years was the opportunity to really build a business using both of the skills I had put together so far. Because at the end of the day, you can have all the great ideas in the world, but if they don't sell, then it doesn't keep going forward. So I was utilizing both corners of my experience, to hopefully do retail right, but at the same time work on exciting product. And that's really what I look at my career today as: the ability to toggle back and forth between the two.

You left John Barlett in the wake of a restructuring. That wound up being a major step in your professional life.
Yeah, that was where my career really changed. I couldn't find the next right job. And that's why where I am today is so shocking to me. Starting in the fall of 2001, I did anything I could to stay afloat. That involved me moving to Miami, working in a car dealership—long story, I didn't sell cars—then moving to LA, having a couple of false starts, working on the floor of Barneys in Beverly Hills, and then, eventually, working for two companies for a few years. I was perfectly happy going along with my life, living in LA, thinking that the life I had before wasn't going to happen again.

But that wasn't the case. You found yourself back in the thick of it in 2010 as the men's fashion director at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorfs.
It was later, in the fall of 2009, when I read that Tommy Fazio had left the men's fashion director job at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. So I called people that I used to work with at Bergdorfs, and they told me who to contact. And I cannot overstate this: No one was more surprised than me that I got that job. But I got it. At 50, to have that life start, continues to be very shocking to me.

Was it jarring moving back into that sort of role? Or did it feel natural, considering your past experience?
When I stepped back into it, for me, it was completely normal. People like Bruce Pask, Jim Moore, Nick Sullivan, they knew me from before, but for a whole generation of kids, they were like, "Who is this guy?" Still, I've said this before, and I believe it: I do feel like I've earned where I am today. I worked for it. I've earned every line on my face, every grey hair. I think one of the problems that social media—the world of Tumblr and blogs—has created is this idea that it's all instant, and that it's all easy. It can be for many people, and hats off if that's your path. But the part that nobody understands when they look at Instagram or a blog post is that something had to happen behind that picture or those words. And I'm here to tell you that I did it that way. I earned it the hard way.

Social media has created this idea that it's all instant, and that it's all easy. But the part that nobody understands when they look at Instagram or a blog post is that something had to happen behind that picture or those words.

There was a fallout with Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf's eventually, reportedly over some quotes of yours in a GQ story. Were there already cracks in the facade before that?
I did the best I could with what I had. Sure, it probably wasn't the perfect fit. But it was the job I always wanted. So I just kept doing it because I couldn't see that far ahead. And yes, they decided that I wasn't right for that job. In hindsight, I'm so grateful to them. I only had to do that for a year and a half; it was really fast. Obviously at the time it was pretty devastating, but I should have been more careful. It's nobody's fault except my own. They did what they felt was right for their business. And it worked out.

Because that's when you worked with Thom Browne, Gilt Groupe, and the Project trade show to start building a presence for your personal brand.
They helped me a lot. I needed money, of course, but it was great to be around people in a universe of opportunity, so I wasn't just sitting at home worrying about what was going to happen. And it gave me a lot of exposure.

And that was right around the point you struck out on your own again.
It had been suggested to me at exactly that moment that I should be doing something on my own. And I said no, because I had always been programmed that I needed to work for someone else. But what I know now is that, yes, I am able to do something on my own in a way that I never could have imagined before. I think that the nature of employment is changing in front of our eyes. And if anything, I am a template for how people who had a corporate existence can and possibly will work going forward. I think people are looking for more varied experience. That's exactly how I would describe my career path. People have asked, "Why did you do that?" I did it because it was interesting! Not because I was clever. I wanted to do the next thing.

And that next thing now is being a free agent. A popular one. Now that you're consulting on so many things, do you have litmus test for what projects and collaborations you decide to take on?
Sure. Except that I don't. [Laughs.] It's like being asked on a date. With some people you know instinctively that it's a no. But other times it's like, "I guess I don't have anything going on. I could eat a meal. Sure, let's do it!" Two years ago, when I started in this place that I am today, I had no idea how it was going to work out, so I just took some jobs. Today, that's very different. I'm able to choose, which is an amazing gift. But here's the thing: I have no idea how long it's going to last. So it's all a risk, a crap shoot, taking it as it goes. But I hope that I've made some smart decisions, worked with some nice people, and we'll see what the future holds. There are no guarantees. And part of that is exciting, and part of it is terrifying.

You're working with Lardini, Greats, Cadillac, and United Arrows, just to name a few. What is it, do you think, that you bring to the table for these collaborators?
I think what I bring is an audience. That's number one. Right or wrong, good or bad, that's just a fact. But equally, and what I might argue is more important, is I'm very experienced. I've been doing this for almost 30 years—actually longer if you count all the years working in high school and college. I've done a lot of different things. If they want me as an endorser, have the picture taken, sure, I can do that. But if somebody actually wants to build something and understand all the steps to get there, I can bring that to the table, too.

And your personal style, of course.
I mean, it never occurred to me that anything I've ever done has been remarkable. Because I thought in order to work in the fashion business you had to have a certain taste, style, point of view—to understand certain rules. But yes, that kind of goes without saying. If people want to hire me or work with me, they want me to bring my point of view, whatever that may or may not be, to the table. But here's the other thing: I can't do it any other way. It's all I know. They're going to get that whether they want it or not, because I don't know anything else.

For more on fashion, watch our documentary 'Ukrainian Fashion Week':

So how would you define your aesthetic? There are things that you can wear that would look silly on other people, but look natural on you. Is there a trick to that? Or is it some sort of inborn Woosterness that elevates everything?
I think it's just stupidity on my part. I mean, I'm afraid. I'm afraid of everything. But I'm not afraid of getting dressed. I think that getting dressed is 100 percent insecurity, anyway. You're trying to maximize whatever is good and minimize whatever is bad. So I guess on some level I just learned how to dress for my body type, and how my body is at that moment in time. And I think having a sense of humor when you're getting dressed is an important thing. I can look back and say, "What was I thinking?" But the point is that I'm willing to take risks and experiment. No harm, no foul. I'm sure that there are many people who think I look ridiculous, and they're probably correct, but I don't know how to do it any other way.

We talked about the idea that you bring an audience to the table. Is social media central to what you do?
It is, I think. It's become that value-add that is now part of the conversation. Look, there are careers based on social media, and understanding the science, and helping companies or individuals raise their social media profile. I don't even know how I did it. I am not that smart. But if someone is hiring me, they're hiring me for my experience, but they're also hiring me for my audience, and now the two are just there.

But you do have upwards of half-a-million followers on Instagram. You must have made specific moves to cultivate that following.
Absolutely not. The only thing that I've done is notice it. Like, "Oh, wow." I'm aware that there are probably things that I've done or could have done that are damaging to building an audience. And there are probably some things I should or could do to build it, but I haven't done either one, because I'm too lazy.

Would you describe your rise to street style stardom similarly? Was it just something you noticed? Or was there a deliberate cultivation there?
I'm not going to lie and say that I'm not aware, when I buy things or decide what I'm going to wear. There are a couple of thoughts that go through my head. "Have I worn this before?" "Would this make a good picture?" So the reality is that sure, I'm very aware. But I would be doing it anyway. And anybody who knows me can tell you that I've always done this. Like I said, in high school, I never wanted to wear the same thing twice, and I'm always trying to figure out a way to wear something differently. Those two things were true 40 years ago, and they're true today. I've always been that person who wanted to look nice. Or better. Or a little bit different. That's never gone away.

Follow Jonathan Evans on Twitter and Bobby on Tumblr.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We're living through a great time for LGBT sportspeople. As more and more professional athletes come out—most recently Keegan Hirst, captain of West Yorkshire rugby team Batley Bulldogs—the revelations are increasingly greeted with rounds of applause rather than jeers. Or, indeed, with indifference—making it known that it's no big deal. However, that's not to say it's easy, of course, and in a sport as deeply rooted in heterosexual masculinity as rugby is, it can be terrifying.

The Kings Cross Steelers were formed in 1995 by a group of gay men in a pub in—spoiler alert—King's Cross. Their aim was to create the first gay-inclusive rugby union team in the world. Twenty years later they have a membership of over 120 and are four-time winners of the European Championships for gay rugby teams.

The story of the world's first gay rugby team starts, surprisingly, with Tory MP and soon to be Lord, Robert Hayward. He wasn't at the founding meeting but joined a few weeks later and was made chairman. "We never set out as some kind of gay crusade. We were just a group of guys who wanted to play rugby," he says. In the early days the Steelers were treated with curiosity by the opposition: "Lots of people, particularly the older people, would ask how we knew we were gay and where we found our players," Hayward tells me. "We were useful in that way because people could ask us questions that they'd never get the opportunity to ask normally."

I'm sitting in the bar that the team shares with East London RUFC. Outside, training has already begun. It's surprising just how many people there are—I count at least 50 guys, which is impressive for a Tuesday night—but I'm told this is actually quite a low turnout. The standard is high, albeit it with a few dropped balls—not a great shock, given that most of the players have spent the summer months with a pint instead of a rugby ball in hand. And then there's the fact that a lot of the players are totally new to the game, or returning from hiatuses caused by not feeling able or welcome to play after they'd come out earlier in life.

The club's current chairman, Alex Smith, is a perfect example. "I had played for straight teams before joining the Steelers, but, to be honest with you, I had self-excluded myself," he says. "I wasn't openly gay at that point and I didn't feel comfortable talking about it. Guys would ask me what I was doing that night and I wouldn't want to say that I had a date. That wasn't something I felt I could say at that point."

Throughout the club there are stories of players who were keen rugby players at school, who were then shunned as soon as they came out as gay. Alex, the PR man who was showing me around the club, was one such case: he'd been part of his private school rugby team until he came out. His next experience of rugby wasn't until late last year, when he joined the Steelers.

All photos by Flora Bartlett

The club's secretary, Ollie, looks like a rugby player and is skillful with the ball, but is relatively new to the game. He's played rugby for three years, firstly with the Cardiff Lions, a gay-inclusive team, before moving to London two years ago. I ask him whether being an openly gay man had been a barrier to joining clubs previously.

"Yeah, it had always played on my mind," he tells me. "Especially thinking, 'I'm going to join a club and I'm openly out.' But the people I would be playing with probably wouldn't know that I was openly out. I had only come out five years ago and I had no inbuilt mechanisms for coming out in the workplace or in a club without making it obvious. At university I had been part of the mountaineering club, and coming out to them was a terrifying experience. I had the feeling that if a certain amount of time had elapsed and you hadn't told them, then you thought that you had tricked them."

Joining a rugby club is an intimidating experience as it is: you're walking into a place where a group of people already have very strong bonds. So coming out to a "straight" club as a gay man must only make that joining process even more terrifying—a feeling Ollie alludes to: "When I asked to join the Cardiff Lions I thought that I was a reasonably confident person at that point in my life, and I could join a straight team," he says. "But it just seemed more straightforward and easier to join a team where you didn't have to come out. I also didn't have a group of gay friends, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet likeminded people."

Homophobic incidents are incredibly rare for the team. Chairman Alex has played in gay-inclusive teams for eight years, three at the Steelers and five for a Manchester team, and has only experienced two instances of homophobic behavior. Sadly, this isn't the case for all of the players. Chris had been sports president at university in Bristol and had lived with rugby players during college, but he'd also had a stilted start to his rugby career.

"I had knowledge of the game; I used to watch it. I fancied it, but I never felt comfortable doing it. My mates played for a straight team in Bristol that had three gay players, but I still couldn't bring myself to do it," he says.

For Chris, the Steelers had been more than just a rugby club: he'd moved to London on a Sunday, gone for a social that night, and begun playing on the Tuesday. Since then, squad members have helped him find a job and a flat. At university he'd participated in gymnastics, hockey, and cheerleading, often being the only openly gay man, and hadn't had any issues. Unfortunately, the uni football team had been less accommodating: "I didn't have many issues at university because I was so involved in the organization and volunteering, but I did have problems with my football team," he tells me. "They hated me and they behaved very poorly; they used to come up to me at the sports nights and say, 'You're such a fucking bender.'"

The Steelers also boast international experience in coach Nicola Evans, who has been capped for Wales's women. She hadn't previously been involved in gay-inclusive rugby but her first impressions have been very positive.

"It's a lot like being at a school, really, because you have the beginners, who have wanted to play rugby but have never had the opportunity, and you have the players who have played all the way through from youth level," she says.

Her experiences in women's rugby are similar to those that gay players face; stereotypes abound, but they can be shattered by simply watching a game. "In women's rugby you get lots of stereotypes, but in reality the women are from lots of different backgrounds and there isn't a type," she says. "It's the same with Kings—the men here are shattering those stereotypes."

Before I visited the Steelers I was expecting to see a team worn down by weekly bouts of homophobia from other teams. The truth is the polar opposite: rugby is about respect, and nothing earns a team respect more than being incredibly good. The Steelers are proof of that.

The next step for them will be taken in Nashville, Tennessee next year at the Gay World Cup. If they win, they can add "world champions" to their list of accomplishments; not bad for a rugby team dreamt up in a pub 20 years ago.

Former FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini

Every year, on the morning of September 11, Mark Rossini wakes up with something on his mind that most Americans could never even fathom, let alone live with: Information once in his possession as a former FBI special agent might have prevented the terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people 14 years ago today.

That year, Rossini and his colleague Doug Miller—an FBI agent who was assigned to the CIA's Alec unit, which was tasked with tracking Osama bin Laden—drafted a memo briefing the higher-ups on what they had learned from the spy agency in the months leading up the attack. This included the information that a suspected al Qaeda operative named Khalid al-Mihdhar had obtained a US visa and was traveling back and forth between America and the Middle East.

He would later help fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

But that memo never made it to the FBI. Instead, Miller says a CIA operative told him to "hold off" and that both Miller and Rossini were told not to talk about what they knew with anyone—not even their bosses. They obliged, and that resulting break in communication between the two agencies is frequently cited as the "intelligence failure" that contributed to what happened on that horrific day.

It's a burden that Rossini lives and breathes—you can read it all over his face. When we met in the lobby of downtown Manhattan's Mercer Hotel, discussing national security and terrorism as the happy hour crowd settled in, Rossini would go on for long stretches, reflecting and dismissing out loud all the counter-arguments out there in fits of agony. It was like watching a one-man trial in someone's mind, with the stakes way too high for any single person to cope with.

Rossini now lives in Switzerland after being ousted from the agency and narrowly avoiding jail time in 2008 for leaking documents to an old girlfriend. For him it's not only about the lives that were lost on 9/11—which, of course, weigh on him every day—but the country America has become since that day.

On the night before the anniversary of a day that changed this country and the Middle East forever, we discussed what Rossini believes really happened (he hates conspiracy theories), what he would've done differently, and how things went so terribly wrong.

VICE: With the anniversary in mind, I've been wondering lately: When will the phrase "September 11th" no longer carry such a weight? My sense is it'll be years from now until that grief subsides, especially for New Yorkers who lived through it, like myself. But I can't imagine what it means to you. Has it gotten any more normal?
Mark Rossini: It'll almost be impossible. It's like saying the Fourth of July. It's the Kennedy assassination. It's an indelible mark in our collective mentality. The thing is that, for me, there's not a day that goes by when I don't think about it. I live with it every single day. It may be hard for people to comprehend or say to get over, but I will not get over it. And I wake up every day in pain, knowing that this thing happened and it didn't have to happen. That's what's been paining me and driving me crazy over all of these years. It didn't have to happen.

There is no way in God's good Earth that the Saudis wanted this to happen. Nobody wanted this to happen.

If you take away Doug and me, the FBI still should've been notified. And the burning question in my mind is that Doug wrote his CIR [central intelligence report] and it was sent up the electronic cube to the next person, who was called Michelle, and she writes back in the electronic system, "Please hold off for now, for Deputy Director of Alec." No one has ever come down on her, or the person who told her; no one ever asked, "Why would you write that?" Now, apparently, she was asked, and she doesn't remember. And then they asked the gentleman that told her to say that. He doesn't remember writing it. I don't buy that answer. How do you not remember writing that? OK, if you didn't remember writing that, can you give me a logical reason why you would've then? What was it about Doug's memo that was so sensitive that you couldn't tell the FBI?

After all of these years, what's your answer to that question?