Our original documentary 'Avatar Sex: Scanning Pornstars into Virtual Reality.' Via Daily VICE.

Tori Black lies naked on a cushioned ottoman, flat on her back. Her legs are spread wide. She's enclosed in what looks like a makeshift dressing room, ensconced by white curtains, with 44 cameras pointed straight at her vulva.

"Do you want me to pose my vagina in any type of way?" she asks.

"Hold on," someone shouts from offstage. "Can you spread your legs a little wider?"

"These vagina lips! They are unruly!" Black hollers back from behind the curtain. A small team of men sit behind a series of monitors on the other side of the curtain, scanning the results of Black's work.

We're in a rundown industrial area on the outskirts of Toronto in what looks from the outside to be a derelict building. It was once home to the local Knights of Columbus chapter, and then it was a church. Now—and probably much to the initial inhabitants' chagrin—the building is home to Holodexxx, a company that makes virtual reality pornography.

Black is here to create her virtual avatar. The final product will perform in an adult videogame, where players can "live out their sexual fantasies." Though Black doesn't perform anymore, she's still one of the most well-known names in the industry. So she's freezing her 27-year-old self in time.

Black's nose is so stuffed up she can barely breathe. And yet, surrounded by the Holodexxx team and a VICE camera crew, she is totally nonplussed at being both the target of so many cameras and the only naked person in the room. Some of us try hard not to stare at her exposed labia, but I get the strong sense that she really doesn't care.

"People are always asking me, 'How are you so comfortable being naked?" she says, as though reading my ever-awkward thoughts.

"Well," she says, looking at a nonexistent watch on her naked wrist, "I've been naked for about a decade now. That's how."

She goes through every pose one might reasonably desire a sex partner to strike. She squats low. She sticks her butt out and throws a sassy glare over her shoulder, one finger in her mouth. She kneels on all fours, tooching her booty.

Black is not the first porn star to be reborn into the virtual world. People are already using VR machines for sexual purposes. VICE made a doc exploring that in 2014. But the advent of VR, as with any major new technology, raises a number of questions: What about consent? How will real-world boundaries be respected in a virtual realm? What are the implications here for human-to-human physical intimacy? What happens to an avatar if the system is hacked? And does it matter?

But first, here's how the game works. One puts on a virtual headset like Avegant Glyph or the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift (which, for the record, does not condone the use of adult content on its system, but won't block it either). Right now, the game is designed such that the player has two controllers which they use as hands to do what they will to the performers in the game. In time, teledildonics will be part of the equation, too.

People are scanned by standing in the custom-made VR rig, which is just 112 Canon Rebels mounted on various poles in a shape vaguely resembling a square. The cameras grasp their victim subject from every angle, and through a relatively quick editing process, they are turned into a 3D version of themselves.

The Holodexxx team ambitiously claims that, soon, virtual reality will be even more ubiquitous than the cell phone. As far as when they expect that to happen, the answer is unclear. One team member says 10 years, another says 20.

Who is this game for?

The men who run this company are Morgan Young, Craig Alguire, and Chris Abell. They've been working on Holodexxx for the past eight months or so. Young and Alguire come from the gamer world, and Abell has a background in film. They started their current operation with 12 cameras total, until Abell, their creative director, came on board and bought an additional 60 cameras. They were set up in Young's bedroom until the rig got too big for that arrangement to be practical. Then, they all quit their jobs to make VR porn full time (they also use the rig to scan people for non-porn commercial work).

They've caught on quick. They give clear directives: "Alright, pouting in 3 ,2,1!" is the kind of directive Abell often shouts from behind the monitor.

Abell is responsible for writing the 200-or-so lines of script. They include a lot of instructions women use when they want their partner to climax, like "harder" and "faster" and "fuck me."

The lines lead me to wonder who this game is really for. Thus far, all but one of the performers scanned have been straight-sized women. They come from a variety of racial backgrounds, but all have the classic porn performer shape. Right now, the avatars can be edited to have bigger breasts or butts, but can't be made thicker across the board without damaging the realistic quality of the imaging. One man has been scanned, but I ask the team whether there will be more focus put on entertaining women, and whether fat and queer and trans people will be scanned.

Young, one of the company's co-founders, says representing all bodies, genders, and orientations is important as the game develops.

"We have an opportunity right now to potentially reset how the industry moves forward," he says. "We're three young dudes. We don't want to come across as chauvinist. We're making a very concerted effort to make sure that everyone's represented equally."

Young says this is a good opportunity for people to gain more agency over their identity.

"I think there's going to be almost like a renaissance. People are going to be able to explore their sexuality in a way that they've never been able to before."

"It's crazy too, because people may not choose to represent themselves the way that they are in the real world in a VR space," he says. "You know, I might talk to you and you like lizards, and you're a big lizard. And I'm an ice cream cone. But if that's how I choose to represent myself as an avatar, then so be it. And we can still step into a space and have an exciting, interactive and intimate connection with each other.

" assume the body you like, assume the gender you like, the race you like, and be yourself and explore sexuality. It's amazing; it's what we're on this planet to do."

Abell adds that those who might be experiencing sexual blocks can break them down in the relative safety of the virtual landscape. If someone wants to experiment with group sex but is too scared, for example, or if they're older and haven't had sex, they can try it in the game first.

While the game can play a major role in helping an individual validate themselves, it can also make an existing relationship between two people that much more powerful. Games like this can, for example, bring a new dimension to long distance relationships. Through the use of teledildonics, people can get each other off from afar.

A look into the ethics of this metaverse

While VR porn has its upsides—"safe" exploration of unchartered sexual desires, the ability to fuck a long distance partner using teledildonics, and even just a more interactive way to watch porn—there are ethical questions that come into play, too. How to ensure a porn performer's boundaries are not crossed in the virtual world? To what degree does this matter? What happens if someone hacks the game and gains control over someone's avatar? What about virtual rape?

Holodexxx says the hacking question is a risk everyone involved will have to take. Music and films get hacked, and this game is as susceptible as anything else.

"It's something that we can't do too much about," Young says. "There's really not too much a small start-up can do to prevent that." He says they'll put in reasonable measures to protect themselves (and the avatars), but in the long run, it's a gamble for everyone.

While the company can't ensure the safety of its avatars forever, Young explains that any boundaries the performers want respected within the game will be observed (though they do try to hire people based on their openness to being put in a variety of sexual scenarios).

"We're dealing with someone's likeness, and it's no longer just an approximation of what this person looks like. It really is them. It's photo real...there's a human being behind that avatar." As a result, he wants to make sure everyone feels comfortable. This means that if a performer doesn't do a specific act in real life, the game will restrict that action in virtual life, too.

So far, the company hasn't come up against any obstacles in this regard.

In a similar vein, one can't help but wonder about the life cycle of these avatars. After their exclusivity contract with Holodexxx is up, what happens to the them? Do they become zombies? Is there a wasteland of unemployed avatars out there in another world? Are they being tied up and blindfolded or enslaved? Young says he doesn't have an answer.

"I don't know where the technology will be in five years—it's hard to say." He says the best the company can do is make the effort to protect its performers in the long run.

I ask Black what she thinks, whether she needs her real world boundaries to apply in virtualland.

"I don't care what my avatar does," she says, "because my avatar isn't who I am. So yeah, all the things that you want me to do that I decline, go ahead and have my avatar do them and be like, 'Hey, look! She finally did it!' I'll be like yeah, great. It didn't cross any of my boundaries because it's all in the computer... I'm completely disconnected."

She says the virtual porn landscape is a place for exploration, and those who are uncomfortable with the idea of lack of consent just shouldn't get involved with it. But if VR is the future of porn, I ask, what are people to do? Her answer? Find a new career.

It's a harsh response, but Black may be right that that is pretty much the only option to ensure complete control.

I'm still worried about the ethics here, though. So I get in touch with Sonya Barnett, a sex educator and feminist activist who also makes porn, to see if she'll share her thoughts on some of the potential ethical fallout here. She says she's not sure there's a way to ensure real-world boundaries are observed in the virtual realm.

"As much as I want to say that having someone create an avatar of you/a porn star/a celebrity/a neighbour—or abuse one that already exists—is something that needs to be policed," she tells me, "people do that kind of thing already with virtual beings: they fantasize about others all the time, whether they watch a porn scene on continued repeat, or jack off to print magazines, or photos, or dolls.

"Is it not an extension of a pornstar-branded Fleshlight or specially modeled dildo?"

While some virtual communities self-police unethical behaviour by flagging, that can be impossible in a private-use VR world. Ideally, Barnett explains, algorithms could be used to prevent the abuse—or creation—of other people's avatars. But she's not convinced that's possible, or that it would eradicate unethical use.

"Also problematic is that the onus is put on the person who wants to prohibit use of their image, who has to then create restrictions for those algorithms to work. It's like creating a 'publication ban' on your image."

What's left, then, is questions. Barnett lists hers off:

" a person is using or abusing an avatar in private, just how much danger is the real live version of that person in? Could a virtual realm be a safe space for people to play out their worst fantasies? A similar question arises in regards to pedophiles using animated or illustrated content vs the photographing of actual children, or even those who engage in rape fantasy play. Is there harm in any of these cases if no actual person is on the receiving end?"

Thus far, the answers remain unclear to everyone involved.

Nervous semi-luddites like myself have been heard expressing consternation about the potential fallout when it comes to real human intimacy. If people can enter a game and "fuck" famous porn stars with bodies deemed "perfect" by Western beauty standards, will they bother to seek out connections with others? As we chat, Young makes me think about this question in a new way. He uses Skype as an example—right now, we can see and hear the people we Skype, but VR will allow us to step right into their space.

At this point, Barnett is not concerned that VR activity will replace the need for real physical intimacy. But, for people who, for whatever reason, don't have access to a flesh and blood partner, she says "a virtual partner for many is better than no partner at all."

Young claims the game will enhance, not detract from, intimacy between people. People made the same argument, he says, with the birth of the cell phone and the internet. He sees VR as an extension of social media.

"I don't see being a blockade, like a one-off thing you do by yourself in the seclusion of your home. I think this is going to be a persistent online, multi-player experience. You'll log into the metaverse and this is where people will spend their time."

In other words, why not have a virtual orgy with the people of your choice rather than watching a passive 2-D version?

What next?

Despite people's fears, Young says VR is already "too big to fail."

He thinks that average household use will be quite common by about 2018. People will use the headsets, he predicts, not just for entertainment at home, but "outside, on public transit, as the headsets become more slimmer and ergonomic and refined and powerful. It'll be like putting on a pair of sunglasses. You'll step out in the world and you might be in a virtual world. Yup."

I tell him it wigs me out to imagine everyone wandering around with their freak goggles on living in a world where they're on virtual acid. What will we be seeing if we're not occupying the physical world? How will we not get run over or something? Will we be undoing the knack we've evolved for recognizing danger?

I ask how he's so serene in the face of all this. He says it'll just be "another method to leverage human connectivity."

This calms me down. But at the end of the 12-hour shoot day, just when I've started to ease into the idea of this technology not being utterly terrifying, he adds under his breath:

"Say goodbye to reality as you know it."

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Zdenko Zivkovic

Dr. John Hall was the kind of dentist who could inspire horror films. He had developed a reputation in his office in Cornelius, North Carolina for experimenting with unconventional treatments. One day, during a routine visit, he told a patient that he was "going to put something in her mouth that would taste funny, but would stop the bleeding." Then he used a syringe to inject the fluid and told her to swallow it. That fluid was semen.

This was not the first time Dr. Hall had injected his own semen into his patients' mouths. Two of his employees had begun collecting suspicious syringes left in his office after they overheard the doctor telling patients to swallow something and at least one female patient objected to doing so, on the grounds that the liquid he was preparing to inject "smelled like sperm."

When Dr. Hall was eventually brought to court—for violating dentistry's standard of care, engaging in immoral conduct, and seven misdemeanor counts of sexual assault—six former patients provided testimonies about how the doctor had incorporated his semen into their dental visits. Another woman also alleged that Dr. Hall had pounced on her in the dental chair and began to "gyrate against her lower body in a sexual manner." The police had confiscated syringes from Dr. Hall's office, which DNA tests proved had traces of his semen in them. The issue of whether or not his homemade remedy did, in fact, stop oral bleeding was never made clear, to the dismay of frat boys around the world.

All of this is to say that a dentist like Dr. Hall should not be in practice. After he pleaded guilty to the charges in 2005, he spent four months in Mecklenburg County jail and had his dentistry license permanently revoked—which is still a pretty sweet deal for making multiple patients swallow a load while in his dentist's chair.

"How in the world can he just walk away from this? There's no justice in this," said Lisa Carpenter, one of his victims at the time, referring to his light sentence. Jail time notwithstanding, at least Dr. Hall would never practice dentistry again.

But early last month, on the island of San Pedro in Belize, Dr. Hall came dangerously close to opening a new clinic before police ultimately discovered his seedy past.

San Pedro is probably best known as the inspiration for the Madonna track, "La Isla Bonita," and a violent feud between the Bloods and the Crips. It's a popular tourist destination for those looking to unwind in the idyllic landscape and blue-green waters, but it's also a poor country with a history of corruption.

Related: Belize's Island Paradise Is Caught Up in a Bloods Vs Crips Floating Drug War

On November 18, 2015, Dr. Hall ran an advertisement in the local Belizean newspaper, The San Pedro Sun, searching for a dental assistant. It was the first in a series of ads—first soliciting office space and staff, then advertising the grand opening of his new practice, The Oceanside Dental Clinic.

Even without knowing his nefarious past, Tamara Sniffin, editor of the San Pedro Sun, told VICE the advertisements seemed suspicious. "We did wonder how he had obtained a license to practice , as traditionally this is a painstaking, lengthy process that discourages many foreigners from even trying," said Sniffin.

Even if you're licensed in another country, getting a license to practice abroad is a bureaucratic and often laborious process. Practitioners first need to secure a work permit, then send in their license from their home country, along with paperwork like university transcripts, board exam scores, and recommendation letters. According to ex-pat blogs on the topic, the process can take many months and the government has a "protectionist attitude" toward reserving high-paying jobs for Belizean citizens. So when Sniffin saw the ads from an American doctor opening his dentistry practice in San Pedro, she found it unusual.

As it turns out, though, Dr. Hall did have a license to practice in Belize. He'd received a work permit under his real name, but before he applied for a Belizean dentistry license, he had to get his highly-Googleable semen incident behind him. So instead of using his legal name (John Robert Hall) he came up with a cleverly devised pseudonym, Robert Bob Hall (or if shortened, Bob Bob Hall). Within weeks, the Medical Council of Belize had issued a Belizean dentistry license to Dr. Robert Bob Hall.

It's not entirely clear how this happened. As Sniffen pointed out, it's unusual for foreigners to have work permits and licenses processed so easily, and while Dr. Hall's license was issued under his fake name, his passport and work permit listed his real name. Still, receiving falsely-issued documents from the Belizean government isn't unheard of: A few years ago, immigration officials in the country—including the Minister of State in the Immigration Ministry—were found to be selling Belizean passports.

Read: The DIY Dentists of YouTube

As the grand opening of Dr. Hall's new clinic loomed, Sniffen—the newspaper editor—began receiving emails from concerned residents, linking to news articles about Hall's 2005 conviction. She told me she forwarded the well-documented evidence of Dr. Hall's crimes to the Ministry of Health, but received no response. So she took matters into her own hands.

"On the morning of 7, I went to the San Pedro Police Department, armed with a folder full of printed articles and info on the deviant, disgusting behavior of Dr. Hall," Sniffin told me. "There was no way in hell I was going to let that pervert touch one person on this island and I thank those who brought it to our attention and worked with us on shutting this creep down."

After receiving the information, Assistant Superintendent Henry Jemmott, Commander of the San Pedro Police, arrested Dr. Hall for "making false representation"—just hours prior to the opening of his new dentistry clinic.

"The people of San Pedro are angry at the Belize Medical Council for overlooking the mistake with the name," Jemmott told me, "but my people are glad that it's been brought to light."

Dr. Hall has been released after posting bail and wrote a 1,400-word manifesto, where he claims he came to Belize "to help the local people with free dentistry" and insists his innocence in the 2004 semen crimes.

"I never thought I would be ridiculed, cussed at, and made fun of with harmful threats to me and my dog based on assumptions instead of facts," wrote Dr. Hall in his manifesto. "When I was accused of a disgusting and absurd action of placing semen in patient's mouths. I did not do what I was accused of doing!"

As of now, Dr. Hall is awaiting trial in San Pedro. He's had his travel documents confiscated by the authorities and is said to be keeping a low-profile on the island until his February 12 court date. Weirdly, the sign for the Oceanside Dental Clinic is still up on the building—an eerie reminder of the semen-squirting dentist who almost was.

Follow Nathaniel Janowitz on Twitter.

Image via Vic Berger on Twitter

Vic Berger IV is not a man with a Jeb Bush neck tattoo, but he played one on TV. During the mounting madness of the Republican presidential primary season last year, the video editor and Tim & Eric collaborator hoaxed the Bush campaign—and a news media all too eager to monetize awful decisions—when he promised to get #Jeb4Prez permanently etched on his flesh if his Vine of the family fail-son touting Apple products hit one million loops. "I still can't believe it happened," Berger says. "I was trying to show that he's just pandering and trying to prove how 'relatable' he is, but when Jeb and his people tried to make me get this dumb tattoo to reach the youth of America, they proved my point for me."

When it comes to Berger's take on America's most terrible famous people, the prank's just the tip of the iceberg. His Vine account is full of brutally funny six-second remixes of right-wing politicians, washed-up musicians, evangelical Christians, and pandering comedians alike. Berger's eye for absurdity, coupled with his disorienting editing techniques, coax out the uncomfortable ugliness beneath the surface of a host of smiling creeps. Besides being funny as shit, Berger's Vines also might be... important. "I feel like @VicBergerIV might be this election's Ralph Steadman, but with Vine footage instead of dripping pens," tweeted writer Dan O'Sullivan. "It's flattering," Berger says, "though I really don't overthink what I do. Basically, I tend to see something dumb that infuriates me and then instead of arguing with somebody about it, I make a video to point it out."

And throughout Berger's body of work, five men stand out as the dumbest, most infuriating of all: GOP alpha fascist Donald Trump and his cuckservative beta boy Jeb Bush; Chubby Checker, the lecherous 70-something singer of "The Twist"; eager-to-please Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon; and disgraced televangelist turned doomsday-prepper entrepreneur Jim Bakker.

"Those are my guys," Berger says. "Those five fine gentlemen give me a wide variety of material to work with, yet they are all so similar in many ways. They all crave attention and especially power, yet each have a unique way of attempting to attain it or keep it. Trump will do whatever it takes to be powerful even if it involves offending large groups of people, while Jimmy Fallon doesn't want to offend anyone because it might risk losing his job as the host of Tonight Show. Chubby feels he deserves to always be at the top of the charts with "The Twist," while Jeb feels he should be President because his last name is Bush. And Jim Bakker claims to be God's friend and has been told by Jesus that the world will be ending soon, so you better listen to him and buy his apocalyptic survival food that costs thousands of dollars and comes in 40 gallon buckets." Below, Berger serves up a bucketful of insight into each of his five favorite targets, illustrated with their greatest video hits.

Jeb Bush

I envision Jeb as someone who had been going to a shrink, and the shrink told him he needed to start doing things out of his comfort zone to improve himself, so he decided to run for president. But the shrink kept on pushing him to do more things that make him uncomfortable during the campaign, like putting on a hoodie or using Uber like the common folk do. I see this painful look in his eyes whenever he is interacting with everyday Americans. That's when his nervous blinking starts. I always think he is on the edge, seconds away from freaking out and punching people to escape the situation.

Donald Trump

Trump is such an awful guy. For a long time, he was entertaining and unintentionally comical, but the longer he stays in the race, the less funny he is. He's a bully, so I typically push that aspect. I also mix his supporters into the videos: When I edit a GOP debate video, I always have someone in the audience that supports Trump blow an airhorn throughout. It's so stupid, but it's the one thing that I always find funny in my videos. I like to have Jeb talking and struggling to get these words out, but then the Trump guy in the audience toots the airhorn and interrupts Jeb to throw him off. And I always use the sound from Trump's rallies of the crowd chanting "We Want Trump!" It's scary.

Chubby Checker

Chubby is by far my favorite to work with. I first saw him about 13 years ago when I randomly showed up at a Borders Books and he was there signing his reggae "Twist" CD. It was pretty awkward and strange and even then. I could tell something was off about him. Maybe the first sign was that he had a reggae "Twist" CD out, but he just acted odd.

I forgot about him until about a year ago when I came across some videos of him talking about the importance of "The Twist." I ended up digging a little deeper and came across some rather disturbing stuff. He goes from town to town to be on all these local morning news shows and teaches the anchors how to Twist and do the Hucklebuck . But he always ends up pushing it and getting very close to these unsuspecting women as he's Hucklebucking with them. He's grinding his pelvic region on these hosts while they try to remain professional and carry on with the broadcast. I think many of these stations just think, "Ah, it's Chubby Checker, he's a sweet old man! He didn't mean to be creepy. He's just old and didn't know what he was doing." Then they move on and forget about it. But Chubby keeps on traveling across the country, and always does this stuff on stage. I have a number Vines where Chubby brings up a lady that he finds foxy and then dances with her and as he sends her off the stage, he slaps her on the butt. Not just a light slap either.

I could go on and on about Chubby. I tried to convince him to star in a project that I was working on, but unfortunately his publicist knew how to use Google, so she looked me up and probably saw all of 300 of my Chubby Vines and videos and decided Chubby should not be working with me.

Jimmy Fallon

Fallon doesn't want to offend. I am sure he is the nicest guy, and would be super fun to hang out with, but his show appears to be this platform where anyone can come on and paint themselves however they want to appear. My annoyance with him started with Chris Christie constantly being on there, dancing around and doing his dumb skits about how much he loves Springsteen. Christie is such a gross and horrible person. I worked for a decade for the state of New Jersey and can truthfully say he's done way, way more harm for the state than he's done good. And the whole shutting down of the bridge bullshit? He denies it all, and then the next thing you see is him on Fallon making light of it and singing a song about it or whatever. Fallon lets these terrible people say whatever they want. Not that the host of The Tonight Show needs to be a hard-hitting journalist getting to the bottom of things—it's just that if he's going to have these people on, at least have some point of view. Don't just laugh nervously about it. I mean, one of his questions to Christie was, "Heard you hung out with the Romneys! So how are the Romneys? They're all awesome."

The other thing about Fallon that drives me crazy is how he will have a guest on and then bring out an iPad and try out some app with them. It's unbelievable. There are segments where there's like 30 seconds of him staring silently at an iPad wearing earphones. I've made a few Vines using those moments.

Jim Bakker

Jim Bakker is the most recent guy I've been working with, and I think editing his show has been the most enjoyable editing I've done. The footage alone is insane, even before I touch it, with all the gigantic buckets of slop being mixed together. But by tweaking it and adding awkward pauses and repeating certain lines, it can turn into a fun nightmare. He is obviously a terrible person, using religion and fear to sell products that nobody should buy, but the more time I spend editing him, I see more of the human side. At times, I can even see him making faces, as if "I can't believe I'm getting away with this." After hours and hours editing this guy, I almost start to like him, and can maybe begin to see it through his eyes. Yet it's very easy to take some distance and see that he is a very cruel man and should probably still be in prison.

Follow Sean on Twitter.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg arrived in the Amazon intending to study its indigenous people. A few dozen years later, the North American biologist Richard Evan Schultes appeared in the jungle to study plants used by the same indigenous population. These two true stories are the point of departure for Embrace of the Serpent, a film by the 34-year-old Colombian director Ciro Guerra. Using these two scientists as a framework, Guerra fictionalizes the history of a forgotten indigenous community, including how the last member of the tribe embarked on important journeys, first in his youth with Koch-Grünberg and later when much older with Schultes.

The film, which won the biggest prize at Cannes Directors' Fortnight and has left American critics breathless with praise, relays the same magnificent spirit of the jungle as in Werner Herzog's classic Fitzcarraldo, but this time tells its story from the indigenous perspective. It's a film that's constantly on the move through this vast, sacred jungle—a sort of psychedelic road trip by canoe—that deals with the history of colonial oppression, religion, and madness. What makes Guerra's film so moving and unique is how well it captures the immensity of the jungle and the incredible lives of the people who have existed there for centuries.

I spoke with Guerra over Skype as the director was preparing to travel from Colombia to Sundance to present Embrace of the Serpent before it opens at select theaters in the United States.

VICE: How did you discover the history of these two scientists?
Ciro Guerra: I was always curious about the Amazon. Making a film there was something I'd always wanted to do. But we know very little about the Amazon—at least Colombians know very little about it—so I began to investigate. A knowledgeable friend told me that a good starting point would be to read the diaries of the explorers who first entered the Colombian Amazon 100 years ago. It wasn't all that long ago because this area had been completely underexplored. I encountered an incredible story that hadn't been told. My first approach was through these explorers because they were men who had left everything behind—their lives, families, houses, countries—to penetrate the unknown for two, three, or even 19 years in the case of Schultes. I identified so much with this. It seemed similar to what happens when you make a film: You set off down a dark road and don't know where it will take you or how long it will be before you see the light.

What was the investigative process regarding native customs, characters, locations? Was it all based on these diaries?
It was based on the explorers' diaries at first, but later when I went to the Amazon, it was completely unlike what they'd documented. We don't have a collective memory for this time as a society. It's a lost epoch. The idea was to return to it, to bring it back even though it no longer exists. It would exist again in film.

So I started to follow their tracks and try to hear their echoes. Later I began to work with the indigenous communities. I approached them and spoke with them about what we wanted to do. Working with them, I realized we'd make something special and unique. We would circle around the history and not tell it from the same perspective it's always told from—that of the adventurer, the traveler—but instead tell it from the indigenous point of view. We'd make them the protagonists. This is the part of the story that hasn't been told. Switching the perspective and putting the audience in those shoes really interested me. It's truly a film that hasn't been seen. But achieving this indigenous perspective, this way of seeing the world, was difficult. It took time. It's hard to change your thinking like this.

Watch the exclusive premiere of the official US trailer:

At first I was worried about being faithful to historical and scientific fact, but later I realized it was more important to let it go and immerse myself in imagination, in dream. I started to lose my western logic and tried to embrace another logic. I wanted the film to feel like an indigenous story, like an Amazonian myth. But Amazonian myth is, for us, almost incomprehensible. Its narrative logic absolutely opposes ours.

Another protagonist, beside the natives and the scientists, is the jungle, like a giant living entity that communicates, that says things.
This is a bit like the perspective they have of the jungle. We did a very particular thing. We wrote the jungle like a female character, in part because there wasn't a female character in the film. In the actual history there wasn't a way to put a female character in, but then I started to understand that the jungle has this connotation for them. I started to do something I've always wanted to do: create a character out of the environment. We made it feminine because they see it this way. This is incomprehensible in our narrative tradition but makes all the sense in the world in terms of Amazonian myth.

Is there fantasy in the film? The last member of the tribe, the search for the flower, is this based in reality?
It's based on a real thing, but it's modified for various reasons. For me to give the native group a real name, the film would have to be an extensive anthropological investigation. I didn't have the right to do that, but fiction gave me permission. The indigenous people don't feel comfortable if we speak of real plants, real myths, real songs because they're sacred. With fiction, however, you can modify these things. We wanted to arrive at the most profound truth, not the superficial truth of anthropological data.

The part of the film involving the messiah is shocking. What's the story there?
When we showed the film to the indigenous communities, we showed it in different places in the Amazon and various people were grateful we'd dealt with the evangelical monks. It's a taboo theme there. Everything that happened one must leave in the past, but this is something they remember and that's been part of their lives.

Later in the diaries there appears the story of a mestizo named Niceto. He arrived at the border of Colombia and Brazil, in Yavarate, at the end of the 19th century, and proclaimed that he was the messiah. He had as many as 2,000 followers and did crazy things, demented things, much more so than what's in the film. His group became unstable and the Brazilian army in the end had to remove them by force. It was out of control. Twenty years later, someone else named Venancio also proclaimed he was the messiah and had hundreds of followers. It all ended in a massive suicide. It's a phenomenon that keeps repeating itself up until today. Even now, on the border of Colombia and Ecuador, there are these Amazonian Israelites. It's a phenomenon related to the fact that the Amazon is a spiritual place. When spirituality is removed by force, it creates a vacuum in which fundamentalism and madness grows.

Director Ciro Guerra

The use of language is particular in this film. The messiah speaks a type of Portuguese, he speaks Spanish, German is heard, there are local dialects. How did you decide to make a multilingual film instead of using just one language?
It has to do with the region. In the area where we filmed they speak 17 different indigenous languages. You meet indigenous people who speak 108 indigenous languages without a problem—and they're not languages that resemble one another. You have to recognize that the whole world has come to the Amazon. Everyone comes looking for wealth or resources or expanded consciousness. It's a story that's been told by the Germans, French, Austrians, Americans, besides the Portuguese and Spanish. The Amazon is a tower of Babel. We wanted to reflect this.

The two indigenous protagonists are from the Amazon?
Yes, they're from the region. We found them where we were filming. It was difficult to find virgin forest because really it's not easy to find jungle unaffected by agriculture, livestock, commerce, tourism. Once we found it, we started walking through the region, passing through communities and inviting everyone to join us. They were very enthusiastic. Everyone wanted to participate. They were very considerate. They didn't ask what we wanted to do. They only asked that we be transparent and not have hidden motives. The people participated without doubt.

Once we found those indigenous actors, we had a space of three months to teach them about acting and movies. Although many of them hadn't had contact with this—not with theatre, movies, or anything like that—they had a strong oral tradition that's persisted for thousands of years, they've maintained it generation after generation, and this gave them the capacity to listen. They really know how to listen, which is hard to find in an actor.

On VICE: Meet the Animator Behind Star Wars and 'Jurassic Park':

Was the filming process difficult?
We were prepared for the worst. We'd heard stories of shootings that became nightmares. What we did was get close to the community and ask for their help and collaboration. We invited them to participate in front of and behind the cameras. They taught me how to work with the environment, with the jungle, to ask it permission. They performed rituals for spiritual protection. They explained to the jungle what we wanted to do. This meant that the shooting came off very well. We didn't have illnesses or accidents. The climate supported us. If it started to rain when we paused for lunch, it stopped later on when we returned to work. The shooting was demanding for everyone but also a profoundly spiritual, humbling adventure.

How long did it last?
The pre-production process and shooting took three months and involved more or less 40 people from outside the Amazon and some 60 people from indigenous communities.

What happened with the rubber industry in the region? It's something that's in the film, the savagery of it.
The rubber industry is responsible for the largest genocide in Colombia. The last novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt, is the story of an Irishman who denounced the rubber industry for its role in the brutal and savage extermination of hundreds of thousands of indigenous. Beyond the disappearance of much of their knowledge, many communities disappeared completely. Hundreds of thousands of people were enslaved and exploited in the worst way to make rubber the great industry it was. For a hundred years it was like petroleum. Manaos in Brazil was like Dubai, the richest city in the world at the time. Everything came at the cost of savage exploitation that was later denounced.

For the film, this wasn't something that interested me at first. If it was going to transform into a film about genocide, it wasn't what I had wanted to make. I was more interested in making a film about consciousness.

That scene in which many actors are dismembered is pretty powerful.
We try to synthesize all the pain in that scene. The truth was much more terrible. If that scene comes close to it, the truth was infinitely worse.

How did you decide to film in black and white?
The explorers' photographs were the principal influence, images in black and white, plate photography, almost daguerreotypes that they took. What you see is an Amazon that's completely different from the one now. You can see all the exoticism, all the exuberance. It feels like another world, another time. Being there I realized it wasn't possible to reproduce with any fidelity the color of the Amazon. There's no filter or camera or oil that lets you reproduce its significance. I felt that to do it in black and white, to get rid of colors, would activate the audience's imagination. Viewers would add the colors in their mind and these imagined colors would be more real than whatever we could reproduce. This imagined Amazon is more real than the actual Amazon.

Translated from the Spanish by Lee Klein.Follow Camilo on Twitter.

Embrace of the Serpent will be released by Oscilloscope Laboratories at Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York on Wednesday, February 17, 2016 , and at Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles on Friday, February 19, 2016, with a national rollout to follow.

He is hungry. Original image via Flickr user Jan Hammershaug

You've undoubtedly seen 2015 described as an acrid pile of burning trash at one point over the past few weeks. That's because it absolutely was.

You also probably saw that description on the internet, perhaps because the internet was a particularly dank, disappointing place last year.

Your friends grew more and more insufferable, all news was bad and the coverage of it was worse, people you like argued ad nauseum, and ungodly promoted content took over your carefully curated instagram feeds. One of your exes got married (lol); another got gout (lol?).

If you were a woman, an incessant stream of dudes yelled sexist shit at you from behind Twitter eggs and Solid Snake avatars. Anonymous threats of sexual violence weren't so much lobbed in your direction as skillfully targeted at you and your platforms.

If you weren't white, dismissals of your experiences clogged up your notifications even when you were just trying to crowdsource a substitute for honey in your homemade energy bar recipe.

If you identify as anything less heteronormative than Tim Allen, your very personhood was up for constant debate from people you didn't know and, more jarringly, in small, subtle ways from some you thought you did.

If you belong to more than one of those groups, you might be commended for even mustering the courage to hang out online this year at all.

Will 2016 be better? Of course not. In all likelihood it will be even worse.

But here are a few things that could, if even fleetingly, start to make it a bit more bearable.

Stop Calling Harassment 'Trolling'

Trolling is a magical and valuable tactic of the internet.

It uses the language and conventions of a group to coax out hypocrisy or frustration from its members. It catches the status quo in all its pomp and silliness.

But trolling is also a word we use to minimize the impact of online behaviour that would be criminal if it happened on the street. Those aren't the same thing.

Harassment online—whether it's threats of violence, or persistent unwanted contact-is harassment, and should be described that way. Whether laws are currently equipped to deal with it or not, harassment on the internet has consistently led to offline consequences.

Language is never the be all and end all, but not trivializing criminal harassment that happens on the internet as "trolling" (or, say, "cyberbullying") helps people that are targeted feel heard and believed. That's a small, good thing.

Troll Power

Trolls aren't inherently bad and neither is trolling, so long as they punch up at power and privilege.

Donald Trump may be the 2015's most famous troll, and in some ways he is. His campaign for the Republican nomination for president has consistently (and sometimes spectacularly) frustrated and embarrassed the big-spending political establishment that is used to picking presidents. He engages the political system with such transparent contempt that he has proven incredibly difficult to pander against, forcing both his opponents and the Republican National Committee to respond to his silliness with a seriousness that ends up reading as even sillier.

But Donald Trump is also an anti-troll, who has taken every opportunity imaginable to punch down at marginalized groups like Muslims, Mexicans, disabled people, and women.

Better examples are the South Carolina State Representative who introduced a bill forcing doctors prescribing Viagra to jump through the same ridiculous hoops that her colleagues had legislated for abortion procedures, the Australians using an iMessage loophole to hassle politicians over new cybersecurity laws, or that fake Campbell's Soup customer service account that made fun of homophobes threatening to boycott the company on Facebook.

The difference between being a troll and being a dick all comes down to who you set your sights on.

Feed the Trolls However the Fuck Much You Want

Being told "Don't feed the trolls" is about as useful as being told "Just get over it." Some people process online harassment by shrugging it off, others need to hold it up to the world and light it on fire. Most use a combination of the two, but either way it comes with new consequences that obviously shouldn't be necessary in the first place.

Feed trolls when it works for you, don't engage with them when it doesn't. But don't accept that either response means you, or someone else, is asking to be targeted.

Stop Confusing Freedom of Speech with Freedom from Consequence

The internet, or at least the parts of it most of us use, isn't a public space.

Hanging out on Twitter isn't like standing on a street corner, it's like standing in a McDonald's. It's a corporately governed space that can impose rules and restrictions on what its users can say or do. Eat a Whopper absolutely anytime and anywhere you like, you're free to do so. Just not in here.

Social media companies have struggled to find meaningful ways to juggle free speech and user safety on their platforms. Twitter in particular has faced years of criticism for its unwillingness to adopt clear, useful mechanisms to protect users from serial harassment.

The same goes for other types of platforms people are subjected to online harassment on, from personal websites, to comment sections, to email clients.

For 2016, Twitter introduced changes that more concretely shape what kind of language it will allow, tackling both personal abuse and more general speech from places like the estimated 50,000 accounts linked to the Islamic State. It's a step in the right direction, but functions like better blocking and reporting may need more attention before users really have the agency they need to use the platform safely.

What should be clear is that restrictions platforms like Twitter seem increasingly willing to entertain aren't an affront to free speech, but rather a clear system of consequences to violating the rules its users opt in to. If we're going to live in a corporate internet, we can insist that platforms keep up with what we want from them.

Don't Host the Comments

Comments are bad, all of them. They are peep shows of morbid curiosity at best, and magnets for the most pompous type of ideological grandstanding at worst.

If you scroll to the bottom of this article, you are likely to find two types of comments: (a) those you already completely agree with; and (b) those you would absolutely never agree with. They're relics from a time when there was a genuine lack of places someone could publicly publish an opinion on the news of the day. That isn't the case anymore.

Canada's public broadcaster closed out 2015 by announcing it would disable comments on articles about Indigenous people, which had for years attracted only the worst types of colonial backwash. In the US, major publishers like Bloomberg, The Verge, and VICE's very own Motherboard all dropped their comments sections last year.

If someone feels a need to add comment—constructive or otherwise—to an article on your website, they have adequate means to do so across thousands of public channels. "Don't read the comments" was 2014. In 2016, more publishers will choose not to host them.

Stop Being Such a Fucking Jerk

We get it. You're callous. You're brash. You take no prisoners. You understand evolution and free markets and Serena Williams' sinister agenda better than anyone. You've memorized all the most scathing Richard Dawkins quotes, and what you've read about ExxonMobil would throw people into open revolt if they only knew.

You're a rationalist: people should be able to explain anything they say using the square equivalencies of Reason, anytime you ask them to, regardless of whether they're busy, or don't know you, or just don't want to. It's all about a free exchange of ideas, can't everyone just realize that?

After all, you're just asking questions. Like seven of them, one after the other. Maybe the last one was less a question and more a suggestion that that person who tweeted about salted vs. unsalted butter is a dumb bitch who probably doesn't even like butter. All you wanted was for them to acknowledge that unsalted butter is clearly more versatile because you can always just add salt to it. It's just logical: but they couldn't confront the truth.

You're no hero. You're just acting out an age-old performance of power, maybe one you feel less and less comfortable doing out in the world these days. Those tiny cracks the Social Justice Warriors and PC Police keep carving into patriarchy and white supremacy seem like chasms from where you sit, jagged expanding holes in the way the world is, or was, or should be.

The internet of 2015, like the internet you're reading this on today, carried all the same awfulness and injustice that persists offline, except instantly searchable and pinging you 24/7.

But you need to use it. To work, to communicate, to lulz, to connect.

Maybe all you can really do to wade through it are the same things you've learned to do offline: keep networks that you trust, pick fights that are worth your time and try to sidestep those that aren't. Do what you have to do to feel safe, support others when they don't, and keep chipping away at the structures that make any of this necessary at all.

2016, as ever.

Follow Seb FoxAllen on Twitter.

Security footage of the suspect. Photo via Fairfax County Police Department's news blog

Read: I Spent 20 Hours Inside a Walmart

It is, apparently, not difficult to steal from Walmart. The store's cameras have a reputation for being duds, their attempt to use fancy face recognition technology to detect repeat shoplifters failed, and there are countless threads on shoplifting forums devoted to the art of stealing from there, with easy-to-follow tips like "get in and get out as quickly as possible" and to keep a lookout for any loss prevention employees on your trail.

But that's so boring, you know? What's the point of pulling off a heist if you can't have a little fun?

Take note, then, of the man in Fairfax, Virginia, who stole straight from the Walmart cash register by pretending to be a store employee.

Based on security footage from the store, it seems this man entered the premises wearing a Walmart employee vest, approached one of the cashiers, and told him he needed to be see in the office. Once the cashier left, the man took over for him, proceeding to check out a customer before calmly unloading the money in the register's box and walking away with it.

This simple plan was so successful that not only did the man leave the store undetected, cash in hand, but police didn't release details about what happened until yesterday, over three weeks after the incident, which occurred on the afternoon of December 15.

According to employees who have worked in Walmart's loss prevention department, the stores hire employees to patrol the aisles in street clothes looking for shoplifters, which is less conspicuous and more reliable than security camera footage. But even with those investments in loss prevention, theft is a big problem for the company: Last year, Walmart's head of US operations Greg Foran named theft an "urgent" issue at the stores, representing roughly $3 billion lost every year.

The Fairfax County police believe this guy has stolen from other Walmart stores, in Maryland and nearby Farmville, Virginia, but they don't know much else about him. What we do know, of course, is that he's destined to become a Walmart shoplifting legend.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Last week, police in Pennsylvania pulled over a car carrying three men and apparently $2 million worth of weed. Among the 247 pounds of pot and $11,000 in cash in the vehicle, investigators also found a law enforcement badge and service weapon belonging to California Sheriff's deputy Christopher Heath, one of the men arrested and a frequent drug investigator in Northern California. Now Heath's bosses have to figure out if the drug cases he led on their behalf will hold up in court given that one of their investigators has been outed as a corrupt cop.

Given how much money's at stake in the drug game, the fact that police can be swayed to join the distributors they usually bust isn't all that surprising. Yet police corruption in the drug war is often depicted by the media as a foreign phenomenon, consigned to countries with notoriously powerful cartels such as Mexico or Colombia—despite decades of high-profile examples of US authorities breaking bad, too.

On one hand, the corruption of drug-law enforcers seems almost unavoidable as long as drugs continue to garner generous black-market premiums, keeping profit margins high in a futile campaign that's failed to reduce use. However, others in the law enforcement and criminology sectors still think we have some options to ensure cops are staying on the straight and narrow in their enforcement of drug laws. VICE spoke with Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic, professor at Michigan State's school of criminal justice and author of several books and many studies on police integrity. She offers some perspective on what tools are available to drug enforcement agencies to better police their own.

VICE: How prevalent are incidences of corruption in drug law enforcement, like this recent example?
Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovic: A simple answer is that we don't know. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper discussing why this is the case. In a nutshell, we do not have the nationwide database that would measure the level of actual police corruption. We do have some data sources, but the answers they would provide are limited.

Given the often invisible nature of police corruption in the drug war, would you say that it's likely that it's more common than the public is aware?
Criminological research teaches us that, for various reasons, there is more actual crime (measured, for example, through victimization rates) than what is officially recorded (measured through crimes known to the police or crimes cleared by arrests). How large these dark numbers are depends on a host of factors, including the nature of the crime; for example, rape and domestic violence cases have larger dark numbers than robbery or burglary. Using the same logic, we can reasonably expect that there are more actual cases of police corruption than what has been recorded in the official statistics.

However, we have to be careful with our interpretations here, because public perceptions and the level of actual crime may not necessarily match. For example, in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident, public opinion polls demonstrated that the public thought that incidents like that occurred frequently across the country. On the other hand, criminological research—based on surveys of representative samples of the US population—has documented that, compared to the overall number of contacts with the public, police officers use force and excessive force very infrequently.

What sorts of oversight and policy tools exist to combat corruption of drug enforcement agents? How effective are they at deterring corruption?
The answer is highly dependent upon a specific police agency. In a country with a highly decentralized police system, composed of about 18,500 different police agencies, police officers in one police agency may experience quite a different control system from the police officers in a police agency down the road or across the country.

Control mechanisms could be internal, such as training, early warning system, reactive investigation; external, like prosecutors, courts, media; and mixed, such as citizen review. I discuss this in detail in my book and a recent book chapter.

If we use the citizen reviews as an example, Walker's study found that the effectiveness of the citizen reviews is highly dependent upon a number of factors, such the type of the review, the powers given to them, the ability and education of the personnel, etc. He found auditors to be more effective in leading a long-term change than any other class of citizen reviews.

With recently publicized cases of questionable uses of force by police officers, citizen oversight of police is being called for more widely. But in regard to drug enforcement, it's difficult to imagine how citizen review could deter drug enforcement corruption, as the nature of it is very secretive compared to a public use of force. How do you think citizen oversight could deter drug war corruption?
When people think about citizen reviews (CRs), they typically think about an independent group of citizens sitting as a citizen review board and investigating individual cases of police misconduct [Class I in Walker's classification]. However, Walker argues that the most effective type of CRs are not Class I CRs, but Class IV—auditors. Auditors work as agencies with the director.

There are examples of effective auditors, such as the San Jose Independent Police Auditor and the Special Counsel to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. From the corruption standpoint, auditors have the capacity to audit police operations and expect documents such as the use of force reports or evidence seizure and custody forms. They also engage in policy review and can identify problems, make recommendations, and monitor their implementation. This way, monitors can identify management difficulties, problems with supervision, inappropriate training; all of which can all be related to police corruption. Walker and Archbold have several examples of how these two auditors changed their police departments in their book.

In this most recent case of a California deputy sheriff being caught smuggling marijuana to Pennsylvania, it appears that while a reactive investigation was pursued, this officer is likely involved in previous undetected acts of corruption and cases he worked may be compromised. How could preventative internal controls be implemented to deter corruption like this from taking place earlier?There are several internal controls that could be put in place to prevent corruption, from establishing the official rules and enforcing them, providing integrity training to police officers, creating the police culture of integrity (one which does not support serious corruption), to strengthening supervision and employing proactive investigative mechanisms. Each of these is described in my book. The most recent tool in the arsenal is the early warning system that many police agencies across the country have been implementing.

Could you tell me more about the 'early warning systems'? How do they function and how could they specifically prevent drug enforcement corruption?
Early warning systems (EWS) or early intervention systems are computer systems which allow police supervisors and managers to identify potential problem officers and address these problems before they escalate. They are expected to "catch" them early. Therefore, these EWS are not part of the official disciplinary system.

Information entered into the system could include use of force incidents, complaints, traffic accidents, and other indicators. Some systems use very few indicators, while others rely on a much larger number. Once the red flag is raised, intervention occurs. It may involve counseling, retraining, or other measures. After the intervention, the officer is monitored for a certain period of time (typically six months to two years).

The Department of Justice recommended the use of EWS in their "Principles for Promoting Police Integrity" in 2001. They have been introduced under different names, like the Personnel Performance Index in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, the Personnel Assessment System in the Phoenix PD, and the Risk Management System in Cincinnati.

The primary incentive for corruption of drug enforcement agents appears to be financial, given how lucrative illicit drugs are. Wouldn't legalizing and regulating drugs such as marijuana greatly diminish any financial incentive for corruption, just as it would discourage many black market dealers due to lack of profit?
Please note that I am not taking a stance for or against the legalization of marijuana. From the economic standpoint, eliminating opportunities for corruption works well as a tool in corruption control. The independent commissions investigating allegations of police corruption in the 1970s reported about the opportunities for police corruption created by the enforcement of "problematic" laws. While police officers in New York were once in charge of enforcing "problematic" laws (gambling, construction), the laws were changed in the aftermath of the Knapp Commission and these illegal opportunities ceased to exist. However, as the case of the NYPD illustrates, unless new opportunities for corruption are monitored and the changes affecting opportunities for corruption are made on a continuous basis, police officers with high levels of propensity for corruption will find alternative new ways of obtaining illegal gain.

What do you think cases like the California deputy sheriff say about the drug war at large? What lessons do you think police leaders and policymakers should be gleaning from these cases?
One of the key lessons is that police integrity does not come as given. The work addressing police misconduct in general and police corruption in particular should be continuous, rather than sporadic.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Bill Kilby on Twitter.

'Call of Duty: Black Ops III' sold more copies in 2015 than albums by Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith

Revenues across the British (home) entertainment media, encompassing music, movies and video games, totalled £6.1 billion ($8.9 billion) in 2015, according to figures published by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA). That's an all-time high figure, surpassing the previous year best of 2004's £6.04 billion ($8.8 billion)—impressive indeed given how hard it can be for consumers in some towns to even get to a record store.

Sales of music on vinyl rose by 65 percent, but still only account for 6 percent of the total album market—that so-called revival is evident, then, but its impact on the bigger picture remains minimal. Compact disc sales were higher than they've been in over a decade, no doubt helped by the phenomenal physical-formats success of Adele's 25, which is the biggest entertainment "product" of 2015, selling 2.6 million copies against FIFA 16's 2.5 million and a bit. Interestingly, sales of download albums are on the wane, down 13 percent on the year before, indicative of a continuing move from ownership of digital music to streaming services.

But while Britain's best-selling video game couldn't come out on top of the overall pile, gaming's slice of the revenue pie was by far the biggest—and the ERA doesn't even have all of the sales data. Games sales, based on figures provided by GfK Chart-Track, amounted to £2.8 billion ($4.08) billion) against music sales of "just" £1 billion ($1.46 billion).

The problem here, such as it is, is that the games industry is notoriously awful at tracking its sales data, and the "official" charts never factor in all of the many thousands of weekly digital downloads. (VICE Gaming contributor Ian Dransfield wrote a piece on this for Kotaku UK, which you should read.) With PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, the Nintendo eShop, and Steam choosing not to share their download stats, the actual sales figures for games in 2015 will be significantly higher than what the ERA is able to confirm. In a nutshell, gaming is massive, and if you didn't realize that already: Hey, welcome to the biggest entertainment medium on the planet. They're alright, these video game things, you know.

What the ERA has done is produce a top ten of 2015 entertainment products, ranked by sales figures. Five games feature in the chart: FIFA 16 at number two with over 2.5 million sales; Call of Duty: Black Ops III at three with a tickle under two million; Fallout 4 at five (1.12 million); Star Wars: Battlefront at eight (just over a million); and Grand Theft Auto V at ten (just under a million). That's Grand Theft Auto V, a game that came out in 2013, selling better in 2015 than movies like Fifty Shades of Grey and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Not bad, games, not bad.

Read more articles on video gaming on VICE, here, and follow us on Twitter at @VICEGaming

The federal 'supermax' prison ADX Florence in Colorado. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

Not many people ever make it out of the ADX.

Officially called the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence—and colloquially known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies"—the ADX is the highest-security federal prison in the country, located in the Colorado mountains. It houses some of the more notorious inmates in recent American history, from Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols to Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who became a Soviet spy. Inmates at the ADX are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and because of their crimes, many are never released.

But Travis Dusenbury, a 46-year-old from Lexington, North Carolina, who was locked up at the ADX for ten years, made it out. And he has much to say about the prison and the famous people he says he met there, including the "Unabomber" and the "shoe bomber."

Dusenbury, a self-described "righteous black power type," first went to prison at the age of 16 for aggravated assault. He has been in and out ever since, for everything from inciting riots to gun charges. In 2005, he was doing time in a federal prison in Florida when he assaulted a prison guard who, he said, had been bullying black and Latino inmates. That got him sent to the ADX as a behavioral risk, where he remained until January of last year.

Dusenbury spoke with us about what life is like inside the most isolated, rarely glimpsed prison in the United States.

What was your first impression of ADX Florence when you arrived there?
Travis Dusenbury: It wasn't like any of the prisons I'd been to, and I've been to a lot of prisons. I've been locked up in some isolated, rural places, but at least at those places I could always see a highway, see the sky.

Travis Dusenbury in an undated photo taken at ADX

But at the ADX, you can't see nothing, not a highway out in the distance, not the sky. You know the minute you get there you won't see any of that, not for years and years.

You're just shut off the world. You feel it. It sinks in, this dread feeling.

What did the place look like—the cell you lived in, the bed you slept on?
It's just the harshest place you've ever seen. Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere.

My cell was all concrete. Every single thing, made out of concrete. The walls, floor, the desk, the sink, even the bed—a slab of concrete. Then you get a little fortified that's outside that you get to go walk around in for an hour a day.

It ain't no lollygagging solitary confinement like you have at some other prisons—it's 22, 23 hours in this concrete room, then one hours in this fenced-in area, and two days a week there was no rec though, and sometimes they just canceled it for no reason.

Did you ever run into any of the well-known terrorists and other criminals who are at the ADX?
Well, I never got sent to the control unit, where they keep the "worst" of them.

But I did meet Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber," on the range . He was just a fucking weird little guy—he wouldn't even go outside when he was allowed to. I didn't like him because I knew about his crime and that crime was a weird thing to do, but I guess I respected him because he was older. So I called him "Mr." and I think he really liked that. He ended up giving me an IQ test, because to him, intelligence was everything.

I also got to know Eric Rudolph . I appreciated him because he could have easily gotten cozy with the Aryan Brotherhood, but he didn't, he talked to me, talked to everybody, never said "nigger." When a black dude was banging all night in the cell next to us, he took it peacefully. He was a gentleman, and that's one thing we can all get with at the ADX.

And I ran across guys like the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, all them with terrorism charges. I'm glad Richard wasn't successful at blowing up the plane. That would have been fucked up. But I got along with them fine enough and learned about how they practiced Islam.

Wait, how did you communicate with those guys?
There was a couple . We got moved around to different units, and sometimes I was on the same unit as them. Sometimes I was the "orderly" and would go around to different cells on the unit, cleaning up. Or I could just sometimes holler loud as I could down the unit and they'd hear you and talk back.

Sometimes, also, you could take a whole toilet paper roll, put it over the drain in your sink or shower, and blow as hard as you could. That would blow the water down the pipes just far enough that the pipes were empty between you and your neighbor's cell. Then you keep holding the toilet paper roll over the drain, you talk into it, and your neighbor can hear what you're saying clearly. It depended on the cell you were in, if the pipes were lined up and all that, but you could usually contact your neighbor this way or even one more inmate down the line.

And then if your rec time happened to line up, you might be able to see them through the fence of your rec area. The closest human contact you could get was what we called "finger handshakes" through the fence.

What did you do with your days?
Wasn't much you could do—pushups, reading. You could also write, but the only pens you could get were expensive and then when you got them, they were these little floppy rubber ink pens, the length of a crayon—so that it can't be made into a . But you couldn't write with those floppy things at all.

You could listen to the radio too, but they didn't have no rap station!

The one thing I would have liked to be able to do was sleep. But I had this monstrous insomnia. I just couldn't sleep. I'd lie there all night, for ten years, not being able to sleep, and by the end I had this sleep deprivation that was absolutely monstrous. The cell just became my world and I couldn't get out of it, not even into sleep.

It's so claustrophobic in there. I know claustrophobia is a condition, but I think that place was claustrophobic. It got to the point where absolutely anything that changed, like if I saw snow falling outside, was what allowed me to survive.

Did they offer you any treatment, any psychological help?
I mean, at first, they would try to catch me sleeping, because they didn't believe me that I was an insomniac—they thought I just wanted the meds. That went on for years.

Then they gave me the meds, but they didn't care if it was the right meds. They didn't care if the meds were working. They just cared that they were giving it to me, and there was no checking on me to see if I could sleep, which I still couldn't.

And did you ever have a chance to get out of solitary?
After five years, I made it into the Step Down program—which was next to where they had a larger yard, so you could see the sky. You were with two to seven people at a time, instead of just yourself.

I'm a people person, and before long, I was hugging other inmates, and the guards were all saying, "Damn, usually motherfuckers don't want to go near other motherfuckers after they've been inside."

But at one point I got into an argument with a former comrade of mine (it boiled down to he was jealous that I was going to get out in four years and I had family waiting for me). But the guards moved us apart, and not long after that they deemed me unfit for the program, saying that I had "failed to adjust." So they sent me back to solitary after only six months in the program.

What about the staff? What kinds of interactions did you have with the guards?
Ain't no black people in rural Colorado. The staff were all white, all lower-class, and they could be more easily manipulated by white inmates than by black inmates. The white inmates could get them to bring in contraband, but the black inmates could never do that. They even sometimes called the white inmates "brother."

They couldn't stand me personally because I was a righteous OG type of cat, a righteous black power type of cat, always causing disruptions—and I wasn't in any type of gang or nothing (the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia) to back me up.

On the whole they just viewed you as less than human, there was this contemptuous look all the time. And they experimented with you by putting you next to people they knew you had violent histories with.

I think most people take it for granted that they are human, but when you get to the ADX, you realize that being human isn't a birthright.

How did the guards punish you when you broke a rule or acted out, the way you've done at other prisons?
It only happened to me three times at the ADX, and I think they did it a lot more to some other guys. But what they would do is they would send this unit that we called the Goon Squad. They'd come in with the tear gas, nightsticks, steel boots, riot gear.

When I was real angry though, I'd get in at least of few punches before my lights went out. They felt it. They knew I was there.

And then you finally got out.
Yes. On January 13 of last year, they shipped me to a medical hospital in Springfield, Missouri; then they flew me to a prison in Oklahoma; then they sent me to Terre Haute, Indiana.

By May 13, I was going home to North Carolina. I'm staying with my mom now, and I'm on the right meds and I'm finally sleeping.

And you know I heard they finally have a rap station at the ADX. That's my legacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Photo by David Marsh

Like a lot of people, I've had a lot of jobs. I've been a deckhand on P&O Ferries, a dustman, a barman, an administration robot, a security guard, tea-boy at L'Oreal, a copywriter, an editor, a social media wonk. I've had zero hour contracts, I've been freelance, and I've had a salary. None of these things have satisfied me. In a country where the average worker spends 36 days a year writing emails (Londoners receive around 9,000 emails each year), you begin to wonder what the hell work really is.

And as we trudge back to work, it seems like a worthwhile time to ask: What is the point?

Peter Fleming, professor of Business and Society at City University, has tried to answer this question in his book The Mythology of Work. When I met him in an overpriced café in east London, he told me, "The refusal of work movement isn't about laziness." In fact, he said, "it's nothing to do with doing nothing. In fact, if you want to see people doing nothing, go into a large corporation. Some of us are very lucky that our work really is a labor of love, but that's not the case most of the time."

General antipathy for work makes it all the more weird that, if you live in a metropolis like London, the one question everyone will ask when they meet you for the first time is, "What do you do?" Fleming says this is natural. "The ideology of work has demolished all of the other traditional status structures related to religion, artistic endeavor, raising family, and other status symbols within communities. After demolishing these structures we have been presented with a situation that tells us the only thing that matters is the work you do—and therefore you should revolve and center your whole life around that. It's followed the increased individualization of society, which has broken traditional communities apart."

A global survey by Gallup in 2013 broke down employees into three different categories: Engaged (13 percent), Disengaged (63 percent), and Actively Disengaged (23 percent).

Engaged workers are jobsworths, basically: "Someone who goes out of their way to make sure the organization succeeds because they see their welfare inextricably linked to the company's welfare. If they see that something can be done better they will share that information."

A disengaged worker has simply given up; they don't care: "They go from Hell One to Hell Two , backwards and forwards. They suffer 'presenteeism': turning up at 9 AM, getting their work done for the first couple of hours and then just sitting there doing nothing for the rest of the day."

If you're reading this at work, that probably sounds familiar.

The actively disengaged, meanwhile, are involved in deliberate sabotage. They "hurt the organization. They see a problem, have a solution, but choose not to offer it. They steal. They hurt those around them. There was a recent case of a city worker, a lawyer, who had put their own shit in the toilet soap dispenser at work, mixed it up with the soap and people used it without knowing. They also hurt themselves, through suicide, or self abuse."

The shitting in a soap dispenser thing is weird and reprehensible, but if you've ever stolen office equipment or are nursing a banging hangover you didn't want on a weekday, congrats: you are the 23 percent.

Peter Fleming

Fleming also talks about a sado-masochistic strain of working life he calls the "dark economy." It's a part of our culture that allows us release from the slow pain of pointless work—a kind of self-inflicted active disengagement.

"You don't see the dark economy in the official statements by politicians or economists but you see it when a banker jumps off a building. There's a reason the taxation on alcohol is the lowest here than anywhere in Europe, because it's an acceptable way to vent the exploitation process. But the dark economy is the unacceptable—domestic abuse, work-related suicides etc."

Gallup estimates that in the UK, actively disengaged employees cost the country between £52 billion a year.

The amount of time we spend at work, even if we are suffering "presenteeism," is more than ever. On top of this, many more companies are now inviting alcohol into the workplace—drinking, as it's known, "aldesko." While drinks in the office on a Friday evening might sound like your boss is just being nice, Fleming is more cynical. He thinks the blurring of work into play and non-work is dangerous. The modern manager "wants to be your friend, and they're actually nice people. It's the worst thing that you can come across. If my manager thinks I'm their friend and I can joke with them, they have created a bond with me that's inescapable. If I want to refuse an order, they will see it as a personal insult, like a friend being jilted. They can rightly say, 'mate, friends don't treat each other like that.'"

The relationship between booze and work used to be so different. Back in the 18th century, employees celebrated Saint Monday—"A customary practice of workers dropping their tools, vacating the factory and getting extremely inebriated on Monday mornings just as the work day was beginning," explains Fleming.

We used to get drunk to piss our boss off, now he encourages us to drink with him.

Related: Watch our documentary 'The Wolf of the West End'

In his book, Peter uses the term "bio-proletarianism" to explain our current position. "Bio-proletarianism refers to the way in which 'bios'—life itself—is harnessed to the economy. Zero hour contracts are a great example of this. If you're on a zero hour contract you are never unavailable. Let's say you work for an agency that provides bar staff—you think you're working at a bar tonight and you're getting ready, you've paid for your own clothes—then the manager calls in and says, 'we don't need you any more' and you don't work. But you are always poised to work, even when you aren't working. Life itself has become a mode of continuous working or always being ready to work."

So what are we supposed to do? How do I resist work? Fleming writes about a time he got flu and turned that into a relief week from work. We are told work is "good for us," but it is in fact the opposite— sitting is the new smoking.

"The problem of resistance," Peter says, "has been stymied by the economization of the work force. In order to economize, you individualize. You put everyone on individual contracts, self-employed. For example, it was reported in 2013 that 70 percent of Ryanair pilots are self-employed—they have to pay for their uniforms and stopover hotels. We need to re-collectivize and rediscover the power of labour."

Fleming proposes some grand, sweeping ideas to think about: a surplus living wage, nationalized industries, a three-day working week, and de-fetishizing work.

But firstly he wants us to understand what is wrong, why we are working so much, and to engage with other people in the same position. "Historically, societies that insisted people work more than three days a week were usually slave societies. We do not need to work more than 20 hours a week."

Now there's a thought.

Follow Kit Caless on Twitter.

The Mythology of Work is out now in paperback from Pluto Books.

Paul LePage at a town hall meeting in October. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

Read: This New England Town Is Trying to Help Opioid Users Instead of Arresting Them

Maine Governor Paul LePage is no stranger to controversy, which is a nice way of saying he can be a bit of an asshole sometimes. The Republican and Tea Party favorite has said that a state Democratic politician "claims to be for the people but he's the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline," joked about blowing up a Maine newspaper, and called the IRS "the new Gestapo." He also got caught on tape talking about how he might like to punch a reporter, and, while touting the safety of BPA, a chemical found in lots of plastic products that scientists claim is dangerous, said that "the worst case is some women may have little beards."

So on one hand, it's not exactly surprising that the Portland Press Herald reported Thursday night that LePage got caught saying some rather nasty and racially-tinged things about drug dealers at a town hall meeting a night earlier. On the other hand, hoo boy:

"These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty—these types of guys—they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home," LePage told a large crowd. "Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road."

New England has been grappling with the problem of heroin being imported into the region for some time, but worrying about presumably black dealers with comical nicknames descending on Maine's "young white girls" and putting a baby in them struck many as bizarre and gross. Hillary Clinton's campaign called LePage's remarks a "racist rant" in a statement, and the Press Herald reported that the Democratic National Committee was calling on Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie, a LePage ally, to denounce him for his "racist comments and his world view."

LePage's communications director has said that "the Governor is not making comments about race," and LePage is holding a press conference Friday morning where he'll presumably clarify that he wants to protect Maine's white girls against drug dealers of all races, creeds, and nicknames.

UPDATE: At the press conference, LePage apologized, saying, "I was going impromptu, and my brain didn't catch up to my mouth. Instead of 'Maine women,' I said 'white women.'" He also took a swipe at the reporters who showed up: "I probably couldn't get so many of you here without saying something foolish."

Ilustration by Sam Taylor

Crazy hours. Chasing dollars. Constantly laying yourself open for strangers. Freelance journalism is pretty similar to prostitution, and I should know—I've had better careers than you in both. I start every article I write about sex work by outing myself as a former pro because there are so few people in the media with firsthand job experience of the issue. See what I did there? It was a joke about handjobs. Because I used to do them. For money. When I was a prostitute. Anyway, I've asked some current sex workers how the game could be improved. Obviously, I was hoping to interview a real expert on the matter—someone like Lena Dunham, or Emma Thompson, perhaps, but they were busy.

LISTEN TO SEX WORKERS

I've been drinking in Laura Lee's Dublin tones for half an hour. Even over the phone, she's a tour de force. "I was at this debate about sex work a few years ago in Glasgow and sitting there listening to the lies they were putting out." She was incensed. "I thought, 'You're speaking a load of drivel that has nothing to do with my life or any of the women I've worked with.'" A sex workers' rights activist was born. This is an increasingly vocal community of campaigners.

Over the last year Molly Smith—a pseudonym—has pushed for sex work to be decriminalized in Scotland. "One of the things I find striking about this debate is that the other side don't seem very interested in acknowledging how the laws they're proposing harm and criminalize sex workers." The "other side" would like to see laws like those in Sweden and Norway, but as Smith points out, "People who sell sex there are still criminalized for working together and migrant sex workers are deported. It's not a feminist utopia." Compare this with New Zealand. Prostitution is legal there, and sex workers say they feel safer at work and have better relations with the police. Last year was the first case of a sex worker in New Zealand taking forward a case against her employer under labor laws and winning.

"You have people with broad platforms using those platforms to call for harmful laws," says Lee, "but they need to speak to the people those laws affect." Last year a bunch of actors, including Dunham, Thompson, and many more well-meaning and well-to-do ladies, urged Amnesty International to oppose decriminalization of sex work. Amnesty came out in support of legalization based on two years of intense research and listening to sex workers around the world. "We have a phrase in sex work activism," says Lee, "'Nothing about us without us.'" It's a phrase I hear transgender activists use a lot, too.

"There's a certain type of feminist," says Smith, "who has a 1970s-ish understanding of what womanhood is, that seems to have this profound and irrational hatred of sex workers and trans women." I suspect they see both matters as things that people "do"—and if only they could only campaign hard enough, people would stop having sex for money or sex changes and all the other naughty things that upset the fancy ladies of White Feminism. They are modern day missionaries, white-gloved and disapproving, here to save everyone by, um, trying to stop us doing things with our own bodies.

Lee is more diplomatic. "I have no doubt that some of them have good intentions at heart, but at best they are very ill-informed." Do they really believe they can end the oldest profession going? "There's never been a society without prostitution," says Lee, "and there never will be either. For me it's about how we manage the most vulnerable people." Of course there are vulnerable people working in the sex industry. Just as there vulnerable people in showbiz. And banking. And politics. "You're not protecting them by taking away their income," Lee adds. "What you need to do is give them safety in the workplace."

Related: Watch 'The Digital Love Industry'

LEGALIZE SEX WORK

Lee is challenging Northern Ireland's sex work laws through the courts next month. It's the only occupation in which UK law compels people to work on their own, and she says that sends a message to would-be attackers that "we're vulnerable, we're alone, we probably carry cash, and we're highly unlikely to report it to the police," though she insists the industry isn't inherently dangerous. "It's the conditions in which we're forced to work that are dangerous." Every sex worker-led organization that I speak to agrees.

Soliciting laws criminalize people who work on the streets, but rather than end streetwalking, Lee says they just make the job more dangerous. "When the tolerance zone was removed in Edinburgh, the number of assaults against sex workers shot up by 95 percent. The police pulled back from patrolling the area whereas before they were there to protect the girls. Now they were there mainly to nab clients, if they were there at all. It happened in Dublin in 1993 as well. Violence against sex workers sky rocketed because clients knew they could get away with it."

Smith adds: "When you criminalize curb-crawling, the client is jumpy and saying 'Get into my car quickly. We'll have a conversation about services and prices and condom when we drive off, because I don't want the police seeing you leaning in.' So sex workers, who've got to pay their rent like everyone else, have to acquiesce." She also points out that, conversely, soliciting laws actually prevent people from leaving sex work. "If you have a criminal record for soliciting, that makes getting another job much harder." Hard as a fucking dick, I'm guessing.

Many anti-sex work feminists say they merely wish to target clients and end demand—as though this would happen in a vacuum. In reality, it just makes sex workers desperate. As Smith says, it's all very well being told "Amazing, no more clients! Patriarchy's over!" but what about when your rent is due and you haven't seen a john all week? "If someone calls you up and says 'Hi luv, I see you're advertising sex for $100. I have $60 and was wondering if I could get oral without ?' you have less power to say, 'Fuck off. I don't want to negotiate my prices or condom use.'" And you should always have power to tell someone to fuck off. It's a basic human right as far as I'm concerned.

Then there are the brothel laws, which criminalize two or more people working together. "You're always in danger of having the police turning up to raid the flat and arrest you," says Smith, "and you will each be prosecuted for brothel keeping the other." Um. OK. What's the most legal way to do it? "Work alone and advertise online." I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty risky to me. "Even then you're subject to stuff like anti-pimping laws," says Smith. "So if your landlord knows you're a sex worker, he can be done for pimping. That puts people like me in the vulnerable position of possibly being evicted at very short notice."

STOP CONFUSING SEX WORK WITH TRAFFICKING

I'm tired of the anti-sex work lobby saying sex work when they mean trafficking. Tired as a hot whore, frankly. Do they even understand the difference? Seriously. Choosing to do sex work is not the same as being forced into it—in the same way that sex is not rape and a cleaning job isn't slavery. Hello, anti-sex work lobby—there's this thing called "consent." Which feminism is supposed to take seriously? Lee agrees that conflation of sex work and trafficking is a common red herring in the debate. "I constantly see horrendous statistics trotted out in the press that simply aren't true. The women I know working throughout the UK and Ireland, to refer to them in any way as coerced, or trafficked, or even feeble-minded is just hysterical. Sex workers are some of the strongest people you will ever meet. Because we have to be."

FINISHING OFF

Researching this article, I spoke to lots of working girls, and they all agreed that making sex work legal is the thing that would improve their lives most in 2016. Apart from Fiona, bless her. She just wants bigger tits. Having listened to everything these women have to say, I can't help but see the "sex work debate" as just yet another waste of time. Like the "war on drugs" or the "climate change debate" there isn't really anything to discuss—the evidence is undeniable. But the arguments just carry on and on, endlessly, like a client that never comes. And it's depressing. Because of course we should decriminalize sex work. So of course we probably won't. Because some people are fucking idiots.

And all the smart people are fucking for money.

Follow Paris on Twitter.

Photos by Michelle Groskopf

In the last days of 2015, I became obsessed with Matt McGorry. He's the actor who plays a fratty, bonehead law student in How to Get Away with Murder as well as the fratty, bonehead prison guard in Orange Is the New Black. I didn't start to fixating on him because of his acting, it was because of how he carried himself on the internet. While none of us were looking, Matt McGorry became woke. Which is to say, it seemed like he did everything in his power to show the world that he was politically active, self-aware, and enlightened in the ways of helping others. He posted Instagrams of himself doing yoga. He protested censorship of female nudity by posting shirtless selfies with other nipples covering his own. On Christmas, he retweeted his followers who tweeted selfies of themselves holding their own copies of The New Jim Crow. The other night, he tweeted, "Thanks for letting me make your hotlines bling to talk about equality schtuff."

On one level, no matter how much of a goofball this stuff makes McGorry seem, this is a good thing. He's using his platform as a celebrity to convince people it's cool to care about social justice. Unfortunately, his social media posturing also sparked a good chunk of laudatory coverage. Unfortunately, the media chose to focus more on McGorry's celebrity than the complexities of his causes. Yes, McGorry was woke, but more importantly, he was bae, which is to say that people were super amped that he was a hot white dude who was super amped about equality.

It was everything that is annoying about the "social justice internet"—the posing, the posturing, the self-policing to make sure all the signifiers match up to form the correct projection of equality-mindedness (never mind that McGorry tweeted "#NoHomo" after appearing at a pride parade in 2014). I began tweeting incessantly about McGorry, mocking the way in which he was lionized by media outlets and spoofing the self-serious way in which he presented himself online, which often came across as him saying, "Hey, praise me for being a hot rich straight white dude who gives a shit about the shit non-hot-rich-straight-white-dudes are forced to give a shit about because they're some combination of not hot, not rich, not straight, not white, or not a dude!" To make a long story short, McGorry ended up blocking me on Twitter after I posted a picture of myself holding a picture of him holding The New Jim Crow. But because of this, I began thinking about how we, specifically men, presented ourselves in the world in 2015.

Instead of swingin' our dicks around with a complete disregard for other humans, last year we really examined what we were doing and why we were doing it. And yet, despite the glut of seemingly well-meaning men everywhere, it often felt like we didn't get any closer to making the world a better place.

Last year was fraught with these contradictions. We were, as Wesley Morris pointed out in the New York Times, obsessed with identity, at a time when identity became harder and harder to pin down. Similarly, we flocked to men who projected and owned their identity, whether that was "sensitive fuckboy," "male feminist," or "rich blowhard." So now, my hypothetical male reader, here's some advice for how to achieve the most important identity for a man to have in 2016: non-asshole.

Prepare to Get the Hell Out of the Way

OK, so the thing about being a dude is we've been in charge of shit forever. As the icy grip of the patriarchy loosens, some of that power will go away. This is good, and it is fine, and as a man you just have to accept it. Fewer men will hold high-level positions on corporate boards and in government, fewer men will be writing bestselling novels, and fewer men will end up writing articles for VICE about how to be a better man in 2016. All of this stuff will still happen, it's just that women will be doing said stuff instead of men. The key here, as a man, is not to get mad or complain that men's rights are being crushed. Instead, you should understand that the mediocre dudes who have ridden their dicks straight to undue success will largely be cut out of their positions of influence and power. If you end up being one of those dudes, that sucks. I will also probably be one of those dudes. I'm sure we will all find new stuff to do that we are good at.

Stop Trying to Act Macho

Undue machismo has plunged humanity into countless unnecessary wars, it made #gamergate a thing, and it probably helped keep the Beatles off of Spotify until a few weeks ago. 2015's ultimate avatar for everything unnecessarily dudely was the human 8chan thread Donald Trump, who transitioned from building an endless series of phallic skyscrapers into a second career as an neo-brinksman who might might end up becoming the leader of the free world. He wants to build a wall around America, has threatened to "hit so hard your head would spin," and during the seemingly endless series of Republican debates, he's done everything but push-ups onstage while calling Jeb Bush a pussified bitch-boy. He is a sentient nuclear arms crisis shrouded in expensively generic suits and insane-looking cotton candy hair.

Look around. Do you see rocks and caves and saber-tooth tigers everywhere? No! You see smartphones and cars and billboards and shit. Every day, you survive without spearing mammoths for food, and there's no point in trying to bop your enemies over the head with a rock because if you do, you'll just end up going to jail and your enemies will probably laugh at you. So stop acting like a fucking caveman.

Stop Living in the Past

Last year, we were bombarded with remakes, reboots, and retreads. All of them took pains to excuse their own sense of cynical retreading by pointing it out before critics—or even worse, audiences—could. With Creed, whoever's in charge of the Rocky movies realized they could essentially remake Rocky and keep Sylvester Stallone in it, giving Hollywood's new golden boy Michael B. Jordan his own can't-lose franchise. J. Cole's album 2014 Forest Hills Drive (which was technically released in December 2014, but went Platinum in 2015) was hailed as a classic by many hip-hop fans, simply because J. Cole took pains to load the album with signifiers that tied it to beloved rap records of yore. When Kobe Bryant decided to declare his retirement from the NBA, he did so by essentially rewriting Michael Jordan's farewell letter to basketball. But the most celebrated of 2015's crop of huge payoffs on incredibly safe bets was Star Wars: The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams's stab at a Star Wars film that shied away from the wonkery of George Lucas's prequels while serving as a combination A New Hope remake/intravenous nostalgia drip. The movie featured the same arcs, hit the same beats, and found familiar characters having spectacular adventures in familiar environments.

If you're a dude looking into 2016, you can learn from all of this unoriginality. Whether it's thinking about the clothes you're putting on or trying to write a book or trying to open an artisanal woodworking shop, remember that what made your forebears great is that they didn't try to carefully place themselves on the continuum of someone else's history, they were creating their own continuums.

Stop Talking and Just Be Yourself

In 2015, we tended to conflate dudes talking with dudes actually doing stuff. Drake won his beef with Meek Mill by making two songs declaring he had won, rather than actually shitting on Meek's character or addressing Meek's accusations that he employed ghostwriters or that some guy had peed on him in a movie theater, and we fucking loved it. Justin Bieber, who went from the next Justin Timberlake to tabloid whipping boy in 2014, told us he was sorry for all the bucket-pissing, monkey-having, and weed-smoking-with-his-dad-on-an-airplane-ing not by actively changing his behavior, but by making a song called "Sorry." And guess what? We fucking loved that too!

And then there was male feminism, which reared its ugly head in the form of men like our already-noted Man of the Year* Matt McGorry. By talking and talking and talking about the stain of the patriarchy and manspreading and self-policing and whatever else, guys managed to make feminism about themselves and inadvertently drown out women who have been trying to talk for, like, ever. Or even worse, there was the trend boy, who Broadly's Monica Heisey describes as a man who self-identifies as "a proud male feminist, or 'more of a humanist,' or appears legitimately invested in fighting misogyny. The trend boy adopts or ignores these beliefs as he pleases."

Perhaps the ultimate trend boy of last year was James Deen, whose veneer of Good Guy Male Feminist Porn Star was undermined by multiple accusations that he was a consent-flouting asshole. Or Bill Cosby, whose scolding of Black America felt hollow in light of the fact that literally dozens of women have accused him of sexual assault.

Now, I'm not saying that male feminists and trend boys are all horrible criminals or have made it so dudes shouldn't be feminists, but I am definitely saying that to be an effective feminist, dudes should shut the fuck up about how feminist they are and instead just not do or say terrible things to and about women.

Meanwhile, men who were less interested in talking and more interested in simply doing have already started winning big this year. Jaden Smith has started modeling for Louis Vuitton's women's line without offering a corresponding polemic on what it "means" that the greater implications of one of the most famous young men in the world is now wearing dresses. He just did it. That is extremely chill.

Stay the Hell off Social Media

Social media often creates an opportunity to project a second self. Appearing authentic on it can require a good bit of fakeness, which is probably why anyone I've ever met who is good at Twitter is also insane IRL. Look, I know how much fun it is to think a thought and then type it into Twitter and have like 15 people immediately hit you with responses, retweets, and likes, or how much fun it is to post a picture of your outfit on Instagram and obsessively check to see how many people commented on how sick you look. Each of those little interactions you receive after putting your content out in the world are little reminders that you did something that mattered, in some way, to someone.

But just like a couple semi-innocent early-evening key bumps can lead to you desperately texting your guy at four in the morning for an eightball just so you can keep the party going, too much social media can lead to, well, even more social media. In fact, a 2012 study by Chinese academics found that for your brain, internet addiction is functionally the same as a regular-ass addiction. This can have actual, fundamental changes on your behavior: getting interactions on social media gives your brain a little hit of dopamine, the chemical in your brain that tells you that you're receiving pleasure. When that little hit dies, a really great way to get more of it is to do some more shit on social media and wait for some more interactions. In this way, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the like incentivize seeking the validation of others and might even influence you to start thinking, doing, and saying stuff because you know people will like it online. That can severely screw with your brain and how you behave, and cause you to distrust your own instincts. It's fine to lob a tweet or two out into the void every once and a while, but too much of it will drive you crazy.

And let's face it—the best case scenario for being super into Twitter is you end up becoming Rob Delaney, the comic whose Twitter fame outstripped his stand-up fame and is now just some famous Twitter guy who happens to do comedy. The worst case scenario is you end up undermining your own career by revealing that you're secretly a horrible person like James Woods or Cee-Lo.

Seriously, Change Comes from Within

I guess the point of all of this is that words should be backed up by deeds, which should be backed up by intent, and in 2015, dudes did too much talking and doing that didn't actually help anyone other than themselves.

Look, everyone likes to think they're a good person. It's just that most people's version of being a good person begins and ends at making sure they do stuff that will make other people happy. If you only do and say things to elicit a good reaction in others, that's stupid and duplicitous, and sooner or later, people will realize you're full of shit, or at least acting good for the wrong reasons. Being an actual good person means genuinely caring about others and treating them with respect and dignity, and doing that stuff should make you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. Figuring out how to change yourself for the better is a lifelong struggle, so if in the process of trying to be a better person, you do or say the wrong thing, or inadvertently act like some shithead asshole, that's fine! As a man, it's OK to make mistakes or say the wrong thing, as long as you're dedicated to learning from that stuff. And if you're correcting the inputs—trying to have more just attitudes, thoughts, and ideas that consider the fact that there are other people who live in this universe of ours—it'll be a hell of a lot easier to produce more desired outputs.

*Please note that Matt McGorry is not actually the Man of the Year; the Man of the Year was Nathan Fielder, or, like, Jidenna.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Police officers patrol in front of the main station of Cologne, Germany, on Wednesday. AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Ever since New Year's Eve, German media have largely been discussing the violence at Cologne's central train station in terms of a rape culture that was imported into Germany—simply because the perpetrators in this case looked "Arab" or "North African," according to witnesses. The only point being, of course, that the men weren't white.

That's an idea that renders sexualized violence and theft harmless by trivializing and exorcizing both notions. The fact that our society and its institutions aren't in any position to protect those affected by the violence and identify its culprits doesn't in any way mean that there's never been sexualized violence in Germany before. In fact, Germany's rape culture is deeply rooted in our collective psyche.

Sexual assaults and even rape happen every year at big events like Oktoberfest. "The way to the toilet alone is like running the gauntlet: within 50 feet, you can be sure to tally three hugs from drunken strangers, two pats on the ass, someone looking up your dirndl, and some beer purposely splashed right down your cleavage," wrote Karoline Beisel and Beate Wild in 2011, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. An average of ten reported rapes take place each year at Oktoberfest. The estimated number of unreported cases is 200.

A 2004 study on the living conditions, security, and health of women in Germany, showed that 13 percent of German women have experienced a form of criminal sexualized violence. The scandal is that only 8 percent of these women filed a complaint with the police. If you include multiple complaints, then the figure decreases to 5 percent. That means that an incredible 95 percent of women in Germany who experience sexual violence don't report it to the police.

According to German law, in order to get a conviction for sexual assault, the victim must prove that they resisted the violence.

Yet the media would still rather talk at length about false accusations, even if they are rare. Depending on the statistics and the country, they account for between 1 and 9 percent of all reported cases—in Germany that number lies between 3 and 5 percent.

The reason behind all that is that in German law, the victim's behavior plays a big role when it comes to sexual assault. In order to get a conviction, the victim must prove that they resisted the violence. This is a completely absurd requirement, largely based on numerous myths about how sexualized violence is carried out. That's why a victim freezing in shock—a common and natural reaction to violence—often leads to the perpetrator being acquitted. Just imagine that the burden of proof for theft lay on whether the person robbed had adequately defended themselves: "Sorry Miss, you didn't hold on to your purse tight enough, it's your own fault."

Amid all this, the perpetrator's skin color or religion is irrelevant. With what happened in Cologne, we'll have to see whether those sexual assaults end up being as thoroughly investigated as the property theft that occurred simultaneously. To date, 90 women have filed complaints according to Zeit Online, with 75 percent of them concerning sexual offenses. Two of them are rape cases.

Nobody's denying that people with immigrant backgrounds or of the Muslim faith are also guilty of committing sex crimes. But to act as if their cultural background has "programmed" them to do so, while making all sorts of excuses and downplaying the crimes of white Germans, will always be racist rabble-rousing.

The clearest thing to come out of the debate around what happened in Cologne as of yet is that Germany has a sexism issue and a racism issue. Both are deep-rooted and were not "imported." It's our responsibility as a society to move towards a culture that celebrates mutual consent and respects boundaries. And that applies to all people, because one sexual assault is one too many—no matter where it took place and who it involved.

Suzanne Lee protesting for changes in Irish abortion laws. Photo by Tyler McNally


Michelle had her abortion alone in a small apartment in Limerick, Ireland.

The 25-year-old postgraduate student waited until her flatmate had left for the weekend before swallowing the pills she'd gone to Belfast to collect earlier that week. "I didn't know her that well," she says. "I didn't know really anyone in the city. I'd just started my Masters and was pregnant after a one-night stand."



She describes taking the pills alone as one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. "I knew it would hurt but I had no idea it would be so bad," she says. "An hour or so after taking the pills I started vomiting and felt like I had the worst fever. Then the cramps started. I was trapped in my tiny bathroom. It went on for six hours. I kept feeling like I was going to pass out and wondered what would happen to me if I bled out. Who could I call? I was completely alone," she says.

Michelle is one of the thousands of Irish women who are forced to illegally order abortion pills online every year to terminate unwanted pregnancies. She could face 14 years in prison for it under Irish law, which criminalizes women who have abortions.

"I couldn't tell anyone why I was sick," she says. "I was so ashamed but now I'm just angry. I felt like an animal, like a creature the Irish state didn't recognize as human."

Like Michelle, Suzanne Lee decided to buy abortion pills online, and she also had to choose who she told carefully. The 22-year-old from Belfast was living in Dublin and couldn't afford to go to the United Kingdom for a legal abortion.

I felt like an animal, like a creature the Irish state didn't recognize as human.

"Close friends knew that I was going down the illegal route, but I guess I was worried about telling other people due to how they'd react. There's a lot of scare stories about how dangerous abortion pills are and I just didn't need the stress of having to justify what I was doing to people," she says.

A pro choice activist for several years, Suzanne took the bold step of contacting the Police Service of Northern Ireland, challenging them to prosecute her for breaking a law she describes as a "joke."

"At the time of getting and taking the pills it never really was a factor that they were illegal. I just didn't want to be pregnant anymore and I guess that's all that was on my mind. The legal implications only occurred to me when I went public and the media were concerned for my safety. At this stage I really don't think the state has the backbone to come after me, the law is just a joke," she says.

According to Wendy Lyon, a human rights lawyer based in Dublin, the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) would rather turn a blind eye to women like Suzanne and Michelle. Although Irish Customs regularly seize packages en route to the Republic, actually prosecuting women could force lawyers into a human rights quagmire.

"There's no question that anyone who takes the pill in the Republic to induce abortion is in breach of Ireland's abortion laws," she says. "Whether they're likely to be prosecuted for it is another matter. To my knowledge, no one has been. The DPP has discretion whether or not to prosecute and I suspect it would be treated as not being in the public interest to prosecute a woman for inducing her own abortion. They may be more likely to prosecute someone who assists the woman, but even then, I'm not at all sure they'd want the headache of it," she says.

Over 1,017 abortion pills were seized by Irish customs last year—an increase of over 50 percent from 2013. Yet despite reports of ominous sounding letters, no prosecutions were made.

Abortion pills are regularly seized by Irish customs officers, meaning women have to travel to Northern Ireland to get them. Photo via Wikimedia

Rebecca Gomperts set up Women on Web, a campaign group that helps women perform DIY abortions in Ireland and other countries where it is outlawed. "The Irish government have been burying their head in the sand for a very long time," she says. "Irish customs stop the packages so they don't get into Ireland, so women have to go to Northern Ireland to get them. It's terrifying to think that the government is making a big effort to stop women accessing this medicine when they clearly have no other option."



Rebecca is now taking a legal challenge against the Irish government to the European Court of Human Rights, and she wants women to join her case. "The public opinion about medical abortion has changed, there was a lot of things that were unknown but now people have a greater understanding and things are changing. It's the right time to fight," she says.

But are women risking their health performing DIY abortions at home alone? Dr. Tiernan Murray is a member of Doctors for Choice, who agrees with the World Health Organization's view that abortion pills are "very safe." He is, however, concerned that women, like Michelle and Suzanne, who take them alone, could be locked out of proper aftercare.

"The pills are very safe but with any procedure there are certain risks. If women experience severe, outside of a heavy period, pain, this needs medical attention. Very heavy bleeding or hemorrhaging are not supposed to happen, but this is extremely rare. Women should be able to have GP attention if they have any complications," he says.


There are no figures on exactly how many women take abortion pills in Ireland, but Dr. Murray says the process is very frightening.

"Women are aborting in flats in Dublin alone. No matter how much information is available on the internet, that has to be scary. Women don't know what to do and they cannot ring any medical professional safely. If you know your own GP and you know what side they're on, maybe. But lots of women can't do that as they've broken the law and are afraid to call. As long as the law stays the way it is, this is going to remain in the shadows. Is it two women a month? Twenty a month? We just don't know," he says.

Michelle, who says she's never regretted her decision, left Ireland shortly after completing her Master's degree.

"It's not the sole reason I moved, but it's one of them. The more I thought about what I had to do, it's like the women that died using clothes hangers back in the 19th century—it's barbaric and no one wants to admit it. When you're afraid you're going to bleed to death because of a procedure that makes other people in your country uncomfortable, well, that's not a country I want to be part of. Maybe it can change but it's already too late for me," she says.

Follow Norma on Twitter.

Screenshots via the game's official website

I'm a fan of the Wii U. Most people who own one are. Any stick Nintendo's console receives primarily comes from gamers who've never had one to call their own, who've never grinned from ear to ear during a mirrored Mario Kart 8 race or super-tight Splatoon match. The system has tremendous games—just not a great many of them. And its roster of platform-exclusive indie titles is smaller still. But that can be a benefit for companies who do decide to publish on the Wii U alone.

Both sci-fi puzzler Affordable Space Adventures, by Danish studio KnapNok Games, and FAST Racing Neo, by the German team of Shin'en Multimedia, enjoyed great visibility on Nintendo's digital eShop in 2015 courtesy of allying with their machine over all others. And Florida's ChudChud Industries (a.k.a. developer Cody Diefenthaler) is looking for some of that sweet, sweet exposure for its new game Temple of Yog, which appeared on the eShop in December but is looking to build momentum across 2016 with a series of staggered updates.

And just what is this new exclusive for Wii U owners, denied the wonders of recent indie hits like Ori and the Blind Forest, Undertale, and Her Story? Fitting so very perfectly with Nintendo's all-smiles, all-ages reputation, it's a tale of human sacrifice. Again: a tale of human sacrifice. At the beginning of the game some ancient evil is awoken on the other side of a mystical portal, leading to four different guilds on the Earthly side of the trans-dimensional doorway—the holy Augurs, the Cult of the Magi, the Livid Blades, and the Rogue's Nest—to band together to send a probably-not-all-that-willing "tribute" through the portal once every so many years, in return for what the game calls "boon." You can call it points, if you like; points that the player then spends on leveling up each guild.

Temple of Yog is a twin-stick-shooter roguelike—which means that you use one stick to move and the other to shoot, and the top-down-perspective, pixel-art stages are randomly generated each time you play. It looks like something that could have come out on the Amiga; it sounds like something that could have come out on the Amiga, its music reminiscent of a Bitmap Brothers production. But this being 2016, there's rather more to this title that surface impressions suggest. Indeed, it quickly becomes quite compelling.

Related: Watch VICE's film on the mystical universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Every sacrifice you send through to the other side will ultimately be cut down by any one of numerous nasties, but when they are their efforts won't have been in vain (unless you really, really suck). The boon they've collected, by killing foes and completing obelisk-given mini-quests (initially just "kill more of this enemy" demands) boosts the magic points, hit points, and shadow mode duration (more on that in a second) of the guild of your choice, all of whom have their own special abilities. So while the Augurs start out with only a weak offense, albeit with a great range, you can quickly boost their abilities and set about slaughtering giant spiders in a no time at all.

Making sense? Good, good. Then I'll continue.

Every controllable character you send to their death is given a name, and they receive a rank upon biting the dust. The lowest is "pitiful," followed by "weak," and the scale goes right up to "worthy." (Oh, Gougre the Worldy, you'll forever be my number one. Clementine the Hidden? With his eight seconds of survival, less so.) You're always aiming for "worthy" and maximum boon, but your first few attempts at pleasing this not-entirely-benevolent god-type figure are likely to be more "pitiful" than not—and that's not always because you're particularly bad at the game.

It might just be my GamePad, but I'm finding the aiming on the right stick a little stiff and inaccurate, which is an obstacle to totally clicking with a game in this genre. Collision detection feels a little ropey, too, but that'll soon be updated in a patch, one that's also going to enhance enemy AI, as right now it's too easy to pick off certain enemies—spiders, mainly—without them reacting to your ranged attacks. The patch is a free update, obviously, and comes before the game's next revision proper, its next "epoch."

See, if you play Temple of Yog today, you're playing its first epoch, the Age of Wilderness. Buy the game later, in the spring, and it'll have moved onto the second epoch, introducing more enemies, three more "ages," and online PvP play. Each update to the game—a third and fourth epoch are coming, too—expands its content; and the more content at the time of purchase, the more expensive the game becomes. So if it sounds appealing now, get it while it's at its cheapest—$6 in the States, or £4 in the UK.

Read on Motherboard: Microsoft Is Killing the Indie Store That Was Too Weird for Xbox

The USP of Temple of Yog is something that a lot of Wii U games still don't do properly, and that's make decent use of the console's twin-screen setup. On the TV you'll see the "light" world of the game, with its own layout and enemies; on the GamePad screen is the "shadow" world, where further foes await in a quite different stage pattern. Holding down the ZR button flips the two, so the shadow world appears on the big screen—but only for as long as your character can maintain a presence there, based on their shadow mode strength bar. You'll need to flick between the two in order to find the exit on each stage—a glowing square—and you can only be harmed by enemies appearing in your own realm.

And if none of that is clear, just watch the video below:

'Temple of Yog: The First Epoch' trailer

What this means is that you're constantly darting your eyes up and down, checking in on what's going on where you're not, and zoning out of one world when necessary to avoid deadly projectiles or zero in on an unsuspecting warg or hiding-behind-a-bush asp. It's a platform-dependent dimension to roguelike gaming that I've not seen before, and it's going to be interesting to see where Chudchud's updates take this mechanic. Temple of Yog could become quite the cult hit of 2016, if it delivers variety enough to keep players coming back for time after time. Right now, a half-hour here and ten minutes there is plenty enough to satisfy my hunger for this retro-styled ritual slaughter simulator, but massive roguelike fans will likely lock themselves into longer sessions.

Just one tip: Don't try to pause the game, especially if you're on a good run. Keep your thumb the hell away from the plus button. You don't want to touch it. Hold that piss in a little longer. Soak yourself, if you must. You'll thank me.

Temple of Yog is out now, exclusive to the Nintendo Wii U. More information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

No.

The idea of the internet troll as a grotty men's rights activist in Milwaukee, gently marinating in his own smegma and Cheetos crumbs, make us feel safe. It's easy to deal with online criticism or abuse when you don't respect the people dishing it out. Indeed, the original grotty blogger stereotype was largely propagated by Hollywood, which felt its control threatened by the pirates and self-appointed critics of the web and hit back by portraying the people behind computer screens as weak, friendless teenagers.

This fiction bares resemblance to other imagined villains in our society: the racist as a pickup driving redneck who has their house covered in American flags or the sexual offender as a real-life black-magic man waiting in the bushes. Of course, there is a minority of true-to-type offenders who fulfill the cliché, but often we cling to these stereotypes so that we can other them, failing to realize that the real ills are a lot closer to home.

Of course, online abuse from a minority of perverts and partisans continued in 2015, but they were not the ones most responsible for denigrating the level of debate online. Rather, it was traditional publishers, social media companies, professional antagonists, and the general online reader who found ways to push helpful discussion wildly off-course.

There were endless examples of this in 2015, from the transformation of #BlackLivesMatter from a statement of fact to a point of contention to the harassment of Ellen Pao, the new Reddit CEO, who tried to shut down some of the site's uglier threads—"transfags" and "CoonTown" for example—and was met by horrifying opposition, often racist and misogynist, by the site's users.

Yes, much of this was led by people with a particular passion for hatred, but Ellen Pao's resignation only took place after regular users started to boycott parts of the site and it was the racialist rancor of a tranche of top-level politicians, police chiefs, and mainstream journalists that pushed the public perception of Black Lives Matter from a protest group born out of anger and grief to a quasi-terrorist organization.

On more trivial issues, the level of discussion has become simply inane, as Click Hole and the real web become harder to distinguish between. From a humor-free article about which UK shops sounds like rappers, to Buzzfeed basically opening a Left Shark bureau, the ravenous content black hole made schmucks of us all.

All of these new tenants of online discussion—indignation, losing the thread of debate, content for the sake of content—came to a head in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, where outrage seemed to overtake grief as a more direct way to express mourning. While shots were still being fired at the Bataclan, people were on Twitter imagining how the coverage was going to play out in the tabloid press or complaining that people only care about the Paris attacks because they happened in a Western country.

Then on Monday, November 16, with some bodies still being identified and families yet to be contacted, the British newspaper the Independent ran a story headlined Got a French flag on your Facebook profile picture? Congratulations on your corporate white supremacy. It was a piece that argued that those who had shown support for the victims of the attack by using the Facebook feature to overlay a tricolor on their profile picture were "essentially saying that white, Western lives matter more than others" and that Facebook resembled the "Front National's image bank." It seemed painstakingly antagonistic, and immediately slapped up on the site's front page, becoming one of their most read articles.

The piece's author was Lulu Nunn. It was her first article for the Independent, her first news-based piece for any major publication (a lot of her previous writing experience is poetry, which appears on her personal website, and an arts journal she runs called Hoax).

One of the democratizing things about the internet is that we don't have to listen to the same tired voices spouting the same opinions, and that some of the best made points come from inexperienced or unlikely sources. But the way the article is presented there is nothing to show that Nunn isn't one of the paper's staff comment writers, or an expert in any field of international politics. Rather, it seemed like a big publication are letting someone take the hit for their traffic bump, something which has become commonplace in the post Samantha Brick era. It means that the most zealous, exaggerated views get top billing on the biggest websites, while the websites themselves are able to deny any editorial culpability. If there was any doubt of the paper's lack of commitment to the piece, below it appeared the line: "For the other side of the argument, click here," linking through to the exact opposite view, delivered with equal gusto, published at the same time by the same newspaper. Because everyone is right on the internet.

Reflecting on the article now, Nunn tells VICE: "The piece was never about telling people how to grieve but rather just advising them to think about how they react to really complex sociopolitical affairs. But I knew it would provoke the insults and trolling which inevitably follow any article that challenges people's views, particularly one by a female writer. One guy offered to sell me to an 'Isis sex camp.' Other people, who wrongly assumed I was a person of color, threw racist abuse thrown at me."

Nunn later posted her original, unedited version of the article which seemed considerably less provocative than the version that ran on the site. "I do think that the article was sensationalized and given a far more contentious, self-righteous tone than my original; news platforms must know when they're editing articles to come across more aggressively that they're also driving more abuse to the writer; more rape threats and sexual abuse if she is a woman, more racism if the writer isn't white, and this leaves a really bad taste in my mouth." Soon there was a debate about the nature of editing and journalism and so, as ever, in a time of international crisis, the internet was now three times removed from the main story, discussing its own workings rather than the world outside.

At around the same time as Lulu's piece, a Channel 4 foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum wrote a blog called "We Cover Bomb Attacks in Beirut too but you Show Less Interest." In it, she writes:

"I wasn't in Beirut during last week's bombing, but I was for one in November 2013 in which 23 people were killed. I see that 80 people recommended my blog and video story while 29 retweeted it. Compare that to the response my colleague, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, got when he challenged the movie director, Quentin Tarantino, on the use of violence in his films: 3.52 million views on Youtube and rising...It's not that we don't cover bomb attacks in Beirut and elsewhere, but sometimes the viewer shows less interest."

So often anything posted online that is funny, personal, heartfelt, examines the minutiae of our existence, gets into the subtleties of our popular culture, tells us something about our humanity is met with a loud screaming "WHAT IS THIS? WHY DON'T YOU WRITE ABOUT THINGS THAT MATTER? EVER HEARD OF SYRIA?" Self-evidently the people begging for more international reporting are not snotty 17-year-olds only interested in video games and jerking off, but self-declaring intelligentsia.

But Hilsum's blog highlights perhaps the big duplicity in online criticism. The internet is the most quantifiable institution in history, every click and hover is measured in perpetuity and analyzed and broken down a hundred different ways. So while people might say there should be a more high-brow and unsentimental internet, the stats show that's not really what they want.

So how can you improve the discourse of our online habits this year? First, stop commenting on the types of posts you don't like, telling people you think what they're doing is dumb. If you want to see more of a certain kind of writing, then vote with your clicks. Publishers are heavily influenced by traffic—what no one is influenced by is the comment section under an article about someone's personal life, full of heartless and patronizing remarks from a group of faux-intellectuals placating themselves with the caps lock key.

Consider where an article comes from before you post to your Facebook under a hailstorm of exclamation marks. The internet has been an empowering tool for teenagers and young people but that doesn't mean they should be judged for their Tumblr posts like it was a supreme court ruling. Consider too, that what you're reading was written about a topic or for an audience you might not fully understand, before you launch into the comments of an article on the evolution of Chicago footwork with your searing "all sounds like a construction site to me" snark.

In the instances where you are unable to stop yourself wading into the online melé, provide a proportionate response. In Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed there is example after example of people who did questionable things—tweet a politically incorrect joke, falsified a few lines of an interview—being met with the most horrifying set of rape threats, violence, and painful attacks on their work and family life. The punishment inflicted on them wildly outweighs the crime they committed and only serves to refocus the debate onto internet bullying and away from their original misdemeanor.

Don't go on about trolls and online abuse and then tweet "@FirstCapitalConnect TRAIN WAS 20 MINUTES LATE, I DON'T FUCKING PAY MY RAILCARD FOR THIS YOU HUMAN URETHRA BUBBLE" as if tweeting at a big company doesn't mean there's some poor social media lackey who has to read caps lock abuse all day. If you're really committed to people being less of an asshole on the internet, then be less of one yourself.

Finally, don't equate what's on "the internet" as what you see people posting on Facebook, if your whole feed is "23 Sherlock gifs that show why Mondays are THE WORST" and xenophobic "#ProudToBeBritish" memes, that is just a reflection of how shitty your friends are. Start hiding people from your timeline and suddenly you'll see a whole different internet.

Of course, there is some internet abuse that comes from exactly the people you think it does. Men's rights activists, red-state racists, gamergate misogynists, and general pig-headed bigots. Nearly always their hate is aimed women and minority groups. Abuse from these people can be as relentless as it is hurtful, no only when it descends into personal attacks and threats of violence, as it often does, but also when anything you do online is followed by a trail of patronizing disparagement.

But we can't do anything about these people. We can't abstain from them, because they exist in the same forums we all use to work and interact, that for many of us are essential to what we do. We can't reply to them, because that's what they want. We can only block them, report them to the police where appropriate, and realize that a sad fact about the modern world is that we will all have to grow thicker skins against strangers who want to upset us.

What we can do is raise our own level of discussion so that the internet valley between us and them is so vast that they feel nothing but exclusion and powerlessness. We can change how we respond to each other, and what we respond to, and improve the way we communicate online. You can start right now.

Artwork from 'Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars'

As a little post-Christmas treat to myself, I bought a few old Nintendo DS games to play on my 3DS—useful when your commutes can last two hours at a time. One of these was 2009's Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, which packs into its tiny cartridge a top-down (but still sort of 3D) version of the Liberty City seen in its bigger brother, Grand Theft Auto IV. You're cast as Huang Lee, the son of a recently murdered Triad boss, who comes to the New York analogue to deliver a ceremonial sword to the new patriarch of the family. Naturally, things don't go entirely to plan—Huang is attacked, the sword lost, and before you can say Hot Coffee the gangland families of Liberty are at each other's throats.

The game's plot is a fun ride, so far, with a bunch of mean Koreans and crooked cops coming into the picture. But one of my main in-game distractions has been Chinatown Wars' drug-dealing mini-game. Early on you get a taste of the money to be made by pushing narcotics, and while you rarely need to do so in order to keep the story going, the option to trade in uppers, downers, ecstasy, coke, and weed and more, is always available, with dealers spread across the city.

Having put a little time into my GTA drug empire, I thought I'd ask a flesh-and-blood dealer in London about how the game's simulation compares to the real thing. Naturally, they're remaining anonymous. And I don't think I can be arrested for selling acid that doesn't actually exist. Right?

VICE: Hello, Entirely Anonymous Drug Dealer. What sort of products would you say you typically trade in these days?
Entirely Anonymous Drug Dealer: Well, it's been a while, but I've been dabbling in dealing since uni. Back then it was mainly MDMA, and weed as well, and since then I've personally dealt mostly in amphetamines.

So I've been playing this old Grand Theft Auto, with its built-in drug-dealing game. Buy low and sell high, you know how it goes. My first deal was acid. Everything's in "bags" in the game, and I buy a bunch of these bags for $20 and sell each one for $25, making me five dollars of profit on each. Does that sound like a good deal to you?
If it's sold in bags, I'd say that'd be tabs, because otherwise it comes in a liquid. If it's a bag of tabs, and you're only making a 25 percent profit on each deal, I'd say that wasn't so great. On hallucinogens, you can expect better. I've sold TCB before, which is kind of like a hallucinogen mixed with an amphetamine, and you'd expect to make 50 percent profit on each deal there, as the drug's quite rare. Stuff like MDMA, coke, and pills, that's everywhere, so you make less of a profit on them.

Related: Watch our documentary 'The Hard Lives of Britain's Synthetic Marijuana Addicts'

Well, that was my first deal in the game. Later I got some downers—again, a few bags of them—for $3 a time, and I sold them all for a $20 profit on each. So, percentage wise, that's pretty good, isn't it?
On downers? That'd be something like ketamine or Valium—these are dissociatives, so they take you out of the state you're in. They literally bring you down. So, you made $20 profit on each one? That's a lot, for downers. Ketamine used to be pretty expensive, and was fairly recently when there was a bit of a drought in London, but it's usually sold at about £20 a gram, which is really cheap. MDMA, for example, is double that for the same amount. So that's a massive profit. You did well on that one.

At one point in the game I get an email—this guy's shifting coke for $5 a time, in amounts that have a street value of $791 a time. Again, these are "bags." But that's too good to be true, obviously. It's a bust and I have to flee the cops, albeit with the drugs still in my possession. Now, when a deal's something like that in real life, I'm guessing it's always going to be a setup?
That is alarm bells. Dealing is simple, really, and regardless of it being a black market, it's still a market. If someone's giving you a deal like that, which really seems too good to be true, then there's always a reason. It might be a bust, or a dodgy batch, or it's really hot because the seller's stolen it off someone else. And by accepting it and then selling it on yourself, you're liable to get fucked over pretty badly.

If you could really multiply what you paid for a supply, on a deal, you would though, right?
It might be a risk worth taking. There have been times for me in the past where I've been able to double my money really quickly, and I've gone for it. But you do have to be so quick, and sell everything you have in one go. That's the way to make the bigger money.

Well, when I did make some money, I spent it on more coke. The market in the game was listing a bag of coke at around $800, and I bought six for $651 a time. I shopped around a bit and sold each one for $972, making a profit of almost two grand on the deal. You'd be pretty happy with that, right?
You'd be pretty happy, yeah. You'd expect to make a chunk of profit every time, of course, or why else would you do it? But that kind of money would definitely be something to be chuffed about. It'd be quite a rare occasion, especially on coke—everyone loves it, so it's not hard to get hold of. So for you to make money on something that's so readily available is impressive. Every man and his dog sells coke, basically, especially in London.

Well, the game's set in Liberty City, which is the GTA version of New York.
Ah right, well, the market there pretty much mirrors London—the drug culture is very similar, with a lot of high-earning people in their 20s doing loads of coke on the weekends. It's a comparable vibe, so I imagine their coke intake is pretty similar.

Read on Motherboard: I Said Yes to All the Drugs in 'Fallout 4'

In the game, you get different prices for your goods in different parts of Liberty City. Different neighborhoods have different demands. I'm guessing that's the same in London?
Yeah, definitely. There are regional splits when it comes to prices and the quality of the drugs. For example, the only people I know who sell good ketamine are in north London. I have some north London links for coke, but you'll get much better stuff south of the river. That's based on where most of the stuff is, and certain areas have reputations for a certain kind of drug. If you wanna get way better stuff, you're going to have to travel. You're always moving from place to place, from borough to borough, because different people will be running things in each place, and cutting their stuff their own ways. At the end of the day, there are always one or two big shipments that get cut, and cut, and cut by people, before it reaches you. If you're in the borough where the shipment is, you might get better stuff, stronger stuff. If you sell drugs that have been cut shit loads you might make a nice profit on them, but nobody's going to come back to you to buy again. Cut it less, you'll make less money, but you'll have that returning trade.

So it's like fish, right? A week passes since you know the last shipment of delicious fresh fish came in, and you're a lot less likely to touch the stuff.
Yeah, sort of. The best thing to do is always get your stuff straight from the source, but that's really hard these days, unless you're on the Silk Road, on the darknet.

Right. My two grand coke profit, then, would you say that's a better deal than most real-life dealers would get? At least dealers who've only been doing it for a few days?
Definitely. It's more than you'd usually get, in the real world. You have out drug-dealt a drug dealer, congratulations.

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A face like that wouldn't trample on civil liberties, would it? THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair is taking over marijuana legalization for the Liberals.

Blair, who was Toronto's top cop for a decade until his retirement last year, was recently appointed a parliamentary secretary to Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. The Toronto Sun confirmed with Blair that he is taking over the pot file.

Eugene Oscapella, a criminal lawyer who teaches drug policy at the University of Ottawa, told VICE the move seems strange because of the traditional tension between weed activists and law enforcement, but that's actually why it might work.

"The strongest opposition to reform is probably going to come from some of the police groups, so better to have somebody with a police background to speak to some of these groups," he said.

Many police forces are still aggressively enforcing current laws while the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, of which Blair was a former president, has stated it favours a ticketing option over straight-up legalization.

During the federal election, Blair said he thought regulating weed could work the same way as liquor.

"We regulate on where it can be used, when it can be used."

Oscapella said it's possible Blair was one of the many people in the criminal justice system who recognized prohibition was a failure but wasn't previously in a position to say so.

Cam Battley, vice president of communications corporate development for licensed producer Bedrocan Cannabis, was very enthusiastic about the idea of Blair heading up a pot strategy.

"He's an ideal choice. He knows this issue up and down."

He told VICE it will take someone experienced and "mature" to balance making weed more accessible for consumers with minimizing social harm and keeping the drug out of the hands of kids.

Jonathan Zaid, executive director of Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana, said he doesn't think the appointment is necessarily good or bad, but that he hoped Blair would consult with the medical marijuana community when making policy decisions.

"There is still an issue of accessibility and affordability," he said. "Those concerns need to be addressed first and foremost in the context of legalization."

Blair has previously said he's never smoked pot but has purchased it as an undercover police officer.

Blair was a controversial candidate for the Liberals due to his role in undercutting civil rights, as seen in the 2010 G20 fiasco and the Toronto police carding policy that disproportionately affected visible minorities.

The Liberals did not respond to request for comment.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Ammon Bundy, center, who is involved in the situation currently playing out in Oregon, leaving a news conference at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Monday (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The situation that's playing out in eastern Oregon seems archetypically American at first. About a dozen people, dressed in army fatigues and armed with rifles, have taken over a wildlife refuge in a declaration of sovereignty from the United States government. As much of an anomaly as this event may be in the US, in Canada and the UK, a similar separatist ideology exists, albeit in a less organized fashion.

Known as Freemen-on-the-Land (FOTL), this anti-government movement has found footholds in the UK, the US and made waves in Canada over the last decade for its members' stunts. Some of these episodes have ranged from mild disobediences of the law to full-on felony crimes. FOTL subscribers range in severity of their disdain for the state, but they all generally have a few similar characteristics: they don't believe in taxes, they believe that they must consent to all statutory law and they believe they have the right to near-absolute individual freedom.

To understand FOTL flagbearers and their motivations, you have to dig pretty deep. Unlike US movements such as the Oath Keepers, White Mountain Militia, the Praetorian Guard, the Bundy Militia, etc. (this list could go for a while), Canadian groups representing FOTL ideals really don't exist—at least not on the surface or on public record. There are vague references to them on online forums (you will find the World Freeman Society to be a decently active community of people sporting FOTL ideals), but they are largely hidden, usually only outed during a show of defiance or a curbside arrest for civil disobedience.

The group first landed on the Canadian media's radar four years ago when a series of bizarre court cases resulted in a ruling from an Alberta judge who went after FOTL arguments. Justice John Rooke oversaw the case of Dennis Larry Meads who tried to declare himself a "freeman of the land" and absolve himself from responsibility of his now-divorced wife and six children. Rooke wrote a 185-paper that struck at arguments commonly used by FOTL as "scams."

"These persons employ a collection of techniques and arguments promoted and sold by 'gurus' to disrupt court operations and to attempt to frustrate the legal rights of governments, corporations and individuals," he wrote.

During the case, Meads tried to argue that the judge had no jurisdiction over him and that legal systems could only preside over men who were in the sea (yes, literally in the ocean).

Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum, holding rifle, speaks to reporters at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016, near Burns, Ore. (AP Photo/Rebecca Boone)

By the summer of 2013, there were roughly 400 cases floating around the Tax Court of Canada that were tied to Freeman language, with one judge being asked by a man in his courtroom to meet him on "even ground" before he was willing to proceed with the case. The Toronto Police later removed him from the court after he refused to leave on his own will.

These sort of arguments—many of which use jurisdiction, "inalienable rights," or some sort of jargon cherrypicked from Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or American constitution—are commonly found in other sovereign citizen movements and have found some support within smaller government parties such as the American Tea Party and the Wildrose Party here in Canada.

Despite similarities in belief around smaller government and less taxation, Vitor Marciano, a spokesperson for the Wildrose Party, told VICE during an interview that the party does not align itself with FOTL ideals and that they have strictly advised against their MLAs from dealing with anybody who presents themselves as a "freeman."

"One of things you have to be particularly careful of , and there's no outside feedback grounding them in reality," he said.

In terms of the possibility of what's happening in Oregon happening here, Hoffman says it's definitely plausible.

"We can potentially start seeing these sort of events happening in Canada. Definitely," Hofmann said.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.