Dalton Mtengwa

Whether it's squabbling about the burqa or being hostile to Muslim refugees fleeing to Europe, Islam—and all sorts of inflammatory statements about it—has dominated Western headlines for the past decade or so. Among all that loud, bolshy coverage, Muslims and those converting to Islam have been forced to deal with mistrust, obtuse interpretations of their beliefs, or just straight up hatred.

With the last census finding the number of Britons choosing to convert to Islam had more than doubled in the decade preceding, now—more than ever—Muslim converts are finding it difficult to allay their new faith with the society around them. A study published today by Cambridge University's Center of Islamic Studies has found that male converts are routinely misunderstood by their peers, families, and people within their newly-adopted faith.

The study of 50 Muslim men living in the UK finds that "there is often targeting of converts by the British Security Services to work as informants," and that their integration into their new community can be "tenuous." White converts "lose their white privilege on conversion" and basically the whole thing is chronically misunderstood.

So, what is it that makes young British people convert to Islam? What troubles do new converts run into with their faith as they acculturate? And how has their belief in Islam helped smooth the bump into their new place in society?

Dalton Mtengwa, from Oldham, is 24 and credits converting to Islam last February for saving him from a life of petty crime.

VICE: Hi, Dalton. What made you want to convert to Islam?
Dalton Mtengwa: I converted to Islam because I found the truth—the right faith. I was mostly raised as a Christian, but I never practiced because there's not that much to practice in Christianity. In Islam, there's more—a lot of doctrine and a lot of discipline.

So you were brought up a Christian?
Yeah. I believed in God. I'd go to church every now and then. My auntie, who's really religious, took me to Bible studies. It was decent, but I was too young to know much about it. It didn't really do it for me, to be honest—not compared to Islam. It's a religion that everyone should participate in. I don't believe there should be so many religions in this world. There should be one religion and everyone should worship the one and only God.

So you wanted spiritual fulfillment but couldn't find it in church?
I went to church because I was searching for cleansing, salvation. I'd been through a lot—depression. A lot of people go through depression when they haven't got peace in their heart.

What do you think caused your depression?
Life in general. Not having the chance to have what I wanted in life so I could progress further—that leads to committing crimes, drug abuse, and stuff like that. I was depressed from about 16 onwards.

Did you commit crimes?
I was involved with crimes and stuff like that, yeah. In my early teenage years I had a tough time at school. I was naughty and was always in trouble. I was easily distracted. I was very popular, which can be quite dangerous. I grew up all over the UK, left school at 17 and tried to go to college, but I found it difficult to adapt. I was more into street life. I was still doing crimes. At college I did get a merit for sport science, but otherwise I struggled.

In your experience, is it common for people who convert to have had a difficult time?
It's very common. The stuff I was doing were just normal teenage crimes—theft, robbery, gang-related stuff. I was in with the wrong crowd, and there was peer pressure. A lot of us were chasing this life of materialistic things. I committed crimes so I had extra money to buy things I saw other people had. It's like a competition. The flashiest things I bought were designer clothes, gold chains, and a lot of watches. Last February I embraced Islam and my outlook changed. It teaches me to be humble and try not to be greedy. When you die, these things don't come with you. It's just your deeds—Allah only judges us on this, not if you're driving a Mercedes Benz.

How did you discover Islam?
My friends introduced it to me—brothers would say to me: "You should take Shahada." It's basically a confession that there's only one God, and Mohammed is the last prophet.

Why did they think you specifically should convert?
They thought that I should take it because they thought of me as a religious person. They looked into my heart and they could see the faith in me. When they first met me, they actually thought I was Muslim. I wasn't Christian, really, I was something in the middle, but they were really surprised when I told them.

How does your religion fit in with your life outside of it?
I'm not working at the moment—I'm back at college studying maths and English. Because I didn't have anything before, Islam made me want to better myself and concentrate on my studies. I'm also doing an Islamic course with a guy called Sheikh Bilal, who is also a convert—learning about the beliefs, the religion, doctrine, and rectification of prayer. There aren't that many other converts near to where I live.

What's your dating life like now?
My attitude has really changed. If you want to get married, you have to be organized. You don't just, like, meet up in a bar. The first time you meet, you might like each other, then she'll get one of her brothers to make up a group chat for me, her, and her brother on WhatsApp. We'll get to know each other that way—it's not done in a sly way. My relationships with women beforehand were hectic. In my religion, I would say there's more romance. There's a lot of respect.

Are you still friends with your old group?
No—my circle is very small. I keep myself to myself. I tend to do my five daily prayers, and the more you do that the closer you are to God. So you always have a routine that you're looking forward to. So I don't have much time. I still see one or two of them, but when I was going through a lot of hardships, people weren't really there for me.

Do you think Islamophobia is a big problem in the UK?
Yeah, it really is a problem. People need to wake up to it.

Have you experienced Islamophobia?
No. And I've never witnessed any abuse.

What was your family's reaction when you converted?
At first my family was a bit confused about me converting, because Muslims were something they'd only ever seen on the TV. They were a bit like: "What's going on here?" The media always portrays Islam as a bad religion. They now realize that I've turned my life around and I'm a lot more chilled out and humble.

Do you ever feel different or cut off from them?
Some converts say it's like that, but it's been the other way around for me. I feel much closer to my family now. Lots of Muslim converts are misunderstood, but people should just get to know them if they want to find out what it's about.

Follow Helen on Twitter.

Marc (right) outside L'Atmosphere. All photos courtesy of Marc Victor

Running a club is stressful enough, but try doing it in a war zone where alcohol is banned. Between 2004 and 2008, Marc Victor ran L'Atmosphere, Kabul's most infamous party spot—a notorious rooftop poolside bar and restaurant, crammed wall-to-wall with journalists, aid workers, diplomats, humanitarians, spies, contractors, and mercenaries. Or, as one VICE journalist described it, "the real-world equivalent of the bar from Star Wars."

In 2008, as Western hangouts increasingly became targets of terrorist attacks, Marc sold up, returned to Paris, and decided to write about it. The result is Kabul Kitchen, a comedy based on his life running L'Atmosphere.

I meet Marc in a cobbled courtyard outside his apartment in Paris. It is serene—pale green shutters, plants, and window boxes—like a postcard. He shows me inside and it's completely barren. The bedroom consists of a bed, the living room, and a sofa. No pictures, no trinkets, no stuff. He hands me some water in a mug. "It's hard to find somewhere quiet in Paris," he says. As we discuss his extraordinary life, it becomes clear why Marc wants some peace these days.

The bar at L'Atmosphere

VICE: So firstly, how did you come to set up a club in Kabul?
Marc Victor: I never set out to run a bar. I was a journalist. I started out as a theater critic, then I went to work in Cambodia for six years for the French radio station RFI. When I came back to Paris, I was bored. So in 2002, when the Taliban fell, I decided to go to Afghanistan to work for an NGO that was training journalists to rebuild the media there. When the project came to an end after a couple of years, I wanted to stay. My friends kept saying to me that there weren't any good places to go out in Kabul. So I obliged.

Was there much of a party scene there at the time?
The expat community was young—most people were in their 20s and 30s and single. It was like a university campus. These kids worked hard, they had stressful jobs, and they wanted to play hard. Before I opened, there used to be parties at the NGO headquarters like UNICEF, and sometimes the American Embassy would host some wild nights, especially when it had contractors in town. But when L'Atmosphere opened, they started coming to my bar. Thursday was the big party night, because everyone had Friday off.

I guess living somewhere so dangerous, you'd want somewhere to let off some steam.
Exactly. That's why we built a swimming pool. Well actually, that took a while—none of the builders in Kabul had ever seen a swimming pool before, so when I tried to get it put in they literally just dug a hole and put some water in it. But I wanted to create an oasis.

In the TV series, everyone is drinking, shagging, and taking drugs all the time—like they had to make the most of every night because it could be their last. Was it actually like that?
Whenever a new young couple would arrive in Kabul, we'd place bets on how long it would be before they broke up—99 percent of them would. There's a constant, underlying tension when you live in a war zone. You never know what's going to happen from one day to the next. That really bears down on relationships. All the NGO workers were sleeping with each other, which was made even more complicated by the fact that they all lived in these dorm rooms. Finding somewhere to actually have sex was difficult. They worked together, lived together, partied together, slept together. It was intense—they needed the release.

How do you run a bar in a country where alcohol is banned?
My life became a constant struggle to get alcohol. It's easier to find drugs than alcohol in Afghanistan. When I first arrived, there were shops that sold alcohol to expats. But then they closed, so I had to go to the military bases to buy off the army. When they ran out I'd have to buy it on the black market, which would cost a fortune and you didn't really know what you were buying. Then I'd have to get it to the restaurant without being stopped by Afghan police. If officers caught me, they'd take me to the station and I'd have to bribe them with money or booze. It was always a battle—people couldn't leave my club drunk or they'd get arrested. And if an Afghan drank in my club and was caught, we'd be shut down.

How do you stop people leaving a club drunk?
With difficulty. The guy I sold the restaurant to after I left in 2008 actually ended up in prison. Sometimes, there would be periods when the Afghan forces would tighten up, just to prove that they were strong enough. They broke into the restaurant, confiscated the alcohol, and put him in jail for a few days. Karzai wanted to show muscle—that he was dictating the laws, not the foreigners.

Is that why you quit the restaurant?
Six years in Kabul wore me out. Up until 2006, the situation in Kabul wasn't bad for civilians and foreigners—all the fighting was between the military and the Taliban. But then the kidnappings and suicide bombings started. In 2008, there was an attack on the Serena Hotel: A terrorist walked into the lobby with a suicide vest strapped to him and killed six people. It was a clear attack on foreigners in the city. I closed the restaurant for a month and decided that I'd leave.

It must have been hard for you to protect your customers inside.
In the beginning it was OK. But as the years went by, and the situation between Afghans and foreigners got more tense, I needed more and more security. In the end we had six armed security guards, sandbags, numerous security doors, metal detectors. It became impossible to be safe. One incident in 2006 was a real turning point for me. A group of young US soldiers, who were apparently drunk, drove an army car through a traffic jam, causing a massive accident. A group of Afghans surrounded them, throwing stones. And the soldiers' reaction was to start shooting. There was a huge riot—and its aim was to kill all the foreigners in the city. I was out at the time in my van, buying booze for the restaurant. I was stopped by the police, with a van load of illegal alcohol. I called the restaurant. All the foreigners in the city had fled. It was chaos. All of our lives were in danger. Our neighbors saved the customers' lives—they put a ladder over the wall and hid them in their houses.

How was the restaurant seen in the local community? You had a bar and swimming pool with women in bikinis in a strictly Muslim country.
Like anyone who runs a club or restaurant, I had to have a good relationship with my neighbors. I hired a lot of them and their families. I put a fence around the swimming pool so people couldn't look in. Although the neighbors' kids would make holes in it so they could peek in and check out the women.

Did you ever have any moral problems with profiting from a war?
When I arrived in 2002, I did not arrive to a country at war. The Taliban had fallen, bin Laden had escaped. Countries have to start living again after conflict. Ninety percent of everything I made there stayed within the country. Some of the NGO types would tell me it was wrong to open a restaurant, you know, "We're here to help these people, not to drink and eat and party." I'd watch them arrive, say they would never come to L'Atmosphere, but 90 percent of them would end up there in the end once they got bored and needed a drink.

Is the club still open?
No. It stayed open for a while but it became impossible to keep the business going. In the end it got cemented over and turned into a parking lot.

Do you like being back in Paris?
Well with the terrorist attacks, I feel right at home... No, in seriousness, it's nice. It's OK. For now.

You sound like you're bored.
A bit. But you know, life is OK.

Kabul Kitchen season one box set is available now.

Follow Jenny on Twitter.

On February 29, VICE will launch our new TV channel, VICELAND—a 24-hour cable channel featuring hundreds of hours of new programming. It's been a lot of work, but we're very proud to share what we have been making.

We've already released the trailer for our new show, GAYCATION, and for our latest seasons of the classic VICE series BALLS DEEP and Action Bronson's F*CK, THAT'S DELICIOUS. Today, we're bringing you the first look at the new season of another old favorite that's making the leap to TV—WEEDIQUETTE, the 420 show that is like no other.

In the series, VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu chronicles the science, culture, and economics of the emerging "green" economy. Each episode of WEEDIQUETTE explores the impact of marijuana legalization across the United States and internationally, examining how people on all sides of this issue are reacting to the growing popularity and acceptance of this remarkable plant.

There are many players in the weed revolution, each one with a story, and we'll be giving them all a chance to tell their tale when VICELAND goes live at the end of February.

Give the WEEDIQUETTE trailer a watch above. The first episode airs March 1 at 11 PM.

'Black-ish' creator Kenya Burris. Photo courtesy of ABC

When ABC's Black-ish first premiered in September 2014, it was the beginning of a much larger, pivotal turn for the current television landscape. The show about a black family living in a predominantly white neighborhood uses a familiar trope ("fish out of water") to address an otherwise unique experience (race relations in the United States). Along with the premiere of Fresh Off the Boat (based on VICE host Eddie Huang's memoir), Black-ish ushered in a somewhat new idea that a central non-white family could be marketable enough to justify a prime time slot on one of the nation's largest television networks.

Centering around the upper-middle-class couple Dre (played by Anthony Anderson) and Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross), Black-ish looks at three generations of blackness from the top-down. There's Pops, Dre's dad (Laurence Fishburne), who serves as an anchor to the black culture of yore, while Dre and Bow's kids often function as a more modern counterpoint to Pops's and Dre's old ways. That the show manages to pull off cutting social commentary while remaining one of the most consistently funny shows on prime-time TV is a testament to the strong vision behind it.

That vision would belong to Kenya Barris, the creator and showrunner for Black-ish, who recognizes how unique his show is in comparison to other family sitcoms. Barris hopped on the phone with VICE to explain how the show—in an earlier incarnation—could have been about a white family. He also discusses his cognitive dissonance with The Cosby Show and preaches about the importance of showing successful black people while showing the alternate realities of black life.

VICE: So, how did Black-ish get started?
Kenya Barris: I think this was my 19th pilot? A couple of them had gotten made in some form another, but this one was the first one that had a network's commitment. I had sold a version of this show probably four or five times. And I think what made the other versions different were a few things: One, the other versions did not have Laurence Fishburne and Anthony Anderson attached; and two, I don't think I was as honest in the other versions. Like when you're writing for a magazine, there's a certain swag that this magazine seems to have, and you may not even do it on purpose, but you know that this is a TIME piece or this is a Vanity Fair piece. So, inadvertently or not, you end up slanting your writing to the choir. So, when I would say, "Oh, this is a FOX pilot," or, "This is an NBC pilot," I did what I had to do. Whether it was taking a family and making them white or taking a version of my story and telling it from a different point of view. I tried to do what I thought was going to get the show picked up. And my biggest advice to anyone is: Never do that. Always tell the most honest version of your story, and from that, it's either going to happen or not.

What finally led to Black-ish as we know it on ABC?
Well, my wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life, financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around and I was like, "Who are these people?" It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up. And even going further, it was the opposite of what a little black kid would be like growing up. were a different version of a little black kid. I started feeling like, "Was I a bit of a relic?" I still had these kind of antiquated views of what black was, and I was fighting that with my children, and my wife—who's biracial, and her mom's a hypnotherapist, and her name's Rainbow, and her dad's this white guy. It's just this totally different thing, so I felt kind of like the outsider in my family.

Kenya Barris on set

So the show was based around this "outsider" black father—was it always going to be Anthony Anderson?
Short answer: yes. I wrote this with Anthony in mind. We had spoken. We knew we wanted to work together, we knew wanted to do something together. Anthony, in a lot of ways, is my brother from another mother. He's from Compton; I'm from Inglewood. We've both had similar experiences. You understand if you come from that situation and are sort of now in a predominantly white world, you're constantly going to feel like you're taking a hit. And that was Anthony and my story. Now, we both have kids who are in private school and are doing things totally differently. It was a lot of those stories that we shared, and we were like, "We have to do this together!"

Let's talk about the politics of the show. How important do you think it is to show black people in high-powered careers?
Well, my parents were great parents, but they weren't doctors or lawyers. So when I watched The Cosby Show, I was like, "I wish my parents were doctors or lawyers! I want to be a doctor or a lawyer!" I love that aspirational viewpoint for kids—especially for little black kids in this day and age. We're having this time where the black middle class is expanding in a different kind of way. But the black middle class also still has a lot of holes in the "hood" because that's where they came from, or that's where their parents came from, and that's what they understand. So I really wanted to be honest and show a different viewpoint.

Speaking of careers, I remember reading a New Yorker piece claiming that Dre's career was changed from a TV writer to an advertising executive so that ABC could cut deals with advertisers.
Well, that is not true. The switch was made because the network and I didn't think that America would as easily identify with a television writer as it would with an ad executive—which we've seen since God knows how long. You know, . You're still often that fly in the buttermilk and you're often sort of asked to be the voice of your people. How many times has someone asked you, "Why do black people do...?" And you just want to be like, "You know what? I don't know!"

That's kind of touched upon in the first season when Dre is asked to be in charge of his company's "urban" division.
Yeah, and that was based around me. I've been on predominantly "white" shows before, and I had also been on predominantly "black" shows. I would complain that when I was on a white show they would only hire me because there was a black character or they needed a black voice. But then I would be mad if they went and hired a white dude in my position. It was that duality and I kind of felt like that's what Dre felt.

"As a creative, you have to be your truest form. You can't worry about fitting into whatever boxes people want to put you in."

Tell me about a day in the writers' room.
I think our room is mixed half and half. We have Jewish writers, and white writers, and Indian writers. We have a lot of women on our staff—I think we might have more women than men—which is important to me as well. For me, it was important to have a really mixed group of people because a lot of stories aren't just about being told from a black point of view; they're about the perception about how black things in life sort of resonate with everyone. At the same time, I also want to know how things that we sort of feel are unique to one culture really aren't—we're just people, and we all sort of share.

Do you ever believe that ABC has stepped in and encroached on your vision?
ABC as a network? Almost never. The thing that I did not know, however, is that S&P company—it's almost like a third party. They run their shop in a way that they don't answer to anyone. That's the battle, S&P.

We're doing an episode right now about what it's like the first time that you have to sit and talk to your kids about civil unrest. The kids are sitting at home, they see a crowd of people, and they're waiting for the verdict of an indictment—and Jack turns around and says, "Why are all these people so mad?" Then you have to sort of decide because the house gets divided. Does Bo let Dre and Pops's sort of ideology about who the cops are—what they were used to growing up—affect how she's going to explain to her children about what's going on? It's a very heavy episode. Of course we try to use a lot of comedy, but it's a hard topic.

Is it difficult to balance that humor with reality—particularly since the show is so indebted to race-based politics?
Yeah, it's the hardest part of the show. I'm a huge fan of Norman Lear's work, and I'll talk to him in a sort of a mentoring kind of way. I still think of this thing that he said: "It's hard enough to do 'my boss is coming over and my wife burnt the pot roast' anyway." That's hard comedy to do in itself. But then when you take out the mundane ideas and put in something like, "Oh yeah, somebody got shot by a cop!" in that mix it starts to become... whew, something else. But I kind of feel that if you start letting things like drive you, you might as well just do a poll of what episodes you air every week.

What does that have to do with the race-ness about it?
Well, we don't get these opportunities a lot. Anyone who has any sort of profile or reaches out to the masses in any kind of significant way, that's his or her responsibility. I hear people say, "I'm not a role model" all the time and it's like, "Well, of course you're not!" It doesn't mean that people aren't going to look at you as one though.

Honestly, that's why it hurt me so much to hear all of the stuff about The Cosby Show. Because, you know, that show had such an effect on me. It's hard when I hear people who want to take away the impact of that show because of the man. You know, my wife and I have arguments and go through hard times just like everyone else. But , if we're not together, does my show not matter anymore? If I get divorced, does my show not count?

Do you feel like that has happened to you—now that you're kind of a "name" because of the show?
Like, I'm going to a luncheon right now, and dude, I want to wear some fucking jeans and a T-shirt! Because honestly, I'm like, I don't give a fuck about what these white people think about the way I dress. But then again, I do. I think Du Bois said it best: We do live a duality. As I'm talking to you right now, I've gone from a Tom Ford suit to leather jeans. At the end of the day I tend to err on the side of representing the show. But at the same time, I'll go to pitch meetings and I'm always myself. And that's what I would give as a piece of advice. You know, as a creative, you have to be your truest form. You can't worry about fitting into whatever boxes people want to put you in. In this country, we've let perception become our reality. But it's not.

Follow Michael Cuby on Twitter.

Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh. Photo by Bartek Kucharczyk via Wikimedia Commons

Men's rights activism bears all the hallmarks of a typical conspiracy theory. The projection of subliminally-perceived personal failings onto an othered social group, the conviction that this group has infiltrated the upper echelons of society to promote its own agenda, the belief that members of the movement have "taken the red pill" and perceived a reality that normal members of society cannot see.

And as with many cultish conspiracy theories, the people who promulgate the MRA gospel can profit massively from the devotion of their followers. Virulent misogynist he may be, pickup artist Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh—who once said rape should be legal "if done on private property"—is primarily in it for the money.

On Monday, news broke that Roosh was organizing a global series of meetups for his "fellow tribesmen." Newspapers, politicians, and activists in over 40 countries discovered that hordes of MRAs would be congregating at 165 locations worldwide for an "International Meetup Day." Press coverage was wall-to-wall and apoplectic, as Roosh intended all along—because his aim is not to unite young men against the oppressive forces of female empowerment, but to profit from the desire of young white men to feel oppressed.

In 2015, Roosh hit the headlines in Canada, following a campaign he swiftly dubbed the "Battle of Montreal." It was a grandiose name for an unremarkable event. Canadian feminists angered by Roosh's neo-masculinist ideology protested against a couple of speaking appearances in Vancouver and Montreal. Roosh urged his supporters to "counterattack" and threaten his feminist nemeses online. In a shocking denouement, a protester threw a beer over Roosh. That was more or less it.

But Google analytics show how searches for Roosh and his website spiked in the weeks of the "Battle," before slumping back to their usual level. Learning from the events of last summer, Roosh has now engineered a headline-grabbing controversy on a much larger scale.

When contacted for comment, Roosh said: "You're an idiot. I'm not making any money off this." But if this weekend's meetups were truly intended to be clandestine, Roosh would not have posted their locations and passwords on a public webpage. Rather, he constructed a honey trap for the media, with his fervent supporters as bait. Then he sat back and watched the coverage pour in, sweeping visitors towards his online store. As this week's story exploded, he shared metrics flaunting the explosion in views to his website, comparing his search-engine ranking to arch-controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos while bragging about his own "infamy."

In its rejection of patriarchal notions of masculinity, feminist theory offers solutions to issues genuinely affecting men, such as high rates of suicide and the stigmatization of mental health issues. But it is "infamy," not the suffering of men, which is Roosh's primary concern.

As such, Roosh repeatedly presents feminism as a "war" against men. " is mere purgatory until a newly devised outrage sends them to hell," he writes. "Those who don't pick up arms... will suffer most." His pseudo-militaristic rhetoric is calculated to appeal to angry young men, desperate to feel a sense of inclusion and importance.

Pickup artists generate profit along broadly similar lines to the Western military-industrial complex. First, take a disenfranchised, embittered man, frustrated by the lack of opportunities for financial and sexual advancement in civilian/beta society. Second, convince him that he can give his life meaning by uniting with other men to assert his dominance over inferior bodies. (Degenerate brown bodies in one instance; biologically inferior female bodies in the other). Tell him that this war is just, and his part in it significant.

Finally, sell him an AK-47 or a self-published e-book called Day Bang: How to Casually Pick Up Girls During the Day, and reap the spoils of war.

Roosh's profits directly flow from the PayPal accounts of his male acolytes. But the phantom oppression he engenders in the minds of his supporters manifests as actual oppression enacted on the bodies of women worldwide.

Women die at the hands of foot soldiers in the MRA war against women. Frustrated to the point of rage by a nine-year dry spell, George Sodini sought the advice of pickup artists like Roosh. He went to their conferences, bought their books, and posted on their forums.

But his investment failed to generate any sexual return. Journal entries detail his rage at the "30 million... desirable single women" who he calculates "rejected" him. So he shot three "desirable" women to death, and then killed himself.

PUAs seized upon his suicide as proof that "celibacy is walking death," weaponizing his "failure" to hawk their products. "Don't Be George Sodini—Seriously—Get some game and get real," wrote one MRA huckster, linking to his own online store.

Sodini is an extreme case, but he embodies the lies peddled by Roosh and his ilk. In reality, there are a couple of reasons why men aren't getting laid: Either they fall outside of patriarchally-imposed norms of attractiveness, or they're sexist pricks.

But MRAs offer an enticing third option, far easier than working to deconstruct external patriarchal values and internalized patriarchal behaviors. The "red pill" offers up a tangible, external enemy, and the subsequent opportunity to wallow in self-pity about the unfairness of a supposedly matriarchal society that won't let you get your end away.

Roosh preys on this deluded craving for suffering to engender attitudes that leave women beaten, belittled, and marginalized, and sexually frustrated men more furious than ever at women—and thus more likely to buy Roosh's books. Those who buy into neo-masculinist ideology are not lions led by donkeys, but "betas" led by "alphas."

Related: Watch Broadly's documentary on the fight to end revenge porn

Both the "Battle of Montreal" and the forthcoming meetups are framed as acts of pseudo-military resistance. Articles on Roosh's website about the "Battle" refer to "airstrikes," "ground campaigns," and the "information war."

Eager to feel part of a bona-fide resistance movement, many fans buy into this rhetoric wholesale. Comment threads about this weekend's meetup salivate over a "watershed moment in world history" and stress the importance of "maintaining basic operational security." (OpSec 101: Publish your security measures on a public forum.)

"It's time to go underground in the cities that threaten the safety of my supporters," Roosh tweeted as the media descended on Monday, amplifying his fans' paranoia to the point of absurdity. Roosh knows that his fans are not in any real danger, but he also knows they want to believe that their lives are imperiled by the feminist threat. Those safe from oppression feel a voyeuristic pleasure in imagining its weight upon them, as though they are watching a horror movie that can be switched off at any point.

The meetups will inevitably be swamped by throngs of journalists, standing around in the cold and trying to look plausibly misogynistic in the hope that a gullible anti-feminist will feed them provocative quotes. It's a vicious cycle, with negative media attention reinforcing MRAs' satisfaction in the imagined knowledge that the whole world is united against them.

To borrow conspiracy-theory terminology, the media shitstorm around this weekend's meetups is a false-flag operation. Roosh has intentionally brought the wrath of the global left upon himself. The meetups were planned to generate purchases of his books, not to establish an international guerrilla network of MRAs. His fans, taking to the trenches in their trench-coats and trilbies, are nothing but collateral.

Follow Matt Broomfield on Twitter.

If you missed the first, PC-exclusive release of Not a Hero in May 2015, I forgive you. I guess. The game, London indie crew Roll7's funny bone-tickling ultra-violent follow-up to its BAFTA-winning OlliOlli skateboard sim (and its equally excellent sequel), came out at the same time as a shit-load of bigger, shinier titles with significantly larger marketing budgets and photo-real-enough viscera instead of chunky red pixels spilling over the screen. It was up against The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Project CARS, the Final Fantasy X remaster, and plenty more. There was competition, basically, and relative minnows rarely last long when they go swimming with sharks, however hilarious their own bite.

"We were a little underwhelmed by the 'noise' on the day of the game's release," says Roll7's founder and director Simon Bennett, "but it turned out that it was released in the busiest month for game marketing spend. There were like 500 games coming out on Steam, and The Witcher 3! But the game has actually outperformed the OlliOlli series on Steam, so commercially it's by far our biggest PC title."

Which makes its move to console a very valid enterprise—and with the release calendar a little kinder right now, Not a Hero has a greater chance of being found amongst the freshest batch of PSN offerings. And to anyone out there with a PlayStation 4, in desperate need of a game that can fill a spare 15 minutes with belly laughs and lashings of claret, I say: Look no further than what's staring you in the face, right now. Not a Hero's two-dimensional levels are laid out to be played at speed, each of them a puzzle of sorts, a maze, a race. It's a short-session godsend. Your chosen character smashes through windows, knocks down and executes goons at point-blank range, lets off pipe bombs and sets up gun turrets to tear through gang members, plasters up posters, steals cheese, burns ganja, retrieves bonsai trees, and unleashes purring-but-deadly kitten bombs about the place, all in the name of... politics, actually.

Things do tend to go bang in this game, and it's usually for the best that you're not standing next to whatever's the cause of said bang

There's a story behind Not a Hero's frenetic gameplay—gameplay that's closer to OlliOlli's muscle-memory twitch moves than first impressions might imply, albeit with a (I think unique, certainly uncommon) single-tap cover mechanic that sees your diminutive avatar duck into the shadows to avoid gunfire. Nutshell: Your bullets-spraying actually-a-bit-of-a-hero is in the employ of a purple anthropomorphic rabbit by the name of BunnyLord, who wants to be mayor of the game's city setting—and to boost his public ratings, he's taking lethal force to the criminal elements around the place. Drug dealers, weapons traders, wannabe fromagers—nobody's safe from BunnyLord's crew of effing and blinding hitmen and women.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's latest episode of The Real, 'The Real 'Better Call Saul'

Sure, why not, can't be worse than that other guy

You begin in control of Cockney gobshite Steve—fast, and always with a running commentary of his murderous exploits, but he can't reload on the move, and his little pistol doesn't pack that much of a punch. Next comes Cletus, a Scot with a shotgun who isn't quite so nimble but whose firearm of choice will see off any close-quarters enemy, and knock others off their feet. I might be imagining a difference in their speed—but the third character you unlock (based on BunnyLord's popularity), the very Welsh Samantha, definitely is a fast mover. There's also Jesus—not that Jesus—and Clive and Kimmy and more. They're all unique, and playing around with the game's roster will soon result in you finding mainstay favorites. While you begin with Steve, you might find yourself using him until you unlock the Latin lothario that is the fleet-footed Jesus—at least if you play anything like me.

And what's key is not to be reckless. The first few stages of Not a Hero can be taken hell for leather, but while there are often sub-quest-like rewards for hitting certain achievements in every scenario, which include speed-based challenges, you'll want to feel your way into each kill zone. I really wasn't fibbing when I told you it plays surprisingly like OlliOlli—and also the likes of Trials HD and Pumped BMX—where the kickflips and fakies can flow like liquid gold only after you've taken on a run at a more leisurely pace.

"Although it might not look like it, Not a Hero shares a similar rhythm to OlliOlli, in that once you have the 'flow' dialed, it really clicks," confirms Bennett. "Except that this time you're exploding baddies with insane weapons rather than landing a perfect 360 kickflip." In other words: Don't be surprised when you die, and die, and die, in pursuit of an all-objectives-passed run of gory glory. "The game plays awesome on PS4," Bennett continues, "and it feels really at home on the console, especially with the DualShock 4 ."

I can vouch for Not a Hero's PS4 suitability—Sony's contemporary system does feel as natural a home for the game as it was the comparably unsafe-for-minors Hotline Miami (which it definitely shares a little DNA with, not to mention a publisher in the shape of Devolver Digital). But there's a significant bump in the road it followed on its otherwise smooth translation from PC, namely the lack of a Vita version.

A bunch of fictional video game people, sitting about, right before some murdering

"On the Vita version, it was an unfortunate 'technical issues' scenario that was kinda out of our hands," Bennett says. "That's just how things go sometimes, we just hope that Vita owners can understand. It's never through lack of trying, or anything evil or malicious. If it were up to us the game would be on every platform under the sun, but that is just not possible with a team of five."

And what that team of five does next is inevitably going to attract industry attention before it's got so far as anything playable—you don't win a BAFTA in a category against the likes of the latest FIFA and Forza games, as announced by Linford Christie, and then vanish into the night with nothing to follow it. Right now, exactly what that is hasn't been announced. But it might not be more Not a Hero—at least, not immediately.

"We do love BunnyLord, and the gang," Bennett concludes. "They are now family. There is nothing currently planned , but never say never."

Not a Hero is out now for PlayStation 4 and, obviously, PC. Find Roll7 online here.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Look at Stephen Maurice Graham's website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

Image via Flickr user Jason Paris

New Orleans is the Vegas of the South, a town where debauchery is not only allowed but compulsory. A combination of Confederate and freak flags fly above it—they make strange bedfellows, of course, but find common ground in the intoxication levels of the people flying them. Bourbon Street alone is a veritable jambalaya of bars, all catering to wildly different demographics, from people who unironically collect Hard Rock Cafe merchandise to absinthe aficionados. There are also things like bookstores, yes, and very good ones at that. But if you happen to enter one, a dusty refuge from the ceaselessly blowing hurricane that is Dauphine Street, your solitude will be inevitably ruined by the existence of someone in an "I Got Bourbon Faced on Shit Street" shirt stumbling inside looking for a place to piss.

I no longer drink. I used to, quite heavily. So heavily, in fact, you might think I was trying to kill myself, and you might be right. Scratch that. You are right. My sobriety is a recent development—so far, so good, but, as with anything in life, able to shatter apart at any moment. This machine doesn't run on dreams, and I was in New Orleans for a stand-up comedy gig that would pay a substantial chunk of my rent this month.

I have been to New Orleans. I have lived in New Orleans. Though rarely, if ever, did I let the bon temps roulet during my tenure there. My partner at the time, a man who did not drink or drug and made a point of letting you know the reasons why, barred me from doing so. The days I spent there were not the darkest, but they were also not especially bright. My partner and I would cut the tedium of our directionless existences with meaningless arguments, usually predicated on a slight I had committed in his eyes. Hurricane Katrina provided a forced break from our regularly scheduled programming—an opportunity to argue in a series of new environments, which we took to with aplomb. In spite of it all, I didn't drink—a feat I now consider miraculous.

To say New Orleans triggers emotions that would normally lead this garden variety lush to the bottle is an understatement. But there I found myself, alone, no longer forced to answer to my ex, or to anyone else for that matter. I was merely there, powerless, wondering... now what?

Once you get off the plane, demon alcohol is there. Hell, you get on the plane, and it's there. It's everywhere. Tempting you, taunting you. Escape from the psychic terrors that plague your existence, it promises, is but sips away. Bereft of these sips, in a situation where you would normally take to them like a duck to water, coping appears impossible. You intellectually know it is possible, of course, but fuck if you know the cheat codes to pull it off.

The check-in person at my hotel handed me two vouchers for free "welcome punch," served in the lobby's filament bulb-laden bar. Fantastic. When I entered my room, a complimentary bottle of wine sat on the desk with a note from the concierge, instructing me to enjoy it with her compliments. Fantastic-er. It felt as though the entire goddamned world, or at least the state of Louisiana, was conspiring to convince me to hit the sauce. I sighed and sat on the bed, staring at the enormous statue of General Robert E. Lee outside my window. (The South is not known for its subtlety.)

I used the bottle of wine as a doorstop, as I felt I needed to give it a sense of purpose, a reason to justify its existence in light of the fact that I was incapable of enjoying it in the manner in which it was actually created.

Now lying on the bed, I could see the wine out of the corner of my eye. Tired of staring at a defiant General Lee, I shifted my attention to it; soon it consumed my entire thought process. It was a red, one I'd drank before, from a country I'll never be able to afford to visit. My chest tightened with anxiety.

I gave in. Who the fuck was I to turn down free anything, even if that anything was poison? Cunning, baffling, powerful poison, ready, willing and able to destroy my life?

The only problem, other than the obvious problem that I was about to willingly hop off the wagon, was my lack of a wine opener. I consulted YouTube for a solution, eventually deciding to heed the advice of an excitable Russian who had successfully opened a bottle with a mere door key. I had one of those! Heck, I had THREE of those!

Approximately 15 seconds later, the key to my best friend's apartment snapped in half, its teeth wedged permanently in an impenetrable cork. All at once, my ability to accept logic kicked back in and I realized this was a fortuitous development. Why I was willing to waste my sobriety on a perfectly good doorstop without a second thought? I suppose it was because I wasn't thinking, just devolving back into my former self.

Image via Flickr uservxla

I took to watching the hotel channel—you know the one, the one that exists in every tourist trap and informs you, the visitor of its fair city, about all the things you simply must do while briefly in its confines, for the sole purpose of distracting me from myself. I watched nothing else, even after the channel's programming looped and began again. In my favorite segment, a woman interviewed two inebriated men outside the birthplace of the Hurricane, a rum-based beverage that looks and tastes like hummingbird nectar. The man on the right, sweating into his polo shirt, pronounced the drink "Whore-icane." This was not intentional, merely a byproduct of his supremely altered state. The host, slightly tipsy herself, chortled. I found her level of intoxication charming; his, the antithesis thereof. I knew, if I drank, I could never be her level of intoxicated. I would always be his.

And so, in the interest of, at the very least, not looking like a fucking putz, I once again resigned myself to a lifetime of abstaining. The overwhelming majority of my fellow visitors, of course, had not taken such a pledge, but they also weren't drunks. They were drunk, sure, but they weren't drunks. Big difference. I didn't hate them. I didn't resent them. I just wasn't them. I turned the television off and went to bed, ignoring as best I could the sound of their revelry outside.

Follow Megan on Twitter.

Rick Santorum praying in 2012. Photo via WikiCommons

As is usually the case in presidential primaries, the days immediately following the Iowa caucuses on Monday have been full of reality checks for the more hopeless candidates. Earlier on Wednesday Rand Paul dropped out after finishing fifth in Iowa and disappointing in the New Hampshire polls—joining Democrat Martin O'Malley and fellow Republican Mike Huckabee as a caucus casualty—and now CNN is reporting that Rick Santorum is following suit.

The Republican former senator has been campaigning for president for what seems like forever—his moment in the sun came when he edged out eventual nominee Mitt Romney in a close Iowa contest in 2012. But since then, he has faded into obscurity: This time around, he never got the poll numbers to appear on the main GOP debate stage, and was increasingly marginalized. In a pre-caucus story headlined "Contemplating Oblivion With Santorum, 2016's Saddest Candidate," NBC News reported that at one event Santorum hosted, "Much of the crowd consisted of Chinese teenagers in matching blue T-shirts visiting Iowa as part of a program to learn about American democracy."

Before the caucuses, Santorum may have been holding out hope that evangelical voters in Iowa would suddenly decide to reward him for his years of social conservatism. But it turns out that pretty much the only person who wants Rick Santorum to be president is Rick Santorum, so he's expected to announce on Wednesday night that he's going home.

Still in the race are Carly Fiorina, who barely outperformed Santorum, and John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush, who are hoping that they can prove their viability as candidates in New Hampshire. Jim Gilmore is also still in the race, though no one really knows why.

All photos by author

Somewhere along the line, photography went from a means of recording reality to a force that informs it. Instead of living our lives and periodically capturing the "Kodak moments" as they occur, we began to manufacture them. I don't know if this is an inherently bad thing—maybe it's just the logical next step in the world Susan Sontag described in 1977, where photography offered "indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had." But we no longer simply go places and photograph what happens. What happens is largely a function of what we photograph. Now more than ever, we author our lives.

It's with this in mind that I decided to go on a road trip across the United States without leaving the comfort of my home. #InstaRoadTrip2016 is a two week journey from New York to California—a classic American voyage of youthful soul-searching and self-discovery—made entirely on Instagram. I mapped out my route and have been exploring all this great nation has to offer using photographs that have been geotagged in the locations I want to visit. I've been on the road for several days now and hope to reach the Pacific sometime in early February.

Why go on #InstaRoadTrip2016? Because it's confusing. I don't mean that I'm hoping to make something that, like a lot of art, is intentionally elusive and hard to make meaning of. What I'm interested in is disorientation—the way our culture of image making and sharing can make fact feel like fiction, and fiction like fact. That is, as personal storytelling/broadcasting becomes our primary motivation for being, acting and doing, the line between story and reality is sure to blur.

My mom currently thinks I'm driving across the American Rust Belt. Either she hasn't been carefully reading the captions under my pictures, or she has and somehow still thinks I'm on a "real" old fashioned road trip. The point is that she's confused. The point is that she's reading my story, but is unsure where her son is, what he's up to, or how he's doing.

Gideon Jacobs is a writer based in Brooklyn. You can follow his work here.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson explaining the gang indictment at his office in Downtown Brooklyn. Photo by the author

On Wednesday, Kings County District Attorney Ken Thompson was explaining how local gangs communicate over Facebook to a coterie of reporters at his office in Downtown Brooklyn.

"'That's opp zone,'" he explained, "as in, 'opposition zone.'"

Continuing down the list on a white placard at his left, Thompson chose a line from another suspect: "And 'I wanna boom it up,'" he said, means, "I wanna shoot them."

According to Thompson and the New York Police Department, the online chat in question took place just before a barbecue in Canarsie, Brooklyn, in May 2014. The young men learned rivals would be there, and hatched a plan to hit the party with gunfire, Thompson said. From the windows of their cars later that night, they allegedly sprayed the party with bullets, injuring two women and one man. Shortly after, one of the suspects—Jerome Myrie, better known just as "Myrie" and still at large—apparently took to Facebook to boast of the bloodshed.

The plan, in the alleged gang members' minds at least, had worked.

But on Wednesday, the allegedly sinister planning—and subsequent social media celebration—was used as evidence in a 76-count indictment against 18 alleged gang members, including Myrie himself. The men are all between the ages of 18 and 27, and are said to hang on Flatbush Avenue, Newkirk Avenue and Ditmas Avenue in Brooklyn. 15 of them have been booked on charges including second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and weapons possession (nine guns were recovered) for attacks across the borough, the barbecue drive-by among them.

The suspects, the DA claims, are part of a larger group called Folk Nation—a sort of gang alliance, or set, with origins in 1970s Chicago that Thompson compared to the American and National Leagues in professional baseball. The idea is that the Folk Nation's allied member gangs are in a constant state of war with a rival coalition, People Nation. The 18 suspects' chapter in Brooklyn is allegedly called No Love City, and according to the DA, the local Crips chapter is its chief enemy.

"To enforce their dominance, they often directed their violence at rival gang members," Thompson, who announced the indictment alongside New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, said Wednesday. "Essentially they would get in cars and go on 'hunting expeditions,' looking for rivals to kill."

In one such example, Thompson delivered a minute-by-minute narration as a surveillance tape from a Canarsie courtyard in July 2014 played for reporters. A 23-year-old suspect named Corey Roberts was seen arguing with someone on a sunny, summer afternoon, as young children passed by on scooters. The video then shows him opening fire from the entrance, as people scream and scatter. His bullets hit two innocent bystanders, one in the heart. (Somehow, both survived.)

According to prosecutors and police officers, violence in Brooklyn surged after a No Love City member was killed by a rival on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood last October. Some of the Brooklyn suspects apparently saw on Instagram that several of their rivals were at a filming of rapper Meek Mills' music video in DUMBO. As the indictment reads, several of them allegedly rushed over in cars and "engaged in a gun battle with rival gang members."

The suspects are said to have escaped through the neighboring communities of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, where this sort of violence is virtually unheard of, and ditched a bullet-riddled car on the street. However, the DA says, they didn't realize that blood and fingerprints were left at the scene, offering crucial evidence to investigators.

The resulting bust, conducted by the NYPD's new Gun Violence Suppression Division, is the latest indication that gang warfare is still rattling major sections of New York. That's especially true in Brooklyn—which is often called the "bloodiest borough" by local tabloids. According to law enforcement officials, a select group of young men are largely responsible for the 18 percent rise in gang-related shootings in 2015.

In high-crime communities, recently-funded "violence interruption" groups have taken to mediation and intensive workshops, in hopes of discouraging shootings before it's too late. And just last month, both Thompson and Bratton announced Project Fast Track, which sets up specific courts for gun-possession charges. (When I asked Thompson if this bust would be tried there, he said no. "We'd like to fast-track them to prison," he told me.)

" have no concern for human life," Commissioner Bratton told reporters, reiterating the tough tone. "And so we should have no concern in putting them away for 25 years."

As of Wednesday morning, all but three of the suspects had been arrested and arraigned. One is awaiting extradition from New Jersey, while two others remain on the lam—both of whom Thompson promised would be arrested in coming days. As Bratton suggested, 17 of the men face up to 25 years in prison, and the lone suspect facing a straight murder charge could do life.

"We're here to say, 'No more,'" Thompson said. "This indictment means to us that our streets don't belong to violent gangs, or armed thugs. They belong to the people of Brooklyn."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

The outside of the Madison Hotel. Photo by the author

Last November, the tenants of the Madison Hotel, a 220-room residential hotel in downtown Los Angeles, sued the property owners for conditions they described as "untenantable." Among the complaints listed: Trash wasn't being collected within the building, leading to a cockroach infestation; the elevator frequently broke and wasn't fixed; the communal TV room and lobby were stripped of furniture; mold grew up the walls; there was a bedbug infestation; and the landlord allegedly threatened to forcibly remove certain tenants, some of whom said they were harassed about their sexual orientation or their disabilities.

The tenants who sued—there were 15, most of them elderly, disabled, or military veterans—hoped that a lawsuit would make the Madison Hotel, which has some of the last affordable housing units in downtown LA, habitable again. But so far, it hasn't.

"Essentially, for the last month and a half, the owners have ignored that there's a lawsuit," said Jeanne Nishimoto, attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. "They weren't even turning on the heat in the building when it was very cold. And it's an all-concrete building—you can guess how cold it gets in there." (William Holdings, LLC, one of the defendants in the law suit, declined to comment for this story.)

Eventually, the tenants filed a court order to ensure the building was kept at a temperature of 70 degrees during the day and 65 degrees at night. But not much else has changed, and it's unlikely to, as long as the low-income residents of the Madison Hotel occupy potentially profitable real estate. According to the people familiar with the situation, landlords using underhanded tactics to evict tenants in Los Angeles goes much further than just the Madison Hotel.

"We definitely an increase in harassment and intimidation throughout the city of Los Angeles," said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, and one of the loudest voices for tenants' rights in the city. Those most vulnerable to harassment are the poor, the elderly, and immigrants who don't speak English, he said. "They get papers telling them to get out, and in most cases they do. They don't know they have an opportunity to fight it."

Figures from the Housing Rights Center (HRC) show that official harassment complaints have more than doubled within two years: There were 251 complaints in fiscal year 2012–2013; by 2014–2015, there were 524. Chancela Al-Mansour, executive director of the HRC, said that the numbers don't differentiate between tenants complaining of harassment from landlords or other tenants. "Although, in Los Angeles, the large majority of harassment complaints are made by a tenant against the landlord," she wrote in an email.

The city of Los Angeles doesn't have a specific anti-tenant harassment ordinance, but the city of Santa Monica—a neighborhood on LA's west side, and technically a separate city—does keep track of tenant harassment. Complaints there by renters have similarly spiked in recent years: 38 complaints in 2012–2013 versus 81 complaints in 2014–2015. To date, there have already been 55 in this fiscal year.

"We are aware that tenant harassment continues to be a problem," said Adam Radinsky, chief of Santa Monica's Consumer Protection Division. "But I'm cautious about drawing conclusions." He explained that this might be the result of tenants in Santa Monica getting smarter about their rights. "It could also be that buildings are being bought by new owners, or even by banks after foreclosure who are trying to evict tenants without being fully aware of the law."

Others agree that the numbers don't tell the whole story. One reason for the increase could be due to cash-strapped tenants filing harassment complaints to give them extra time to muster-up the rent, said Melissa Marsh, an LA-based attorney who represents both tenants and landlords. "We've had a lot of job losses in the last couple of months, despite what you're hearing in the media."

Los Angeles is the least affordable rental market in the US, according to a study by UCLA. Of those at the bottom 20 percent of the income ladder, nearly 78 percent pay half or more of their income on housing (the gold-standard is considered 30 percent of income spent on rent). Seven out of the ten most overcrowded zip-codes in the country are in LA, and the city has the largest number of chronically homeless people in the nation.

LA's poorest are being squeezed to the fringes of the city or out onto the streets by the lack of affordable housing. Since 2001, nearly 19,000 rental units in LA have disappeared through the Ellis Act (a law that allows property owners to evict a tenant in order to remove the unit from the rental market, as long as they don't re-rent within a certain period). As of 2014, there was a deficit of 376,735 affordable homes needed for extremely low-income renters—at the same time, residential development in LA is booming and rental costs are steadily increasing.

The latest housing bubble inflating property prices in the city almost certainly drives tenant harassment complaints, said Dianne Prado, a senior staff attorney at the Inner City Law Center. "Share holders who own these LLC's, they come in, they don't do their due diligence or actually care what condition these buildings are in. All they're doing is coming in to purchase these buildings to flip it to see how much more money they can make."

Marsh is keen to distinguish between official types of harassment (landlords making threats or illegally entering apartments, for example) and building and safety code violations (like allowing a building to deteriorate). But Steve Diaz, community organizer at the Community Action Network, said it's not always that simple. "Landlords use a wide range of ways to get what they want."

A few years ago, the owner of another residential hotel in downtown LA began construction on a building, with the intent to push the tenants out, according to Diaz. "And then the next thing, these tenants got a knock on the door, 'Hey, I'm the new manager, would you like to move for $500?' That's some of the worst kind of harassment, right there."

The city is paying attention to the problem—on the surface at least. Three city council motions to address things like the affordable housing crisis and the Rent Stabilization Act are pending. But Gross isn't convinced this is a sign that things are about to change. "I think this is a test to see how serious the city is in wanting to address the crisis we're facing. When you try to address unbridled development in the city, you're talking about a very powerful force that has tremendous resources, and which provides a lot of campaign contributions."

In the meantime, Marsh says renters should "smarten-up" about their rights, like taking the time to read through a lease before signing it. "Everyone has a duty and obligation to educate themselves about their responsibilities and rights."

Follow Daniel Ross on Twitter.

This one little plant has sparked an entire industry full of lucrative careers. Photo via Flickr user Rainer Vandalismus

A few weeks ago, when I was interviewing reporter-turned-pot activist Charlo Greene at a weed-themed ball, she hinted that I should ditch my job and follow her lead.

"If you were to transition what you're doing right now in journalism to the cannabis industry, there are a number of jobs you could apply for. And what's even greater, there's even more opportunity for you to create exactly what you want to do because there's so much need," she told me, at which point I interjected, "Are you trying to recruit me?" "Maybe," she replied.

I'd been asking Greene what Canadians could expect to come out of legalization. In short, her answer was: money and opportunity.

"Every time you look up there's another headline about some new innovation or product or service that's out there and it creates real value... We're just at the tip of the iceberg now."

The event drew people who worked in TV, education, finance, real estate, all looking to cash in on cannabis. The move makes a lot of sense. Weed may not be 100 percent legal yet, but once that happens, it's expected to generate $5 billion of annual revenue in Canada. In anticipation, plenty of above-board (and semi-above board) jobs are already cropping up, some of which pay serious cash.

On the corporate side of things, people working as consultants or in quality assurance for licensed producers are cracking six figures; meanwhile budtending and retail positions are in line with what you'd expect from comparable service sector jobs. VICE asked people in the industry to tell us what's available now, skill requirements, legal sketch-factor, and salary range:

Health Canada Inspector

Salary: $71,591-$96,000

Being a Health Canada inspector is as legit as it gets. You are a narc—and as such you're paid very well, around $100K a year at the top end. According to postings obtained by VICE, these jobs require you to suss out "regulated parties who perform activities such as importation, production and distribution of narcotics, targeted substances, restricted drugs, marijuana for medical purposes, industrial hemp, controlled drugs and precursors." Basically, this means you visit legal grow-ops and make sure everything follows the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

You need a science degree and one-two years of experience "in the regulation and/or production and/or quality control of drugs, medical devices, natural health products, consumer products, pesticides, tobacco, food, plants."

As a perk, as if getting paid to tour weed factories wasn't sweet enough, you get to travel lots.

Who wouldn't want to hang out in a forest of weed all day? Photo via Facebook

Master Grower

Salary: $100,000 and up

The master grower, or "pot whisperer" as one newspaper put it, oversees every aspect of growing for a licensed producer including selecting strains and seeds, cloning, potting, transplanting, feeding, trimming, harvesting, packaging, and inventory. The space can be massive—Tweed Inc., one of Canada's largest suppliers, has a 168,000-square-foot production area—so they're split up into rooms managed by section growers.

Tony Lacombe, Tweed's brand new master grower, told VICE he has no academic expertise in agriculture. He's just been growing weed for a hella long time.

"All of my experience comes from practice: hands-on experience/experimentation during the era," he said. "Since this is an erupting industry, I feel the job depends more on adaptability, logic and good communication." Black market growers would probably be ideal candidates, but those who've been busted are fucked—you need a clean record to work at an LP. Jordan Sinclair, communications manager at Tweed, wouldn't reveal the salaries of employees there as he was hesitant the company could be characterized as "corporate pigs" and "f*#$ing profiteers." But an industry-watcher who spoke to VICE said master growers at major firms can bank around $250,000 a year.

Photo via Flickr user Fotoblog Rare

Director of Quality Assurance

Salary: $100,000 and up

Buying weed on the black market means when you end up with a shitty batch, you're left with no real recourse. It's frustrating as hell, but calling out your dealer when there aren't many other options is kind of like biting the hand that feeds you. That's what makes legal weed and its promises of quality control so appealing. Tweed claims its quality control measures go beyond Health Canada requirements. Everything from growing instruments, to the facility, to the plants themselves, is tracked and tested. As an example of how thorough the process is, production rooms at Tweed are monitored "to help ensure only the cleanest air enters" and products are tested "for pathogens that could be contracted through oral consumption or inhalation—so you know there is no risk regardless of your method of delivery."

Tom Shipley, who performs this role at Tweed, was previously a Health Canada researcher who worked in toxicology and later evaluated vaccines. Shipley told VICE weed's dubious legal status "can act as a research barrier or deterrent, limiting the number of peer reviewed publications on the topic."

In addition to overseeing everything that goes down at the facility, it's his job to investigate consumer complaints.

Freshly trimmed cannabis. Photo via Flickr user Mark

Trimmer

Salary: $11.25/hour and up

This job sounds dull as fuck, but it's a pretty straightforward way to make a buck. Suited up in coveralls, a mask, and goggles, you trim buds for legal growers, removing the sticky stuff from stems and leaves. "It's an easy job," said Sandra Colasanti, vice president of sales and business relations for Remo Cannabrands, a BC company that sells weed-friendly nutrients to legal growers.

"But it's mundane and you sit there for that many hours, you're also ending up with carpal tunnel syndrome." (She said black market trimming jobs pay around $20-$25 an hour.)

Trimmers are checked before they leave a facility, so unfortunately there's no way to pocket any green for personal use.

A Weeds Glass & Gifts location. Photo via Facebook

Dispensary Employee

Salary: $12/hour and up

From dabtending to scaling to straight-up customer service, dispensaries are probably the best bet for a young person looking to get into the weed biz.

Don Briere owns Weeds Glass & Gifts, a dispensary chain that has 28 of locations in BC and Toronto. (There are an estimated 40 dispensaries in Toronto, with more opening up by the day. Vancouver has more than 100, though the city will likely crack down on many of those in the next couple months.)

"I'm like Starbucks," Briere told VICE. "I basically sell half of a store to working partner, so I'm spreading it out in the community."

Likewise, he said his staffers almost act as restaurant employees—a dabtender serves up a "shot of cannabis"; scalers measure out different amounts of chronic.

They start out making $12 an hour and graduate to $15 an hour after a 90-day probation period.

Briere, who takes home $84,000 a year, also pays his workers medical, dental and pensions.

"All these jobs were created because cannabis is now going to be legal," he said. "We support police, schools, and hospitals and (organized crime) doesn't."

A dabtender at Hotbox Cafe in Toronto. Photo via Facebook

Vapour Lounge

Salary: $50,000-$60,000 (owner), $12-$14/hour (customer service)

Hotbox, one of the oldest vapour lounges in the GTA, features a large patio where people can sess as well as a private member's lounge with a dab room and video games.

Owner Abi Roach opened it in Kensington Market in 2003, inspired after a trip to Jamaica where she saw people openly smoking pot everywhere.

"I had an opportunity to take out a small business loan and I thought 'What do I love to do the most? I love smoking weed.'"

For now, the location, which is undergoing major renovations, is BYOP, though Roach hopes that will change when the laws do. The venue offers snacks, but no alcohol, and closes at 11 PM on weekends to avoid late-night drunks.

"I'd rather just close and not have to clean puke and deal with people fighting and screaming," said Roach. "I just want a place where people can come and smoke a joint."

It's not just your average weed brownies out there these days. Photo by Allison Elkin

Baker

Salary: $25/hr

Baking is a risky business right now. A Supreme Court ruling from last June made it legal for people to consume cannabis any which way they pleased, including by eating cookies, brownies, etc., but it's still not legal to make those products for sale. Vancouver has implemented an outright ban on edible sales, using the "think of the children" (who might mistake weed candy for regular candy) logic. So bakers are pretty much operating in a grey zone.

"Before the a baker found making cannabis butter, it was akin to running a meth lab," said Tracy Curley, a patient's advocate who owns The Wake N'Bakery in Toronto.

"A pedophile would do less time than someone making cannabis butter."

She learned to bake from a dispensary owner and two-and-a-half years ago started the business, tailoring her recipes for cookies, s'mores and pixie sticks to suit patients with diabetes, cancer and celiac disease.

Between processing the plant and turning it into coconut oil and butter, "it's a full-time job."

The market has grown incredibly in the last couple years, she said, and those looking to bake can start by turning to YouTube.

"i'm kind of looking forward in the next year or two to being completely out of business."

Beauty/Health

Salary: $24,000-$36,000

Yes, weed beauty products are a thing now. So if you're one of those crafty people who likes to make their own soap, you might be in luck.

Sarah G. is one of those people. She started Mary Jane's Touch in 2012 with a medicated balm used to treat chronic pain; the line has since grown to include soaps, bath salts, body butters, and scrubs. She also makes healthy THC-infused snacks, like granola, root vegetable chips, dried fruit, and pressed juices.

"We saw in dispensaries or compassion clubs were sugar laden sodas and juices, and felt like there should be a healthier more natural option."

She and her partner work out of an office space, where they do everything from production to packaging. But they're expanding to a team of eight and will soon offer medicated massages, facial masks and a delicious sounding "canna-cocoa hydrating wrap."

(Employees would make around $15 an hour plus incentives, she said.)

As for training, Sarah said "we're still a way away from there being a formal education system for Cannabis jobs in Canada." So basically, people with backgrounds in health and beauty have an upper hand.

Consultant

Salary: A few hundred to a few thousand dollars per project

Yep, weed is now so corporate that it warrants its own specialized consultants. The term consultant has always seemed very vague to me, doubly so in a weed context. But basically it's someone who helps people break into the industry.

"There is a spectrum of passionate people who want to enter the cannabis industry ranging from working trades people to pharmaceutical chemists, but not everyone knows how to enter," Alexzander Samuelsson, a Toronto-based tutor who recently launched Devat Consultant, told VICE. He says his background in chemistry and history as a medical patient make him right for the job. On a day-to-day basis, he said he connects investors and entrepreneurs.

In addition his rate, Samuelsson said he negotiates for equity of around 20 percent or a mix of equity and wages.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Taken from inside a North Slave Correctional Centre in Yellowknife. Photo by Pat Kane

"Send me back. I'm going to hell right now."

The disheveled Inuk man with a mop of jet-black hair continued to yell as he slammed his head against the plexiglass in the prisoner's box. Moments earlier, Justin—who is originally from the remote fly-in community of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, but has spent several years living on the streets of Yellowknife—had tried to strangle himself with his shackled hands. If it hadn't been for a social worker frantically shooting up from her seat to bring the suicide attempt to the attention of the sheriff, he might have succeeded.

Justin was being brought before the courts last week because he had allegedly kicked an RCMP officer in the head after he was found sleeping on the floor of a bank's ATM lobby on a typically brisk -20 C night in Yellowknife. He is currently facing several other charges, including several for assault, which date as far back as 2014, but has no convictions in the NWT.

Having covered the court system on and off for local media outlets over the past several years, the scene was all too familiar: a person clearly suffering from mental health issues being dragged through the court system, when it is obvious that some form of medical response is needed.

Fortunately, Peter Harte, a defence lawyer who has been working in the North for the past 12 years, recognized Justin from his time in Cambridge Bay and submitted a request for him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation under the mental health act—an application that was reviewed and approved the following day by a judge. Had he not been there, Harte believes Justin could have been left to fend for himself.

"I was concerned that he was going to be treated not as someone with psychiatric problems but rather treated as a criminal," Harte told VICE, after his intervention on Justin's behalf. "There's a systemic problem, which is why I stepped in."

On any given day, the courtrooms of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut offer a glimpse into the complex web of inter-generational violence, mental health issues, and substance abuse in Canada's remote north, through the lens of the criminal justice system.

Outside Yellowknife Court House. Photo by the author

Last Tuesday was docket day in Yellowknife's Courtroom 2, where a lengthy list of accused, consisting mostly of young Aboriginal men, were brought before a diminutive female judge with greying hair. The few exceptions were a 40-year-old Caucasian man who plead guilty to stealing $281.90 worth of chicken, beef, and shrimp from the local grocery store, and the parade of a half-dozen white men of varying ages who were being charged with trafficking crack cocaine. The latter is a phenomenon which is increasingly on the rise in the NWT, as gangs and drug traffickers from southern provinces move North to prey on a population that is vulnerable to addiction.

The demographic of the crowd in the courtroom was unsurprising given that 87 percent of the criminals held in the territory's correctional facilities are Aboriginal, while 86 percent are male, according to figures provided by the justice department. (Although the rate of Aboriginal incarceration is high compared to the national average of 24 percent, half of NWT's population of 44,000 are Inuit, Metis, or First Nations, and only three of its 33 communities have populations where non-aboriginals are in the majority.) The crimes being tried ranged in severity from a 34-year-old man accused of stabbing a man to death and attempting to murder a woman, to the theft of a bottle of vodka from a liquor store in Inuvik.

"It's a microcosm of all the Aboriginal issues you see on the TV every day," Harte said of docket day, where the court mostly deals with procedural matters such as setting trial dates, entering pleas, and in some cases sentencing.

Of the 74 people who were scheduled to appear—some in person, others in custody via teleconference—many were up on violent charges, with sexual assault (13) and assault (14) accounting for 27 counts. Another handful of men were appearing on charges of aggravated assault or assault with a weapon, in addition to one child luring case and the aforementioned man accused of murder.

The sheer volume of charges might not seem high to someone living in Vancouver or Toronto, but when taking into account the size of the NWT's population, it's alarming. Compared to the rest of Canada, rates of violent crime in the Northwest Territories are nearly seven times higher than the national average (Nunavut is close to eight times higher); homicide rates are nearly five times the average (Nunavut is more than seven); when it comes to sexual assault, the rate is more than five times higher (Nunavut's is almost nine); rates of domestic violence meanwhile, were nine times higher than the rest of the country in the NWT and nearly 13 times higher in Nuanvut according to figures from 2011.

While those statistics are shocking in their own right, it is the high levels of violence within the household that stand out for Lydia Bardak, the executive director of the John Howard Society of the NWT, a non-profit focused on crime and prison reform.

"If you talk to people their earliest childhood memories are of being sexually assaulted, molested or witnessing violence in the home," said Bardak, who spends most of her days watching court proceedings and assisting those who end up tangled in the system.

There is no simple explanation for the levels of domestic violence in the North. However, as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee concluded, Canada's residential school system had a devastating impact on Aboriginal people, particularly in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, which have the highest and second highest per capita number of residential school survivors in Canada. While the NWT's last residential school closed its doors in 1996, it is not uncommon for the abuse and neglect students suffered to be passed down as the resulting trauma and addiction go unaddressed.

"Men will often tell me about being seven or eight years old when they're trying to protect mom from whoever is beating her up. It might be the father or some other man, and they can vividly describe wiping mom's blood off the floor and the walls," said Bardak. "We have chronically, severely disabled people who are terribly misunderstood."

With so much violence in the home, Bardak said people tend to turn to alcohol to cope at a very young age. Last winter I had the chance to travel up to Fort Good Hope, a remote community of 572 people, which has one of the highest crime rates in the territory (668 reported incidents in 2014, 118 of which were considered violent). Despite being one of 18 NWT communities which either has a ban or a set restriction on the possession of alcohol, the officer in charge of the detachment at the time lamented, "There aren't many calls we go to where there isn't alcohol involved." Sure enough, last week saw the beginning of a trial where a then-minor from the community is charged with brutally beating a 23-year-old mother of three to death—an incident in which alcohol is believed to be a factor.

The interior of a cell at North Slave Correctional Centre. Photo by Pat Kane

Aside from the obvious impairment in judgement, Bardak said dependence on alcohol ends up hampering cognitive development both in young people who start drinking and through the transmission of fetal alcohol syndrome. In the end, the dependence on alcohol ultimately exacerbates the high levels of physical and emotional trauma children are exposed to when growing up, thereby creating an ugly cycle of violence and addiction.

How else can you explain someone like Patsy Novoligak, who appeared in court via teleconference from jail on Tuesday on a sexual assault charge. It's bad enough to think that a 24-year-old would be charged with such a serious crime. What is truly shocking though, is that despite barely being an adult, Novoligak already has twice as many convictions—48—as he does years on thisplanet. When asked how you can explain the extensive criminal history of someone like Patsy, who started drinking at the age of 11, Bardak paused for a moment.

"I guess we just have try and imagine the horrors he lived through as a kid," she said.

The territorial government has made some small strides in an effort to divert people from jail in recent years, namely with the creation of "on-the-land" addictions programs for youth, as well as through its funding of a wellness court, which allows people who plead guilty to certain offences to serve sentences in the community while seeking rehabilitation. But, despite its minor investments, there remains a huge deficit of services in the more remote communities in both the NWT and Nunavut.

"There's a lack of resources up here," Harte said. "There's no group home, there's no substance abuse treatment. Those resources don't exist so at the end of the day people like Justin show up in criminal court."

Take for example the fact that 11 of the NWT's smallest communities don't have a permanent police presence despite MLAs repeatedly calling on the government to make good on promises to address the shortfall. The territory is also failing to provide sufficient levels of mental health and addictions support in order to keep people out of jail in the first place, according to Bardak. The NWT's Health Minister Glen Abernethy acknowledged as much last fall when he announced that the government "needs to rethink the way it provides mental health services."

The territory closed the last of its addictions treatment centres in 2013, after having shut down its only other one in 1999. Last fall, Chief Roy Fabian, of the Kátł'odeeche First Nation where the now defunct treatment centre is located, issued a call to reopen the centre, but the suggestion was shot down by Abernethy, who argued it was cheaper to send patients to southern treatment facilities. Despite resistance from Yellowknife Fabian told VICE the Kátł'odeeche is currently drafting a proposal to reopen the centre with a range of programming that goes beyond just treating addiction, but would also bring back much needed jobs to the community of 325.

The importance of creating jobs in the North cannot be understated. On Tuesday, the court heard that it was unemployment and alcohol addiction that lead a 40-year-old diamond driller to try and steal nearly $300 worth of meat. "I was just trying to survive until I got back to work," the remorseful man said at his sentencing.

Unfortunately, given the grim economic outlook in the NWT, the chances of Fabian's vision becoming reality look slim. Last fall 434 people were laid off as De Beers shut down the operation of one of its largest mines just north of Yellowknife. And just on Monday the NWT government announced that it could be in debt by as much as $1 billion in 2020 due to a decline in federal funding transfers.

With the threat of tightening purse strings looming over the Northwest Territories, there is a very real possibility that the social resources needed to combat high levels of crime will be stretched even thinner. Although Northerners are known for their resilience, that doesn't bode well for the Justins and Patsys who will continually find their names on the court docket rather than a treatment centre's waiting list.

Follow Cody Punter on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Facebook's dystopian "On This Day" function has been going for about a year now, but it feels like none of us have acknowledged the wretchedness of beginning each day by looking back at how previous days may have been better than the present: spending time with people we prefer to those currently in our lives, employed in more fulfilling jobs, walking on a beach in a country you'll never return to, and not scrolling through Facebook in an office wondering if it would be a bad thing if you got fired.

These daily nostalgia injections also serve to remind us how much of our lives are still on Facebook—not just the profile pictures we carefully curate to make us look fit, but the five-year-old tagged photos of that awful trip to some festival where you wore neon pink face paint. Don't think that people aren't bothering to look at those bits to see if you're a suitable person to have sex with; they definitely are.

Even if you're not a professional Facebook lurker, we've all done the entry-level "tagged photo left arrow" stalk, where pressing that one button takes you right back to the start of your friend's tagged photos. You in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt in an album called "NEWQUAY 2006, NEVER FORGET :)". You during that phase where you put concealer on your lips and tilted your head 90 degrees to the left every time a camera was in the same room as you.

That first photo says everything about you that you don't want to be said: Your misplaced assurance in your own sense of style, your weird face that hadn't properly found what shape it's supposed to be—it's like having your bar mitzvah video played on repeat for anyone to watch at any time.

With that in mind, we got a bunch of VICE staffers to write about their first tagged photos and what it says about them. Frankly, they're all idiots for doing this, because now these pictures are not only available to all their Facebook friends, but are going to come up on Google Images for the rest of eternity. Suckers.

Josh Visser (Managing Editor, VICE Canada)

I think I've matured in the nine years since this photo was taken. For example, I now drink beers with my own hands and do not allow myself to be photographed via flip phone. I think I'd still wear that shirt though, so maybe there has not been that much growth. Fun fact for nobody other than me, the other person visible in that photo is now a very well-known figure (i.e. kinda classy) in the Canadian lit world. Always remember where you came from, man.

Not surprisingly, I don't really remember the story behind this photo, other than it was a bunch of dumb kids during the first few weeks at a new university trying to make friends.

Other than the time I went as Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks for Halloween and that other time I shaved off half my beard for a magazine article, this is probably the last clean-shaven period in my life. But seeing this has already reminded me why I've kept the bearded streak alive.

Anyway... I'm chatting with my pal and former bandmate Darcy, probably about Neil Young, with whom we're both fairly obsessed (Darcy ripped his vinyl copy of On the Beach to mp3 long before it was reissued). I spent a lot of time riding shotgun with that guy, half-terrified/half-awestruck by his ability to eat, drive, talk on the phone, and dig CDs out from under all trash and gear in his backseat without getting us killed.

Manisha Krishnan (Staff Writer, VICE Canada)

The caption for this photo, which I wrote, is "FSU" as in "fuck shit up." That should give you an idea of the kind of 19-year-old I was. You can see that I'm lighting up a bloated doobie, because back then I had no idea how to ration my pot. I rolled the fattest and lumpiest joints possible, so eager was I to get stoned beyond the point of being able to verbally communicate. I'm showing a lot more skin than I would these days, I think I was in a transitional phase from dressing super slutty—I'm wearing a tube top ffs—to my current look, hobo chic. I am easily the worst dressed person in this photo—the clear groupie in a clique of badassery. I remember this party pretty well, considering it was about a decade ago. It was NYE at a warehouse in East Vancouver. At the stroke of midnight, the friend to my right ran up to me, yelled "I love you!" and shoved two blue caps of ecstasy (RIP pressed pills) in my mouth. The rest of the night is black.

Allison Elkin (Staff Writer, VICE Canada)

I resisted joining Facebook for as long as I could, determined to never leave my first true love, MySpace, for a social network where I had to use my actual name instead of a made-up persona. This selfie, taken in 2006 and contained in an album entitled "whatever," represents my failure. It's a relic from an age before the advent of front-facing cell phone cameras—a time when it was considered a skill to be able to contort your body around in unnatural angles to capture your eyeliner-smeared face in just the proper light. Here, at the age of 15, I am seen with my best friend of the moment who was one of those borderline-famous MySpace girls, Katyface.

We are pictured here in the alcohol section of a Wegmans, an upstate New York grocery store, despite the fact that we were straight-edge. Later that day, we probably tried to pierce obscure parts of each other's ears and went to a Christian hardcore show because that is literally all I used to do with my time. By the next year, I broke edge and was smoking weed with gangsters and passing out drunk at strangers' house parties regularly.

Hanson O'Haver (Social Editor, VICE US)

This is a photo from 2007, of me on a beach in Santa Barbara, during my freshman year of college. I'm wearing a Weirdo Rippers-era No Age shirt under an American Apparel sweatshirt, thanks to a friend who worked at the store and let me buy things with a heavy discount. I'm also smoking two clove cigarettes at the same time because I was that type of guy.

I spent most of that year annoyed that I didn't get into any of the colleges I wanted to go to, mentally hating on fraternity guys and the girls who went to their parties, and trying to get good grades so I could transfer schools. I don't really remember much else. I took intro to philosophy that year so I know I must have felt alienated. I remember that one time a group of us got stoned and rode our bikes to see Pineapple Express. We ran into a drunk driver checkpoint and I was the only one who freaked out. I turned around, biked back to campus, locked my bike, walked to the theater, paid for a ticket, and watched the second half of the movie.

The next year I moved to New York, realized that everyone had been perfectly nice to me, and felt like an idiot for being a gloomster while people who wanted to be my friend played frisbee on a beach in December. I don't keep in touch with anyone from back then, but I've held on to lots of pictures of people in racist halloween costumes, just in case any of them ever run for office.

Paris Lees (Writer, VICE UK)

I've always been hot. This photo shows me soon after I transitioned from male to female, in the late 2000s, before it was trendy. I think I look pretty feminine for someone born physically male who hadn't, at that point, taken hormones or had any surgeries. That's my natural hair color at the roots, by the way. Long time no see! My bum's fatter now, which I prefer. Oh god, why the fuck is my ass on Facebook? I don't think I had much validation in other areas of my life back then, so a lot of my self-worth came from feeling sexy. I thought that men's lust for me proved I was a real girl. I thought I was a fucking Pussycat Doll.

I was an escort as a teen and advertised this pic in the back of Exchange and Mart magazine. I was a "fully functional Pre-Op TS" offering "the full girlfriend experience" for "discreet gents." Laser hair removal and food aren't free. The photo was taken by some sleazeball called Callum, who made bukkake films and the odd bit of "tranny" porn. I thought his place was posh at the time—now I see the bed frame is tatty IKEA shit. I never did any of his videos because I always knew I'd be a big deal one day and didn't want it coming back to bite me in that gorgeous bum of mine. I'm on X-Tube, though. No face. Tenner if you can find me.

River Donaghey (Associate Editor, VICE US)

Sorry for the lo-res pic everyone

An older friend of mine had a bunch of acres of farmland outside of Eugene, Oregon, so he decided to build a stage and put on a thing called VirgoFest. He invited my band to play, and this is from that time. We all camped out on his property and took drugs and got chigger bites. I was 15 and had hair that could only be described as "Peter Frampton-esque." My nails were painted black, but the camera mercifully missed that.

I'm wearing a Wowee Zowee-era Pavement shirt that was very short for some reason. My belly button was always exposed. Those two girls were older than me—they'd driven down from Washington State to see our show. At a point during the acid trip later that night one of them said she didn't believe in evolution and everyone thought she was kidding. The one on the right took my shirt when she left. I never saw them again.

Joel Golby (Staff Writer, VICE UK)

Ah yes, here's me rocking a Sandi Toksvig–esque haircut and the kind of sunglasses they give you after you have laser eye surgery. I am wearing one of those sort of zip-thru granddad cardigans that were the only thing Burtons sold for a good 18-month period ten years ago, and I would not describe this as a "strong look." Not even at all.

I remember this party: It was the end of second year of university at the house of a guy I hated. In the first year this guy came into our halls and tried to invent a new slang term for cool, which was "chili pepper." As in: "Yo, bro! Chilli pepper!" Later it was shortened to just "chili." He found true meaning in his life when he joined the university ultimate frisbee team. He called ultimate frisbee "disc." "That disc sesh was really chili" was an actual sentence he actually said. He wore two wrist sweatbands at all times. I hated him so much. I still do. I wonder what he's up to now, actually? What was his name... Simon something? "Si." Oh shit, I've just found him on—he's a business development manager. That is so Si. He has written his job title like this: "BDM." His Facebook page is every cliché going: He has checked himself in to his local commuting train station. He has done a "flight booked Milan 2016" update with a cry-laugh emoji. He's shared one of those recipe videos doing the rounds. This one seems to be shepherd's pie jacket potatoes. They look revolting.

I wonder if he's happy, you know? I bet, deep down, he's happy. I bet he goes home and eats a jacket potato stuffed with shepherd's pie filling and thinks about Milan and cuddles up tight to his girlfriend and thinks: nothing. I bet he thinks nothing. This has long been my theory: That the truly basic cannot be deeply unhappy because they have so little synaptic firing that they are genuinely satisfied with Family Guy reruns and mince-based meals and early nights and holidays pencilled in for eight months' time.

But what am I doing that is so good, huh? I mean: Who the fuck am I? Why did I hate him in the first place? Is it because he was everything I was not? He was popular: that was why we were at the party. Girls liked him, which was an additional reason why I was at the party. In fact, one girl entirely mistook me for him and started... I don't know, talking to me. Why did I hate him? Maybe... maybe I'm the dickhead of this story, you know? Me in my fucking sunglasses indoors and my "Dad's taken the divorce quite badly so he's moving in with a man called Hilary" haircut and my fucking zip-thru cardigan. Sitting silently in the kitchen of a house party drinking beer and talking to the same friend I always talked to. Taking this blurry-ass picture. I'm awful. I absolutely loathe myself.

Daisy-May Hudson (Producer, VICE UK)

This is me, breaking free from the chains of Epping, at the tender age of 15 for my first ever house party. I'd never been to London on the train before and my mum called me at least four times before I'd even got there. Up until this point my drink of choice had always been Malibu and pineapple, and my look basically involved straightening my baby hair so hard that it stuck up on its end. But here I was navigating my way through a sea of nu-rave boys wearing pink skinny jeans with kirby grips in their hair listening to Cajun Dance Party. I had discovered a whole new world. I hadn't forgotten my roots, though: If you look closely, you can see my necklace says "Epping Gash."

Aws Al-Jezairy (VICE News)

This was in my early days of getting smashed. I was an obnoxious drunk with little self-control and wouldn't consider it a successful night out unless I had turned paralytic or picked a fight with someone. This was at a nu-rave themed party that actually took place during the height of nu-rave. Don't know if that makes us meta or just dickheads. It was when I first discovered American Apparel too, so I was head-to-toe in it—apart from my jacket, which was probably bought from Krisp or Mark One. I was wearing a stolen pair of the staple AA striped thigh-high socks, and jewelry that I had stolen during my biggest and only ever shoplifting binge. I think you'll agree that I look great.

Matt Taylor (Crime Editor, VICE US)

This photo doesn't actually include my face, which is probably for the best. It's the spring of 2006, and I was going through a phase where I was trying to make up for my previous phase of really caring about homework. So here I am in an album titled "Beer Pong," getting into some kind of Natty Light-and-weed-inspired backyard boxing match, and, in fairness, loving every bit of it.

I also may have been engaged in some subconscious effort to make up for the fact that a year earlier, I got in a fight with a guy I worked with—we were cabana boys—and didn't exactly prevail in the parking-lot melee.

Jamie Clifton (Deputy Editor, VICE UK)

This is me in 2006, which was the year "Gravity's Rainbow" (Note: This is a song by Klaxons, which were a big deal in the UK.) came out, which you probably could have guessed from the pink headband and green metallic eye shadow I have smeared over quite a lot of my face. I was at a nu-rave fancy dress party, but I did also go outside dressed like this a few times.

The Klaxons look wasn't a super popular one in the town I went to college in—the cool guys in the canteen were more into Bench T-shirts and those funny wet-gel faux-hawk mullet things you now only see on European footballers or jobbing magicians—but don't worry, no one ever shouted insults at me. I was never made to feel persecuted for being really into primary colors. Still, it's a pretty good illustration of the confidence of youth. Soon after this was taken, a load of stuff happened that made me grow up really quickly and develop a crippling self-awareness that would make it impossible to do anything without second-guessing it ever again. Shouts to adulthood!

The lip ring is a hangover from my pop-punk phase. I did get a lot of shit for that. A kid outside a cinema called me a mosher, so I called him a townie, so he punched me in the throat, so I hit him on the arm, and an usher broke up the only fistfight I've ever been in.

Tshepo Mokoena (Weekend Editor, VICE UK)

Rectangular frames, like street harassment or every Clapham bar, are a reminder of everything that's wrong with humanity. I used to wear them in my part-hippie, mostly clueless about clothes phase, when I'd cut off my chemically treated hair and grown dreads as a political statement on rejecting Westernized beauty standards. Or something. I was 16, both naive and idealistic. My BFF of six years at the time took this photo in the bedroom of one of our closest friends. She lived a few doors down from me, in our electric-fenced, guard-patrolled suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe, and was legally old enough to have that just-seen bottle of South African cream liqueur in her room.

OK, so, the candy penis pouch. It was a gift from one male friend to another, given the day this was taken, and we may or may not have later eaten it off his body.

Sam Wolfson (Executive Editor, VICE UK)

The photo comes from an album called "Uncle Nick and Aunty Claire's Silver Wedding Anniversary." They're not relatives of mine. The truth is even more depressing: When I was about 16 I would make some extra cash taking genuinely the worst PA system in Britain to bar mitzvahs and 50ths and "DJing." I remember this one went very badly and I was essentially booed off my by friend's parents and all their mates. I think we just put on The Best of Motown in the end. Still got £150 though.

Bruno Bayley (VICE UK Magazine Editor)

I have never had Facebook. I was heavily dug into a phase of pretension at the time all my friends started getting into it, and made such a fuss about how crap and self-congratulatory it was that I couldn't ever sign up, even years later when, at times, I imagine I could have enjoyed it. I did, however, get a MySpace, which was, unsurprisingly, crap and totally self-congratulatory. It was probably worse than having Facebook because it was consciously not Facebook.

MySpace thankfully coincided with my end of university/start of going out in east London phase. Accordingly, all the photos on it are of me at my friends' club nights wearing bad hats and T-shirts with lots of writing on them. This is representative of the genre: me in a "fun" hat, wearing a T-shirt with my friend's record label's logo on it, at Push, an indie-electro piss-up attended almost exclusively by acquaintances of the promoters, at Astoria 2, pretending to be more drunk than I was because I thought it made me look cool.

The Zika virus is transmitted through mosquitos. Photo via Flickr user John Tann

By now you've probably seen at least a handful of sensational headlines about the Zika virus, which was recently declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.

Perhaps, like me, all you've picked up is that it can spread through mosquito bites or sex and it may cause babies to be born with underdeveloped heads.

But is there really cause for the average Canadian to be concerned?

A Zika virus outbreak that originally took place in Brazil in May 2015, is now expected to impact four million people by the end of this year, according to the WHO, which notes the virus is active in about 24 countries in the Americas.

It's being declared an emergency because of how quickly it's spreading and the link to a birth defect called microcephaly. A baby with microcephaly would have a smaller than normal head and depending on which part of their brain was impacted, could suffer from developmental delays, cognitive delays and seizure disorders—impairments that could last a lifetime.

The two have not been definitively linked though there are strong indicators of a relationship between them.

In 80 percent of cases, however, Zika doesn't cause any symptoms.Those that do develop are generally mild—rash, fever, joint pain—and only last a few days. Here are some things Canadians should know:

How many confirmed cases of Zika have affected Canadians?

At least four—two in BC, one in Alberta and one in Quebec. In all of these cases, the virus was contracted by travelling to affected regions such as South and Central America. Due to privacy reasons, not much is known about the infected Canadians, but Horacio Arruda, the director of health for Quebec, told reporters the woman who was infected in that province was not pregnant and is recovering.

Is the Canadian government issuing travel advisories over areas affected by Zika?

Yes. At the end of January, the Public Health Agency of Canada issued an advisory telling Canadians travelling to South and Central America to protect themselves against mosquito bites e.g. wear repellent, dress appropriately and use mosquito netting. Pregnant women or those considering getting pregnant should discuss travel plans with their doctors and "consider postponing travel to areas where the Zika virus is circulating in the Americas." The advisory maintains that risk to Canadians is low.

Is there a concern that the virus could spread in Canada?

No. The virus is transmitted via Aedes mosquitoes, which we don't have here. "Canadians can travel to Zika-virus affected areas, get bitten, get infected, return to Canada, and get bitten by a mosquito," said Issac Bogoch, of Toronto General Hospital, "but the mosquitos here just don't have the right machinery to transmit the virus."

Should everyone who comes back from affected areas get tested?

"Not at all," said Bogoch. There are guidelines for pregnant women coming back from travel—blood tests and ultrasounds that can be used for screening. But a Toronto woman who recently returned home from Brazil says she is considering an abortion because she was refused the blood test due to not showing symptoms. Instead, her health care providers have offered to track the development of her fetus' head with ultrasounds. The woman said she may terminate the pregnancy because "we are just completely unwilling to take the chance."

Can it spread from person to person? What about through sex?

The vast majority of times, the virus is spread through mosquitos, although there is one recent case out of Texas that is confirmed to have spread through intercourse. In that case, the partner of the person who contracted the virus had recently travelled to Venezuela.

"By no means should anyone discount that this could be sexually transmitted," said Bogoch. "If you have symptoms you should obviously wear a condom and get tested. If you come back from a Zika-virus infected area, you should wear a condom for a month."

What is Canada's role in responding to the public health emergency?

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, the government will coordinate with global agencies like WHO to monitor the virus and share information. The agency's microbiology lab is also equipped to help diagnose the virus. Gregory Taylor, Canada's chief public health officer, told journalists that Canadian and American researchers have paired up to try to develop vaccines for the virus at Laval University.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo by Fairfax Media, via Getty

In 1999, a couple of days after Shawn Williams met the woman he'd eventually marry, she went in the hospital for knee surgery. Two months later, after the cast was taken off her leg, doctors informed her that she had multiple sclerosis. By 2005, his wife was forced to leave work—something as mild as turning her head would lead to uncontrollable vomiting. For a while she could still get around with a cane or crutches, but by 2009, she was bedridden.

Williams installed a downstairs bathroom to their two-story home and converted the living room into his wife's hospital quarters. Williams made the transition into a full-time caregiver. Last summer his wife fell out of her hoyer lift (a device used to move immobile people in and out of bed), and he was forced to check into a full-time nursing facility.

A couple of years ago Williams started the r/caregivers subreddit. It's a place where he and fellow caregivers can talk about the stresses, questions, and sadnesses that come with supporting an incapacitated loved one. The community is small but dedicated, and it provides an empathy that the rest of the world can't muster.

"It was slow going at first, and it's still slow going," Williams told me. "I follow the MS subreddit and told them about it, which brought in a circle of people. It's nice to just throw stuff out there, even if people didn't have any advice for me and were just lending a shoulder."

R/caregivers is one of many communities on the internet focused on fostering empathy between people who look after loved ones. While a lot of the conversation on these sites is focused on granular, mechanical advice—like, for instance, "do medical alert bracelets work?"—these are also spaces to be sad.

"I can't stress enough how important it is to have support whether online or in real-life," said a caregiver who prefers to remain anonymous, who regularly posts on the Facebook group Dementia Caregivers Support and reads r/caregivers. "People in real life don't really want to know what's going on. They don't want to hear anything other than, 'Life is great! My loved one is so sweet and I love being able to care for them! What a blessing!' The minute you voice the truth, people get uncomfortable."

"In the group I'm in on Facebook," the caregiver added, "I can talk about how my loved one just hit and screamed at me, and people will talk me off the ledge. I can ask about how to remove the smell of pee from a carpet. I can ask a question about Medicare or etiquette when hiring a live-in. Other people who actually understand what I'm going through are a godsend."

Williams told me that his wife doesn't know about the caregiving subreddit, which allows him to be as honest as he needs to be. "Venting is important," he said. "There's so much frustration, you want to be mad at the disease, but you can't help but take it out on the person. If you can it's good to bide your time until you're in front of a keyboard so you can do your screaming there."

"Caregiver here. I've cared for my mother for about seven years. No family. No friends. No job. (Not for lack of trying) I've run out of ways to stay positive I believe," user pookie74 wrote in an r/caregiving post titled "Depression." "The stress is overwhelming and my health is deteriorating. I realize how hopeless this sounds (and actually may be) but, as a sole care provider, having stopped my own life years ago, what can I do?"

Around 43 million Americans care for an aging loved one, said Andy Cohen, head of the caregiving support site caring.com, adding that the grief that comes with that task tends to stay private.

"One of the things that came up in our research is that while people are looking for objective information, they're also looking for emotional support," Cohen said. "If you're planning a wedding or having a baby you obviously want to talk to your friends about it, but if your parents are dying you're not inclined to do the same thing because it's very sad. We set up our forums to use aliases so people can be open with their feelings in a supportive group. One of our customers called it her 'sacred garden.'"

Some of that honesty can be brutal. Cohen says that some people come to his forums and talk about hating their parents—something they would likely only say anonymously.

In a few years, Williams hopes to buy a house with the necessary equipment that would allow him to bring his wife home and return to caring for her full-time. It won't be the final hurdle, but they've learned to roll with the punches and stay optimistic.

"Not to be cliche, but she's my soulmate," Williams told me. " gets me on a level that nobody else does. She's someone I can trust. She understands all my crazy ideas, my dreams, my sense of humor."

Follow Luke on Twitter.

Mug shot via New Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office

Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir and subject of HBO's true crime miniseries The Jinx, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to unlawful possession of a .38-caliber revolver. The deal was reached after Durst got arrested by the FBI in New Orleans last March, with the feds apparently concerned he might flee the country as a result of the renewed interest in his case, The New York Times reports.

Durst is expected to get sentenced to 85 months in federal prison. But he still hasn't been arraigned on a Los Angeles County district attorney's charge that he murdered his close friend and girl Friday, Susan Berman, in 2000. The plea bargain over the gun charge requires LA prosecutors to arraign him by August 18, meaning they have a little over six months to put the case together and transfer Durst from New Orleans to California, where his crack defense team will contend with Berman's execution-style murder by a gunshot to the head.

Durst's adult life has been marred by allegations and mystery. He was born rich—inheriting a slice of his father Seymour Durst's real estate fortune. In 1982, Durst's first wife, Kathleen McCormick, disappeared, and has never been found; her family has believed for many years that Durst is responsible for her disappearance. Meanwhile, Durst was acquitted of murder in an unrelated incident in 2003, even though he described the process of chopping up the body of his 71-year-old Galveston, Texas neighbor, Morris Black, and dumping it in the ocean. (His defense was that the lethal gunshot got discharged accidentally, during a struggle.)

The event did, however, result in a felony conviction for evidence tampering and bail-jumping.

After Berman's body was discovered, a letter was found apparently attempting to tip off the LAPD to the location of a "cadaver" at her address. The handwriting was analyzed at the time, albeit inconclusively. However, analysis performed in the HBO series, as well as Durst's audiotaped confession, were cited in the arrest warrant last year.

If and when the murder case does go to trial, the scene in the courtroom will surely be a colorful one. Durst's lawyer is spunky Texas litigator Dick DeGuerin, who won the acquittal in Texas, and the relevant district attorney is LA's legendary cold-case prosecutor John Lewin.

In 2012, after putting a convict away for 26 years for a murder that occurred in 1985, Lewin told the press, "The passage of time played to this case's advantage," adding, "Lies are hard to remember. The truth never changes."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Artwork by Nick Scott

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When I was 17, I developed an anxiety disorder that intensified when I moved to London at 21. It caused agoraphobia, claustrophobia, depression, and a debilitating phobia of fainting. Someone told me at the time that I was existing, rather than living.

Before this starts to resemble a woe-is-me memoir excerpt, know that I managed, from about 2014, to start recovering. But life after mental illness is a neglected part of the wider conversation we're having on mental health. Future in Mind, the UK's strategy report on mental health treatment for young people, only mentions the word "recovery" twice in more than 80 pages.

One in 25 people in the UK are affected by a generalized anxiety disorder and one in ten young people overall will experience a mental health problem, a spokesperson from charity Rethink Mental Illness says, "with half of these going on to experience a lifetime of mental health issues." A fair number of these people will recover and there's support and advice available for them. But a big part of recovery is being able to live independently, and is something we hardly seem to talk about.

Andy Bell, deputy chief executive at charity the Centre for Mental Health, says that from a care perspective, recovery isn't just about trying to "fix" someone. "The important thing to understand about recovery is that it should be treated from the perspective of the person," he says—and not seen as a one-size-fits-all model. "Many people say the most important thing for them is whether the help they got was focused on the things they wanted, such as sorting out housing and a career." This makes sense to me. After something has such a devastating effect on you, regaining control and independence is the most important step in the recovery process.

Everyone's route to recovery is different, but experts agree on five general points. First, Rethink's spokesperson says it's important to accept your illness: "Acceptance may help you make changes and take steps towards achieving new goals. It might help you to read about your illness and talk to other people with the same diagnosis."

"You might find it more helpful to focus on developing ways to cope, rather than trying to get rid of every symptom of your mental health problem."
—Rachel Boyd of Mind

Rachel Boyd, information manager at the charity Mind, tells me that this means being patient with yourself. "It's important to remember that managing your mental health problem is a journey, and won't always be straightforward. You might find it more helpful to focus on learning more about yourself and developing ways to cope, rather than trying to get rid of every symptom of your mental health problem.

"If at any point you do have a setback where you feel worse or symptoms return, try not to be disheartened or angry—things can and will improve if you find out what works for and helps you."

Bell says that local NHS and social services can support people through recovery by helping them push past fear or deep depression and do the things they want to do—a second key part of recovery. He says it's important to join in with your peers' activities, making adjustments wherever they're needed, and seeking support to help you do this. Rethink suggests making small, gradual lifestyle changes, such as volunteering, learning a new hobby, or exercising.

Jessica Brown

They sound simple, but fit into feeling like you're in control of your life and your recovery, even if you need to make some adjustments. "If you've lost a job, relationship, or anything else because of your illness," a Rethink spokesperson says, "then there are different ways to deal with this as part of your recovery. Some people try to get back some of the things they have lost, and others try to look for new opportunities." If you work in a good, accepting, and non-stigmatizing environment, Bell says going back to or starting work is a big step on the way to recovery. "Work can be part of the answer, not the problem."

Having hope comes next, he says, and with it knowing "that it's possible to have a good life with or without symptoms." Rethink advises reading about other people's recovery stories online, or joining a support group where people share their stories: "For some people, low self-esteem and a negative outlook can be barriers to having hope for the future. Recognizing these issues and understanding that they may be related to your illness can be the first step towards building hope."

The last part of recovery relates to accessing services and being able to talk to someone, "whether it's your , a friend, a member of your family, or an organization such as Mind or the Samaritans," says Boyd, from Mind. "There are different ways to treat mental health problems, and it will depend on what feels right to you, and how your diagnosis affects you. 'Talking treatments' like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have been effective for some. Your doctor might also look at whether medication will help you manage the symptoms of your mental health problems," and she says there are alternative techniques to consider, from hypnotherapy and support groups to relaxation techniques.

While evidence of what works in recovery may still be thin on the ground, this year will see the end of a pilot two-year program offering local courses on recovery to up to 80,000 adults. It aims to investigate how people manage their post-illness mental health, and will use those findings to help local areas shape their services. We're getting somewhere.

My illness left gaps in my life where friends, experiences, and career progression should be, but I've learned to transition from a fear of leaving the house to being able to hold down a job and find a relative sense of stability. No one may have prepared me for illness, but we may as well do whatever we can to talk about what happens afterwards.

Follow Jessica on Twitter.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Dear So Sad Today,

Have you ever experienced having toxic friends? And if so, what is your advice on that? I just stopped being friends with two of my friends who seemed very toxic to me and even though I loved them, I believed it was best for me to move on. What is your advice on moving on and finding new friends? I've been trying to find newer, closer friends to replace them but it's very hard to find such friends. Should I join more clubs on my college campus? If you could send me some advice that'd be great.

Sincerely,

Smothered

Dear Smothered,

When I was a freshman in college I was friends with a group of girls. One day they decided they didn't like me. This was because I was hooking up with what they thought were too many dudes. Also, sometimes I would just leave them alone at a party to go hook up with a dude (sorry, but that's part of my charm!).

For a few weeks I kissed their asses, feeling insecure, trying to win back their love. But then I realized, wait, I don't even like them. In time, I became friends with some new girls who were sluts just like me. I had only met these girls in passing, but they seemed like cool people to be friends with—way less judgmental and concerned with what I was doing with my vagina—so I reached out to them.

Once I became friends with them, what ended up happening is that the two groups kind of merged. I introduced a few of the girls I liked from my old group of friends to the girls in my new group of friends and we all moved in together, becoming something of a squad.

This being said, I've never felt totally comfortable in a squad. There is something about group dynamics that makes me feel the need to shut a door—any door—and be alone. After college, I never lived with people again. And over time, I've felt like some of the members of the older friend group are still too conservative for me or don't fully understand me. So I have taken a lot of breaks from my friendship with them. I feel that I can be friends with them sporadically and I love them out of shared history, but when I find myself starting to really doubt myself around them, I take a break. That self-doubt is a symbol of too much influence on their part. It's a form of toxicity.

I'm not the type of person to say that everything gets better. But one thing that has really gotten better for me with age is that I don't care so much what friend groups think of me anymore. This might be because I now spend my time worrying what anonymous strangers on the internet think of me, but that's a different story.

When I think back to being excommunicated by that group of girls during my freshman year of college, or by another group in middle school, I feel a great relief in being my own person now. This has only come with time and was not something I could force, but it does happen.

xo

So Sad Today

***

Dear So Sad Today, queen of goth life,

I need your help. I need some advice. What do you do when you're sad like just try to cry an endless river? It's triggering idk what to do.

Thanks,

Goth Princess

Dear Goth Princess,

Despite how it may seem, I am not a good cryer. Like, I'm always afraid that if I just let go then my feelings are going to kill me. I'm scared that if I start crying I'm never going to stop: even though history has shown me that I always stop at some point. So I am definitely more of a bottle-upper. Actually, I guess what I am is a tweeter. Consider every tweet a tear not shed.

But it's weird that I'm scared to cry, because every time I do cry I feel so much fucking better after. It's like, oh shit, why don't I do this every day? I've also noticed that sometimes, if I'm having heavy cycles of panic attacks, they finally subside a bit when I cry. It's like the anxiety is not anxiety at all, but other trapped feelings pushing up against the inside of me.

The thing is, I'm still not great at knowing what my underlying feelings are. Half the time I'm sad for an obvious reason, but I'm like "No, it can't be that." It's usually only after I do something primal and physical, like sex or yoga, that I start crying and realize I've been carrying around a bunch of shit and have needed to cry for days.

Since my yoga practice sucks and I never do it, I tend to end up crying after sex quite frequently. When I feel the cry coming on, I excuse myself from the person I'm with to go pee (always pee after sex so you don't get a urinary tract infection). Then I get a few minutes of good tears on the toilet.

I don't know of anything that makes me feel more alive. Crying alone on the toilet is probably the thing that makes me feel most whole. I guess I could watch a sad movie or listen to some sad music to try and get the same effect. But sometimes I'm just too scared of my feelings to intentionally bring it on. It's like I have to run and run until there is nowhere else to go, and then, finally, the tears come.

xo

So Sad Today

***

Dear So Sad Today,

I want to tell the friend I am in love with my feelings, which is causing me great anxiety. Am I setting myself up for disaster?

Best,

Not Telling

Dear Not Telling,

I think it's usually better for the truth to be out there. Any time I've waited to tell someone how I felt about him, the fear was usually based on some underlying knowing that either the person didn't like me in that way or didn't like me as much as I liked him. It's almost like I was keeping it to myself to preserve an illusion that something would happen. Living in illusion is a high sometimes, but eventually, the person either likes you or doesn't. So if you don't want to delude yourself, it's probably best to say something now.

That being said, you may risk ruining the friendship (or putting it on hold for a while) because one or both of you might feel uncomfortable after you say something. But I think it's hard to just have a real friendship with someone you secretly like romantically anyway—at least if the air has not been cleared.

xo

So Sad Today

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released in March from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

Follow So Sad Today on Twitter.