Mark Duffy sees the world as it is: often a bit stupid. The Irish-born, London-based photographer just released his first book, Vote No.1, which is made up of photographs of the campaign posters that coated Ireland's walls and buses during local elections last year. The book's printed in an edition of 500, including 100 special editions handmade from actual corriboard election posters and bound using plastic ties.

Duffy focused his attention on the wear and tear and clumsy placement of posters and screws, leaving him a series of images of local politicians who look like they've been severely disfigured or pierced quite aggressively through the neck with zip ties.

The book's been featured in a bunch of photography festivals around the world, was nominated for the LUMA Dummy Book Award and won the Vienna Photo Book Award, so I thought it was probably worth having a chat about it with Mark.

VICE: Your first book is out—has this been a long time coming?
Mark Duffy: Well, I've been kind of doing photography for years; studied it in college, graduated about ten years ago. That course completely put me off photography for a long time, actually. Originally I was doing fashion, but I got sick of that very quickly. I moved away and gave up photography for a good few years, and then took it up in more of a documentary style. I didn't really do anything with the photographs, so it's only recently that I've been trying to establish myself.

You say documentary, but they're also kind of abstract still-life photos. Are aesthetics a big part of your work, or rather a tool for expressing specific ideas?
The image has to be visually appealing. It can't just be an image of an interesting thing; it has to be in an interesting way, but I don't really overthink these things too much, I suppose. I respond to a situation. If there's something that I think is interesting to photograph I try to photograph it in the most interesting way possible.

They're also funny, your photos, which is quite rare in typical documentary photography.
One reason I think this project has done well is because there doesn't seem to be much humor in photography these days. When I was a teenager, I particularly liked Elliott Erwitt. I would say she's one of the photographers that got me into photography, just because her images were so funny. Also, have you ever seen Ralph Eugene Meatyard? He's a very strange photographer, who photographed kids wearing these weird distorted masks in these dilapidated surroundings—really odd stuff. I was a big fan of his when I was in college, and only recently did I remember his work. I was thinking about this and I thought that you can see the influence that it's had on my work. It's quite disturbing, actually. I imagine that Roger Ballen was heavily influenced by him.

I feel like a part of your work is almost laughing affectionately at society, and a part of it is quite sombre and critical.
I didn't intentionally decide to do something about politics, I just happened to be back in Ireland when there was an election going on. I grew up with these things, and they're so different from here. When you're , if you don't watch television you wouldn't know that there's an election going on; there are very little signs of it, apart from the crap they shove through your front door. But in Ireland these posters are absolutely everywhere, stacked on top of each other. On the way home one day, I noticed a horribly disfigured face placed on the side of a car and I thought it was hilarious. A couple of minutes later, I saw the first picture in the book, the woman with the plastic tie through her throat, and I was just like. "This is ridiculous, how have people not noticed this?" I was thinking maybe this is the result of disgruntled workers intentionally disfiguring their bosses' faces, I think it's so strange that people didn't see it.

So you wouldn't consider yourself political?
I have opinions, but it's something I tried to steer away from for a while. I try to keep my head in the sand because it can be quite disheartening, I think, when you look at the political system, especially in this country. But I try to be fairly neutral in this book. I didn't focus on the party I hate most or anything like that.

Were you trying to get across that sense of disappointment?
It was more to reflect the general mood as I see it in Ireland at the moment, which is people just really losing faith in the political system. One party got us into trouble with the financial crisis, and then we elected the other fellas and they came in and they haven't really done anything apart from raise taxes and cut public spending. So I thought it was fortunate to find something that accurately reflected the mood as I saw it. There's a lot of work out there of political posters with graffiti on them and stuff like that, so I really made a point of steering clear of that. I thought this was a softer way of doing it.

Do you think art should have a purpose? Say you lived in a country where political satire was punishable by law, do you think you'd still do it?
That's a really tough question. I think that art is such a varied and individual thing, and I wouldn't want to say it has to be one thing or another, but I think that art is at its best when it has a point. And the more easily understood and accessible that point is, the stronger the work is. But if it's only decipherable with the aid of a masters in art history or by reading a five-page essay telling you what to think, then you're only ever going to get through to a tiny handful of people.

As for the second part of the question, it's so hard to say. Instinctively, my reaction would be to say, "Yeah, of course I would have done it." But that's so easy for me to say, having never experienced anything like the level of oppression and fear that you describe. Honestly, I don't know. I'd like to think I would have at least taken the photos, but whether or not I'd actually do anything with them under those circumstances, who knows.

Have you spoken to any of the politicians in the book?
Two, one of which I contacted because the trade edition , and she said, "Yeah, as long as it doesn't make fun of politics." But I showed her the project and she was OK with it, because it's not blatantly insulting—it's just a gentle poke, you know.

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What's the most fun you've had with photography in the past, or the most memorable experience?
Once on a photography job I had to hide in a garden shed to avoid the Queen's security so I could then come out and photograph her meeting a client of mine. I was working at the Chelsea Flower Show, but my boss only had a pass for the Royal visit for himself and this other designer, and they had paid me to be there for the day so they wanted the photographs. I had to sit in for an hour and a half while they cleared everybody out.

In terms of subjects, I think I'm quite drawn to grotesque things. The photograph I most regret not getting since I've been living in London is something that I saw once, on my commute, walking through Peckham. This guy was walking towards me with a trolley and I had to double take because it was a trolley full of skinned sheep's heads, but I didn't have a camera on me. I was absolutely gutted.

I actually have a funny story relating to the book. When I started shooting the project, I had the idea for the format of the book immediately, so I started to try and track down all of these posters to make the covers. This particular guy was a local politician, and he was like, "Yeah, I've got tons, you can take as many as you want." So I went down to his house and he had a shed full of them. I took a massive stack, went through them, and saw that not only were they not all his posters, but they weren't even his party's posters. He had basically been cutting down his opponents' posters, and I helped him destroy the evidence. The games that go on—dirty games.

What are you working on at the moment?
I'm toying with a few things at the minute, but for the past year it's been all about this book and trying to get it published and trying to promote it. I have a full time job on top of all that, which means I haven't had that much time to actually take pictures. I have a few little things on the boil—we'll see if they develop into something bigger.

Top secret?
No, not really. I actually had a really awkward one a few weeks ago; I was at a gallery and a friend of mine introduced me to this other photographer, a relatively prominent guy. We were chatting away, so I asked him, "So, what's your next book?" He starts telling me what he's doing, and I'm like: "Oh, I actually have to stop you there, because I'm doing something remarkably similar and I don't want you to accuse me of plagiarism." It was really, really awkward. We both just kinda went, "OK, bye."

No matter how good your idea is, there's always someone out there with the same idea at the same time. You really have to strike.

Buy a copy of Vote No.1 here.

The sun setting over Dubai. Photo via The_Dead_Pixel

There's an old Jon Stewart stand-up bit about spending time in Arizona during the height of summer, and the cooling nozzles built into some buildings there that go off intermittently to spray a cooling mist on the unlucky bastards stuck outside in the desert heat. Steam rises from the streets as the water hits them, and Stewart wonders—while walking through the hot, red, sun-burnt city during the blistering midday heat—if he's even still on planet earth. How do people live here?, he asks himself.

Well, soon, at least in some cities on the Persian Gulf, people may not be able to anymore. A new study released Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that some cities there will "exceed a threshold for human adaptability," possibly by as early as 2100. They will, as the Washington Post succinctly put it, "literally be too hot for human survival."

Many metropolises in the region—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and, perhaps most distressingly, the Saudi holy city of Mecca—could be affected. Critically, they might exceed a "wet bulb" temperature—a measure of actual air temp and the moisture the air contains—of 95 degrees Fahrenheit during summer months, or a heat index of 170, according to the authors of the study. That's important, because when "wet bulb" temps rise to that extent, the body can lose the ability to cool itself by getting rid of excess heat via sweat, or even by seeking shade. At these temps, the body takes on the excess heat instead of shedding it, and those outside risk heat stroke, hyperthermia, and, ultimately, death.

The report was authored by a pair of scientists—Jeremy Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, from Loyola Marymount University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively—who write, "Our results expose a regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future."

The study projects "an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this critical threshold under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas concentrations." That's a science-y way of saying unless we curb carbon emissions soon, before too long the sun in the Persian Gulf will be hot enough to actually murder you.

Most concerning to Pal and Eltahir are the potential ramifications for the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken by millions each year.

"This necessary outdoor Muslim ritual is likely to become hazardous to human health, especially for the many elderly pilgrims, when the Hajj occurs during the boreal summer."

The Persian Gulf is built for extreme heat. It regularly has clear skies, and sports relatively shallow seas, which absorb heat and release water vapor that retains heat near the ground. This past summer Bandar Mahshahr in Iran came close to experiencing a wet-bulb temp of 95 F, falling just short at 94.28—an anomaly Pal and Eltahir's study shows could soon become the norm.

Luckily, as the quote from the report above illustrates, these possibly lethal temperatures predicted in the Persian Gulf will only occur if we continue "business as usual," and steps aren't taken to curb carbon emissions. Countries like India have pledged to reduce their carbon emissions 33 to 35 percent by 2030, and President Obama has urged large US companies to commit to cutting emissions, and has also announced historic carbon pollution standards for power plants. With the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled to begin on November 30 in Paris with the stated objective of achieving a "legally binding and universal agreement on climate" from all nations, there may still be some hope for future generations to stand outside in Dubai without dying.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

Who is he? Tom Steyer, 58, billionaire hedge fund manager, environmentalist, and co-founder of the NextGen Climate super PAC. Al Gore once called him "Mr. Tipping Point", which is a weird nickname that has something to do with Steyer's efforts against climate change.

Do you know him? That depends. If you're a Democrat, then probably. Steyer has been a fundraising force of nature for the party the post- Citizens United era, donating more than any other individual in the 2014 midterm election, with the explicit goal of electing candidates who agree with his signature platform on combating climate change. In 2014, Steyer's NextGen Climate super PAC spent $74 million—nearly $67 million of which came from his own personal fortune—to elect "green" candidates, and he's almost certain to raise more for the eventual Democratic presidential candidate and other Senate and gubernatorial candidates running in 2016.

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Is he effective? Unfortunately, Steyer's record hasn't been so great. In 2014, a generally piss-poor election for Democrats, only three of the candidates Steyer backed won their races. In addition, the billionaire's biggest midterm target—Florida Governor Rick Scott—won his reelection campaign, despite Steyer's efforts to help Scott's opponent Charlie Crist.

But Steyer has also had some real success in other years. He funded opposition to a 2010 California ballot initiative that would have eliminated the state's greenhouse emissions law, and in 2012, led a successful initiative to eliminate a corporate tax break in California and redirect the money into a "Clean Job Creation Fund."

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Outside of his home state, Steyer also helped Democrat Terry McAuliffe get elected as governor of Virginia in 2013 by matching the Republican Governor's Association's donation to McAuliffe's opponent with his own money. That same year, Steyer donated significant money and resources to defeat Keystone XL-supporting Congressman Stephen Lynch in the Democratic primary for Massachusetts' US Senate race, although his tactics in that campaign were slightly controversial.

Over the past couple of years, NextGen Climate has also gained a reputation for putting out some very strange campaign ads including a 2014 spot featuring laughing millionaires talking about then-Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst. The most controversial ad, in which an actor playing TransCanada CEO Russ Girling rode the Keystone XL pipeline like a luge, was pulled by NBC.

Why does he matter? While his efforts in the last election cycle may have fallen short, Steyer's enormous wealth and willingness to give a bunch of money to green-focused Democrats and candidates gives liberals an answer to conservative dark money powerhouses Charles and David Koch. Steyer actually met David Koch for the first time in July, and the Atlantic reported that they posted for pictures and later met for coffee. Isn't it sweet when two billionaire political donors can manage to find some common ground?

Steyer, however, rejects comparison to the Koch brothers, and he has a point: The billionaire conservatives haven't been nearly as transparent as Steyer and his super PAC, funneling the money in their political organization through several different PACs and nonprofits , many of which do not disclose their donors. The Kochtopus network is also far more flush than Steyer and his super PAC, spending $400 million in 2012 and more than $250 million in the 2014 midterms. And while Steyer is expected to ramp up contributions in 2016, it's unlikely to come close to the nearly $900 million the Kochs plan to pump into this election cycle.

What does he want? It's tough to say what Steyer's influence has been on the national debate, but it's no coincidence that his chief issue—climate change—has been pushed to the forefront of the Democratic platform. Whereas Democratic candidates in past years have hesitated to talk about global warming in a substantive way, Steyer set a baseline back in July by asking for candidates to commit to making sure that 50 percent of US energy comes from clean sources by 2030 and that all US energy is completely clean by 2050 as a condition of getting his financial support.

Related: A Brief Guide to the Koch Brothers

So far, it seems that Steyer's efforts are paying off. When Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton unveiled her green energy plan, her campaign staff eagerly noted that it "cleared" Steyer's target. Her opponent, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, is running for the on an aggressive clean energy platform, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has been calling climate change the "greatest national security threat" facing the US today. All three have voiced their opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.

Who is he supporting for president? Steyer, who has been active in Democratic politics for nearly his whole life, hasn't said who he's supporting yet, but we have a good idea who he'll back in the end. He initially supported Clinton in the 2008, and he and his wife hosted a fundraiser for Clinton at their California home back in May.

Steyer has had good things to say about most of the Democratic candidates, though, and a NextGen spokeswoman cited Clinton, O'Malley, and Sanders as "leaders" who "stand up on the campaign trail for climate action." But don't expect Sanders to take Mr. Tipping Point's money: Proving that his crusade against Big Money includes those who agree with his policies, Sanders told CNN's Wolf Blitzer this spring that, "Frankly, it is vulgar to me that we're having a war between billionaires."

Is he ever going to run for office? Steyer's name was mentioned frequently as a possible successor to US Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, when she retires in 2016, but he passed on that race earlier this year. When he made that decision, though, a "source close to Steyer" told The Hillthat it "was no longer a question of if or when—but what office" the megadonor would eventually decide to pursue. The word now is that Steyer could run for governor of California in 2018. He launched a committee "Fair Shake Commission" dedicated to combating income inequality in August, intensifying speculation .

For now, however, Steyer is dedicating most of efforts toward electing likeminded candidates around the country. His NextGen Climate super PAC has already spent $6.6 million this election cycle, and some have predicted that the figure could easily rise to well over $100 million by next November. And if liberals are going to be competitive with Koch-funded conservatives, they're going to need it.

Follow Paul Blest on Twitter. Drew Lerman, the illustrator, is also on Twitter so follow him too.

A screenshot from 'F.E.A.R.'

I first stumbled upon the game First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R.) at the comic book shop I frequented back in 2006. I usually went there to play card games with some of the older folks, and one of them had set up an Xbox 360 and TV on one of the plastic folding tables usually covered in longboxes and playmats. As I watched him play one of the game's first levels, he noticed me and turned to the store manager behind him, who was organizing Magic: The Gathering booster packs on a display case.

"Is it OK to let him watch?"

"Hey, are you 18?" he asked me.

"No." I was a freshman in high school. But I was way into the idea of consuming media I wasn't meant to.

"Then sorry, dude."

The guy playing turned and scooted the monitor away from me. "Yeah, sorry. But this is like the scariest fucking game ever."

I furrowed my brow in doubt. No way. But as it turned out, the October 2005-released F.E.A.R. ended up being one the most frightening experiences I've had in video gaming. But not for the reasons you might think.

I was as scared of monsters as any kid growing up. I had a "typical" reaction to Resident Evil 2, the first real horror game I never played—I refused to ever look at its intro sequence and only could only watch someone else play it on the condition that Claire Redfield would never touch a zombie. But by the time the state-of-the-art first-person horror F.E.A.R. came out, those primal fears had mostly fallen away. Monolith Productions' work was an exhilarating tightrope of first-person shooter design, with enemies that reacted to player movements instead of simply acting out their own scripts. It's cheesy now, and the AI patterns are obvious and exploitable, but during my first playthrough all those years ago it felt exhilarating to encounter opponents who seemed to acknowledge my presence in a noticeable way.

But scary? Not really. In one of the first levels, Alma, the game's Samara knockoff, ambled towards me in a hospital hallway laminose with blood and fire, and all I could do was laugh. "Scariest fucking game ever?" Please. This was about as frightening as a Simpsons Halloween special.

But then, come the game's fourth leveI, I found myself inside an enormous office. And as soon as I entered the Armatech building by crashing through a glass window on its ceiling, I felt a twinge. The way the harsh and disparate lighting caught these cubicles and empty office lounges was just perfect, and a little too familiar. It brought back an old fear of mine.

Alma. Creepy. Kinda.

Years before I ever touched an Xbox, my mother was a janitor. Working the night shift at the towering Travel and Transport building (a name generic enough to fit a game video game from the mid-00s), she vacuumed, steam-cleaned, and wiped several floors every night, all on her own. It was low-pay work, the kind you only take on when you're a mother of four who couldn't speak a word of English.

On occasions, she'd take my brother and I along with her, to help get her through her chores a little faster and make her effective wage-per-hour just a little bit higher. By the time we got to the building, everyone else had gone home. Without the need to give dozens of corporate and personal vacation specialists the light to see their keyboards and coffee makers, only one out of every ten or so bulbs was on, leaving most of the building in an artificial twilight; each glowing orb was a beacon, and my brother and I wanted to stay near the light as often as possible. It was the two of us, our mother and a Rubbermaid cleaning cart against the darkness.

Article continues after the video below

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Every once in a while my mother would let us scurry off to pilfer the nearest vending machine, get to the break room, and watch some TV. On the way, we'd shoot glances at the cubicles, to see what made all of these people work at such a boring place. We'd hop between the illuminated areas, chasing, and keeping track of each other so one of us couldn't leap out of nowhere to scare the other. And naturally, we maintained a look out for anything else that might be lurking in the shadows. Boys and their imaginations: silence and stillness can conjure such wonderful horrors in the mind's eye, nightmares banished only by remaining in the light, in the company of each other and whatever was on television at that time of night. Garbage, probably, but it kept us secure through our mother's shifts, all she could find at the time to support our family.

After a couple of years of cleaning these staid, dimly-lit hallways, my mother got a job at a meat-packing factory, which we weren't allowed to visit.

F.E.A.R., the "scariest fucking game ever," made me relive a lot of those moments at Travel and Transport: staring a blaring TV, the only light source in an otherwise pitch-black room; taking out the trash and having my brother hold the door open as I walked through the harsh glow of the street lamps to get to the dumpster; stepping across a floor and checking every cubicle with a flashlight to make sure it was tidy (and, y'know, that its occupant had gone home, just in case). As I painted the Armatech hallways with the blood of dozens of its soldiers, encountered phantoms, and broken technology, this is what I was actually afraid of. I didn't fear the armed opposition or Alma herself—she wasn't going to hurt me, and I had more than enough firepower and health packs to deal with mere humans. I was afraid of their absence, because it left me to wrestle with my memories of the Travel and Transport building, of not knowing where I really was, and understanding that I was mostly alone and that I didn't quite know the circumstances that had led to me being there.

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Upon release, reviewers mostly praised F.E.A.R., but had issues with its repetitive environments. The offices were bland, the industrial work sites and urban environments likely a result of a raw computer processing power over aesthetic sensibility. Its later underground labs and future-tech reactors were hardly any better. Where was the variety and storytelling that made Half-Life 2 so enthralling? The outdoor combat? The fire level or platforming puzzle?

F.E.A.R. didn't need any of that. It got by on the pure rush of its combat, which admittedly now feels a bit dated. But it managed to create a startlingly real sense of doom in those saccharine, carpeted offices. The haunted office buildings, bland as they were, were a perfect stage to dredge up memories; to create an even scarier phantom by making me believe the outlandish things that happened in video games could happen in my own life.

For someone who's always seen video games as a way to visit other realities, facing the "scariest fucking game ever" meant facing something worse than virtual ghosts. It meant revisiting my own.

Follow Suriel Vazquez on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

About three months ago a guy we'll call Michael was prescribed a stimulant medication for his ADHD. He takes it three times a week, on and off, and he gets the bugs. They appear when he stays still for too long or is exposed to heavy light and sound. He knows they're not real, but the only thing he can do is try to ignore them.

The drug was called Vyvanse and it contains dextroamphetamine, an amphetamine that was used by the US Air Force in WWII as a "go-pill" for fighter pilots. The night it first happened, Michael had downed a 30mg dose and gone to bed. After a while he started to get a pulsating, tingling feeling moving across his skin like something was crawling over his body

He'd had the feeling before but this time he panicked. He ripped off his sheets and started looking for bugs. At first he couldn't find anything, but when he looked closer he found a small translucent bug about a millimeter in length. Then more. Then they were everywhere, some darker than others, like the static on a television screen.

"After a while I gave up," he said. "I was tired and just lay in bed. The crawling continued and I took about an hour to fall asleep. I would wake up several times during the night and feel a nasty itch, so I knew they were still there. This continued for three days at the same intensity."

Michael let it go for a week before he had someone check his bed to make sure he wasn't crazy. When they found nothing, he didn't believe them and in his search for answers, he ended up online where he learned about a psychosis called Ekbom's syndrome. Ekbom's or "delusional parasitosis" is a rare form of neurosis where someone genuinely believes they are being swarmed with bugs. To avoid this feeling Micahel went back to the doctor and was prescribed a meth-based medication. He still gets the bugs but tries to ignore them.

On the street, Ekbom's is more commonly known as ice bugs or meth mites, and is associated with hardcore meth users. But not everyone with Ekbom's uses meth, and not everyone on meth gets the bugs. When writing this article I spent days trying to find a local user who had experienced bugs and finally gave up. Eventually I turned to the net, which is how I found Michael, who lives in California. According to Jack Nagle, a past addict who works as the national intake and assessment manager at Dayhab, a rehab clinic specializing in meth addiction about half an hour east of the Melbourne CBD, this isn't surprising at all. He personally sees how rare ice bugs are, and even when he was a gaunt, thieving addict he never got them.

These days he's four years and four months sober. His job is to get addicts into treatment, but every time an anti-ice scare campaign hits national television, such as a recent Australian government initiative showing a woman digging her fingernails into her skin, things get a little bit harder.

"It prevents people from seeking help," he said. "Because a lot of people come here and talk to me and they think they don't have a problem because they don't have the bugs. They still have a job. They still have a family. They may have mental health issues, but they don't think they have a problem."

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When someone gets the bugs, understanding how it happens can be complicated. Dr. Nicole Lee, an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction at Flinders University, told VICE that only those doing a lot of meth, around five times a week for at least six to eight months are at risk. Yet beyond this pattern, doctors can only hazard a guess at what's going on in the brain.

Dr. Lee explained that it possibly has something to do with the way dopamine works on the pre-frontal cortex and the limbic system within the brain. Ordinarily, these two areas "talk" to each other as they work to analyze everything that happens in a person's environment. They also run on dopamine, which gets released every time a person does something nice. Anything left over gets recycled and used again the next time around.

"What we know from other forms of psychosis is that high levels of dopamine increase psychotic symptoms," Dr. Lee said.

Dr. Lee said meth floods the brain with dopamine while blocking its ability to recycle the leftovers. There are no exact figures, but estimates are that meth increases dopamine to 1,200 times baseline levels and sustained use over a long period breaks the system, killing the conversation between the two parts of the brain.

Numbers on how common Ekbom's actually is among meth users is hard to come by. The same goes for stats on those who are most at risk, but based on those who move through his clinic Nagle believes women are more likely to get the bugs. At the very least, he said they are more likely to develop some kind of obsessive skin picking disorder, which he puts down to society's obsession with beauty.

"They look at a pimple or a blemish on their arm or face and they start picking at it and they don't realize what they're doing," he said. It is a theory that seems to be supported by at least one study cited in a review of the medical literature of Ekbom's more broadly, which found women were more at risk.

Whatever the case, both Dr. Lee and Nagle stress that very few meth users ever get the bugs and using them as a measure of addiction either individually or as scare tactics in a fear campaign is stupid and harmful. Hyperbole only makes first-time meth users tune out of any conversation about the potential health impact, while at the other end, getting addicts to admit they're addicts is already hard enough without holding up a select group of hardcore users as a false standard. Addiction, as Nagle likes to tell those at his clinic, is not just drug taking, but a way of being.

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Hanna Bohman poses outside Kobane, Syria. All photos courtesy Hanna Bohman

As thousands of Syrian refugees flee the country, escaping Bashar al-Assad's barrel bombs and the barbarism of ISIS, one woman from Canada has headed to the war zone for a second time.

Hanna Bohman, aka Tiger Sun, joined the women's militia army of the People's Defence Unit, known as the YPJ in the Kurdish region of Syria (Rojava) following a near-fatal motorbike accident last year.

Bohman flew out to Rojava in February, as soon as she was fit, and took up arms with the Kurds to fight ISIS. There, she spent six months, serving in two different units, the first of which was with new recruits and saw little action besides keeping watch over open territory. The second unit had more experience and Bohman's first night was inaugurated with a firefight with ISIS. But the lack of "normal food like steak and pizza" lead to malnutrition and exhaustion, prompting Bohman to head back to Vancouver to recuperate and regain some of the 30 pounds she had lost in weight.

Bohman is one of a handful of Canadians who are known to have joined the fight against ISIS.

The men who have left the lands of democracy to join the ranks of the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG) and the Peshmerga in Iraq to fight ISIS include former servicemen, security contractors and even one Hollywood actor.

As for the women, it seems that ISIS has the greater pulling power and there has been no shortage of media coverage flummoxed over seemingly bright teenage girls leaving the comforts of human rights to become jihadi brides.

Bohman is in a rare category as one of the only western women to have joined the fight against ISIS, or the "Satanic State" as she calls them.

And now that she has regained strength, she's back to take up her post with the Kurdish freedom fighters. This time, she's better equipped and better prepared while documenting her experience on her Facebook page. VICE talked to Bohman about joining the YPJ, gender equality, and ancient weaponry.

Haval Berxodan, Bohman, and new western recruits

VICE: Why did you return to Rojava?
Tiger Sun: I decided to return for two reasons. The first—I miss the friends I made. The second reason is deeper. After returning to Canada, I couldn't imagine going back to a normal job. Nothing seemed to inspire me. In fact, things were getting stressful. The cost of living in Vancouver is ridiculous. I went through $10,000 in two months and I wasn't even paying rent, so the idea of getting back into the rat race again didn't appeal to me at all. It was the same reason I went to Rojava in the first place. I had wasted so much of my life trying to make a living, that I hadn't actually started to live. Fighting the Satanic State and being part of the revolution in Rojava is a dream come true. Not that I dreamed of killing people, but that I am now truly useful. I'm actually contributing to the betterment of other peoples' lives, and for me, that's far more important than selling insurance, or banking services.

Why and how did you join the YPJ?
It was mainly because of what ISIS was doing and how our governments were doing nothing to stop it. I thought that if people can join and volunteer for ISIS, then people can volunteer to fight ISIS too. The Lions of Rojava Facebook page put me in touch with the YPJ and I joined them in February 2015, as soon as I was fit. I flew to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and was smuggled across the border in a rubber dinghy.

Did you get any training?
I went to the academy and got four hours' of training—how to assemble and disassemble an AK, the Dragonov—pretty much what I could have learnt from YouTube. There was no medical or procedural training. They (Kurds) go through ideological training, which includes gender equality and ecological responsibilities. It's supposed to be 45 days, but from what I've seen actually fighting with them, they rely on senior members with experience and learn on the job.

The YPG/J are affiliated with the PKK—a terrorist organisation according to the US, what was your impression of them?
YPG/J and the PKK are separate, but they follow the same ideology based on Abdullah Ocalan's teaching. The PKK defends the Kurds from Turkey and many have come to Rojava. A lot of the commanders are PKK, they're always the best-educated and nicest ones. They call themselves humanists—they treat everyone with humanity, even if they are the enemy.

What is a typical day like as a YPJ fighter?
It is boring. Most of the day is spent with no fighting. You wake up around 5 AM and it's really chill, not a regimented army. You get up, have breakfast—meals are communal and the food is mainly vegetarian. It is a peasant militia and a lot of the food is donated. I had meat eight times in three-and-a-half months and even then it was just scraps of meat.

How is it as a women fighting with the YPG?
They're so ahead of us on gender equality. To get equal treatment we have to protest and then laws are changed. Over there it is so equal, there is no conscious division, the women are naturally included and work with the men equally at every level—they're in the trenches, they take positions, sometimes they're the only ones fighting. It's just so equal that it's hard to explain. It's more of a matriarchal society, I never felt threatened by the men or objectified.

Did you kill anyone during your first tour?
No, I didn't, I only had an AK which is only really good for 300 metres, and even then if you hit something, it's luck. They gave me a brand new gun, but it was 40 years old.

Is there a weapons shortage?
There are guns, including American-made guns, but ammunition is hard to find. It is not a case of weapons shortage, it is a case of weapon quality. don't have heavy weapons, and with the air strikes, they don't need to fight that much.

Tiger Sun with Jesper Söder, who is doing humanitarian work in Rojava

How does your experience this time round differ from your first visit?
For my second tour here, I decided to concentrate more on documenting life in Rojava. I want to show more of the life outside of the military. I recently went to Kobane, which is probably the global symbol of resistance against the Satanic State. A lot of other cities were also attacked, but none like Kobane. At one point, 80 percent of the city was under terrorist control, but the YPG and YPJ fought back and saved their city. However, a lot of young fighters died, and it's incredibly tragic how they were essentially left to fight the Satanic State without help from anyone else. So I wanted to document what has become an important moral victory for the Kurds.

The city is absolutely obliterated, yet it's the most lively city in Rojava. The Kurds didn't give up defending Kobane, and now they're not giving up rebuilding it. Families are returning, schools are reopening, shops are back in business, and the city is coming back from the dead. It was an incredibly emotional visit and I hope my photos and stories from Kobane will help in some way.

Since the end of your first visit, Turkey's airstrikes have targeted PKK strongholds in Syria and Iraq. What has been the impact?
The Turkish airstrikes don't seem to be as problematic for the PKK as the media makes it out to be. Turkey claimed about 300 Kurds were killed in the airstrikes, but how do they know that? They didn't land helicopters so they could count the bodies? They posted videos showing hits on buildings and houses and claimed they were PKK hideouts but that's bullshit. I've been to the camps. They don't stay in buildings and houses because they're easy targets. I think only about seven PKK fighters were killed in all the airstrikes. In reality, the Turks killed innocent villagers who had no connection to the PKK.

Did the Canadian government give you any grief when you returned?
I have been contacted by various government agencies—they're more concerned with Canadians who joined ISIS. I went to the US and spoke to the services there. They pretty much know what I had to tell them.

Where is your Instagram account?
It keeps getting suspended and my Facebook account has been suspended four times. Turkey has an active campaign to censor anything on the internet, so you can't post a map of Kurdistan. I'm being targeted by ISIS supporters and Turkish nationalists who report my account. Turks were attacking me on Instagram, one guy said he would enjoy raping my ass after ISIS cut my head off.

How long do you think you'll stay this time?
I've only been back about a month but I plan on staying at least six months, but that depends on my health again. I lost far too much weight the last time I was here but hopefully this time, I'll be better able to manage my calorie intake.

All photos by Raymond Ahner

Kirk Hammett got his start in music founding the Bay Area thrash band Exodus in 1979 at the age of 16. By 1983, he was lead guitarist for Metallica following the firing of Dave Mustaine (now of Megadeath fame). The curly-haired guitarist is known for his killer riffs—he came up with "Enter Sandman"—searing solos, and the occasional sneaking in of jazz and blues into Metallica's sound, especially during the band's Load and ReLoad period. But, for me, I've always thought of Kirk as a serious horror dude. He's published a book documenting his collection of horror memorabilia, and he's created his own horror convention/festival, Kirk Von Hammett's Fear FestEvil (Kirk Von Hammett is the name he takes when working in the horror realm).

As a serious horror enthusiast myself, Kirk was always on my radar as a pro-collector. With the Halloween season fully upon us, I spoke to the metal master about a lifetime of horror fandom, the joys of watching Nosferatu 800 times, and his favorite new and all-time horror flicks.

VICE: Let's start at the beginning. How did you first get into horror and collecting horror memorabilia?
Kirk Hammett: I saw my first horror movie when I was five years old. It was Day of the Triffids. That was totally the "stuff" of horror movies. By the time I was six years old, I started buying and reading monster magazines, particularly Famous Monsters of Filmland. I would save my milk and donut money, and starve over the course of a school day, just so I could go buy comics and magazines.

I've also seen in your collection lots of vintage horror toys. Was that something you collected later in life? Or did you collect those as a kid, too?
It was pretty wacky, but when I was a kid, I collected comic books and magazines. I also played the hell out of all the monster toys. Actually, I didn't keep any of those old monster toys, I blew them up with firecrackers and set them on fire.

From ages 14 to 23, I was just eating, breathing, sleeping music, but in the back of my mind I was still thinking horror.

And how did getting into music affect your collecting habits?
Music came into my life and totally washed away everything else. I became totally obsessed with music and playing guitars. You know, learning the ins and outs of being a musician. But by the time I started making some disposable income, around the time of Ride the Lightning, I started buying comics again and buying a lot of monster toys that I could not buy as a kid. And then I started buying the masks and the artwork and paintings and got totally immersed in all that. And the last thing I got into was the movie posters, and when I started getting into those, that was the ultimate thing for me to collect. The graphics are incredibly beautiful. The design, the style—I just found them to be objects of beauty. So the last 30 years or so, I've been an active collector. From ages 14 to 23, I was just eating, breathing, sleeping music, but in the back of my mind, I was still thinking horror. I was still watching horror movies and reading horror novels.

Do you see similarities between the way you dove so deeply into music when you first got into it and the way you dove so deeply into collecting?
Oh yeah. I'm totally OCD, I'm totally obsessive compulsive. It really, truly is a mental disorder for me. But at the same time, I'm not a hoarder and I'm very, very selective about what comes into my collection. That's my approach to building my collection. A lot of people just buy and buy and buy, with no real thought behind it other than to just acquire. I've never been that kind of collector. For me, being a completist or having multiples of stuff is just not my bag. It never has been. But what is my bag is trying to get these movie posters recognized as the fine pieces of art they are. Particularly, the posters from the 1920s and 30s, which were the ultimate in graphics and design. If you look at them, there's a romanticism in these posters that you just don't see in movie posters today. There's a lushness and an elegance to these posters that are slightly out of place because, after all, they are advertising horror movies.

I can't watch a lot of that stuff at home because my kids are still too young for body parts flying in the air. When I was their age, I definitely watched body parts flying through the air, and it didn't really do me any favors.

Do you have a favorite horror flick? For me, and I always get in trouble for this, it's Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
I. Love. That. Movie. Bro, it's so weird. It has nothing to do with the first two movies; It has nothing to do with any of the following movies. That's part of the reason why I love it.

I'm obsessed. Do you have a movie like that that you're obsessed with? That you watch over and over?
It changes from time to time. I've watched Nosferatu like 800 times. I watched Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera with my kids the other day and was astounded because it had the original soundtrack synced up to the film. There's a restored version of Metropolis that I've yet to watch, so I've been delving into the silent era a bit more. I usually say, for my favorite film, The Mummy or Bride of Frankenstein. I just watched the first four Frankenstein movies with my kids, and I have to say, the first Frankenstein is a piece of art, man. From beginning to end, it has a pace to it. It has a vibe. All the actors are fantastic. Karloff as the Monster is a showstopper.

It feels cliché to say "they don't make them like that anymore," but with Golden Age Horror... I mean, they really don't make them like that anymore.
Yeah, but there's a lot of really great stuff coming out now. I think the movies coming out now are a lot better than the state of horror movies ten years ago. I loved Amigo Undead, and there's this movie that I somehow missed when it came out two or three years ago called Rigor Mortis. And WolfCop—I love WolfCop. I love What We Do in the Shadows—I think that's a great fucking movie, man. I love that movie to death. I watch a lot of the newer horror movies too because, I just can't help myself.

When I go out on tour, I make sure I have a lot of stuff to watch. I can't watch a lot of that stuff at home because my kids are still too young for body parts flying in the air. When I was their age, I definitely watched body parts flying through the air, and it didn't really do me any favors.

On VICE: Talking to the Guys Behind the Vampire Mockumentary, 'What We Do in the Shadows':

What are you working on next?
I'm working on a KVH YouTube channel [KVH stands for Kirk Von Hammett], which is going to be a pretty fun project for me. I'm going to take a crack at doing something I've always wanted to do, which is be a horror-show host. I'm telling VICE first! We're still working it all out. We're in the pre-production stage, but just putting it out there that that's my intention.

Follow Giaco on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Nina A.J.

Until Justin Trudeau legalizes marijuana, smoking a joint in some parts of Canada can still land you a criminal record.

Trudeau has said a Liberal government "will legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana," though his timeline for doing so remains unclear. In the meantime, everyone who isn't licensed to sell or buy medicinal weed is at the mercy of local police forces.

Driven by Stephen Harper's ideological war on drugs, marijuana related incidents and charges went up 30 percent between 2006 and 2014, according to the CBC. Data shows the approach to enforcing marijuana laws varies dramatically across the country. According to Statistics Canada, the rates of pot possession charges in 2014 were the highest in Kelowna, BC at 250 per 100,000 people, while the lowest was 11 per 100,000 in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. The average was 79.

In places like Saskatoon, there's a very good chance you'll be charged with a crime if you're caught smoking weed. Pot possession charges in the prairie city are among the highest in the country, at 112 per 100,000; charges are laid in nearly 80 percent of weed-related stops made.

Inspector Dave Haye of the Saskatoon Police Service told VICE his officers are instructed not to issue warnings to recreational weed smokers.

"We will charge on a leftover roach if we can," he said. "It's how we feel about the use of illicit drugs in this area."

Haye said marijuana is a gateway drug—a theory that's been disputed by scientific studies—and that his police force considers it a "public safety issue."

Saskatoon's finest chasing down some roach-wielding perps. Photo via Flickr user Jeff

"The marijuana we have on streets today is not the marijuana of the late '60s," he said. "I know what's used in grow ups; the marijuana itself could have negative health impacts."

Leaving aside the fact that marijuana has been proven to be less harmful than legal substances, like alcohol and tobacco, Haye's comments actually make a decent argument for legalization—once marijuana is regulated, there will be oversight on things like quality control. But until that happens, Haye said he will continue to enforce the law to the harshest degree, even comparing smoking weed to driving under the influence of alcohol.

VICE reached out to law enforcement agencies across the country for reaction to Trudeau's position on marijuana. Of those that responded, none would speculate on the potential implications of legalization. Still, there are major differences in their approaches to marijuana-related offences under the current laws.

Constable Brian Montague of the Vancouver Police Department said public safety is also a top concern in Vancouver, which is why cops there don't bother with "simple possession" charges.

"I can't think of a case in many, many years where that has happened," he said. Pot-related possession charges are issued to about 48 people per 100,000 in Vancouver.

Montague said there have been investigations involving dispensaries—of which there are more than 100 operating in a grey market in Vancouver—that require police attention. But, in general, "we are extremely busy dealing with violent drug dealers and drugs such as cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl. Marijuana has simply not been a priority."

Canadian Cannabis - The Dark Grey Market

Victor Kwong, spokesman for Toronto police, said officers use discretion when deciding whether or not to enforce the law. Rates of possession charges in Toronto are slightly lower than the national average.

Two years ago, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police put forward a resolution calling for a ticketing option as an alternative to laying criminal charges. The federal government said it would consider that suggestion, but nothing became of it.

The rationale behind the ticketing scheme was two-fold: it would free up police and court resources required to pursue a criminal charge and it was considered a more fair option than saddling someone holding a small amount of pot with a criminal record.

Neil Boyd, director of Simon Fraser University's school of criminology, said even that position doesn't go far enough.

"The problem with the approach is they wanted to retain the criminal status of marijuana," he said. "I just don't think marijuana has a place in criminal law."

He characterized Saskatoon police's position on marijuana as "nonsense."

"Alcohol presents a much greater threat to public safety than cannabis ever could."

Boyd said young people are being hit especially hard by marijuana criminalization because "they tend to use marijuana more openly and frequently." And once convicted, finding employment and travelling become difficult if not impossible.

The Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) prosecutes drug offences in Canada. It would not agree to an interview with VICE but in a written statement said: "The PPSC prosecutes offences that fall within its jurisdiction including those under the , based on the existing laws in place."

Randie Long, a former federal prosecutor and board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, said profit could potentially be a motivator for loading up on marijuana prosecutions before the law changes.

Private law firms are hired to prosecute federal laws, he explained, and are paid based on the size of their caseloads.

"By definition, there is a built in bias in favour of marijuana prosecution because of the sheer bulk of Canadians using marijuana," he said, characterizing weed cases as the "low-hanging fruit" of drug prosecutions.

Long, who practises criminal and family law in Nanaimo, BC, told VICE criminal charges are laid for weed possession in Nanaimo likely because it's policed by the RCMP, as opposed to Vancouver, which has a local police board.

"Federal funding made it more attractive to run marijuana prosecutions in one place and not the other."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo of a guy dressed as Michelangelo via Flickr user David, Bergin, Emmett and Elliott

Read: What the Fuck Is Going on in 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'?

The Anderson Police Department in northern California is going to begin arming its officers with nunchucks, as the Los Angeles Times reports. After all, if it's good enough for Ninja Turtles and Bruce Lee, then it's good enough for the people enforcing America's laws in 2015, right?

According to the paper, the 20-person police force was "looking for a versatile tool that would limit injuries to officers and the people they detained." Presumably, everything clicked when someone stumbled across a late-night airing of Enter the Dragon on AMC.

" us the ability to control a suspect instead of striking them," Police Sergeant Casey Day said. "I see the value and the safety they bring me."

Officers will not be required to switch out their batons for nunchucks—technically known as "nunchakus"—but if they do feel like spicing up their lives, they have to complete a 16-hour training course. Whatever it takes to keep things interesting in this town of 10,000 people, apparently.

Photo via Flickr user Ryan Stanton

On Monday, a video of a burly white cop violently arresting a female black student in a South Carolina high school emerged, prompting a deluge of outrage and disgust from around the country. Filmed from inside the classroom, which the girl had reportedly been asked to leave by her teacher and an administrator, the video shows Deputy Ben Fields—a school resource officer (SRO)—grabbing the child so hard that he upturns her desk. He then proceeds to throw her across the floor and subdue her. At one point, he threatens another student: "I'll put you in jail next."

The girl and another female student were charged with "disturbing school."

Photo via Facebook/Ezra Levant

Yesterday, a petition to have Calgary International Airport renamed to "Stephen J. Harper International Airport" cropped up on the internet after a Calgary man made the point that the outgoing prime minister deserves to have YYC—one of Canada's busiest places for flying machines to land at—named after him.

Although the main petition, which can be found here, has no exact signature count, a proxy petition on Change.org has garnered over 2,000 signatures since yesterday afternoon, thus putting it on track to go absolutely nowhere.

The man who created the petition, Ezra Levant, describes himself as a "lawyer" and ""all-around troublemaker" on Twitter. In order to learn a little bit more about him and his reasoning behind proposing the sure-to-fail idea, we gave him a call while he was, believe it or not, about to board a plane.

VICE: Maybe you can tell me a little bit about why you made the petition? Just in your words, I guess.
Ezra Levant: Sure. Well, Stephen Harper is not a media hound. He is not a self-bent aggrandizer, he's not the selfie prime minister, he didn't spend $10 million renovating 24 Sussex Drive. He's probably the first middle-class prime minister we've had since Joe Clark. He's not a gazillionaire. I don't know if you know this, but he declined to take his full pension entitlements. I mean, he literally left a million dollars on the table, it's just not his style. So how do you mark a guy like that? Well, how about Calgary International Airport.

First off all, it's weird the airport doesn't have a name to begin with, and second of all, it's very normal to name it after PMs. Pearson Airport. Trudeau Airport. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon.

The only thing I'm thinking here is that, with Trudeau and Pearson, I think it's understandable because they had , but not the same for Stephen Harper, considering how he was ousted. What makes Stephen Harper—
I've gotta stop you right there. First of all, this is not a national airport, this is a Calgary airport. Stephen Harper has won every election he's ever run for in Calgary with huge majorities. Second of all, after nine years as prime minister, he still got 32 percent at the polls. Why the hell should Calgarians care about a few "Harper derangement syndrome" haters who would probably never fly to Calgary anyways? You're wrong to say it's a matter of popularity—it's a matter of marking a prime minister.

Do you think the petition will be successful? You guys only have around 2,000 signatures now.
No, we have 9,000 signatures as of about half an hour ago. When I went to bed last night, we were having someone sign the petition every two seconds. There are a couple petitions out there—ours is at harperairport.ca. I saw a little one on Facebook and another on Change.org, so there's a couple people out there with the same mindset. I thought, "Well, let's add some muscle behind it." We've got a big online audience, we've got some video, so I thought, "Let's just throw our effort behind it." I expect, by the end of today, it will be 15, maybe 20,000. What we're going to do is we're going to send it to Calgary Airport Authority and we're going to send it to the new transport minister when he's sworn in.

On Twitter, you describe yourself as a "lawyer" and a "troublemaker"? What do you think you're more of?
I'm an advocacy journalist. Sometimes I report on the news, sometimes I have opinions on the news, and sometimes I act on the news. It depends on the day. This is a little bit of opinion-commentary, and a little bit of activism. Sometimes we break hard news.

I'd say about ten per cent of the time, I'm a news reporter. About 80 per cent of the time, I'm an opinion journalist, and about ten per cent of the time I'm an activist.

Do you think the Calgary airport will actually end up taking you on board for this?
I don't know. I think that if—I think it's probably the most suitable named suggested to them. I think there's other Alberta political leaders who have already seen their name marked. I mean, there's the Peter Lougheed Hospital, that was actually built when Peter Lougheed was alive... That's the thing in Alberta, we sometimes don't wait for the politician to pass on before we name things after them. I mean, the great Peter Lougheed lived to see the hospital named after him. So, we tend to have a bit of tradition in Alberta to name things after them while they're still there.

Now, if you asked Stephen Harper about this, and I have not, I am sure he would be appalled by this, because he is the anti-self-promoter. I mean, he is not a selfie-taking guy, he is not a, y'know, the kind of guy who poses with his best Zoolander pose like some other prime ministers. So he's appalled by the idea, but so what? He's a public person who brought prominence and importance to Calgary that it didn't have before.

Well... Photo via Facebook/Badar Munir Chaudhary

So, in a way, are you leading the charge in spite of Stephen Harper?
There is no spite or "in spite of." I am just saying that Stephen Harper is a modest man who would not go around aggrandizing himself but I think Calgarians, who always supported him and still do, would probably find this an appropriate way to commemorate the man's achievements.

Let's say the petition was successful but the airport didn't take it on, what do you think the next best thing to name after Stephen Harper would be?
I don't know.

You said that you were at an airport earlier. Did you drive there?
Yeah.

Would you name your car after Stephen Harper?
OK, I'm going to get on a plane here and I know you're doing the VICE thing, so goodbye and enjoy, but send me an email if there's anything else you need.

OK. Take care, Ezra.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

The author in his hostel bed. All photos by Jake Lewis

A typical night in room 25 goes something like this: You are woken for the first time at 3 AM, when the last partying backpackers come to bed. The stairs that lead into the room are entirely hollow and have been lined with plastic by some sadist, so anyone who climbs them sounds like they're stomping up a mountain of old body-bags. Behind them, the automatic door-closer slams with the force of a medieval trebuchet.

At 4:30 AM, a series of alarms jolt you awake. The early risers climb down from the rows of silver bunk beds and creep out of the room, wearing high-vis overalls. The dorm smells sweaty and damp, like an unwashed PE kit. Orange light seeps through the single window at the far end.

At 5 AM, the man in the next bunk starts to get dressed, a process that seems to require him to repeatedly smash a metal belt buckle into the floorboards by your head. From the neighboring bed you can hear gentle rubbing accompanied by soft sighs, the sound of either satisfactory itching or furtive masturbation.

At 6:45 AM, someone opposite begins speaking on the phone in French. "Oui," they say. "Oui. Oui, oui, oui." You try to cover your ears with your pillow, but it is as thick and as noise-canceling as a cheap slice of ham.

By 7 AM, your French neighbor has expressed agreement over 40 times.

At 7:11 AM, someone with a Midlands accent shouts: "Shut the fuck up, mate, people are trying to sleep."

At 7:12 AM, the phone conversation ends.

At 8 AM, you wake again with a start. An air raid siren is sounding. You jump out of bed in a panic to discover the gray-haired man at the end of the row is gently snoring through his Cold War alarm tone.

At 10 AM you arrive at work with bloodshot eyes and wild hair. Your eight-year-old student looks at you for a moment and says, "Why do you look so tired, Ed? Why do you look so sad?"

I had moved into the No.8 Hostel in Willesden, north-west London, where I was staying in a 20-person dorm. There were a number of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I am not a teenager. I'm not on my gap year. I'm a very light sleeper. I have a job. And I already live in London.

I've also had a string of hellish experiences in hostels. I was dumped over Skype in a hostel. A malfunctioning toilet squirted liquid sewage into my backpack. I had to sit and listen as a Canadian barman described Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls as "the best fuckin' film of all time." So why was I moving into a hostel in my hometown?

The answer was rent. A night in a backpacker hostel in London costs as little as £8 , which is what I'd usually pay for two pints or one season of Murder She Wrote on DVD. It's also around half the price of my matchbox-sized room in Tulse Hill.

And, as it turns out, living in a hostel to save on rent is not a unique idea. While most of the residents of No.8 are backpackers from overseas, a significant minority are living there on a permanent basis while working in London.

Jordy, 25, an Australian teacher living at the hostel while she looks for work in London

The backpackers tend to be younger. They're visiting for a holiday or staying temporarily while they look for more permanent accommodation. When I spoke to them, the consensus seemed to be that No.8 was a good choice: clean, sociable, and very cheap.

Colm, an Irish carpenter in his early 20s, was about to move out into a house in Neasden. But he'd enjoyed staying in the hostel: "There are no scum here," he said. What do you mean by scum? He hesitated. "No cunts."

Giulia, an 18-year-old student from Italy, had extended her trip to London after befriending a group in the hostel. Since then, she'd experienced many wild and crazy things. "Like, once my friend passed out drunk downstairs. I made him a pizza, but then it sat there in the kitchen for two hours," she said. "The reason was, he had passed out again outside the toilet!" What did she think of the permanent residents? She paused and thought. "Everyone here is strange. I was normal, but now I am also getting stranger."

The long-term guests are older, in their late 30s and 40s. They come from the UK or elsewhere in the EU—job insecurity or low pay mean they're unable to save up for a deposit. For a full-time minimum-wage worker, even £78 a week for a hostel dorm bed represents over a third of their post-tax income—a level that can threaten your ability to meet other basic needs.

There were definite signs that the long-term residents had been affected. One morning, I met a man in the kitchen sporting grubby combat trousers and a pigtail. I nodded at him and he gave a phlegmy chuckle. "How was your weekend?" I asked, looking for something to say.

He furrowed his brow. "No, no, weekend," he said, with a definitive jab of his thumb. "Today weekend. Today Saturday."

It was a Monday.

Przemek

Przemek, another longstanding resident, is a slender man with light grey hair. He seemed severe—on my first day I gave him a friendly smile and he looked back as if I'd tried to punch him in the throat—but in conversation it turned out that a raucous laugh frequently breaks through his stoic expression.

From Poznań in Poland, he had lived in London for four years, working in various temporary jobs and sending money back home. His daughter was born around the time he left for the UK. "This is not good for your kids. It's difficult keep relationship with your wife. Over longer times it's impossible. You can't live like that," he said.

He had lived in hostels throughout 2015 and was now into his fourth month in No.8 while he looked for work. "Hostel, this is good choice for people who is alone, who haven't a lot of money, and who like a relationship with another people," he said.

But would he choose to live in one if money wasn't an issue? "No, obviously not, no," he said. "Every time, the main reason was money, every time I chosen the cheapest one." There are, he said, a number of downsides. "Very far to toilet. You haven't table, desk, or furniture. More people, less space. Not private space."

The author next to his bunk

Had he saved any money while he'd been staying here? "Honestly, not really. Not really. I try now earn some money, to go to Poland. This is better for my family."

Some have been living in No.8 for even longer. I heard estimates as high as five years, but none of the longest-term residents I spoke to were willing to be interviewed for this piece. It seemed that having to live in a hostel was an uncomfortable fact, best not dwelled on.

A lack of private space clearly affected people. You could spot a No.8 veteran by how they obtained privacy. One had wrapped sheets around his bunk to create a gloomy den. Another wore expensive, custom-fit earplugs whenever he was in a public area. I saw a third eating her meal in the kitchen. She had tucked her plate into the furthest corner and twisted her body round, facing away from everyone else as much as physically possible.

Rachel

Rachel, the hostel manager, estimates that 10 percent of the residents of No.8 are long-term; by my count, the number is even higher. Why did she think people ended up living here? "You never know someone's history. I work in the hospitality industry, I'm not going to ask people about their personal issues," she said. "But I think some of the people, maybe they have problems, or they did, and they just find it easier staying here. At Christmas time, I'll get them a card, buy them a present, because they're not home with their own family. I don't know what's happened, so it's nice to make them feel a bit welcomed, like they're not alone."

A week of disturbed sleep had left me struggling. After waking 15 times every night, the heavy, drooping bags under my eyes made it look like I'd been punched out by Manny Pacquiao at least four times on each side of my face. Too exhausted to teach, my lesson plans started to include sections called "Play Match Attax" and "Get Oliver to describe the plot of Minions again."

But losing sleep is only half of the problem. The worst part of hostel living is the impossibility of spending any time alone. When you take a dump there are people queuing outside. The lights in the shower switch off automatically after ten minutes. Everywhere else, there's always somebody there—and people become strange when their private behaviors are a public spectacle.

Guests playing darts in the hostel pub

It was karaoke night as I entered the pub on the ground floor of the hostel. Two maroon-haired ladies were performing "Don't Stop Believin'" in two completely different keys. As I shuffled towards my room in the back, the ponytailed DJ boomed into the mic: "Loverly stuff, ladies. Lov-er-ley stuff."

In my hostel bed one final time, I carried out my nightly ritual—adjusting the pillow so it covered the mysterious bloodstain on my sheet. Tucked in nearby, a Russian man carried out a muttered phone conversation, even though it was well after midnight. As he hung up, he rolled onto his side.

"Sorry," he shouted in a unsteady voice. "Sorry for disturbing you, everyone. Sorry for making this noise. But I miss my wife. I have to speak with my wife."

Follow Jake on Twitter.

William Head on Stage's fall 2014 production of Time Waits for No One. Photo by Jam Hamidi

I'm sitting shotgun as a Correctional Services Canada (CSC) staff member chauffeurs a van full of people down a quiet road within William Head Institution, a minimum security prison on Vancouver Island.

"We used to have the inmates drive," says the CSC staffer from behind the wheel. He adds a few more comments about security tightening up over the past several years, hinting towards the previous Conservative government's tough-on-crime policies that have stiffened penalties behind bars. With a move to stricter security measures, harsher crime laws and cut-backs to prison rehabilitation programs, I wondered how Stephen Harper's government somehow overlooked the artsy pastime taking place within this Vancouver Island compound: prison theatre.

The van pulls up outside the doors of a multipurpose building known as "the gym." An inmate dressed in a suit and tie hands me a program for the show and I'm lead inside to find my seat. This is where 130 of us would watch William Head on Stage's (WHoS) annual play. Getting its start in 1981, WHoS has built up a reputation as Canada's only inmate-run theatre company.

All personal belongings are banned from entering the prison. I considered smuggling in an audio recorder, but I didn't want to fuck up this rare chance of getting within the walls of William Head. Unfortunately, that means I can't share exact quotes from this experience (without undermining CSC, that is). So on a separate occasion, I met with some of the WHoS's production staff who introduced me to Ryan, a former William Head inmate who performed in nearly 20 WHoS productions over 13 years.

"When people come in the door, and you say, 'Welcome to the theatre company,' you put all the prison bullshit behind you," explained Ryan, who asked us to keep his last name private and the details of his case limited to protect his identity. "This is a safe place basically to explore things, emotions, to cry, to laugh."

Exterior of WHI

Ryan discussed his story of confinement over a cup of coffee. His hair was short and neat, he wore simple blue jeans, rectangular glasses, and a fleece jacket.

"What were you sentenced for?" I asked.

"Murder," he admitted, with a tinge of apprehension. Ryan was just 18 when he committed the act that would put him behind bars for second-degree murder. "I served 19 years of a 20-year sentence." He was granted parole four years ago and has since settled into a relatively normal life in Victoria. He credits WHoS for teaching him teamwork and responsibility, crucial life skills that have helped him transition from a criminal to a law-abiding citizen.

"When I got out, I was like, 'I want to go see some theatre, I want to be exposed to some things'... rather than just sort of stay in a shell," he said.

In the play I saw, nearly 20 convicted men took the stage. For many of them, this was their first time performing for a live audience. One man forgot his line for a moment, while another dabbed sweat off his face with a hand towel. In these moments of vulnerability, the prisoners swapped their tough-guy facade for a little compassion from their peers.

WHoS' fall 2013 prison puppet show. Photo by Jam Hamidi

"If one person fails on stage, everybody fails, the play falls apart. So if somebody's struggling, you go over and help them." Ryan told me.

In other countries, prison theatre is more widely integrated into the penal system. In the United States, for example, Shakespeare Behind Bars has been putting detainees on stage for the last 20 years. In France, the Ministries of Justice and Culture have created a protocol that puts attention on culture in prisons, with theatre being part of that. In the UK, a 2011 study looked into the economic benefits of arts programs in prisons, suggesting for every dollar spent on prison arts, about four times the investment is generated back into society.

But apart from this one Vancouver Island theatre troupe, the rest of Canada hasn't gotten the memo about prison theatre.

"There are currently no plans to develop or expand a theatre program as a national initiative," CSC Senior Communications Officer Sabrina Nash said in an email. Instead, anything arts related is lumped into their social programs. " include sports, theatre, fine arts, and hobby crafts and provide offenders with opportunities to learn and practice social skills, necessary for personal and social development," Nash added.

Simply put, CSC does not have any specific data on the impact of the arts in Canadian institutions. WHoS is basically an extracurricular activity, registered as a non-profit society in the province of BC, surviving on ticket sales from the previous year's performance and grant money from Canada Council for the Arts. Once funding is locked in, theatre artists from Victoria help the William Head prisoners put the show together and CSC only plays a part with security.

The fall 2015 production of HERE a Captive Odyssey. Photo submitted

During the 80-minute performance, about half a dozen security guards kept a constant watch on the inmates. Aside from their gruff presence, the show didn't feel anything like a prison play. It was actually... pretty good. A long applause broke out at the end with some people even giving a standing ovation.

"Just that first time they get the applause is quite profound," explained WHoS director, Kate Rubin. "It's the first time they've been acknowledged in a positive way, in a big way, with like 100 people all clapping for something they've done, that is giving."

A question and answer period followed, where one lady boldly asked how many of the men will be released from prison by this time next year. Three or four inmates shyly raised their hands in uncertainty. The reality is: many of them don't actually know.

S.T.—a William Head inmate—sought me out to talk about his experience seeking release. He applied for parole in September of this year, but was refused. He remained hopeful in trying for parole again soon, so long as our newly elected Liberal government begins to dismantle the tough-on-crime mindset that's existed over the last decade.

During the campaign trail, Justin Trudeau said he would consider repealing some of the mandatory minimum sentences the Harper government brought in. His election platform, on the other hand, did not detail many changes to the criminal code. VICE reached out to the Liberal Party, but they did not provide comment on their future plans for the criminal justice system.

But it's not just the inmates who are waiting for answers. WHoS's staff and supporters are also eager to see if funding will be more readily available for prison arts programs in Canada.

"Do you want to punish people, or do you want to rehabilitate them?" Ryan asked. "If I had my way, would be a place of learning and growing and healing and the theatre company is a huge part of that."

Follow Jen Munaretz on Twitter.

As a child, video games were my main pastime. There were few things that my younger nerd enjoyed more than a journey into a virtual world that was as vivid as my imagination would come to be. I wasn't lonely; I had many friends with whom I played at school and occasionally in the street, but, for the most part, the non-educational hours of the day were me time with my consoles.

For some reason, however, that had to involve deflecting the nagging of family, whose constant urging me to play outside suggested that our house stood in the middle of fucking Disney World. Sonic didn't pester me like that. The only way he would ever judge me was tapping his foot impatiently while I stopped playing to get more juice. All Mario ever had to say was "wa-hoo!" as we leapt into another adventure, never, "It's a lovely day outside, get off the computer." They understood me.

My mother then—perhaps reluctantly—bought me a game for my birthday, a recommendation from her friend's son. Little did I know he was a long-haired, dope-smoking recluse, and death metal aficionado. I hasten to add that I have nothing against such types—they're just not necessarily ideal role models for childhood recreation. Considering my interest in sea life and a vague ambition of becoming a marine biologist (it didn't materialize in later life—if I could be snorkeling for a living, I wouldn't be sitting here writing), she took his advice and purchased a copy of Ecco the Dolphin for the SEGA Mega Drive. It was to be one of the most memorable games I would play in my life.

"You're a wee dolphin," she offered as I was handed the box and surveyed the cover art. "You swim around in the sea with the fish. It will be just like the aquarium."

The calm before the storm

I excitedly popped in the cartridge and, within moments, was at the title screen. Games had next to no loading times back then, so no sooner had my mom closed the door on her way out than I started the first level. I got a feel for the controls and, before long, was merrily darting around Home Bay, talking to my dolphin chums via sonar and leaping out of the water like I didn't have a care in the world. One huge jump, however, would prove to be disastrous. Breaching a certain height triggered a violent hurricane that instantly sucked all of the wildlife out of the sea and into the sky with a frightening cacophony. I stared in disbelief as I was suddenly alone in the water, and a strange, mournful tune filtered in. If anything, the game was starting as it meant to go on.

Two things happened recently to inspire this tale of seafaring woe. No sooner had I found the eldritch abomination of an original cartridge in a cellar-clearing spree than Ecco's creator Ed Annunziata followed me on Twitter. While I wait for a 140-character apology to restore the fractured pieces of my childhood, I'll share with you some of the aspects of this game that terrified me after that initial introduction.

Having also seen it added to the Nintendo eShop (in 3D no less—like I want to be closer to what's happening), perhaps I can dissuade—or at least mentally prepare—a generation who didn't experience Ecco the first time around. Normally, I would feel a bit crazy and exposed talking about a 16bit game in this way but, judging by YouTube comments and replies to a recent Facebook post I made on this very matter, it would seem that I'm not alone. Just like Ecco wasn't...

I realize that I've been fairly cagey in detailing these horrors, so let's dive in, if you'll pardon the expression. Introductory levels see you face a huge octopus whose arms you need to slowly pass or face a sting, as well as the odd easily avoided shark. Those I can live with. The rest, I still struggle to.

The first major jump comes at a quarter of the way through the game in the Open Ocean level. The urgency with which it starts, by dropping Ecco from the sky (wait, what?) into the Pacific (although it isn't so specific) as screeching, soaring music mercilessly floods out. It's the most linear course in the game, with no walls or floor, just more sharks than a dodgy pool house, all of whom are intent on lining their stomachs with our cetacean pal. Surviving that prime example of the fight-or-flight response eventually leads you to the Big Blue, a monolithic whale and perhaps the biggest piece of sprite artwork to grace a 90s console. He was, thank fuck, a friendly creature, but the way he appeared from the vast nothingness of the Arctic waters with a low, echoing drone was enough to guarantee that the controller hadn't even hit the floor by the time I was out of the room.

After that came the Asterite. He wasn't particularly fearsome, but he did set the precedent for the game being weird on a Gary Busey level. A DNA double helix of orbs, he was an undiscovered life-form and a being of higher consciousness that would guide Ecco in his quest. He sends us to the ruins of Atlantis, where things take a notable leap from realism. Learning of aliens that feed upon the planet every five hundred years and using a time machine built by the humans to accordingly flee, Ecco warps back millions of years into the past. Terrific, dinosaurs ahoy.

Ironically, this is the safest part of the stage.

Here's a little scenario that would often happen in the prehistoric arc. Having been dropped into the water by a pterodactyl that helps you navigate the Carboniferous landscape, you decide to swim slowly as the path guides you downwards into dark caverns. Suddenly, a trilobite that can inexplicably swim faster than a dolphin gives chase from nowhere and attacks relentlessly, Ecco doing that piercing screech like he's being electrocuted every time. You're soon forced to reconsider your wary approach to exploration and dash off, invariably swimming right into the titanium jaws of a Dunkleosteus, a monstrous, thankfully now-extinct armored fish. All of this while you're technically drowning.

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Returning through time to the first level of our Lovecraftian childhood adventure, Ecco follows his pod into the intergalactic tube that claimed half of the ocean and flies across the universe into some kind of industrial space station. At this point, everything is entirely fucking mental. The penultimate level is a lurching, biomechanical hell in which one wrong turn will compress Ecco into an economy brand of canned tuna in a flash of scarlet red, forcing you to start from the beginning. Couple that with the fact there are mini-Cthulhus coming at you from all angles, and it's perhaps one of the most frustrating levels in gaming history—a deliberate decision on the creator's part to increase the likelihood of purchases over weekend rentals. The final boss, Vortex Queen, is potent nightmare fuel; a gargantuan, disembodied H.R. Giger Alien-like head against a backdrop of complete blackness. Being sucked into her gaping, razor-lined void of a mouth will send you back to the previous stage, ensuring that if the fear didn't get to you, the anger would.

FUCK THIS. DONE.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes Ecco such an unsettling experience. It's as much these things happening as it is the instilled sense that they could happen at any moment. Music is an obvious factor: the throbbing bass lines that beat like a heart as you search frantically for air pockets; the whimpers over the plaintive, prehistoric themes; the idiosyncratic ambience and playful melodies that undermined your struggle. These Pink Floydian soundscapes create a perpetual sense of mystery and, subsequently, a merciless sonic backdrop against which an enemy could spring at you from thin H2O. Strangely, for levels so full of life, there's a sense of loneliness. The underwater world is unknown to us to begin with but, here, it's further turned into a barren dystopia, with in-game clues suggesting humans no longer inhabit the planet and the initial high degree of realism conjuring up a palpable feeling of abandonment.

The sharks get sexier around the halfway point.

I've shot and slashed my fair share of monsters—I finished ZombiU with few repercussions, I can just about play Resident Evil 4 with the lights off, and closing the bedroom door firmly keeps Five Nights At Freddy's out of my dreams. Why does Ecco scare me more than most straight-up horror games? I think it's ultimately down to context. You go into a survival shoot 'em up knowing that you'll be spending the majority of your time feeling jolts in your viscera as you fight for your life against whatever unholiness may come. Abandoned mansions, claps of thunder, and bumps in the night are created with the intention of filling underwear. You go into a relatively realistic game about a dolphin, however, with expectations of flipping joviality, interaction with other marine creatures, and perhaps the odd-run in with a shark at most.

Related on Munchies: Sharks Could Be the Future of the Seafood Industry

Looking at it retrospectively only serves to add to the wonder of what now-defunct developers Novotrade achieved. Fitting so much atmosphere and so many disparate elements into a cartridge game in 1992 is, in a way, a much more impressive feat than giving a Hollywood shine and deliberate scares to the horror games of today. The anachronistic, subtle discomfort plays on the mind more and has undoubtedly led to a demographic of 90s kids who never learned to swim. A 1994 sequel, The Tides of Time, didn't so much take the sci-fi baton as bludgeon the original to death with it and run off with its wallet, but it's the pseudo-realism of the first that keeps the crown on its head.

I feel that I might be coming down with an acute case of Stockholm Syndrome as, even after all of this, I can't begrudge Ecco the title of something of a masterpiece. Atmosphere is woven into every pixel of its being, and it rarely lets up. It's a completely immersive game and, in its own way, unlike any other I've ever played. Despite a fair portion of the memories it holds being unpleasant (to the extent that I still do a semi-conscious psych-up every time I see the glistening SEGA logo upon starting), that's pretty special.

Or perhaps mom knew all along, and it was a ploy to scare me into getting some fresh air.

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Jay (left) and Rob (right). All stills courtesy of the film's UK PR

Nintendo Quest is a documentary about one man's attempt to purchase all 687 NES games officially released in North America in just 30 days, without the aid of online retailers. Jay Bartlett, a Canadian with Bowser and Bomberman in his blood, was posed the lofty challenge by his friend (and the film's executive producer) Rob McCallum.

The film is a road movie, following Jay and Rob and crew south, cruising highways and an array of second-hand stores and basements so impressively stocked with mint-condition gaming relics that they'd turn anyone a Hyrulean shade of green with envy. Online sales being off limits, Jay meets a world of comparably enthusiastic sorts, some who are more than happy to aid his mission, while others basically get in the way. Collecting can be pretty competitive, so it turns out. As Jay's quest unfolds, we're given a basic history lesson on Nintendo, and learn why it is that this one system's software means so much, not just to this film's makers but to video gaming as we know it today.

Billy Mitchell, the first gamer to ever get a perfect score on 'Pac-Man,' and more recently featured in the film 'King of Kong,' is amongst the contributors to 'Nintendo Quest'

But still one question above all others lingers at the back of my head: Why?

"Dreams are worth it, regardless of obstacles," is Rob's reply to me, the same response he gave anyone else asking the same question during the film's production. "This just happens to be a cool, gamer-related dream."

Jay seeking out some of the 687 games he needs

"The NES redefined gaming in many ways, and showed that it could be profitable as a business too," Rob continues. "The industry was on life support before the NES hit, in North America at least. So when they introduced high-quality games with narrative elements that told a story, instead of games mainly based on beating a high score, people could identify with them and the games took on a new inherent value and connection. Final Fantasy for the NES is directly responsible for me becoming a storyteller. I didn't know stories could be like that, until that game. Gaming became about personal expression and that's incredible.

"It's Nintendo's ability to inspire and create memories that inspired us to make this film. The influence and effect their games, culture, and ethos has had on us is something we wanted to share and in turn inspire people with Jay's journey. So the games are the ultimate documents that inspire us."

Jay feels that the NES era was one of broader gaming appeal, which naturally led to more kids-back-then getting into the culture, with less of a, let's say, unsavory stigma attached to being a "gamer."

Step away from the Genesis games, away from the SEGA delights

"I don't think gaming was as male-centric as it is today," Jay tells me. "Games back then were for everyone, and appealed to everyone. There is a lot more testosterone in gaming today then there ever was back then. Now we have franchises like Call of Duty and Gears of War, whereas back then it was Pac-Man and Super Mario. To me it didn't really matter who your character was, you made them your hero. You had to use imagination, while today in gaming the story is directly told to you and your character has his or her own voice."

That said, Rob's quick to admit that there's not as much female representation in Nintendo Quest as he'd have liked—the vast majority of guests, be they high-score masters at NES classics, fellow collectors, or simply amazingly invested gaming fans, are male. "We wanted more," he says. "As a filmmaker, I wanted and needed more for a balance of opinions, but time and access to the right people was limited and unfortunately you gotta stop making a movie at some point. It's a glaring issue for me because Nintendo is very universal regardless of gender yet our film doesn't do that aspect justice."

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Jay and Rob go back a long time—they bonded, as children, over the games they shared, their families living just two doors apart in London, Ontario. "Jay actually introduced me to gaming, starting with Spider-Man on the Atari 2600," Rob recalls. "But the NES was the first console I had. We were collecting games back then, and not just amassing the library but preserving the boxes and displaying them like a museum would; it's just always been a thing for us and we've been friends for over 30 years."

The obsession's been there since day one, then. And day one of Nintendo Quest finds Jay and Rob endeavoring to deliver anything but "a boring history lesson with stats," to quote the latter. I think they just about pull it off. There's little in terms of Nintendo's story in this movie that I didn't know prior to watching it, and I'm sure that'll be the same with many a gamer (of my vintage, or thereabouts); but nevertheless, it succinctly highlights both the cornerstone releases of the NES catalogue and the titles that, for one reason or another, have become incredibly sought after. The very rarest of these, carrying an astronomical price tag when sold online (check the still, below), is Bandai's Stadium Events. Although it goes for several thousand times as many dollars as, say, Super Mario Bros., the game was as essential to the completion of Jay's challenge as any other. Just another box to tick. It needed to be found.

Yeah, I'll probably leave it

I'm not about to spoil the film by revealing whether or not Jay did pick up Stadium Events, or any of the NES catalogue's other (official, expensive) rarities—amongst them Bubble Bobble Part 2, Bonk's Adventure, and Mega Man 5. But I can confirm that Stadium Events isn't close to being Jay's favorite game on Nintendo's breakthrough console.

"Zelda II, Donkey Kong, and Little Samson are my favorite three," Jay says. "Those games are timeless. The gameplay is perfect, the challenge is steep, and the replay value is there. I absolutely think they are on the same level as modern games. It's just like saying Return of the Jedi stands up to newer movies, like Avatar. Jedi is timeless and absolutely goes toe to toe with any new film out there."

Read on Motherboard: 'Super Mario Maker' Players Are Reviving Mario's Rarest Levels

Yaaas

And why is it important to own these games on their original cartridges, when emulation options are so rife, not to mention entirely legal eShop downloads of old-school classics? "I simply collect because it's in me," Jay says. "The artifacts themselves mean so much to me, holding so many great memories that I had with that library, and continue to today. Digital-only gaming will never take over. I buy a game digitally and I feel like it's never really mine. I can't do what I want with it. This past year I've seen a lot of gamers start to realize this.

"It's all about the human connection we have with the artifact. The memories, friendships, and experiences tied to it. There's no excitement or fun to acquiring a digital game: you just click a button. Whereas, in the old days of gaming, going out with friends and getting the games, those stories you had along the way make it have a long lasting personal connection with you and your friends. That, arguably, is just as fun as the game you just purchased."

Nintendo Quest is, if nothing else, a tribute to those stories we used to create for ourselves even before a game was played. The build up, the anticipation; the small quests we all went on, from home to the store and back, perhaps on the bus, perhaps in the back of a car. The tearing away of the shrink-wrap, and that first-time clunk as the cartridge found its home. Satisfying. It's about people, joined by a love of a medium that's still growing but preserves its previously shed skins like few forms of expression before it. "I think our film has touched the lives of many people," Jay concludes. "To hear them come up to us and just say, 'Thank you for making this,' it's the most incredible feeling in the world. The film continues to change my life on a daily basis, and I am so grateful."

Nintendo Quest is available to view on Vimeo on Demand now, and will be released on physical formats and via other digital platforms December 1.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Ryan Albrey

At school, I had a teacher called Mr. Rees—or "Greasy Rees," as we called him. It was the 90s, but Mr. Rees seemed to have time-traveled to us from an earlier time. He spoke like they do in old war movies, called us all by our surnames, and wore his hair on the back and sides tightly slicked to the head, like a parody of an old style bank manager. The hair on the top, meanwhile, had gone completely and in its place was a polished bald pate so shiny it was clear that the same product that went towards keeping his remaining hair plastered down was also used to add a little luster on top.

Being the noxious little shits we were, we never let him forget his baldness. The favorite wind-up was to pull your hair as tightly back as possible and slap your forehead whenever he came in the room. If he noticed our mockery he never let on. Except for once. It was during science and one of the class morons fired an elastic band across the room that hit him plumb on his bald patch. It was an impressive shot, to be fair, but Mr. Rees didn't see it that way. He blew up, screaming and shouting at the kid; his bald head turned puce with rage.

Afterwards, all the talk was about what a nutter old Greasy was for losing his shit like that. That we had pushed him to it never occurred to us, nor did it cross our mind that there was anything wrong with humiliating a nice man for a physical characteristic over which he had no control.

We were just kids, of course, but prejudice against baldness continues into adulthood. "It's the last bastion of political incorrectness," says Spencer Kobren, the LA-based host of the Bald Truth, a radio show aimed at men losing their hair. "You're not going to go up to a chick and be like, 'Hey, do you know what, it looks like your ass has got bigger!' But that same girl can go up to a guy and say, 'Hey it looks like you're losing your hair,' and it's considered OK."

Even if most of us aren't so crass as to do that, the prejudice is deeply ingrained. Studies consistently show that women are more attracted to men with hair. Note also our aversion to hairless presidents—Eisenhower is the only bald man to be elected to the Oval Office in modern times—or the way Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's bald patch recently became an actual issue in his bid for the Republican nomination.

Faced with such a hostile reality, it's hardly surprising that the realization they're losing their hair can be a painful experience for many men. And yet, says Kobren, they're not supposed to complain.

"Society doesn't let men show that they're uncomfortable about their appearance. You're expected to just man up," he says.

This attitude is particularly true for balding men. A 2012 study by the University of Pennsylvania found that men with shaved heads are perceived as more manly, a finding that's consistently reflected in TV and movies where bald men are generally either violent psychos or heroic tough guys. Not the sort of chaps who would be seen dead crying into their cornflakes because of a few strays hairs shed on the pillow.

"I don't want to be too casual about the use of the term 'depressed,' but balding certainly put my anxiety through the roof. I wore a hat a lot and generally tried to avoid all discussion about hair." — Phillip Paoletta

Yet hair loss can be devastating. A study two years ago by researchers in Germany revealed the psychological toll of going bald. Staff at the Charité Universitätsmedizin teaching hospital in Berlin found that the "enormous emotional burden" of hair loss caused problems of self-esteem and, in the worst cases, triggered psychological disorders like body dysmorphia and trichotillomania, an obsessive physical tic that causes the sufferer to repeatedly twist and pull their hair, making the hair loss far worse than it would ordinarily be.

According to the American Hair Loss Association, two-thirds of American men will experience some degree of appreciable hair loss by the time they're 35, while 85 per cent of men's hair will have thinned out significantly by the age of 50.

Most of this hair loss—95 percent—is caused by male pattern baldness (MPB). Also known as Androgenetic Alopecia, MPB is characterized by a receding hairline or a thinning crown or both, as in the case of poor Mr. Rees.

Sup, baldie. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Phillip Paoletta began experiencing MPB in his second year of college. Besides the telltale hairs left on his pillow, he noticed hair clogging the drain after a shower. For a long time he explained it away with various unlikely excuses—lack of exercise, poor diet, a suspect ingredient in the shampoo. This denial was shattered, however, when he spoke with a doctor, who told him point-blank that he had MPB. The revelation didn't go down well and there followed a long period of unhappiness.

"I don't want to be too casual about the use of the term 'depressed,'" says Paoletta. "But it certainly put my anxiety through the roof, and made me exceptionally self-conscious. I wore a hat a lot and generally tried to avoid all discussion about hair. It was a miserable time."

Kobren is less circumspect about linking hair loss to depression, comparing the way baldness can negatively effect men to "a cancer of the spirit."

"For many guys it completely destroys their self-esteem. I had a guy call in who told me he gave up a law degree to be a delivery man, just so he could wear a hat."

Going Bald Sucks, But Going Bald When You're a Woman Sucks Harder

Dr. Gershen Kaufman, a former professor of psychology at Michigan State University and the author of The Psychology of Shame, thinks stories like this reflect how much our hair is tied into our self-image.

"Think of all the times we look in the mirror and we see our face and hair and experience them as part and parcel of the same thing—who we are," says Dr. Kaufman. "Our self lives in our face and anything that alters our face, namely our hair, is going to drastically alter how we perceive ourselves."

Dr. Phil's missing half a head of hair, and he's doing just fine. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

When I was a kid, the haircut of choice was the spike. At my local barbers, Adams Gents Hairdressers, I sat on the wooden plank that Mr. Adams balanced across the chair arms for boys too small to sit in the seat and waited to be transformed into Val Kilmer in Top Gun. The ensuing mess usually looked more like a bad case of static.

Another boy who made the vertiginous journey up to Mr. Adam's wooden plank in order to get spiked was my old school mate Paul 'Riggs' Riggall. Riggs, who is now bald, feels no nostalgia for his lost locks.

"I had terrible hair," he says. "Once I got into mid-teens and wanted a longer, Oasis-style cut my hair would stick up and became impossible."

Riggs, like Phillip Paoletta, tackled his early onset baldness by shaving his hair off completely. Both found it liberating.

Paoletta described the experience of having his remaining hair buzzed in a barber shop in West Africa as "one of those close-my-eyes-and-see-what-happens moments" from which he has never looked back.

Riggs, meanwhile, thinks shaved heads look better because they suggest a willingness to embrace the change. "You're saying, 'Yes, I'm going bald and I don't care.'"

He says that this is in contrast to the kind of in-between baldness of our old teacher, which seems to cling hopelessly to the past, thereby creating an air of desperation.

This perception is confirmed by research. The Pennsylvania University study quoted earlier found that while men with shaved heads were viewed as stronger, taller, and better potential leaders than their coiffed counterparts, none of these findings held true for men with thinning hair.

You don't need hair to be successful. Just look at Kim Dotcom, the man behind Megaupload.

Kobren doesn't totally buy it. He says that Hollywood poster boys for the shaved head look like Jason Statham or Vin Diesel are "anomalies," who happen to have "the right facial structure and stature where hair loss works."

"But for most of us, it doesn't," he says. "I'd look like Caine from Kung Fu if I shaved my head."

For the many men who share this view a multi-billion dollar hair loss treatment industry has developed to help them in their quest to hang on to their mane. But be warned, Kobren insists that 99 percent of the products and services for sale out there are "complete bullshit."

To make his point he describes an encounter with the Florida-based hair restoration company, the Hair Club, back in the late 80s when he was first battling hair loss.

"When I went to see them I was greeted by this really hot chick who told me, 'We can help you and no one's going to know.' I kept trying to push her to tell me the process and eventually she brings in someone who has gone through it. This guy's wearing this really obvious wig and I'm like, 'That guy's wearing a wig!' She says, 'Well, it's not really a wig, it's a hair system.' And that's when I found out they wanted to shave off all my hair and fit me with a rug."

Kobren steered clear of this and many other "miracle treatments," but others have fallen prey to the charlatans, sometimes with tragic results.

Did you know steroids can cause hair loss? Read about it on Motherboard.

In the early 90s, Michael Potkul ended up with scars from his temples to his neck after a botched hair transplant by a surgeon in Pittsburgh. A court was told that Dr. Dominic A. Brandy severed key arteries as he tried to stretch Potkul's scalp, stunting hair growth instead of encouraging it. Potkul was so appalled by the result he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest, the bullet barely missing his heart.

In the end, Kobren found a doctor to prescribe him Finasteride, a medication for enlarged prostate that he had heard anecdotally was effective in treating MPB. Finasteride is now marketed as Propecia and alongside another medicine, Rogaine, is the only FDA-approved drug for the treatment of hair loss. But Propecia remains controversial. Users have to take it daily and if they stop, it ceases being effective. Meanwhile, some users—Phillip Paoletta included—have reported suffering sexual dysfunction as a side effect.

Kevin Spacey's balding and people still like him, right? Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Besides medication, increasing numbers of men are opting for hair transplants. The boom is likely due to improved surgical techniques, which have eliminated much of the risk of scarring. These improved techniques have been accompanied by some magically restored hairlines among a host of male celebs, including Kevin Costner, David Beckham, and LeBron James. While the stars are remaining tight-lipped, the smart money is on Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE), a technique whereby naturally occurring clusters of one to four hairs, known as follicular units, are cut out from the back of the head and put into balding areas at the front.

Dr. Robert M. Bernstein, Clinical Professor of Dermatology at Columbia University, wrote the first paper on FUE in 2002. At his clinic in Manhattan he operates daily, offering FUE and another hair transplant technique known as Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT), in which hair follicles are dissected from a long, thin strip of skin cut from the back and side of the scalp.

The procedures cost around $15,000, but despite the high price, Dr. Bernstein says business is up nearly a third in two years. He says his clients cover the full range of ages from 18 to 80 and are from all backgrounds and ethnicities.

"We treat a lot of young Indian men," he says. "It's very important for them to have hair when they are dating and for marriage."

He denies that there's much stigma surrounding hair transplants these days. "It's pretty widely accepted at this point. There are about 400,000 done around the world every year."

Asked why so few celebrities admit they've had it done, he says: "I think with any cosmetic procedure people are reluctant to admit to it, especially men."

I'm not sure what we'd have done if Greasy Rees had walked into class one day sporting brand new hair, but I can't imagine we'd have been too sympathetic. I feel bad about the way we behaved towards him (though obviously not so bad that I'm going to stop myself from exploiting the memory of his mistreatment for this story). I suppose the one consolation he must've had was the sure knowledge that, statistically, a large proportion of his tormentors were likely to suffer the same fate.

Though he can't be certain, my old school pal Riggs thinks he probably joined in the goading of Mr. Rees. These days he finds retribution coming close to home.

When he plays superheroes with his eight-year-old son, the boy is very specific about the roles dad can play. "I can be Lex Luthor or The Thing from Fantastic 4," he says.

Follow Paul Willis on Twitter.

Already miss you, bro. Stephen Harper/Facebook

This summer past, I started hearing a phrase that I wasn't ready for.

"He might lose."

Rank-and-file, true-blue-blood, Canada-has-created-1.2-million-net-new-jobs-since-the-depths-of-the-recession type of Conservatives, they were the ones who began admitting to themselves that this might be the end.

Those were still good days for the Conservatives. Their mortal enemy, the Liberal Party, was stuck in third place. Justin Trudeau, that inexperienced drama teacher, was never going to become prime minister. It was just Stephen Harper going mano-a-mano with Thomas Mulcair, the bearded wonder. And their power levels were even. An election cage match could go either way.

Publicly, the Conservatives were confident. Privately, they were voicing some concerns.

After all, things weren't all that rosy. Whereas staff in 2011 were clambering aboard the Stephen Harper express, this time, the pandemonium was muted. Long-time Conservatives abruptly retired. After promising their party that they would run again, senior ministers John Baird, James Moore, Shelly Glover, and Peter MacKay all up and split with little notice. Staff left with them.

Offices of senior ministers, rife with talent, cleared out as the party faithful began to glimpse the end of a five-year marathon and began searching for placements in the private sector. Even if Harper won again, many of those staff didn't want to affix themselves to the lumbering Voltron that the Harper government had become.

A few staff were done with the control—done with vetting every decision through "the centre," done with the prime minister inserting himself in every file, done with Harper kneecapping otherwise good files by slathering his clamped-down brand of media relations all over it.

So October 19 came, and Rome fell.

Part One: "The tired, old, corrupt Liberal party is cornered like an angry rat."

It's hard to remember what Stephen Harper stood for in 2004. That's what he promised when he unified the right wing—to get rid of the tired, old, corrupt Liberal Party.

Populism, accountability, federalism, democratic reform, chucking gay marriage (four-out-of-five ain't bad)—that Stephen Harper didn't have credibility problems. That Stephen Harper had personality problems. People had a hard time believing that man—cold to the point of robotic, dogged to the point of pathology—really had the temperament to be prime minister.

Paul Martin won the 2004 election, the one dubbed "shallow, cynical and mean-spirited," thanks to a lot of rhetoric around Stephen Harper's "hidden agenda" (one that we were still waiting for, ten years on) but was ultimately cut down in 2006, thanks to a raging corruption scandal that made his Liberals not just unpalatable, but outright toxic.

While we all may smile fondly in recalling those heady Liberal days, it's worth remembering that Martin's party was responsible for $100 million in graft and waste that merely lined the pockets of old boy Liberals. When the opposition parties, outraged, trying to topple his government in the House of Commons, Martin simply cancelled the opposition parties' ability to do so. (Sound familiar?)

Nobody was particularly saddened when Martin lost. The National Post wrote that "the cruel irony" of Martin's defeat was that, "for the most part, the principal agents in the sponsorship scandal kept their jobs and the money. Paul Martin lost both his job and his principles. His corruption was total."

Harper's 2006 campaign, as I've already written about, was not as scary as we remember. He vowed not to introduce any new abortion laws. He would scrap the obviously ineffective long-gun registry, but not lessen gun control otherwise. He would hold a free vote on re-defining marriage as a strictly non-gay enterprise, but must have known that the baker's dozen of his Conservative colleagues would vote against it, ensuring that nuptials remained fabulous. He would beef up our military, but would not, if he could help it, help knock over any two-bit rogue -istan that drew the ire of the Pentagon.

Columnist Colby Cosh summed it up in 2006 as thus: "Canada remains in 2006 largely what it was in 2005—a country where cigarettes are taxed 300%, but heroin is free to addicts; where gay widowers have an easier time obtaining pension entitlements than Second World War veterans; and where a women can go topless in public unless she has hate literature tattooed across her breasts."

And so, frustrated with the arrogant, bloated beast that was the Liberal Party of Canada, Canadians opted for Harper's reformed Reform Party. They elected a class of penny-pinching farmers and car salesmen, fetishists of the nuclear family and inherently distrustful of politics, the media, lobbyists—hell, anything in Ottawa.

It was those guys who burst into the House of Commons in 2006.

They had just ousted Canada's miserable government on their second attempt. They brought what Canadians wanted: change.

And this is how the Conservative Party came to power. Not with a promise to change Canada. Not with a vow of retribution. But with a promise to fix politics.

Part Two: Stephen Harper Tried to Change Ottawa, But Ottawa Changed Stephen Harper

Somewhere between Stephen Harper the Angry Ideologue We Hired to Fix This Shit, and Stephen Harper the Man We Fired In A Fit of Frustration, the prime minister wore a lot of different hats.

Stephen Harper the Hawk. Stephen Harper the Broad Thinker. Stephen Harper the Tinkerer. Stephen Harper the Libertarian. Stephen Harper the Panda Love Master.

But ultimately Stephen Harper was more interested in hanging onto power than he was in turning the tables on the urban elites or installing himself as Kaiser. From 2006 until 2011, the Conservative mission was survival. Hang on. Don't get ousted. Don't allow another Liberal decade. Don't drown in the recession.

That doesn't mean he didn't improve some facets and levers. He had to pay lip service to that promise to clean up Ottawa. He forced departments to hand over ever-more information to the public. He clamped down on how lobbyists skulk through the halls of power. He put in oversight for appointing lackies to important jobs. He did good things.

But like every jagoff who moves into 24 Sussex, this jagoff—like all the jagoffs before him—couldn't separate politics from government.

He had to employ the very tactics that he had railed against. He appointed flunkies to the Senate. He prorogued Parliament to avoid confidence votes. He stuffed controversial legislation into omnibus bills to jam them through.

He was flawed by the exact process he promised to fix.

And maybe he never really wanted to fix it. Harper is a political animal. Maybe he knew that promising populism is a hell of alot easier than delivering populism.

But for the list of accusations made against him, a jury of his peers would have a hard time actually finding Harper guilty of some of the more specific crimes.

Stephen Marche, Toronto-based columnist, took to the New York Times to decry the Harper legacy, and it's a good place to look to see this principle in action. Harper political staff barred bureaucrats from talking about snowfall to the media? Actually, non-political bureaucrats decided not to do the interview all on their own. The Fair Elections Act tightens the requirements for voting? The final (amended) version of the legislation did no such thing. The government is killing research critical of the tar sands? The reality isn't quite so simple.

This isn't to say that the Harper government didn't, from time-to-time, engage in some skullduggery. Sometimes, even effectively. But Canadians shouldn't confuse radio silence on, say, scientific research with an actual end to the research itself.

When you peel it all away—all the accusations, all the "facts" pulled from ShitHarperDid.ca, all the indictments of the Harper government—you're left with the legacy of a team of overworked and under-trusted micromanagers who fucked up four-out-of-five files on their desk, not a shadowy cabal of operators hell-bent on destroying liberal, happy Canada. This was a government more incompetent than evil.

Tucked inside Marche's column, written as almost a throw-away, is one of the most insightful things ever written about the Harper government.

"But the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country. The policies that he has undertaken have been negligible—more irritating distractions than substantial changes," Marche wrote.

And that's exactly it. Harper didn't want to dismantle the welfare state. He didn't want to change how we think about Canada. He didn't want to fix entitlement culture or hack at equalization. His broad strategy was a simple and attainable one: downsize government and neuter it wherever possible.

Last May, I swung into the opulent Laurier Room, inside Ottawa's gaudy Chateau Laurier, to eat some free cheese and slug a couple of complimentary Heinekens from the open bar.

Maybe three dozen conservatives and/or Conservatives were milling around the room. A little stage was set up at the front of the room. I shook a few hands with the Tories I recognized, then set up shop near the bar.

The event was being run by the Canadian Taxpayer Federation—a group that oscillates between hysterical pearl-clutching over every cucumber sandwich bought with public money, and legitimate concern over waste, incompetence, and graft in the federal government. The main portion of the event was a Q&A, which included Minister of Defence Jason Kenney, re-elected earlier this month and the odds-on front-runner for leader of the party, and John Williamson, felled New Brunswick MP who was particularly popular for speaking out against his own party when the occasion arose.

As events go, this one was particularly prone to navel-gazing. The two MPs slapped each others backs, and fetted nine years of fighting for the public dime.

But this, despite all the histrionics about the Harper decade, was the heart of Ottawa during the Conservative reign. Self-congratulation for slashing red tape, downsizing federal bureaucracy, and prying law-abiding citizens out from under the regulatory thumb of government. They didn't sit around, stuff their faces with cheese, and brag about how they've stripped Canadians of the right to vote and muzzled scientists.

It was in the hell-bent mission to lower taxes and streamline government that Harper and his team of sycophants tripped over themselves on file after file. Even when they didn't mean to.

Their mandated bureaucratic downsizing meant that Veteran's Affairs Canada would shutter offices and turn around WWII pilots. It meant that the very watchdogs that were set up to save money and improve performance were so short-staffed that they could barely pay for postage to mail their toothless requests for more funds. The military emerged from a "decade of darkness" only to see a decade of dim twilight under the Tories.

A government caught between spending as little money as possible, delivering for its industry clients, and simply surviving as a political entity is a government that has little ambition to please the public. There's simply no time.

Harper ran the federal government as though it were irrelevant—a nuisance and a hinderance. If he could return your tax cheque, he would. If he could approve your pipeline, he would. Whereas the Liberals want to prove that the federal government could be all things to all people, the Conservatives want it mean very little to as many as possible.

To offset his lacklustre, Harper pummeled the Liberal Party whenever he could. Luckily for him, the Liberal Party made it all too possible, by hoisting unelectable rubes into their top spot. Men whose vision of the Canadian government were so ephemeral and arrogantly-built that the offer of no government at all—essentially what Harper was peddling—seemed more appetizing.

The closest thing that came to euthanizing the Harper government was Jack Layton's battle cry of "Ottawa is broken." Had the 2011 election gone on another seven days, it's possible that Canadians would have agreed.

And that's what so damning about Harper's critics. They couldn't win the argument. Faced with all the supposed horrors of the administration, they couldn't offer a better solution.

Part Three: "Normal."

It didn't take long after the Conservative Party's defeat for the knives to come out.

It took all of a day before the Conservative rank and file began their long march away from the Harper decade. Member of Parliament Ron Liepert dug at Harper's personality. Surviving MP Michelle Rempel subtweeted her way through an announcement that she will likely try to replace the big guy. Leadership frontrunner Jason Kenney told the media that they, as Conservatives, needed to learn to smile more. Nice-guy MP Dan Albas said he wants a "sunnier" party.

And those are the Conservatives. The Toronto Star, by comparison, read like the New York Times after the Emperor surrendered.

The intolerably self-aggrandizing Heather Mallick congratulated herself in Harper's defeat before lamenting, unironically, "it's a huge mistake to define yourself only by what you dislike." Haroon Siddiqui took once last kick at the Conservative decade in proclaiming: "Canadians reclaim their country from Stephen Harper." Robin Sears describes post-apocalyptic Canada reborn, arguing that we have returned to "normal."

It's very easy to burn the effigy of Stephen Harper that we've created. Very easy to go on and say that Stephen Harper was the problem, and standing next to his funeral pyre, that we've fixed it all.

It's easy to say that he won a majority government with 40 percent of the vote, in an election with 61 percent voter turnout. It's easy to say he and a shadowy room of operators cooked up the robocall scandal in order to fudge the results. Easy, too, to say his manipulative style and Republican-inspired politics choked out political opponents at every turn, making a good-guy victory impossible. Easiest yet is the idea that racist and xenophobes backed his party, pitting them at odds of multiculturalism and tolerance.

But these myths, these ideas that Canada is good, Harper is bad, and his government was some sort of horrible aberration, they still don't explain how 5.6 million Canadians continued to support his government. And those myths assume that these problems—inaction on various social problems, secretive bureaucracy, environmental destruction, racism—are new, or that the previous governments have handled them responsible. They are not, and they did not.

Canada was not cursed by a witchdoctor in 2006. It did not transform overnight.

Justin Trudeau—or prime minister-designate Thomas Mulcair, winner of the alternate reality election where Harper was forcing all women to wear the niqab at citizenship ceremonies—will not be a clear break from Harper's policies.

On tone, sure, the Liberals will approach governance like brunch with your bae. But on the day-to-day machinations of government, Trudeau wants the same tax breaks (altered, slightly), the same departmental spending (heightened, a bit), the same security legislation (fixed, at spots), a mimicked foreign policy (improved, in style), and the same social services. The country will not be run that differently.

We must be very careful of the myths we choose to create. Harper's government was not as bad as we chose to paint it, and Trudeau's promises are not as bold as we choose to believe.

And maybe that's the saddest thing about the Harper decade. He stormed into power as the inheritor of a populist mandate—a license to actually change how politics works, and to make it more accountable and beholden to the public. Instead, he said "fuck it" and started cutting us cheques for pumping out babies in a sad attempt to curry our favour with our own money. And his enablers, the very ones who are now promising us a new era of conservative politics, were the ones who stood by and made it possible.

It's the same trap that has swallowed the NDP wholesale: that all you need to do to win at politics is to play the game with the same set of rules we've been playing with for decades. If anything, the one-time socialists should be even more ashamed of themselves—at least Stephen Harper actually won before he shed his principles.

We should thank Stephen Harper for showing us just how broken and superficial our politics actually are. But we won't.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

A Russian submarine at the Saint Petersburg Submarine Museum. Photo via Getty.

It's sometimes easy to forget (if, in fact, you ever knew) that the information superhighway travels mostly in huge cables buried deep at sea—miles and miles of fiber optic wire that carry on them 95% of our daily communication and $10 trillion (!) worth of global business. If someone were to sever enough of said cables, our tenuous grasp on the modern world would be lost. Electronic banking would be a distant memory, your smartphone would be just a phone, and door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen would descend upon suburban neighborhoods again. In short, life would be hell.

These usually distant fears have been stoked recently by Russian naval activities. According to a story in the New York Times on Sunday, Russian spy planes and submarines are "aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications." American intelligence officials are reportedly worried that this activity could mean the Ruskies are scouting vulnerabilities and thinking of cutting the cables sometime in the future.

Feeding the fear, of course, is the fact that our relationship with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has never been more frayed. With military plays in Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, and Syria, he's thumbed his nose at the U.N., and tensions between the US and Russia are at dangerously high levels not seen since the Cold War—something Putin's cagey meeting with Obama late last month illustrated.

So, how likely is it that Russia would cut these cables, and what would it look like if they did? For that answer we asked Nicole Starosielski, Assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, and author of the book The Undersea Network (Duke University Press), which is accompanied by an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs. She made us feel a bit better.

VICE: Russian submarines and spy ships are, according to the New York Times, "aggressively operating" near vital undersea cables that carry almost all global internet communications. There's a growing fear the Russians will cut these cables in some of their hardest-to-access locations. On a scale of one to ten, how totally petrified should we all be about this?
Nicole Starosielski: I don't think we should be totally petrified about this. Or, at least, we should be much more scared of other things before we worry about a Russian threat to US internet traffic. By and large, our network is concentrated along a set of narrow cable routes, which are regularly disrupted by everything from natural disasters to fishermen's anchors. These take out more cables than deliberate cable cutting ever has.

What would it take to cut cables in these "hardest-to-access" locations? Something tells me we're not just talking a couple divers and a pair of bolt cutters.
It wouldn't take much to cut cables in the deep sea. They can be severed just as easily, and using the same means, as shallow water cables. They can be cut with an anchor, a grapnel, or any large, sharp device dragged along the seafloor. It would actually be easier than sending divers down with bolt cutters.

Walk us through what happens if, say, tomorrow we wake up and these vital cables have been severed. Will the internet disappear? Will we have to engage with strangers instead of staring into our smartphones?
This really depends on how many cables are cut, and where they are routed. Cable breaks are actually fairly routine—on average once every three days. But in most cases, traffic can be redirected. When the 2011 tsunami severed a number of the undersea cables in Japan, the country remained online, in part because of its massive number of international connections. In other cases, such as in nations that only have a few cables, a single break could be disastrous. There are a number of occasions when the internet has disappeared after a set of cable cuts. The 2006 Hengchun earthquake severed a number of cables near Taiwan—a pressure point in the global system—and made the internet inaccessible for many, disrupted financial transactions, and brought down other critical systems. In the United States, however, you'd have to cut quite a few cables before anyone would have to start engaging with strangers.

In the Times story it says these cables carry "global business worth more than $10 trillion a day, including from financial institutions that settle transactions on them every second." What does the cutting of these cables mean to us in a financial sense? Should we all be hoarding our money under our mattresses? Will our ATM cards stop working?
Stephen Malphrus, staff director at the US Federal Reserve Board, has said if the cable networks are disrupted, "the financial services sector does not 'grind to a halt,' rather it snaps to a halt." If the undersea cable network stopped operating, it would not only disrupt connections between major financial institutions, but would affect many of our everyday financial transactions. ATM cards included. Online banking would be out of the question. But again, these cuts already happen on a regular basis, and are disproportionately felt in regions with fewer cables.

Beyond spy planes, in what ways does the US monitor the kind of activity we're talking about near these cables?
By and large, cables aren't monitored. They stretch thousands of miles across the ocean, and it's simply too much work to monitor them all. Cable companies have been trying to monitor their lines for over a century, using all kinds of tactics: helicopters, patrol boats, and so on. But that hasn't prevented them from being broken time and time again by fishermen and boaters in the coastal seas

If the Russians did this, wouldn't it disrupt their own internet communications, too? What would be the upside in this for them?
Yes, this is certainly a problem. A worker in the industry once told me that contemporary cable cutting would be kind of like standing out on a tree limb and then sawing it off—you'd disrupt your own networks at the same time. If a Russian submarine were to cut a number of cables linking to the United States, this wouldn't just affect the United States. It would affect all of the countries that use these links to get somewhere else, and all of the countries linking to the United States. We're a huge node in the global communications system, so the effects would extend far beyond our national boundaries. If any country, Russia or otherwise, simply hoped to cause widespread disruption for anyone using digital media, then this might be an effective technique. But it's an indiscriminate one.

Doesn't it seem kind of old fashioned that the entire infrastructure for our data is run through big-ass underwater cables?
Well it is quite old fashioned—undersea cables are one of the oldest global communications technologies. Even though the lines have been updated from copper telegraph wires to high-speed fiber optics, they're still being laid much like they were 150 years ago. And they often run along the same routes. But they're the most effective and efficient way to communicate today. Cables carry data traffic at faster speeds and lower cost than satellites, and it's unlikely that we're going to move on from them anytime soon.

Why aren't the locations of the cables more closely guarded or kept classified?
The most significant human threat to cable systems has never been intentional sabotage. This has been an anomaly in the history of cable disruptions. The biggest threats are from boats that unintentionally drop anchors or nets on cable systems. Some cable companies allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars annually just to repair these disruptions, which they assume will happen. The best protection against this threat is the publication of cable routes, so that way fishermen and other boaters won't accidentally break them. Military cable routes, on the other hand, are kept classified.

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When it came time to finish my novel, I knew the last thing left to do was to see the hills I'd written about but had never seen. Research had given me a skeletal lay of the land, but I knew I needed to experience the places I charted, because those parts of the book felt flat even after several revisions. So last March, I went back to Bangladesh for the first time in seven years. It was the dry beginning of summer, a couple months shy of monsoon. My sister joined me on a last-minute whim. She was finishing up grad school and wasn't sure when she'd have another opportunity to visit. Better than sitting on family couches and eating, she told me. We'd be two women travelers on a cross-country bus ride, along with our uncle, our tour guide and male protector.

"Don't speak English. They'll know you aren't Bangali," warned my uncle, an activist turned UN bureaucrat with a graying handsomeness.

"People are religious here, best to keep your arms covered," he said as we settled into a bus headed to the restricted tribal lands of Rangamati. His tone was gruff, as usual, but I thought I heard the toll of playing tour guide getting to him.

"Where are women safe?" I asked.

"Nowhere," joked my sister. "Not even inside."

Her joke wasn't actually a joke. After all, inside was Rana Plaza, the deadliest garment-factory accident in human history. Inside was the home, the plight of every domestic worker or housewife we knew. Women's work, 24/7, for a pittance. "It's not safe here" was a constant reminder that there was no safe place for a woman to be alone. Inside, outside, in homes, offices, factories, farms, or buses, you could be destroyed.

"Just cover up, and you'll be fine, that's it," replied my uncle.

The bus driver honked loudly and continuously to barrel through the nighttime road.

"I hate the stupid buses in this stupid country," I muttered.

"Don't say that," said my uncle, not bothering to look up from his cell phone. "Don't call it a stupid country."

My sister and I grimaced at an unspoken thought of being on a nighttime bus full of men, and the fatal New Delhi rape that happened in December 2012. Years ago, I'd lived in that bountiful, harsh city. Years before that, I had been raped, on a winter afternoon in high school. It struck me how the date of the New Delhi rape, December 16, was the date of Bangladesh's victory in the Liberation War of 1971. Intimate violence is not rare, nor extinct, as likely to happen in New York as New Delhi. It happens everywhere, to everyone, between strangers, lovers, family. Dark thoughts seeped into my dreams that night. Bus as death trap, drivers honking wildly, swerving in and out of lanes, riders only half-asleep. Home as vessel, brimming with trauma.

I want to go home, I thought, realizing the sensation wasn't new. This always happened during one of these "homeland" trips. The isolation and claustrophobia would get under my skin. I said this often as a child. Alien melancholy laced with a wistful desire to belong. Growing up in Alabama, Texas, Missouri, and suburban New York, I felt like a perpetual outsider. Those places had nothing to do with family, friends, religion, or shelter. What I longed for was somewhere to call my own. As a kid in St. Louis, on the bus home, the principal's son taunted me with Gulf War–inspired Islamophobic epithets, and I remember sitting silently still, wishing I could transport myself home. But when I did get off the bus, it was to our roach-infested apartment, with no room of my own. I wanted desperately to escape, and sometimes I did, usually at the library, with the Childhood of Famous Americans series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Stephen King, and V. C. Andrews in tow. I wrote peppy short stories, nothing as gloomy as the books I loved to read.

On Broadly: Ruqsana Begum's Fight to be a Muslim-Bangladeshi Thai Boxing Champion

When I shed the armor of my childhood—the thick plastic glasses, multi-colored braces, hairy legs and upper lip—I discovered a new brand of adolescent alienation. I turned into a sexualized, vulnerable young adult. I wanted to experience everything, and my defiance shook my Muslim Bangladeshi foundations. I snuck out of the house, dabbled in miniskirts, pepperoni, booze, hookups—I found it all delicious. The more I was told I shouldn't, I did. I ignored the advice of my cautious, loving parents, that breaking rules had harsh consequences: You will not survive. No one will love you. You will end up alone. You will go to hell.

I survived.

Once in a while I felt loved, but mostly alone for the decade after I graduated from college. And, for a long spell of hell, the scars of sexual assault lingered into my adulthood.

To cope, I explored inanimate, Indian-ish, New Age forms of healing–crystals, hypnotherapy, cleanses—with the fervor of an acolyte. I channeled my anger and trauma into world travel. Living between worlds was a way for me to escape. By way of nonprofit salaries, study-abroad programs, a fellowship, and family trips to Bangladesh, I traveled and discovered points of departure for my fiction over the years. I went to places that mirrored my volatile state of being: Nairobi, New Delhi, and Dhaka. In my not-quite homeland, Bangladesh, 160 million people bound by land smaller than Wisconsin live in a chaotic, verdant, gorgeous, dirty, and stifling world. I love-hate it. The restrictions of not being able to speak, eat, dress, or move how I do in my day-to-day unsettles me and stretches my imagination.

My face is mirrored in millions of faces I see. Still, it is not, and will never be, home.

This cambering bus ride to Rangamati would take us to a restricted part of the southerly Chittagong Hill Tracts. Foreign nationals were required to get special permits to enter tribal lands, so our uncle would do all the talking. No one questioned a man who did all the talking. We were undercover, posing as authentic. Our gringo Bangla was a sad consequence of too many years studying abroad.

Kaptai Lake, a marvel in the middle of nowhere, was the town's main attraction. We chartered a boat at the foot of a suspension bridge that connected the town to the forest.

"You should see the hills after the rains," muttered my uncle. "It's all dry and dead shit now."

I memorized the details of this arid March version of a fantastic voyage: desiccated sal forests, a trickle of waterfall, invasive water hyacinth islands that mapped the lake's surface. I took note of all the trees I could name, the miens of travelers who came from all parts of Bangladesh.

"The lake is beautiful, though," I said.

"They call it the Pahari people's tears," replied my uncle. "The lake is beautiful, but its history is very dark. When the government built Kaptai Dam, it formed this lake, displacing the Chakma." The Chakma were the majority Tibeto-Burman community in Rangamati, who traced their lineage to 15th-century Arakan, a part of present-day Burma. The word pahari is Bangla for "hills."

Bright textiles swayed like flags on a gazebo atop a hill, and I asked our boatman to dock. We walked up stairs carved into the hillside, entering a village, walking until we heard a woman call to us.

"Come in, brother and sisters," said a Chakma woman. The woman was wizened and bamboo skinny, a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. She stood in the doorway of a blue hut made of latticed palm leaves. Freshly dyed shawls hung from a clothesline. We followed her in. More shawls wrapped in bundles. Spare, colorful details composed her home—a Buddhist altar of candles and flowers, a tiny TV, a world map.

"Have some tea," she offered, along with a tray of cookies and cigarettes. Her stilted Bangla, not her mother tongue, matched the staccato in mine. She told me her name was Puspumaya.

"Have you lived here your whole life?" I asked.

"No, we lived where the lake is, until I was five," said Puspumaya, exhaling a smoke ring to the ceiling, a shade of green that muted the cheer of the blue walls. "There used to be tigers, lots of animals. She shook her head wistfully. "Nowadays, there are only humans."

Puspumaya lived in the country of her birth as a minority, as did I. We belonged to the Bangali Muslim majority, who visited her land as a tourist attraction. We belonged to the people who'd oppressed hers for generations. Yet her warmth indicated no resentment. I wondered if she read us as being somehow different from the Bangalis she had known throughout her life. Secretly I wanted her to see us as different.

Here, in her little blue home, hazy with incense and cigarette smoke, Puspumaya sold the shawls she made with her sister to another pair of sisters—my sister and I, who'd also grown up as outsiders their entire lives.

I looked over my notes that evening, knowing I wanted to write about the sinister undercurrent of ethnic racism and displacement that tempered Rangamati's idyllic peace. I realized that the only Chakma people besides Puspumaya we'd seen were the weathered old ladies weaving intricate lanyard bags along the lake. Or the waiters at the hostel we were staying in. That was it. While we spoke to them in Bangla, it was evident that it wasn't their first language. They were forced to speak it by the dominant majority, who had never bothered to learn their language.

The tension was as beautiful as it was terrifying.

The next day, we took another day trip to a Chakma Buddhist temple, where colorful prayer Buddhist flags adorned the grounds. Gaudy plastic flowers were woven into garlands and Hindu swastikas to decorate the walls. Again, just as there had been Bangladeshi tourists at the lake, hordes of Muslim Bangalis gawked at the saffron-robed monks and Buddhist worshippers.

All of us were snapping pictures to show everyone back home where we'd been and the people we'd seen. After the temple trip, we cut tickets to leave for the tea-laden, wealthy, and pious northern city of Sylhet, where the wartime events of my novel took place at the India-Bangladesh border.

Although I couldn't see them, I knew Indian BSF officers, armed with assault rifles, would demand visas, which we didn't have.

We arrived in Sylhet just an hour shy of dawn. Our digs were a hot new tourist trap, an eco-lodge in the woods, a stone's throw from a tea estate and rubber-tree forest. Within a day, our plans changed: Unexpectedly, our uncle had to return to Dhaka, something vague about business matters. But my sister and I knew the real reason: We'd worked his last nerve with our diatribes.

My sister and I had both taught high-school after-school programs for New York City nonprofits, and were raring for a chance to meet fellow activists. So I got in touch with the director of a local NGO that worked with ethnic communities in Bangladesh to set up a meeting.

"All of our tribes are like khals feeding a river," said the director, who hailed from the Manipuri community. From a certain angle, he resembled actor Lou Diamond Phillips. "Without us," he continued, "there would be no river." Each tribe was an intrinsic thread in Bangladesh's social fabric. Unravel one, you unravel them all. Displacing indigenous people with ill-conceived development projects worsened environmental problems like soil erosion and flooding. His words were a reminder of how we violated each other in infinite ways. Born into places we'd never belong, fighting to carve out places where we could live. The heart of everything I wanted to write in my novel was where our discordant tributaries met, disappeared, reemerged.

On VICE News: Sex, Slavery, and Drugs in Bangladesh:

On our last day in Sylhet, we hired a driver for a day trip to Jaflong, a border town, where my novel's Bangladesh Liberation War flashbacks take place. I wanted to stand at a border where Bangladeshis crossed over, like a cast of revolving characters: refugees, husbands, smugglers. From the lowlands, the Indian foothills loomed majestic, ringed by giant clouds.

"Guess the Indians won the best-land prize, huh?" we laughed, another joke that wasn't really a joke. I yearned to cross over, through the jungle and into the Indian state of Meghalaya, but we were divided by nature and national patrols. Although I couldn't see them, I knew Indian BSF officers, armed with assault rifles, would demand visas, which we didn't have.

Our driver, a baby-faced newlywed with loads of road rage, parked his jeep along the Piyain River's banks. He led us past hundreds of rock collectors pulled boulders from the river that crisscrossed the Bangladesh-India border. Their labor would be churned into cement, sealing the foundation for buildings throughout the subcontinent.

We crossed the river into a lush stretch of betel, areca, and Burma teak. We rode past homes made of stone and wood, colorful blips between the trees. This land belonged to the indigenous people in these parts, the Khasi. Theirs was a matrilineal society, and our rickshaw driver told us that some Bangali men had married women in this particular village. For love, or to claim their wives' property, he couldn't be sure. We snuck a peek into one of the homes. Two Khasi women giggled with an infant on a small wooden bed. As if they could feel our watchful eyes, they stopped laughing.

"I wish we could talk to them," my sister said to me. "I wish we could do this alone."

Our drivers—by car, boat, and rickshaw—were men. Where could we, or any of the women we met, find a sunset, a late-night bus ride, a morning stroll, a smoke break—completely alone? There was so much outside, but there wasn't anyplace where could we roam freely.

After our journey, I returned to a still-cold New York to finish my novel. There are so many details—the flora, the rivers, the people—newly catalogued in my imagination, allowing me to finish my novel. My relief was manifold, being spared the swelter of April in Dhaka. I wear what I want, walk where I want, when I want. And now, a year after my trip, I've been horrified by the murders of freethinking writers—men who dared to question faith, religion, government. The violence against people who try to break free from home, its boundaries and restrictions, crushes all of us.

As a feminist writer, my search for a home in a place that will never be home is akin to Bangladeshi atheist bloggers calling for the freedom to think and speak as they please in their country. The recent violence reiterates the alienation we, as feminists or atheists, feel. But we keep on. We write what we need to write, telling our stories so that we can make homes we belong to. What I have left are photographs of solitary women, capturing each of them in their own world. In one of these photographs, a rock collector squats by the riverbank, washing clothes on a flat rock. Her toes in water, heels on the ground. She belongs to the river and the earth. She is focused on her task, luminous in the amber dusk. She pays us no mind.

Tanwi Nandini Islam is the author of Bright Lines (Penguin, 2015). A multimedia artist, she is also the founder of Hi Wildflower Botanica, a handcrafted natural perfume and skincare line. Follow her on Twitter.