In November, the release of a silent minute-and-a-half long cut of video was followed in rapid succession by the indictment of a cop for murder, the firing of a police superintendent, calls for a mayor and state's attorney to step down, and a federal investigation into America's second-largest police department.

The footage depicted 17-year-old Laquan McDonald as he was gunned down by a Chicago cop in October 2014—importantly, he was shown walking away from the officer rather than advancing threateningly, as the police alleged. Those following the case already knew from witness accounts and the autopsy showing that McDonald had been shot 16 times that initial police reports had to be wrong. But the visual of the video is what crystalized public outrage and earned nationwide media attention.

McDonald's is one of many cases where footage of a fatal officer-involved incident contradicted police reports and made national headlines. The Washington Post recently published data documenting nearly 1,000 deaths at the hands of police in 2015—the great majority of which the paper found to be justified. The number of criminal charges against officers for fatal shootings was few; only 18 cops were indicted for killing people in 2015, though that's far more than in previous years.

In that small sample, however, video played a large part: In ten out of the 18 cases, prosecutors leaned on footage to make their case.

With the high number of fatalities at the hands of police last year came plenty of rage. Perhaps most glaring was over the disproportionate number of unarmed black men killed by cops; almost half of the year's total fatal police shootings claimed the lives of people of color, according to the Post's analysis. At the same time, however, the use of body cameras was expanded (particularly thanks to a $19 million grant from the Department of Justice) in an effort to increase transparency and reduce the use of force by police.

There may be an abundance of footage—be it from a squad car's dashboard, officer's lapel, private surveillance camera, or bystander's phone—but the public is often left in the dark. Police department policies on video release range from near instantaneous posting to complete lockdown. For its part, the Post reports that fewer than half of the paper's requests for body camera footage from police departments were granted, even though the cameras were intended to promote transparency.

Despite the police being increasingly under the microscope for the deaths of civilians, and despite it becoming easier to document these incidents on camera, access to this footage has been restricted. Police departments and city attorneys use an "ongoing investigation" exemption under open records laws to keep video confidential during investigation that some argue should not apply to videos of police shootings.

This matters because there have been several cases, like McDonald's, where the video has dramatically contradicted initial police reports, changing public perception of what occurred and who is at fault. Take Cincinnati's Samuel Dubose, who was pulled over for a missing license plate and shot in the head moments later by an officer who claimed the man was trying to run him over. Or South Carolina's Walter Scott, who was said to have been shot in a struggle with an officer over his Taser, when he was actually killed running away from the cop. Or Noel Aguilar, killed in May 2014 by a Los Angeles County deputy who thought he was shot by Aguilar when he was actually shot by his own partner.

These examples don't exactly encourage activists and family members of those killed by cops to buy the police accounts of shootings.

"None of us in the community have seen Jamar Clark's video, so we don't know what's on it," says Anthony Newby, executive director for Neighborhoods Organizing for Change in Minneapolis. Clark was 24 when he was shot and killed by police in November last year. Witnesses say he was handcuffed or restrained when he was fatally shot, but an attorney representing one of the officers argues Clark was resisting arrest and attempted to take a gun. "None of us are afraid of what it looks like," Newby says. "We just want to see it, and have access to it. Jamar Clark is dead. It doesn't get worse than that."

Twenty-six-year-old Alexia Christian was shot at ten times by Atlanta police in the back of a squad car last April, dying the same day at a hospital. Her mother and activists have asked that the city release dashboard and surveillance tapes depicting Christian's death. "As a mother, I deserve to know what happened to Alexia," she told the city police chief. But according to Atlanta officials, an ongoing investigation means the video cannot be released. And, as the department pointed out, there is "no statute of limitations on these things."

In other words, the investigation can remain open indefinitely.

This denial of access to video footage after officer-involved fatalities is often described as essential to protecting the investigation and maintaining public calm. But that argument works best when communities trust that the authorities are working for them and not trying to cover up wrongdoing. Activists like Newby simply don't think the police can police themselves.

"As a matter of transparency and accountability, the police and prosecutors cannot be the only ones to have access to video evidence," he argues. "The public has a right to know. The family has a right to know."

Currently, it's not uncommon for police departments to refuse video release under an exemption to state open records laws for ongoing investigations. But Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union argues that this exemption was not created for—and shouldn't be applied to—police shootings. The ACLU has proposed detailed policy on the handling of body camera video; they suggest that footage be stored for a period of "weeks not years," noting privacy concerns, unless the case involves the use of force, a complaint has been filed, or it led to detention or arrest. Stanley says that in cases where a complaint has been filed, once the involved officers (and perhaps key witnesses) give their initial report and have seen the video, sharing it with the public generally doesn't hinder an investigation.

He argues that merely keeping it private to prevent the public from seeing it is "not a legitimate goal on its own."

"The public pays police officers to protect the public...and have a huge interest in monitoring exactly how its employees, the police officers, go about doing that," Stanley says. The need for transparency is "rarely as sharp," he adds, as when police are using deadly force.

If some see video technology as protecting the public from police, the formula can also be flipped. Jim Pasco is the legislative advocacy director for the Fraternal Order of Police, an organization of over 325,000 members in law enforcement across America. He sees video as a tool to exonerate officers in many cases. "A lot of people have talked about the fact that in places where body cameras are used, that complaints against police plummet, and suggest that that means that police wearing body cameras behave better," Pasco says. But the opposite is true, he says: "It's a lot harder to complain about police conduct during the course of an arrest when there's evidence to the contrary."

Policies on cameras and footage vary around the country, and it's not like all law enforcement bodies are committed to keeping controversial videos under wraps.

When Chris Burbank served as Salt Lake City police chief, before he joined UCLA's Center for Policing Equity, he took the department's use of video to a transparent extreme. Video was made available to both officers and civilians regardless of investigation proceedings, a point of contention between Burbank and district attorneys, he recalls. But this kind of transparency yields efficiency and effectiveness "on both sides." If both civilians and police know they are being recorded and will have a chance to review the footage, he asks, "Does that not create an environment in which everybody involved is going to be more inclined to be as accurate as possible?"

In Seattle, a federal investigation found a pattern of excessive use of force by local cops in 2012, and the city has since taken strides toward using video to heighten transparency. Following a fatal officer-involved incident earlier this month, Seattle police released the associated footage within 24 hours.

Still, most jurisdictions are in the process of figuring this all out.

"I've never held a news conference like this before," San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said at a press conference last month. This was in the aftermath of the shooting of Fridoon Rawshan Nehad, who was unarmed when he was killed by cops on April 30, after police responded to a report of a man threatening people with a knife. (Nehad was later confirmed to be holding a metallic pen.) San Diego police initially refused to unearth the footage but acquiesced after a federal judge ordered its release. At the conference, Dumanis went through footage from several videos, describing the sequence of events down to the shots fired and the officer attempting to stop the bullet wound from bleeding with his finger.

Meanwhile, leaders of some cities and police departments have dug in their heels. Chicago officials waited 13 months to release the video documenting McDonald's death. It was only last week that the city dropped its opposition to the airing of videos documenting the death of Cedrick Chatman, also 17, the day before a judge was expected to order release of the same footage. Chatman was killed three years ago, his case representing yet another death where the family's attorney says the video differs dramatically from police accounts. In the video, Chatman is seen running from the cops as one officer stands back and shoots at him.

The hope for those who want to see more videos released is that dishonesty on the part of the cops has a better chance of being exposed—and discouraged.

"Before we had video, it was always a he said-she said situation, putting the word of a uniformed police officer against an accused criminal," explains Stanley of the ACLU. "Judges, juries, the public, prosecutors always tended to believe the police, and so the fact that video exists is crucial."

The mere existence of video far from guarantees that justice will be served, however, even if it is widely seen as incriminating. Some argue that the acquittal of the officer who killed Eric Garner in 2014 and the decision not to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice that same year, suggest video is no panacea for bad cops. But prosecutions do seem to be somewhat tied to the existence of a video record. McDonald's case is one example: Officer Jason Van Dyke is the first cop in almost 35 years to be charged with murder in Chicago for an on-duty shooting.

It's also hard to say with any degree of certainty that we'd even know the names of the small fraction of victims who have made national headlines were it not for video documentation. In fact, it's brought to light deep-rooted issues of police abuse in our country, says Stanley. "I think a lot of white middle-class people haven't experienced anything of this nature with their police officers, and just haven't believed that it takes place," he says.

"Video is a game-changer," argues Jamie Kalven, the activist journalist who wrote a Slate article last February arguing for the city's release of the video of Laquan McDonald's death.

In that piece, Kalven seemed to predict how Chicago's handling of that video could devastate police-community relations, writing, "The McDonald footage will come out, but a great deal turns on how it comes out. Will the city be forced to release it in a way that deepens the crisis of public confidence in law enforcement, or will it be released in a way that helps restore the 'foundation of trust' between residents and police on which effective law enforcement depends?"

The question of whether, and how, to release videos and shootings is far from an academic one: Already this year, 47 people have been shot and killed by the police, according to the Post.

"At a time when people are demanding transparency, and when departments want to provide more transparency, we have to look at ways we can do that," says Elise Armacost, director of public affairs for the Baltimore County police department.

"But at the end of the day we also have an investigation to protect."

Follow Camille Pendley on Twitter.

Photo by Robert Foster

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

For as long as I can remember I've been preoccupied with the night. I'm still trying to figure out who's to blame. Some people I've met over the course of my life have to drive themselves to complete physical and mental incapacitation before they can bear to leave the night alone, to go to bed. Others seem happy to give in after some takeaway and a bit of TV.

I'm not here to cast judgement on anyone. The question of what separates one type of person from the other isn't one I feel capable of answering just yet, though I'm sure there are armies of therapists working hard to get to the bottom of it in the leafiest parts of whichever city you're currently having a nervous breakdown in.

Instead of attempting to psychoanalyze anyone who's ever woken up after a night out feeling like a train's crashed into their face, I'll try to put into words why the night should be saved. Because the night is a living thing and in Britain it is currently—blatantly—under attack.

In the last ten years, the number of nightclubs that remain open and operational in this country has halved. It's a stat that came out last year and that I have since seen quoted more times than the number of nightclubs in this country that remain open and operational. At first it was shocking, and yet it probably shouldn't have been. For years now it's felt as though there's been an ongoing persecution of the night as something criminal in itself, a repeat offender complicit in every bottling, murder, and sex attack that has taken place after sunset. While there's obviously some justice in this—the greatest weapon of social control ever devised isn't the cop or the baton, it's the streetlight—the greater injustice is the attempt to deny us the night and all it has to offer by roping it off, turning it into a slightly crapper extension of the day where it's colder and everything costs more.

The night deserves more than this. No matter how many relationships it ruins, drug habits it fosters, or debt collectors it keeps breathing, the night is a god of possibility; it is where people go to fall in lifelong love, find the friends they need to thwart the thoughts of suicide, locate themselves in a world that seems to be growing more and more resentful of human life every day, but is really just the same mess of vanity and confusion it's always been.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

The night: music I fall in love with inevitably sounds like it. All my happiest and worst memories were born in it: my biggest strokes of luck and gravest mistakes, epiphanic dawnings of art, resolve, and self-disgust, first and last kisses. The list of things that could never have existed without the night includes but is not limited to the following acronyms: the KLF, the IRA, the ECL, AFI, XTC, NARC, PCP, PMA, PKD, PDA, STD, CBT, ZMA, AWOL, and MPS in the sky. Some of those things are good, some of them aren't, but then that's what the night is for. It doesn't give you things you wanted, it gives you things you didn't ask for, things you never even knew you wanted. The night is chaos—or at least it's meant to be.

There is no chaos in the night that the current government has planned for us. The authorities' attempts to colonize and cleanse the night—to shut down bars and clubs and any of those other "third places" that you go to when you're sick of the spaces you work and sleep in—should be seen as an act of territorial aggression, temporal terrorism. And this is not me trying to plant my own flag in the night; it's never been anything other than impervious to my hounding of it, that pursuit well into its second decade now to the detriment of my mental and physical health, most cherished relationships, reputation, and bank balance. But if any cunt does "own the night," it's definitely not a Tory.

Read on Thump: A History of British Nightlife According to Dave Haslam

There is a lot of evidence to support that statement: doggers, ravers, striking junior doctors, crews of cruising boy racers, every Facebook profile you've stalked post-Tinder/happn/Bumble/3inder, and cocaine, its stubborn, continued rise making it as visible on Britain as Premier League football, more popular than poetry. But the more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to something a little less recent.

In 1957, The Black Cloud, a work of science fiction by the prescient British astrophysicist and author Fred Hoyle, was first published by Valancourt Books. Hoyle was a legit maverick, a man who had important ideas about stars before anyone else and coined the term "Big Bang," while at the same time dismissing the theory itself as completely stupid. His writing can't have helped him gain the respect of the British scientific community, who never truly embraced him. In The Black Cloud a massive, sentient cloud of gas wedges itself between the sun and the Earth, blocking out all the light, and refusing to budge after the army fire nukes at it.

Photo by Robert Foster

It sounds anathema to what you'd expect from an astrophysicist, a man—supposedly—of numbers suspending his disbelief to reel out a metaphor of the night as a living thing for the duration of a novel. But it's a brilliant book and it feels apt now to hark back to it and what, for me, is its central message.

At a time when our relationship with the night is changing, it's heartening to know that no matter how many nukes, licensing regulations, sodium bulbs, or CCTV cameras are fired up at it, the night will always be out there, lurking, looming, waiting, for those people whose inbuilt curiosity compels them to explore it right to the most distant edges.

Follow Kev Kharas on Twitter.

What Bagley's nightclub in King's Cross looks like today. All photos by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Turnmills in Farringdon, The End on Tottenham Court Road, Shelly's in Stoke, The Quad in Bootle: Clubs like these paved the way for British nightlife, yet today they've all been demolished, left to rot, or rebuilt to make way for high-rise condos and offices.

There is always sadness when a club closes. These were places where lasting connections were made and friendships formed, some that lasted a few hours and some, decades.

Of the clubs that are still standing, many are Iiving on borrowed time. Councils, police, and developers are closing down these spaces at an alarming rate. But what's it all for? What happens in these bulldozed, empty arenas?

We traveled the country to find the people who now sleep, eat, and work where you danced.

THE END, LONDON

An intimate basement club run by Mr. C and Layo, tucked just behind High Holborn. With the booth in the center of the dancefloor, it was one of the first clubs in London said to be built by DJs for DJs.

Opened: 1995

Closed: 2009

Today: Most of the building is empty or occupied by guardians, people who live in properties for a cheaper rent to prevent squatters moving in.

Resident: Brian Sury, 39, freelance journalist.

VICE: How did you end up living here?
Brian: I moved in about three or four months ago now, but people lived here before I did. I used to go to The End—a friend of mine used to host parties there and I helped promote them. I used to go on a Tuesday, to a night called Players Club, which was sort of for industry people that worked at the weekend. That was our weekend, on a Tuesday.

When was that?
It must've been eight years ago. I spent a lot of time trying to get into that club and I was quite excited about the fact that I could actually live there. My bedroom was a private dance floor, an area I never knew about.

You live here as part of a guardian scheme. These set-ups are often temporary, right? Have they said what they're going to do in the future?
The building is an island, like a square, and the owners have bought the entire block. It's Russians I think, or some corporate company, and we've got no idea what they're going to do. It's three floors below ground level so we were thinking they were going to turn it into some mega mansion because everyone in London wants digging underground for cars or cinemas or swimming pools. It's a vast underground space and it's perfect for that, but I don't think they've got the planning for it so that's why it's still like it is.

Have you ever been down there?
The only time I went down into there was when they had a squat party and there was literally the most horrible gabber techno blaring out from under my street, so I went to investigate.

What was it like, was it the same as you remembered?
It was always quite industrial, Berlin-esque, but now it was like that and beaten up and covered in spraypaint. The squatters are anarchists so they spray-painted the lot. It looked horrible. That's the last image I'm ever going to see of The End.

BAGLEY'S AND THE CROSS, LONDON

Bagley's and The Cross were both on the huge King's Cross site that has since been entirely redeveloped. Bagleys was a huge multi-room warehouse club that held some of London's biggest Saturday night parties. The Cross filled six arches and brought a Balearic party atmosphere to the most run-down corner of central London.

Opened: 1991 (Bagleys), 1993 (The Cross)

Closed: 2007

Today: The buildings are in the process of being restored and made into shops, restaurants, and the Jamie Oliver HQ, as part of the wider regeneration of Kings Cross.

Occupier: Morwenna Hall, senior project director of Kings Cross redevelopment.

VICE: Kings Cross has changed a lot recently. What are your plans for this area?
Morwenna: Kings Cross kind of had three eras—industrial goods and freight canals, then wasteland, but now it's becoming a place where you can live and work. Sat under the building are the arches and that's where The Cross was located. It was originally built as stables where horses would take coal and fish across London.

Where are you with it at the moment?
We're just over half way through the restoration and we are working with Jamie Oliver and his enterprises. Jamie is taking it over for his head office. The arches themselves will be a new concept restaurant for Jamie. People will be able to go and eat and drink and reminisce. Bagley's was located opposite in the Coal Drops building. It was called that because 100 or so odd years ago it was a bottling factory and in a warehouse unit called Bagley's. We've been working for a year and a half with Thomas Heatherwick, an up-and-coming local architect, and this last month we put in the planning application to the local authority.

What's the plan for the Bagley's site?
The idea is that it will be the retail part of King's Cross; there will be 60 units of various sizes.

I've heard you've had a street-naming competition.
It's important that people who lived and worked in the area have some sort of input so we opened it up to local people. We've got an approved shortlist—you can't have two streets called the same and we got 10,000 entries. We've sorted through them all. There were lots of Amy Winehouse suggestions, but that's Camden not King's Cross, and we have a Bagley's Way/Lane on there too.

Can you tell that these buildings used to be iconic clubbing destinations and are you trying to preserve that legacy at all?
It's really important to us that all the layers of history are represented, we want to tell the story right from the beginning all the way through to now. You can see it in the architecture—all of the external signs bolted on the walls are signs from the 90s. No one is forgetting it. I work with contractors and people who say, "Yeah, I used to go clubbing in here." It's very much a part of the history.

QUADRANT PARK, LIVERPOOL

Began as a cheesy nightclub before becoming a rave destination in 1990. Host to Orbital, Sasha, Carl Cox, and regular favorite "the Frenchman" Laurent Garnier, The Quad was the UK's first legal all-night rave.

Opened: 1988

Demolished: 1998

Occupier: Carl Trevaskiss, Site Foreman at South Sefton Household Waste Recycling Centre.

How long have you worked here for and what do you do?
I've been working here for 11 years now. We have a Reuse Shop on site, where the public can visit and drop things in to donate for reuse and also buy items as well. It saves them being sent to landfill and it raises money for the YMCA.

Had you heard of Quadrant Park?
I knew this used to be a club, I've always lived in Bootle, so I remember it from back in the day. There aren't any signs left that it used to be here, it was completely demolished before the recycling center was built. We've not found anything that was linked to it over the years that we've been here.

Do people still talk about it?
A few people have talked about how it used to be where the nightclub was, but this was mostly when the site first opened. People said they used to love it. From what they've told me it was very, very popular and was always packed every weekend, but I never went myself.

Is this still a clubbing part of the city?
No, the nearest nightlife is on Bootle Strand, but it's mainly bars these days, not really any big clubs like that one was.

THE HACIENDA, MANCHESTER

The birthplace of the "Madchester" scene and the club that kicked off the house music revolution. Launched as a rainy, northern version of cool New York venues, it showcased artists including Madonna, The Smiths, and New Order.

Opened: 1982

Demolished: 2002

Today: Luxury flats and Bridgfords letting agency

Occupier: Wolfgang Webster, 50, property photographer for Bridgfords.

VICE: Do you know much about The Hacienda?
Wolfgang: I used to go to a lot of the clubs in Manchester back in the 80s and 90s. I started taking pictures then, in around 1989, and started working for Sankeys and the Hacienda and a music magazine called the Blue Planet. The club actually shut down in '97 and it was derelict. They made some flats and the office in the front was an architect before Bridgfords took over.

That's where you work now, right? How did that come about?
The director contacted me for pictures of the Hacienda and they bought my artwork for there and other buildings in Manchester. These days I photograph their corporate events. It's good because I'm still involved in that building.

When you're at work do you ever think about the times you used to spend partying there?
Yeah, I do. The downstairs has never changed, it's only the upstairs that is different. The bars have gone but the layout is exactly the same.

VELVET ROOMS, LONDON

Founded by Ibiza party man Nicky Holloway, the venue hosted international DJs as well as some seminal club nights, including the dubstep-founding FWD>>.

Opened: 1993

Closed: 2003

Today: Superdrug

Occupier: Ayo Nuga, 25, Team Leader, Superdrug.

VICE: Can you tell that this used to be the site of a club?
Ayo: No, not in my opinion anyway.

Does it surprise you?
Yeah, it does. I see pubs round here, but no sign of clubs. It's not a clubbing area. When customers come in asking for nightclubs this way I always direct them towards Soho, those sorts of places.

Do you go out much yourself?
I go out occasionally but not that often. I'd travel further for a good night out or go to central London.

TURNMILLS, LONDON

The first venue in the UK to get a 24-hour dance license. Its flagship night was Trade—the original afterparty.

Opened: 1990

Demolished: 2008

Today: Home to media agency SMG

Occupier: Scott Curtis European Mobile Strategy & Development Director at SMG.

Did you ever go to Turnmills?
Yeah, I did. It was an amazing club, I used to do some partying there back in the day, many years back.

What kind of nights did you go to?
It was mostly the house nights. I don't remember specifics of a particular DJ or night but we used to go partying up in London a lot and Turnmills was one of the haunts.

There's a big Turnmills sign at the entrance of the building now. Are there any other clues to its former life?
We've got meeting rooms named after festivals and DJs. It's just kind of to carry on the legacy of the old building and maintain that creativity. Turnmills has been closed for a while now. Obviously it's not the same, we're a media agency, but the site is still being used for a sort of creative thing. And also I used to go partying there too so it's nice from a personal perspective.

Do you still go out partying much?
I'm too old to go out much now. I have very irregular nights out at like The Egg or somewhere like that, but not with the frequency of the past. I used to love it. When I was 17 I used to go to True Playas nights in Fabric and then through to Pacha, The Egg, The Cross, The Key, Turnmills. I stopped a good few years back, when work started getting a bit too important.

SHELLY'S LASERDOME, STOKE

Known for launching the careers of Sasha and Dave Seaman, who were both Friday night residents, and mega brand Amnesia House ran the Saturday nights.

Opened: 1987

Demolished: 1998

Today: Farmfoods

Occupier: Jane Johnson, Store Manager Farmfoods, Longton, Stoke

Did you know there used to be club here?
No.

Has anyone ever talked about what used to be here?
I don't know anything but it, I don't come from Longton. Perhaps, I've heard of it but I think it was years ago, wasn't it? Didn't people like Tom Jones used to go to it? My mom and my dad probably went 100 years ago, you'd be better off talking to them.

Did you ever go out partying much when you were younger?
Clubbing's not my thing, no.

Photo via popperking.com

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

RIP to the world's most disgusting headache, RIP to idiots drinking something from a bottle clearly marked "do not drink," RIP to doing butt sex the right way. In the latest alkyl-nitrite related news, those little metallic cans of heart-pounding juice are pretty much over in the UK. British Members of Parliament voted 309 to 228 against an amendment to the upcoming Psychoactive Substances Bill that aimed to exclude alkyl nitrites from the list of banned drugs. Basically it just means that when the bill goes through (as it almost certainly will) then poppers will be 100 percent illegal here.

Of course, outlawing any drug just pushes it into the underground. Instead of going into a shop to make a legitimate legal purchase, people could be picking up Liquid Gold around the back of a co-op or brewing some of the good stuff in their mom's bath.

Basically, if they aren't above the counter, they're going under it and someone, somewhere is going to be making them. So we asked an expert—Professor Andrea Sella at UCL—what this might look like and how easy it could be. He reluctantly gave us some vague instructions, pointing out potential dangers of home brewing and why the bill could be a bad thing in terms of rogue fake poppers.

VICE: Hypothetically, how easy would it be to make poppers?
Andrea Sella: The chemistry isn't difficult—it's 19th century chemistry. Someone with good basic synthetic chemistry skills could handle it, not a problem. How safely they would do it I don't know, but then they probably don't care. I would say it's safer than someone making ecstasy. That involves several steps, but you could make these in three or so steps using materials that aren't that hard to get.

So if you have an undergrad degree that would be enough knowledge to do it?
I'd say you'd be able to do it. I mean, all the steps are pretty straightforward. The guys who are out in the home labs—the kind of Breaking Bad dudes—they aren't making anything new, they don't have the facilities to check what they have made, they are not academics or explorers, all they are doing is making chemicals that are known.

In terms of your home lab, what would you need to make poppers?
You'd have a moderately equipped chemistry lab. Standard glassware to be able to stir things and extract. You need to be able to remove solvent sufficiently, you need to be able to do vacuum insulation. But these are the standard things that an undergrad would learn. And coming out of an undergrad degree, you would probably struggle to replicate it immediately but you'd be familiar with it and if someone gave you a bit of advice you'd be able to replicate it no problem.

OK, so what are the chemicals you'd need to get your hands on?
I'm a little reluctant to speak in great detail. But the information is not hard to find. There are straightforward salts or organic compound solvents that are multi-use, you can source them reasonably easily from suppliers and the internet provides a lot more shady ways, not that I've actually tried or took a look. Let me see if I can see anything on Ebay...yeah, yeah, you can do it.

That's so strange I didn't think you could make poppers with chemicals from eBay.
Well I haven't really looked very much but it looks like there's all kinds of stuff you can get. If it came from the US or Estonia it might get picked up through the post, but if it was from the UK through Royal Mail it would be private anyway so it's just as good as TNT or Federal Express.

How expensive would it be to make it?
I imagine your profit margins would be pretty high. And as you'd be doing it on the sly you wouldn't have to follow fully certified practice, like you'd dump all the waste down the sink, so you wouldn't have all the overheads associated with a normal practice.

Of course the flip side is you would be unlikely to have much information on purity. And that's the whole point of buying stuff from persons unknown is that you don't really ever know about the purity or dosage of what you're taking. Or whether they're mixed in with things you don't want. And these are just small basic compounds that have very potent cardiovascular effects on the body. So we know that the physiological effects on the body are big time. So getting the dose right is probably wise.

What do you think about the psychoactive substances bill that blanket bans pretty much everything, even something as minor as poppers?
If you ban things compound by compound you'll have to update your list every five minutes. But then you also can't predict what new starter chemicals will be brought in from people within and outside the country that really know their pharmacology. How do you frame legislation in terms of being able to protect people for real—like making the drugs actually safe given how people behave. The demand is there and we know the pharmacology. We know the pharmacology of the class A drugs, cocaine, heroin, and so on but we haven't really begun to understand that what we're doing is opening up a market for other things that are totally unknown.

So should we be worried?
My concern is that as you start making certain classes of molecules illegal and difficult to source is that you open the gates to a huge industry simply because it is much more profitable to sell something that is illegal than something you can get from the corner shop. What we are doing is creating extraordinary untapped business opportunities at a time of austerity.

Photo via Sisters of the Valley on Instagram

Last October, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act into law, requiring local jurisdictions to develop their own marijuana regulations by March 1, 2016, or relinquish authority to the state government. As a result, as many as 19 cities around the state have scrambled to ban medical cannabis dispensaries before the deadline, and more are considering enacting bans or restrictions of their own.

One of those cities is Merced, located in Northern California's San Joaquin Valley, where local lawmakers voted Tuesday to impose a moratorium on the cultivation of medical marijuana until the city figures out exactly what to do about the issue.

In the lead up to city council vote, the most visible opponents of the ban were the Sisters of the Valley, a pair of self-described New Age nuns who grow medical marijuana in the garage of Sister Kate, the elder nun and the founder of the group. The Sisters concentrate on growing cannabis strains that are rich in CBD, a non-psychoactive element of marijuana, and sell medicinal salves, tinctures, and other goods via Etsy.

Although the Sisters of the Valley wear habits, they aren't nuns in the traditional sense. Sister Kate, and her partner Sister Dee, don't follow any sort of organized religion, but rather see themselves as a spiritual sisterhood devoted to medical marijuana. VICE spoke to Sister Kate about the Sisters fight against the new ban, and their commitment to making marijuana medicine by the moon cycles.

VICE: Who exactly are the Sisters of the Valley? What do you guys stand for?Sister Kate: When you're a sister, you represent order, cleanliness, efficiency, honesty. I thought, "What could I form that is self-sustaining, that could be a sisterhood, that would weave in spirituality, that would weave in Mother Earth?" and sort of came up with Sisters of the Valley. We want to be self-empowered, female-run, and female-owned.

Why wear a habit?
We chose that uniform because people can identify with it very quickly. We never hide the fact that we're not Catholic nuns; we're a New Age sisterhood. We try to operate based on what our ancient mothers would do. We make our medicine new moon to full moon, and we work everyday in our habits, and those are the days we do prayer ceremonies and focus on the medicine. As soon as we're through a full moon, we're in a relaxation state for two weeks. It's during that time that we are more relaxed and more likely to be out and about could shut me down. But I've already made it clear to all of them that they're going to have to shut me down.

Sister Kate during the harvest. Photo via the Sisters on Instagram

As a self-identified "nun," how would you describe your spirituality?
I think there are many, many women who are missing the concept of a sort of sisterhood, a supporting sisterhood. I would never, ever say that we are aspiring or trying to be like the Catholic nuns, because we're not. We're trying to do something that's more activist-based, that's more planet-based, Mother Earth-friendly. What we are very, very strict about is being vegan during our medicine-making moon cycles. There are two weeks out of the month where we are strictly vegan because that actually does something for Mother Earth. That to me is putting an olive branch to the old concept of sisterhood. We want to be empowered one hit out of the pipe, his shakes can go away, and he can actually get up and make tea and act like a normal person. So the spirituality for me, personally, it was a convenient way to develop a work ethic in my business. It's a mode of work that demands excellence, that demands high quality, and demands intention and purpose. It nourishes me to have that in my daily life. But it does something bigger. As long as we are the honorable women and wear the garb honorably, then we are a counterbalance to the stoner culture.

How central is cannabis to that spirituality?
Our culture of sisterhood isn't just about the cannabis plant. Spirituality is about following ancient wisdom, planting by moon cycles, and harvesting by moon cycles, and participating in what is nourishing to the soul. We are trying to create a lifestyle that has us putting our hands in Mother Dirt in the early part of the day, and maybe doing office work later where there's some spirituality booked into the schedule.

We don't pray to the cannabis plant; I laughed when someone suggested that we were honoring the cannabis plant. No, we're putting our own inherently divine healing energies into the growing and producing of medicine that our ancient mothers did.

Follow Madeleine on Twitter.

One of 2015's most obsessed-over games wasn't a frenetic shooter or fantastically accurate sports sim (although they came out, too), but a leisurely paced, narrative-focused adventure game starring a teenage girl whose return to her Oregon hometown of (the fictional) Arcadia Bay coincides with the discovery that she somehow possesses the ability to manipulate time. Stir in a healthy dose of hormones and a whole heap of social circle stresses, alongside schoolwork deadlines, and a best friend who is way more wild child than straight-A student, and you've a game that sounds like an entirely niche attraction, rather than a played-by-millions commercial and critical hit. But then, Life Is Strange isn't much like many games that came before it, and its success shows that original ideas can triumph in a market so dominated by routine design given a fresh lick of paint at yearly intervals.

(And, once again, if that headline wasn't enough of a notice, this article contains massive spoilers. The game is out, finished, done, albeit with a physical edition now available for those who don't like to download digital titles. If that's you, and you want to go into Life Is Strange with everything a mystery, click away now.)

"It was a bit of a risk," the game's co-director at Paris-based studio Dontnod Entertainment, Michel Koch, tells me—and fronting the money for that risk was Square Enix, the huge publisher behind today's Tomb Raider, Hitman, Final Fantasy and Deus Ex franchises. "It was something different, and we never really thought about audience or marketing when making it. We were not sure that it would work commercially. We knew we'd find some public, of course, but not a big appeal. So we're really happy to have that. A big community has grown up around the game."

Max and Chloe, the latter in a typical pose

There was a degree of skepticism directed at the project, from the press, when episode one of this five-part game emerged at the very end of January 2015. Here was a very languid introduction to Max Caulfield, our player-controlled "hero" of sorts, who ultimately must make a plot-climaxing decision, after so many (some seriously tough) choices across the game, to see her home destroyed, along with many of its inhabitants, or save her best friend Chloe from death. By the time of episode three, Life Is Strange is revealing its dark secrets, its irresistible lines of investigation and complex character arcs, complicated so much further by Max's time-hopping tendencies. But episode one was almost entirely primer fare, like the pilot of a TV series, setting up characters and location but not featuring too much action. It was big on sense of place and humming with potential, but somewhat unsatisfying as a standalone experience.

"We didn't actually get everything we wanted in that first episode," says Michel's fellow game director, Raoul Barbet, "but after episode two we changed a lot, and a lot of players gave us good feedback. It's cool to think about how the first episode was received, now. On our side, it was quite stressful, because the game was quite different from Remember Me, our first project. Episode one was an entry point into the game's universe, with a lot of characters to discover. You've Max's power to understand, and lots of settings to become familiar with. It's a slow-paced episode, but we wanted to make sure the player had a good starting point.

"It was funny to see players react to the later episodes by saying they wanted to go back to the cocoon of episode one, when everything was nicer. But that's what episode one was meant to provide—that sense of being safe inside your bedroom, in this little cocoon."

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch our interview with Pusha T for 'Autobiographies'

Life Is Strange might sound like a mix of teenage high school drama and science fiction hijinks on paper, but while Max and Chloe's relationship forms the spine of its story—how they reconnect after several years away, become closer (potentially romantically, depending on the decisions you make in the game) and either inseparable at the cost of other friends and family or forever split by the wicked hand of fate—its supporting characters are cyphers for very relatable troubles. They are consistently drawn "in shades of gray, and not in black or white," to quote Raoul, and first impressions are rarely the complete picture. Chloe's stepdad, David, seems to be both a dick and a pervert when we first meet him, but he later proves to be fiercely loyal to his loved ones, his overprotectiveness to blame for some questionable monitoring of local students. Max's friend Warren seems like a bubbly geek full of platonic respect for our protagonist, yet there soon seems to be something creepy about his passive-aggressive text messages—plus, he's been spying on her dorm room. And the top bitch on campus, Victoria, isn't quite the ice queen episode one sets her up as.

Episode two, "Out of Time," explores cyber-bullying, and its potentially devastating effects on victims and those around them. In the game, the religious character Kate is doped at a club, and filmed kissing strangers while totally out of it. The video goes viral and she can't take it, leading to a rooftop standoff between her desire to end it all and Max desperately trying to make her step back from the edge (without the use of her powers, too). Episode four, "Dark Room," begins with what is essentially a debate on euthanasia, as an alternate-universe Chloe is permanently disabled and asks Max to end her suffering. It's probably the toughest decision in the entire game: turn up your friend's dosage of painkiller to send her into an eternal sleep, or demand that she fights on, a hollow act of betrayal as both characters know there'll be no victory.

The characters Kate and Victoria

"We love the character of Kate, and we put her in that position for two purposes," Raoul tells me. "Inside the main story arc, it's the first time that Max realizes that she has more responsibilities than she did before, when she was using her power just for fun. We use the scene on the roof that Max's power might not always be there, and she has to take actions by herself. And the second purpose, of course, was to talk about this theme of cyber-bullying. It was really important for us to talk about that.

"We receive letters and fan art and cosplay photos every day to the studio, and reading some letters where players explain how the game has moved them, how a lot of themes have spoken to them, that's really something. And it's heart-breaking for us, sometimes, to read these personal stories, to see how people have related to this game, to the characters. Of course, we wanted to talk about difficult themes, ones that were perhaps more adult than you find in other games. And the community is happy to talk about this stuff, because of a video game."

On Motherboard: Most Developers Believe in Virtual Reality, But Aren't Developing for It

Max can stop Kate from falling to her death before a crowd of smartphone-wielding gawpers—I did in my playthrough. But there's no saving the Chloe who's confined to a wheelchair, unable to move from the neck down. She's doomed however Max chooses to play the euthanasia scene. "We put a lot of research into that, just as we did into all of the themes the game addresses," Raoul says. "It was important to treat it with respect and show that we're accurate with the subject. We studied specialized home equipment, read blogs by disabled people, and asked them what their setup was at home. One of the designers on the game has had some family issues like we present in the game, at that moment, but we have to be careful as developers and creators to not make the subject too game-y. That could be seen as not respectful, and we really want to talk about the subject and sometimes put the player in a really difficult position, and have them think about this."

'Life Is Strange,' boxed limited edition trailer

Episode four ends with a revelation that I certainly did not see coming. Having considered both Nathan—a spoiled schoolboy brat whose family has a great deal of political sway in town—and Frank—a drug-dealing drifter type who lives in a dilapidated RV—as the game's most-likely antagonists, Life Is Strange throws a dizzying curveball with the reveal of Max's own photography tutor, Mark Jefferson, as the "big bad" of proceedings. Actually, "big bad" doesn't come anywhere close to summarizing the man's evilness. In a scene echoing the torture chamber basement of Martin Vanger, from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we're shown that his studio is in fact an underground lair, his "dark room," within which he drugs young girls and puts them into compromising poses before shooting them—with a camera, that is. Although murder is far from beyond him, as he proves at the climax of episode four when he kills Chloe—not that her death, at that point, can't be undone. (Sort of. It's complicated.)

"Some people did predict that Mr. Jefferson was the bad guy, as there are some clues in the game leading up to his reveal," Michel says. "If you listen to his lecture in the art class, in episode one, he's directly saying what he's doing . One of his first lines when he's talking about photography is, 'I could frame any one of you in a dark corner, and capture you in a moment of desperation.' And if you look at the photographs, he has on the campus, his exhibition, they're of women in some sort of vulnerable poses. And in episode two, there were more hints. Actually, we were worried that we'd put too many hints in there."

"I have to admit that I thought more people would see the reveal coming," Raoul continues, "but, no. So it was OK. But we had to be careful with having that kind of cliffhanger, at the end of episode four, to make sure that it's believable. I think we managed to do that, but we had to be careful with the twist."

The reality of Jefferson's practice becomes the opening scene of Life Is Strange's concluding episode, "Polarized," after which the plot accelerates to its life-or-death final decision, an ending that Michel says was in the studio's collective mind from the very beginning of the development process. "The final choice was always there," he says. "Everything we were working on in the game, it was going towards that end scene, in that direction, to really put the player's choices and the consequences affecting their version of Max and her relationship with Chloe, in a different way for everyone." Raoul tells me that players were 55 percent in favor of sacrificing Chloe to save Arcadia Bay, which is the decision I went for, adding: "For this big one, we weren't really sure how it'd play out, but in the end it was quite even."

Dontnod's success with Life Is Strange is something the studio is rightly very proud of. But moving onto their next project, the role-playing game Vampyr, due out in 2017, they're taking nothing for granted. "I think this is a good moment for us," Michel says. "But now we have to work. It's cool because back at the beginning of making Life Is Strange, it was difficult to describe what we wanted to do with it. People didn't immediately get the idea—they thought it might be boring. But now we know that players want games like this. So we want to move forward and try other original ideas." More than that, though, Life Is Strange proves that intimate, emotional, and empathetic interactive experiences can come backed by the support of the gaming world's biggest publishers. It's going to be fascinating to see what precedent the game sets for mainstream gaming, across the next few years of this always-evolving medium's irrepressible growth.

Having previously been a digital-only game, Life Is Strange is now out in special physical editions for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. More information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Jimmy Paul and Tabboo!, circa 1988. Photo by Linda Simpson, collection of Jimmy Paul.

In the 80s, the artist Tabboo! was a legend among New York's gritty and glittery Lower East Side underground art scene, then headquartered at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. The regulars there included RuPaul and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and it was the heart of the city's drag resurgence; the annual drag festival Wigstock, founded by Lady Bunny in 1984, was supposedly the brainchild of a drunken night at the Pyramid.

Tabboo! arrived in New York from Boston, fresh out of art school, in the early 80s. She lived and painted in a loft a stone's throw from the Pyramid, and in addition to performing avant drag there, made flyers by hand for the club. They were alive with doodles and collages, cute cartoons, and portraits of queens, the same mix of wit, glam, and scrappy spirit that oozed from Tabboo!'s performances. A celebration of bad taste and disobedient sense of humor carpeted the scene. Tabboo! played in a few irreverent art bands—Fuckin' Barbies, Chihuahua Squad, the People Tree—and starred in projects like Mark Oates's campy horror parody Psykho III the Musical. These performances veered into deliciously absurd territory at times. In one clip I found of Tabboo! onstage at the Pyramid, she rapped like the Lorax ("I speak for the trees") and shrieked like an animal-rights activist ("Even Mister Goldfish needs some love").

Tabboo! remained a fixture of the downtown drag scene, performing well into the 90s, even as her peers burnt out around her. Jimmy Paul, a.k.a. Jimmy Paulette was one of them. Now a prominent editorial stylist in the New York fashion scene who does covers for Vogue and W, Paul only performed drag for a few years, but together with Tabboo!, the two were immortalized putting on their makeup in photos snapped by Nan Goldin, a close friend. These pictures are considered some of the most iconic images of New York's queer community from the late 80s and early 90s.

All through the years, Tabboo! has always painted, and since hanging up the wig, it's her main practice. A diaristic impulse spans her work—she's always painted what's around her. Decades ago, that was drag queens. Today, however, her subjects are more idyll and intimate—a portrait of a friend or a still life of flowers. In 2013, Damiani published the artist's first monograph. Coming up this week, SITUATIONS gallery is presenting a selection of Tabboo!'s art, which includes her drag-queen portraits as well as her later-day paintings, at the Outsider Art Fair in New York from January 21 through 24. To better understand the context this work emerged from, I chatted with Tabboo! and Jimmy Paul about how they each grew up and out of New York's 1980s drag scene.

'Solo Pyramid Figures' (1985) by Tabboo!

VICE: When did you first move to New York, and did you move to the Lower East Side right away?
Tabboo!: I moved to New York City in the summer of 1982, meaning "Manhattan." I was a big drinker back then, living in a dumpy old-age home known as the Homo Hilton, drinking Manhattans, working at dead-end jobs, yet still making out an artist's life. What little money was left after my frequent trips to the liquor store was spent on art supplies! I was always painting away and "doing shows." With my friend Pat Hearn and her new French husband, we were performing in a sort of no-wave band called Wild and Wonderful. We figured are chances were better if we headed to the Big Apple. Pat found a loft for rent (way over our collected budget), so within a month we split up and I ended up in a big, bright, sunny six-room tenement dump off of Avenue C. So many years later, I'm still here, painting away!

Jimmy Paul: I moved to New York the day after my 19th birthday, August 28, 1982. I'm from a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It didn't take very long before I ended up in the East Village. Tabboo! and I met maybe in '83. I moved in shortly after we met.

I wanted to move away from where I grew up as soon as figured out that it was an option. During high school, I started to take the bus downtown to hang out with the gay folks. Believe me, there were some good ones. That is where I met my first trans friend, Angie. Her image continues to inspire. Gorgeous.

How did you each start performing drag at the Pyramid Club?
Tabboo!: The very first day of getting to New York, I ran into Anne Craig and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and they said come do a show at the Pyramid! So it was off to the races from the very start. Wild and Wonderful did shows at the Mudd Club, CBGB, and Club 57, but those clubs were far past their prime. The Pyramid was exploding. As fate would have it, it was just a few blocks from my apartment-studio.

Jimmy Paul: A friend of mine from the Pittsburgh scene was working at the Pyramid Club doing lights. I heard he was working there, and I also heard they had drag queens dancing on the bar. He got me a job there when I was very new in town. It was the beginning of my new life.

What was the transformation like to get to become this drag persona?
Tabboo!: As far as trans-forming into Tabboo!, with the safety of having big, strapping doormen to protect me from being fag-bashed, kicking around on five-and-a-half-inch patent leather pumps for an appreciative audience, not to mention money at the end of the stick, it was no problem at all. As a child, I was always getting told, "Stop flitting around the house and take off that ridiculous outfit." Drag was freeing, fun, and there was a huge community of like-minded souls!

, just because I haven't worked the clubs as a queen [in recent years], doesn't mean people haven't called me Tabboo! I mean, it's not a woman's name; it's an art name—a tag name, in graffiti slang.

Tabboo! Photo by Nan Goldin

How was the punk (for back of a better word) drag that was happening at Pyramid different from the stuffier, old-fashioned drag people were used to?
Tabboo!: The old-school queens seemed to always be "doing" a famous diva: Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Judy, Liza. So, of course, they lip-synced. The greats could actually create the voices like Craig Russell, Jim Bailey, and Jimmy James. All the queens I knew were just into jumping into drag to be themselves. Once the lashes were on... HELLO!

Jimmy Paul: I never really thought about the previous drag performers who did traditional female impersonation. I never aspired to that. I much more related to the Warhol queens and glitter rockers: Candy Darling, Bowie, the New York Dolls.

What were the bands like that you played in?
Tabboo!: Fuckin' Barbies was sort of like the group Pylon. We played with toy instruments and banged on metal folding chairs and other found objects. Our two "hit" songs were: "She Never Had Eyebrows, She Painted Them In" and a cover version of the That Girl TV theme song. By the way, Jack Pierson was in that group with me, and we were all in drag. There were real girls, too. Seven of us.

The next band was Chihuahua Squad with Philly, Hapi, Jimmy Paulette, myself, and this girl who was the lead guitarist from Flipper, a famous LA hardcore band. Again, it was all drag, and this time our hit was a cover of the Troggs' "Wild Thing."

The People Tree was the most successful of all. Deee-Lite opened for us! We were a glam-rock band. I played drums in all the bands, but this time we even had a rock cello and matching outfits.

How did drag influence and interact with all the art, music, and fashion world in New York at the time?
Tabboo!: Well, I would say every single person I knew in the 80s and into the mid 90s—I dropped out of the drag scene around then, 20 years ago—was a drag queen or at least did it now and then. Yes, it influenced everything. I still refer to everyone as "she." When I met my first queens as a teenager in the gay bars, I couldn't get enough of the wild lingo, the gestures, the history. I gobbled it up with a passion. The gay world seems so conservative now, everyone wanting to blend in. We were the opposite—children of Bowie and T. Rex and International Chrysis.

Jimmy Paul: I didn't realize it at the time, but drag was edgy then. Without trying, we were ahead of the curve. Still, I was burning out fast. I was in a few bands, but I didn't feel like it was going anywhere. At the same time, Sprouse exploded on the fashion scene. Teri Toye [one of the first openly transgender models] was around. I always loved fashion, but this was happening right alongside all the stuff we were apart of. I saw a place for myself there.

Ethyl Eichelberger, a legendary performer, suggested I do hair or makeup as I spent so much time on my own. I think she would see how much I loved it. The scene supported me. For my first hair salon job, Agosto Machado, a major queen, gave me designer clothes to wear. Danilo, a genius hairdresser, later helped me. I apprenticed with him. My first photo shoots were with people I met through the scene. Tabboo! was a muse. I practiced my craft by doing wigs for him. He has a tiny head like models do, and sort of Anjelica Houston bone structure—not to mention very inspiring style. It was always a collaboration.

'Delphiniums with Crow' (2007) by Tabboo!

What's the relationship between your performance work and your painting?
Tabboo!: Well, they're both two different art forms. When I was doing those ads for a drag club, of course I drew cartoon queens. That was the job. On the other hand, my paintings have always been more realistic and the form and content more classic. Still, lives of little setups I do around the house with house plants and figurines, flowers in vases (imagined or real), portraits of friends, landscapes, all on stretched Belgian linen, with me doing all the work myself, old school. I haven't done drag in decades, but people never get tired of bringing it up!

You have this presentation coming up at the Outsider Art Fair. Do you identify with the term "outsider artist"?
Tabboo!: Call me what you want, but just call me.

Follow Whitney on Twitter.

Trump at an Iowa rally on January 19. Photo via Flickr user Alex Hanson. Thumbnail via National Review's Twitter.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike Donald Trump. Just to name a few, there's his fascist leanings, his open xenophobia and Islamophobia, the fact that he makes Americans look bad, the support he gets from white supremacists, and his recent endorsement from Sarah Palin. But National Review, the publication of the old-guard intellectual right founded by William F. Buckley, is attacking him for a simpler reason: Trump's not conservative enough.

On Thursday night, the magazine published a scathing editorial on its website titled "Against Trump" that attacked the leading Republican candidate as "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist" who "often makes no sense and can't be relied upon" and is "a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself."

Many, many observers have noted that Trump contradicts himself the way you would if, say, you were running a campaign for president while basically making up shit as you went along. But since National Review is essentially critiquing the GOP frontrunner from the right, its editors are concerned mainly with Trump's history as a real estate mogul who used eminent domain and favors from politicians to enrich himself while voicing support for "abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy."

The magazine also commissioned a shining city on a hill's worth of prominent conservative voices—up to and including Glenn Beck—to echo the publication's concerns. The essential critique, to quote National Affairs editor Yuval Levin's contribution, is that conservatives have been generally in favor of "limiting the power of institutions, reversing their centralization of authority," whereas Trump seems to be in favor of an all-powerful presidency, just so long as he occupies it.

Or, as Townhall editor Katie Pavlich put it:

"Conservatives have a serious decision. Do we truly believe in our long-held principles and insist that politicians have records demonstrating fealty to them? Or are we willing to throw these principles away because an entertainer who has been a liberal Democrat for decades simply says some of the right things?"

Any other candidate would be presumably disqualified from leading the national Republican Party for saying the things Trump has said, so what makes him so special? You can almost hear National Review grabbing the right-wing electorate by the shoulders and screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

The reasons for these frustrations aren't hard to suss out:National Review, along with the rest of the Republican establishment, likely imagined that the 2016 primaries would be about choosing between the varieties of conservatism offered by Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and maybe Rand Paul. Problem is, the GOP base seems more enamored of Trump, despite everything. Long after pundits predicted his demise, the short-fingered vulgarian is leading nationally as well as in Iowa and New Hampshire, even though he's inspired a lot of animosity along the way. No one has had the chance to cast a ballot for him yet, but if he starts actually winning primaries, the GOP will have to contemplate a reality where the face of their party is bright orange and topped by insane hair.

Even now, the Republican Party is bracing itself for a Trump nomination. In response to the National Review editorial, the Republican National Committee disinvited the magazine from being a debate partner, which publisher Jack Fowler shrugged off as being a "small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald."

It's not clear if National Review's efforts will have any effect on the election, since the type of conservative who reads it likely already had pretty severe doubts about Trump. (The magazine has previously engaged in online spats with the racist alt right.) And if Trump does get the nomination, there's a chance that a lot of his former conservative haters will hold their noses and declare him the lesser of two evils. As Erick Erickson wrote in his denunciation of Trump, "I would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton."

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini during a news conference Thursday at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Maryland. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Its name is Jonas, which, Weezer connotations aside, honestly doesn't sound all that threatening. But the winter storm set to pummel the East Coast this weekend is a monster that has set off storm warnings across the Mid-Atlantic region.

Jonas is expected to make landfall Friday night and will really get cranking over the weekend, extending through Sunday. Washington, DC, and Philadelphia will be under a blizzard warning starting Friday, meaning they could experience wind gusts of up to 35 miles per hour. A blizzard watch for the New York City area, which includes parts of Long Island and New Jersey. goes into effect on Saturday. The National Weather Service warns winds could be most severe on Saturday evening, reaching up to 60 miles per hour.

"I am not trying to scare people," Louis Uccellini, the director of the National Weather Service,said in a statement. Still, he warned, "people should be aware that this storm has the potential to be a major snow producer and if they don't take the proper steps... they could be adding to the impact or adding to the risk factors."

In DC, residents are preparing for two feet of snow, which would be the most the nation's capital has seen in over a century, according to Weather Underground blogger Bob Hensen. That city's mayor, Muriel Bowser, said at a press conference that she expected the storm to last 36 hours; her office issued a press release reassuring the public that the city had 39,000 tons of salt, more than 200 plows, and 145 dump trucks on hand to help clear away the deluge.

According to the Weather Channel's latest model, other areas of the East Coast, including New York and Philadelphia, will see a foot or more of snow, and there are warnings of ice and coastal flooding. The report stated that as of Thursday night, more than 85 million people—about a quarter of the country's population—were covered by winter weather warnings, stretching from eastern Kansas to the Carolinas to the New York City metro area.

The Weather Channel also is also reporting that ice will cause massive problems. Ice accumulation doesn't just lead to slick roads and perilous travel conditions, but can also cause tree damage, which in turn can take out power lines. Parts of central and eastern Kentucky and regions of the Carolinas are most at risk for losing power as a result.

Coastal flooding caused by Jonas is also expected. Atlantic beaches, the Jersey Shore, and the Delaware Bay are all expected to be impacted significantly, especially on Saturday morning and evening, when high tides and potential beach erosion are expected to cause damage. The coast of Massachusetts and the west end of the Long Island Sound, and also face a chance of coastal floods, according to the Weather Channel.

Just how bad will Jonas be compared to other historic snowstorms? Most sources place it up there with the Big Dogs of Winter's Discontent: the Snowmageddon/Snowpocalypse of 2010 that dumped at least 20 inches of snow across the Mid-Atlantic; the so-called "President's Day II" storm of 2003 that brought ten inches from Ohio to Delaware to southern New England; and the famed Blizzard of '96, which Tom Niziol, the Weather Channel's winter weather expert, said is the storm Jonas most closely resembles.

It's fair to ask whether these Doomsday predictions are being a bit overhyped—New Yorkers will remember last year's winter weather panic, when Mayor Bill De Blasio shut down of the city in the face of a prospective "Storm of the Century" that never really materialized. There's no real way to say just how much impact Jonas will have on the East Coast, but as far back as Tuesday, NOAA Weather Prediction Center forecaster and Northeast snowstorm expert Paul Kocin was warning that "the mechanisms coming together for a major snowfall are textbook."

The American Red Cross has provided a handy checklist to help those in the Jonas's path prepare for the storm. In it, you'll find the suggestion that you winterize your vehicle and fill it up with a full tank of gas before the storm hits. You'll also need to stock up on food, a week's worth of canned or food that doesn't need to be cooked like bread and crackers, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

As a child, I was surrounded by superstitious warnings: If I sat at the corner of the table, my mother would shout at me to move, since this was a sign I would never get married. If a shoe was upside down, it was an omen of bad luck. One time, I was severely punished for drawing a frame around my picture in the yearbook with black marker, which my mother believed had cursed me with some sort of impending death.

The belief in these superstitions might seem ludicrous to the majority of the Western World, but in my household, run by my Israeli-immigrant mother, it was part of daily life. No one is born superstitious—we learn to be superstitious from our parents, which is exactly what happened to me. Over the years, I've been able to let go of most of them (like, OK, I'm not going to die because my shoe is upside down), but there's one that I've never been able to escape: the Evil Eye.

Belief in the Evil Eye is a centuries-old tradition. The idea is basically that through a simple glare, similar to the stank eye, someone can bring supernatural harm upon you. It's more likely to happen when people are envious—your good fortune can provoke someone to give you the Evil Eye, sometimes unintentionally. In other words, if you tell people about the good things in your life, you're inviting them to curse you.

The Evil Eye was a convenient explanation for things like widespread disease, natural disasters, and sudden illness, before there were scientific explanations available. How else, in ancient times, could you explain why bad things happened to good people? Of course, nowadays, there are plenty of reasonable explanations. But that never stopped my family from warning me about it.

Family members regularly gave me necklaces with a hand-shaped charm (called a hamsa) or red strings to wear around my wrist, as protections against the Evil Eye. My grandmother would put her hand over my face, say a prayer in Hebrew, and remind me not to share my good news with anyone—especially my closest friends—lest I make them envious and cause them to curse me.

According to Stuart Vyse, author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, people cling to these kinds of beliefs because they "provide what psychologists call an 'illusion of control.'" It's a way of coping with things out of our control, good or bad. Ironically, though, believing in the Evil Eye has become its own curse: It's contributed to my chronic anxiety, given me intense trust issues, and made me believe, at an early age, that everyone around me had a secret desire to see me fail.

"If you are anxious, superstitions are more likely," Vyse told me. So, people who have anxiety seek a sense of control, but the false stability of superstitions can actually worsen anxiety.

Take, for example, a study from 2013, where researchers at the University of Chicago asked students to "jinx" themselves by saying out loud that they would not get into a car accident. The jinxed students were more likely to believe that they would get into a car accident than those who hadn't jinxed themselves.

On Motherboard: Stop Blaming the Moon For Your Problems

Not all superstitions are inherently negative, but the ones that are basically just make people more anxious.

"Fear of black cats or the number 13 brings its own anxiety," Vyse explained. "I see no real upside to this kind of superstition. We would all be better off if no one ever taught them to us." Women are more likely to believe in negative superstitions, and those beliefs can lead to the development of anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behavior, according to research.

But positive superstitions—like believing that certain things will bring good luck—can also help people cope with anxiety. Doing things like crossing your fingers, saying "break a leg," or holding onto a lucky charm have all been proven to improve performance, likely because it gives people a sense of control and confidence in whatever they're doing. Having anxiety is essentially feeling out-of-control, so positive superstitions can be a way to get around that.

Even the Evil Eye seems to have potential to yield positive results. A 2010 study conducted by researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands found that the fear of suffering the effects of envy made those in more enviable positions act pro-socially.

I asked Niels van de Ven, the lead researcher in that study, how exactly the fear of being cursed by our own friends can make us kinder. He boiled it down to social strategy: "Imagine that right now you are doing better than others. If you share some of your benefit, they are likely to do so in the future as well. This means that if you fall on hard times, others will help. The Evil Eye sort of institutionalizes such a norm in society."

For me though, the Evil Eye has only ever been a source of anxiety. I realize I've used it as an excuse to keep myself from getting close to people, even though what I really fear is being hurt, not cursed. But I'm working on reminding myself that I can't control the things that happen to me, and the Evil Eye shouldn't control my own anxiety. Today, I wear the jewelry my family members gave me more for the aesthetics than for its alleged magical powers. But, you know, I'm also not taking my chances.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

Illustration by Kelly Keith

Blowfly a.k.a. Clarence Reid passed away on Sunday, and I wanted to put together a collection of art honoring his memory. I asked Johan Kugelberg, perhaps the most important hip-hop historian to write a little about Blowfly to accompany these drawings.

—Nicholas Gazin

If you choose to immerse yourself in the work of a recently deceased celebrity, then let it be Blowfly. Your everyday life will be illuminated by him. The duality of Clarence Reid is consistently fascinating. Under his own name, he was the author of the sublime "Clean Up Woman," sung by Betty Wright; as his alias Blowfly, he created the equally sublime (if also giddily repulsive) "Shitting on the Dock of the Bay" or "Spermy Night in Georgia." He was a true craftsman, building extraordinary songs in R&B, soul, and funk over decades before he came across a window of fiscal opportunity assembling X-rated novelty songs. Using his inherent ability to make up saucy lyrics on the spot ever since his teens, Clarence Reid became Blowfly. Starting in 1971, Blowfly released a slew of albums along a same-ish formula of smutty/funny lyrics parodying well-known songs on top of sleazy funk grooves. These records were an extension of a long-standing African-American tradition of raunch, of wild, trashy, sexually-charged novelty music that was the soundtrack to better parties than you or me or anyone of our pals got to go to. These records were wildly successful in the marketplace, and sustained Clarence Reid for decades. His performances are legendary: off-the-cuff, spontaneous, sometimes insane, and (naturally) they became an insider calling card of hipness within an informed urban audience both black and white. Blowfly's legend was further cemented within DJ culture and frontline hip-hop, as Clarence Reid produced not only proto-rap recordings in the 1970s, but also issued the sublime Blowfly's Rapp in early 1980.

Honor Clarence Reid by slow-dancing with your significant other to one of his many fine slow jams. Honor Blowfly by following that up with a freak party in your heart or apartment. I love Blowfly, I love Clarence Reid, and his soul music is a perfect counterpoint to his triple-X party jams. Love and lust, exploitation and introspection.

—Johan Kugelberg

Patrick Rocha

Johnny Ryan

Nicholas Gazin

Exeter University estate patrollers talking to a student. All photos by the author

"Often, we'll know that if we hadn't shown up, the student would have died. But nine times out of ten, we never hear from them again."

It's early on a Saturday night and I'm in the back seat of The University of Exeter's Campus Security van, listening to a couple of estate patrollers exchange horror stories about the many Captain Morgan casualties they've had to deal with over their years on the job. I'm here to accompany them on their night shift—the hours in which students traditionally try to break their blood-alcohol records—and for now we're just driving around the city, past the various blocks of student halls, waiting for headquarters to radio in the first incident of the evening.

The patrollers are tasked with looking out for the welfare of Exeter Uni's undergraduates, many of whom—I'm told—don't particularly want to be looked out for. One patroller, Gary White, describes the typical reception he and his colleagues receive from students on campus: "We arrive and they don't let us speak," he says. "We get abuse. These kids get brave after a few beers."

Students converting a large chunk of their student loans into hangovers is nothing new, nor is the backlash. Various studies have pointed out that university drinking culture isn't exactly ideal—that it can lead to increased stress and a higher risk of contracting sexually-transmitted infections, and also, you know, having to get your stomach pumped or throwing up on strangers. The British government has also launched campaigns to decrease binge drinking at universities, with one optimistic project in 2014 aiming to get otherwise shitfaced students excited about the idea of a European-style "cafe culture that runs into the evening."

A survey conducted by national student website The Tab put Exeter University at number 16 in a list of the UK's heaviest-drinking universities. A similar survey on hexjam.com placed it at number 14, adding that the average student there drinks 12.25 units of alcohol per week, or about five-and-a-half pints. Listening to the estate patrollers talk, that figure sounds a little tame.

The first call-out of the night, just before 10 PM, is a noise complaint about a party in a block of student halls. Walking through the entrance, the corridor smells like a 4/20 legalization rally. A guy spots us and barrels back into the kitchen. Another one of the partygoers is asked to step outside.

"You are aware this entire place stinks?" asks estate patroller Charlotte Mackie.

"Why did you bring me out, though? Why me?" asks the student. "I don't smell anything."

He is lying, or he has nose-blindness.

He starts hurling abuse at Mackie, who tries to calm him down. With no physical evidence of anyone smoking weed, she and her colleague give the students a caution.

Allan Edgcumbe in the estate patrollers' CCTV room

In a later interview with the university's head of security, Allan Edgcumbe, I'm told the estate patrollers always try to give students the benefit of the doubt. "We're aware that these are educated people," Edgcumbe tells me, "not goons out to knock people's lights out."

However, students are less likely to return the same courtesy to the patrollers. Mackie, who graduated with a degree in English and History in 2005, says that students often assume the estate patrollers are "menial workers."

"They think we won't know what cannabis smells like," she says. "They assume, because we're security, that we're less intelligent."

That said, not everyone on campus is so blindly anti-security. Just like a militant anarchist with an ACAB neck tattoo might grudgingly value the police a little more once they've helped solve a burglary at his mom's house, students who security have helped give credit where it's due. Charlie Levell, 20, recently called estate patrol. "They helped me get rid of a drunk girl who'd been left outside my house," he says. "They're usually pretty understanding."

Leaving the block, we walk past a guy throwing up on the floor. His friend pats his shoulder meekly, his Saturday night presumably not going the way he'd wanted it to. "Maybe a bathroom would be better," estate patroller Paul Cook tells the friend. "Have him drink some water."

"Our students reflect what's happening in society," says Edgcumbe when I ask him about university drinking culture. "They're no better or worse than others."

During last year's Freshers Week his team took 741 calls, but he's sympathetic towards first year students arriving at university, most of whom have "probably been working very hard to get the grades" they needed to secure their place.

"They arrive and they get swept along with the euphoria. I think it's fantastic," he says. "I used to play rugby, I don't mind a few pints. But of course some students have a bit more than they're capable of holding."

There are 16 people on Edgcumbe's main team—those who work alternating day and night shifts—and three who only work nights. "I've got a great staff," he says, "their hearts are in the right place." He stresses that estate patrollers are "soft security," meaning they balance security with welfare.

At 12:40 PM we're given directions to our first drunk pick-up of the night. A girl had been walking home alone, before some other students had spotted her and taken her back to their house to wait for the estate patrollers. We arrive to find her curled up on a sofa, her hair matted into a kind of vomit-y dreadlock. For a while she struggles to remember her address, before we're eventually able to take her home, White and Cook supporting her between them.

"No one home," Cook mutters as we get in. He radios Vicky Laskey, one of the residence patrollers, who keep watch on much smaller areas of the student residences on foot and are students' first point of contact before estate patrollers are called in. Laskey arrives to make sure the girl is alright until her housemates return.

"At least they've got the Friends boxset," Laskey jokes.

Back inside the van, White tells me that the sight of a drunken student headed home alone is all too common. "None of their friends want to stay behind with them or have to take them home, so they let them wander off," he says. "A couple of years ago I found a girl passed out on the high street at half ten, all alone."

"Seven or eight years ago, we had a student die from choking on their own vomit; they'd collapsed walking home alone," says Mackie. "For a while after that, students made sure to walk home with friends... But time passes and students forget. Unfortunately, something has to happen to scare them, to make them act more carefully."

As the team's advanced paramedic, Mackie often deals with the more severe cases they're called out to. "Cider vomit is the worse," she says. "Port, red wine... vodka is OK."

Mackie says that even when she was a student there wasn't the same attitude to alcohol, calling university-drinking culture "perverse." I recount stories I've heard about society initiations, which are now banned officially by the university. Cook, who worked as security at an agricultural college before joining the team, has memories of students drinking out of pigs' heads.

Read on Thump: I Recorded Guest Vocals For David Guetta's Euro 2016 Anthem

Over the course of the night the team responds to roughly 20 calls, ranging from a car that needs towing to complaints about a student house letting off fireworks. One call-out is due to a fire alarm going off; we arrive at the accommodation to find students shivering outside, glaring.

"They'll go on a night out in just a T-shirt, but if the fire alarm goes off we get blamed for making them wait," says Cook. In 2015, the team responded to 732 fire alarms across the campus.

Of course, over his 13 years with the team, Cook has had to deal with far more serious incidents on campus; he recounts breaking down a bathroom door, the force snapping the rope a student had been trying to hang themselves with. "Students see us as the big, bad wolves, shutting down parties," explains Edgcumbe. "But we're very much more than a security team."

Alan Taylor, tonight's duty supervisor, tells me there's a "pattern" of increased reports of self-harming and suicide attempts around exam time, which correlates with a number of studies investigating the link between exam stress, depression, and suicidal feelings. Taylor thinks these incidents have increased since the rise in tuition fees, citing the "added pressure" students are under.

Related: Watch 'House Party Politics'

Student Maria Bowles, 20, says that the patrollers "are not just the party-crashing killjoys people think they are." She describes being picked up after a severe accident in first year. "Estate patrol took me home, reassuring me and making me laugh when I felt close to having a breakdown," she says.

As I'm driven home at 4:30 AM, the image of the solitary girl being guided home by the patrol—her shoes slipping off her feet—flashes before me. Following similar cases, Mackie says the team "hardly ever get a thank you."

"They'll wake up the next morning and never even question how they got back home."

Follow Flora on Twitter.

Still from 'Peter Pan XXX: An Axel Braun Parody' via Wicked Pictures

It's award season again and somewhere behind closed doors a committee of faceless men and women are deciding which of 2015's cinematographic triumphs will be validated with the industry's top honors. Yes, the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards in Las Vegas are upon us, and unlike the stuffy boys club that is the Oscars, at this ceremony women are on top and calling someone stuffy is a compliment.

I've operated on the fringes of the porn world since working for Larry Flynt's skateboarding magazine Big Brother from the 90s until the early aughts. Yet for all of the friends I've got inside the industry, many of whom have won awards for their good fuck moves, I'm ashamed to admit that I've never understood what exactly makes a porno award-worthy. In my naivety I assumed that it was a pay-to-play system and that the only surefire road to a nomination ran through the AVN committee's pants. The reality, however, is a fair and democratic voting system featuring a panel of men and women binge watching sex scenes for weeks on end while goring on a constant supply of snacks and debating the finer points of lesbianism and BDSM.

I recently sat down with AVN senior editor Peter Warren, who oversees all nominations, at his Chatsworth office to better understand the voting process for the awards and to find out just how many blow jobs would win the committee over. (Spoiler: The answer is zero.)

VICE: Peter, I'd like to know all about the process of getting nominated and winning an award. An outsider looking at the sex industry might assume that a blowjob would curry favor among the judges. Is that the case?
Peter Warren: No, sadly. If only it were that easy. I mean I'm one guy and we have a committee of about nine people who meet for weeks on end. We went for five weeks this year of intense watching and arguing and whittling down everything to the nominees for each category. And then when we emerged from that hell, we announced the nominees to the world. There's a larger pool of voters all over the country, too. It's a little smaller this year than it has been in the past, but there are about twenty-three voters or something like that. All of the nominated movies get sent out to all the voters. They have their own unique passwords to a private website where they do the voting. Basically, majority wins.

What criteria do the initial nine look for?
That's a tough question to answer. We kind of break it up initially. Each of us has our own special genre we're particularly interested in or experts on, so we'll say, "You take the BDSM movies, I'll take the all-girl movies." Ultimately we come together as a group, and we very democratically go through everything. Sometimes it gets ugly. Sometimes we scream at each other. Sometimes we throw things. One way or another we get it down to the 15 final nominees in each category.

Are you sitting in a room watching films together?
Yeah.

Still from 'The Turning' via Girlsway/Girlfriends Films

What's that scenario like? Is there popcorn?
There are snacks. There are a lot of snacks. The room gets very littered with snacks. We get lunch. That's the one nice perk, we get lunch every day, catered for us. We get a little sick of each other's faces as the weeks wear on. All of us have been a part of this for years, so we know what each other's quirks are, what each other's likes are. In the end, we're all very proud to be a part of it.

Has anybody, even as a joke, pulled out his dick and started jerking off during the course of this?
No. I don't think anybody would be very happy with that.

After weeks of watching videos around the clock, are you sick of porn? Do you need a breather?
You need a little breather, yeah. Luckily the way it's always timed, we wrap it up just before Thanksgiving so we get a nice little break around Thanksgiving. But then it's kind of right back into it because we have to start voting. Voting is about a month, give or take.

Still from 'Wanted' via Wicked Pictures/Adam & Eve

You said everybody's got their specialty or category that they prefer. You're the Girl/Girl expert. What do you look for in your nominees?
It's not rocket science: hot girls that are very into what they're doing. I'm very notoriously against using toys. I think toys in a lesbian scene is blasphemous. I always get accused of being into stuff that's like fake-lesbianism, but I don't really think that's true. I don't like to see girls who are very obviously there to collect a paycheck. I want to feel like they're into it.

We're seeing fewer extreme sex acts in videos than we did a decade ago. Does that garner favor these days? Does doing extreme acts get a girl closer to winning Performer of the Year, or is it more the style and the passion that they show on-screen for the committee?
You see this ebb and flow over the years. When I first started it was going through a super extreme period, then things tamed, now they're starting to get more extreme again. I think girls and companies are competing very intensely against each other in this industry because there are so many girls and so much product out there that they have to do something to stick out. In a lot of cases, that something turns out to be the more extreme the better. It gets our attention, no doubt about it. Whether or not it carries them any favor for being nominated for awards I think it depends on what their overall body of work looks like, because we are looking at everything that they do, not just one thing. If there's a girl whose whole shtick is to shove the largest objects on the planet up her ass in every scene that she does, that's not a lot of range. Also, again, is she into it? We like to know that girls are really after something and that they really care about establishing themselves and loving what they're doing, and caring about the awards. We probably do favor someone who really, really wants to win an award over someone who just says, "Fuck the awards. It doesn't mean anything. It's a paperweight."

Riley Reid. Image via Tushy.com/Jules Jordan Video

Are web-only scenes eligible for nomination, or is it a hard rule where only things distributed on DVD can be considered?
We have started to expand that. We've kind of made a major shift this year. For the first time, we took our four biggest sex scene categories and said, "OK, we will allow scenes from websites to be eligible for these four categories." I expect that next year after it registers with everybody and they see that we're announcing, "This is a scene at such-and-such .com," not from the Gangbang Me 2 movie, that it'll probably click and we'll get flooded next year with a million web scenes. That's not going to be fun, but it's the world that we live in now.

If you were a betting man, who do you think is going to win Performer of the Year this year?
That's actually a really tough one because there are a few really big contenders. I think for sure it will be between Adriana Chechik, Riley Reid, and Carter Cruise. I think those are the big three.

For more details or to buy tickets go to avnawards.avn.com

Follow @Nieratko or go to ChrisNieratko.com

An inmate (not the writer) gets treatment from a registered nurse at San Quentin State Prison in California in 2007. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

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.

"Chow release in five minutes," the voice of a correction officer says over the North Block PA system, waking me up from an erotic dream.

I close my eyes and think of Disney's characters, hoping the G-rated images chase away some of the insatiable desire. I imagine Daffy Duck slapping Mickey Mouse. Goofy appears, trying to break up the fight. Then Minnie Mouse shows up in a short skirt, with fishnet stockings, and...

Stop that.

Reaching up, I turn on my television, hoping the morning news will calm me down. The anchor appears on the screen, and watching her full red lips deliver the news makes things harder. I turn off the television.

I start to inhale and exhale, long and slow. Inch by inch, blood finds somewhere else to flow.

For a lot of men in prison, it's a struggle to stay sane.

As usual, Old Man Bobby (not his real name) is still asleep on the bottom bunk. The 55-year-old has been incarcerated for over 20 years. He is a cool cellie, but our schedules clash. He wakes up after me, goes to work in the kitchen to prepare dinner, but returns at the same time I do. I hardly get any privacy.

Today I have an appointment at medical right after breakfast, so I need to hurry. If I'm late, they will start calling my name over the loudspeaker. If I don't answer, they will call everyone back to their cells in order to find me. All that to get me there on time, only to have to wait hours to be seen and told nothing is wrong and sent on my way. I hate the overcrowded medical-treatment dance, but I go to keep reporting my symptoms—of fatigue, dry mouth, low blood pressure, cramps in my toes, and weird bowel movements.

Here's the one good thing about going to medical: the majority of the staff is female. Leaving a world filled almost entirely with men to one dominated by women balances the unnatural prison universe.

I used to take women for granted. Like Nas once said, "You lose money chasing women, never lose women chasing money." I had devalued women. I had devalued love. And in doing so, I had devalued myself. I miss being loved. I miss having someone concerned about what happens to me.

Studies show that conjugal visits are awesome for rehabilitation, but the rules for lifers in California, combined with harsh sentencing laws, mean that having the comfort of a woman is out of my reach. Anyone who tries to love me would be serving out a life without affection.

For a lot of men in prison, it's a struggle to stay sane. Some stalk any woman they see working in the prison. Some straight, incarcerated men become prison gay. Some men become cold and violent.

On the way down the tier, I see a poster of a curvaceous Hispanic woman in a bikini taped to the inside of an open cell door. My eyes are glued. I prefer not to keep pictures of half-nude women in plain sight to prevent myself from going crazy, but I can't control every man in this place

Outside the dining hall, the chow line is long but moving fast. One of the correction officers walking towards me has long, braided hair and the kind of lips you want to kiss forever. I have to avert my eyes, reminding myself that her lips aren't thinking about me, so I shouldn't be thinking about them.

I receive my food without ever seeing who passed it to me. Looking at the small portion of scrambled eggs with the beans on the side, I remember the last breakfast I ate before being arrested. She had gotten up early. From under a blanket on the living room floor, I watched her prepare the meal in a short robe. Then the US Marshals started pounding on the door, shattering the moment. They took me away in handcuffs without allowing me a kiss goodbye or a bite of the breakfast. Now my meals are cooked without care and served in a large dining hall where men sit at self-segregated tables.

In five quick scoops, I devour the balmy eggs and get up to leave.

On my way to the medical building, I glance inside the mainline law library entrance and see that the condom dispenser is half-empty. A new law passed in September of 2014 requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to make condoms available to inmates. We can have three condoms, although the CDCR does not condone having sex. Since people have sex anyway, the logic is that making it safer can help limit the spread of diseases inside, and eventually outside, of prison.

I check my reflection in the law library's glass windows. Everything is in order—I am ready to be seen.

When I reach the doorway to medical, the correction officer at the front desk catches my eye. She has rosy red hair and green eyes. I calmly say, "Thomas for medical," while handing over my ID and a slip of pink paper that has my name and appointment time printed on it. Her eyes show no signs of attraction. She scans the appointment slip and says coldly, "Go to the right."

Check out our documentary about America's for-profit bail system.

I go to the right, and another officer is standing behind a podium. I hand over my ID and take a seat to wait for a nurse to call my name. It will probably take hours. Nurses pass by constantly, my eyes in close pursuit.

"Thomas. Thomas," calls a small Asian nurse with caramel skin.

"Here," I answer, surprised at being called so fast.

I follow her into the small office, and she tells me to have a seat and starts checking my blood pressure.

"I've never seen you before, are you new?" I ask.

"No," she says. "I was on a leave of absence for two years, but I'm back now."

"Oh, I've only been in San Quentin for about that long. Hey, wait a minute—I don't know if we should take you back. You left us for two years."

"Oh really?" she says. "Who else would call you back here this fast? Do you really want to go back to waiting hours to be seen?"

The band around my arm fills with air and squeezes me like a clamp. Then the pressure releases. The numbers 85 over 60 appear on a small screen. I ignore the reading.

"You know prisoners have abandonment issues. How can we trust you again?" I tease.

"You weren't even here when I left."

"True, but that means I missed out on the pleasure of meeting you until now. All those times I waited two hours to be seen are your fault."

"Just be happy you don't have to wait so long any more," she says, smiling.

Placing one gloved hand lightly on my shoulder, she uses her left one to remove the armband. The contact is fleeting and innocent, but still thrilling. She smells like soap.

Rahsaan Thomas is a 45-year-old inmate at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California. He has served 15 years of a 55-to-life sentence for 2nd-degree murder, with a 35-year enhancement for using a firearm. He shot and killed two armed men who he says were stealing property from him.

Kayode Ewumi

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In October of 2015, 21-year-old actor Kayode Ewumi uploaded a video to YouTube called "Hood Documentary." The short film follows deluded, hopeless—but strangely lovable—aspiring grime MC Roll Safe as he guides the viewer through "the hood," a.k.a. a small area of south London.

Dressed like a young Eddie Murphy in Delirious—leather jacket and a bare chest—and acting somewhere between David Brent, MC Grindah, and Chris Eubank, it seemed implausible that anything about Roll Safe could be real. Still, that didn't stop many "Hood Documentary" viewers from believing RS actually existed.

Of course, that was partly why Ewumi and his best friend, Tyrell Williams, dreamt up the character.

"It's based on a world that we've seen," says Ewumi, who plays RS, when I meet him at London's Young Vic Theatre; he used to work here as an usher until his newfound notoriety made the job a little tricky. "Everyone knows someone like RS, no matter what context . He's that guy in the hood convinced that he knows everyone and everything."

Granted, not everyone knows a Roll Safe, but we've all met someone who thinks they're much better connected than they really are. The girl at school who was convinced she was related to royalty. The guy at work who strongly reckons he can get upgraded to first class every time he flies British Airways.

"Hood Documentary" started on Vine; Ewumi's cousins persuaded him to make an account after he'd inundated them with videos on WhatsApp. His seven-second Vines—him mimicking his Nigerian parents, or playing any one of a vast array of characters, RS included—started to gain traction. A friend then showed Ewumi a few episodes of BBC shows People Just Do Nothing and The Office, and they decided to make a show of their own.

Three months and millions of YouTube views later, "Hood Documentary" has spawned countless reaction videos and memes. A month after its release, Ewumi appeared in character as Roll Safe on BBC Radio 1Xtra's "Fire in the Booth," notching up more than 3 million views and making his appearance the third-most watched YouTube video in 1Xtra history, surpassing well-respected UK rap and grime acts (and Ed Sheeran).

Roll Safe's "Fire in the Booth"

With all the hype and hysteria, it came as a surprise to many when Ewumi announced he would be putting the character on hiatus. In a statement posted to Twitter in December, he said: "For now the #HoodDocumentary will take a break as we pursue other genres and explore our creativity."

Surely this was all a bit premature? The life and times of Roll Safe had only just begun, before being snuffed out in a single tweet.

Really, though, we shouldn't be surprised: Ewumi retired from stand-up comedy aged 19, after two shows. His approach stems from a Dave Chappelle quote, which he paraphrases as: "Once you get it, get out."

I ask if this is a mantra he's determined to stick to.

"Have you seen Jungle Run, when they go and have to get the golden coins?" asks Ewumi in response.

Jungle Run, in case you haven't seen it, was an ITV children's show similar to The Crystal Maze, in which kids had to complete tasks such as collecting coins and bananas hanging above a swamp while standing on lily pads. The children would then run as fast as they could, or risk being trapped in the jungle forever.

"You see—that's the same with me," Ewumi continues. "Once you get the coins, get out of there!"

Though he may have retired the character for now, social media isn't quite so ready to let go.

"In a way I admire that RS is carrying on without us," says Ewumi. "Before, I was a bit cautious about being known only for RS. But now I say to myself that I know I'm an actor with an ability and a gift from God, so versatility is something I will always embrace."

Needless to say, Ewumi is self-assured. During our conversation he says stuff like "everything I touch turns to gold" and compares his relationship with co-creator and director Tyrell as "a Leonardo and Scorsese-type thing."

However, while he's clearly confident in his ability, he's also realistic: he knows he can't just rely on the success of Roll Safe and is keen to prove he's capable of more. He's determined to avoid being known purely as a comedian, or even a comedic actor; he simply wants to be known as an actor, and a serious one at that. From as young as 15 he was performing youth theater at The Young Vic, before going on to study theater and practical performance at university, graduating last June.

Watch on Noisey: Skepta—Top Boy

I steer the conversation back towards Twitter and Vine, digital platforms that Ewumi has been noticeably absent from so far this year.

"Mate, they were a massive part of the success," he exclaims, "and I pay a lot of homage to that—but I don't want to be a slave to it."

Ewumi isn't the first British actor to find success online. Performers like A Squeezy, Don't Jealous Me, and, a favorite of Ewumi's, Tommy Xpensive have been making comedy similar to "Hood Documentary" for years, but never gained the same level of exposure.

I ask Ewumi why he thinks this is.

"Because I wouldn't pin down on that genre of black British comedy—it's more than that; it's not generic," he says. "No matter if you're Asian, white, black, people find it funny."

But not everyone "gets" Roll Safe's humor, I point out.

"It much younger demographic, you're right, but I think it's much more than the 'urban' demographic," he replies. "Tyrell went to university to study creative writing and journalism. I studied theater and professional practice, so the way we write is from what we know."

Interested in Ewumi's reference to People Just Do Nothing, which started as a YouTube series before being picked up by the BBC, I ask him why he thinks there hasn't been a character like Roll Safe on TV.

"I guess because some networks are afraid to commission work of black origin, because they are afraid they're not going to make their money back—and I find that absurd," he says. "But there are so many people who are not bothered about being on TV. As black creatives we are doing it online, so why go to a network that might try and change it into something different, instead of us keeping it online and keeping it fresh?"

Follow Amelia Dimoldenberg on Twitter.

A flame atop the Armada gas condensate platform, operated by BG Group Plc. Photo via Bloomberg.

On Wednesday oil prices dropped to just under $27 a barrel, their lowest since 2003. That's down 25% in the last year, and analysts are worried the price may keep falling. As the International Energy Agency told Reuters, the world could "drown in oversupply" of oil in 2016, along with other determining factors, like a shift to other energy sources weakening demand, and price wars between big oil and gas industry players.

These low oil prices have helped consumers at the pump, of course. They have also lowered the price of flights (down 15% since this time last year, according to NPR) while bolstering the bank accounts of some airlines. But there are losers, too. The oil and gas industry has seen 250,000 layoffs since the precipitous slide, according to oilprice.com, and the global stock market is down amidst fears stoked by the rout. (Though it did rebound slightly Friday, propelled in part by a small spike in oil prices.)

To find out what the hell is going on with the price of oil, what the instability means, and how bad things could get, we reached out to Delia Morris, a senior market analyst at Rigzone, an online publication frequented by oil and gas industry insiders that features in-depth coverage of news and data in the field. In an email exchange she explained that there is more at play here than just simple supply and demand—potential price wars between energy supplying nations, an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) not keen on cutting production that could stabilize the market, and conspiracy theories about market manipulation by key players abound.

VICE: What is the big reason oil prices have dropped so low?
Delia Morris: There are several factors why prices have dropped since June 2014. First the US tight oil boom (which started in earnest in 2009/2010) added millions of more barrels to the global crude supply, there was a panicked perception that we'd run out of storage to house it and tepid demand to consume it. (More of a supply shock). The first real acceleration in the price downturn occurred when OPEC had their fateful meeting on Thanksgiving, November 27, 2014, when the cartel decided to maintain production levels. The cartel has historically overproduced, or gone over individual country quotas, but this was a clear sign that the cartel was not after keeping a floor on global prices (which is theoretically their role in crude markets) and, instead, the name of the game was to go after market share. There were many theories around why OPEC (namely Saudi Arabia) would do this. I am of the opinion that it was to make better sense/better predict the behavior of the US shale players (force them to consolidate, not necessarily to put them out of business). Frontier plays (like the Arctic and ultra-deepwater plays) and Canadian oil sands (which require huge upfront capital costs) I think were targets (by OPEC) to forcibly put them out of business. And we are seeing that play out now.

In August 2015, oil started plumbing new lower levels due to news at that time coming out of China that pointed to an economic slowdown, or that the economic situation was worse than markets had originally thought. China is the world's second largest consumer of crude. The Yuan was devalued several times in the space of a week and there was tumult in their stock markets. Demand concerns abounded at this point and oil prices plummeted as a result.

Then we come to the next big marker, the OPEC meeting of December 2015, where Saudi and its Gulf allies basically said we're going to pump as much oil as we please and it's up to the non-OPEC countries (namely Russia and the US) to dial back their production in order to balance the market. For a time this past fall, Russia was producing somewhere around 10.8 million barrels a day, breaking post-Soviet records and was the world's largest oil producer. No one has dialed back production materially, in order to show a supply response. And this week, following the lifting of sanctions on Iran, the oil markets are even more worried that more supply will flood the markets in coming weeks against the backdrop of a slowing world economy, with China and other important emerging markets looking weak.

Who benefits when oil prices are this low? Who is hurt?
The main beneficiaries of lower oil prices are the refiners who use crude as an input. Their margins widen, which is the difference between their input price and their marketed petroleum product price (gasoline, diesel, heating oil, jet fuel, etc). Airlines also benefit as jet fuel becomes much cheaper. Of course drivers/consumers of gasoline have benefited as pump prices are at all-time lows.

Oil producers are the ones that suffer the most as oil prices drop. The profit per barrel falls and companies that get a realized price that is much lower than the benchmark are suffering even more. Producers who have high lifting (production costs) will suffer the most.

Will the price of oil keep going down? Why or why not?
Good question. Really, this price down-cycle has surprised everyone and is unlike other past price drops, so will have a longer and different trajectory than others (2008, 1986). Just as we thought there was a floor—for example in 2015 many thought when US onshore production finally rolled over—then we'd see a so-called "supply response" from the shale producers. Well, that never really happened and right now there are really no positive catalysts on the horizon for oil prices, either on the supply side or demand side. The US economy was a positive catalyst for a while in that there was an uplift in gasoline consumption because of lower prices, but that benefit is probably already played out. China was also consuming more oil in 2015, but that was not representing true demand and more to fill their strategic reserves. What we do know is that, theoretically, these prices are not sustainable.

We have to keep in mind that for conventional oil wells across the globe, the average decline rate is between 4.5% to 6%. All things being held equal, in order to replace supply for existing demand, we need to at least find new barrels to keep up with this decline rate. The implications of underinvestment by the oil industry because of the current conditions will have implications for supply in 10-15 years from now. The average time for deepwater/complex projects from discovery (when hydrocarbons are first found) to first oil is on average ten years.

The price will find a floor soon, but it might involve a catastrophic event, which usually happen during very fragile times. And these are fragile and jittery times!

We've already seen that the drop in oil prices affect the stock market. What do oil prices this low mean for the economy?
For the US economy low oil prices can spur deflation. Just as the Fed has given the go-ahead to raise rates, which will have a negative impact on the stock market, low oil prices (which are an indicator of low economic growth in emerging and developing countries in some ways) is having a negative effect on stock markets across the globe.

You mentioned OPEC opting not to cut production in order to stabilize the market. Might they do that down the line?
I believe there is more of a chance of OPEC breaking up than for them to stabilize the market. Venezuela, Algeria, Nigeria, and Angola are countries that are no longer benefiting by being part of the cartel and are pushing for price stabilization. Saudi is the de facto leader of OPEC and whatever they do/say holds sway. So we need to look at Saudi and what they are doing to determine if OPEC will stabilize prices. I think it will happen only when something catastrophic happens to their oil installations in-country. Then the price war will end.

If the price of oil continues to plummet or stays around where it is, what will the future of US oil firms look like?
In terms of the US majors (ExxonMobil, Chevron) and other big players that have global portfolios, they will benefit. They have the cash and wherewithal to sustain and grow through this. There will be buying opportunities for them and they have war chests to make acquisitions. As for the smaller shale players, many will go under, but the ones with good assets will possibly be picked up. Many of the shale players that are currently in the red are forced to keep producing in order to make their interest payments. So don't expect US production to fall. I think it will continue at this pace or even grow. Also, we know that offshore the US Gulf of Mexico production has picked up in the last year and will continue growing.

There are a number of conspiracy theories floating around about why oil prices are so low and who is pushing them ever downward. Is there truth to any of them? Is Saudi Arabia flooding the market with oil to hurt Russia and Iran, etc?
Sure, there are a lot of reasons why Saudi Arabia took the decision to basically eliminate their spare capacity and go all out and produce to the max and try and gain market share in Europe and Asia (they are playing a long-game). A lot of that was to gain market share from Russia and Iran, but also from the US. But as we have seen, Saudi Arabia may have pushed itself too far. The country for the first time had to sell bonds, institute austerity measures and cut back on other subsidies. They are playing a long game and are fighting proxy wars with Russia and Iran in Yemen and Syria, and oil is part of the mix. I think the biggest disruptor to all this is the US lifting of the crude export ban. I don't think the Saudi's had worked this into their calculus (at least the timing of it). So, if buyers of crude (ones that process light, sweet, which is what the US will mostly be exporting) start looking for a politically stable seller (i.e. the US), the US could obtain market share and back out Saudi crude, which is largely heavier and more sour and produces a lower yield for refiners than the US quality crude.

You can read Delia Morris' weekly discussion on oil prices and more on Wednesday's crash here.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Brother Andrew Suarez holding the green and red versions of Monk Sauce. All photos courtesy of Subiaco Abbey

Every morning at 5:45 AM, the monks of Subiaco Abbey gather to pray together in an airy, white chapel below a massive gold crucifix bearing an emaciated, pained-looking Jesus. There are group prayers; then there are private prayers. At 6:30 AM, a community-wide mass begins, with more prayers.

Then, after hours of pensive thought and meditation, the monks head to their dining hall, where each table holds a bottle of fiery red Monk Sauce, a bottle of chipotle Monk Sauce, and a bottle of tangy green Monk Sauce, all of which are made by the monks.

The tables also have all the old standbys—Tapatio, Tabasco, Cholula, and Sriracha, and a salsa made by a Mexican-American monk. There, they silently set their tongues aflame with hot sauce.

If the life of a monk is monotonous, their diet is not. Monks have long been responsible for making and keeping alive the some of the world's most exciting food traditions—monks were the first ones to process chocolate in Spain, Trappist monks have created some of Europe's finest beers, and even Dom Pérignon champagne was originally made by a Benedictine monk. In Subiaco, Arkansas, the monks make hot sauce.

Subiaco Abbey has existed since 1878—relatively young compared to the medieval monasteries of Europe, but no less traditional. It's a Benedictine monastery, a sect that's long espoused traditions of growing, cooking, and eating food together.

"Food plays an important part in monastic living," said Charlie Kremer, Subiaco Director of Food Services. "There is an emphasis on health and wellness for the monks and the challenge to our kitchen is to provide healthy and nutritious meals that are also appealing to about 40 people."

The monastic diet is also disciplined: There is no meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, and every Wednesday, the brothers have a noontime meal called a "fast day meal," made of beans and cornbread, or soup and rice, which saves the brothers money that they give to charity. To keep the humble meals from being bland, Kremers aims to serve things like pho and kimchi, and the addition of hot sauce—in particular, the two varieties made on the premises—gives the monks of Subiaco an opportunity to indulge and individualize their spice profiles.

The monks started making their own hot sauce in 2003, when Father Richard Walz, now head of the food production team, was stationed in Belize. He learned to make habanero hot sauce from the recipes of local cooks and when he returned to Subiaco, he brought his precious project back with him. The monks planted the Belizean habanero seeds in the Subiaco garden and built a greenhouse to grow tropical crops like pineapples, papayas, bananas, ginger, and lemongrass.

"More so than food itself, I like working with plants," Walz told me. "It's perfectly monastic to be concerned about the environment and work with gardens."

Richard Walz, tending to the habanero peppers

During that first harvest, the monks made 140 gallons of the sauce. They mostly gave it away to friends, but they had so much that they decided to sell it, on behalf of the monastery. In the summer of 2004, they sold 3,500 bottles of Monk Sauce. They opened an online business called Country Monks, made deals with local restaurants and farmers markets, and eventually created a second sauce—a green version, picked just before the habaneros reddened.

Now, the monks shrug off their habits in favor of jeans and plant between 300 and 600 habaneros each year, yielding a harvest between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds of peppers.

There is, it seems, only one activity that's more important to the monks.

"If the bell rings for prayer, you stop whether you're finished with work or not," said Brother Reginald Udouj. "For us, there is monastic leisure, and there is balance in life. The prayer is our primary job, and everything else is secondary."

"You're up to your elbows and tingling. I'd get to prayer and I'd be rubbing my eyes and crying all throughout prayer." — Brother Reginald Udouj

Udouj had been a furniture salesman before coming to Subiaco to work in the chili garden, where he now spends most of his non-praying time between February and October. He helps plant, water, weed, pick, clean, pack, and freeze the habaneros. After his first harvest, he learned to wear gloves.

"You're up to your elbows and tingling. I'd get to prayer and I'd be rubbing my eyes and crying all throughout prayer," he said. "The old monks would say, 'Oh, look at Udouj, he's so devout in prayer, he's crying.'"

Meanwhile, his tongue has also adapted to tolerate Monk Sauce, which clocks in at 250,000 Scoville units—significantly hotter than a Korean chili pepper or a jalapeño, but gentler than a Carolina Reaper or a ghost chili.

It's sweetened by carrots they grow themselves, rendering a fine balance of hot, sweet, and fruity. Approximately 12 to 14 peppers go into each bottle. "Others have suggested that we market a 'mild' version of our sauce," Walz said. "I countered by saying that there is no such thing as a mild habanero pepper."

Brother Pio Do and Brother Reginald Udouj picking Habanero peppers in the garden at Subiaco Abbey

The monks file into the refectory for dinner every night in silence, standing in a line to read the evening's ordained scripture and Subiaco's particular version of an ordo, a church calendar that denotes feasts, martyrs' deaths, and honored bishops. Then they proceed to their tables, where the monks eat in silence—no matter how spicy.

"Going back throughout the millennia, time shared at the table was a special time, a time for shared prayer and shared reflection," said Udouj. "The Rule of Saint Benedict gives special detail for this time." It's a time for togetherness, spiritual reflection, and also discipline—to silently eat and pray, while their mouths are on fire.

Follow Dakota Kim on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Sarah Keenlyside

Ferris Bueller was the original lifehacker, decades before that was even a thing. Any kid (or adult, for that matter) who has seen John Hughes' iconic film Ferris Bueller's Day Off—whether back in 1986 when it first came out, or in the nearly 30 years since its release—was probably struck by the same thought: How can I rig my room to fool people into thinking I'm home sick so I can spend the day doing whatever I want?

Toronto artists Sarah Keenlyside and Joe Clement are bringing that notion one step closer to reality: They've constructed an exact replica of Ferris' bedroom, including all the ephemera and even a working IBM computer from that era, in the Gladstone Hotel as part of the venue's Come Up to My Room immersive art exhibition. The friends and collaborators (they have matching tattoos, and Keenlyside is helping produce Clement's in-progress documentary about local architectural wonder of the world, Integral House) scoured eBay and crowdsourced the materials, and spent a ridiculous amount of time rewatching the film. The result is a pretty epic mindfuck of nostalgia and teenage fantasy.

Watch more of our trip to Ferris's room on Daily VICE.

VICE: So what's your relationship with Ferris Bueller's Day Off?
Sarah Keenlyside: I'm very much of the era of the movie. I saw it in the theatre. So I've always talked about the room as kind of a portal, particularly from the analog age into the digital age. Ferris had an awesome computer and was able to change his absence days at school, and I was like, 'How is that possible?' And there are all these little details in the room that stuck with me and made me feel like something important was happening in there.

Ferris himself is kind of this idealized version of a teenager, and almost not even a real person but just something that affects all the other characters, so the room is this ultimate teenager's room.
Keenlyside: It really resonates with people. When we started doing research on it, there are so many blogs dedicated to this room. And there's been all this analysis, like Wired did a story about all of his stereo equipment. I probably wouldn't have been able to figure it out except for the fact that the story existed. It made it easier, but it also made it harder because there was so much known about it and you couldn't just fudge it. I think the Ferrisimilitude/verisimilitude really matters, because if it was just any old stereo equipment, or any old posters it wouldn't be the same.
Joe Clement: It would lose its import. It would be a rip-off as opposed to a recreation and would lack any sense of emotion. It would be a half-assed attempt at doing something that doesn't really connect to anybody, it just kind of looks like it. So i think it's important to have that authenticity to it, as much as possible.

Sarah Keenlyside and Joe Clement, pictured above, are the artists responsible for the recreation of Bueller's room.

You crowdsourced a lot of this stuff, but can you talk about the process of collecting everything.
Keenlyside: In my naivety, I thought that in a collectible world and through the magic of eBay that all these things could be found. I really thought that people would still have these posters. But I assume that the people who have these posters don't want to let them go. In some cases, I couldn't even find references for the posters other than the movie. In many cases I mocked them up.

My favourite story is the computer, and to me it's the most touching. I'd been looking on eBay because Ferris had an IBM 5160 computer, which was made in 1985. You could find bits and pieces, but when you add up shipping and all that and the possibility of things being broken, it was really starting to stress me out. But then I started googling to see if there is some awesome nerd who's kept these things. And I found that guy: he runs the personal computer museum in Brantford, his name is Syd Bolton. He has dozens of old functioning computers. I called him and he was like "I'm a huge Ferris fan, I'll see if I can help you out." And he let me walk out of his museum with one of his prized computers. And not only that, he programmed it so it will count down the absences and has Ferris' student card information on it. He said that when he finished the program and had to save it, he wrote "Save Ferris" and was like, 'Oh my god!' Such serendipity.

Why do you think people are so obsessed with the room? Like you said, there are blogs, articles, and someone even made a map of Ferris's travels during the day. In researching all that, did it help you understand that appeal?
Keenlyside: I think my age group especially, is a very nostalgic generation. And I think that comes down to the fact that so much has changed. I think now, time is accelerating, our progress is accelerating. I used to watch a lot of 80s shows and movies because they didn't have cellphones or the internet. But as I said, this room is a portal to that because had a kind of internet connection and a cellphone, but approached it with an innocence that we don't have today. We're like like, ugh, my iPhone doesn't work. We take it for granted. But I remember seeing it on the screen and it was like magic, like how the hell is he changing his absence dates.

He's kind of like the original lifehacker. So, yeah, his room is stocked full of cool shit, but then he breaks it apart and uses it to accomplish his needs—fooling his parents and hacking into the school system. So as much as there's nostalgia here, I think what people identify with is someone who's fighting against the world that they're in.
Keenlyside: Well, nobody likes the rules, right? For me, I'm a freelance person, as is Joe, because we're not really great with the way things are done. And I think for Ferris, do you ever once question that kid will become something awesome in his life? Maybe he'll peak in highschool, but something tells me that he's a special character, a special person for his whole life. And that's partly because he's willing to buck the rules and not let the man get him down. Ferris just gets away with it because people love that about people. To me, it's what people aspire to be but say, "Oh I could never get away with that."For both of us, that's why this character and this room represents so much.

Photo via Flickr user Ilkka Jukarainen

A 61-year-old man has been arrested for stealing large quantities of oil from multiple sites in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The alleged thief, who hails from Lashburn, Saskatchewan, is accused of using his tanker truck to pilfer oil from energy compounds in Maidstone, Cutknife, Lloydminster and Kitscoty.

The tank's 30-cubic-metre capacity allowed the man to make off with a lot of pretty much worthless oil (now valued at about $30 a barrel). He probably would have been better off jacking cauliflower from produce stands.

After monitoring him for months, RCMP finally made an arrest this week. He's been charged with multiple counts of theft valued at over $5,000, according to the CBC.

Maidstone RCMP Sergeant Jolyne Harrison told the CBC he's not sure what motivated the man to steal something of such little value.

"I don't know, I guess that's something we'll have to ask the suspect involved," he said. "I guess there is still some profit to be made."

The suspect is set to appear in court Feb. 23.

Goodweeds, pictured above, was raided by Toronto police Thursday evening. Photo via Facebook