Peoria, Illinois, City Hall. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

My hometown of Peoria, Illinois, is in the middle of Middle America. If you've heard of it, that's probably because of the phrase, "If it plays in Peoria," where the name serves as a stand-in for the thousands of ordinary, sleepy, mostly interchangeable towns and small cities across the country. In the national imagination, it's famous for being completely average, the kind of place politicians might shout out as a bastion of bland, working-class heroism.

At least, that was the case until last year, when our mayor sent a SWAT team after my friend for making fun of him on Twitter.

For those not up to speed on Mayor Jim Ardis and the turmoil he's put Peoria through over the past 18 months, let me catch you up. Ardis was pissed last April when he discovered a Twitter account that parodied him, which happened to be run by my friend Jon Daniel. The mayor didn't have thick enough skin or the basic maturity to ignore @peoriamayor's obscenity and "filth"-laden tweets. (Ardis's word, not mine.) So he did what any psychotic despot would do: He used the police as his personal goon squad and had them toss Daniel's home in the type of jackbooted raid usually reserved for drug kingpins.

The cops scooped up Daniel and his roommates from their jobs, dragged them downtown for a few hours of interrogation, and confiscated their cell phones and other electronics before releasing them into the night under a fearful and paranoid cloud of utter disbelief.

One unlucky roommate had weed in his room, which the cops of course took and used to charge him with misdemeanor possession.

"I thought they wanted me for a triple homicide or some shit," Daniel said recently when recounting his detainment and interrogation.

At every turn of this bizarre sagathe raid itself, the emails I obtained that showed how arrogant Ardis had been in his quest for vengeance, the trip to Chicago Daniel and I took to meet with the American Civil Liberties Union, the press conference at which my friend announced his lawsuit against our shared hometown and, finally, the approval of the $125,000 settlement the city reached with Daniel and the ACLUwe thought this thing couldn't possibly go on much longer, or get any weirder.

But there just doesn't seem to be an end to what in Peoria is known as "Twittergate" and among my friends is generally called "that whole shit."

The most recent chapter came Thursday night, when The Daily Show lampooned Ardis and portrayed Daniel as a cartoonish villain bent on preying on harmless and dangerously stupid old men who don't understand the internet.

For the segment, Daniel went along with acting the part of a vicious predator. It's a hilarious bit but he spent the hours leading up to his television debut last night nervously smoking and deciding whether he would watch at all.

"It'll be a game-time decision," he told me.

Daniel is the guy who walks around with a mean mug when things are going well in his life. He always looks mad, but usually he's just nervous. This is the contradiction of his personalityhe is an outrageously funny storyteller who keeps to himself, rarely goes out, and picks around on a fake Hofner bass in his down time.

That's why he was a wreck when Jessica Williams and her crew from The Daily Show came to his Peoria home a few weeks back. The pack of Marlboro menthols he burned through on the back porch that day never stood a chance.

"I'm just a little worried that I didn't do a good job," he told me Thursday, as if he were an actor being paid to perform.

Now, me and my friends believe, the world finally sees Daniel for the funny, goofy, loveable guy we all know him asnot some lowlife who took advantage of his situation to get a hefty paycheck.

With Ardis's name forever attached to this obscenely stupid scandal, it's unlikely he'll ever make it much farther than mayor of Peoria, and even that position might be in danger. (Like other city officials involved in this affair, he did not respond to a request for comment.)

You see, Daniel is now running for mayor.

Check out our documentary on taking down Tokyo's corrupt diamond syndicate.

He has a campaign manager (our mutual friend Dan Brown) and a Facebook page. And despite his political novice status, Daniel probably has more business holding elected office than the bloated windbag and golden retriever headwear enthusiast Donald J. Trump.

"I think Sleezy fully intends to run," Brown told me, referring to Daniel by the first part of his nickname, Sleezy D. "The election is still a year away, but he's looking into all the official requirements for candidacy. I think the attention he'll get from appearing on The Daily Show is more than most Peoria mayoral candidates achieve."

That may be the case, but Daniel will have to work his ass off to get the attention of Peorians, a generally apathetic bunch. Still, this story keeps chugging along because it involves something most of us take for granted: the right to say whatever the fuck we want about whomever we want, which many of us believe is is one of our fundamental rights as Americans. Twittergate is a classic story of the powerful abusing their power, and the public and the press afflicting the powerful right back.

The pace of Daniel's life has slowed since his lawsuit was settled. "I don't got reporters at my door no more," he told me. Maybe The Daily Show segment last night will change that. But what's more likely is that Daniel will go back to his normal lifecruising around in the blacked-out Chrysler 200 he bought with his settlement money, cooking up chicken wings at the bar where he works, drinking his after-shift drinks, watching the Cubs, Bears and Blackhawks, and hanging out at home his family.

But he will always have that smart-ass bone in his body. Recently, a Peoria government employee happened upon Daniel when he was having a drink at the end of his shift. The man chatted him up, apparently unaware of who he was.

Daniel kept his secret, but buzzed and feeling like having some fun, brought up Twittergate anyway.

"Yeah, I guess you can do whatever you want nowadays," the man lamented.

Apparently, like more than a few people in Peoria, he still thought Daniel was in the wrong when he parodied Ardis. Sleezy D played along.

"Yeah, he may have been wrong," Daniel said, referring to himself, "but that doesn't mean he should have had his house raided. I mean, people do wrong things all the time. Drinking and driving's wrong, but you're about to do that, too."

"Well, you got me there," the man replied, laughing.

He began to leave but turned around to tell Daniel one last thing.

"You're a stand-up guy," he said.

Daniel said thanks, waited, then walked inside and started laughing his ass off.

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

Courcelles, Belgium. All photos courtesy of Gert Verbelen

For his latest book, The Inner Circle of Europe, Gert Verbelen traveled to and spent a week photographing the geographical center of 18 eurozone countries. His goal was to piece together an abstract representation of the eurozone as a collective entity. He found that with migration of younger generations to bigger cities, and a lack of development in smaller villages around Europe, the lives of small town people are often a lot lonelier than we think.

I met up with him to ask a few questions about this latest work.

VICE: What inspired you to do this trip and why did you choose the center of these countries?
Gert Verbelen: I live in a small village near Brusselswhich is in some way the center of Europe. The idea of visiting all the eurozone countries came about when the 18th country (Latvia) was added in 2014. I didn't want to target the capitals, the big cities, or the photogenic areas.

Instead, I wanted to visit a single place in the heart of each country, stay there, explore, and take pictures for exactly one week. By limiting my stay to one week rather than traversing an entire country, I was able to have a far more intense involvement with each local community.

How did you calculate the countries' centers and the perimeters in which you could work?
My brother, who's a mathematician, showed me how to geographically pinpoint the center. This rather limiting rigid structure provided me with borders and formed some sort of geographical cage in which I could work with the greatest freedom. Ironically, I almost always ended up in semi-abandoned places where younger people had left for bigger cities in search of workleaving behind empty streets and faded glory.

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Gone: The Story of Paul Alexander'

And the language barriers?
My limited French and German helped out here and there but sign language was the most efficient way of communication. I "talked" for hours with a shepherd on a Spanish mountain. I was invited into an Estonian home without verbal communication. In Cyprus, I ate lunch at a place where "lovely, lovely" was the only English spoken. When I was bitten by a dog in Latvia, the villagers asked a student who'd recently returned from an Erasmus exchange to be my interpreter at the doctor's and later in the hospital.

There must have been quite a bit of suspicion and interest around youa new guy walking about with a camera round his neck. I don't suppose many of these places have a lot of visitors?
Small villages don't really like strangers. Gossip spreads like wildfire and I did raise quite a bit of suspicion. When I was in Slovenia, there were cop cars following me. When you find yourself in a non-touristy area, where there's seemingly nothing worthwhile to take pictures of, people immediately presume that you have criminal intentions.

Which of the countries was the most welcoming, and did that reflect their economic position within Europe?
I have to say that the south felt warmer, both in terms of climate and the people. Although that comparison didn't hold up everywhere. But it's the individuals that you coincidentally meet who determine this welcoming feeling, rather than the economic situation of that particular country at the time. The least welcoming situation was by far the Latvian dog that bit me, when he broke loose from his chain. The young guy that took me to the hospital made up for it, though.

Greece's economic crisis and the mass influx of refugees have been the news stories dominating 2015. Did you notice either of these things while you were working on this project?
I saw a lot of deterioration and sensed a lot of hopelessness, especially among younger people. Few prospects for better times or more jobs; the ever-rising cost of living and no chance of a better life. A lot of people I met were thinking of migrating to other European countries where economic prospects were better.

When I was in Greece, I sensed a lot of hostility towards Germany and their leaders. Europe seemed to be failing for the inhabitants of these smaller villages. Being part of the eurozone came across as a threat to their local economy. People were afraid to lose their identity and traditions in the end. Overall, what really struck me about my voyage through these charming villages was how the rural exodus towards big cities, the aging population, and the lack of local employment resulted in this massive loneliness.

See more of Gert's work here.

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Canadian scientists and their supporters have called on the federal government to stop cutting scientific research and muzzling its scientists. Photo via The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

The Harper government's unlove affair with science and lust for industry isn't exactly a secret. Even international media outlets have run stories about the Harper government's "war on science," the muzzling of scientists, and Canada's science community has responded accordingly.

"The government's policies towards science in general over the past few years haven't been very good, and I think, certainly, government science has been hit the hardest," said Katie Gibbs, executive director for advocacy group Evidence for Democracy.

Read more: Canadian Scientists Are Rallying Against the Government's War on Science

"Things aren't looking very good for government science right now in Canada."

Depending on how everything goes down Oct. 19, federal science may get a reviving shot that Conservative critics say it desperately needs as all of the other three major parties (yes, I'm counting the Greens) have promised to restore what science-based federal agencies have been losing under Harper.

Muzzled scientists have made the catchiest headlines, but it's hardly the only problem. Budget cuts (Environment Canada's lost hundreds of millions alone), staff sackings (we've lost more than 2,000 federal scientists in the past five years), the elimination of the long-form census and libraries getting tossed are also among the Tory decisions heavily criticized by the larger scientific community.

The Conservative Party would not respond to a request for comment for this article, but in a debate on CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks, Conservative candidate for Cambridge and former minister of state for science and technology Gary Goodyear defended his party's record.

"This government has a 'seizing Canada's moment' strategy. We have put more funding into scientific research, innovation and ultimately moving that knowledge discovery into commercialization, more funding than ever in the history of this country," Goodyear said.

And he's technically not wrong. For example, the Conservatives created the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, a $1.5-billion pool that post-secondary institutes can apply to receive grants from. The government also committed to make a $1.33 billion-investment over six years into the Canada Foundation for Innovation, another proposal-based funding system. As well, the 2015 budget proposed an addition $37 million to three granting councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council).

That last point comes with the caveat thoughthe funds won't be available until 2016-2017, meaning funding this year has stagnated at 2014 levels ($2.7 billion combined). And the funds aren't exactly a free-for-all as portions have been earmarked for "market-driven initiatives," according to the Higher Education Strategy Associates in their analysis of the 2015 budget.

Protest in favour of scientific freedom. Photo via Facebook/Evidence for Democracy

"Though the Tories have made sure they cannot be accused of abandoning research, they are certainly not making it a priority, either," the analysis said. "The government's insistence on dictating the minutiae of how to spend funds provided to granting councils... lays bare the its attitude that it knows a lot more about research priorities than do researchers themselves."

The analysis also took aim at the Conservatives bragging about making the largest-ever investments in research when it comes to the Canada Foundation for Innovation: "This is sheer puffery: at an average of $222 million in new funding per year, this is substantially below the 1997-2012 average of $370 million per year in funding. This will make it difficult for Canada to maintain its position as a research leader in areas such as science, engineering, and medicine."

But in the debate, Goodyear defended the Conservatives' commercial-friendly approach.

"Science powers commerce.... The direction the government is going is the direction the world, in many cases, has already gone," Goodyear said.

But what industry has gained, basic research and federal agencies have lost, according to Green Party Burnaby North-Seymour candidate Lynne Quarmby when she spoke with VICE. Quarmby, who's also Simon Fraser University's Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, said she's seen first-hand the damage inflicted by the Harper government's approach to science.

"Basic science, research, is at starvation level. It's very, very underfunded. There's been a realignment of research funding to tie it to corporations," she said, a view she repeated during the Quirks and Quarks debate.

"I felt it personally, but I've also witnessed the tone."

"The government should not play God with respect to science and decide which science is more important than others. That is a short-sighted approach to scientific research," Garneau said.

Like everything in this election, it's a game of numbers of promises when it comes to the future of science on Oct. 19, but it basically boils down to this: a party that highly values commercialization and industry partnerships, and three parties that want to bring back what's been lost over the past decade. It's worth noting that the Greens, Liberals, and NDP aren't anti-economically-profitably scienceall three mention "clean" or "green" jobs in their platforms. But even if the NDP, Liberals, or Greens (haha, kidding) emerge victorious on Oct. 19 and follow through with their promises, Gibbs said it would still take some time before Canadian government science will be back on its feet.

"Things have gotten so bad. It's going to be very hard to fix them," she said. "But this is a good first step to reversing the trends we've seen in the past few years."

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter and Facebook.

Tom Mulcair and Rachel Notley. Photos via Flickr users Laurel L. Russwurm and Connor Mah

So the federal NDP is in some pretty serious trouble.

It's been a rough few weeks for the party, beginning with the niqab debacle and quickly followed up with Thomas Mulcair's switcheroo on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The party's now charting a solid ten percentage points below the other two major parties, and Mulcairwho participated in a VICE town hall on Oct. 13currently sports the lowest support for his economic platform (less than half of what the other two leaders polled at).

One component that may have contributed to the NDP's remarkable drop is the unfolding fiscal clusterfuck in Alberta. Or, at least, conservative activists have been doing their very best to push for that perception: Ricardo Acua, executive director of the Parkland Institute, says such efforts are "trying to create outrage at something that hasn't happened as a way of leveraging conservative politics."

A quick review of the facts: Albertagoverned by the Rachel Notley-led NDPis facing a $6-billion deficit, the prairie province's largest shortfall since 1986.

Todd Hirsch, chief economist at ATB Financial, notes the situation is exclusively a result of the halving of global oil prices. The per-barrel cost for crude oil has plummeted from $106 in June 2014 to $60 in May 2015 (when the NDP were elected) and has since declined into sub-$50 territory.

This drop has gutted the prairie province's balance sheet, which usually receives between 20 and 30 percent of revenue and between half and three-quarters of exports from oil and gas (officially qualifying the province as a "petrostate").

And despite the fact there's no clear way to link the performance of the Alberta's NDP to the fact the country's sporting a very depressed dollar and measly 0.3 percent GDP growth, conservatives have certainly tried.

Lorne Gunter of Sun Media, Ezra Levant of Rebel Media, and Derek Fildebrandt of the Wildrose Party, among many others, have been blaming the new government for current economic circumstances, contending that policies such as an increase in the minimum wage, hike in corporate income tax rates, and reviews of non-renewable resource royalties and climate change policies have been enough to throw the economy farther off its game.

A Gunter column from late September featured a headline of "Canada's NDP future? See Alberta." Fildebrandt, who has since tweeted that Globe and Mail reporter Carrie Tait "intentionally torqued a story," described the Alberta NDP as "a party that is instinctively anti-business and anti-capitalism" (and also bizarrely suggested its platform "was never actually meant to be implemented as real policy").

But others suggest it's simply not reasonable to draw a line between the NDP and the wounded economy. Acua contends: "There's absolutely no evidence to indicate that, at all. The fact that somehow in five months the NDP's policies are somehow responsible for a large chunk of the deficit, or any of it: how on earth would you draw that conclusion based on numbers and statistics? It just defies logic."

Jim Stanford, economist at Unifor, echoed that sentiment: "The main reason business investment has been deterred in Alberta is because the price of oil has fallen by more than half. These other changes are not even going to be visible in the data."

Photo via Flickr user Joseph Morris

Yet there seems to be a very good reason for the hyper-precise attacks, regardless of the potentially fallacious nature of them. The federal NDP received a major boost from the Alberta victory and was leading the tight three-way sack race for a decent chunk of time.

Many voters have voiced skepticism about the NDP's ability to create jobs and strong fiscal policies. This ongoing crusade by conservative activists to discredit Alberta's NDP could ostensibly be intended to solidify that doubtfulness.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has excelled at "wedge politics" during this election, recently got in on the festivities when he dubbed the Notley government "a disaster," later arguing that "the recession has been made worse because the NDP government came in and followed up by raising taxes on everybody."

It's very rare for a high-ranking minister, let alone a prime minister, to voice such ideas.

Angella MacEwen, senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress and a fellow with the Broadbent Institute, rejects Harper's suggestion by noting that tax cuts correspond with low "multiplier effects"that is, how much new revenue comes from new investmentscompared to investments in public transit, childcare, clean tech and First Nations communities.

"If you're the situation of Alberta right now, where they've had this huge economic shock and had companies cut back their investments, it's the perfect time for the government to step in to fill that gap and make some of their own investments," MacEwen says.

The subject of deficit spending versus spending cuts is hotly contested, and one that's surprisingly divided the election into two camps: the Liberals, who argue that counter-cyclical spending is smart, and the NDP and Conservatives, both of whom pledge to balance the budget in spite of all other circumstances (like a very low price of oil).

Janice MacKinnon, public policy professor at the University of Saskatchewan and chair of Joe Oliver's Economic Advisory Council, acknowledges that deficit spending can be a reasonable thing, especially in a place like Alberta which isn't facing an Ontario-style debt crisis.

However, MacKinnon warns that consecutive deficits can normalize the tactic, which can result in poorly planned investments that don't result in growth and lead to debt problems. It's a concern MacEwan also voices: "You want to make sure you have the revenue in place to pay for the programs you want to build so they're there for the long-term."

But ultimately, the Alberta NDP have little chance to test out such strategies.

There can be almost no doubt the decision to postpone the budget release until Oct. 26 was influenced by the ongoing federal election: a major deficit out of Alberta, regardless of rationale, could suggest the NDP have a poor economic handle on things and give the other major parties easy ammunition.

And to be sure, Notley and Mulcair certainly haven't seen eye-to-eye on everything, recently spatting about cap-and-trade in the most Canadian way ever.

But Stanford argues that drawing a connection between the two leaders, or even insinuating the Alberta NDP are somehow responsible for the province's fiscal issues, runs into some serious trouble and that Alberta doesn't have to feature such an oil-dependent economy.

Hirsch of ATB, the non-partisan crown corporation, concludes: "This is by no means unusual. Anybody who's been in Alberta for any length of time knows this is the cycle we go through with quite a lot of regularity. For a lot of people who perhaps don't know Alberta very well or are maybe new to Alberta, this is going to feel like a jolt.

"But this is in fact just part of life here, this happens every so often. We'll get through this just fine."

VICE intern Joe playing 'The Legend of Zelda' at our London office

My son gets in from school not long after three, the bloody part-timer. Just the other day he came crashing through the front door to find me playing The Witcher 3's new expansion, Hearts of Stone. One of the characters spluttered out a "fuck." Yeah, probably time to turn this adults-only entertainment off. Instead, I brought out something from the pastor, rather, the present, but with its design entirely based around software that first came out three decades ago.

A beautiful package arrived at VICE earlier this week, all the way from Seattle, Washington. Opening it was like Christmas, when you know what it is that you're getting but to see it, to feel it, to power it up and gawp at it as if it's some entirely alien technology that the Earth should be down on its knees in envy of: something else entirely. And I've got to be careful what I write here because this isn't paid-for advertorial, but on the other hand: fuck me, the Analogue Nt is a gorgeous machine.

The Analogue Nt and a bunch of games from when you were probably an egg

It's a single, solid chunk of aluminum with insides that replicate the original technology of the Nintendo Entertainment System, down to using the CPU of the time, the Ricoh 20A3. With the relevant adapter installed it outputs in HD so crisp that Mario's never looked squarer, not even on the side of a lunchbox. That's 1080p Super Mario Bros. 3, people; look excited. You slip a cartridge into its slot (it has twoone for NES carts, one for Japanese Famicom games) and it grips it just tightly enough to feel secure without the need to really yank it out again. It's compatible with all the old hardware, and in the bottom of the box are two NES pads, ready to get sweaty. I could geek out over this something chronic. For the sake of this piece's word count, I won't.

Besides, VICE already wrote about the Nt over here, where we also spoke to Analogue Interactive founder Chris Taber (actually a SEGA kid in his youth). Why do this, at all? The answer's simple: "I wanted to fully explore this piece of video game history, with no compromises." Job done.

As it's really easy for me to mist up over anything 8bit, given I was there at the time, I figured it'd be better to set the Nt up in VICE's screening room and get a couple of the London office's fresh-faced and ever-so eager interns to experience it. (Them, and a good handful of full-time staffers, drawn like nostalgic moths to a pixelated flame by the familiar bleeps coming through the door.) The NES was as good as obsolete when they were born, the Super Nintendo having taken over and the Nintendo 64 just a few years away. What the hell would these comparative kids make of games so many technological worlds away from today's realistic shooters and immersive simulations?

Joe playing 'Vice: Project Doom'

Joe was born in 1994, the same year that the final officially licensed NES game, Wario's Woods, came out for the console. We asked him to play Mega Man 2 (1988), The Legend of Zelda (1986), and Vice: Project Doom (1991).

VICE: Do you play video games much at the moment?
Joe: I don't play games so much right now, but I was really into World of Warcraft. Like, I'd say I was borderline addicted.

That's good, that's contemporary. Whereas these games definitely aren't. Had you ever had a go on one of these before?
I've never played a NES game before. I wasn't very good at Mega Man 2. I wasn't getting anywhere at all. There's just four buttons on the pad, and I still couldn't figure out how to use it.

To be fair, the Mega Man games are cruel bastards. Do you feel like you're playing a little history here? Can you see anything you know about today's games in these old NES titles?
Well, The Legend of Zelda has a link (genuinely no pun intended) to World of Warcraft in terms of the movement, the four-way direction keys. And there's the fantasy aspect. But beyond that, maybe not.

So you don't feel that people of your age are about to rush out and buy a NES, if not an Analogue Nt?
I can imagine there being a resurgence of this stuff as a cool, retrophile, sort of hipster movement, but that's it. I imagine a lot of people still walk around with Game Boys. Well, you get those Game Boy iPhone covers. I don't know if that means those people actually know anything about Game Boy games.

You won't be playing any more games from before you were born, then?
Umm, no, sorry.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film about two kids remaking the classic 1980s movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' shot for shot

Tanwen playing 'Double Dragon'

Tanwen was born in 1992, the year of the first Super Mario Kart and the debut of popular pink butt-with-a-mouth Kirby. She knows a bit about Nintendo games. We asked her to play Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), Double Dragon (1988), and River City Ransom (1989).

VICE: So you've already told me you had a Game Boy...
Tanwen: I still have a Game Boy. I really like these older games. I'm not really one for playing newer games, I find them too complicated and quite stressful, but playing these NES games was nice.

Was the simplified button layout a factor?
There's not very much to ityou could mindlessly play these things for ages.

As people did, trust me. Did you have a very instant connection with the games, because of their simplicity?
Yeah, I like how they were stripped down and exclusively about having fun, rather than making you think your way through reams of other stuff.

You played two fighting games just then, but obviously they're entirely unrealistic. Is that more appealing to you than today's photo-real-ish games of blood and gore?
I think so, and I like these kind of retro visuals anyway. I suppose they're sort of in fashion again, right now. I find them quite attractive. But yeah, I think when games are too realistic, they lose some of their appeal, for me. I don't know why you'd want to go and play Grand Theft Auto where it really graphically shows people getting beaten up. That doesn't seem all that much fun to me. Better to bash in oversized heads with cartoon trash cans (as in River City Ransom).

What was your favorite game, of the three you just played?
The second one, Double Dragon. That was good. Mario wasn't bad, but I'm not that good at it. I couldn't get through the first level.

Is it weird to play games that are from before you were born?
I can vaguely remember games that were sort of similar. We had a Nintendo 64 when I was little. So perhaps these NES games are reconnecting me with my childhood.

What do you think the appeal is of a new system that exclusively plays old, original games? Joe said he thought it was a hipster thing.
It probably is a bit hipster-y, but it's fun so I don't care.

Alfie from VICE London's IT team sucking at 'Super Mario Bros. 3'

New on Motherboard: Inside London's Underground Mosquito Lab

I sit my son, born in 2011, down in front of Super Mario Bros. 3. He's familiar with Super Mario Maker. Loves it. Spends literally minutes stacking up goombas and then running the powerless-to-stop-him plumber into his immediate death, before his attention switches to Cbeebies or asking for a biscuit. The first of Mario 3's rather less-soft-looking goombas comes stomping towards him. Press A to jump, I tell him. He does. Over and over. The goomba kills him. Second life: a dash this time, and death by piranha plant fireball. And so it goes until the question's asked: "Can we just play Super Mario Maker instead?"

Yes we can, but first, anything to tell me about this old game? You know, when this first came out in Japan, daddy was only eight years old.

"These old games look funny. They're all made out of squares and stuff."

Yes, those are pixels. Look, all of the characters are made out of them, and they are literally that in this instance, tiny squares. Clever, isn't it?

"The music sounds odd, not like proper games."

These are classic melodies, mister. Classic.

"I think that the newer that games are, the easier they get."

Well, there's no denying that.

The Analogue Nt makes NES games look phenomenal. Seriously. Like, mouth-open, jaw-on-the-floor, tongue-everywhere remarkable. Its makers' website is here, where you can find loads more information and, if you're feeling loaded to the tune of $500 , you can order one for yourself. Yes, that's a lot of money, but what else are you going to spend it on, food and heat? Once again, this is not advertorialit's just that the product is really quite something, so forgive the gushing positivity. It's nice to get excited sometimes, isn't it? In the interest of disclosure, it's worth me adding that the games we played were in the same package as the Nt, so mega thanks to Chris and the Analogue Interactive team for this awesome trip down memory lane.

Thanks to our brave interns for giving up some of their lunch breaks.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user David Dennis

Capping off a 72-day clusterfuck/dumpsterfire of an election, a new Forum Research poll shows that, while the Islamophobic policy requiring women to remove their head-covering before taking the oath of citizenship might be popular, at least it didn't actually motivate people to vote. Thank fuck.

The poll, provided in advance to VICE, shows that 58 percent of the country opposes allowing women to wear the niqab during citizenship ceremonies, while just 31 percent support allowing it.

The issue has become a wedge for the Conservatives and Bloc to split the NDP's vote in Quebec. Unsurprisingly, 84 percent of Conservatives and 94 percent of Bloquists are opposed to allowing women to wear clothing on their head while they take the entirely ceremonial oath of citizenship.

The poll shows the issue has made for unlikely bedfellowsboth Quebec and Alberta are predominantly opposed to the niqab. Atlantic Canada and the prairies, weirdly, are the most supportive of letting women keep their clothes on.

The most depressing part of the poll is that, when educated on the matter, respondents didn't change their mind.

Forum pointed out that all would-be citizens, before they take their oath of citizenship, have to unveilin privatein order to get a passport photo. "Knowing this, do you favour or oppose allowing women to wear the niqab during citizenship ceremonies?" the poll asked.

FIfty-nine percent still opposed allowing women to wear the niqab, while 34 supported it.

Forum tried again: "One new Canadian who wears the niqab recently won the legal right to swear her citizenship oath privately before a judge. Is this an acceptable or unacceptable compromise to unveiling for the citizenship ceremony?"

The numbers budged, but just barely. 52 percent found it unacceptable, 40 percent said it was an OK compromise.

VICE Canada had input on the Forum questionnaire used in the poll.

The results show that: yeah, Canadians are pretty much cool with discriminating against women who wear the niqab.

The silver lining is that opinions are shifting, if only slightly. The last time Forum asked these questions, in March, just 22 percent were in favour of letting women sport the headscarf that covers their face. Now, it's nearly ten percent higher.

Forum went on and asked about another crackpot idea: do you support or oppose allowing federal public servants wearing the niqab at work?

Sixty-two percent said, no, they don't support it. Just 29 percent said they do.

The Conservatives have said they are considering that policy, should they be re-elected.

But it seems like Stephen Harper's race-baiting policy might not have gone over so well.

Forum asked whether the Conservatives' position on the niqab had an impact on voters' political preference. And it found that, yeah, it sort of did. Sixteen percent said it moved their decision at the ballot box.

The numbers show the effects were largely scattershotnine percent said they swapped their vote from the NDP to the Conservatives, 12 percent said they switched from the Liberals to the Conservatives, while another 12 percent said they went from the Conservatives to the NDPbut the biggest move was, surprisingly, from the Conservatives to the Liberals.

While the sample size for this is obviously quite low231 people overall23 percent of them said they moved their vote from the Conservatives to the Liberals.

Justin Trudeau, obviously, has been a vocal critic of Harper's play on the niqab.

Another 21 percent of Quebecers (again, only about 38 people) said they were now voting for the Bloc Quebecois over their support for the policy.

Forum also asked about another religious issue that popped up during the campaignwhether Ottawa had been prioritizing Christian refugees from Syria, over Muslim refugees.

The numbers Forum found don't paint a clear picture. Canadians appeared generally unaware of the story, and weren't convinced that the Harper government was really leveraging one religious minority over another. Generally, though, they didn't like the idea of it54 percent said they would disapprove of such a policy.

The poll was conducted between October 13 and 14, and questioned 1,438 randomly-selected Canadians. It is considered accurate +/- 3 percent, 19 times out of 20.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Matty Matheson is the star of Keep it Canada on Munchies, but for 36 hours, he was also a national correspondent for VICE on the trail of Canada's elusive prime minister: Stephen Harper. To get a correspondent on the media circuit of the Conservative Party's campaign costs $3,000 per day, so we figured, with that kind of coin leaving the building, why not send the most animated and hilarious person we know? Watch as Matty asks Stephen Harper two questions, fraternizes with his new friends on the media bus, flies on Harper's jet, and chats with protesters at Conservative rallies.

Criminal justice reform may be in vogue in the United States right now, but worldwide, the picture looks a bit grimmer. After all, there are still governments that kill people for drug crimes. And as the United Nations General Assembly prepares to hold a special session on drugs next year, human rights organizations hope to use the occasion to shine a spotlight on UN funding for drug interdiction in countries that execute drug offenders.

Financial support for these severe punishments, they say, is blatantly inconsistent with international standards and any semblance of human decency.

Neither the European Union, which has banned the death penalty altogether, nor the United States execute drug criminals. But that doesn't stop the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) from proudly funding drug war policies in countries like Iran, where the death penalty for possession of certain amounts of illegal substances is not just an option for judges, but a mandatory sentence. The policy sends hundreds of alleged drug offenders to their deaths every year.

On VICE News: Reporter Threatened for Asking Turkish President About Jailed VICE News Journalist

Groups like the Open Society Foundation (OSF), which recently published a report detailing drugs and the death penalty across the globe, say these executions violate international law. They also argue that drug-related death sentences contradict an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights resolution reserving the death penalty for "the most serious crimes," a stance echoed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

...experts say those killed are not limited to high-level drug traffickers, but also include low-level dealers who are some of the most marginalized and impoverished people in the country.

Last year, a consortium of human rights groups signed a letter to the UNODC urging a freeze in funds for Iran's drug program. In a press release, they wrote, "The are world leaders against capital punishment, to support programs which risk enabling capital punishment on such a broad scale, to such a heinous degree."

Follow Kristen Gwynne on Twitter.

Photo by Julian Master

Read: How to Deal with Hangovers

On Thursday, the Center for Disease Control released a study saying that excessive drinking wastes $249 billion annually.

The report claims that the money loss stems from crime, car accidents, and hospital costs caused by binge drinking (which is apparently five drinks for men and four drinks for women, but who's counting).

The real drain on the US economy, though, is what the CDC calls "impaired productivity and absenteeism"basically meaning that during all those hungover days when you were calling in sick or sitting at your desk reading about what happens when you pop a ball, you were actually helping to sucker the USA out of billions.

The economy is hurting from all our drinking, and things don't seem to be getting any better. This year's $249 billion price tag is up from the $244 billion annual loss the CDC blamed on booze a decade ago, Bloomberg reports. And that quarter-trillion dollar estimate is probably low, since the study only takes into account money drains where alcohol was the "primary cause."

"Intangible costs like pain and suffering were not included," the CDC says.

Illustration by Dan Evans

How hard do you think The Rock could punch me? Obviously: to death. I feel The Rock could punch me on most of the parts of my body and I would immediately die. Would I die if The Rock punched me in the head? Yes, I would die. Would I die if The Rock punched me somewhere less vital, the back of a thigh, maybe, a lower rib? Yes, I would also die of being punched by The Rock. The force of The Rock punching me would work its way up my body and explode my heart. Agony would hum up my body like a tuning stick until my brain just up and stops. I feel, sometimes, like The Rock could punch me so hard (to death) that he wouldn't necessarily need to make bodily contact with me for the punch to kill, The Rock just punching the air I was about to inhale and it somehow killing me, the oxygen imbued suddenly with a force too powerful for my weak human lungs, my weak human lungs breathing punched Rock air and just exploding. But my favorite, when I think about The Rock punching me a single time to death, my favorite is imagining him punching me directly above the heart: a single solid thwump, and my chest blooms purple and I die instantly, my heart cleaving neatly into four like a fresh coconut dropped from a height, and The Rock delivers a lineleans over my newly wilted corpse and murmurs, "It doesn't matter," something like thatbut, look closer now, look at my face: My eyes are glassy and my skin is cold but my mouth is formed into a perfect, long rictus grin

The only way I will die happy is if The Rock punches me horribly to death.

Girls have Beyonc, and they love her, and they pray at her altar, and that is fine. And yes, I know: Beyonc is for everyone. Everyone is inspired by her slogan tee-wearing and her high luxe Instagram life. She is married to Jay Z and that is a nice thing, that Beyonca literal angel from heavenis married to a man who has the sincere vibe of being a puppy who woke up in a human body bewildered and confused to find himself holding a cigar. I have seen Beyonc in real life and from a distance and I can tell you it is almost too much for a human brain to handle: Looking at Beyonc is like watching some elven queen bathe in a naturally occurring fountain while an actual rainbow illuminates her hair; supernatural, more than beautiful, six or seven amplifications more breathtaking than any other human you've ever seen. It's honestly a bit too much. I think we can all agree that sometimes Beyonc is just a bit Too Much.

But it's hard for me, as a dude, to fully appreciate Beyonc for what she is, because there isn't that deep-in-the-blood pull towards her, that "I want to be that person" urge, because Beyonc wears a lot of kind of high-crotched leotard things and is good at dancing, and that's not me. I've seen girls draw power from an especially sassy Beyonc .GIF like an iPhone charges from a USB plug, but there's not really been a deified equivalent for dudes. Essentially: Where is my Beyonc? Where is BoyoncBeyonc for boys?

It doesn't matter who Beyonc for boys is.

(Beyonc for boys is The Rock.)

Photo via Flickr user David Shankbone

Theory: There is no man on Earth who doesn't respect The Rock so much that it busts through being simple adoration and goes right on into being full love. Everyone loves The Rock, the primary reason being: He is strong. I am extremely serious about this: The Rock is hugely, visibly strong. He is so strong. I polled a number of my friends about why they love The Rock in preparation for thisthere was no point asking, "Do you love The Rock?" because everyone loves The Rock. The only question left to ask then is, "Why do you love The Rock?"and, to a man, they all started with the same four words: because he is strong.

Look at this photo of The Rock. It's like someone looked at a tank and decided it didn't look aggressive enough so bolted two arms on the side of it. And I'm not talking about human arms, like those weak little pipes you've got going on, those little typing sticks: no. When I was a kid I remember opening a copy of Match! magazine and seeing a photo of the soccer player John Barnes in full flight, and being just absolutely amazed at the size of his thighsone John Barnes thigh being the equivalent of about four or five regular human thighs, squeezed into the space of two thighs, dense and powerful and huge similar to this. The Rock's arms are essentially two John Barnes thighs, each.

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When you look at The Rock, you are fundamentally looking at a man who is mad that the boundaries of the human physique do not allow him to be more gigantic. Consider, for a moment, space: Thousands of years of evolution, millions of dollars' worth of technical exploration, and we can land a probe on Mars and send HD telescopes flying deep into the abyss, peer deep into galaxies we couldn't possiblywithin a single lifespantravel to. Do you think any of that matters to The Rock? It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters to The Rock is muscles, and muscle fatigue, and the vague chance that there might be a muscle he has not discovered yet that he needs to work out. If you live your life thinking The Rock hasn't at least once ordered an explicit medical textbook in from Amazon and combed it for diagrammatic evidence of a hidden, unworked delt: You are a human idiot. He does that at least once a week. Do you think The Rock could lift up a barbell with his dick? He could totally lift up a barbell with his dick.

Let's look at The Rock again: here he is being so strong the sunglasses can't stay on his face, and he's still not as strong here as he currently is:

Here's The Rock doing that selfie face he does, which is of a good-looking thumb that learned how to scream, and just look at those teeth: thousands of teeth, millions of teeth, perfect white teeth as far as the eye can see, teeth that go down his throat and through his body. Even The Rock's teeth are strong:

And here's a still from San Andreas where The Rock is showing fear, and yet he's still never won an Oscar. Consider that for a second: The Rock, a man who looks like he can tear a truck tire in half with his hands, demonstrating fear. That man has never been afraid in his life. Eddie Redmayne got an Oscar last year for going out of his comfort zone and playing someone with a severe, crippling disability, and when The Rock does the same thingusing his acting powers to channel something he is not, i.e. a human being capable of experiencing fearhe barely wins an MTV award. The world is unjust.

Big thing about The Rock is how he evolved from "wrestler Rock" to "movie star Rock" and transitioned between the two just by eating a monstrous amount of cod, shouting a mantric "FOCUS!" a lot in the gym, and somehow getting huger. It's actually quite hard to reconcile The Rock now, in his current iteration as a family-sized car rolled in ham, with The Rock before, where he was a wrestler.

For ease, we're going to have to introduce notation here. Because The Rock is technically "The Rock," the People's Elbow-dropping, People's Eyebrow-popping, larger-than-life sass-talking wrestler; and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is his current evolutionary form as an exceptionally strong large actor, and the overlap between the two is oiled and blurry. But basically when you say "The Rock" now, you mean Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. But what you're actually saying is "The Rock." Do you understand? I... actually, I might need to do a diagram:

Extremely scientific diagram by Dan Evans

Right: The Rock is Squirtle, and he evolved into Blastoise. He did not pause to stop at Wartortle. The Rock was not Wartortle for even one second. He just straight up skipped over to Blastoisewithout passing Go, without collecting his $200and now he is just Blastoise's body with a man's handsome head on top. The Rock got it done. But now we're in this curious stage of denial where we are still calling The Rock "The Rock" because we loved "The Rock" so much, but he's not "The Rock" any morehe's a large actor named Dwayne.

Wrestler Rock was a phenomenon: a sleekly muscular smack-talking catchphrase machine who knew how to sell the living crap out of a Stone Cold Stunner; The Rock the most bonafide of bonafide WWF Superstars, at his peak when WWF was just him and Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker rubbing their big oiled chests together while everyone played WWF Smackdown on PS1; when The Rock was the center of every story coming out of that muscle foundry, a charisma machine, an eyebrow with a really large dude attached, an icon. And during that time he deigned to yell over a Wyclef Jean song about how his name was The Rock, and that it doesn't matter how much cheese you have in your pocket, and &c. Seriously, look:

Anyway: "It Doesn't Matter" by Wyclef Jean feat. The Rock is the most Year 2000 thing to ever happen. A thousand songs at once. The Rock beats a gigantic man so Wyclef Jean can have sex with his wife. There is a slow-motion shot where The Rock takes a pair of sunglasses off, and then ducks into the shot so you can see he's doing the People's Eyebrow, and then really theatrically just murders this dude. Wyclef Jean wears a fur coat and a matching fur hat. I mean, it's insane, but alsopossiblythe greatest thing that came out of that year.

Because, for me, that's sort of when The Rock truly became something bigger, broke through the fourth wall, became something greater than the sum of his parts. "It Doesn't Matter" by Wyclef Jean feat. The Rock is The Rock's "Crazy in Love." Because this is when The Rock broke out of the confines of wrestlingon an alternate timeline, The Rock stayed in WWE throughout, slowly being head dropped until his entire face went sort of pink and gristly, like a bad batch of jerky, The Rock walking around WWE a little dazed and always wearing sunglasses and pointing to the wrong camera and saying "brother" a lotand instead became a sort of quiet cultural phenomenon.

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There's a thing in wrestling called the face-turn, or heel-turnI mean, there's a lot of turns, in wrestlingwhere you flip suddenly from baddy to goody, or goody to baddy, and those weird feverish wrestling crowds go just crazy, waffling their big cardboard signs, turning the baseball caps on their head somehow further back-to-front than they already were, tearing their hockey jerseys off and throwing them weakly towards the ring, great swathes of pinky psoriasis dotting their torsos. And after doing a few heel-face turns in the ring, The Rock has sort of quietly done a real life one: gone from a nice guy who was very strong and didn't button up the front of his shirt for about an eight-year period (19972005), to just an incredibly huge box office leviathan who stars in can't-miss movies that make bank (2005present). When, exactly, did that happen? When did he go Squirtle to Blastoise? He did it without us even seeing.

Essentially: just recognize that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson burst out of "The Rock" like an exceptionally huge snake shedding its skin, and is a separate entity now, a butterfly to the caterpillar, and he sort of did it without us ever noticing. In 2002, when The Rock (wrestler) was preparing to star in The Scorpion King, everyone was all like, "What's he going to do: People's Elbow an ancient dead mummy into submission? Ha ha ha: right." And now, when he lines up in a helicopter in San Andreas, you kind of go: Yeah, actually, maybe The Rock (actor) could sort of mend an earthquake through force of personality and his big strong muscles alone. I'm sorry I ever doubted him.

The Rock's latest project, Ballers, is HBO's most-watched comedy in six years. The Rock gets a lot of propswith Forbes quoting him as earning $31.5 million last year, he's the 11th highest-earning actor on Earth, and I suppose 31-and-a-half million props are probably, by most accepted scales, enough propsbut I'm still not sure he gets enough props. On paper, none of his projects make any sense, but with him on screen they do: San Andreas turns from yet another disaster movie into an extremely passable blockbuster; nobody really knew they wanted three more Fast & Furious sequels until there was a trailer where The Rock breaks a plaster cast off his arm while saying "Daddy's gotta go to work," and then everyone was like "oh HELL YES! GIVE ME ONE HUNDRED MORE OF THOSE FILMS!"; Ballers is just Entourage with football instead of doomed movies. But if you follow his Instagram, you get the impression that The Rock loves the heck out of every single project he's involved in. I mean, look at this announcement that The Rock is the new "spokesman of service" for Ford. Have you ever seen anybody that psyched to sell anything? What even is a spokesman of service? It doesn't matter: The Rock loves fucking being it, and he loves the heck out of Fords, and he loves the heck out of you, too.

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And I think this is the deep truth of The Rock, because fundamentally he is this: one huge, enormous, strong, good vibe made crystalline and flesh and forced into the large body of a semi-retired wrestler. This year, The Rock has made headlines for three big things: for this lip sync battle, for officiating a dude's wedding in a heartwarming viral video, and for saving two drowning dogs from his pool. But The Rock deserves headlines every single day of the year. "Enormous Man Still Alive, Is Great"; "Gigantic Man Continues to Be Amazing"; "There Is No Way the Base Laws of Physics Allow This Dude to Open a Can of Coke Let Alone Contort His Arms into the Necessary Angles and Shapes to Put on a T-Shirt, but Huh, Here He Is, Somehow Wearing a T-Shirt." Every second of Rock we are, as a species, indulged with should be celebrated.

There's the bumbag photo, the workout videos. The times he meets young fans and just is The Rock at them. The baffling and unknown truth about where he finds clothes that fit him. His iconic cheat days. Focus. The fact that The Rock couldquite easily, using only his handskill you, and me, and everyone else on Earth. For being the second man in history after Bruce Willis to look actively better since shaving his head. Focus. A man bred in a lab to fold his arms while inhaling deeply. A smile that is essentially a sunbeam. Hold on, do I actually love The Rock? Focus. There's a chance I actually deeply am in love with The Rock. Focus. The fact that he woke up one day and decided to become even larger than the already large wrestler he was, and then did that, and then went on to earn $3 billion across 16 movies at the box office. Focus. I mean imagine being The RockThe Rock!and then thinking, You know what would be cool? If I got twice as huge as I currently am.There's Wake Up Call, the self-help series which is essentially Pimp My Ride but for people with troubled lives, where The Rock would just turn up and tell them to work out more and be less crappy, and then they just would? Focus. Focus. Focus. The Rock is the greatest. The Rock is the greatest dude alive. We should all be thankful to just exist on the same planet as him. I want him to punch me to death with his enormous strong arms.

Follow Joel Golby and Dan Evans on Twitter.

Opioid overdoses occur when the receptors in the brain become overwhelmed by the drug. Naloxone knocks opioids off these receptors, allowing normal functionssuch as breathingto resume. Image courtesy of the Canberra Alliance of Harm Minimisation and Advocacy

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

Lorraine is a homeless woman living in Sydney's Redfern neighborhood who's injected opioids for the last 15 years. On Tuesday night, she was with a group of friends under a bridge. They'd taken some coke and were about to shoot up some gear. She told a male friend, who had just gotten out of jail, to be careful and only take half. A few minutes later, she heard another woman calling out that something was wrong.

"He wouldn't blink and I just started screaming, 'He's dead, he's dead.' Because I didn't see him breathing," Lorraine recounted. "I didn't have a phone, so I said, 'Someone call an ambulance.'"

Another woman, who'd been trained in CPR, began to try and resuscitate him. It took between 20 minutes and half an hour for the ambulance to turn up, but fortunately the man's life was saved.

Read on Motherboard: Meet the Fake Heroin Behind the Next Overdose Epidemic

In the midst of the commotion and arguments about how to keep his heart beating, another man who was there named Terry Terry turned to Lorraine and said, "Have you got any naloxone?"

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist, meaning it counters the effects of opioids like heroin and oxycodone. A user overdoses when the receptors in the brain become overwhelmed by the drugs. Naloxone knocks opioids off these receptors, allowing normal functionssuch as breathingto resume.

Lorraine didn't have any of the lifesaving drug on her that night, nor did anyone else who was there. But from early next year, when it becomes readily available at Australian pharmacies, it will be more likely that someone does. (Naloxone is currently available over-the-counter in a number of US states.)

Related: Watch VICE News' documentary 'Back from the Brink' about the a heroin antidote

On October 1, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) announced its interim decision to down-schedule naloxone in single-use pre-filled syringes. It will go from being a Schedule 4 prescription-only substance to Schedule 3, making it an over-the-counter (OTC) medicine. The TGA's final decision will be announced in late November, but according to Angelo Pricolo, the pharmacist who submitted the application to reschedule the drug, the interim decision is a "virtual rubber stamp," which means naloxone will be available without a script as of February 1 next year.

The latest figures from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre outline that in 2011 there were 683 accidental opioid overdoses in Australia, with an additional 162 intentional cases and 114 undetermined.

Angelo saw the need to make naloxone easier to access. In his 25 years of practice, the Brunswick pharmacistwho currently runs a 100 client opioid replacement treatment programhas never filled a prescription for naloxone. "A concerned third party can now go to the pharmacy and buy naloxone and that's the big difference," explained Pricolo.

Of the 96 submissions made in support of OTC naloxone, 57 of them were submitted via the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC). Dr. Marianne Jauncey, medical director of the center, told VICE that it was important to provide their clients with information about the decision and the capacity to make submissions. "It was trying to give a voice to people who are most directly affected," she said. "They may be receiving the dose or they might be giving the dose to a friend or loved one."

Marianne stressed naloxone has no potential for abuse and it should have a dual listing, making it available over-the-counter and via prescription at a subsidized price. She also says that people who obtain it will need access to training in how to recognize an overdose and when to use it.

RELATED: How Not to Die of an Overdose

James was watching the third State of Origin game at home in Sydney with a friend last year. They'd taken some prescription painkillers, which they'd mixed with benzodiazepines. It was after his friend shot up some heroin that he noticed something was off. "She was slumped over," he recalled. "When I pulled her back, her face was all blue."

But luckily the 31-year-old, who's been using himself for 17 years, has been prescribed and trained in the use of naloxone at the MSIC. After administering a second dose, his friend began breathing. "It was the fact that I could access naloxone that saved my friend's life."

A problem with the current system in Australia is that a doctor prescribes naloxone to a drug user, who is unlikely to be able to administer it to him or herself after overdosing. In Italy, naloxone has been available over-the-counter since 1995, making it available for peer administration, with no adverse effects. A 2010 report outlined that since 1996 in the United States, programs had distributed 53,032 naloxone kits and 10,171 overdose reversals had occurred. A 2014 World Health Organization report recommended that countries expand naloxone accessibility.

"It's been very successful. We've had 58 overdose reversals that we know of."Dave Baxter, coordinator of the Canberra Alliance of Harm Minimisation and Advocacy

Of late, Australia's first take-home naloxone program, trialled in the Australian Capital Territory, has made some breakthroughs. Along with naloxone's potential to save lives and minimal side effects, the TGA listed the results of this program as one of the reasons for making their decision.

Established in April 2012 and run by the Canberra Alliance of Harm Minimisation and Advocacy, the trial has seen the distribution of naloxone to 200 participants, along with training in the use of the drug and overdose management. "It's been very successful. We've had 58 overdose reversals that we know of," said Dave Baxter, coordinator of the program. "It's quite likely there's been more that haven't been reported."

The Centre for Research Excellence into Injecting Drug Use was another institution that made a submission in support of OTC naloxone. Professor Paul Dietze, one of the chief investigators at the center, said the decision to make naloxone a Schedule 3 substance is an important one in the global context. "There isn't enough training out in the community about how to access and use it," Dietze explained. "Hopefully the down-scheduling will change that situation."

Yesterday, Lorraine was back at the MSIC in Kings Cross, still a little shaken. She was given a free naloxone kit and undertook the training on how to administer it. "That would have made a whole hell of a difference, if we had it then and there," she said, referring to the events of the night before. "He would have been sitting up two minutes into it."

Follow Paul on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

I adore Gwyneth Paltrow. But much like my love of blue cheese and the Macarena, it's a devotion my friends don't necessarily understand. "Gwyneth Paltrowisn't that the one who tells people to sustain themselves on algae and sprouts and to clean their vaginas with steam?" they often ask.

Sure, Gwyneth Paltrow is one of these celebrities with a bag full of life-improving advice. In general, I hate people who try to tell me that my lifestyle isn't good enough. I, more or less, eat like vegetarianplus I did two sit-ups last week. I'm living my life the best I can. To me, keeping up with the newest trends in healthy eating is just as stressful and superficial as following the "crazy antics" of the Kardashians.

This time last year, agave syrup seemed to be the it-thing for my health-conscious friends; last month, I baked a cake with it and was treated as if I was trying to slip them some crack. Apparently agave syrup is no longer healthyit causes cancer. Why does food always have to be either super healthy or give you cancer?

It seems as if the only person I can truly trust when it comes to life-optimization is Gwyneth. A few days ago, I came across her cookbook It's All Good. In it, she presents healthy recipes that are, well, all good, I assume. The blurb on the back promised that this book would help me look better. Bought!

Reading the foreword, I realized that me and GP are two totally different people. Living like me means drinking barrels of wine and taking the phrase "all you can eat" far too literally. If you want to live like Gwyneth, you have to say goodbye to the following things: Coffee, alcohol, milk, eggs, sugar, shellfish, deep sea fish, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn, gluten, meat, and soy, a.k.a. everything that makes life worth living.

Shocked at this puritanism, my jaw dropped and I'm pretty sure I spat out a few peppers and an entire deep sea fish. Would I be able to, at least for a few days, lead a "proper" life and eat like the queen of pretentious lifestyle optimization? I had to try it out and see.

DAY 1

Every day on the Paltrow diet starts off with a glass of freshly pressed green juice, which according to Gwyneth is just like coffee. Unfortunately, it consists of repulsive ingredients that I would never eat in solid form (cabbage, ginger, mint, and lemon). On top of that, I had to face my fear of my juicer. It's an old, noisy machine that sometimes spits out smoke. I turned it on feeling as tense as a dog on New Year's Eve.

For the sake of my forthcoming good looks, I gulped the green broth as if I were the lead in a remake of Two Girls One Cup. It didn't taste horriblemaybe I even liked it?

Throughout the day I snacked on almonds that I'd soaked in water for six hours. Gwyneth says they're the "ideal snack." Obviously she's never tried chili cheese fries. She also forgot to mention that this snack doesn't taste like anything. But, whatever, I was going to a dinner party that night.

Fun fact: Gwyneth loves dinner parties but only when they're in Europe, because she feels the conversation is more refined here. One time, she was at a dinner party in America and the person eating next to her asked her where she bought her jeans. JEANS! Ghastly.

I decided to be a good guest and bring Gwyneth's most mindful dessert: a gluten-free berry crumble with quinoa flakes. The crumble was a downright hit at the party. My friend Sarah, who's an amazing chef, complimented me for bringing such a tasty pudding. All the compliments were getting to my head. I wondered if Sarah had ever soaked almonds in water. Overall, the dinner party was a huge success and nobody tried to steer the conversation toward denim.

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DAY 2

The second day of my experiment was all about Gwyneth's legendary miso soup with shiitake mushrooms and bonito flakes. Once, in her first cookbookMy Father's Daughtershe revealed that she ate the soup for breakfast and for dinner. GWYNETH! The same soup twice in one day? Madness.

I wanted to copy Gwyneth's miso excess so I cornered an employee at the local supermarket. "Excuse me, where would I find dried bonito flakes here?" I asked while scratching my chin. She gave me a look that screamed, "Please leave the store immediately" and disappeared down one of the aisles without saying a word.

The soup tasted amazing even without bonito flakes. While eating I decided to watch YouTube interviews with Gwyneth. I felt so connected to my mentor that I noticed myself talking to the screen: "Gwyneth, I wasn't able to find bonito flakes unfortunately..." I whispered, embarrassed. I could sense she forgave me. "I still can't believe you ate this soup twice in one day!" I giggled before realizing I might have far more serious issues than I'd thought.

Later that night I met up with some friends at a bar.

"Did you know that Gwyneth only smokes one cigarette a day?" I asked them.

I didn't even wait for an answer. It's just one of many Paltrow truth bombs that I dropped that night. I could tell that my mates were silently weighing the pros and cons of being friends with me. "She also doesn't stick to her diet all the time, so my exception is totally fine!" I said way too loud as I sipped on my beer.

After our third round (ooops), one of my friends suggested we do yoga together this week. This was obviously a thinly veiled attempt to shut me up. I ecstatically agreed, of course. Let's do yoga together and not talk about jeans. Gwyneth would love this shit.

DAY 3

Maybe it was the beer but I woke up feeling weak and just about ready to end my diet. I obviously didn't have as much willpower as Gwynethwho on her birthday in 2012 skipped cake and instead nibbled at a "birthday fruit platter" with her friends Sofia Coppola and Cameron Diaz.

But then I remembered the time Gwyneth was hiking in Arizona and thought she heard the rocks whispering the mantra, "You have the answer, you are the teacher!" I stayed really quiet and hoped that my walls will whisper something to me. Unfortunately, I only heard my older neighbor coughing and then spitting something out.

I decided to work out to a fitness DVD called Metamorphosis. It was made by Tracy AndersonGwyneth's trainer and the mastermind behind "Tracy Anderson Method." I decided to try the "Cardio Workout" where Tracy says absolutely nothing, only hectically dances to porn music for 30 minutes. After a half-hour, I wasn't just sweaty, I was about to drop. I laid myself down on the floor and reminisced about the days where I could ingest all the gluten I wanted.

DAY 4

By this point, my muscles were sore but I was just about able to crawl out of bed to make it to the organic market. I was hoping to find the makings of Gwyneth classic "Baked Beans with Molasses." But I accidentally came across something else: dried bonito flakes! They exist! You can also find all manner of other Gwyneth goodies at the organic market: brown rice syrup, gluten-free toast, and almond flour. For a moment, I was entirely sure that a bag of spelt pasta was whispering, "You have the answer, you are the teacher!"

I got home and made the beans. They taste alright but they looked like they'd already done a round through someone's digestive tract. Not for Instagram.

A few hours later I met up with my friends to do yoga, as we decided when we were drunk. The beginning of my trial session was pretty harmless, except for the fact that as a person who isn't flexible, it was difficult for me to do anything but scream like Michael Jackson when pulling some of the poses. And if you think it's a good idea to eat a kilo of beans before an hour of yoga, think again.

I definitely liked yoga more than Tracy Anderson's pinger dance spectacle, but my favorite position is still "shavasana," where you have to lay on the floor with your legs spread as if you'd eaten a bad curry.

DAY 5

When Gwyneth Paltrow dropped Chris Martin in March 2014, she described it as a "conscious uncoupling." I guess Gwyneth is a better person than I am. Whenever I've been dumped, I just told my mates that the person in question had died in a boating accident.

At any rate, on the fifth day of Paltrow-palooza I decided to consciously uncouple from Gwyneth. I cold-pressed a green juice for the last time, snacked on soggy almonds, and invited a few friends over for dinner where I'd be preparing Gwyneth's vegetarian dumplings.

Dinners at Chez Buchinger are usually a huge debacle. Friends usually don't even bother to hide it when searching JustEat for "something decent" to nosh. But, there was a lot at play this evening and I was about nervous as someone wearing a toupee during a tornado. While prepping my meal, I couldn't do anything else but reflect on the past days. Obviously Gwyneth Paltrow is in many ways an eccentric person who's easy to make fun ofespecially when she talks to rocks in Arizona or attacks her vagina with a steamer. But she seems to know how to lead a good life.

All of the recipes I tried from her book were delicious. I hardly felt hungry at all and I even got a Facebook message from an older man calling me a "fresh boy xD"which I assume meant that I'd gotten cuter. The dumplings didn't disappoint, either; my friends could hardly believe that this delicious dish came from my very own kitchenthe home of burned Christmas cookies and a horror juicer. Maybe all the annoying things people say about nutrition aren't as wrong as I'd always thought.

As my little experiment came to a brilliant end, I felt like Gwyneth was sitting right next to me with a proud smile on her face, darting me a look and joking, "You better not ask about my jeans."

Follow Michael on Twitter.

Bobby Henline at the Uptown 78 Lounge in San Antonio, Texas, before performing his comedy routine. Henline, 41, is a veteran of four tours to Iraq and sole survivor of an IED blast that killed the other four soldiers in his Humvee in Iraq in 2007. He received burns over 38 percent of his body in the blast. Photo by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

Like the ancient Greek story of Ajax itself, Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today is at times not an easy read. But itshould be on all must-read lists and for all the right reasons. Drawn from classicist and translator Bryan Doerries's experiences as the founder of Theater of War, a theater project that performs at military bases all over the world, Doerries's convincing book shows us how performances of fifth-century Greek tragediesand the discussions that followcanhelp us understand a part of war that's highly overlooked and yet issomething that forever effects those who participated in its unique hell. It's a striking and important document that anyone from a four-star general down to your everyday low-ranking infantry grunt can understand and be deeply moved by.

To behonest, when I first received this book, I was like, Are you fucking kidding me? As someone who's witnessed the theater of war up close and personal as an infantryman in the United States Army (Iraq 20034) and has lived to tell about it, I foundthe whole concept to be a bit absurd. I know there's allsorts of crazy shit out there beyond the conventional VA-prescribedprescription medication and/or therapy sessions to help those returninghome after war "adjust": yoga, nature hiking, scuba diving, filmmaking,horseback riding, tai chi, herbal and dietary supplements, group drum circles,art projects, meditation, ballet dancing, getaway vacations, bright-lighttherapy, music therapy, companion dogs, medical marijuana, acupuncture, andother such things. But now there's this bright idea of exposing soldiers toGreek tragedies that were written 2,500 yearsago as a way to help those struggling with readjustment issues and PTSD?Get the fuck outta here.

So, tosay that I was at first was a bit skeptical of this concept would be a bit ofan understatement. Initially, I found myself regarding the project in the same weary way as many of the soldiers, who had been forced by their chain of command toattend these performances, soldiers who soon found themselvesnot only captivated by these performances but, most importantly, identifying andrelating to the story of Ajax. Some to the point where they literally said outloud and to one another: "I am Ajax."

Italso didn't take me long at all to be in full agreement with the ambitious Armybrigadier general Loree Sutton, who, after witnessing the reaction and success that these performances had, suggested, "Here's what we do, gang. We rent football stadiums, pack them withsoldiers30,000 a performance."

Thisbook needs to be read by that larger audience as well.

Writtenby the famous playwright Sophocles, who was also a decorated general, Ajax is an uplifting and heartwarmingstory about a warrior who returns home from war and feels as if he's beenbetrayed, gets depressed, snaps, goes on a blind killing spree, then kills himself with his own sword. I recently spoke over the phone with author Bryan Doerriesabout his new book, Ajax, and Sophocles.

VICE: How did you come up with this ideaof connecting the ancient Greek tragedies with helping soldiers struggling withPTSD?
Bryan Doerries: I'm not the first person to make theconnection between ancient Greek tragedy and the military. There have beenpeople writing about that for a long time with far more scholarly credentialsthan I have, but I was the first person I guess crazy enough to takeancient Greece plays and to use them to help contemporary soldiers engage inthese issues. The idea that Jonathan Shay and others have made really popularstarting in the early 90s is that, in ancient Greek storytelling from the Homerepics The Iliad and The Odyssey to Greek tragedies, the veryimpulse to tell stories in the ancient world in the West was born from the needto hear and tell the veterans' stories. Ancient Greek tragedy, in particular, wasa form of storytelling aimed at communalizing the experience of war for anaudience that could be comprised of 17,000 citizen-soldiers in a century inwhich the Athenians saw nearly 80 years of war. Sophocles was a generalhe waselected general twice. On Aeschylus's grave, it doesn't say, "Here lies thegreatest playwright in the Western world"it says, "Here lies a man who foughtin the battle of Marathon."

"Ididn't know a single active-duty person in the military when I started Theater ofWar, so I went with that impulse, I thought, as a civilian, What can I do?"

For me, what made your book compelling werethe stories about the soldiers responding and relating to the story of Ajax.
Ithink Sophocles wrote the play to convey to all the citizen-soldiers in Athensthat if they had any of the feelings that were being expressed onstagenotthose exact feelings, but anything that would even resemble themthen they werenot alone. Not alone in a community, not alone in Greece, and not alone acrosstime. He was talking about the Trojan War, which was as distant to them, insome ways, as they are to us.

I wasmotivated to do makes things that aretrivial fall away and brings into focus what's important.

Follow Colby on Twitter.

The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today by Bryan Doerries is in bookstores and online from Knopf.

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics at her website and Twitter.

Just in case you've never seen this before

This article appeared on VICE UK.

Today, the nominees for the 2015 Mercury Prize are announced. This award supposedly recognizes the outstanding British and Irish albums released over the past 12 months, and when I was writing about music full-time, I always found plenty to say about it. Prior to this year's shortlist of 12 records being confirmed, bookies' favorites included Jamie xx's In Colour, an album of dance music for people who hate dancing, and Everything Everything's Get to Heaven, polished-to-irrelevance "quirky" indie fare for students too young and/or ignorant to have ever heard Enon and Q and Not U.

Ahem.

In video gaming, there's no obvious Mercury parallel, no award that offers just the single category, encompassing indie and major releases alike, that holds one title aloft above all others and declares: yes, this is the game. (Unless you count the GameCity Prize, but I'm not sure many people know about it, and it's not clear if it's even happening in 2015.) I talked to a few journalists at this week's Games Media Awards about this gap in the self-congratulatory calendar that probably doesn't need plugging at allit's not like there aren't awards dished out on the regular for video games that are better than other video games. We all agreed: it'd be real easy to draw up a list of 12 excellent video games from the British Isles released over the past dozen months that would comprise a shortlist worth turning Twitter into a battleground (again) over. Pointless, probably, but it could be done.

So I'm doing it. For no other reason than it's Mercury announcement day and it's comforting to feel like you're producing topical content. Oh, the C-word. How it stings. Here's 12 video games released during the same "catchment period" as the 2015 Mercury Prizefrom September 9, 2014 to September 25, 2015presented in a list of sorts that only exists because you're reading it.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Brighton-based indie studio The Chinese Room got itself an all-formats number one in August with ...Rapture. You do a lot of walking in it, which cheesed some reviewers off. Not me. The game's so pretty I was content to crawl around its astoundingly peaceful apocalypse, and I wrote as much over here.

Volume

This stylish stealth gamethat unexpectedly shredded my nerves when I played it on its August releaseis the follow-up to maker Mike Bithell's breakthrough puzzle-platformer Thomas Was Alone. It features ready made levels to creep around, a solid 100 of them, spread across a story mode, and also a build-your-own option which makes the create-a-park component of the latest Tony Hawk game look like kids chucking Duplo bricks at an old man's haggard face. Great music, too.

Alien: Isolation

Scared the shit out of me. The best video game based on the sci-fi horror film franchise since Alien 3 on the SNES. Yes, since Alien 3 on the SNES. VICE just marked its year anniversary with a piece right here.

Her Story

Did she do it? Didn't she? Sam Barlow's FMV-driven investigative puzzler of June is a terrifically inventive experience that puts the player in the position of deciding the fate of a young woman who just might have offed her husband. It's set in the 1990s and the old-school computer effects, which extend to the clacking of the keyboard you're not actually using, are brilliant. Read our interview with Sam here.

Until Dawn

The unlikely critical hit of the summer just gone, this PS4 exclusive mixed horror and humor in a compellingly creative style, asking the player to essentially direct their own slasher movie. A bunch of not-quite-teenagers, a spooky old house on a cursed mountainside, and just a squeeze of sexy potential: stir and leave to simmer across a few evenings of watching everyone die horribly. With little mainstream marketing from Sony, Supermassive's surprise success could have easily been missed. I like to think that VICE's coverage of the game helped secure at least a few fans.

Football Manager 2015

It's Football Manager, of course it's like a drugone that some players have been known to get rather too addicted to.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's article on highly competitive gaming, eSports

LittleBigPlanet 3

A.k.a. Sackboy gets some friends. While the single-player aspect of Sumo Digital's November-released platformer is somewhat forgettable, its backwards compatibility with previous series entries' user-made stages and overhauled creator modeshare your devilish levels with others online using an intuitive UI; laugh maniacally as they die and die and die by your wicked handmake it the Super Mario Maker-like must-have for anyone dumb enough to not own a Wii U. Check out more words on the game here.

The Swindle

What was it that our own Carolyn Petit wrote about this steampunk crime caper, from BAFTA-winning indie studio Size Five? Oh, yep, that's it: "Every decision is yours and the stakes are so high that The Swindle succeeds at capturing the feel of being in a heist film better than any other game I've played." And that includes Grand Theft Auto V, which has really good heists.

Elite: Dangerous

It's the Han Solo simulator that you've always dreamed of, obviously. But don't just take my word for itAndy Kelly penned some fine words of his own on Frontier's galaxies-spanning epic, and exchanged a few with its director David Braben (OBE), back in November.

Grow Home

Grow Home wasn't supposed to come out. It began as an in-house, private project at Newcastle's Ubisoft Reflections studio, an internal experiment that had very little in common with the open-world extravaganzas of the company's parent publisher. But the team soon realized they had something special sitting right in front of them. The player controls a little robot who's doing all he can to collect seeds from a gigantic beanstalk thing on an alien world in need of oxygen. More plants means more O2, so the more seedlings that our mechanical hero can nurture, the better, albeit mainly to reach new areas. And these things can grow big, which is sort of the main point of the gameplay: once the central plant reaches a target height, congratulations. There's not a lot to Grow Home, really, and it's criminally short, but while you're in its grasp you'll be thinking of nothing else.

OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood

More excellent side-scrolling shredding from the dudes of Roll7, a BAFTA-winning London-based studio that VICE already profiled as not only being able to duke it out with the bigger boys of the gaming industry, but proving more than capable of knocking them on their asses.

Batman: Arkham Knight

Punch famous villains in their stupid faces, over and over again, until you no longer know where you end and the Dark Knight begins.

Related: Busting the Myths Around the Mercury Prize

I hear you, I do: where's FIFA? Thing is, right, that FIFA 16 was made in Canada. I know. Canada. Equally, LEGO Dimensions came out two days after the cut-off point, so misses out. Those exceptions aside, I dare you to pick at my list and not conclude it represents the best spread of relatively arbitrarily assembled video games made within the past 12 months, somewhere that isn't too far away from where I'm sitting right now, where I might even be able to drive to, where they just about speak my language and I can use real money to buy fries, an entirely relevant snack given how salty the internet would be right now if this was a legit prize with a winner and everything. Which would be Until Dawn. Obviously?

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Photo by Dan Winter/courtesy of HBO

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

There's a lot of blood in The Knick. Squirting out of cadavers, smeared onto the uniforms ofthe doctors and nurses, spilling from the lips of its characters. The award-winning show,whose second season on Cinemax premieres tonight, follows a group of doctors andnurses working to combat the high mortality rates of the time with innovativesurgeries at the Knickerbocker Hospital during the early 20th century. Writers Jack Amiel and Michael Begler and director Steven Soderbergh don't deny the fact that "medical advances" have always come at theexpense of human life. The cures and operations that we now hail asrevolutionary were once barely understood conceptsthe experiments of troubleddoctors who were grappling with their own ailments and addictions.

In the new season, we see Dr. John Thackery(Clive Owen) delving into an intensive study of addiction. Thackery, who at theend of season one suffered an extreme cocaine-induced breakdown and wascommitted to rehab, cuts into the corpses of people who succumbed to heroin andalcohol addictions, trying to find common links. Spurred by his own compulsiveneed for a fix, he proposes this line of study to the board of theKnickerbocker, which is comprised of old, white men who scoff at the idea. "Addiction isa problem of lowly, moral degenerates," huffs one boardmember, startled thatThackery would even propose such a thing.

With this new storyline, the writers are tappinginto a contemporary issue. Even today, there's stigma around drug addiction, causing familial embarrassment and personal shame. Addiction isoften seen as a pipeline to criminal activity, and substance abuse is met with jail time instead of medical treatment, leading to a dangerous cycle of relapsein many people. In tracing the earlythreads of that stigma, the show could offer some valuable insight into how weaddress addiction today.

Meanwhile, the Paris-trained Dr. AlgernonEdwards, played beautifully by Andr Holland, receives some news that threatenshis livelihood as a doctor. Last season, we saw him painfully navigate amedical world that saw his exclusion and humiliation as commonplace andnecessary, only to see him rise up, create various medical proceduresincluding one in which he repairs an elderly black man's herniaand anunderground clinic to serve black patients who were refused entry into theKnickerbocker.

Photo by Mary Cybulski/courtesy of HBO

Dr. Algernon inhabits a curious spacehe's a better doctor than his white colleagues, but represents a group of people who aren't seen as human.

The show depicts the early world of medicine asan extension of racism, religion, fear, corruption, and ignorance. All of theseills merge with scientific thought, bolstered by the powerful white men whoendorse them. They bear some of kind of misguided "truth" that allows groups ofpeople to be deemed unworthy of proper medical attention, includingAfrican-Americans, women who need abortions (and must secretly get them donethrough a fierce nun named Sister Harriet), prostitutes, and immigrants, all ofwhich sounds not so different than today. Here, Dr. Algernon inhabits a curiousspacehe's a better doctor than his white colleagues, but represents a group ofpeople who aren't seen as human.

This is shown ina scene from season two in which Dr.Everett Gallinger, a strapping, attractive man with aracist streak and jealousy toward Algernon's success as a black surgeon,happens upon a group of white medical colleagues as they extol the virtues of eugenics, proposingsterilization as a way to stop "mongrel" races from procreating and dilutingthe European bloodline. "Many of the great minds support this new line ofstudy, including Carnegie. I will be teaching a course on it next fall," one ofthem boasts. Gallinger leans in, intrigued.

The Knick deals with race in stirring, uncomfortable ways. In one of the best episodes of last season, a race riot erupts after a white man harasses a black woman and is stabbedby her black male lover. In sweeping, extended tracking shots and dynamic widecompositions, Soderbergh illustrates the making of a mob, as white residentstear through the town beating, punching, and bludgeoning any black person theysee. Dr. Algernon becomes a target of their hatred because he works in thehospital where the white man dies from his stab wounds. Somehow, he's blamed.To save him from the mob, the sympathetic Nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson)transports him to the local black hospital underneath a rolling hospital bedwith a thin white sheet on top. Soderbergh shoots the scene from Algernon'sperspective underneath the rolling bed and sheet, and we see the sweat collecton his forehead.

But this is not the only time that Algernonflirts with death in the series. His love affair with Cornelia Robertson, the daughter of the hospital's founder,puts him in an impossible situation. The forbidden nature of their interracialunion only make it more satisfying to watch. The show gets the sexual chemistry between characters right, and the result is beautiful televisederoticism. Last season, the relationship between Thackery and Elkins floweredinto a scene where Elkins sits on her bed the day after their lovemaking andrecounts the moments we didn't see previously. She smiles and giggles with eachimage, as soft natural light falls on her face. Soderbergh's direction here andthroughout the series gives acute such insight into the characters and the locationsthey inhabit. Characters are often framed in wide shots, amongst elaborateperiod sets that situate them in the murky New York landscape, while low, high,and skewed camera angles give a sense of a world that's out of whack.

Watch: The Real 'True Detective'?:

Perhaps what makes the show work so well is thatit's not just a period drama, or a medical drama. It's a show about people whocome into this hospital with their own complex cultural worlds during a time whenthose worldsof addiction, blackness, interracial relationships, andfemale sexualityweren't accepted. Thackery, while gifted, is an addict, and hemay be forever. The show is not concerned with an easy or neat way to cure hisaddiction. Nor is it concerned with making Algernon's existence as a blackdoctor any rosier than it would've been during that time. Elkins, who suffersthe end of her affair with Thackery this season, attempts to negotiate herChristian upbringing with the "sins" she committed, only to be chastised andcast out due to her confession. Later, we see her reading a book aboutgynecology, a field populated by men during that time. The ways thesecharacters interact with the medicine and procedures they perform are allinfluenced by these complex backstories.

The doctors' forward-thinking approaches to thelimited, often accepted medical practices of their times mirrors how certain commonmedical advances of today may be disproven as harmful in years to come, such asthose related to cancer. The Knick shows how far we have come in medicine, and in society, and how far we still have to go. Sometimes it requires a little blood.

Follow Nijla on Twitter.

The second season of The Knick premieres tonight at 10 PM on Cinemax.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Jackie Anselmo

Screencaps via WKRC

The incident: A woman's nine-year-old daughter thought that some Halloween decorations were real dead bodies.

The appropriate response: Taking five seconds out of your day to explain to your child that she is looking at Halloween decorations.

The actual response: The mom complained to the city in an effort to have the decorations removed.

Late last week, Cincinnati, Ohio's WKRC ran a story about the Halloween decorations at a suburban home in the nearby town of Parma. The decorations, which you can see above, consist of several mutilated plastic bodies hanging up around the house's front yard. Despite the fact that they're all pretty standard Halloween decorations, a local mother named Jackie Anselmo took issue with the fact that the house is less than a block from a school.

"You take a double take because it is a very realistic display," Jackie told the network. "And almost horrified that somebody would think it's OK to put it that close to an elementary school."

"I felt scared cause I thought they were real people," said her daughter, who saw the display while being taken to school.

Instead of expressing her concerns with the homeowners, Jackie took a photo of the display and emailed it to city officials. She says that the city told her there was nothing they could do about the display.

Speaking to WKRC, Vicki Barrett, who lives in the Halloween-y house, said that nobody had approached her to complain about the display, and that she would consider toning the display down. "We don't want to scare any kids," she added.

The network asked Jackie's lame daughter if she had any suggestions for a more appropriate Halloween display. "Like, fake plastic sculls or little tiny skeletons or blow up pumpkins," she said.

Cry-Baby #2: Some parents in Georgia

Screencap via ABC

The incident: A school taught kids about ISIS.

The appropriate response: Nothing. Schools exist to teach children about the world.

The actual response: Several parents filed complaints.

Last week, 7th grade students at Jones Middle School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, were taught about ISIS during a social studies class. As part of the lesson, students were given a homework sheet that featured an explanation of what ISIS is. It included information about the group's killing of journalist James Foley.

On the back was the cartoon shown above, which shows a man holding a bloody knife.

ABC 6 reported that a "handful" of parents had lodged formal complaints about the lesson. Many more reportedly expressed outrage on social media.

"This does represent the rigorous integrated lessons that we want our students to be exposed to," school spokesperson Sloan Roach told ABC. "It was really designed to help make students think."

One unnamed mother who was interviewed by the network said: "There is zero tolerance for weapons in Gwinnett Country, but yet this was OK to send home." This is, presumably, because a drawing of a knife is not a weapon.

The mother reportedly wished to remain anonymous "out of fear of retribution." It was not specified whether she was concerned these retributions would come from the school or ISIS.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A guy who threw a tantrum over bacon jalapeo mac and cheese vs. a woman who fired a gun at some suspected shoplifters.

Winner: The fucking bacon jalapeo mac and cheese guy.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Thumbnail photo via Flickr user Mike Mozart

Read: Meet the Working Moms of Porn

On Wednesday, a woman named Gina Young and her twin sons were strolling through Target in Campbell, California, when her children's virgin ears were assaulted by the sounds of porn playing over the store's loudspeakers.

Young's video of the scene made the rounds online, but the real story didn't start coming together until a few days later, when KTVU reported that this is at least the fourth time mysterious porn audio has been piped into Targets in Northern California since last spring.

KTVU writes that one of their own employees witnessed a similar porn-y Target incident at a Bay Area store in April. San Luis Obispo was hit in July, and Tulare got it in September.

That can't be a coincidence, right? Could it be that there's some mysterious hacker on the loose, dialing into the Target speaker mainframe and rerouting porn? Is that even how hacking works? And what, if anything, can be done?

"We are actively reviewing the situation with the team to better understand what happened and to help ensure this doesn't happen again," a spokeswoman for Target said. Until then, hide your kids.

Mug shots of the six people charged after the beating incident. Image via Fox59

In New Hartford, New York, there's a three-story brick building from which people in long black trench coats are said to come and go at 3 AM. Outside the converted schoolhouse is a sign that reads, "Welcome to the Word of Life," and children are seen there performing yard work. Women are rarely spotted on the premises without men, and the bathrooms are helpfully labeled "Adam" and "Eve."

This eerie upstate communityonce a closed-off mystery and source of anxiety to neighborsis now being picked apart in an investigation into a 19-year-old's death, the details of which sound like they are set in a Southern Gothic short story rather than a New York State suburb. Police say that on Tuesday, Lucas Leonard was fatally beaten and his 17-year-old brother was severely injured during a counseling session, possibly because one of them had plans to leave the church.

The brothers' parents, Bruce and Deborah Leonard, have been charged with first-degree manslaughter, and four other members of the cultish church have been charged with assault. All have pleaded not guilty, according to the New York Times, and an attorney for Deborah Leonard has claimed there was reason to suspect that the brothers were molesting children in the church. (On Thursday, he told the Associated Press the "intervention" spiraled out of control and she felt helpless to stop it.)

Officers with the New Hartford Police Department, for their part, say there's no evidence to back up claims of molestation or sexual misconduct.

So prosecutors and police are left to piece together what exactly what happened inside Word of Life on Tuesday, and why. Chadwick Handville, a former member, told the Times that a man named Jerry Irwin had founded it in the 80s. He apparently disappeared for a while, and then came back in the 90s, ousting the leadership and subjecting the congregation to systematic abuse. Apparently, one of this tactics for getting people to do physical labor was to deprive them of sleep so they would become more open to suggestion.

"Soon he became the only authority in that church, the sole authority," Handville told the Times. "Then things broke down: respect for each other, respect for the law, respect for other people."

Irwin died a few years ago leaving his wife, Traci, as the church's spiritual leader (members reportedly referred to her as "Mother"). His daughter, Tiffanie, became the pastor, and the 29-year-old was the one who allegedly called the counseling session that went wrong on Tuesday.

Lucas Leonard died the day after that meeting, and his brother is still in the hospital with serious injuries. Joseph Irwin, who is 26 and Tiffanie's brother; Sarah Ferguson, who is 33 and the Leonard brothers's half-sister; David Morey, who is 26; and Linda Morey, who is 54, have been charged with felony assault.

Before their story made headlines, neighbors described the kids as polite and quiet. One told the Associated Press that Lucas and his younger brother weren't allowed to have sleepovers and were required to read the Bible for two hours every day. Another told the Times that his wife had given the family a Disney cartoon, but that the kids weren't allowed to watch it because "Mickey Mouse never married Minnie Mouse." The neighbor added that the Leonard home, which he has lived next to for eight years in the nearby village of Clayville, "stinks like hell."

The church used to be patrolled on Halloween to prevent vandalism, but after Leonard died, it was surrounded by heavily armored police vehicles and cops pointing riles, witnesses told the Syracuse Post-Dispatch. Eventually, at least seven children were taken from inside and placed in foster care.

Now the place sits empty, its once guarded-off entrance open to any reporter who cares to walk inside. According to one from the Post-Dispatch, things seem to have been abandoned quickly, and the space is in disarray with papers everywhere and sandwiches left half-eaten.

A preliminary hearing for the defendants was scheduled for Friday.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Footage courtesy Daily VICE

Slamming back sangria (or bourbon or screech) is a natural reaction to dealing with a lengthy dumpsterfire of a federal election. Which makes the hosts of Drunk Feminist Films instant experts when it comes to properly assessing the effect of campaign ads. DFF is, after all, a collective of feminists whose approach to analyzing gender representation in Hollywood involves a whole lot of booze. They host screenings and run a YouTube series and are generally hilarious and outspoken about films like Gone Baby Gone and 50 Shades of Grey because, well, booze.

Watch: Daily VICE featuring the drunk feminists

We wanted to get their perspective on campaign ads from the leaders of the three major federal parties (the actual ads, not the fucked up ones created by the director of The Chickening) so we invited Amy Wood, Amil Niazi, and Gillian Goerz to our screening room for some "shots and heckling."

Some of the choice quotes on the various ads include: "I think I caught a small glimpse of his dickprint" (Justin Trudeau trapped on the elevator); "My number one response to Thomas Mulcair is that he looks like a hamster" and "It's not that he has a beard, it's that he shaves his whole face. #hamstertruth" (getting to know Tom Mulcair); and "it doesn't say what he did about it, it just says that it happened while he was prime minister" (the world went to shit while Stephen Harper was PM).

Follow Drunk Feminist Films on Twitter.