Traffic in Toronto during last week's Uber protest. Photo via the author.

UberHOP, the newest branch of the popular/controversial ride home app service, will be hitting Toronto streets on Tuesday for a test run, which puts the dysfunctional Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in a bit of an awkward position.

As of right now, Uber only offers their regular ride services—Uber X, Uber XL, and Uber Black—in the 6ix, but this week will mark the introduction of UberHOP as well, which premiered in Seattle last week.

The service, which is essentially just a fancy way of splitting the fare with other people headed in the same direction, offers a $5 flat rate to anyone travelling between Financial District and one of four high-traffic hubs during peak travel hours.

The current routes offered—notably to Liberty Village and the Distillery District—would directly cut into the city's congested transit lines, which include the 504 King St. car, a route often used by around 60,000 passengers every day.

The app could be popular considering the TTC's beleaguered high-traffic streetcar lines. With transit prices continuing to soar (Toronto has one of the highest fare rates in North America) and the city's ongoing battle with manufacturing company Bombardier over the now-extremely-overdue delivery of modern streetcars—just two of the many issues Torontonians regularly complain about when it comes to public transit.

According to the National Post, TTC CEO Andy Byford says that the app service isn't a real worry for the transit service (despite its raging success at being an existential crisis for taxi services in the city). He does note, however, that the TTC is launching a legal inquiry into the basis of UberHOP infringing on TTC operations.

"Because has been announced and there's a very clear intent to effectively provide an alternate transit service, we want the lawyers to have a look at it," Byford said.

Byford noted that he is not against Uber itself—he's just protecting the interests of the TTC, making no mention of plans to hang onto the doors of moving Ubers in protest.

"I'm not anti-Uber but my loyalty is to the TTC," Byford said. "I thought it was kind of ironic that the head of the TTC should be sent an Uber invitation...I can tell you now I will be continuing to use the 504 King streetcar."

In fact, earlier this year, Toronto's Taylor Scollon crowdfunded a proposed bus service that would deliver people directly to Liberty Village. Scollon axed the idea once he realized how intense Toronto's transit regulations were.

Uber in Toronto has faced intense criticism, most notably from the city's various taxi cab companies who have shut down major intersections and streets during rush hour in an attempt to protest the app-based taxi service.

While critics say that a lack of regulation around Uber is a huge problem and the cars needed to insured and licensed legally to continue operating, the municipal and provincial governments haven't come to a conclusion. Today, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory both endorsed the idea that people choosing Uber is a sign that it's the inevitable next progression for commuters, but noted that they still need to create laws to accommodate the app service. Perhaps more shirtless protests are needed.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Alisha Vargas

Dead Canadians aren't receiving autopsies anymore.

The posthumous procedure, which involves examining the body's organs to find out more about the cause of death, has been around forever (it started in Ancient Egypt), but apparently it's rarely considered necessary by doctors these days.

Only around four percent of deaths (11,141 out of 246,596) in Canada resulted in autopsies in 2012, according to a Maclean's report based on Statistics Canada data; in 1991 that number was 17 percent.

The reason for the decline is physicians feel imaging technology, including CT scans and MRIs, allows them to examine bodies adequately, eliminating the need to slice and dice. Cost could also be a factor, with coroners budgets taking hits in recent years.

A CBC investigation found the BC coroner's service had the lowest autopsy rate in the country at 19 percent. Deaths that are sudden, unnatural or suspicious are reported to the coroner, and an autopsy is ordered if "cause of death cannot be established through examination of the scene, body, and history," according to BC's Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe. (Other provinces have variations of the same rules.) But one family who spoke to the CBC believes their relative, a bodybuilding doctor, may have died in a homicide that was ruled a suicide. The man was found in his home with cuts on his arms and chest. Other coroners around the province have been critical of the low autopsy rate, but claim they are short staffed.

Studies have shown that autopsies often catch misdiagnoses made by doctors that would otherwise go unnoticed. According to a 2002 US meta analysis of such studies, in one out of four cases, autopsies reveal major errors relating to diagnoses or causes of death.

"The technique is millennia old, but can still teach us huge amounts," Angus Turnbull, a medical student who has studied falling autopsy rates told Maclean's.

That may be true, but if rates continue to fall, Canadians could be taking the secrets of their deaths to the grave.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Jason Hargrove

Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne is the latest to endorse a growing movement to sell weed in liquor stores once it's legal.

Speaking at Queens Park Monday, Wynne said the LCBO "is very well-suited to putting in place the social responsibility aspects that would need to be in place."

She said selling marijuana alongside booze "makes a lot of sense."

Similar sentiments were recently expressed by Warren "Smokey" Thomas, head of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents LCBO employees.

"They do age checks, they do refusals if somebody's intoxicated," he said.

Unions representing liquor store employees in BC are also pushing to have the two substances sold side by side.

But is this really a responsible idea? Pretty much the only times I ever vomit is when I smoke weed while drinking.

Just last week, I tried dabs for the first time after having several high balls over a period of a few hours. The night ended (quickly) thereafter with me barfing aggressively in my bed still fully clothed and immobilized. I'm not proud of this story, but I tell it for the sake of journalism. Before I blazed, I felt a light buzz, yet almost immediately afterwards, I was a hot mess. For some people, taking even a couple of hits of a joint while drinking is a fast track to spending several hours hunched over the toilet, if you are lucky enough to make it there.

Selling chronic and liquor in the same place will no doubt encourage customers to buy them together but any stoner knows this combination carries the risk of greening out. Maybe those are the people Wynne and others should consult before they make an avoidable, rookie mistake.

You know how to reach me, Kathleen.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

President Barack Obama addressing the country after the December, 2012, Sandy Hook massacre. Screen-cap via Whitehouse.gov

When mentally-ill 20-year-old Adam Lanza used guns to kill 26 people at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, exactly three years ago, I had just finished covering the 2012 presidential campaign as a freelance political reporter. Gun control was not a major issue that fall. In fact, it wasn't even really on anyone's radar, except as the issue the National Rifle Association (NRA)—perhaps the most effective lobbying outfit in America—was leaning on, as it always did, to gin up fear and turn out gun supporters in swing states. Instead, the media spent most of that campaign talking about Mitt Romney's obscene wealth, the "47 percent" of voters who are lazy and want free shit, and dozens of now-obscure gaffes and talking points. (Remember Romney's weird rhetorical assault on a Pennsylvania bakery's cookies?)

For a few days that December, though, gun control took center stage. The victims of the Sandy Hook violence were "beautiful little kids," as President Barack Obama tearfully described them on national television, and it seemed unimaginable that the country wouldn't pass legislation—at the federal or state level—in an attempt to stop a tragedy like that from happening again. Members of the press, people who cover this stuff for a living, looked around at each other and thought: Surely, this will be the time we actually do something about guns in America.

Of course, we were wrong. No gun control measures were passed by Congress. And though many states passed laws restricting access to guns, more states actually made it easier to buy weapons. If you think, as many do, that mass shootings are awful and the way to prevent them is to prevent people from having so many guns, the last three years have been a devastating disappointment.

Zoom out a bit and the Sandy Hook shooting—and the legislative non-response to it—don't seem all that remarkable. Thirteen people died in the 1999 Columbine shooting; the same year as Sandy Hook, a 24-year-old named James Holmes opened fire and killed 12 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. A bevy of similar incidents over the preceding decade had made starkly clear America's fondness for firearms was out of hand. Yet attempts to limit access to guns at the federal level have been fallen short when they exist at all. The Assault Weapons Ban's efficacy at stopping gun violence is debatable, but when George W. Bush and a divided Congress let the law expire in 2004, it was a symbolic defeat with a clear message: Gun control was a laughable liberal fantasy. By the spring after Sandy Hook, the most viable piece of gun control legislation in play—the so-called "Manchin-Toomey" bill in the Senate—was dead.

Arguments about the only antidote to shootings being more guns—the old "good guy with a gun" theory—elide a basic truth, as articulated by Harry Siegel in the New York Daily News on Friday: Guns kill. They kill more effectively than just about anything else, and they make it possible for almost any self-radicalized terrorist to go on a San Bernardino–style shooting. Gun control measures would not stop all mass shootings, but they might stop some; at a minimum, tougher federal gun laws would make it more difficult to buy guns in areas with loose regulations and send them to big cities.

At this point, it's tempting to just shake your head and accept it every time another tragedy happens. If past horrors—like those in suburban Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, where a member of Congress was shot in the head, or at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado last month, where three were killed—aren't enough to pry some kind of sensible, Japanese-style gun control regime out of our political elites, what could possibly do the trick?

A fresh Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll speaks to this hardening of the national consciousness. Mass shootings are increasingly accepted—by about three quarters of us—as an essential part of American life, like fourth of July barbecues and binging on Netflix. We simply don't see a way out, and don't have much or any confidence that our leaders will craft one. Just as rising income inequality seems to be intractable, horrific episodes of gun violence—ideological or otherwise—are apparently inevitable, the only question being whether you can arm yourself and your family in time to ward off oblivion.

What does seem plausible, however, is that fear of the other—in this case, radicalized Muslim immigrants—might, perversely, be the grease that forces a handful of swing votes in Congress to embrace gun control. You can argue, of course, that that won't be enough—that guns are simply going to be available to whoever wants them, and there aren't enough federal regulators to stop the endless cycle of mass shootings in America.

That may be true. But when so many people are dying, a failed attempt to improve things is far more palatable than grim resignation.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

All photos by the author

Enough time has passed since the world was at Peak Hipster for us to look back at it as a movement, or a craze, or a meme, or whatever the fuck it was and try to take stock of what it all meant, if anything. So this week we're doing exactly that in a short collection of stories.

My career really started when I was 18. I was working for Shepard Fairey, and he took me to a lot of amazing art shows and concerts and stuff. This was before iPhones, and before a lot of people had digital cameras, so I was usually the only person there taking photos. People would always ask me to email them the pictures I'd taken at these events. And that's what I did—I would write down their email addresses and send them the pictures. I was young, so I was just excited people wanted to see my photos.

That eventually got kinda tedious, so I decided to start putting them on a website. It took off pretty much overnight. I'm pretty sure it was the first of its kind, though Last Night's Party started around the same time.

Originally, it was called Polaroid Scene, because I loved Polaroid pictures and going out at night. But after about a year, Polaroid told me they didn't want me to use their name, so I changed it. I went with Cobrasnake because it had nothing to do with photography, and I knew nobody could take it away from me.

In the beginning, I was just super excited to see all these trends. I searched far and wide and traveled on my own money around the world to see the coolest parties I could find. I was documenting the culture and, I think, inspiring the culture. Because the people who didn't go to those events could see how the coolest kids in London or LA or Tokyo or New York City were dressing, and they could take inspiration from that.

I think my documentation of the scene snowballed it. I could easily see trends spread through the internet. Like, how everyone wanted to drink Red Stripe because it was the cool drink, and then it was Pabst, and then it was Sparks. I think I might have been responsible for the trend of glasses without lenses. I had laser eye surgery, and because I'd worn glasses my whole life, I didn't feel comfortable without them on my face. So I would wear the empty frames, and I was photographed a lot, and people would always ask me about the glasses, and then it became a trend.

Related: An expert explains why people hated hipsters

I think I was always a hipster, even before hipsters were a thing. I've always worn weird clothes that I've bought from the thrift store. I was voted Most Unique in my high school. I think hipster has become so mainstream that it makes it difficult to tell who the weirdoes are. Before, you could find somebody based on how they were dressed and know they would know about the Pixies or Radiohead or whatever. But now, you could talk to a guy wearing skinny jeans and he might not even be able to name a Radiohead song. The style has transcended the culture.

It's overwhelming to think about the amount of places and events and parties that I've been to. When I was looking back through old photos for this post, I realized I've shot over a million photos.

I was blessed to travel around the world and see the things I saw. I was there in the beginning for the careers of Katy Perry and Steve Aoki and Sky Ferreira. And a lot of people who were just scene kids when I started photographing them have started bands, companies, or become successful artists or designers. It's been amazing to see them rise to where they are now, and to have those photos. Nobody else can create those moments.

Everyone has a camera phone now. The party is livestreamed. Everyone is on Snapchat and Instagram. It's kind of like everyone is their own Cobrasnake. But I'm still inspired by young people being creative and having fun. I hope I still inspire them, too.

Mark Hunter is still working on photography, and is also currently in the process of reinventing himself as a fitness guru (NYMag recently described him as a "hipster Richard Simmons.") You can read more about that here.

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Enough time has passed since the world was at Peak Hipster for us to look back at it as a movement, or a craze, or a meme, or whatever the fuck it was and try to take stock of what it all meant, if anything. So this week we're doing exactly that in a short collection of stories.

"For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable."

-A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud, 1873

Mary Wilke: "He was given to fits of rage, Jewish liberal paranoia, male chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy, and nihilistic moods of despair. He had complaints about life but never any solutions. He longed to be an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices. In his most private moments, he spoke of his fear of death, which he elevated to tragic heights when in fact it was mere narcissism."

-Manhattan dir. by Woody Allen, 1979

I JUST WANT TO DRINK COFFEE AND CREATE STUFF AND SLEEP

Branded apparel, various, 2013

******

We will remember 2015 as the year the YouTube comments got a political party. The year Drake made every moment of your life feel like you were half-drunk at a wedding reception. It was the year Hipster Runoff died for good, the year the internet swallowed itself whole, and with it any straight-faced mention of the early-aughts Hipster, at least the hard-defined, Look At This Fucking variety.

This package of stories serves as a gravestone for the hipster, but eulogizing them here seems at once premature and belated. It was an aesthetic, a demographic, a notion that seems as though it had both existed forever and yet was never fully realized, a caricature from its inception, diluted, imprecise, corny, and yet still a sort of begrudgingly effective shorthand. The hipster, if it was anything at all, was the open-armed embrace of emotions, ideologies, and fascinations that Republicans might call you a pussy for.

Related: An expert explains why people hated hipsters

Wielding these obscure remnants of musical or philosophical or social movements was to shout that you were a pioneer or an archivist or preservationist. This was bullshit, but all Americans have mostly ever been about is implication anyway. A pose. A chest thump. Who they convince themselves they are in the mirror, who they realize they are on the walk home, keeping these two things separate for as long as possible. But we are not vulnerable to any of that anymore, not really. There are no more fake-pioneers because there are no more fake-frontiers. Everyone can be everywhere always. The internet decontextualized everything. You didn't come from anywhere because we all live in the same place. We all like movies, getting laid, wasting time. So we got Netflix and chill. It doesn't matter what you're watching or who you're trying to fuck; these are our compulsions, tame and generic as they are; exclusivity is over. "I'm here for a good time, not a long time," said the sage. Aesthetic is just the facilitator, the conduit, the means to actualize the same thirst we all have, at the Cracker Barrel or at Roberta's or microwaving Hot Pockets—wherever it is, it doesn't matter.

2015 was the year the internet called out The Fat Jew for stealing memes, and then... none of it made much difference. There he is, still, singing karaoke versions of every track on Self-Loathing on the Internet: Shut Up and Play The Hits. It was the year we all became some collaborative, reflected version of ourselves. It was the year we gave birth to and turned dabbing into a bloody carcass in a matter of three days. We made memes into sweatshirts. There are no cultural elites because there is no scarcity. On the internet, anyone can be a billionaire. TFW, emojis, memes that speak to your most omg same! impulses, the universality of all things. The year the internet became fluent in that broad, ya-ever-notice? Seinfeldian observationalism. We are the same people, always, our need for community and rebellion and isolated self-realization simultaneously.

***

The parody sold by Urban Outfitters and Hipster Ariel memes always felt inadequate. The hipster was instead something defined by carefully managed dichotomies. It was a means of boldness for a people who seemed so innately feeble otherwise, infinitely redefining and assessing, figuring out who they wanted to be. What the populace seemed so uncomfortable with was not their art itself but the consumption of it, the need to classify and dissect, to validate their own investment.

Hipster seemed once like a combative pose. A hyper-intellectualized response to the blunderingly retrograde Bush years. Now, it means nothing besides, maybe, "semi-affected intellectual with no loans and a bicycle." Can you imagine anyone besides your parents or Marco Rubio objecting to a Kardashian? Could the most cold-hearted stereotype resist Carly Rae? Rich white people still have a thing or two to say about how you should be living your life, but sometimes the world is a drag and only Justin Bieber can resuscitate you, and no one can really dispute that.

The hipster as a movement always seemed in its adolescent stage. They moved like someone who was at any moment between twee, precious affectations and strains for brooding mystery. The need to be all things at all times. Michael Cera's dopey sensitivity, Woody Allen's hypochondria, and Stanley Kowalski's heedless renegade. Respected like philosophers and feared like men who trust only impulse. Primitively minimalist and yet dainty. You could describe both of those people as hipsters and yet they share almost no qualities, physically or spiritually, besides a kind of self-satisfaction, an adherence to a rubric of aesthetic tenets.

Writing for the New York Times about Basquiat in 1985, Cathleen McGuigan said, " maintains a fine balance between seemingly contradictory forces: control and spontaneity, menace and wit, urban imagery and primitivism."

Have Hipster-Ipsum spit out four paragraphs of hipster-related filler text for you. What defined hipsters, really, is a bunch of those same contradictions. "Pabst" and "craft beer," "vegan" and "pork shoulder," "leggings," and "flannel." Hipster was a marginally edgier Stuff White People like; it was "basic" with better taste in music and maybe-more-liberal sexual proclivities. It was to be both immersed in something and detached at once, devoted and apathetic, something I guess we'll call qualified hyperbole—"this guacamole is sort of the best thing ever"; "I kind of think Thoreau is bullshit." It was sold as something at the nexus friendzone and fuccboi; it was both the guy who would never call you again, and the guy you'd call to talk about the guy who didn't call.

A propensity for acting both compulsively sincere and emotionally withheld, overtly masculine and unabashedly feminine. Post-emo tumblrs about Final Fantasy and being sad in Minnesota, but then also dude-dude types who think they're Hemingway in the book jacket, black and white, hedonists, nihilists, men proud of their hairy thighs.

Hipster, inasmuch as it exists today, is the ability to endorse not just Bernie Sanders but, for audacity's sake, Donald Trump, too. People who can align themselves with both lofty idealism and unrepentant narcissism. Ruin America, make America great again, make America a socialist utopia—it doesn't matter, because there is no wager, really. Hipster is just a man rich enough to dare you to object to him, in all his infinite costumes, because of how inherently unobjectionable a rich white man feels he is at his core. It's all an amusement.

What made hipster culture so persistent was not the knit hats or the glasses or the micro brews, but how it functioned as a sort of permission, a license to veer into mindless recreation and Important Movements in equal measure. Hipster was just what we called the games white people play with their various entitlements.

One man's #occupywallstreet is another man's #champagneshowers.

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

Illustration by Ella Strickland de Souza

In the week following the attacks in Paris in November, anti-Muslim incidents in the UK increased by around 300 percent according to Tell MAMA, a helpline that monitors anti-Muslim incidents in the country. The majority of these victims—60 percent—were female.

The spike in incidents is significantly affecting the way female Muslims live their daily lives, warns a study by Nottingham Trent and Birmingham City University. Victims are reportedly suffering from a range of psychological and emotional problems including depression, anxiety, and low confidence. Some have even begun taking steps to become "less visible."

"Female-focused Islamophobia is an extremely worrying phenomenon," says Steve Rose, a spokesman for Tell MAMA. "There are numerous factors to consider why this is happening. But one explanation is that the hijab and niqab have become identifiers, which some people relate to terrorism.

"When people see these items of clothing they are quick to make sweeping assumptions. And, sadly, until we begin to tackle bigotry through education I fear that the number of those affected by this will continue to rise."

Madihah Ahmed, a 21-year-old medical student, was recently targeted at a restaurant in Glasgow's Southside while out with her 16-year-old sister and two friends.

"We were just minding our own business when two middle-aged couples came and sat near us and immediately started sniggering and laughing," says Madihah, who hopes to become a GP. "I then overheard the woman say, 'Why doesn't she take that veil off her face, is she to ashamed to show it?' I'm quite used to this kind of thing so I just continued eating.

"Later in the evening I needed to use the bathroom but was too afraid to go alone so I went with one of my friends. As soon as I entered the toilet all I heard was screaming. I ran back to the table and the four fully-grown adults had surrounded my sister and one of the women was yelling, 'Get that fucking piece of shit off your face you stupid little bitch.' All four then began shouting at me. None of the customers or staff helped us. When they eventually left us alone we tried to order some food but the manager refused to serve us."

"Females who wear the hijab are very visibly Muslim, which is one of the reasons they are attacked more than men," says Masuma Rahim, a writer and clinical psychologist based in London. "But it's also important to remember that there's a gender dynamic to this. It's easier to target a female because they are less likely to fight back, verbally or otherwise. It's essentially a way of targeting someone without any real risk to the perpetrator. It's cowardly and is akin to bullying in my view."

Related: VICE meets the London Black Revolutionaries

For Madihah, this treatment is a regular part of her everyday life. "These kinds of incidents aren't one-offs, they're almost routine," she says. "And they're definitely becoming more common. I was recently in a supermarket when an old man and his granddaughter walked past. When the man saw me he yanked the little girl away and said 'Don't go near her.' I've also had a bottle thrown at me on the bus and have even received abuse from patients I've been helping in hospital. Does it make me scared? To say that I'm not would be a lie. I'm afraid to go anywhere by myself and always have to drag someone with me."

Not all attacks are aimed at women or take place "in public." A large number of incidents also happen online, mainly in the form of Facebook messages, memes, or Twitter hashtags, such as #KillAllMuslims, which went viral in the UK in January. However, over 70 percent of incidents reported to Tell MAMA in the week following the Paris attacks were street-based. Furthermore, about a third of cases took place on buses, trains, and the London Underground. And females appear to be particularly vulnerable. Of 16 verified incidents of hate crime recorded on public transport in 2014, 13 were directed at women. And men were responsible for over 70 percent of the attacks.

In November, 23-year-old Ruhi Rahman was threatened by a man on a busy Newcastle train, who told her "you're bombing different countries and don't deserve to be here or in this country." The man was forced off the train by other passengers. In the same month, footage emerged of a woman wearing a hijab being pushed into an oncoming London Underground train. And in early December, Tell MAMA received a report concerning an assault on a niqab-wearing female who was punched twice by a man on a London bus.

The recent terrorist attack in Paris isn't the only event to trigger a rise in Islamophobia. After terrorist-related incidents, it is common to see a surge in religiously-aggravated hate crimes in the UK. In the three weeks following the 7/7 bombings in 2005, such incidents rose from 40 to 269. In the three months following the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013 the number grew from 73 to over 120. And in the week following the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 the number of anti-Muslim incidents more than tripled.

"It is clear that national and international terrorist events have an impact on anti-Muslim prejudice and hate incident reporting," says Tell MAMA director, Fiyaz Mughal. "And sadly, it is visible Muslim women who are the ones being targeted for abuse and on occasions, threats and physical intimidation. This should be seen for what it is: anti-Muslim prejudice and male-on-female aggression and intimidation."

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

Nazi plunder stored at Schlosskirche Ellingen, Bavaria, April 1945. Photo via Wikipedia

You remember that train everyone was talking about a while ago? Yeah, the Nazi one with all the gold. Remember those two guys said they'd found it and that they'd reveal the location in exchange for 10 percent of the value and everyone lost their collective shit about the Indiana Jonesyness of it all?

Well, turns out it was too good to be true. After sending the world's media into a meltdown, the whole story was overturned on Tuesday by that oft-overlooked character, the glamorous geologist.

Researchers surveying the site have announced that the last words of the dying man—allegedly revealing where he'd helped hide the train over half a century ago—were most likely inaccurate. This comes despite Poland's deputy culture minister Piotr Zuchowski saying in August that ground-penetrating radar images had left him "99 percent convinced" that a German military train was buried near Walbrzych.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Professor Janusz Madej of Krakow's Academy of Mining, revealed his findings from the survey, saying in that now-infamous Polish adage, "There may be a tunnel. There is no train."

At first glance, this appears to lay to rest hopes of turning the saga into a major motion picture biopic. Now that we know the ending of The Legend of the Nazi Train Revealed in the Last Words of a Dying Man, it seems unlikely that Hollywood execs will be scrambling to greenlight it.

Or maybe this is just the beginning. Join Professor Madej, played by Harrison Ford, as he travels the world, busting local legends and romantic film plots in The Metal Detectorist. Next week, we head to Scotland for Nessy: "There may be a loch. There is no monster."

All photos by the author

As I rode in an Uber to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where I'd spend the next few hours freezing my ass off at the red carpet ceremony for the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere, I felt a sense of creeping dread about having to actually watch the new Star Wars movie. The closer we get to The Force Awakens, the more and more I feel like I want to simply savor the anticipation, rather than actually watch the thing. The closer I am to its release date, the more certain I am that The Force Awakens will let me down.

See, I'm less concerned with The Force Awakens being a good movie than one that means something to me personally. But the more I see the advertisements, and the more I see literally insane Star Wars branding on packaging, the more it feels like "Star Wars Stuff" is becoming a cultural format the same as books or movies or porn. This iteration of Star Wars is meant to be as universal as possible, and will be almost coldly efficient in how incredible it is. But as long as I don't see it, The Force Awakens is infinite in its possibilities and can actually be the very exact Star Wars movie that would appeal to me as a Star Wars fan and an adult who has been shaped by Star Wars in very tangible ways. Right now, The Force Awakens is both the best possible Star Wars movie and the worst. After I see it, it will land being somewhere in the middle. Call it Schrödinger's Tauntaun, if you will.

It was even more overwhelmingly clear to me that The Force Awakens is truly the Star Wars of the masses at its premiere, which took place at three theaters on a multi-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and which I got to several hours early because I am an idiot. Despite the fact that it was easily the coldest, windiest day I've experienced in my year of living in Los Angeles, there was already a sizable crowd on the street, consisting in about equal numbers of both Star Wars fans, as well as members of the media who were there to interview them about being Star Wars fans. You could tell who was a member of which camp because they were, quite literally, wearing uniforms. The fans were bundled up in Star Wars blankets and Star Wars hats and Star Wars coats, holding Star Wars accoutrements like toys and lightsabers and posters, while the media people were generally armed with cameras and microphones and fleece jackets with the logo of their news outlet sewn on the chest. When one camera crew would find a good interview subject, like a woman covered in Star Wars tattoos, you'd see the rest of them start swarming, like moths to some sort of flame that provided content instead of warmth. It's moments like this that made The Force Awakens itself feel like an afterthought, simply yet another event that will provide an opportunity for content to be created, money to be made, and then forgotten as we all go on to the next Cultural Event to be consumed.

A woman gets interviewed about her Star Wars tattoos

This is not to say that The Force Awakens will be bad. I expect that it will be at least as good as it needs to be. Which is to say: The Force Awakens will be good enough to restore the feeling that the original Star Wars trilogy gave viewers, while simultaneously washing the taste of the prequel trilogy out of Star Wars fans' mouths, while also being accessible for someone who has never seen a Star Wars movie. Given that Disney has put probably a billion dollars, if not multiple billions of dollars, into TFA with the intent of accomplishing that exact goal, it's extremely likely that the film will be much, much better than it needs to be. It's very possible that it will even be great. Ultimately, it will please as many people as possible, and one of those people will probably, at least on some level, be me.

But still, what I love about Star Wars isn't that it's this universal thing that's meant to be loved by everybody, I love it because of what it means to me. The memories that I've got wrapped up in it are mine and mine alone, and they're important because exist at all. Things like being in the first grade and making my dad tell me the plots of all the Star Wars movies and deciding to watch Return of the Jedi first, because I was afraid of stories not having happy endings and needed to make sure the trilogy worked out OK for the good guys before I could watch the whole thing. Or effectively growing up with The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars, and Revenge of the Sith, being too young to understand why anyone hated them so much but still feeling distinctly horrified and embarrassed at this one particular Clone Wars trailer on TV that featured the slogan, "Who da man? Yo-da man!" (it helps if you say that one out loud). Or being in college and leaving parties early because I wanted to read Wookiepedia, the Star Wars wiki page, half because I wanted to find more out about Chewbacca's family tree, but half because I felt awkward around new people and wanted an escape.

These memories aren't necessarily tied to Star Wars as chunk of the western cinema canon, they're just tied to Star Wars existing at all. In fact, I almost like how bad the prequels are. They're like the filmic equivalent to that one uncle you've got that you literally have to love because he's part of your family, even if he's loud and annoying and shares dumb memes on Facebook that he earnestly captions, "Really makes you think." Over the years, you grow to love him precisely for his loudness, for his annoyingness, for the dumbness of his memes. That's how the Star Wars prequels are for me, amazing in their unique terribleness, the watching and picking-apart of them a sport unto itself for my friends and I. Both at its best and worst, Star Wars has played such a huge part in the experiences that have shaped me into the person I am today.

This sensation of feeling shaped by this vast thing that stretches across different mediums and that is so massive and ambiguous that you can draw your own meaning from it, is not unique to me in the least. That's part of what's so wonderful about Star Wars, that it's a big tent and nobody judges you underneath it. Take the above sisters that I met in a Buffalo Wild Wings while hiding from the elements. They had come to watch the red carpet because Star Wars reminded them of their dad, who they explained had gone to see the original trilogy when he was living in Mexico. He'd passed on his love of Star Wars to them, they told me, and they'd grown up with the prequel trilogy just as I had. Now they were adults and had taken off school to watch The Force Awakens' stars in person. I asked who they wanted to see the most; the one on the left told me she had a crush on Mark Hamill.

A security checkpoint leading to Hollywood Boulevard

The Wild Wings we were camped out in just so happened to have a deck that allowed you to see The Force Awakens' stars exit their escort vehicles just before they took the red carped. It was on this deck that I hung out for most of the afternoon, periodically retreating into the Wild Wings to drink some Diet Coke or order the bare minimum of chicken that would allow me to stay there.

Watching people get out of cars was not particularly exciting, simply because most of the people involved in The Force Awakens are either not famous or not recognizable. As a crowd, we'd often greet the arrival of some high-powered studio executive, or (I assume) some cast member who'd spent the majority of their career hidden inside some suit or several layers of makeup and was therefore all but anonymous in person, with a collective shrug. But then when someone actually famous showed up, like Harrison Ford, or Lupita Nyong'o, we'd go berzerk, greeting them with unified chants as well as individual screams for attention. Perhaps fittingly, it was Star Wars' new head honcho J.J. Abrams who garnered more cheers than Star Wars creator George Lucas, who at 71 seems content to recede into the background rather than pilot the proverbial X-Wing for this go-round.

From where I was standing, though, nobody got more cheers than Mark Hamill, who leapt from his limo with aplomb, skipping and cheering before he hit the red carpet, waving to fans and approaching the ones closest to him to high-five. Hamill, seemed excited—jubilant even—and more than that, grateful for his reception, and he was determined to make the most of it.

Though he's consistently found work as an actor and is somewhat known for voicing the Joker across various forms of Batman media, Hamill is tied to Star Wars in a way that his costars Harrison Ford or even Carrie Fisher are not. Fisher is a respected writer and actress, while Ford is (obviously) one of the most prominent actors of the past 30 years. They don't need Star Wars. Hamill does. In a way, Star Wars fans probably showed so much love to Hamill because he is a part of Star Wars—which has become this thing that is much greater than the die-hard fans who are willing to hang out in some of the worst weather L.A.'s seen in years—that is theirs and theirs alone. And now that Star Wars has taken over the known universe for the time being, that's a rare thing worth cherishing.

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This is what you get when you google the word "Hipster." Image via google

Enough time has passed since the world was at Peak Hipster for us to look back at it as a movement, or a craze, or a meme, or whatever the fuck it was and try to take stock of what it all meant, if anything. So this week we're doing exactly that in a short collection of stories.

When I accepted my boss's request to write an article about how the hipster became mainstream, I figured the best way to go about it would be to find a famous hipster and ask them what it felt like to be mainstream. I made attempts to get in contact with Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend; Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork; the guy who wrote The Hipster Handbook; two different authors of books on the concept of coolness; noted academic and turntablist Jace Clayton aka DJ / rupture; Chuck Klosterman; noted punk and cultural critic Ian Svenonius; Carles from Hipster Runoff; as well as both Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein of Portlandia. The closest I got to any of them was Brownstein, whose publicist at IFC referred me to a different publicist, who asked if I'd gotten anyone else to talk to me for my article and then when I said "no" stopped responding to my emails.

I thought about hipsters for several days, puzzling and pondering how I could possibly accomplish this task. I read books, articles, and essays. I interviewed non-famous hipsters about being hip. I tried writing about subcultures and their relationship to commerce, media, and technology, and how hipsters, with their access to the internet and the shrinking gap between mainstream and underground, accelerated the process of discovery and subsequent saturation. It sucked. Then I interviewed my friend who was a hipster during the early 2000s and knew Adrian Grenier and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and shit before they got famous. Problem was, that only explained what it was like to be the type of hipster who knew the Strokes before they got big. The domain of hipsterdom is too vast, too hazy to try to pin it to what it was like to be alive in New York at the turn of the century. So I rewrote this article a third time, trying to nail down just what a hipster was, and how that very large definition of a hipster meant it was unfathomable for hipster not to become mainstream. Only that article sucked too. At some point, I realized the only way I could write accurately and truthfully about the mainstreaming of the hipster was to write about myself. So now, that is what I am going to do.

Related: 2015 is the year that hipster died

I will spare you the details of my mainstream hipster resume, whose bona fides are so plentiful in number that I dare not list them here—though rest assured that they are all embarrassing and many of them involve v-neck t-shirts. I am a 26 year-old white male from the backwoods of North Carolina. I have spent the majority of my adult life writing about hip-hop for various VICE-owned publications. I did not single-handedly hammer the nails into the coffin of hip, but I certainly helped. I am equipped for writing about the mainstreaming of the hipster in the same way that a fish with hands would be equipped for writing about water.

A portrait of hipster Mickey and Minnie on sale at Disneyland; pixel art and mason jar Christmas decorations on sale at Target; and faux-vintage record players on sale at J.C. Penney. Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

I first realized I was a hipster in 2008, right around the time that I started denying that I was a hipster to my hipster friends. I was attending college in North Carolina, and I came by my inauthenticity in the most honest way possible—through reading VICE. Your first year of college is, for many, the first time that you really come into your own as a person. You try on new attitudes, new poses, new selves. Though I was initially drawn to the magazine for its record reviews—which seemed to have access to channels of music not accessible to freshmen in University of North Carolina dorms—I quickly found that VICE served as a bible for all things hipster, offering suggestions on how to dress, party, eat, fuck, and anything else that an impressionable 19 year-old might want to know about life. Between reading VICE and Pitchfork—which delivered incisive commentary on what a human being might want to put into their ears at any given moment—I learned how to act and what to talk about.

If I had to guess, I was not the only young person around this time who was influenced by these publications in this way. If you ask a proto-hipster who was around in the early 2000s what it was like to be a hipster, they'll probably tell you that they were trying to be punk and failing, or that they were just trying to live their life and stop calling them a goddamn hipster. But this nascent movement was obsessed with documenting itself in ways that would help establish a template for the hipsters that came after them, through sites like Cobrasnake, VICE, Last Night's Party, and even music like LCD Soundsystem, whose first album largely served as an opportunity for James Murphy to take stock of the hipness all around him.

If nothing else, reading VICE and Pitchfork helped me play catch-up, transforming me from a nervous, generic-looking-and-acting freshman into someone who looked and acted in a way that was socially acceptable to the legions of tight-pantsed smart-asses from cities who seemed hopelessly smarter, cooler, and, well, hipper than I could ever hope to be. Adopting hipster fashions helped me create a visual language for myself, signaling to potential friends that I, too, was hip, and therefore worth becoming friends with.

The author, age 18, in North Carolina

In a way, the hipster became mainstream precisely because the term "hipster" was so hard to define. After pouring more research and thought into the topic than I care to disclose, I've developed the theory that there are actually two types of hipsters, and they are both totally legitimate and sort of uniquely hateable.

There are Hipster-Creators: genuine artists, writers, and musicians, as well as those who belong to a large number of subcultures that produce art and ideologies through a collective mindset (this includes punks, ravers, fashion kids, crusties, literary nerds, cool academics, etc., and unfortunately often discludes the genuinely impoverished and marginalized). These are the people who, if they're good at what they do, have their work recognized, often by the mainstream. This can be in the form of James Murphy being hit up to work with Britney Spears, or it can be in the form of a collective like Odd Future gaining organic traction on the internet to the point that they become an undeniable cultural force. (Not that James Murphy or Odd Future would identify as hipsters, but then again, part of being a good hipster is not being a hipster at all). As Hipster-Creators gain recognition, they often get written off by others in the underground for selling out, appealing to too many people and therefore becoming hipster bullshit. And even if they don't, there is a certain snobbery, or at least sense of discernment, that comes hand-in-hand with being this type of hipster.

Then you've got Hipster-Consumers, who, loosely, are regular-ass people trying to live their lives but who take cues from artists and subcultures who scan as "hip," simply because they're too busy with their own lives to join a subculture or put a lot of thought into the art, culture, and fashion they consume, so they just wear whatever's on sale at Urban Outfitters and consume whatever culture people are talking about on the internet. Culture moves fast, and the time between something getting sucked up to the mainstream and spat out to Hipster-Consumers is quick. But depending on how you feel about it, this, too can be disingenuous, simply because it's easy to argue that people like this are just letting others do the legwork in acquiring their identity (and god forbid people ever acquire identity through a means other than what they consume). In an essay in Wag's Revue, the writer Robert Moor explained the anger toward this type of hipster, saying, "Without a postmodern philosophical backing and resistance to capitalism, hipsterism quickly devolves into just what it always appeared to be to the uninitiated: a shallow, meaningless, vain, hyper-consumerist, self-hating and poisonous system of living."

More than anything, being a hipster to me has always been more of an attitude rather than a specific set of signifiers. To be hip is to view the world through a specific lens that, even if you can't necessarily describe it, is still uniquely distinct. It encourages people to look at the world through new eyes and assemble a self through incorporating the flotsam and jetsam that have washed up on the shores of modern culture. For my money, it doesn't quite matter if the hipster is talking about Justin Bieber or Stan Brakhage, because consumption itself becomes the radical act, rather than the object or activity being consumed.

This blurring of creator and consumer is, to me, an essential part of the hipster as a social movement. Let's call it, as writer and self-admitted aging hipster Christian Lorentzen described to me over the phone, the "thrift store aesthetic." Lorentzen characterized it as "a method of throwing off the class codes that you grew up with in order to confuse people that just took a look at you as to whether you might have grown up rich or poor."

So essentially, hipsters were too good at creating more hipsters, and therefore became irrelevant by being too cool. At some point, calling someone a hipster essentially became a way of calling them young. And that, I guess, is where we're at now.

Hipster Hello Kitty on sale at the Sanrio Store; plaid shirts on sale at Old Navy; and craft soda (whatever that is) on sale at Best Buy. Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

As college wore on and I became a better and better hipster, I eventually stopped reading VICE and Pitchfork and became the arbiter of my own tastes. I prided myself on being an early adopter to the imminently cool—my friends and I were the first people we knew to be into Four Loko, Lil B, and rolling our own cigarettes. We were convinced that we and only we knew the correct way to process such ultimately banal pop culture ephemera as the Wu-Tang Clan, Flavor of Love, World of Warcraft, and Seinfeld. I attended parties where the point was spray painting the walls of someone's bedroom so that he would get high off the paint fumes as he went to sleep. I competed in professional air guitar tournaments. My friends and I made a website based on both communism and partying. I DJ'd a show at the campus radio station in the dead of night. Sometimes I would sing along to Prince songs, live on air.

In 2011, I graduated college and, as many hipsters before me have done, moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, North America's holy land of hip. To be honest, the move didn't really feel like a choice; it seemed like something that had to be done if I wanted to be a writer (I did) and was a hipster (I was). True to the tradition of the millions of hipsters who came before me, I arrived to Williamsburg too late: by the time I got there the party had, for the most part, already packed up and moved to Bushwick. But I settled into my apartment off of the Bedford L train stop and started to fulfill my destiny. I began hanging out with a cabal of writers and started interning at what can best be described as a "hipster video game publication." By the fall of 2012, I was working for VICE's music site Noisey, covering hip-hop full time.

In the years I was busy transforming from a little alt pupa to a full-on hipster butterfly, agents of mainstream culture began co-opting the hipsters themselves. When Justin Bieber's career needed a kick in the pants, he called up Diplo, the master of repackaging underground music in ways that club kids vibed with. When Adidas wanted to inject some cool into its brand, they enlisted Jeremy Scott, fashion's chief interpreter of the willfully weird and outlandish, to throw some wings and/or a teddy bear on a pair of high-tops. Perhaps the most significant photographer of the 2000s is Terry Richardson, whose chief skill involves stripping his subjects of their greater context and presenting them in the same naturalistic, understated scene, over and over, whether they're a megastar or somebody he grabbed off the street. VICE, meanwhile, is, uh, did you guys know we're gonna have a TV channel?

It's not that this practice is anything new. Madonna lifted voguing from ballroom culture back in the 80s, Malcolm McLaren was a huckster whose entire aim was to profit off the Sex Pistols, and before he played Gilligan, Bob Denver played Maynard G. Krebs, some TV executive's best guess at a beatnik. It's just that when you co-opt your cool from people whose chief skill is co-opting the cool of others, you essentially cannibalize culture, accelerating the rate at which subcultures develop and then flame out to hyperspeed. Think of something like Seapunk, which became mainstream so quickly that it didn't even have a chance to go from being a joke to becoming an actual subculture.

A "Portland" shirt on sale at Target; a Chipotle bag featuring an illustration of a fixed gear bike; and a "local brews" section, also at Target. Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

There's not anything necessarily wrong with this—subcultures have always been on the cusp of becoming mainstream. It's arguable that countercultures must always exist in opposition to something, and that opposition will always swallow it up and co-opt whichever elements it thinks it can sell. That can mean a lot of things, like Volkswagen marketing itself as the car of the hippies, Fugazi's Ian MacKaye complaining that so many people were dressing like punks that nobody even understood the original reasons for dressing like a punk in the first place, or Geffen breaking grunge by buying a pre-Nevermind Nirvana out of their contract on a label, Sub Pop, whose name if we need to be pointlessly literal means "below pop."

Similarly, the idea that the hipster is undefinable in the present tense is not unique. In a recent Baffler piece on the public perception of punk, Eugenia Williamson wrote, "the people present at the beginning of punk had only nominally political and social aims, and the moral imperative to forswear major labels, money, and fame asserted itself only in retrospect." Indeed, it seems like punk, one of the most casually politicized social movements of all time, didn't truly take on the political bent we associate with it until guys like Ian MacKaye and Keith Morris took over, unleashing pointed invective to go along with the sonic squalor.

There is one difference between the hipsters and the countercultural movements of the past, though. Unlike the hippies replacing the beats and the punks replacing the hippies, hipsters haven't been replaced by anything other than more hipsters. The hipster is elastic, a catch-all for countercultures that came before it, a bubble that instead of bursting, simply expands.

And so, here we are, in the age of the mainstream hipster, or perhaps the close of the epoch of alt. In the three years I worked at Noisey, I watched as music blogging completed its transition from sites telling their readers about cool stuff they didn't know about to simply telling their readers why the stuff they were already listening to was cool. I am in no way special for being around for this. If I had never existed, VICE would have hired another young hipster for the same job that I had, and if VICE never existed, I would have watched the hipster go mainstream for some similar entity.

I guess what I'm saying is that at a certain point, subcultures just become culture, and at that point they become bigger than any one person or organization, and the archetypes and values which were once unique to one group become present in society at large. The actions of the hipster, the person for whom art is consumption and consumption is art, has become replicated through the very fabric of technology and society. We communicate in retweets and reblogs, likes and shares, references and early adoptions. The true hipsters, meanwhile, have become too mainstream to remain hip, and the mainstream itself has reacted by picking up that which was once alt. The ethos of the hipster has spread throughout culture to the point that the hipster is no more.

I fully understand that this essay opens me up to a ridiculous amount of criticism, namely that I am a hipster dipshit for even writing it at all. But then again, I'm just fulfilling the function of the hipster, pointing out patterns that already exist. And you're just fulfilling yours by getting mad. So who's the hipster now?

Oh, wait, yeah. Still me.

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When imagining future fashion, we tend to gravitate toward Gattaca's sharp suits, Mad Max's apocalyptic leathers, or The Fifth Element's take on futuristic bondage. At a push we might consider Her's high-waisted pants, but we don't deviate massively from that. What's less commonly envisioned are the new materials and repurposed products that will make up these clothes. New materials like meat. Yes: blood, tendon, with a baked potato on the side. Meat.

At Zurich's Functional Materials Laboratory 28-year-old PhD student Philipp Stoessel and his colleague Professor Wendelin Stark are working to bring fleshy threads to market. They've found that the skin, bones, cartilage, and tendons of slaughterhouse waste can be turned into textiles.

While your mind may jump to Lady Gaga's meat dress at the 2010 MTV Music Video Awards, the reality is less confronting. Stoessel's fabric is made up of fibers that resemble wool and have similar levels of insulation, but are less allergenic. When spun the fabric has a smooth surface and attractive luster. His prototype for proof of concept was a glove, which was "knitted" from the yarn.

The surprisingly un-fleshy prototype. Images courtesy of Philipp Stoessel

Although carcass-derived clothing sounds a little macabre, it's a resourceful approach to the massive amounts of slaughterhouse waste generated globally. In Europe alone, around 25 million tons of waste is produced each year. Stoessel told VICE that the idea behind his research is to "think of ways to make the best out of byproducts from the agricultural or food industry." He added, "In no way are we trying to promote the (enormously high) meat consumption. But nose to tail dining is exactly what should be done. If an animal is slaughtered, all of it should be used."

This is not the first time garments have been conceived from raw biological materials—casein from milk and zien from corn were used to make fabrics a century ago. More recently, Suzanne Lee of design consultancy BIOCOUTURE grew a jacket from kombucha tea that had a similar texture to vegetable leather. This process of biofabrication—growing materials from bioactive elements such as algae, yeast, and fungi—is a global growth industry. It has applications in far-reaching industries, from automotive and architectural, to medical and agricultural. In her 2011 Ted Talk Suzanne points out that the advantage of such materials is that "we can grow what we need without producing chemical waste, then biodegrade the items after use."

The expectation isn't that biofabricated textiles and Stoessel's slaughterhouse threads will altogether replace mainstream fabrics, but that they will offer environmentally friendly and cost-effective additions to the industry. Stoessel explains, "Alternative fibers are very important, especially in view of the high interest in biopolymers and the bad image of synthetic fibers." The global textile industry is massive—it's estimated 90 million tons of apparel is traded worldwide every year—and petrochemical-based fabrics like polyester and nylon still account for almost two-thirds of that figure.

The gelatin yarn up close. Images courtesy of Philipp Stoessel

But before we can expect to be getting around in a sweater made from the off-cuts of someone else's burger, Stoessel and his colleagues are working to resolve the challenge of the fabric's water solubility. As common with many of these biopolymer textiles, the wet strength of the slaughterhouse yarn is relatively low (think of a gel capsule in contact with water). Water resistance currently relies on additional chemical treatments to fortify it, which adds costs and diminishes the eco-status. Stoessel says that while they work through this challenge, they are also looking to secure an industry partner interested in large-scale commercial production of the fibers.

If this still sounds grim to you, remember that a decade ago the thought of dining on Blood Custard and Bone Marrow Flan in chic restaurants was unthinkable. But just as the nose-to-tail movement has slowly gotten us used to eating shins and necks, meat fabrics could ultimately be seen as another evolution of sustainable living. After all, you'll eat a burger made from a cow, why not wear a jumper made from one?

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Photos by Stefan Djordjevic

This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia

It's 9 AM and we are sitting in a spacious, well-lit living room in one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in the Balkans. A smell of fresh coffee and a cloud of smoke take over the room, pushing away that typical hospital smell. This room, with its large windows blocked by metal bars, is the only place where smoking is allowed in the state-run Laza Lazarevic in Belgrade

"Taking cigarettes away from a psychiatric patient would burden them with additional pressure," says chief nurse Sandra Radulovic as a patient named Blondie rolls me a cigarette. He is about my age and before being admitted, he worked as a business consultant. The nickname, which has nothing to do with his real name or the way he looks, was given to him here.

The hospital was founded by Serbian duke Mihailo Obrenovic in 1861, as a " Home for Those Who Lost Their Mind." About 15 epilepsy patients were admitted that year. Nowadays, more than 33,000 people are admitted on a yearly basis. The clinic's emergency ward treats up to 7,000 patients per year, and on average 3,000 of them are hospitalized for a certain period of time.

"People usually don't know that only 1 percent of our patients are chronically ill. The remaining 99 percent come when the crisis erupts," Radulovic says.

Blondie was one of the 10 percent of patients brought in by the police. "I forgot what reality felt like," he explains and offers me black coffee in a plastic red cup. He starts rolling another cigarette. "I don't remember my first three days in here," he says, smiling. "I feel better now."

Nurse Radulovic explains that in the case of great psychomotor agitation, the patient immediately receives pharmaceutical treatment. "It's very rarely—only when it's established that the drugs don't help—that a patient will be chained to a bed. And that is not allowed to happen for longer than two hours," he goes on.

Straitjackets have not been used in this hospital since the middle of the 20th century but the stigma of mental illness has remained as strong: In the small town I grew up in, 200 miles from the capital Belgrade, anyone having spent time in "Laza" was to be avoided. There are even football chants concerning fans who've "escaped from Laza."

"Everyone in Serbia knows what Laza is about," project manager Dr. Gorica Djokic tells me. Meanwhile the clinic's manager D r. Slavica Djukic Dejanovic adds that "our collective subconscious is characterized by a fear of insanity. And we are right to be afraid, in a way—every human being can become mentally ill," she explains.

Shame or fear of discrimination is what most often leads to a majority of mental patients not getting treated in time, while experts insist that the sooner one seeks help, the more likely it is for the healing process to be successful. In Laza, patients are sent from other medical or social care institutions, or they come voluntarily when they feel the need for help.

One of the patients, Jimmy, tells me that he "always felt rather tense" before coming in. He moved to Belgrade with his wife a couple of years ago. She is in Laza for treatment, too.

"It's like you two are on your honeymoon," Blondie jokes, in a constant bid to charm everyone. Only certain tiny details make it obvious that I am talking to mental patients; wide pupils or restless hands, for example. Blondie manages to calm his hands by playing with his cigarette.

A while later, he shows me to the ward's library and I ask him what he's reading at the moment.

"Something called Love Delusions," he says.

"What's the biggest delusion," I ask.

"I would say it's being in love, isn't it?"

As we leave the ward, we pass a row of big, neat rooms taken over by rows of beds. At times, my eyes meet those peeking below the blankets and I involuntarily avert my gaze, feeling embarrassed. However, it's not before the doors of the ward lock behind us and I see the big "Lock Twice" sign on them that I remember where I am.

With an average monthly salary of £254 and the unemployment rate hitting just over 20 percent, Serbia is one of the poorest European countries. Recent studies have shown that about 45 percent of the younger population is unemployed, while the majority of 20-somethings still live with their parents.

"Because of the social tensions that we experienced in the past decades, late adolescence in Serbia has now been prolonged. We have 30-year-olds facing problems that would normally stress a 20-something. Most of the patients of that age mention unemployment and a dependence on their parents as their focal sources of stress," Dimitrijevic says.

And that is the reality that most Serbians—just like Blondie—often forget.

Scroll down for more pictures.

Victims of Elshinawy's alleged scam. Photo via Wikicommons

A Maryland man busted by the FBI for allegedly receiving around $10,000 from ISIS through online transfers earlier this year says he was actually just trying to scam money out of the terrorists and that, when you think about it, he should really "be offered a job to work with the FBI" because of it, according to the criminal complaint.

The FBI claims they have evidence that 30-year-old Mohamed Elshinawy (or "Mo Jo" for short) took at least $8,700 from the terrorist organization and initially tried to say some of the money was to "purchase an iPhone for his friend."

"When confronted by the FBI, he lied in order to conceal his support for and the steps he took to provide material support to the deadly foreign terrorist organization," Assistant Attorney General Carlin said in a DOJ statement.

Once Elshinawy realized the FBI knew the money came from terrorists, he copped to the fact that one of his childhood friends in Syria had reached out over social media to connect him with ISIS operatives who began to funnel him money. According to Elshinawy, though, he was just trying to do his patriotic duty and "take money from 'thieves,'" with no intention of carrying out a terrorist attack.

At the time of writing, the FBI had yet to make Elshinawy a job offer.

Image via Flickr user Jennie

But for now, next time you see your grandparents, do your part and ask if they need a rubber.

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Six people have died taking drugs at festivals since November last year. Image via

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia

This year's Australian music festival season has begun badly. It started on November 28 when pharmacist Sylva Choi died after drinking MDMA dissolved in water at Stereosonic in Sydney. Then, only one week later at Adelaide's Stereosonic, Stefan Woodward was rushed to the hospital after taking ecstasy, only to die hours later. These cases bring the number of drug-related deaths at festivals to a total of six nationally, since November last year.

So what the hell is going on? With so much information on mitigating drug risks for users, event organizers, and law enforcement, why are people still dying?

A recent study based on data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime showed that per capita Australian adults are leading the world in ecstasy consumption. But in European nations like the Netherlands, where party drugs are notoriously popular, similar stories don't seem so common.

In the case of 19-year-old Stefan Woodward, the police put the incident down to a dodgy batch of pills. This scenario has been of concern for many years. Individuals believe they're purchasing drugs containing MDMA, but instead they contain another psychoactive substance, such as PMA, which is similar in effect, but much more toxic and potentially harmful.

However, according to Dr. David Caldicott, senior lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at the Australian National University, contaminated drugs aren't the risk we might think. "The problem of contamination, I certainly don't think is the problem that it was ten years ago," he said. "But the problem of purity is more significant than it has ever been." He's concerned that MDMA pills of very high dosage are being produced in southwestern China and turning up on the Australian market.

And then there's the Australian tendency to binge, whether that be on alcohol or illicit drugs. "We know that in Australia there's a great enthusiasm for double and triple dropping pills," Caldicott said and explained that if individuals take multiple pills of a high dose, they "can be in a world of pain really quickly."

Unharm members in Sydney calling for a ban on festival sniffer dogs. Image via Unharm

But there's another aspect of the festival scene that leads to dangerous drug taking, and that's law enforcement. In 2013 James Munro died after taking three pills at the Defqon 1 festival in Sydney. The 23-year-old learned there were drug detection dogs at the entrance and took all his drugs at once. This practice, known as panic dumping, has become more prevalent amongst festival goers along with cavity hides.

A government office worker whom we'll call Holly has been attending music festivals since 2009. The 27-year-old resident of Sydney's north shore said her friends are amongst those using cavity hides to avoid police detection. "I don't go into a festival without my drugs wrapped in a condom inside me," Holly said and explained that one of her friends once swallowed three pills he'd been hiding in his mouth when stopped by police to be strip-searched. "By the time he got into the festival and was able to go into the bathrooms to throw up, it had been such a long time that his stomach acid had started disintegrating their packaging."

Will Tregoning, director of harm reduction group Unharm, told VICE that the presence of sniffer dogs at festivals has stopped very few people from taking illicit drugs, while huge amounts of these substances continue to make their way in. "But there is clear evidence that the practices people have adopted in response to the presence of drug detection dogs have been overwhelmingly negative, to the point that they put themselves at greater risk of overdose and medical complications," he said.

In light of all this, what can be done to prevent deaths at music festivals? Caldicott believes the answer is drug checking. On arriving at a festival, punters can have their drugs tested for harmful substances and potentially lethal doses. These services have been utilized successfully in European nations for decades and the European Union has actually produced best practice guidelines.

As Caldicott sees it, the main shift that occurs with the use of drug checking services is that "people change their behavior at the point of consumption." If they get a bad pill, they choose not to take it. "If you do it over a prolonged period of time at the same event, we find that the attitude toward drugs change," he added.

And on the legal side, Tregoning explained that "we don't have to wait for drug use to be decriminalized to make music festivals safer." Legislation could enable drug checking services to operate in a similar way to Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, where it's not a crime to possess or self-administer drugs. He points out that in NSW "there's a formal police protocol" where they won't "prosecute people for drug consumer offenses in the vicinity of registered needle and syringe providers." A similar method could be utilized for drug checking services.

Daniel Buccianti. Image via Adriana Buccianti

In 2012, Adriana Buccianti tragically lost her 34-year-old son Daniel at Rainbow Serpent festival in Victoria. She now works with the organizers of Rainbow Serpent advising revelers to look after themselves and consider their safety when it comes to drug use. Two weeks ago, prompted by the death of 25-year-old Sylvia Choi at Stereosonic, she started an online petition calling on politicians to introduce drug checking services. So far it's gained over 35,000 signatures.

Buccianti believes it's time for the government to allow young people to access these life-saving services without fear of arrest. Last month, Australian Greens leader Richard Di Natale spoke out in favor of drug checking services, but Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull recently said the government would not support them. " are not pro-drugs. No one's saying taking drugs is a safe way," Buccianti explained. "What we're saying is we need to protect the children."

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On Tuesday, every public school in Los Angeles was closed after officials there decided a credible bomb threat had been made, as the New York Times reports. The threat, issued via email, was vague and contained a few details about a plan using "backpacks and other packages" to harm children, according to Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the second-largest in America.

At a press conference early Tuesday morning, Cortines said the threat was made to many schools, and specifically cited events like the terrorist attack that killed 14 and injured 22 in San Bernardino early this month as influencing the decision.

"I am not taking the chance of bringing children any place, into any part of the building, until I know it is safe," he said. The Los Angeles Police Department and FBI are currently investigating, and the schools are to remain closed, Cortines indicated, until every building on every campus in LA is searched and deemed safe. That's no easy task considering that, as the Times reported, the Los Angeles Unified School District is home to more than 640,000 students in nearly 1000 schools spanning hundreds of square miles. Citing School Spokeswoman Shannon Haber, the AP reported that the threat was made against a school board member and was thought to have originated in Frankfurt, Germany.

Around the same time early Tuesday, a similar threat was made against schools in New York City, but was quickly deemed a hoax, and schools there remained open. At a press conference Tuesday morning, Mayor Bill De Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said that, along with several other districts nationwide, New York schools received a generic email threat, but local officials quickly determined it posed no real danger, as a local NBC affiliate reports.

Bratton, who earlier in his career was commissioner of the LAPD, called the the decision to close schools there a "significant overreaction," a criticism the city's current chief, Charlie Beck, retorted was "irresponsible." (Cortines, for his part, said the schools receive threats all the time but deemed this one "rare.")

"Our schools are safe," Mayor de Blasio said. "Kids should be in school today. We will be vigilant. But we are absolutely convinced our schools are safe."

Bratton believes the email threat may have been sent by a fan of the Showtime drama Homeland—the threat "mirrors a lot of recent episodes"—and added that officials believe the emails originated overseas, and did not come from Jihadists. "For example, Allah was not spelled with a capital 'A'," Bratton said, according to DNAinfo.

De Blasio added that the threats were "so generic, so outlandish," they were quickly deemed a hoax.

If the threat does turn out to be phony, LA school officials can be expect some blowback from parents. Though they were asked not to bring their children into school Tuesday, many were already on their way when the order to close came down. Los Angeles school buses, too, had already begun making their morning trips. Children who did arrive to school, and whose parents went about their days, are being kept out of the buildings. Parents have been asked to pick them up at school gates whenever possible.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Three years can be a long time.

The last three years have seen the release of the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, almost certainly too many Assassin's Creed titles and at least two dozen video gaming controversies. Oh, and one Yakuza game that took its sweet time making the leap from its Japanese homeland to the West.

Yakuza 5, originally announced in August 2011 and released in Japan in December 2012, was unveiled as a West-bound release at the 2014 PlayStation Experience. To say it's been a long, long wait for Yakuza fans is some understatement, with the previous Western release in SEGA's series, zombie spin-off Yakuza: Dead Souls, being a bit of a disappointment for those of us who had grown to love the Japanese melodrama that follows in the wake of main protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, the hardest bastard in all of video gaming.

So, what's Uncle Kaz been up to since the events of Yakuza 4? Well, he's now a taxi driver in Fukuoka, trying to put his old life of violence behind him and make a fresh start in a new town. For six months, Kazuma has been working, keeping his head down and sending money to support his orphanage back in Okinawa (first seen in Yakuza 3), and living a lonely life of relative peace. This comes to an end when Daigo Dojima, the Sixth Chairman of the Tojo Clan—Kaz was the fourth—gets into our hero's taxi and starts him on the road back to Tokyo, back into the hyper-violent world of the yakuza.

'Yakuza 5,' launch trailer

The previous Yakuza games have been full of twists and revelations, and the fifth main game is no different. Like Yakuza 4, you'll get to see the story from several perspectives, with 5 featuring five playable characters: Kazuma; Yakuza 4 vets Taiga Saejima and Shun Akiyama; new boy Tatsuo Shinada; and finally Haruka Sawamura, finally playable after being in all the games since the 2005 original.

Each of the characters controls differently, and they offer not only another view on the main story, but also have their own side-quests and sub-stories—and these comprise some of the highlights of the game. Take Kazuma's sub-story where he, in his role as a taxi driver, takes on the Devil Killers, a street racing gang that terrorizes the locals. This combines a new type of gameplay to the series, car racing, with a totally unrelated plot tangent and an excellent Eurobeat soundtrack. It's totally bizarre and out of place in a game about honor, politics, and conspiracies, but it's in these moments that the game truly comes into its own.

The bread and butter of the Yakuza series is its combat, and while it's not vastly changed from Yakuza 4, the brawls of this fifth entry are still deeply satisfying to play, even if sometimes it can be a little grisly. Throwing kicks and punches, or using weapons, begins to fill your Heat bar, which, once full, lets you unleash some of the most intensely violent and funny attacks seen in the medium. There's maybe nothing more satisfying, not to mention totally OTT, than seeing an enemy get absolutely wrecked with a traffic cone, or watching as Kazuma cycles a bike at a street thug and flips it into their face.

But that's something you can only do when playing as one of the four male protagonists. Haruka, while playable, doesn't use her fists to settle arguments—she uses her dancing skills. The father/daughter relationship between this orphan girl and Kazuma has always been the warm heart of the series, and here it's interesting to see her going out on her own, becoming independent, and separating herself from the violence of her earlier life. Again, her sections of the game showcase something new, dance battles, but they surprisingly succeed in keeping the tone of proceedings intact and, more importantly, they're a lot of fun.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the yakuza's ties to the Japanese right wing

When it comes to extra-curricular activities, playable when you're not pounding skulls, Yakuza 5 is the most accomplished game in the series so far. The five cities it takes place in are packed full of distractions. In the arcade, you can play Virtua Fighter 2, crane games and Taiko no Tatsujin, the best drumming game on the planet. You can also go fishing, hunting, sing karaoke, hit the batting cages, play VR machines, enter fighting tournaments, read manga, or just pick up customers in your taxi. While the game area is much smaller than something like GTAV or Just Cause 3, it's densely packed and highly detailed, full of atmosphere and life.

The thing is, like I said earlier, three years can be a long time, and while this game will delight and surprise with its depth, there are some aspects that can throw the player. The save system remains untouched from the first Yakuza, released just over ten years ago, with you having to save at telephone booths or in other set locations. This isn't a deal-breaker, but autosave has become such an integral feature of modern games that it's easy to turn the game off, forgetting that your last manual save was over 30 minutes ago. Too easy.

While it's not fair to compare the graphics to recent games, there are still issues with pop-up and collision physics that have plagued the series. And while some of the faces you'll meet are beautifully detailed, there's still an abundance of generic-looking thugs clogging up the streets of Japan. Bear in mind, though, that this is a PlayStation 3 game, and we've been rather spoiled by the looks of some current-gen console games. (I mean, just look at the first trailer for Yakuza 6, which is PS4 exclusive coming out in Japan in late 2016.)

Maybe more than anything else, the biggest criticism that I have about Yakuza 5 is also one of the things I love about the series as a whole, and that's the sense of familiarity. While the plot changes from game to game, their structures remain almost untouched. New elements are added—more characters, new cities, mini-games, and so on—but how you progress through the series never feels like anything but like a straight line.

Some might see this as repetition, with the potential to leave the player treading the same old ground, but for me the common elements of Yakuza games have always had me thinking of the Zelda series, where game-makers firm up a solid foundation to build a saga upon. Open yourself up to these stories of honor, family, and friendship, and you'll be constantly rewarded with a world that doesn't just feel familiar, it feels like home.

As someone who loves this series, getting to play Yakuza 5 after so long, at least without some poorly translated guides or YouTube videos, has been one of my highlights of 2015. It might well be the final new game worth firing the PS3 up for, and even if you're new to the series, it's a fine starting point, with a fresh story and an option to watch catch-up films covering the events of previous installments, to get you up to speed. If, like me, you've been a fan of the series since it first arrived in the West, you'll be pleased to know that the epic wait hasn't been in vain.

Yakuza 5 is out now, exclusive to the PlayStation 3

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When thousands of pro-democracy protesters took to Hong Kong's streets last year, their movement was dubbed the "Umbrella Revolution," after they faced down clouds of tear gas with their umbrellas. The UK government raised concerns with China over events in the former British colony, and after months of unrest the protests ended peacefully this time last year. Hundreds were jailed and scores injured.

Now VICE can reveal a secret army file, which shows how British soldiers planned to deal with unrest when Hong Kong was still a British colony in the 1980s. The file, discovered at the National Archives, shows that the British army's plans to handle a similar situation were actually much worse. While the Chinese police used tear gas, the British Army would have preferred bullets.

Military officials from the Porton Down chemical weapons establishment in Wiltshire visited Hong Kong in 1981. They compiled a secret report, comparing crowd control plans in the Far East colony with tactics used in Northern Ireland, which had been rocked by riots that summer following the deaths Bobby Sands and nine other Irish republican prisoners on hunger strike.

Security forces in Northern Ireland fired a record 29,695 plastic bullet baton rounds in 1981. Between April and August that year, these weapons resulted in the deaths of seven people, including a 12-year-old girl, Carol Ann Kelly, who was shot dead walking home from the shops carrying a milk carton. Despite these fatalities in Northern Ireland, the secret document, written in September 1981, shows that British soldiers in Hong Kong planned to be "very much more aggressive than the present tactics in Ulster" if faced with a riot.

Major Duncan Briggs, of 6 Gurkha Regiment, told his visitors from Porton Down that, "Theoretically the escalation would be: Talk, Photograph, CS , Baton rounds, Shotgun, and then Small Arms fire." However, Briggs told his visitors that in reality his men would skip the less lethal option of using tear gas and resort straight to opening fire: "Practically the steps would be: Talk, Photograph, Baton rounds, Shotgun, and Small Arms fire", he said. To be clear, "Small Arms fire" means actual rifles shooting real bullets, not plastic ones.

The secret document shows Briggs regarded tear gas as "a reserved option to be fired at the back of the crowd to avoid the necessity of the SF donning gas masks." In case there was any doubt about the deadly consequences of Brigg's plan, he concluded that, "Small arms fire would be directed into the crowd for lethal effect."

The chilling report was written nearly a decade after British paratroopers had shot dead 14 unarmed civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday. Just last month, detectives arrested one of the former soldiers on suspicion of murdering three members of the march.

I showed the Hong Kong document to a leading human rights NGO in Belfast, the Committee on the Administration of Justice. Daniel Holder, its deputy director, told me that, "Plastic bullets were used by the security forces in Northern Ireland in public order situations with deadly effect, especially for children. Rightly, yet selectively, such weapons have never been deemed 'appropriate' for use on the streets of Britain in similar circumstances. What this document reveals is that 'very much more aggressive' responses including the use of live ammunition were deemed appropriate for the people of Hong Kong."

Holder added that, "The state has a duty to equally uphold the rights of all in its jurisdiction, including a duty not to take their lives, yet it is evident the more you are on the periphery and away from the core of the state the less such rights are respected."

Picture from the 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles website

Major Briggs's gung-ho attitude towards crowd control does not appear to have compromised his career. He was later promoted and made Commanding Office of the 6th Queen Elizabeth's Own Gurkha Rifles. The regiment's website carries a photograph of Briggs giving the Queen a tour of their barracks in 1989.

The Gurkhas are a revered regiment in the British Army, with its Nepali soldiers highly prized for their discipline and fighting ability. Private security giant G4S has even set up an section of its company, G4S Gurkha Services, comprised of veterans. The company's website claims that they "excel in protest management." The G4S offshoot was recently used by fracking company Caudrilla to guard against protesters at its controversial shale gas exploration site in Balcombe, West Sussex.

The secret report makes clear that such an aggressive approach was not isolated to Major Briggs but went right up the chain of command. A brigadier also "pointed out that the general philosophy for the BF in Hong Kong in an IS [Internal Security] situation was a couple of steps up in Northern Ireland and the UK. A more aggressive stance would be taken to quell rioting."

The brigadier explained that differences included, "the freedom of action which is necessary in Hong Kong... they were not going to be Aunt Sallies as the Army were in NI [Northern Ireland]." The brigadier must have thought that soldiers in Northern Ireland just passively turned the other cheek during riots, because "Aunt Sally" is a traditional English pub game where people lob sticks at a dummy of an old woman's head. The document also states that armored personnel carriers "would be used aggressively" against crowds in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong-born Anna Lo, who is now a politician for Northern Ireland's Alliance Party, told VICE that, "The history of policing and security force activity in Northern Ireland highlights the dangers of applying military tactics in a civilian context."

The colony had already seen deadly riots in 1967, after police arrested striking workers outside an artificial flowers factory. By 1981, the secret report shows that army intelligence in Hong Kong were concerned that "economic problems due to inflation will lead to disturbances which, because of high density of the population, could rapidly escalate to large riots."

The Ministry of Defence told VICE that it would not comment on the Hong Kong document, describing it as "theoretical speculation." However a spokesman insisted that, "our Armed Forces operate under strict rules of engagement which are legal, proportionate, and appropriate to the situation."

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Illustration by Wren McDonald

With the exception of rent, I spend most of my money on consumables. Lunches I bought because I'm too lazy to make myself a sandwich in the morning, after-work beers, the too-frequent packs of cigarettes. I don't think my case is unusual, just unfortunate. After all, I wish I had more cash to spend on things like, say, going on vacation or investing. Instead, I throw tasty or mind-altering things down my gullet to anesthetize myself to the banality of daily life. "Man Brings Lunch from Home to Cut Down on Small Joys" reads the headline of an Onion article that speaks to me, a person who knows that a Tuesday doesn't feel as shitty when you're stuffing a $15 Sweetgreen salad into your head.

When I was in college and broke as a joke, I thought that financial solvency equated to being able to buy a burrito whenever the mood struck me. I still don't think that's bad logic; not having to worry about food makes the animal part of my brain feel very comfortable. But if I've learned one thing from writing about personal finance for the past few months, it's that the animal part of your brain is a selfish idiot who wants you to gorge yourself on $12 hamburgers and take cabs everywhere instead of paying off your loans.

The traditional alternative to buying overpriced food, as any college student knows, is to eat ramen you cook on a hot plate sitting on the floor for every meal until you get physically ill and have to ask your parents for money. But surely there's a middle ground between death by sodium and bankruptcy via indulgence. What I wanted was a diet that would be cheap without taking years off my life.

So in an effort to curb my spending on food while not suffering the fate of a so-sad-it's-funny Onion article subject, I decided to conduct a short experiment: How cheaply could I eat while still getting all the nutrients I needed? I tested two methods out. The first involved some futuristic meal replacement, and the second involved some old-fashioned gruel.

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

Meal Replacement

The first thing I did to help suss out the one perfect food was to consult a nutritionist named Laura Cipullo, who told me my plan was ill-advised. She said that there's really no way to get everything you need from just eating the same food over and over.

What she told me ran in direct opposition to the mission of trendy meal-replacement products like Soylent, which promises all the nutrition of actual food without all that annoying "picking what you want to eat and then chewing it" stuff that today's busy tech workers have so little time for.

"I think if you're in a crisis situation, like our troops abroad, these could be a good option for a short period of time," Cipullo told me. "But where are the antioxidants that you would get through fruits and vegetables and all these other cancer-fighting properties?"

I wasn't worried about cancer, though. I was only planning on doing this for a short period of time, and I doubt that anything I could ingest would taste worse than Easy Mac, with which I have a storied history. But getting a subscription to Soylent would mean all my meals would be liquid, and I wasn't ready for that lifestyle. (One of my colleagues over at Motherboard took the plunge a while ago, if you're curious how it turned out.) Instead I ordered ten MealSquares for $30.

MealSquares, for the blissfully uninitiated, are "nutritionally complete" 400-calorie meals that come in the form of a block that is like a scone but much, much denser and also incredibly dry, like something you could build a house out of. Some people at the VICE office eat them like normal food but I have no idea how. I tried, but my body rejected the MealSquares. My jaw would not chew. I took to chasing the MealSquare bits with coffee like they were pills, and the animal part of my brain said, What are you doing? What have we become?

By this time the smell of any other food gave me hunger pangs; I walked past a pizza place and nearly cried.

One day and 400 calories into this experiment I realized the MealSquares contained chocolate and picked all the dark bits out of my breakfast. By this time the smell of any other food gave me hunger pangs; I walked past a pizza place and nearly cried. Cipullo had warned me of this, saying that it's necessary to eat a variety of foods not only for nutrition reasons, but for your mental health.

"We eat for psychological reasons, we eat for behavioral reasons," she said. "And there is research coming out saying that the way the body responds to a meal will depend on your stress level. So say you're stressed and you don't like your meal, you're going to digest that differently than something else."

Watch our documentary on the marijuana industry in Quebec:

Gruel

On that note, I asked Cipullo to come up with a meal designed for me that was nutritionally complete but made of constituent ingredients that were so cheap they were practically free. I did not much like her answer, which was to sauté spinach or kale with olive oil, mix it with rice, and top it with a scoop of canned tuna.

However, after two days of eating MealSquares, I was so desperate for anything else. I wolfed down my tupperware of weird gruel almost immediately upon getting to the office on Wednesday morning. It was the opposite of the problem I'd had with the MealSquares, which took me so long to get down that I wasn't physically able to consume enough calories in one day to properly function.

The next day, I made more, and that was good, because I continued to love my new food invention even though it is remarkably similar to a recipe I found online for homemade pet food. When I came home that night, I added a bunch of Russian dressing to a bowl of my gruel and mixed it up to the point that it became a delicious paste. I had two more after that and fell asleep feeling like I'd just discovered the best lifehack in the world.

When my coworker dipped potatoes into some sort of sauce, then put them in his mouth, it was borderline pornographic.

That didn't last long. The next day, my mood worsened. I made a "breakfast" version of the gruel by substituting the tuna with a fried egg. At this point I noticed that I was moving very slowly and that my arms were tingling. I was also starting to freak the fuck out, staring at any food the way a dog stares at a squirrel. When my coworker dipped potatoes into some sort of sauce, then put them in his mouth, it was borderline pornographic.

On Friday I was five days into my experiment and I felt like I was moving underwater. My monotonous diet had given me a permanent hangover, only I hadn't been drinking—and when I did have half a beer I got so dizzy I worried about collapsing on the floor. The next morning, I felt worse.

"There is research coming out saying that the way the body responds to a meal will depend on your stress level," Cipullo, the nutritionist, explained. "So say you're stressed and you don't like your meal, you're going to digest that differently than something else."

I asked what she meant.

"Like, you're more likely to have bacteria leak from your intestines and go into other parts of your body." She insisted this "isn't as bad as it sounds," but, like, what the fuck?

All I know is that on Saturday, when I was out with my friend in Queens, I was suddenly struck with most intense urge to vomit I've ever experienced. I can count the number of times I've thrown up in my life on one hand, but that sensation is pretty unmistakable. I dropped an iced coffee on the ground, fell into a cab, and concentrated really hard on keeping it together until I got in my apartment—no easy task.

The amount of money I spent on food that week? $10.06. I don't even want to think about how much the cab ended up being.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.