Puff Daddy at Butter on November 5, 2015, in New York City. Photo by Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images

Late Tuesday, just a few hours before he turned 46 years old, you could find Sean Combs, or Puff Daddy if you will, entering a packed screening room at New York City's Soho House, dancing more or less by himself to music he produced nearly 20 years ago. He did this while downing a golden bottle of what looked to be champagne. Gold was, for this man estimated to be worth 735 million dollars, a motif of sorts: His untied, white leather sneakers had gold zippers on each side, and he wore two large gold chains above his white shirt, medallions attached to each. "I represent that black American dream, and that shit is ten times harder than any other dream," Combs remarked late in the evening, with full sincerity.

The ever-youthful rapper, record producer, actor, clothing designer, and reality TV star, who was last in the news for allegedly assaulting a UCLA football coach, wasn't just here to celebrate further encroachment into middle-age, however. Puff's publicists had invited the oddball assortment of hack journos and rap industry folk to imbibe, consume high-end snack foods, and get the first listen of Puffy's newest album, MMM, which was released the following morning.

"I was at home with my girl and wanted to watch some gangster shit. So I got on the Netflix, and we watched Paid in Full," Combs explained during the introduction to the evening, going on to say that Charles Stone III's cult-classic 2002 film provided the inspiration for his new album Money Makin' Mitch. Claiming that the album was, like the film, "a Shakespearean tale that needs to be told because the black man is God, and we comin'." Puffy suggested Money Makin' Mitch was also a prequel to his previous album, Last Train to Paris. The city is pictured on MMM's cover, an Annie Leibovitz photo of a fur coat-clad, sunglasses-wearing Puffy with a pensive Kate Moss as they exit a motor vehicle, surrounded by paparazzi, taken in 1999.

A screening of sorts then commenced, although the images—a black-and-white assemblage of NYC street scenes cut to the beat of the album and chock-full of experimental film clichés—were clearly secondary to the music. Featuring appearances from Future, Lil Kim, and Pusha T, the album itself isn't bad, though it doesn't retain the urgency and unshakable hooks that made his work such a staple of MTV and rap radio in the late 90s and early aughts. Of course, to expect such a thing would be ludicrous: Even in his heyday, Combs was seen as more of a showman with an eye for talent in collaborators than a genuinely great MC. Still "Auction" and "You Can Be My Lover" evocatively simulate the flashy production and elegant sampling that powered his debut album No Way Out. Combs has announced that his next and ostensibly last album will be a sequel to his chart-topping debut.

As the films and album played simultaneously in the packed room, Puffy stood along the carpeted stairwell about halfway up, bobbing his head, his eyes intensely radiating whatever satisfaction he still gets from being the center of attention. Eventually he took a seat in the middle of the space, as occasional cheers of "Baaaad Boooooy" would erupt from the hangers-on, ones that he would gleefully join in with. During interludes between films, Puffy or one of his minions would retake the microphone as the houselights went up to continue talking about how great he was.

The whole evening had the vibe of a congratulatory lap around the motorway, with various executives from Epic Records, which is releasing the album for free, offering their praise for Diddy. "He's the man who gave us Biggie," one said flatly, to immense applause, as though Sean Combs had birthed Christopher Wallace himself.

On VICE: Shoe-Shopping with Rick Ross:

"I had to be honest with myself, I had to get back in the game," Puff said toward the end of the evening, growing more reflective. "I don't want nobody to buy it. I don't want there to be no stress."

Given that the version of the record industry which allowed Combs, a child of Harlem and Mount Vernon, to send his kids to Horace Mann and down a gold bottle of champagne after making a star out of Wallace and later himself is long gone, it's probably wise to give his music away. His wealth and fame allows him to truly be the type of "artist" he frequently claimed he started out as—someone who wasn't in it "just for money," he pointed out during an interlude between films.

"All I'm doing right now is just speaking the truth, I don't know why, it just feels better that way," Combs said at the end of the night. "That's what money buys you, you get to speak the truth," he added, before telling people how unusual the opulence all around them was. "I'm not going to let you sit in these silky seats and think that that's regular. It's not regular."

Follow Brandon on Twitter.

The problem with 'SPECTRE' isn't that it's dumb—it's that it's not dumb enough. Images courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Columbia Pictures/EON Productions

Bond movies vary wildly in quality, but the most consistently good part is the Bond villain, one of few cultural touchstones that exists more purely in parody than it does in its original form. You can watch every single James Bond movie—as I did, growing up—or you can just watch the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons and pretty much get the same sense of what Bond villainy is all about. Same for an episode of Archer or even one of the Austin Powers movies. It isn't only that these parodies distill Bond villains effectively because they're writ large, though that certainly is part of it—Bond villains only let you down when their diabolicalness is subdued. Recall the Rupert Murdoch-type figure of Tomorrow Never Dies, who tries to start a war with China to sell newspapers.

Whether it's the henchmen or the volcano lair or the German lesbian aide-de-camp, all the key things we think about when we think of Bond villains go back to SPECTRE. SPECTRE was introduced onscreen in the beginning of From Russia with Love. The scene begins with SPECTRE's leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld—just a voice at that point, literally stroking a white cat—watching three Siamese fighting fish peck each other to death in an aquarium. "Brave, but on the whole, stupid," he intones, except for the third one, "who lets the other two fight while he waits, waits until the survivor is so exhausted that he cannot defend himself." SPECTRE is that third fish, designed to pit East and West against each other and then profit.

SPECTRE was always refreshingly quirky and self-contained, for a terrorist group.

The concept is vaguely logical, but even as an acronym, SPECTRE only barely makes sense—the letters stand for Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. The SP comes from "SPecial," but then we drop the I from "counter-intelligence" for some reason, and not to nitpick, but Revenge isn't something an organization usually concerns itself with. Really, most of their business just involves Extortion, stealing something from the US or Russia and then selling it back to them, but even that can usually be done more efficiently. When bad guy Will Farrell is arbitrarily killed via an Eames chair in the first Austin Powers movie (" I'm still alive only I'm very badly burned"), that's actually something Blofeld does to some poor sap in Thunderball, where a key part of the scheme seems to be a cool boat. In Diamonds Are Forever, Blofeld creates a series of body doubles of himself for a reason I cannot recall and then launches a laser-shooting satellite in order to do... something, it's escaped me. Probably Extortion.

Other Bond villains can be said to have had some kind of relevance speaking to contemporary fears. Goldfinger did debut just seven years before America left the gold standard. Even the insane plot of Moonraker—in which the goateed Hugo Drax wants to repopulate the Earth with the Noah's Ark of beautiful people he's taken into space (all of whom, this being 1979, look like porn stars)—this batty conceit could be seen as some demented reading of the burgeoning environmentalist movement, like Ian Fleming wrote it after being hit on the head by the Monkey Wrench Gang. But SPECTRE was always refreshingly quirky and self-contained, for a terrorist group.

I've always been comfortable with how stupid James Bond is, not least of all because the height of my obsession was during my tweenage years. Unlike the nuanced characters of Fleming contemporary John le Carré, Bond is, as Fleming himself once called him, a " blunt instrument." The greatest piece of screen spy fiction remains the BBC's seven-part 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which follows Alec Guinness in a twisty, personal hunt for a mole at the top of the British intelligence service. Episode two is entirely devoted to a flashback from Tinker Tailor 's own blunt instrument, Ricki Tarr, about a mission—and a love story—gone wrong in Lisbon. That single episode is basically the best Bond movie ever made: one exciting, dangerous piece of a much larger puzzle.

Bond is one-dimensional, so his ideal opposite is one-dimensionally evil, so evil that Bond has no hope of understanding them. This is why the old SPECTRE worked so well. SPECTRE wasn't just bad—it was the worst. It was your evil boss, it was the person who mugged you, it was somehow responsible for your boyfriend leaving you. It was the kind of dark global conspiracy that Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon would later write about. Which is to say: It was pretty fun.

The new James Bond movies owe much to the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, which makes sense, since both have the same goals: making believable and human two heroes whose perceptions in the public mind have atrophied, through camp and studio mistakes.

SPECTRE lends itself to parody because it was already so wonderfully absurd. If we had to psychoanalyze people in the 60s, we'd probably say that SPECTRE was an exaggeration of what many feared about the Soviet Union—only it wasn't the Soviet Union, it was that third fish, so it was OK to be amused by it. And then you saw that the thing actually amusing you was your own fear of the Soviet Union, so that fear itself became ridiculous.

Perhaps the most incredible thing about SPECTRE is that, for such a dumb idea, it and Blofeld have been hotly contested properties. Fleming and EON studios actually didn't own them because Fleming came up with them while working with another producer, which is why they stopped appearing in movies after For Your Eyes Only. In 2013 Sony and MGM announced that they'd acquired the rights to these ur-supervillains, which is why we're finally getting SPECTRE onscreen again.

It's mostly for the best that people demand more from their action movies these days, the same way they demand more from their beers. People want to discuss them; they want to have opinions. The new James Bond movies owe much to the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, which makes sense, since both have the same goals: making believable and human two heroes whose perceptions in the public mind have atrophied, through camp and studio mistakes.

On VICE Sports: How Daniel Craig Developed James Bond's Street Fighting Skills

Without giving away too many spoilers, the new SPECTRE struggles to find its place in a world with way more than two Siamese fighting fish to pit against each other. And like the Nolan Batmen, SPECTRE really gets into trouble when it tries to make some kind of political statement. Because we don't want to be lectured about the evils of the One Percent or government surveillance—those sins are obvious, and we read them in the newspaper every day. This isn't an opportunity to do that. This is an opportunity to reinvent the Joker by way of the Sex Pistols.

SPECTRE also feels like the studio noted it to death, which we actually know from the Sony email hacks. "THERE NEEDS TO BE SOME KIND OF A TWIST RATHER THAN A SERIES OF WATERY CHASES WITH GUNS," one exec wrote. Regarding Bond villain Christoph Waltz, the exec continued, "WHAT DOES HE HAVE UP HIS SLEEVE?"—a simple bad guy wasn't enough. The result is an overly literal take on the "we're not so different, you and I" speech, which they make Waltz deliver about five different times, always very seriously. It's awkward.

To be honest, chases with guns would have been fine with me—not everything needs the hoppy complexity of a barrel-aged double IPA. And part of what's great about the Craig movies is their emphasis on the fact that Bond is a hitman, rather than some actual intelligence agent. But then in this new movie someone goes and ruins it all by comparing him to a drone. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we're shown the Bond family crest, which boasts three—three!—golden balls, and the phrase "Orbis non sufficit," the world is not enough. But sometimes the world can be just too much.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

SPECTRE opens in theaters today.

Every year with the dry monsoon, farmers and landowners across the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo burn off peat forests to make way for new agriculture. This includes plantations for pulpwood and, as you might expect, palm oil.

Tropical peat forests are some of the most carbon-dense environments on the planet. Their trees grow from a bed of compacted, decomposed plant material that accrues carbon over thousands of years. When these forests burn they release this carbon in gases such as methane, which has 21 times the greenhouse influence of CO2. That's how for nearly a month Indonesia's fires produced more greenhouse gases than the daily output of the United States.

This year's fires are currently on track to be their most damaging on record, measured in terms of air quality. Yet despite pressure from Singapore and Malaysia, the Indonesian government has done surprisingly little. There have been a few resolutions, but not much action, and certainly no urgency.

To find out more about what's happening on the ground and why there's been such a lackadaisical response, we spoke to Jakarta-based Erik Meijaard, who works in forestry management across Borneo.

None of these photos have been color-doctored. All by Björn Vaughn

VICE: Hi Erik, let's start with the forests. They're national parks right?
Erik Meijaard: A lot are. There was a good, in-depth study on how local farmers get funding to go up these mountains in national parks to burn the land illegally. No one really knows what a particular piece of land is, so are kind of just playing in the margins; see if they can get some titles, make it formal first, make a claim, and then see if they can somehow formalize that claim. I think this is happening in lots of places in Indonesia, because the governances are completely broken down.

So to be clear, private companies are burning public land?
I don't have clear data on that but a lot of the peat forests are traditionally kawasan hutan (state forest). You can't develop these areas into oil palm plantations. They need to be degazetted before they can be used and that's why there's a big network of Mafioso-types linked to local government. I think a lot of people are looking for opportunities for expanding.

Who are the guys lighting the fires?
These are people who are spare-time burners. There's a clear pattern in the fire—the haze gets very high over weekends. They work in offices in Palangkaraya during the week, and then they take time off and they go to burn. This is a well-directed, well-planned, exercised process of claiming land.

And it's essentially due to corruption?
Yeah, but the big question is how far can you draw that up to the national government, but I don't know. We can only guess, but we know that they're not clean here.

What's the most frustrating part about this story?
The callousness. There is a general acceptance that people are dying there, and too many people are shrugging their shoulders and saying, I don't give a shit.

Why do you think there's been so little action?
I think the government's response matches the lack of international pressure. I mean there have been some angry Malaysian and Singaporean messages and inter-governmental meetings but nothing big. It'd be very nice if President Obama would mention this in his talk with President Joko Widodo. But more importantly, the pressure needs to come nationally. As far as I can see, there's a lot of very pissed off people from Borneo or Sumatra, but their voices are small.

Do you think a lack of international action also comes from a lack of awareness?
Partly. It's not a Chernobyl-type thing that blows up in your face. This is a silent tragedy happening. Slowly people are suffocating, babies are suffocating. There are good people involved, bad people involved, but there are no clear villains.

Do you think that if the government was serious about stopping this it could?
I've got an interesting parallel to this from about 2005. At that time illegal logging was rampant and I worked in East Borneo. Every night we'd get 30 to 40 trucks passing through the village, all loaded with illegal timber. This was a time when the government started to realize how much money Indonesia was losing in timber, all taken to Malaysia without any taxes going into the state's copper.

So the government started taking this seriously and the army came in and the problem disappeared within a month. No more trucks! Ultimately Indonesia is a pretty law-abiding country. If someone enforced the law I really believe this situation could change.

Failing military intervention, how long do you think it will take until the fires are put out?
Well it's in the peats and the peats are dry, so it can burn for months. You can extinguish the fire on the surface but it can pop up again in some other spot. What we need to put out the fires is a couple weeks of hard, consistent rain. That will hopefully come with the November monsoon.

Follow Stanley on Twitter.

The Million Mask March in London Thursday night was bigger and rowdier than ever. Police predictions of violence turned out to be accurate as a mini riot broke out and protesters trashed a cop car. We sent VICE photographer Chris Bethell to check it out.

As the evening throng of commuters hummed through Union Square on Thursday, Kevin Blanch wanted to make sure no one walked by without taking notice of the Million Mask March. "Bankers are robbing us and they still have jobs," another man bellowed into a megaphone Blanch handed him moments earlier.

The megaphone circulated through the crowd of about 100 protesters who gathered in solidarity for the annual November 5 action organized by the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which encouraged similar events in cities around the world. And though the crowd pumped itself up with short speeches about everything from police brutality to the Federal Reserve, the protest almost immediately began to fray at the edges.

"Let's go!" Blanch, who had become something of an unofficial emcee, shouted, indicating that it was time to start marching. A moment passed, and he realized he hadn't picked a direction. "Where are we going?" he wondered out loud. "I'll go anywhere." After a few moments, the crowd started walking down 14th street toward Sixth Avenue, chanting: "Whose streets? Our streets!"

This wasn't an Occupy Wall Street rally circa 2012, but at times, it sounded an awful lot like one.

The rally's stilted nature captured the challenges facing Anonymous activists across the world. Because the group largely rejects hierarchy in its decision-making, the protest often felt aimless and disorganized, even to those who showed up in Guy Fawkes masks and counted themselves as Anonymous supporters. "I know this isn't going to accomplish anything," said 16-year-old Callie, after the crowd had marched all the way to City Hall only to unexpectedly change course toward Wall Street.

And while Callie, who declined to give her last name, wasn't the only skeptic about the tangible changes the protest would likely yield, many defended it as an important way of exchanging ideas and talking about the many forms injustice can take. "The problem is that there's so many problems to stand for," said Jae, a 25-year-old from the Bronx who attended largely to draw attention to police brutality but counts herself as an Anonymous supporter. "I just feel like we've lost sight of humanity and I want to be part of a movement that brings that back."

Photos by Pete Voelker

A man who calls himself Shade Septem was among the protesters who have literally taken to the streets. A stout man in his 40s, he had no trouble weaving in and out of traffic on Sixth Avenue, alternating between shouting at the police officers who were asking him to get back on the sidewalk and purposefully blocking traffic.

This was one of few heated moments with the handful of police who trailed protesters much of the night. For the most part, the officers successfully corralled them back onto the sidewalk—but the police were generally content to let demonstrators wander into the street without shouting or threatening to arrest them.

"There's been restraint on both sides," acknowledged Septem. "I respect the individual all day. I'm mad at a system. I'm not mad at the little parts." For its part, NYPD officers said they hadn't initiated any arrests connected to last night's protest.

Across the Atlantic, a very different scene played out. Thousands of protesters at London's version of the Million Mask March clashed violently with police, leading to dozens of arrests and the hospitalization of three police officers, according to the BBC. Other accounts of the protests in London, however, described the violence as 'eerily stage-managed' and more interested in cosplay than politics.

There was certainly some of that in New York. Andy Adriano, a 25-year-old student at Brooklyn College, for instance, was decked out in V for Vendetta gear, sporting six plastic knives, a Guy Fawkes mask and a suit. "I don't know what issues we're doing," he said. "This is my first time out. I love V for Vendetta."

Misha Schmidt, a 23-year-old who marched last night, said he was at London's protest last year and a previous November 5 Anonymous protest in New York. "In London, it's huge," said Schmidt, who remembers protesters being teargased, beaten with batons and burning cars. This year's protest in New York, he added, "Is the smallest I've seen so far."

"This is a moderate turnout—thank God for camera phones," agreed Reverend Roy Beckford, one of the night's more vocal activists who compared Anonymous to the Black Lives Matter movement. "They're all civil rights movements," he said, noting problems as varied his own confrontations with police that he suspects were racially motivated, and a prison system that only sees an economic upside to incarceration. "We've been raped by the system."

Beckford wasn't the only one to talk about racial justice. In fact, that was one of the more common threads throughout the evening.

"I actually grew up wanting to be an officer," explained Jae, as we ride on a No. 6 train uptown to meet another group of protesters who had gathered outside Rubert Murdoch's News Corp. headquarters. But as she increasingly witnessed instances of police harassment and brutality, she said she's more interested in playing a role as an activist.

Still, as the evening wore on and I spoke with dozens of demonstrators, it was clear there was no single unifying issue. A small selection of problems raised by protesters included: genetically-modified foods, income inequality, military spending, cyber security, media conglomerates, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the merits of the Electoral College, vaccines and whether they cause autism, and corporate data breaches. It made me wonder if the protest could have a political impact if the people who showed up could cohere around a single set of objectives.

It's an issue I put to almost everyone I spoke with, and many came up with similar responses. "I don't think it's 30 ideas. It's actually one idea expressed in 30 different ways," explained Shade Septem. "The one idea—love over all—be willing to fight for the weaker person, that's who we are."

Still, he added, "Do I believe there are changes in my lifetime? Probably not. I believe that if we find more like Anonymous, our children actually have a shot of being free."

Thursday's protest also came against the backdrop of Operation KKK, a high-profile effort orchestrated by Anonymous to reveal the identities of 1,000 white supremacists. One list leaked early, however, and appeared to contain flagrant inaccuracies. Anonymous indicated it wasn't responsible for that early leak, and as planned, released a slew of names yesterday—which apparently listed mostly well-known white supremacists and included misleading information of its own.

Many Anonymous supporters last night said they were familiar with Operation KKK, but didn't know a whole lot about the legitimacy of the leak. Back in Union Square where the protests started, those details didn't seem to matter all that much, though. Kevin Blanch picked up his megaphone to make an announcement: "Anonymous just released 1,000 names on the KKK list," he said.

The crowd cheered.

Follow Alex Zimmerman on Twitter.

Read: Pulp Fiction Was the Film That Made Me Realize I'm Not Cool

A few weeks ago, an NYPD union got really butthurt after Quentin Tarantino spoke at an anti-police brutality rally. The president of the union—the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association—called on New Yorkers to boycott the filmmaker's new movie, The Hateful Eight, which is slated for release this Christmas.

Tarantino mostly shrugged off the ordeal, saying he has First Amendment rights and clarifying that he isn't anti-police, but more anti-police "shooting unarmed people."

That apparently wasn't enough to appease the cops. On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that Jim Pasco—executive director of the largest police union in the country—has a "surprise" in store for Tarantino. If that sounds like a threat, it's because it probably is.

"Something is in the works," Pasco said. "Something could happen anytime between now and ."

That doesn't mean that the cops are going to go rough Tarantino up like he's a private eye from a Raymond Chandler book, though—Pasco is planning to take aim at Tarantino's wallet, instead.

"We'll try to hurt him in the only way that seems to matter to him, and that's economically."

You wouldn't know it from most of the coverage, but last night's Million Mask March might have been the quietest protest that London has ever seen. This is probably down to the fact that it's from the internet, having been called by Anonymous, the world's scariest anime club. The result was pretty much what you'd expect: several thousand people in identical Guy Fawkes masks milling awkwardly and not saying very much. One person waved a nyan cat flag, another held up a sign reading "Investigate 911." Wobbling on top of a stone plinth in Trafalgar Square, a red-faced man was blowing into a plastic horn every few seconds for no discernible reason and to no particular effect. Sometimes someone would attempt to start up a chant, which would be mumblingly echoed and then fade back into an embarrassed silence.

The demands were appropriately incoherent. "We're out here fighting pedophiles," one woman explained. Others were angered by the use of dogs in Chinese cuisine, vaguely defined threats to the internet, and organized religion. "One of the police told me that if I don't like how things are, I should run for office," a Guy Fawkes mask said. It laughed. "I don't know a fucking thing about politics."

While the cops and the newspapers treat it as a political protest, it's worth pointing out that the Million Mask March is actually an attempt to reenact the final scene from the awful 2005 film V for Vendetta, the one where vast, silent, and totally badass crowds kitted out in Guy Fawkes costumes converge on Westminster just in time to watch the Houses of Parliament being blown up. (In real life, it was a bit less cinematic.) Unlike many protest groups out there, Anonymous's model for political revolution isn't based on Marx and Lenin or Laclau and Mouffe, but on Warner Brothers and the Wachowskis. It's cosplay, not politics: maybe slightly more radical than going to a convention in furry costume, but probably slightly less than trying to trace Leopold Bloom's path around Dublin.

Of course, most of the photos from Parliament Square tell a very different story; they tend to show something that really does look like mass social unrest, terrifying figures shrouded in smoke and fire running riot over the home of our cherished democracy. But these images are always necessarily incomplete, because they don't show the person behind the camera. What tended to happen is this: Someone would light a flare canister and hold it up in a heroic pose, there would be a small cheer from the crowd as if something had actually happened, and that person would then be instantly mobbed by a frantic phalanx of photographers trying to document something exciting. Few people at the protest wanted to talk to the press, but they did like posing for them.

This led to some events that were frankly weird. As the march passed the line of riot cops guarding Downing Street, for instance, there was a sudden flurry of violence, as the dozens of cameramen and photographers started jostling for a good position to capture whatever it was that was about to happen. What this actually meant, though, was that the media had ended up forming a protective line between the cops and the protest. The march stalled, as everyone tried to work out what they were meant to do. Someone shouted that David Cameron was a pigfucker. Satisfied, their duty done, the protesters then carried on.

It's not that there wasn't any violence, but it all seemed eerily stage-managed. When the march arrived at Parliament Square, there were four roads it could have continued along: three that were entirely open, and one, Great George Street, that had been blocked off by a line of cops in riot gear, batons raised. Obviously, because this was about defiance, yeah, (far more so than it was about overthrowing the government or even breaking windows) everyone immediately crammed themselves into Great George Street. The result was a lot of pushing and shouting; sometimes the demonstrators threw bottles or firecrackers, sometimes the cops surged forward to hit the nearest and loudest person in the head. The Metropolitan Police described its efforts to manage the protest as a "significant policing operation," with thousands of officers being drafted in against potential riots, but it's very likely that if they had decided not to show up at all, everyone would have got bored and gone home.

Related: The Disturbing Truth Behind the 'Spitman' Urban Legend

It was almost an hour after arriving in Parliament Square that a small breakaway group realized that they could escape the police kettle by just taking another street. A group of about fifty people ran off, shouting that they were going to storm Buckingham Palace, so naturally I followed them. Along the way there were some displays of symbolic violence: insurrectionists extravagantly kicking over signs that read "diversion" or "road closed" (fuck your oppressive traffic advice!), or spray-painting anarchist symbols on hoardings or bus stops, but never any actual buildings.

We passed an empty police car: a bin was upended on top of it, and a window smashed in; they then posed in front of it like rappers showing off a Lamborghini. Most of the destruction was actually quite civic-minded—even when the small crowd was standing in the middle of an intersection to block traffic, they'd bunch up to let ambulances and even couriers through. I couldn't help feeling that when we did make it to Buckingham Palace that little switch in the British national psyche would flick on: oh but we love the Queen, really, she's not that bad, let's leave her alone.

In the event, it didn't matter. Once we arrived (it took a while; the group tended to shed a decent portion of its members at every turning, where half its number would run roaring in the wrong direction), the Palace was surrounded by hundreds of police, some on horses, manning an impressively Byzantine network of barricades to protect Her Majesty's beauty sleep. One man was despondent. "Let's just storm the Palace anyway," he said. "We do this every fucking year and nothing ever happens." Nobody followed him. The Palace remained unstormed.

After that it was more of the same. A little knot of Guy Fawkes masks would coalesce somewhere in central London, police vans would pounce screaming out a nearby side-street, and the demonstration would trudge off to the next target. By 9 PM, when the protest was supposed to finish, most of those that remained had returned to Trafalgar Square. The police announced that everyone had to leave the square, and they enforced this by blocking it off entirely and preventing anyone from getting out. It made about as much sense as anything else.

Follow Sam Kriss and Chris Bethell on Twitter.

Alberta tar sands development. Photo via Flickr user thekirbster

In late October, Shell Canada scuttled an 80,000 barrel/day tar sands project in Alberta's Peace River region. Some conservative activists, most notably Ezra Levant and his cubs, blamed the decision on the release of the Alberta NDP government's budget.

That was indisputably unaccurate.

"The biggest impediment right now to growth in oil production in the oilsands, or anywhere else for that matter, is just the price," says Allan Fogwill, president and CEO of the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI). Shell even sent the NDP a letter directly countering Levant's claim.

But anti-pipeline organizations also hopped on the bandwagon. However, this one was heading in the ideologically opposite direction. Greenpeace, for instance, trumpeted out the news with Naomi Klein-like elation: "People power beat Big Oil again this week." Which is obviously not to equate environmental groups with Levant's delusionally far-right agitprop blog.

Yet some experts warn that trying to connect the dots between anti-pipeline activism and slowed growth in the tar sands—which we've also witnessed in the aftermath of TransCanada's denied request to the US for a delay on its Keystone XL project—is borderline erroneous. For while greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are unquestionably a clear and present danger, it's considerably less obvious that anti-pipeline activism is actually impacting the situation.

But let's backtrack a little bit.

A single day before news about the Shell project broke, the Washington DC-based organization Oil Change International published a 40-page report (grandly titled "Lockdown: The End of Growth in the Tar Sands") that argued protests against projects like the Keystone XL and Enbridge's Northern Gateway had "successfully stopped and/or delayed tar sands pipeline infrastructure." It was quite the timing.

The pantheon of environmental NGOs—350.com, Sierra Club, Environment Defence, the Natural Resources Defense Council—collaborated on the report, granting it even more clout.

Which all makes sense: Canada's latest GHG emissions projections, published long before the price crash, predicted that tar sands growth would come close to nullifying all emissions reductions achieved in other sectors by 2020. Oil Change International calculated that almost 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which seems like quite a fucking lot, would be left in the ground if the four major Canadian pipeline projects—Keystone, Northern Gateway, Energy East, and the twinning of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain—were scrapped.

The North American pipeline network is, on average, 89 percent full and future tar sands expansion plans (from 2.29 million barrels/day in 2015 to 3.95 million barrel/day in 2030) may run up against the problem of a full pipeline system as soon as 2017, according to "Lockdown."

"The oil price is having a major impact on the profitability of these expansion projects," says Adam Scott, who serves as the climate and energy program manager at the Environmental Defence and helped review the report. "But the lack of export infrastructure is the thing that tips it over the edge. In many cases, it takes many projects from an expected 12 percent , to triple that, to quadruple that—makes no sense on a planet that's trying to reduce emissions globally," he said.

Jaccard agrees that public opposition has slowed pipeline expansion, but he's very wary of assigning too much responsibility to activists in the absence of a "semi-controlled experiment," which is a dorky way of describing a situation in which oil prices would crash without public opposition and vice versa.

"People should be careful of sounding like George Bush: 'Mission Accomplished,'" he cautions. "If a revolution breaks out tomorrow in Saudi Arabia and knocks ten million barrels/day out of production, then all bets are off."

To be sure, Shell did cite a "lack of infrastructure to move Canadian crude oil to global commodity markets" as a factor in its decision to cancel its Carmon Creek project. But as any long-time Alberta resident can tell you, the price of oil's extremely volatile and impacted by a many variables.

On one hand, Scott says the diluted bitumen, referred to as "dilbit" in the industry, has to be sold for a significant discount due to bottlenecks in the pipeline system. Conversely, Jennifer Winter—associate director of energy and environmental policy at the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy—suggests a factor that has far more of an impact on projects than pipeline woes is cost overrun: projects constructed in a high price-per-barrel context will often outpace available labour, costing companies far more to hire out-of-province workers to build and operate the project.

From Winter's perspective, the problem isn't so much pipeline capacity as it is that pipelines are "essentially flowing in the wrong direction." The United States has experienced an incredible boom in shale oil production over the last few years, resulting in a domestic supply glut due to refineries not being able to handle the quantity.

"Some of the pipelines need to be reversed, and that's happening slowly over time," she says. "But there's a lot of stranded light crude oil in the US as well and that has a further dampening impact on prices for Canadian oil."

A protest against the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline in BC. Photo via Flickr user Mark Klotz

Fogwill says transporting crude by rail currently fills much of that gap: the CERI has calculated that using such a method only costs about 10 percent more than by pipeline—partly because costly diluent isn't required with rail—and that "one could argue that there's enough market access right now to manage any new production increase" (Scott disputes this assertion, arguing "the shipping of oil by rail at these prices is not at all economical").

New pipelines would be preferred by energy companies, of course. But Fogwill says companies are taking the opportunity to fine-tune future plans, something explicitly mentioned by Shell in its press release about the cancellation—"the project would be re-phased to take advantage of the market downturn to optimise design and retender certain contracts"—but oddly ignored in most articles. Which might be the crux of the problem.

The regulatory process that governs pipeline approvals is fucking boring. Each round requires years of consultations. Winter says the information used by the National Energy Board is submitted by proponents, neutral parties and opponents, with the agency's mandate of assessing public interest fulfilled solely via documentation.

As a result, Winter dubs the idea that anti-pipeline activists are changing the game as a "red herring," given that regulators wouldn't exactly be doing their job if they were making decisions based on polling data instead of evidence (the same way that judges and juries are supposed to ignore public pressures and focus on arguments made in a highly controlled context). Fogwill adds that he hasn't seen any instances where regulators have "in any particular way done anything but business-as-usual in Canada" on account of protests.

Which might tie back to the broader concept of narrative. Back in 2013, Winter wrote a blog post for the School of Public Policy titled "Why don't environmentalists protest auto plants?"

It's a pretty fascinating query that still hasn't been resolved for her: "I think the environmental groups have been very successful at narrating a story where 'if we just stop the producers, if we just stop the pipelines, then we're going to save the world, essentially,'" she says. "But what many people fail to realize is that the oilsands are being produced because there's demand: in Canada, in the US, around the world. It's the demand for gasoline and iPhones and computers that is driving our production of oil and natural gas. But it's far easier to blame someone else than look at one's own behaviour."

Jaccard remains sympathetic to the concerns of anti-pipeline activists: he notes that for the entirety of the Stephen Harper epoch, blockading pipelines was really the best environmentalists could do given "you knew he wasn't going to put in any kind of decent policy to reduce our domestic emissions" and that pipelines represent "discrete units that you can rally people around."

But now's potentially the time, he says, for those same activists to push hard for a legitimate Canadian vehicle emissions standard in the same vein as California's, integrating a cross-subsidization of electric cars by mandating higher costs for fuel-intensive vehicles like Ford F-150s.

Jaccard notes there are so many commercial technologies out there that would help reduce gasoline consumption but just require a little more financial incentives to propagate. While campaigning for something like that—or an economy-wide carbon pricing system, or a feed-in tariff for promoting investment in renewables—is bound to be far less exhilarating than slamming the evil oil companies, it could likely do far more for the cause or cutting GHG emissions.

"That's a way of saying to Alberta: 'Look, we're not going to let you expand oilsands production," Jaccard says. "'We're not telling you that you should stop producing from oilsands. We're saying the responsibility for reducing emissions falls with all of us.' It isn't just let's go attack Alberta oil producers."

Endnote: Shortly after this story was published Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama issued a presidential veto of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would allowed the export of an additional capacity of 830,000 barrels/day from the tarsands. The decision could be challenged in court. A Republican president would likely have much more sympathetic views of the pipeline and could invite TransCanada, which initially applied for permits in 2008, to re-apply. "This pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others," Obama said in a press conference at the White House. In May, U.S. domestic oil production reached a 43-year high. The Keystone XL expansion would have contributed 27.4 million metric tons per year if constructed. In 2011, domestic oil and gas production in the U.S. contributed 225 million metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Refineries pumped out another 182 million metric tons.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Marc Diego

A couple months ago, I brought a sweet, dorky dude home from the bar.

We spent the whole night talking about federal politics before hopping into bed. I knew I didn't want to have sex with him, but all of a sudden I had a brainstorm.

"If I give you head, will you give me feedback on it?" I asked. He readily agreed. I proceeded to give him a blow job for about seven minutes before I got tired (it was 5 AM) and gave up. Then I asked for his critique, which was mostly flattering. His main suggestion was to make sure I used my hand consistently. I felt relieved.

My clinical approach to giving this guy a blowjob may sound strange, but that was the point of the whole exercise. BJs give me anxiety, they always have. The apprehension comes from many places. Like most straight women, I've dealt with my fair share of assholes who've been demanding about oral sex. The type that push down on your head when you're making out or unexpectedly hump your face. Those encounters were degrading and in and of themselves would be enough to turn anyone off blowjobs. But my reasons are practical, too. For one thing, I have a petite mouth and a fairly active gag reflex, which means, worst case scenario, I'm throwing up on your dick. Also, I generally don't like staring at penises. Much like the sun, I enjoy their presence but try to avoid direct eye contact. That's challenging when putting one in your mouth.

The bulk of my insecurity, though, comes from being confused about exactly what I'm supposed to be doing down there. And potentially doing it wrong.

Over the years, I grew to believe a great blowjob was something you were just supposed to know how to execute, but I never really felt like I had a good grasp on it. So I gave them infrequently and was hesitant to discuss my doubts with partners or even friends.

"I can make a guy cum in like five minutes," one of my college girlfriends would brag; she tried to walk me through her foolproof routine, which involved leaving a glass of water on the bedside table to dip her hand into in case her saliva ran dry. It seemed like a lot of work—and also just weird. Cosmo and other women's magazines aren't any less overwhelming with their endless guides to the "best blowjob ever." How are there 21 never-before-heard rules on how to perform what should be a fairly utilitarian act? This is a blowjob, not Settlers of Catan. (Also, is there anyone out there who is actually going to alternate between putting ice cubes and hot water in their mouth to create two "really nice, but different sensations.")

I asked Claire Cavanah, co-founder of Babeland, a sex toy company that hosts workshops like The Art of the Blowjob, if my concerns were uncommon.

She said while attendance for Babeland classes on things like g-spots and S&M has dwindled over the years, the ones on oral sex "can still fill a room."

"You are not alone in wondering how to do it better or the anxiety that you're feeling."

That anxiety, she said, comes from wanting to please the other person but maybe lacking the actual experience to do so. To make it less scary, she suggested doing some research, like reading sex-positive books ("you can sort of learn about penises before"). Beyond that, she said, "practice really does help."

According to Cavanah, talking about sex is one of the biggest challenges for couples, but it is key to getting information that might help one get over something like BJ anxiety.

"It leads to answers to your questions, things you need to know, like what he likes," she explained. She recommended waiting until after sex to barrage a partner with questions so as not to kill the mood—probably best to avoid preemptively ask a guy to rate you like I did.

She also said try to have a good time, because "the more fun you have the more fun he's going to have." I pressed her on this point—how much fun can one have when giving head? It's not like licking a popsicle where there is a clear, measurable benefit to the person doing it. She clarified "mainly it's the pleasure of making him happy." So yeah, maybe fake that part a little, if need be.

What put my mind most at ease was when I asked Cavanah what she hears from men regarding blowjobs. I was expecting her to share at least a few horror stories involving teeth, but I'd forgotten how simple dudes are.

"They're just like, 'Hell yeah, a blow job.' They loooooooove it," she said. "If you're great at it that's just icing on the cake. Bad sex is like bad pizza, it's really not that bad."

Like most other aspects of sex, I'm realizing blowjobs are inherently awkward. The reason I chose to practise on the poli-nerd is 'cause I knew he was harmless and that I wouldn't see him again, so I didn't feel self conscious.

Maybe next time I'll be braver and try it with someone I'm actually into. If it turns out I'm the Pizza Pizza of giving head, well, there are worst things.

Pentecostal Christians performing a baptism in a river

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Photographer Remus Ţiplea has been photographing the baptisms of various Christian denominations in Romania, the European Union's most religious country. "Orthodox and Catholic Christians baptize their newborns, whereas Pentecostals, Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses are baptized when they hit adulthood," Remus explains. "People don't take the plunge until they feel ready to do so, because it's considered a very important process and usually happens in front of the entire community."

A Jehovah's witness baptism

He continues: "Each community is guided by certain rules, and if you follow them, they will welcome you. I've established a strong connection with many of them, they know me and are used to me being around."

Of course, there have also been times when things didn't go according to plan: "Once, I traveled a few hundred kilometers to where the ceremony was taking place, and the leaders of the congregation simply forbade me from taking any pictures. At another ceremony, I was told, very politely, that I wasn't welcome at their ritual because I had a beard. My favorite experience was in a village on the bank of the river Somes. The priests were baptizing people in the river and I actually followed them in so I could take pictures. I was up to my neck in water."

Scroll down for more pictures.

Illustration by Amanda Lanzone

Five years ago. Western Connecticut. You get a job bartending because you want to write words for a living. There is a logic in all this, somehow, you promise yourself that. You're in your mid 20s and self-loathing has become a sort of recreational activity. You are prone to the sort of blubbering melodrama that would compel a man to, say, title a Gmail folder "DRINK THE FAILURE." Growth or decay or stagnation, you never know where you are. You write, but for purposes you cannot identify; messy ideas you eject in spasms and never refine. On the backs of receipts and in messages typed into your phone when you're riding the subway. You seek things detached from writing completely. You mow grass. Fold laundry. Shovel snow. For a few hours you are consumed by things you do not like but know you can at least get rid of. You float in a nothingness, a lack of context, a separation from the narrative. The snow is there under the tires and under the stacks of wooden planks rotting outside the garage. It exists in finite quantities; your body repeats the same mechanics automatically until it is gone. It is grueling but in a way that writing is not: it is of no significance beyond the act itself. You can't be good at shoveling or bad at shoveling. If you are it doesn't matter. It is just snow. You get what you can and the rest melts.

So you get this job at this bar. You think bartending is more snow. It is a bar you have been to before, in Dayton or New Brunswick or wherever. The whole place smells like some mix of wet rags and simmering canola oil and maybe-a-gas-leak. The fans hanging from the ceiling spin wildly, permanently on the verge of coming dislodged. The floor is not made of carpet or wood or rubber, just a sort of fossilized grime, a "black." The owner refuses to do anything about any of it, and that is fine, because transporting drunks to an alternate universe requires no deception. It is a place that means nothing to anyone anywhere except to these men, drinking, glazed, killing minutes, hours, and then the last of the daylight, distracting themselves from what is cold and real and being charged a 14% fixed interest rate. Bowlegged men standing at the urinal telling filthy jokes while you wash your hands, taking forever to squeeze their piss out. Men who cough like a fork stuck in a garbage disposal, coughs with an interlude, men who look like they cut their hair in the reflection of a toaster oven. Men with no teeth, men with teeth in the wrong place, teeth that are gray and sharp. They measure their lives in the length of SUV commercials; in halftimes, parking meter clocks, meetings with their probation officers, the time elapsed since they last ignored a call from their wives.

Bars like this one are to preserve a moment, a state of being, nothing ever changing; crypts with golden sarcophagi, men who can exist as royalty for all eternity.

Men who study lotto numbers, looking for order in the chaos, chasing dreams, chasing jackpots but really chasing some other life, none in particular, just not this one. Their faces are Good & Plenty purple, craggy like elephant hide. They smile and grab your arm, dragging you into this moment with them, at three in the afternoon, eyelids peeled back deep into their skulls, ready to reveal their lotto theory, proud to have a lotto theory: 6 AIN'T BEEN THE MEGABALL SINCE FEBRUARY, SEE THAT? IT'S COMING. They are almost embarrassed for you, that you're only now hearing all this for the first time. Everything is imminent. They're one step away, almost there, just waiting on this next one and then I am gone, kid, you have no idea.

Three days later you will see them again, half-awake, faces gnarled by sun and shame, and they will repeat in a low voice those same lies while you pretend to not know any better. Bars like this one are to preserve a moment, a state of being, nothing ever changing; crypts with golden sarcophagi, men who can exist as royalty for all eternity.

A year passes. Two years. You're still there. You buy coconut ice from the bodega next door. The television above the soda cooler is muted and fixed to Spanish soap operas—delirious half-naked women, crying and licking their lips and slamming cabinets. You stand on the sidewalk eating the ice while you listen to the trains behind the building leave the station. You play video bowling in the bar till the sun comes up and you can see school buses driving by. You eat 17,000 jalapeno poppers. A man with thick scraps of pure white hair named Frank tells you about the time he heard "Rainy Night in Georgia" in a bar in Thailand during the Vietnam War, on a night when it was actually raining, horizontal rain, apocalypse rain, but he just sat there, unfeeling, maybe like the way he was sitting here right now, as he tells you this. He survived that war but now he's in this other one, a life adrift. Maybe it's a lie, but you consider that maybe all of it is a lie, everything that anyone could ever tell you. Sometimes he tells you about being a carpenter. Sometimes he tells you about the Red Sox. Sometimes he doesn't tell you anything. Sometimes he just tastes the booze.

You're still here, in these walls, with these same people, them keeping you alive now, because they have felt pain before, just like yours.

More years. You meet a girl here. You love her. You realize after a while maybe you don't love her, it doesn't work out. You meet another girl. You love this one, too. It doesn't work out, but for different reasons this time, you love her too much, she can't handle it, she's gone. But you're still here, in these walls, with these same people, them keeping you alive now, because they have felt pain before, just like yours. They know where the brink is, the edges of the universe, and they came back once, and now they're bringing you back. Old men, hurt men, men so tough they'll let you see them weak and bruised, beaten and forgotten.

"You ever think about how the best songs make you feel better for a little, but they make the wound bigger?" You ask this to an Italian guy named Jimmy who works at the airport. "Yeah," he tells you. He's playing pool by himself. "That's why all the best songs are about women or heroin."

You never get any better at bartending, your legs just stop hurting. You sleep less. You complain less. You tip more. You play "Moonlight Mile" on the jukebox, because it's the middle of January, and seriously, this fucking song. Some guy knows all the words. You never see him again. You stay open late with strangers to wait for election results. Another night, something on the news about a murder in Harlem. A year later; the Mets lose the World Series. "Well this is all bullshit isn't it?" Most conversations end this way. All this usually is bullshit, yeah. All these moments next to the same people, people you've known forever, people you don't know at all, really. They leave. You sit counting change and drinking cheap whiskey, and then you finish counting the change but you keep drinking the whiskey. You play "Moonlight Mile" again, but this time it's just you there.

It is a habitat. An incubator for the mutilated. Bars are noise management facilities. Men making things as loud as they can go, music or impulses or bodily functions, or as quiet as they can go, fears or doubts or debts. Men using their Dramatic Voice, holding the back of her chair, telling her how he got the scar on his lip, straightening his collar, hold-on-just-listen-to-the-drums-right-here, tossing out important-sounding acronyms, because he knows things, he doesn't have time to explain it, he's busy, so let me ask you again do you want to get out of here or not, baby? Brokenhearted men speaking to sympathetic women, resuscitating the men with the maximum voltage of exclamation points, every sentence wired to a socket, transmitting hope so they can get the hell out of there. The men believe in anger or God or the pursuit of pussy. But they all believe in drinking, because drunk is an absolute, it is undeniable; they can see it and feel it and watch the liquid in the glass disappear. Drunk is a sledgehammer.

One night, you meet a man named Patrick with a stomach so dense it looks like it could protect him from a small-caliber bullet. He drinks Budweiser and Gran Marnier, alternating little sips of each. He tells you about his neighborhood growing up, where he came from. He's laughing, he's swiveling. But then abruptly the memories become something immediate and present and he's up out of his chair. It's 1974 again now, it's late, he's at his neighbor's house in Yonkers and his father is coming at his mother with a boot in one hand. His brother Danny is screaming in the corner, the closet door is knocked off the hinge, Patrick's biting a chunk out of his father's shoulder. The sweat and the dogs barking and the smell of the radiators. Every moment of this man's life is on fire, his cheeks are sizzling, he doesn't know you but he will make sure you feel this with him. And you do. Drunk is also a magnet.

***

You will see in the bar, nearly every day of your employment, a kid named Dennis. He's 22-years-old when you meet him. Once, years ago, while his father was taking a shit, his first wife shot herself in the head in the next room. His father sold mozzarella cheese, which Dennis recites as a sort of euphemism for organized crime with Italian people. When Dennis was little he would ride in the backseat and pass beers up to his father from a plastic cooler as they drove to Yankee Stadium. Dennis drinks cheap beer now until he vomits or pees on the sidewalk. He asks for a bucket so he can clean it himself and he tells you how sorry he is. For the six weeks that his jaw was wired shut, he tilted his head back and poured beer slowly through the cracks between his teeth.

Two years ago his father got sick, and then his father got lung cancer, and then lung cancer became a marauding goblin horde that settled in on the soul and memories, raping the women and setting the village on fire just because. His father slept in a chair because he couldn't breathe unless he was upright. Dennis slept on the bed. In high school he played football. He was All-League. His father was never there. Then his father was there, but halfway, less than that, writhing on itchy polyester, asking for a glass of something. His father needed someone to carry him to the bathroom. Dennis needed a place to live. So they half-watched the Yankees, half-living their lives, together but not together.

And then his father died, and Dennis and his brother drank and cried until their faces were swollen, their cheeks stretched and pink. Their father left them $2,000 and they spent it all on scratch-off tickets and beer and massage parlor hand jobs. They didn't cry as much after that, then they stopped crying at all. And then they drank more beer, because beer is always there, even when your father isn't.

When Dennis was younger, he bought his father a Don McLean cassette tape for his birthday. He found it at the Salvation Army on the 25-cent rack. He gave it to his father, but his father told him it was the wrong one. Not that there is a right one; it's Don McLean. Dennis still feels the wrongness anyway. His father's favorite song was "American Pie," and he has spent every stray dollar he possesses playing it on the jukebox. He roams the black floors, unloading during the chorus, spilling his beer, trying to find someone to join him. It is Don McLean, so no one does, except we are all sort of joining him, wailing about Chevys and good ole boys for eight and a half minutes.

Whole months go this way. A lifetime. But then Dennis stops coming by as much. You hear he ran out of money. You hear he joined the Marines. You don't really ask. He was here once but he isn't anymore, and sometimes that's all the logic you need. You can't stay in one place forever. Eventually you have to write some words. Eventually you stop telling lies.

Follow John on Twitter.

All screenshots from Steam

Video games don't do sex well. Even when they try to present sexuality as something more than blatant attempts at titillation, they have a bad habit of ruining whatever digital encounters of the flesh they might want to portray. This is largely because sex acts as a reward for players who've managed to play the romance "game" well, brought the right gifts to the right person, or completed a difficult quest. It's contingent on fulfilling certain conditions and favors. And while I support the idea that games should try to feature relationships instead of ignore them, "run an errand for me and I'll have sex with you" strikes me as a bad idea to peddle.

Most of the time, the sex itself is either implied, and unsatisfying, or comically coy, hiding naughty bits because even our most "mature" games end up playing it 12A. And let's be honest, models rubbing their skivvies on each other as they stare off into space isn't the least bit sexy.

Cibele, an independent release from Star Maid Games, does sex right. The key differentiator between this and most games that try to portray sex is that sex in Cibele is not a goal, but rather an outcome. It's not about the act of getting it on, and sex isn't a reward; instead, it's about everything else in a relationship: the text conversations between girls talking about other boys and evaluating their relative cuteness; profile pages from archived websites chronicling the teenage years of a girl obsessed with anime and racked with self-doubt; the provocative, headless selfies the sender hopes will give them the approval of their love interest.

These moments matter to the act of sex as much as the sex itself, and though Cibele doesn't show any nudity, it's unquestionably about love and intimacy, and pulls it off in the most natural way imaginable. Sex doesn't always have a long build-up, and casual hook-ups are as valid as anything else. But even then, sex is about more than touching someone: the physical act simply follows an emotional groundswell.

Cibele takes place on the computer desktop of Nina, a girl in her late teens who's addicted to a fictional MMO called Valtameri, within which she plays the role of Cibele. She meets a guy through an in-game guild and the two hit it off, eventually planning to meet up in the real world. On her desktop, you can click around through her files, look at photos of her in high school, read emails, or jump straight into Valtameri to talk to Ichi, the guy Nina's fallen in love with. After defeating a boss in Valtameri, you'll see videos of Nina, played by creator Nina Freeman (the game is meant to dramatically retell a real encounter Freeman had through Final Fantasy XI) in her underwear, typing at her computer before deciding to lose a few items of clothing and pose for a picture on her bed.

Valtameri is more implied than real, but you assume it's as deep and nuanced as Final Fantasy XI because most of the people Nina talks to have clung to it for years. But insofar as you interacting with it, it's really no more than clicking on a few enemies and watching them die. It's interactive, but simple, and really only there to facilitate conversations between Nina and Ichi, as well as field messages from other guild members and friends. It's background busywork, and reflects the ways in which games can be there simply to occupy our minds, to assuage anxiety, or fear, or other thoughts and feelings we'd rather not think about in that moment.

The conversations Nina has with Ichi, whether ad-libbed or rehearsed, bear a close resemblance to conversations I've had over online voice chats clients like Mumble or TeamSpeak. The cadence, the response time, the cut off statements—they're all there, preserved in the way you'd say them to someone on the other end of the internet. As the topics change from guildmates who aren't picking up their slack and Valtameri's latest expansion to more intimate topics about relationships, how people treat each other, and what online relationships mean, I got palpable flashbacks. Games like Valtameri or FFXI, which eventually create followings, and guilds, and cliques of players, generate lasting memories for those able to build a sense of community with others, and Freeman mines those memories expertly.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the mobile love industries

Through these distant, intimate conversations between Nina and Ichi, Cibele captures one of the most unique emotional conflicts of the 21st century—being close to someone without having met them. It captures the pull of an online relationship, one where we can clearly relate to the persona on the other side of the screen. But we may not want to delve further, for fear of having our perceptions about that person turned on their head. As the leader of Nina's group, Ichi's personality is commanding; he leads his guild with iron fist, and refuses to have anyone get out of line. As someone entering a relationship with an online friend, he acts far less sure of himself, wary of how opening up to someone could affect his self-image as a loner.

The story keeps everything short and simple, but again, it's the contextual details that make Cibele a powerful confession. It's is an intensely personal game, and playing it often feels like prying into someone's closet, much in the same way games like Gone Home and Her Story make us feel a bit uncomfortable sneaking around homes or watching video tapes to learn more about someone. The difference here is that you play the game as Nina herself rather than someone looking through her things, and this serves as a form of consent on Freeman's part. In looking through photos of Nina (the character), I didn't feel like I was prying at all—I felt nostalgic, and it's all because the game makes it clear that you're not playing yourself, but Nina.

And I remember feeling like Nina. Granted, she's decided to archive her old writings, poems, and photos whereas I would just as easily pay good money to see the early traces of my time on the internet excised entirely. But through the documents, photos, and chat logs on her desktop, I see friends I've had in her and begin to understand them a bit better. Nina and her friends discuss girls at school whose bodies they're jealous of, who get the attention of more guys than they do, and I think about the guys I knew back then who seemed to have everything figured out when it came to girls. Of course, none of them ever did.

New, on Motherboard: This Video Shows Just How Big 'Second Life' Really Is

As a guy, I see things from the other side of the fence. I think about all the times I didn't ask a girl out and realize that I probably should have. But Nina, like every other teen out there, is still stuck in a quagmire of doubt, even if she and her friends know it. All the alluding, all the shimmying around affections, the diffusive "haha" at the start of texts—they're our way to not get hurt, to seem distant, jovial in the face of heart-racing moments, aloof. But looking through someone else's baggage, I realized most teenagers are just as afraid of that intimacy, of being hurt.

This trepidation, this confusion, it isn't just the setup for sex—it's part of it, especially when we're Nina's age. These feelings always matter, whether it's a developing relationship or a night at the bar. And it's these feelings, swirling around us, and sparking, and drawing us, that make sex what it is. Cibele opens itself to us, offering a look at the vulnerable world of a teenager who wants to make a real connection with someone. And we need more of that in our games if they're ever going to do right by one of the most important parts of being human.

Cibele is out now. More information here.

Follow Suriel on Twitter.

In the UK, November 5 is Bonfire Night. The evening commemorates the time in 1605 when Guy Fawkes tried to blow the Palace of Westminster straight to hell with over 5000 pounds of gunpowder, and it is celebrated with fireworks and general pyromania. Unsurprisingly, it is the busiest night of the year for the UK fire service. This is relatively unsurprising, given that Bonfire Night has a lot to do with setting things on fire. However, what is quite shocking is how very wrong a lot of that celebratory arson goes: last year, there were 572 call-outs in London alone (which, admittedly, is a lot better than the 1,372 in 2005).

I wanted to see what the fire service are up against each Bonfire Night—how, exactly, so many people manage to start fires that spread uncontrollably to the point that they need professional help—so I made some enquiries with the Manchester Fire Department about tagging along for the evening.

"It's like a war zone up here sometimes," a press officer warned me on the phone. "I'll see what we can do, but you should know it can be dangerous—you're a long way from Chelsea up here, lad."

I'm not totally sure why he thought I was from Chelsea, but I appreciated the concern. After a few more phone calls everything was sorted out for the evening. I was set to ride along with the White Watch at Manchester's Moss Side fire station.

When I arrived at the forecourt, the team were having their briefing, stood to attention while the Watch Manager went through plans for the night. Cuts to the service have seen numbers and resources at this station fall, from two vehicles to one for the majority of the year.

"It's going to be busy tonight," I heard someone explaining, "so there'll be two pumps on tonight." Fire engines aren't actually called fire engines, by the way; they're called pumps. It's because they pump water. I learned this last night.

With the briefing over I made my way up to the kitchen, where the crew were standing, amped up and raring to go. I sat next to Ian Melville, White Watch Manager at Moss Side and a firefighter for 21 years.

"Moss Side has changed massively over the last few years—people with money are busy developing the area," he said. "A lot of the old accommodation has gone now, too; demolished to make way for redevelopment."

The area has a reputation for being a pretty rough part of town, and fire fighters have often born witness to the area at its worst. In 1981, for instance, the area saw a series of riots and became a hotspot for Manchester's gun crime and drugs trade. All that kept the team busy for a while, but with investment times have changed.

"Obviously that means the number of fire calls we get have reduced as well," Ian explained to me. "We've been doing too good a job."

But while kids setting fire to stuff for the hell of it might have become less common, on this day in November they're still fond of burning things. "Tonight there'll be bonfires, bin fires, that sort of thing," said Ian. "But who knows what the night may bring. One time we ended up ruining a fireplace."

Before Ian could tell me how he fucked up someone's fireplace, the alarms started to sound. It was 7:30 PM; the night had begun.

I jumped in the back with Mike and Chris, while Ian and the driver Paul sat up front. Another pump had already made it there by the time we arrived, so we stayed in our seats.

I asked if they ever come up against violence, because, in my mind, fire fighters—like paramedics—are very much the good guys. You never read about someone suing the fire service for brutalizing a civilian during a routine call-out, or see photos of them smashing peaceful protesters to the ground with their shields. "You'd like to think we're the good guys," said Ian as we made our way toward the next call. "But because we're in uniform people sometimes just see us as authority figures, and some people don't take too kindly to authority."

For Manchester's fire crews, being attacked is all too normal, a part of the job that you just have to accept. "We get a lot of issues with the youth of today," said Ian from the front seat. "I've been attacked while on a Bonfire Night job in Gorton. We were ambushed—lulled into an alleyway before fireworks and rockets starting being lobbed."

It's a lot safer now, though, he told me, with all the pumps in the region fitted with CCTV. However, there's still plenty of hostility toward crews around this time of year. Last night was no different; one incident in the northeast of the city saw youths hammer firefighters with bricks and missiles, having started a fire after ripping down the fences close to an electricity sub-station. Elsewhere, the cops were called in for backup after a hose was deliberately slashed while firefighters tackled a blaze.

The next job came through the system; a pub called The Unicorn was reportedly alight. We made our way there and found some families standing around a sizable bonfire on a green. The pub, now a nursery, was totally fine. In normal circumstances this outdoor fire would be out within seconds, but with adults on the scene the team were willing to let it slide.

"As long as there's no danger, people get to do what they want tonight," Mike explained to me as one of the guys in front went out alone to check all was OK. "We're much more flexible on Bonfire Night, but we still need to check things are safe. One year we came across something similar to this. I wasn't going to get the team on it, but wanted to see everything was OK. I made my way over and people started shouting abuse, reaching to chuck things toward me for no reason at all."

As Ian jumped back in his seat, the siren was off again, the pump hurtling toward a rural suburb where a barn was "well alight." Getting closer, word came through that it was just a bonfire and that we weren't needed. Flashing lights switched off, we headed to fuel up the engine's tank.

After a short disagreement with the guy working at the gas station (I was taking photos of the crew, who were happily posing, but a woman told us all to stop because it was a fire risk), another call came through. This time a vehicle was ablaze.

The guys kitted up next to me, all of them holding oxygen masks. In the back of the pump was some snazzy chart thing where the guys put their names on tags and stuck them next to some stats. "It's to show how much oxygen we have left, and who's on a job," Mike explained to me. It's also an indication of who's in a building, so you know who still needs to come back.

The van was definitely on fire when we arrived, an unexpected display for the neighbors standing by. Water and foam cut through the burning plastic and metal, smoke filled the pavements, and the fire was out.

"It's been parked funny," Ian suggested to me, "and the owner looks extremely relaxed, so I've informed the police that it's possible deliberate ignition." With the charred wreckage in a parking bay and more calls for us to take, we were off onto the next one, the council left to deal with the car carcass the next day.

As we sped off towards Salford, I asked if any of the guys had ever have rescued a cat from a tree. "No, I haven't had to do that," Chris laughed. "But I've rescued a lesbian from a tree before."

TRENDING ON MOTHERBOARD: Here's a Global Heat Map of People with Your Last Name

"For me, the weirdest jobs are always when children get trapped," said Mike. "I've had a kid trapped between a toilet and the wall, one with their head between the railings on a bed. Oh, and that kid who got his penis trapped in his zip."

Before the penis-in-zip story could be finished, word came in that we were to be dealing with "youths setting bins on fire." Pulling up in an estate, a bonfire was in full swing, the blue lights sending a group of kids running off down an alley. While the crew got on with their fire-fighting, I headed off after the supposed delinquents, keen to find out why Fawkes' insurrectionary plot sparked a carnal desire in them to burn stuff.

I could only find two lads, both in trackies, who introduced themselves to me as Harold and Rupert. "We didn't start the fire," Rupert assured me, "it was some other lads who did it."

After chatting for a bit about the area ("it's shit") and school ("it's shit"), I asked if they'd be up for me taking a picture of them on the grass. "Nah, I don't like photos mate," Harold told me. "Else they'll know we started the fire and..." He stopped talking and they both legged it, realizing they had just admitted to starting the fire they said they hadn't started.

Safe in the knowledge that kids still like to burn stuff and then lie about it, we popped into the closest station for a "piss and brew stop." The team had been working non-stop for nearly three hours now, but after only a few minutes of downtime we were back on the pump.

As we made our way closer to Moss Side station, finally the promise of dinner seemed within reach. It was past 11 PM by this point, so the thinking was that most people wanting to set fire to trash cans would have probably tired themselves out by now. With the station in sight, the crew could almost taste the meatballs. Then the alarm went off. Some kids had set fire to some dumpsters. Really far away.

Related: Watch 'Cash Slaves', our film about the men who give thousands of dollars to dominatrixes they've never met.

It was midnight when we finally made it back to Moss Side station, after taking our share of the 300+ calls that came through in the eight hours since 4 PM. Jumping out of the back of the pump, Paul ran off to cook up the meatballs. I followed him to ask what he makes of his last 23 years on the job.

"Until you get there, you don't know what might be happening, so you have to treat everything as the real deal—remain focused, just in case," he said. "Problem is, we have far fewer teams now, and we're dealing with a control now that are sat in a contact center where they don't know the job or the areas. We get messages mixed up. It's all a bit of a state."

With food being passed around the table, talk turned to recent changes in the service, like guys starting out now expected to work the job for 40 years before qualifying for their pensions. "I don't physically think you can do it," Phil—one of the youngest there—told me.

For the next two hours we sat and talked about all sorts of things, but by 2 AM it had been quiet for a few hours, so I decided to say my goodbyes. "Come back and do this again—it's been a pleasure," Paul said to me, as I inexplicably got a bit emotional that my time with him and the team had come to an end.

My time with White Watch reminded me that these people risk their lives on a daily basis, whether it's saving families from an inferno or putting out the bonfire you're too drunk to control. They were some of the friendliest people I've ever spent time with, genuinely not frustrated that they were driving around non-stop to clean up people's fiery mistakes.

I'd definitely take them up on their offer to hang out again. Moss Side fire station might be a bit out the way, but word is: if you set fire to a dumpster and call it in, they'll drive straight to you.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

An injection booth at Insite, a supervised injection facility in Vancouver, Canada. Photo courtesy Vancouver Public Health

This article was originally published by The Marshall Project.

This week, a Boston nonprofit announced plans to open a "safe space" where people can come when they're high on heroin. Dr. Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, told radio station WBUR that no one will actually use drugs in the room. Rather, it's for people who are already high and "need a safe place to be that's not a street corner," she said.

It would appear to be one of the only of its kind in the United States. But public health officials in eight other countries have for many years gone even one step further, allowing people to actually shoot drugs under their watch. At about 100 supervised injection facilities around the world, health care providers are available to intervene in case of overdose, connect users with drug treatment resources and provide clean needles and other supplies. Vancouver operates the only such facility in North America. Ireland this week announced plans to open four safe injection sites next year.

"A lot of people are homeless or unstably housed, and when people are injecting in public it tends to be riskier," says Daniel Raymond, Policy Director at the New York City-based Harm Reduction Coalition. "They tend to rush because they don't want to be seen. This increases risk for overdose, for spreading infections. There's logic to saying, if you're at risk of overdose, let's at least be inside where someone can respond."

Many years of research have shown that supervised injection facilities reduce overdose deaths, prevent the spread of HIV and hep C, increase the likelihood that users will seek drug treatment or other medical care, and decrease street crime and discarded syringes in public areas.

But until recently, the idea was a political nonstarter in the US. "It's beyond ridiculous to ask Americans to pay for drug addicts to inject themselves with heroin and cocaine," South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said in 2007 after the San Francisco health department co-sponsored a day-long symposium to explore whether a supervised injection facility might help to address some of the city's longstanding problems with public drug use in its Tenderloin neighborhood. DeMint introduced a measure (which ultimately failed) that would have banned federal funding for supervised injection facilities. Then–San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said he did not support the idea, and Office of National Drug Control Policy official Bertha Madras called the conversation "disconcerting."

"This is a form of giving up," Madras said.

Raymond, one of the event's organizers, said, "It just kind of crashed and burned. The country wasn't ready for this conversation." It wasn't until 2009 that the federal government ended its decades-long ban on federal funding for needle exchanges. Supervised drug injection was just a step too far.

But with the recent spike in opiate use and overdose deaths, which have hit white, rural and suburban communities especially hard, has come an emerging national recognition of drug addiction as a public health problem.

And with that recognition comes a tentative embrace of a philosophy known as "harm reduction." Pragmatic rather than punitive, harm reduction operates with the assumption that the next best thing to preventing drug use altogether is minimizing its harm. This approach ushered in needle exchanges in the 1980s, and more recently has driven advocates and health departments to begin distributing Narcan so drug users can reverse overdoses at home. In 2001, there were two official Narcan-distribution programs. Only one state—New Mexico—had legal protections for those who prescribed or used Narcan. Today, more than 100 Narcan programs are operating 30 states, and 37 states have passed a Narcan law.

Reaction to this week's announcement in Boston reflects the change in attitude. "I'm up for trying anything when it comes to addiction and active using," Boston Mayor Marty Walsh told WBUR. "If we can help some folks, homeless folks in particular, we should try anything."

But Boston's safe space stops short of being a supervised injection facility, and some don't think the plan goes far enough. "I don't find that there's anything controversial about what they're doing there," said San Francisco-based epidemiologist Alex Kral, who studies supervised injection facilities. "People who use drugs can be in pretty much any spaces they want to."

Around the country, Kral has heard from social service agencies with what he calls "safer consumption bathrooms." Knowing that clients will use drugs in the bathroom no matter what they do, these organizations have stocked the rooms with clean needles and Narcan and taken other safety measures. "They've got a door that is cut out at the bottom of it so that someone outside can see if someone has fallen to the floor. They have doors that have timers on them that automatically open after five minutes," Kral says.

One organization has gone even further, Kral says, operating an actual supervised injection facility with mirrors, stainless steel counters, and a staffer trained in overdose prevention and other harm reduction techniques. However, the staffer is a layperson: nurses, EMTs, or doctors would risk their medical licenses by being involved. The facility lacks any certification or oversight—it must operate underground because it's breaking several laws.

Organizations looking to launch an official supervised injection site could find workarounds in state law—health departments can seek legal exemptions in the case of a public health emergency, for example—but would still be vulnerable to federal prosecution. Federal "crack house statutes" make it a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to "knowingly open, lease, rent, use, or maintain any place... for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance."

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of everything under the sun. We hope it'll help you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

There's a scene early on in the 2013 horror movie/fart comedy This Is the End where Seth Rogen explains his gluten free "cleanse" by saying "Whenever you feel shitty, that's because of gluten," then he admits he doesn't know what gluten is, and blows his commitment to the ways of the gluten-free by eating a burger. Here in Los Angeles, that pretty much covers the general attitude toward foods contaminated with gluten: They won't kill you, but if you can steer clear of them, you'll feel somehow better, even though most of that feeling comes from smugness.

Is gluten really a contaminant? Nope. It's just a protein that the reproductive part of a wheat plant creates in order to feed the budding wheat embryo—the part of the wheat plant we eat. You can extract gluten by washing flour until all the starch is gone, and only a sticky residue is left behind. That sticky residue can be formed into big chunks of gluten, which come in a can, and are used by my local Vietnamese restaurant as a substitute for poultry meats, called "mock duck," and I could eat that stuff all day.

But if you have celiac disease, you should avoid mock duck like the plague. Celiac disease is "an autoimmune disorder that can occur in genetically predisposed people, where the ingestion of gluten leads to damage of the small intestine," Talia Hassid, public health expert and community coordinator for the Celiac Disease Foundation told me in an interview.

The general belief with celiac disease is that a big, gluten-heavy meal is a formula for a couple days of cramps and shitting yourself. Hassid told me that's generally true in children, but less so in adults. "Adults have a completely different set of most common symptoms, including headaches, brain fog and joint swelling," she said, adding that the neurological nature of those symptoms means adults with celiac disease are "even more difficult to diagnose, because most people don't know to associate that with what you're eating."

I get symptoms like headaches, brain fog and joint swelling—who doesn't? On the off chance that I had celiac disease, I decided to cut out gluten for a week, and see what effect it might have on my life. After all, according to Hassid, "83 percent of people with celiac disease are undiagnosed." It's estimated that celiac affects about one out of 100 Americans. For reference, death by gun affects about one in 365 Americans. Statistically, my odds are much better of having celiac disease than being shot to death, but how scary is it?

"The amount of gluten that can fit under your pinkie finger nail. That can make someone with celiac disease sick," she said.

But how sick?

After a mysterious bout of illness that looked like it might kill him in March of 2013 Jeff Hurst, a retired store clerk (and in the interest of full disclosure: my uncle) found out that decades of gluten consumption had been quietly devastating his health for years.

He calls what he has "silent celiac." He shows no outward symptoms when he accidentally eats gluten, but looking back he feels pretty sure he could tell something was wrong for years. "20 percent of people are asymptomatic, so they continue to eat gluten," according to Hassid, and while that's going on, it's "wreaking havoc on the insides," she said, adding, "Even if you're not feeling bad, you're still doing badly."

"I can see evidence that I was getting worse over the course of several years but since I wasn't having any obvious distress I didn't know it was serious," Jeff said. He blithely ate bread, pasta and other gluten-stuffed food for over five decades, only suffering any symptoms in his fifties.

One of the biggest problems preventing diagnoses is a knowledge gap about diarrhea. Had Jeff known it was gluten that was making him feel lousy over the years, he still wouldn't have had celiac's supposed trademark symptom: diarrhea. It was 2013—the height of gluten mania—and saying gluten was making him feel weak back then would have made him sound less like a serious celiac sufferer, and more like one of those people you roll your eyes at when they say they have a "gluten sensitivity."

The idea of "gluten sensitivity" is the bete noire of many an armchair public health expert. In May of 2014, an Australian study found that it was likelier that a particular carbohydrate called FODMAP was to blame for the symptoms believed to be gluten sensitivity. Consequently, The Mayo Clinic website says "there is no scientifically valid test to diagnose non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and research is under way to develop one."

That backlash led to many people dismissing the whole idea of non-celiac gluten sensitivity, when actually, the jury's still out on that. In any case, Hassid said, regardless of the symptoms, the difference between "sensitivity" and celiac disease is simple: "someone with gluten sensitivity doesn't have the gene."

My uncle Jeff—who has the gene—got much worse over the course of 2013, and then the symptoms got weird. "Nothing tasted good," he told me. He also had to take frequent breaks while doing normal things like walking. He became quiet and withdrawn at family gatherings.

Then it got scary.

He couldn't function, and started fainting, so finally he was admitted to the hospital. "I came down with a cellulitis infection of my leg," he said. "The cellulitis went up my leg from my foot to above my knee over the course of about three or four days." Then he started fainting, and finally went to the hospital. "I had kidney failure, fever, severe pain, a catheter. You know, fun stuff," he said.

According to Dr. Daniel Leffler, Director of Clinical Research at The Celiac Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, this isn't unheard of. "Hospitalization due to very severe celiac disease is rare but occurs in about one percent of people who get diagnosed with celiac disease," he told me.

"His case is very dramatic, but most cases of celiac disease are," according to Hassid. "Most people are sick for years, and are struggling for years, before they get the simple blood test, and get diagnosed," she said.

The kidney problems and infection that coincided with Jeff's celiac attack appear to be pretty unusual, however, according to Leffler,"Any severe malnutrition can lead to immune compromise because the body does not have the resources to keep the immune system active. Again, this is rare in celiac disease but can occur."

With Jeff's health in decline, and his symptoms still mysterious his family waited around like bit players in an episode of House before the diagnosis finally came. My mom was one of the people in that waiting room. She sent me a series of texts: "As of late last night, still no answers about Jeff's condition. Has received seven pints of blood but continues to lose blood. Leg infection seems a little better. Hopefully better news today. Please continue to keep him in your prayers."

Then his blood test revealed celiac disease and doctors finally had a culprit. When he was topped up with blood cells and told to lay off the gluten, he started improving "It's amazing what oxygen will do for you!" he said, although he says the residual pain lasted for months.

Hassid told me the recovery time for people who've just had such an episode varies wildly. "It can be anywhere from a couple weeks to two years," she said.

But once it's under control, the worst things about gluten sensitivity, assuming you don't wind up in the hospital, is all the times you'll have to irritate waiters, and having strangers roll their eyes at you. But according to Hassid, "You have to be very inquisitive to get a safe meal."

I asked Hassid if—in the light of my headaches and occasional swollen joints—I should get the blood test for celiac. "It could literally be anything. I would recommend a Celiac blood test, along with a whole panel."

Then she gave me a very puzzling instruction: "Get back on the gluten."

If you think you have gluten problems, you're not supposed to get off gluten, according to experts. You're supposed to get tested instead. And if you've already dropped the gluten, and you suddenly want to be tested, the test won't work unless you start eating gluten again.

The point is that if you have celiac disease, the course of action really has nothing to do with whether you're asymptomatic, or you have a foggy mind, or you're getting headaches, or you're shitting your pants, according to Hassid. In fact, in 2013, researchers found that one third of Americans were "trying to cut back," but according to Hassid, those among that third who actually had celiac disease, weren't doing much of anything at all by cutting back. They needed to cut it out.

"Even if you're not experiencing symptoms, it's still damaging your intestines," Hassid said.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Gluten?

2/5: Taking Normal Precautions

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Mhmmmm meat and special jizz sauce. Photo via Flickr user James

Halifax, a city that generally flies under the radar unless something terrible is happening at Dalhousie University, appears to be losing its shit over a saucy sandwich that most people only eat when they're wasted.

I've never been to Halifax, but I picture it as a beautiful place where all the water faucets flow with Alexander Keith's. Likewise, I'm ignorant to the charms of the donair. To me, it looks just like a shawarma, but I'm told physical appearance is the only trait the two share. The donair consists of spiced beef that's shaved, placed inside a pita, and drizzled with sauce made of evaporated milk and garlic. One colleague described it as "mystery meat with sweet jizz sauce." It does sound kinda appealing, but as of late the city seems hell-bent on boosting the status of the late night snack for drunks to something that could rival poutine as Canada's national dish.

Last month Halifax Regional Council passed a motion asking staff to provide a report on the logistics of making the donair the city's official food.

"You must have heard of people going to Toronto and getting upset outside bars because they couldn't get a donair," said councillor Linda Mosher, citing a concern that, as a Toronto resident, I've literally never heard before. Mosher also expressed anxiety that Edmonton could beat Halifax to the punch and claim the donair as its own.

Though some questioned the value of spending taxpayer money on studying the impact of a wrap, councillor Tim Outhit shut down that argument with his epic kitchen-party ready throwdown, "If we don't do this, won't we all falafel?"

Meanwhile, a coastal battle is brewing between two donair restaurants, with the Halifax-based chain King of Donair suing Burnaby, BC's Donair King for trademark infringement.

According to a statement of claim, the similarity in names "will lead consumers to the inference that the defendant's donair products and restaurant services are either provided, operated, sold or franchised by the plaintiff or done so pursuant to its approval."

In addition to damages, King of Donair is demanding Donair King "destroy all menus, signs, packaging, promotional material, advertisements, business cards or any other material bearing its trade name Donair King and the associated crown logo," the CBC reports.

Donair King has agreed to change its name, provided King of Donair drops the lawsuit, but has yet to receive a response.

Suffice to say, there's a lot of donair-fuelled tension in Halifax right now, so the timing of local rapper Quake Matthews' single "Down with the King"—a massive big up to donairs—couldn't be better.

Matthews reminisces about hollering at chicks and getting into fights at "Pizza Corner," proclaiming, "I'm a true Nova Scotian, wake up every Sunday drunk with donair on my clothing."

The tourism brochures kind of write themselves, don't they?

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photos by Chris Bethell

There are a few different images you can find in the media that perfectly demonstrate what life in Britain looks like in 2015. There's the photo of David Cameron, for example, dressed in a tuxedo and white bowtie calling for "permanent austerity" from a gold lectern at the Lord Mayor's banquet back in 2013. Or there's the guffawing young Conservative clutching a copy of the Telegraph at last month's party conference, a line of thick, yellow egg yolk suspended perfectly off his forehead.

Though not quite as strong a distillation of contemporary British class war as these, if you happened to be on Staines Road in Hounslow yesterday afternoon you might have stumbled across another good example. Over 100 people were lining up in the rain outside an ugly office block in West London, some having spent the night. Why? They were desperate to get first dibs on one of 228 unbuilt "affordable homes" after 2,000 people had registered their interest in advance.

The home sale had been arranged by Galliard Homes, a property developer that claims to be "committed" to helping Londoners "get on the ladder." The company had advertised it heavily in the media and told the press in advance that people would "camp out overnight in sleeping bags and tents." It seemed like a deliberate publicity stunt, which, given the weather, time of year, and the desperation of some of those outside, felt pretty inappropriate.

When we arrived at 2 PM yesterday, a few hours before the sale began, a line of people—some first-time buyers, others investors—were lined up in the rain holding Galliard-branded umbrellas. Those at the front had been waiting for hours facing questions from journalists as the Galliard Homes press officers eagerly retweeted praise about their "PR machine" being "on fire."

Of course, not everyone in London gets to choose whether to spend the night outside, and for those of us privileged enough to live in sheds at the back of gardens or as de facto security guards, even properties priced well below the market average—these ones were going for between £199,000 and £355,000 —are way out of reach. Nonetheless, keen to find out what drives Generation Rent to spend a winter night on the streets of Hounslow in the vague hope of buying an unbuilt, off-plan shoebox that won't even be ready until 2017, we asked a few wet punters for their views.

Dinesh Kumor. All pictures Chris Bethell

VICE: Did you camp here last night?
Dinesh Kumor: Yes. I slept at the front outside. I arrived at 5:30 in the evening.

Jesus. Did you have a tent?
No.

Wasn't it a bit cold?
It was a little bit cold. Yes, definitely.

So what motivated you to do it?
I heard about it on the radio. It's been advertised all the time on LBC, on TV. I saw everybody outside doing it so I said I'll join the party. Whether it's going to be a successful investment only time will tell.

It seems like a pretty strong illustration of the housing crisis. What do you think about London's housing situation right now?
Personally, I don't like it. I think it's a con and I think the government is doing nothing to alleviate the crisis. But if you don't join in you're going to miss out. You go to auctions or estate agents and it's the same or even worse. In Britain this is the way it goes, there is no other way so you just go and do it. It's crazy that in Britain you have to own a home. If you go to Germany most of the population is renting and everybody is very happy.

Arslan Mehmood

VICE: How do you feel about all the people lining up outside here in the rain?
Arslan Mehmood: It's madness. I've heard from friends that everywhere it's the same experience. Wherever you go there's a lot of people, some looking for their own places, some looking for investments. This is my first experience with Galliard but it's not a very good arrangement, they should have something indoors. With this kind of weather it's hard.

Why have you come down today?
I'm a first-time buyer so I'm renting at the moment in Croydon. I'm sick of it but I can't afford to buy my own place. This is a really good opportunity. I've been trying to get something but failing.

Dr. Jag Singh

How long have you been waiting?
Dr. Jag Singh: About one and a half hours.

Not so long then. What do you make of the situation?
The situation is bad. A lot of people are queuing up for the property. I think most people here are looking for an investment, though there might be a few people looking to move in. I'm renting at the moment and rent is expensive. It means a lot to me to buy something because I have saved my earnings to make this step.

Arun Mehrotra

VICE: When did you get here?
Arun Mehrotra: Just now.

What do you think about the people who lined up last night?
I think that's going to happen all the time. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, there was no problem. Suddenly in the last decade there's a massive problem. I think the competition is really high, which is why people are queuing.

Watch: 'Regeneration Game' – the VICE documentary about the battle to live in London

What's your housing situation like at the moment?
I have two older kids in their mid to late 20s and I need to get them out of the house at some point so I have to look at what the options are. They've lived at home all their lives and we'd like to see the back of them at some stage.

What do you think of these flats? Are they even that cheap?
No, not really. They are quite expensive, but given how expensive other properties are in London they're OK.

Emma Rading

VICE: How long have you been waiting in the line?
Emma Rading: Actually not that long. About an hour or so.

What do you think of the people who camped out?
It's insane. It's ridiculous and I think the bubble is going to burst soon again.

Are you hoping to buy a flat?
I'm looking to purchase a flat for a buy-to-let investment. I'm already on the property ladder so now I'm onto the next round. I have another property I let out in Acton. This is strategic.

Don't you think cheap properties should be for people who need them more?
I completely agree and sympathize with that and I was one of those people a few years ago. But now I'm doing my bit to queue up and it's first-come, first-served.

David Galman

VICE: Why have all these people stood outside in the rain and others camped overnight for a publicity stunt?
David Galman, Galliard Homes Sales Director: I don't think it was a publicity stunt.

Why didn't you do it online then?
Because they wouldn't be able to see the flats online, would they? We have a building here.

But why didn't you do a first-come first-serve thing by registering people online rather than making them stand outside?
We didn't make them stand outside, they chose to. The minute it was raining we gave them all umbrellas and ponchos and when it was safe to bring them in the building we brought them in.

So not a publicity stunt?
Why would it be a publicity stunt? We don't need to do a publicity stunt. We build and sell 4,000 homes a year.

Seems like a lot of people here aren't actually first-time buyers but buy-to-let-landlords. What do you make of that?
I can't stop people buying flats. It's going to happen, unfortunately. As long as we're serving a purpose and we are providing a property and decent accommodation for people to live in that's part of our job done.

What do you think this whole thing says about London's lack of affordable homes?
I think the people that should be looked at in respect of London's lack of affordable homes are the local authorities and government in terms of planning permissions and the banks in giving finance. There's a misnomer that developers sell properties very early off-plan for commercial gain. The reason we have to do that is if you haven't got a sold product you cannot go to the bank and get finance to build it.

Thanks, David.

Follow Philip Kleinfeld and Chris Bethell on Twitter.

Illustration by Wren McDonald

I have no idea where my money goes. I don't mean, Ha ha I sometimes spend slightly too much on frivolous things! I mean I've gone months—maybe even an entire year—without logging into my online bank account thanks to a paralyzing cocktail of anxiety and magical thinking. It's easier to delude yourself about being broke if you never confront exactly how much money you don't have. It wasn't until recently, when I started paying off my credit card in earnest, that I faced my fears and started monitoring how much money I had left over for things apart from rent and food and the occasional sweet release of alcohol.

According to people more grown-up than I am, keeping track of your finances and saving money is more than just a pragmatic way to make sure you don't spend the end of every pay period eating peanut butter in the dark, it's the path to self-actualization. At least that's what I was told by Ryan Howell, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied the relationship between money and life satisfaction for the better part of ten years.

"Basically, what we find is that the more credit card debt you have, the less you enjoy your discretionary spending," he said. "So to be really happy, you need to make sure you feel financially secure—and get your credit card debt under control—and then you should use your discretionary resources to bring you closer to your friends and family. That is the simplest path from money to happiness."

That said, I figured it made sense to finally delve into what I was wasting money on, ask experts how to stop doing that, and then come up with an ultimate goal to aspire to savings-wise.

Related: Which Grad School Degrees Aren't a Complete Waste of Money?

Why Young People Don't Save

I'm swimming in student loan debt, which eliminates almost all of my financial breathing room. The money I would ostensibly be skimming off my paycheck and tucking away has to be dedicated toward keeping my head above water every month. I want to save, but I have no idea where the money will come from. I'm not alone in that struggle: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported a few years ago that the average millennial starts off in post-grad life $25,000 in the hole.

Of course, debt isn't the only thing stopping young people from saving. For instance, Howell said that even though studies have shown that life experiences are what generally make people happy, twentysomethings tend to blow all of their money on consumables or objects in attempt to look cool.

"Unfortunately, people in their 20s try to present who they are through their material items—a certain brand of clothes, for example," he told me. "In San Francisco, I don't think there's anyone under the age of 30 who has a PC rather than a Mac."

"Young people can't think of a time when they'll be too old to work, or not want to work, or will need money for buying a house. The pace of their lives is so fast, and savings are slow." —Dr. April Benson

And then there are the people who scoff at saving because if you don't drop money on extravagant nights out and late-Roman-empire-style excess, you'll have missed out on the joyful hedonism of youth. Once you inevitably rise to the top of your chosen field, you'll have more than enough money for savings. Or as a head-scratcher of a recent Elite Daily piece put it, "When you care about your 401k, your life is just 'k.'"

As many people on the internet pointed out, this is very, very bad advice that could only come from someone who has enough of a safety net not to worry about having to deal with sudden, unforeseen expenses like medical bills. When you can't afford to replace your stolen phone, you're probably going to wish you didn't listen to the human greeting card who wrote, "When you live your life by numbers, you strip yourself of poetry."

Dr. April Benson, a psychologist who runs a program for compulsive shoppers, said there's a reason young people have this mindset, even though it's obviously ridiculous on an intellectual level. Basically, it boils down to YOLO.

"They're often feeling dependent on parents to bail them out if they need it, so they think they don't need to save," she told me. "I think it's part of the impulsivity of the age. I think another thing is of invincibility. Young people can't think of a time when they'll be too old to work, or not want to work, or will need money for buying a house. The pace of their lives is so fast, and savings are slow."

Watch: The Cost of Dying in Greece

What You Should Be Cutting Out of Your Life

Knowing that I was mentally primed to give up on saving, and also realizing I didn't have any idea what my spending habits were, I downloaded an app called Digit. Every few days or so, the program looks at what's in your checking account, figures out what's likely to be in that account in the future, and determines what you can live without.

Digit takes money out of your account depending on your spending habits. That means there more I cut back on stuff, the more I would see my savings grow. Although I know the average American spends more than $1,000 a year on coffee, I stick to drinking the stuff out of my office's machine. I needed to figure out where I was wasting all my cash in order to make the necessary adjustments.

To that end, I got another app called Mint, which goes through every item you buy, puts it in a category, and tells you where you're allocating your finances.

Mint creates a budget for you by recording what you spend and trying to reduce it by 20 percent.

ATM fees are now at a record high of $4.52 per transaction on average, up 20 percent from five years ago. One of the first things I noticed from using Mint is that I, like apparently most people, was spending too much money on them.

Since the end of June, I've forked over $65 in fees for withdrawing cash, which is honestly beyond infuriating, because that means I spend ~$150 a year getting access to my own money. The combination of New York businesses' stubborn insistence on forcing you to pay in cash and my bank being 20 minutes from my apartment meant I was going to random bodega cash dispensers to the tune of $2.50 a trip.

My solution was to switch banks to Charles Schwab, a company with no brick or mortar locations, which might be a problem if you needed to visit an IRL banking professional for whatever reason, something I've never had to do. The upside is that they pay your ATM fees.

Benson, the savings psychologist, also offered up eating out and transportation as things that people my age spend too much money on. I know that every time I go grab something for lunch I spend about $10 on average, or $50 a week. To remedy that, I signed up for something called Blue Apron, which costs $60 a week and delivers all of the groceries to make three meals for two average-sized people, or like nine meals for myself. I spend literally no other money on food unless I'm out late—the cost of the program covers all my lunches and replaces grocery shopping.

Another lesson is to take advantage of any program your job has that allows you to pay for things with pre-tax dollars. For instance, my job lets me put a portion of my paycheck into a transit account that I can use for the subway, and that deduction is made before taxes come out—a big deal in New York, which has an unusually high tax rate.

The Ultimate Goal: The Fuck-You Fund

My friend Michael wanted to quit his job last year because his boss was an asshole. While most of us have experienced this exact scenario and not been able to do anything about it, he was able to leave as soon as he'd reached his breaking point.

That's because my buddy had saved enough money to say "fuck you," which should be the first goal of any saver. But how much of your income should you strive to put away? How many months of income do you need to have under your belt before you can cash in on all those fantasies of walking out the door with both middle fingers extended?

"Although this figure will definitely vary somewhat, a good rule of thumb is to have approximately six months worth of living expenses in savings," Andrew Schrage, a co-founder of MoneyCrashers.com, told me. "It's very helpful to set up automatic transfers to a separate bank account in order to save."

HYFR

This figure terrifies me, because I currently have $115 and some change in my Mint savings account after using it for a few weeks. Granted, this is much more than my previous record of less than a dollar, but $20,000 seems really, really far off.

At the rate I'm going using Mint, it seems like I'll never even get to $6,600 which is what I would need just to pay rent for six months. But the thing to remember is that the more money you have saved, the more interest it earns. For instance, my savings app gives you five cents for every $100 you keep in the account for three months. If I get to $6,600 goal, I'll be making $3.30 a week; if I ever made it to $20,000, the savings account would give me an extra $10 a week in income.

Meagan Hooper, the founder of BSmartGuide.com, is the poster child for turning savings into what she calls "passive income." She babysat during her mid 20s until she became the COO of a hedge fund, and by setting aside her $20-an-hour income from her side hustle, she was able to invest an extra $1,000 a month. That money compounded on itself and is her greatest source of income today.

Not everyone has the willpower to give up their Friday and Saturday nights to babysit, so Hooper gave me another option for generating some quick cash to invest or pay off credit card debt. "I'm a big fan of selling your stuff," she says. "That will net you a few thousand dollars in a week. That way outpaces cutting out your Starbucks."

Still, that sounds like it takes a monk-like level of austerity. I like my stuff. Using apps like Mint and Digit and switching to grocery-delivering startups like Blue Kitchen was easy. I still barely have to look at my bank account if I don't want to. I'm not really doing anything. In contrast, what Hooper suggests seems stressful and sure to affect my quality of life. Maybe there's something to what the Elite Daily author suggested when she wrote, "When you're too worried about your bank statement, you're not making your own."

Just kidding.

Hooper told me to keep my eyes on the prize: Pay off the last of my credit card debt, build up my financial safety net, and start investing whatever money I can by thinking about how it will just turn into more money in the future.

"Unless you have that goal of generating passive income and you see that nice passive interest compound interest later, I think it's very hard for people to stick to any goal," she says. "But think when people see the math, it's easy. You'll eat eggs every day if you see that you'll have $10 million in 20 years."

Correction 11/6: An earlier version of this story overstated the amount of money you can earn from Mint.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

When Nigerian author Amos Tutuola's book My Life in the Bush of Ghosts first came out in 1954, it was celebrated internationally as a richly imaginative take on Nigerian folklore. At home, however, the story—a Yoruba folktale of a boy who escapes war into a forbidden world of ghosts and spirits—was largely shat on by the intellectual elite who felt the language, written in the fantastical and naive perspective of a child, was a digression from the "proper English" impressed upon them from their colonialist past.

But it's as much due to this playful remixing of language that gave Tutuola's story a magical feel, enamouring it with audiences in Britain, Africa, and America. Today the book is essential Nigerian reading, and went on to inspire musician David Byrne who, alongside Brian Eno, recorded a groundbreaking but also initially derided album with the same name.

The book continues to enchant new readers, including Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel—an artist and documentary photographer whose previous exploration into African history, Afronauts, re-imagined imagery from Zambia's failed space program in the 60s.

VICE chatted with de Middel, whose show closes November 7 at the Contact Gallery in Toronto, about the haunting and beautiful Tutuola-inspired images from her new series This Is What Hatred Did.

Photos by Cristina de Middel

VICE: Tell me about how you were inspired by Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts?
Cristina de Middel: I loved the narrative sequence and structure of the book, and the images that would come to my mind while reading it were already very interesting. I started sketching that and I didn't know what I would do with that, but when I was invited to show the Afronauts, they took us on an excursion to an area called Makoko—where most photojournalists go to take pictures of the cliche of Africa. You know: the poor kids and the poor neighbourhood, while they are all happy and smiling. It's a very stereotypical neighbourhood where they smoke fish so there's all this smoke and it's so dark and beautiful at the same time, and spooky and scary and romantic. I felt it was the best place to really try and tell the story because I could talk about the story itself—about the book, which I thought was incredible—and I could really give a chance to the neighbourhood to be portrayed from a different angle. If you type in Makoko, Lagos, or even Nigeria on Google Images, one of the first images that will come up is from Makoko.

I wanted to tell the story of the neighbourhood—or at least try to, because I'm still a white woman and I can project my imagination to that—but of course I am not an expert, I will never be an expert in what happens in the neighbourhood. It's not my job.

I wanted to do the opposite that I did to the Afronauts. The Afronauts is a real story that I translated into fiction and this is a pure fiction that I made happen for real, so I took the story and took it to the place and made it happen in the place, so it was a return journey from the Afronauts.

You had a photojournalism background, right? I'm interested to see how this move toward fiction relates to your work as a photojournalist.
For me it was just to realize and acknowledge something that everybody knows—I mean, I'm not discovering dynamite here—but would react. But I was very surprised.

A shot of Christina's show mounted in Toronto. Courtesy Contact Gallery

Follow Raf Katigbak on Twitter.

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