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Why Marching in an Anti-Nuclear Rally Is Both Logical and Completely Futile

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

On Saturday, I went along to what's been described as the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in a generation, ahead of this year's expected vote to renew the Trident weapons system. Tens of thousands of us drifted in dregs and clumps from Marble Arch to Trafalgar Square in London, and the message throughout was clear: instead of spending vast sums of money to turn the seas to ash and the skies to radioactive fire, we should put that money towards the NHS, public transport, and education instead.

This is a fairly sensible suggestion, and at the same time deeply weird. Because Trident is not, as was claimed, just another example of Tory hypocrisy, or an enormous vanity project, or a hidden subsidy to the arms industry. Trident is the end of the fucking world. The more of these weapons there are, and the longer they're kept around, the less chance any of us have of making it out alive. Say Russia decides to invade a Britain that doesn't have a nuclear deterrent: the worst-case scenario is a lifetime under the brutal and crushing rule of someone called Boris, but not the one we'd expected all those years ago. If they try to invade a Britain with its missiles intact, we'll all be killed.

The rockets contain the potential death of every single person on the planet, packed tight into metal tubes and sent off to prowl through the oceans. Usually, in films and fairytales, when the heroes come across some ancient sarcophagus housing an evil power that could destroy the entire world, they take what should be the obvious step of immediately destroying it. They don't have to draw up a risks-benefits analysis and present it to a parliamentary committee. They don't have to explain, in a measured and sensible tone, why wiping out all life would probably, on balance, be a bad thing.

But the world we live in is often stupider than fiction: keeping the deadly relic lying around isn't just an honestly expressed opinion—it's the dominant political orthodoxy. Saturday's protesters had to come up with the pragmatic case against nuclear winter. So this is what they ended up with: please don't kill us and everyone we love; it'll be too expensive.

But what can ordinary people do when faced with the sheer terror of the nuclear bomb? The bomb stands outside history or society—it's the condition of our extinction, a power too monstrous to fully comprehend, and has been put in the hands of a few preening public schoolboys. Who would win in a fight between tens of thousands of normal, fragile bodies, and one Trident missile? If it came down to it, all the people packed in to Trafalgar Square, with their hopeful banners and their shouts of "wanker!" whenever anyone mentioned George Osborne, would be turned into a few wispy trails of radioactive smoke in the flash of an instant. What about a hundred thousand people? A million?

The thing about the atomic bomb is that the more of you there are to fight it, the more crushingly you lose. How do you organize a march against the violent death of every living thing? The answer is, of course, that you can't. There's a fury and a madness that comes over people who are really fighting for their lives and the lives of their families. That fury was not on display this Saturday; death has been hanging over us for too long. A few speakers made a game attempt to give some sense of the stakes: the sheer carnage that would come out of even one nuclear explosion, the bodies, the famine, the living envying the dead. But really, it was just another slow, strolling demonstration through central London on a Saturday afternoon.

We gathered around Nelson's Column, a monumental middle finger of British imperialism, the intercontinental ballistic missile of the nineteenth century, and clapped for Jeremy Corbyn. Some people shouted for free education or council houses or for the entire Tory cabinet to resign. (When the right wing assembles to protest, there's usually one thing in particular they want to change, and they usually get it. The left, standing for all the abandoned innocents of history, has to oppose everything.)

There were big creepy puppets and "v for vendetta" masks, whistles and bongos, men dressed like Gandalf riding around on heavily customized bicycles, Trotskyites with messenger bags hawking the Socialist Worker, and halfway down Park Lane we stopped briefly to watch an impromptu folk gig, as if acoustic guitars and sincerity could fight back against the primordial evil of nuclear fission.

The Black Bloc contingent, the hooded anarchists who can usually be relied upon to inject some sense of urgency into the proceedings, were mostly up in Liverpool, trying to fight back a group of right-wing extremists calling themselves the North-West Infidels. Saving the world from total annihilation might seem to be a more important cause than throwing bricks at some wretched, pug-faced Nazis, but at least the fascists have a reasonable chance of being defeated. The nuclear bomb, not so much.


Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP (in red) and Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton, smiling beside her

The demonstration was vast, and it hosted the leaders of three major political parties and the sitting MP for another. Nicola Sturgeon, the head of government of the UK's second-largest constituent country, marched at the head of the protest. This was not, as all the assembled worthies kept pointing out, a fringe movement. But as much hope as they might have had for victory, everyone seemed to know that the cause was lost. If Trident renewal comes to a Parliamentary vote, it'll pass. The Conservatives have an absolute majority, and a big chunk of Corbyn's Labour party are in love with easeful death, to the extent that they reacted with horror when he said that as Prime Minister he'd refuse to push the big red button marked 'exterminate the brutes.'


Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn addressing the crowd in Trafalgar Square

This is mad, but the atomic bomb is madness itself, and we're living in the world that the atomic bomb built. So we tried to be sensible: we gathered in our thousands to make the pragmatic case against being murdered as we sleep, even though being sensible in the face of the catastrophe has never done much good. As Corbyn spoke, clouds pulled away from the sky and it gleamed with the approaching dusk. And then everyone went home.

Follow Sam and Chris on Twitter.



Watch the Pilot Episodes of Some Upcoming VICELAND Shows Right Now

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You've heard that we are launching a TV channel, right? It's kind of a big deal for us. The whole thing is going live on Monday, February 29, but we're so excited about all the stuff we've been working on that we couldn't wait that long. Over the past week we've been premiering the pilots to some upcoming shows online.

Some of the shows are brand new, like Ellen Page's GAYCATION, and some are classic VICE favorites that have been reimagined for TV, like WEEDIQUETTE. They're all pretty good, if we do say so ourselves.

If you didn't have a chance to give all those pilots a watch when we first released them, here's a handy little round-up so you've got them all in one place. (We understand you are lazy—it is the weekend, you're probably hungover. We got you.)

BALL'S DEEP
Premieres Wednesday, March 2

Thomas Morton has been a VICE GOAT since forever. It's about time he's got his own television show. Variety recently called him the "poor man's George Plimpton," but did George Plimpton ever bare-knuckle box a teenager in the Peruvian Andes? Plimpton was too busy prancing around Paris with Terry Southern to attempt half the shit Thomas has.

GAYCATION
Premieres Wednesday, March 2

GAYCATION is one of our new shows, tailor-made for VICELAND. In it, Ellen Page takes her best friend Ian Daniel to investigate what life is like for LGBT people around the globe. Remember when Page got up in Ted Cruz's shit last year? Yeah, that was for GAYCATION. We're really proud to have her, and this pilot proves why.

FLOPHOUSE
Premieres Thursday, March 3

FLOPHOUSE is another new show, this time about the lives of up-and-coming stand-up comics. It was dreamed up by the immeasurably talented Lance Bangs, and the first episode even features some folks who have written for us before, like Brandon Wardell and Clare O'Kane. We're pretty sure Josh Androsky pops up somewhere in there, too.

NOISEY
Premieres Tuesday, March 1

For the pilot episode of their VICELAND series, Noisey went to Compton to hang out with Kendrick Lamar and take a hard look at the impact gang life has on the city's inhabitants. Do you like Kendrick? Do you like music? Do you like anything? Watch this.

F*CK, THAT'S DELICIOUS
Premieres Thursday, March 3

Action Bronson's food and lifestyle show is another classic VICE joint that's made the leap to the big time. Let's let Mr. Wonderful himself sell this one himself, with his verse from "Baby Blue": There were times I used to hide my feelings / Now I'm butt naked in the Lamborghini / And motherfuckers can't see me / Wait 'til this chick see me on TV, I make the shit look easy.

WEEDIQUETTE
Premieres Tuesday, March 1

Finally, did we forget to mention that WEEDIQUETTE is making the great leap to TV as well? In the premiere, Krishna travels to Oregon and California to meet families who—as a last resort—have turned to hyper-potent weed oil to treat their children's life-threatening cancers with seemingly positive results.

Give all those pilots a watch and we'll see you on the airwaves when Monday rolls around.

Photos of the Police Trying to Push Anti-Fascists and Neo-Nazis Apart in Liverpool

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Another weekend, another set of scuffles over British identity. On Saturday afternoon, far-right group the North West Infidels landed in Liverpool to exercise their "democratic rights to freedom of expression, speech, movement, and assembly." In this case, that meant meeting at the Crown Hotel, not far from Liverpool's Lime Street train station, and encountering by a counter-protest before they'd even started marching.

Police quickly surrounded the front of the pub, to keep back the growing group of anti-fascists and passersby as they escorted the Infidels to their congregation point in the city center. By the time the fascists had met up with another of their group on the steps of St George's Hall, things kicked off. Police had to pen in the far-right group while members of the counter-protest and Infidels reportedly pelted each other with loose missiles.

Counter-protesters stood against the police barricade, chanting "Nazi scum" while bottles, firecrackers, and other projectiles flew from both sides. Altogether, Merseyside police made 34 arrests, according to the BBC, and ended the afternoon with one of their officers concussed when hit by an object thrown in his direction. Here's what we saw.

The Shady, Anti-Communist Origins of the Oscars

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Photo by Daniel Arnold from our magazine photo series, 'Photos of the Wolfpack's First Visit to Hollywood'

There are currently over 900,000 posts tagged "#oscars" on Instagram. One in particular is a photoshop of Leonardo DiCaprio as Indiana Jones, poised to grab the award, substituted for the boulder-triggering idol in the first movie. Are all of the posts like this? Images as encouragement for multi-millionaires whom the poster will never meet? DiCaprio is a celebrity among celebrities who works with great directors and has multiple models Uber'ed to him on any given Wednesday. He doesn't need you to root for him.

But of course this is the point of the Oscars. When they're not meaningless, they promote nothing more than the status quo, and then try to make us excited about it. Thankfully, they are most often meaningless.

In 1970, the film critic Rex Reed appeared on The Dick Cavett Show just before the ceremony, to kneecap the awards. "I don't think they can be bought," said Reed, blasé, "but blocks of votes can affect awards because studios get behind their personnel." He goes on to correctly guess that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won't win because it had to split its votes with another film made by the same studio. Reed also has a "terrible, lurking, poisonous suspicion" that John Wayne will finally win Best Actor by reminding everyone of his cowboy legacy in True Grit. (In case you can't tell, Reed does not like John Wayne.)

Reed's prognostications remain excellent because they draw attention to something we all suspect to be true about the Oscars: that they do not aim to reward talent, and that most of the time they are a fait accompli due to weird agendas, inscrutable studio politics, and arcane etiquette. Anyone who's seen the 2004 best picture, Crash, knows that on some level. Perhaps Reed's other compelling element is his disaffection with the whole shebang. Because if you regard the Oscars as anything but the annual, televised offsite retreat of a company that is hugely profitable despite everything about itself (complete with the crummy inside jokes), the problem is really with you. The Academy Awards were never meant to be anything but that.

Initially founded as the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, the Academy was the brainchild of MGM kingpin Louis B. Mayer, who saw it as a way to circle the wagons and protect every studio from the twin threats of talkies and unionization. Insularity being the whole point, the "international" part was dropped not long after this.

Related: Watch our film about the two kids who remade 'Indiana Jones' shot for shot

The Academy was first and foremost a trade group, there to keep Hollywood running smoothly from a business and publicity perspective. Mayer's primary concern was the Studio Basic Agreement, the first major agreement between the studios and the unions, but the awards, first a gimmick, came to be useful too.

"I found that the best way to handle was to hang medals all over them," Mayer said later, in Scott Eyman's Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer. "If I got them cups and awards they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted." The awards were never intended to do anything but reward the most profitable movies that featured politics and morality attractive to Hollywood at the time. The first ceremony was held in May 1929, at a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the first best actor award went to Emil Jannings, a literal Nazi who would go on to work for Joseph Goebbels.

The awards were also never intended for public consumption, but that first year publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst instructed Louella Parsons, gossip columnist for his papers, to pump them up, because he assumed that he'd be able to obtain one later for his actress girlfriend Marion Davies, according to Anthony Holden's Behind the Oscar. The awards were only broadcast on television, for the first time in 1953, to offset their growing costs.

Over the years the Academy Award—if it came to mean anything at all—meant a higher gross for a nominated movie and a higher pay rate for an actor in future roles. In 2010, a study out of Colgate University found that male actors can expect an 81-percent bump in salary after winning an Oscar. Actresses tend to experience no increase at all, perhaps because their wins tend to come in their mid-30s and the ageist industry offers women fewer roles as they grow older.

Politically, the Oscars have never really shaken these conservative, business-oriented origins, and there are dozens of examples of Hollywood showing its true colors during the Cold War, from the loyalty oath required of Academy members ("Any person who... shall have admitted that he is a member of the Communist Party... shall be ineligible for an Academy Award") to its awarding the 1952 best picture to a movie called The Greatest Show on Earth (Rotten Tomatoes rating: 44 percent), because it made $12 million (roughly $107 million today), over High Noon, a film written by blacklisted writer Carl Foreman that also happens to be one of the finest pieces of art to come out of that era.

"I found that the best way to handle was to hang medals all over them."

The spectacle of the awards has come to eclipse the other activities of the Academy. Last year the event is estimated to have hauled in $100 million in ad revenue. This is not to say its new cause is not any more worthy. Writing on the 2012 telecast, New Yorker critic Anthony Lane likened the whole thing to "teenage sex": "It's all about the fizzing buildup, and the self-persuading aftermath," he observed, a fizz that's only been encouraged by the internet over the past ten years. "The dafter the matter in hand," he wrote, "the more swollen the spleen of our opinions."

But even without an anti-union agenda and the inflated apparatus, the fact that the Academy is essentially the NRA of movies has led to all kinds of horrible decisions over the years. Studio dynamics, and a general sense that one has a duty to support what's best for business, are the only way to account for the fact that Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman never won best director, or the fact that a movie like Forrest Gump won over Pulp Fiction. Anyone over the age of 12 should have a memory of some year where a truly bizarre movie swept the Academy Awards for reasons that are completely inexplicable unless you work for a studio.

This year more people are finally paying attention to how old, white, conservative, and frankly boring the Academy is, and that's great. But it's important to remember that each Oscar statuette only costs around $100 to make. To us, the moviegoing public that subsidizes all the surrounding glamour, the award should never appear to be much more valuable than that.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

​My Husband’s Sperm and the Lesbians Who Want It

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All photos by the author

Michael, my husband, is a strapping six-foot-four dream with strong German-Irish-Swedish blood by way of the Midwest. There are Ivy-leaguers in his family. His grandfather lived to be 90. His sperm is liquid gold.

Valentina and Alissa, a queer lady-couple who are some of our dearest friends, had spent two and a half years and $20,000 trying to get Alissa pregnant with no success. Working with anonymous donors at sperm banks in Oakland, they'd return for more juice only to find that their carefully-considered donor was sold out.

At our wedding this past summer, they formally asked my groom if he'd donate his seed, to which he enthusiastically agreed. A few months and two flights from Berlin later, we arrived in the Bay in order to provide as much of Michael's sperm as was humanly possible to generate in two weeks. This meant that I would be sex-starved and Michael would be chafed, small compromises to make in the name of life-making.

The act itself was simple biological mechanics: Michael would come in a cup, hand it over, and Alissa and Valentina would retreat to their bedroom for an attempted insemination via a needle-less syringe. He'd also make several deposits at California Cryobank, leaving behind frozen sperm for future attempts or someday-siblings.

Then there was the paperwork. We signed and notarized contracts stipulating we wouldn't sue them for custody and they wouldn't sue us for child support. Standard. They weren't going to pay for the sperm—that seemed unethical and plus they didn't offer—but they would cover the costs of flights, housing, car rental, doctors appointments, therapy, and separate legal counsel. And before Michael could gift his junk, he would have to go through all kinds of genetic testing and physicals and blood work and poking and prodding—all required by the sperm bank in order to rid themselves of liability.

The first night we roasted a chicken and talked again through our intentions and anxieties. Valentina and Alissa assured us that they wanted us to be present in the child's life—or as present as we could be while living in Europe. We'd be like uncles, a responsibility we looked forward to and expected to excel at. At worst, Michael worried that meeting his offspring could result in his own biological clock going off. At worst, I worried that Michael's mom wouldn't be able to stop herself from sending knitted booties, a possible overstepping of grandma-donor-boundaries.

At the doctor's office, Michael sat calmly and listed the ABC's of his family's genetic flaws—Asperger's, breast cancer, colitis—but I felt anxious. As Valentina started to squirm, I thought I should maybe offer up my bloodline, which, after a quick internal tally, realized didn't sound much better.

So I distracted myself with my camera and then wandered to the bathroom with the intention of sneaking into the cryobank's masturbatorium for a quick glance: a former handicapped bathroom stocked with analog and digital porn. I was ready to cry discrimination at the lack of homo-porn until I found some bareback and soldier DVDs. It should have been no surprise that the majority of the offerings featured creampie and bareback sex.

As Michael came in a cup in that same room a little while later (I couldn't keep him company, I asked), Valentina nervously googled some of the conditions that she had heard Michael mention. My husband soon emerged victorious and sheepish and was quickly whisked away by a nurse for some blood deposits.

Later, we found ourselves in group therapy talking through some of the more subtle complications that working with a known-donor can bring. We were warned of the dangers of language: using a phrase like "biological father" could seep unwanted notions of parentage into one's subconscious. We also learned to make space for the child. We can state our intentions as a foursome, and Valentina and Alissa can state their intentions as parents, but we have no idea what the child will want or will be curious about.

We woke up to the news that Valentina had an LH surge—a hormone released that indicates your body is ready to ovulate. Typically the ovulation lasts 24-48 hours, meaning it was time to inseminate that evening.

So Valentina, Alissa, and I watched Real Housewives of Atlanta in the living room and pretended that Michael wasn't jerking off into a cup in the other room. Once he handed off his nut-harvest, he and I took a drive to In-N-Out burger while Valentina and Alissa inserted the sperm into Valentina's vagina in their bedroom. My husband and I ate greasy fries and joked about how we could have just conceived a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or the next Adolf Hitler. The big duty felt over, and now it was up to the Valentina and Alissa.

As we left San Francisco, I felt relieved that our obligations were over. At the same time, I noticed that I didn't feel as anxious as I did at the start. I no longer felt like a middleman, but now more vital to our unique foursome. Moments after touch-down back in Berlin, we found out that Valentina got her period—no dice. First attempts usually don't work, but next time they might get lucky, or the next. Or it might take five years. Or my friends might never get pregnant with Michael's sperm. We can't control biology, but we tried our best. At the very least, I'm convinced friends can literally be the family you get to choose.

For more of Alexander's work, visit his website and Instagram.

STIs, Shame, and the Sabbath: Orthodox Jews Reflect on How They Learned About Sex

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I first learned about sex in the bathroom of my co-ed yeshiva day school when I was eight. While we huddled around an automatic hand drier, two of my kippa-wearing, tzizit-wielding friends told me roughly what happens when a man masturbates: "You rub your dick a lot and then white stuff shoots out!" I listened in horror, unsure if they were joking. I was too scared to ask my parents or teachers and embarrassed to ask my friends to clarify; I wouldn't hear about sex from my teachers until I was nearly 13.

I grew up in Teaneck, a town of 40,000 in northern New Jersey, which has, by my count, at least 18 Orthodox synagogues. For the first 17 years of my life, I split my time in a variety of Modern Orthodox Jewish schools in Manhattan, Paramus, and Riverdale. Half the day was devoted to Jewish classes with the other half committed to a secular curriculum. In these schools, the classes mixed boys and girls together, one of many ways being Modern Orthodox differs from being ultra-Orthodox/Hasidic.

We'd study Talmud, but still read Harry Potter. We'd observe the Sabbath, but still discuss last night's episode of The OC. Despite my relatively-liberal religious upbringing (at least compared to many other Orthodox Jews), there were still limitations and filters through which we learned about the world around us. For example, talking about sex was something that just didn't happen. Nevertheless, thanks to pop culture and the internet, I pieced together some information about intercourse the way any preteen might. Still, my school didn't formally broach the topic until the year before high school when an awkward rabbi who gave us a rough outline of all the terrible things that can happen as a result of sex: babies, disgusting rashes, dick discharges, and, of course, AIDS. Not once during the class was sex described as a mitzvah or something to be celebrated with a partner, which is how some observant Jews interpret sex between married couples.

"While not unique to the Orthodox community, sex education is not about sex in Orthodox schools," says Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus, a modern Orthodox Jew with a PhD in Human Sexuality and the founder of the women-focused sex psychology group Maze Women's Sexual Health. "Rather, it's about how not to get pregnant and how not to get STDs. Nobody talks about pleasure or the kind of framework sex can fit into and I feel like that's what kids are really curious about. And that's what they should be talking about, in addition to how not to get pregnant and how not to get STDs."

By the time I got to college, I felt a huge culture shock. The casualness of sex among my newfound college friends was startling—I had never discussed anyone's sex life before. It was only after considerable time spent with people from different backgrounds that I realized how my introduction to sex affected my own sexuality, and how the lack of sex-positivity ended up complicating my entrance into an independent adult life.

"I'll talk to a young girl, and she'll feel horrible about being sexually active before marriage," Dr. Marcus told me over the phone. "This will be a two-year blip in her life, but nobody in the Orthodox community sees it that way. [To many Orthodox teenagers], the things they do when they're 18 feel like the be-all and end-all of life."

Recently, I became interested in finding others Jews who grew up in the small Modern Orthodox world before exploring their own paths. I wanted to know how other people with such a limited education of sexuality as a teenager handled the transition into a world where suddenly sex seemed to be everywhere. I reached out to four former Orthodox Yeshiva students around my age and asked them about what their sex education was like growing up and how it influenced their sexual activity and outlook on sex as teenagers and young adults. The interviews were conducted anonymously (mostly for their parents' sake) and have been edited for length and clarity.

For more on sex and religion, watch our profile on the 'Slut-Shaming Preacher':

Talia
23 Years Old
Grew Up in New Jersey
Currently Lives in New York
Religious Status: Unaffiliated

VICE: What was your sex education like growing up in an Orthodox Yeshiva high school?
Talia: From what I remember, we had what my school called "Health Ed" in 11th and 12th grade. Once a month, for a few months, the instructor—either the school psychologist or the college guidance counselor—went over dealing with stress, sleep, and a very light version of sex education. The sex ed piece was focused on how reproduction works, without much detail.

Did your family talk about sex openly?
Not at all. I never even heard the word sex in the house. We didn't even talk about kissing or what a physical relationship with someone my brothers or I were dating might look like. I got most of my sex ed from watching TV and movies and reading books, which I think my parents assumed. I realized that sex was present in the world, but I had no communication about it with anyone until that mediocre sex ed class in 11th grade.

What was it like losing your virginity?
I was comfortable with it. I was no longer Orthodox and I was dating a non-Jewish guy who was older than me. I actually had to kind of convince him. He knew about my religious upbringing and was kind of nervous about being the one to "take away my virginity." We did not talk about it a lot since it made him nervous. The physical tension was intense and sex actually helped relieve that.

Learning what you did growing up, was there stress at the beginning your sex life?
It took time to reconcile. My mom's reaction to telling her I had sex was, "Your namesake is turning in her grave." Which was rough stuff; my namesake is my grandma. I told her because she asked me straight out and I decided it was silly to lie. My parents and I eventually went to family therapy and sorted it out and we now actually have a very strong relationship. We still don't talk openly about who I really am... I think that's the one thing I wish was a bit different.

Are you open about your sex life with your friends that are still Orthodox?
With the ones who want to hear it, yes. The ones who identify as Orthodox but are having sex themselves like to hear about it and like to reciprocate and share their own stories, fetishes, and general feelings around it. Most of these people are in monogamous relationships and I think they justify it through that. I also know many people who identify as Orthodox and justify their desire for sex by only having anal, because somehow that somehow makes it OK.

Sam
23 Years Old
Grew Up in Manhattan
Currently Lives in Manhattan
Religious Status: Self-Identified Pagan

VICE: How did you first learn about sex?
Sam: I think I learned from reading this young adult sci-fi novel in third grade, as well as from conversations with friends and stupid teen movies. I remember searching for the word sex on like Microsoft Word Clip Art in computer class in elementary school and seeing the gender symbols.

Did you learn about sex from your parents or school?
My family never really sat me down to explain because I assume they knew I knew about sex. In terms of sexual content in religious texts, my school usually skipped those passages or used euphemisms we would take literally.

As you got older, did the lack of communication about sex affect you?
In like seventh or eighth grade, I was really repressed and compulsive about trying to adhere to all the micro-details of the ritualistic stuff we were taught to do. It became like a form of OCD that I'd waste hours on—not meditative prayer, but anxious fiddling. Finally, I realized that wasn't what God would want, and then I became much more relaxed about sex. Over the next few years, as I saw adults become more extreme with enforcing these rules, it left a worse and worse taste in my mouth.

What was high school like?
For a while, I managed to fit in among various sub-areas of the modern orthodox bubble, but then as I got older, my relationship with my parents suffered (in the typical ways) and I began to draw away from these sub-groups. I never enjoyed being called or considered "off the derech" (path) because I continued to carry a strong sense of interpersonal ethics. But facts of my lifestyle made me feel like an outsider.

Which parts of your lifestyle that made you feel like an outsider?
Well, I'm gay and I was in the closet about my sexuality and didn't tell people that I was hooking up with people I met online. Inherently, that private aspect of my life made me feel like I didn't belong. In high school, I would ditch school, go on these fucked-up solo adventures, and be very much be on my own. At the end of high school, I ended up beginning to date this older guy who encouraged my personal interests and made me feel like perhaps I had a place I could belong. This relationship was kept secret from almost everyone, besides my closest friend and a teacher who I would talk to about it.

How did your parents react to your sexuality?
My parents knew since I was 16 because they had installed spyware on my computer, so they saw what I was looking at on the internet. My dad took it very bad and our relationship took a downward spin for a number of years. I didn't come out during school because I thought I'd get kicked out, but I wish I had in retrospect. That being said, I don't feel angry at Judaism itself, but rather its institutionalization.

Are you comfortable with your sexuality now?
Yeah, absolutely. The eroticism in the bible (both straight and gay) always seemed pretty explicit to me. The pain I felt related to my upbringing was more of a social isolation. Sexuality doesn't make me feel uncomfortable. I wish I was more open with it during school, and even if being forced to come out to my family was traumatic, I'm still glad it happened.

Ben
22 Years Old
Grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn
Currently Lives in Manhattan
Religious Status: Secular Jew

VICE: Do you remember how you first learned about sex?
Ben:
When I was 12 or 13, I went to Jewish sleepaway summer camp. My counselors played us one of the American Pie movies.

So you learned about sex from Jason Biggs?
Essentially. It was my counselors who discussed it with me for the first time, but they were just a few 17- or 18-year-old guys and were probably misinformed themselves.

Did you have any formal sex ed?
Nope, not at that point. I had it maybe in like tenth grade, but by then I already had my first sexual experience.

Do you think you would have benefited from having sex ed before then?
Totally, especially if my understanding of it at that point was just what I gathered from American Pie. I made a point to have my first kiss before I entered high school because I didn't want to be behind everyone else. So I kissed a girl in camp the summer before freshman year. Then, when I got to high school, I found out I was only one of a handful of people who kissed someone else before.

How did you feel about sex as you continued going to a Yeshiva high school?
I came from an even more Orthodox culture in Flatbush, so I thought it would be different going to a slightly more liberal high school. But at my school, guys and girls totally conflated money with popularity and sexual hierarchies; it was kind of messed-up.

Sex was also a way to rebel against the administration's constant nagging about tzniut (sexual modesty). Also, bringing attention to tzniut brings attention to those things, which were not allowed. It was like telling someone they can't have something, only making him want that previously unknown, unattainable thing even more. That was one of my first ways of realizing how distant I felt from the "Ortho" ways. But you also were conditioned to feel guilty for being interested in those forbidden topics. My high school set people up for that "othered" feeling, either while they were in high school or after.

How does your family feel about you having a sex life before marriage?
Well, they're used to it now. I've been out of high school five years and I'm dating a non-Jewish girl. That's a huge issue for them, though. And mind you, I'm a Jewish studies major, and committed wholeheartedly to my Jewish identity and community at large, but sometimes it's hard for Orthodox people to see outside of their monolithic understanding of Jewishness. The situation with my girlfriend is tough; my parents and I don't talk about her at all. It's an unspoken thing, and it causes me a lot of anxiety.

At what point did your thinking about sex change and evolve?
Once I started having oral sex in 11th grade, I was all in. My secular education in high school, however limited, showed me how wonderful it could be. Like watching any Goddard films outside of school, you just want to have passionate sex like that.

Rebecca
23 Years Old
Grew Up in Manhattan
Currently Lives in Israel
Religious Status: Secular Jew

VICE: Can you tell me about your religious background?
Rebecca: I grew up in a house with mixed views; my dad is Modern Orthodox and my mom is pretty much traditional, but not observant. I went to a Modern Orthodox school and I was very involved in the Jewish community. I went to synagogue and observed shabbat, etc. After high school, I became a lot less observant. Now I live in Israel on a kibbutz (a communal settlement), I work on Shabbat, and I don't go to synagogue.

Do you remember sex-ed in elementary school/high school?
I don't think I had sex ed at all in elementary school or high school. My mom used to tell me to use protection and I used to go to the gyno, so I pretty much knew about sex, but I guess I learned a lot on my own.

Was your mom always liberal in her attitudes towards sex?
She has always been liberal—thankfully. My mom's side of the family is also really secular, so I felt that I always had them to talk about these kinds of things with. Sex was not a taboo subject with them.

How did you reconcile your mom's views with the strictness of your high school and tziniut?
It was hard in elementary school because I was embarrassed about the fact that my mom is not religious and I felt like I wanted to keep the status quo. In high school, I matured and I grew to appreciate the way she was. I felt like she was there for me to talk about certain things, stuff I knew that my girlfriends' moms were more conservative about. She was the cool mom.

Did the students at your school have the same level of understanding about sex? Or was there more of a divide?
In high school, most of my friends started having romantic relationships. All of a sudden lots of people were hooking up. I think they did what was natural. It's not like they were rebellious about it, but we did have fun and smoke and go to parties because I went to a Modern Orthodox school and the students that go there have an open mind. It was not like the single-sex schools.

Do you ever feel guilty about your adult sex life?
As I got older, I released the guilt that school made me feel about sex, but it took a while. When I graduated and had sex for the first time, I kind of felt bad about it because was kind of a "bad boy." But I feel like if sex was a more normal thing in high school then I would have felt more comfortable about the whole topic in general. Today, I have a good relationship with my father and mother. I live with my boyfriend and it's all good with them. The fact that they even know I'm in a serious relationship makes them happy.

Visit Jackson's website and Instagram for more of his photo work.

The Founder of the Razzies Explains What the Academy Awards Are Getting Wrong

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A Golden Raspberry award

The Academy Awards purport to celebrate the best films to grace the silver screen each year, but with the omnipresent criticism of this year's ceremony, more and more people are putting the Academy's understanding of artistic excellence on the chopping block.

John Wilson, however, has distrusted both the Oscars' and Hollywood's taste for nearly four decades, inspiring him to found the Golden Raspberry Awards in 1981. Lovingly dubbed the Razzies, the ceremony has spent the last 36 years celebrating the absolute worst that Hollywood has to offer. Winners for Worst Picture have varied from now-cult classics like Mommie Dearest and Showgirls to bigger Hollywood fare, such as Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and the final chapter of the Twilight saga.

The Razzies may be snickering from the sidelines, but they're far from the fringe. Since its inception, the anti-Oscars has become a big player in the cultural lexicon, applying a rubric and language with which to talk about bad movies. On the eve of the 2016 Razzies, we spoke to Wilson about the ceremony's modest start (which coincided with the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan), the future of the Oscars, and why Adam Sandler is still the king of Golden Raspberry nominations.

VICE: How did the idea for the Razzies come about?
John Wilson: It was August of 1980, and I'd paid 99 cents to see a double feature of Can't Stop the Music with The Village People and Olivia Newton John in Xanadu, and I wanted my 99 cents back. And the manager said no!

Can you tell me about the first ceremony?
I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but when John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan, they postponed the Oscars for 24 hours. That night was the first Razzies.

The first one was essentially an Oscar-watching potluck party. It was very silly, very innocent, and very short. It was 40 people total; we just all thought it was such a funny idea. And the next year, we got a friend of mine whose mom lived in Bel Air to let us use her mansion for the party. By the fourth year, we had USA Today and CNN in attendance and we moved the ceremony to a grade school. And it has just gotten exponentially more out-of-hand since.

How would you describe the relationship between the Razzies and the entertainment culture at large?
We like to think of ourselves as the voice of the people, really. A bulk of our membership is made up of moviegoers who pay a fee and can vote on the films we select. And we like to think it makes pretty good sense to become a member because Hollywood makes a lot of movies, and good movies and bad movies all cost the same so if nothing else, that should be enough of a motivating factor.

What's been the biggest change you've noticed in the Razzies over the years, either in terms of the nominated films or just the spirit of the ceremony?
Well, the basic essence of it hasn't changed much at all over the years, but the number of people voting is approaching a thousand. We have voters now from 48 states and, I think, 22 foreign countries.

What do you consider to be the duty of the Razzies? Do you aim to spoof Hollywood or actually highlight some kind of idea about what makes for a bad film?
The intent overall is humor, really. We want to get to the point where there are no films for us to pick on, but it's been 36 years and it still hasn't happened. But it's also about the ridiculousness of Hollywood this time of year.

You mean around Oscar season in particular?
Between Christmas and Easter, there are 357 awards shows! And they take them all so seriously—especially the Academy. So something that pompous and over-the-top is just begging for it. It wants to be ripped apart! It's like there's a big red balloon in front of you and you're holding a big, sharp pin—what are you going to do, not pop it?

Aside from the actual noise that surrounds the ceremony, what do you make of the actual Oscars nominations themselves?
The academy has a total disinterest in the films that people actually like. It's really crazy. They have ten spots, or however many, for Best Picture, so why wouldn't they nominate Star Wars: The Force Awakens? It made a zillion dollars, it's already the highest grossing movie ever, fans loved it, critics loved it. That's a great Hollywood film!

Do you think the box office is something that the Oscars should consider? It does factor into how you guys nominate the Worst Pictures—all five of the films up for consideration this year are big-budget productions.
They just have no excuse for being among the worst films of the year! They have so much at their disposal. Some of the movies are the result of bad marketing, so bad box office isn't the only qualifier. But we look at box office because it's Hollywood's own barometer of success.

Are you a fan of big Hollywood blockbusters? I would think a good number of those films would end up on Razzie ballots.
There are ways to make a good blockbuster, it's not an impossible task. A movie has to have a degree of respect for its audience, and that's a lot of what's missing today. The studios go into the films thinking, "If we hit them over the head with a rolling pin, they'll love it." But sometimes it's about doing less. There are a lot of big studio films that I love. I thought that J.J. Abram's first Star Trek was amazing; that's another film that should have been nominated for Best Picture, in my opinion.

Are there films from the past year that surprised you?
I thought Creed was terrific. I went into it thinking it would surely be on our list—it's like the eighth one of these movies, and himself, and they got a great performance out of him! Now he's the front-runner for that Oscar. I definitely didn't expect that, but he was terrific.

Where do you think the Oscars can go from here? This year has seen such a storm of criticism.
I think the criticism is totally valid, but I also think the Academy has handled it pretty graciously. It's going to be interesting going into the next two years because the Academy itself is in a state of flux now. You have them admitting new members to up diversity, which is amazing, so the next couple years will be very telling, I think.

What is one of your favorite Razzie memories?
When Halle Berry showed up to accept her Worst Actress award for Catwoman. We got a call the morning of saying that Halle wanted to come and accept the award in person, and immediately we had to figure out where to meet her, which exit to block off, how to coordinate with her security team, etc. It was nuts. I told my wife and she didn't believe me. When Halle came out, I think everyone in the room thought it was a look-a-like at first.

Were you surprised that she took the whole thing so well? It feels like it could be risky to bruise the ego of a movie star.
If you win a Razzie, we're really not saying "stop making movies," you know? We're saying, "stop making movies like this. We know you can do better." We don't have a ton of repeat offenders. Except for Adam Sandler, I think he might be our most-nominated actor.

Is there a particularly famous Worst Picture win or snub?
The only one that won by a landslide was Battlefield Earth. It got something like 93% of all votes for Worst Picture. So I felt free to vote for the film that I really couldn't stand which was Adam Sandler's Little Nicky. I still don't think it's even his worst movie.

You really hate Sandler, yeah? You keep bringing him up.
I don't hate him, I just wish he would grow up! He's a 45-year-old teenager.

Follow Rod on Twitter.


The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Donald Trump. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

US News

Trump Declines to Condemn KKK Leader
Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders have all attacked Donald Trump for refusing to condemn the Ku Klux Klan or white supremacist leader David Duke. Ted Cruz called it "really sad," while Bernie Sanders called Trump a "hatemonger." —CBS News

US Student Apologizes in North Korea
A US student arrested in North Korea has appeared on state media and apologized for trying to steal a propaganda banner from a hotel. Otto Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia, said he was asked by his church group to bring back the "trophy." —CNN

Governor Knew About Flint Water Poisoning
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder could have declared a state of emergency over tainted drinking water in Flint months in October last year. Emails show Snyder knew about lead poisoning in Flint's water supply around October 1, but he did not declare an emergency until January 5. —Detroit Free Press

Salt Lake City Riot After Police Shooting
A small riot erupted in Salt Lake City after police shot a teenage boy, who reportedly was wielding a broomstick and trying to break up a fight outside a homeless shelter. A crowd gathered and began pelting the cops with rocks, bottles, and debris after the shooting. —VICE News


International News

UN to Deliver Aid to 150,000 Syrians
The UN is to use the partial ceasefire in Syria to make major aid deliveries to besieged towns. The truce, which began on Saturday, has defied expectations by holding, allowing the UN to hope it can deliver aid to around 150,000 Syrians over the next five days. —BBC News

Moderates Win Clerical Body in Iran
Iran's reforming moderates have won out over the country's hardliners, winning 59 percent of seats in the Assembly of Experts—the body choosing the nation's next supreme leader. The vote is seen as significant given that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is 76. —AP

Japan Charges Three Over Nuclear Disaster
Three former executives of the Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) company have become the first people to face criminal charges over the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The three men were charged with professional negligence resulting in injury and death. —Reuters

Pakistan Hangs Killer of Reforming Governor
Pakistan has hanged the assassin of Salman Taseer, the governor who sought to reform the country's strict blasphemy laws. Mumtaz Qadri—regarded as a hero by those who thought Taseer a blasphemer—was executed at a Rawalpindi prison for the 2011 killing. —Al Jazeera


Host Chris Rock hits out against Hollywood racism at the 88th Annual Academy Awards (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Everything Else

The Oscars: All You Need to Know
Chris Rock pulled no punches with his Oscars opening monologue, tackling the #SoWhiteOscars controversy head-on: "You're damn right Hollywood's racist," he said. Elsewhere last night, Leo DiCaprio finally got his Oscar for best actor, singer Sam Smith claimed to be the first openly gay man to win an Oscar (he isn't), and Lady Gaga sang alongside victims of sexual assault. —VICE

Corpse Found in French Airbnb Garden
A group of friends who rented a house in the Paris suburbs on Airbnb discovered the decomposing body of a woman in the garden. They canceled plans for their Saturday night party after finding the corpse in a shallow grave. —TIME

SpaceX Aborts Rocket Launch
SpaceX—Elon Musk's space technologies company—was forced to abort the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket for a third time. The decision was taken just two minutes before takeoff. —Gizmodo

The Most Right-Swiped Jobs on Tinder
For men, the jobs most likely right-swiped on Tinder are: pilot, doctor, entrepreneur, firefighter, and TV personality. "I'm surprised people would put up with us coming home in the middle of the night," says one doctor. —VICE



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What Life Is Like Inside the Besieged, War-Torn Syrian City of Aleppo

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Illustration by author

"The boy didn't know what happened. He only knew he was going to school, and, then waking up with a lost leg. That's a lot of shit for a seven-year-old child," said Dr. Hamza Kataeb, 29, in a voice message sent to me via Facebook. Dr. Kataeb is the manager of a 32-bed field hospital in Eastern Aleppo, and he was covering for another doctor; he was on the 72nd hour of his shift. In the voice message, his courteous voice sometimes broke from exhaustion as he described a recent victim of Russian airstrikes. He had 20 hours left to go.

Kataeb is part of a rare group. Ninety-five percent of Aleppo's doctors have left, fled, or been detained since the start of the war, according to the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights. Kataeb himself has suffered from this persecution: After participating in anti-government demonstrations, he told me, he landed himself on a wanted list, and he had to abandon his medical residency. According to a recent UN report, airstrikes have destroyed the vast majority of the 33 hospitals in Aleppo, leaving field units like Kataeb's as some of the last providers of health care left in rebel-held parts of the city. Kataeb, who treats both chronic conditions and traumatic injury, says that once the Russian airstrikes started, he began treating the seriously injured in far higher numbers.

In January, these Russian airstrikes sent over 30,000 Syrians fleeing to the mostly-closed Turkish border. Camped out with little to no food, shelter, or sanitation, these refugees live in squalid conditions that aid groups struggle to address. From the other side of the border, international media document their plight.

But conditions in Aleppo and the surrounding countryside are even more dire.

Since the regime and its allied militias cut the main supply road from Turkey to Aleppo, prices of essential goods have spiraled upwards. "All food and fuel supply routes were cut except from one hardly-accessible and very dangerous road," said Amr Yagan, a Dubai-based activist and lawyer from Aleppo who works as a liaison with local aid organizations. "This caused the prices to jump up extraordinarily amid shortages of life's necessities." When the Russian intervention began, organizations Yagan worked with stocked up on fuel, wood, and basic foodstuffs. But with the road cut, Yagan said, it became difficult to bring in everything from diapers to heating to the vehicles used by the city's civil defense. Fuel has grown scarce, and according to one cab driver I interviewed through a translator on Facebook, the diesel that powers most cars and generators had nearly tripled in price.

Watch 'Inside the Battle: Al Nusra-Al Qaeda in Syria':

The partial blockade has been coupled with steady bombardment of civilian infrastructure—bombings that target not just Aleppo but most rebel-held parts of Syria. Earlier this month, after airstrikes hit a pair of hospital's in Syria's north, including one in supported by Médecins sans Frontiers, the organization said the attacks "can only be considered deliberate, probably carried out by Syrian-government-led coalition that is predominantly active in the region." Fearing more strikes, MSF now refuses to share the GPS coordinates of its facilities with the Syrian government.

Bombs fall on schools as well as hospitals. On January 11, Al Jazeera reported that 15 people, 12 of them children, had died after a Russian missile hit a school in Ain Jara, fewer than ten miles north of Aleppo. On February 14, Russian warplanes reportedly bombed a school in Orem Al Kubra, a town in Aleppo's countryside, leaving five children wounded. Over Facebook Messenger, Ismaeel Barakat, an Aleppo activist who witnessed the aftermath, told me, "The children's blood was mixed with pens, ink, books, and papers."

"There's a state of panic and psychological pressure," said Amr Yagan, the activist. "Our schools are functioning with major difficulties because of the bombing and the students' fear of going to school gravely affects their education."

Every day more bombs fall on the eastern part of Aleppo, the world's oldest continuously inhabited city, gradually turning neighborhoods into graveyards of rubble and dust. Recently, a member of the Aleppo's civil defense (also known as the "White Helmets") told me that airstrikes have targeted the city at least six times a day, concentrating on civil and residential neighborhoods. After bombing runs, he said, planes wait for first responders to gather, then bomb again. This is the notorious "double-tap" strategy that allegedly killed Canadian photojournalist Ali Moustafa and that was used in December against an MSF hospital in Homs.

Describing the challenges of his job, the first responder recalled one morning when he and other civil defense employees watched the government helicopters buzzing like insects in Aleppo's sky. One dropped a barrel bomb on a group of civilian cars. The White Helmets ran over. "I saw a horrific scene when I went to search inside one of the cars, a mother pressing her child to her chest because of the strong explosion and fear. Both bodies were charred," he said.

When asked about the toll of their airstrikes, the Syrian and Russian governments respond as governments always do. They deny killing civilians. According to them, their bombs kill only terrorists—and since 9/11, the Muslim terrorist has become a folk devil in the international imagination, whose existence justifies any torture, military aggression, or crime.

As Russian airstrikes displaced tens of thousands of Syrians in mid-February, the Russian Ministry of Defense tweeted: "Near #Aleppo, terrorists are evacuating their families to the north of the province, to the Turkish border due to complicated situation." Even fleeing women and children become terrorists when seen through the funhouse mirror of military PR.

Attacks on civilians are heinous but link civilians to terrorists, and to many people, such actions suddenly become palpable. It's not just the Russian government that engages in this kind of calculus, either. In December, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said of ISIS, "We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out." Not to be outdone, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has floated the idea that he would fight terrorists by "tak out their families." The US is no stranger to attacks on civilian infrastructure in Syria: In February, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that US airstrikes killed 15 when it hit a bakery in an ISIS-occupied town near the Iraqi border. Nor does the US necessarily spare hospitals. In October, a US gunship razed an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 30 staff and patients.

On midnight Saturday, a limited cessation of hostilities came into effect in Syria after negotiations between the US and Russia. But the agreement does not cover strikes on groups considered "terrorists," including ISIS or the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.

Because of this, many opposition supporters treat the "ceasefire" with bitter skepticism. When asked his thoughts, activist Ismaeel Barakat called it "a dirty game the Americans and Russians are playing to eliminate the revolution under the pretext of fighting terrorism."

On Saturday, the White Helmets reported via Twitter that things were "very quiet" compared to the last several years, but there have been numerous violations of the agreement throughout the country, with Russia trading accusations with Turkey and rebel groups about who was responsible for which attacks.

Despite bombings and a potential siege, an estimated 320,000 people remain in Aleppo. Some are too old, sick, or poor to join the flood of refugees. Others have established businesses, or built homes, that they are unwilling to abandon for a precarious life in Turkey.

Others stay out of a deep sense of commitment. No matter what happens, Dr. Hamza Kataeb and his colleagues aren't going anywhere.

"We are not only medical professionals; we are also activists," he told me. "We will stay here until the end. Until the regime is completely over. Until the end of the revolution, so that everyone who killed innocent people should get the outcome of his doing. That has to be in a courthouse."

This Year's Oscars Summed Up in 13 GIFs

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oscars

All GIFS by Marisa Gertz

The 88th annual Academy Awards have come and gone. Leo finally got his Oscar, Mad Max took home a bunch, and some Los Angeles Girl Scouts made more money in cookie sales than most of us do all year.

In an era when most televised award shows are awkward as hell, the 2016 Oscars took it to a new level of hot-take launching weirdness, from the usual mindless presenter banter to constant reminders from the Academy, which often took the form of "yes, we're aware we have a race problem—here's a joke about it." If you missed the show, don't worry—here's a little round-up of all the big moments of the night, in GIF form.

Chris Rock made a pretty big deal about the lack of African-American nominees.

oscars

"You realize if they would've nominated hosts, I wouldn't have gotten this job," he joked.

A few minutes later, he called Hollywood out for its inability to recognize its own internal bias.

oscars

So he took to the streets to create his own "Black Oscars."

Beyond Rock's monologue, the night still managed to have some memorable moments. Here is a good reminder that Fifty Shades of Grey is an Oscar-nominated film.

oscars

Somebody sat around sweating in this bear costume all night just for one Revenant gag.

oscars

Sam Smith claimed to be the first openly gay man ever to win an Oscar.

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Although, Radiohead's SPECTRE theme was better.

Without a doubt, the Girl Scouts were the biggest winners of the night.

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Girl Scout cookies are $4 a box, right?

On one of the evening's rare serious notes, Lady Gaga and Joe Biden brought attention to the ongoing issue of campus sexual assault.

High Wire: How Many Drug Overdoses Are Actually Suicides?

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When I was injecting heroin in New York in the 1980s, it was impossible not to know the risks. Even as I shrugged off the after-school special scare stories, I saw evidence of them in my own life.

One of my friends, M*, once woke up with a dead man in her bed after having given him his first dose of the drug the night before. (Frighteningly, he had snorted the heroin and never touched a needle.) A mutual friend of ours, K, also nearly died from shooting up in M's apartment.

We joked, in an attempt to deny the horror, that M was some kind of black widow.

But while the first death was clearly an accident, K's overdose was not. As my friends carried him out of M's walk-up—both to try to get help and to avoid drawing attention to a place we often took drugs together—he weakly said they should leave him to die. That time, he survived, but less than a year later, he hung himself.

He couldn't have been older than 25.

K's hanging made his intentions quite clear: With hangings and gun suicides, it doesn't usually take an expert to figure out what happened. Except for the small minority who get sexual pleasure from asphyxia, no one uses these methods on themselves for any other reason than to die.

Unfortunately, the question of how often overdoses are really suicides is far more complex.

When someone takes a deadly drug mixture that contains an opioid— the cause of most overdose deaths—the line between the intentional and unintentional is murky at best. Many people who truly want to live (like me, even during my active addiction) sometimes take insanely high doses and mixtures. It's well known that the best advertising a dealer can get is to have someone die from their batch. To wit: All of my heroin friends wanted to try the stuff that had killed the guy in M's bed.

But in the face of an overdose epidemic that now kills more people between 25 and 64 than car accidents, determining whether people actually intend to die really matters. For one, many pain patients say they would kill themselves if they feared they were about to be cut off from their medications. If such deaths are counted as accidental overdoses, however, access to those same medications can get blamed incorrectly. And the same information that reduces unintended death risk can also be misused by people who do want to die.

"I think we have a really serious problem in the US with undercounting poisoning suicides," says Ian Rockett, a professor of epidemiology at West Virginia University and an expert in overdose deaths who's worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a committee studying suicidal intent.

Rockett and his colleagues published a study last summer that examined over 111,000 drug overdose deaths between 2008 and 2010. It found wide differences between the 50 states in the proportion of those deaths that were attributed to suicide, divergences that seem unlikely to be linked to the actual rates of intentional and unintentional deaths. For example, in Louisiana, just under 6 percent of overdose deaths were classified as suicides, while in South Dakota, the proportion was almost 29 percent.

"I think there's reason for concern more generally that drug intoxication suicides are being seriously undercounted," he says, "But more so in some places than others."

A tendency to mischaracterize such suicides has many potential causes, like issues related to death benefits that are denied in cases of suicide, and sensitivity toward families who have already suffered a terrible loss. Also: A high level of proof is required to label a death a suicide, so in an overdose where there is no note and no one reports recent suicidal behavior, it is likely to go undetected.

Rockett's study found that deaths in the South, which has also been hit hard by opioids, were far less likely to be labeled as suicides, compared to those in the rest of the country.

And while it's possible that people who take opioids in South Dakota are more than four times as likely to be suicidal than those in Louisiana—and Kentucky opioid overdoses are half as likely to be suicides as those in New York—the sheer size of these discrepancies strongly suggests other factors are at play. For instance, suicide may be more stigmatized in Southern states, or regions with fewer fatalities may have more resources and time to do careful death investigations.

Check out our documentary about America's shady rehab industry.

Research on calls to poison centers related to opioid overdose also suggests that suicidal intentions are commonly missed in those who actually die. A 2015 study of over 184,000 calls received by these centers (including over 1,000 that were linked to deaths) found that two thirds of the cases overall involved signs of intent to commit suicide. Among those who died, the proportion was even higher: 75 percent in people aged 20 to 59 and 86 percent in those over 60.

Further, rates of known suicides are also rising, particularly in one group that is at the highest risk for opioid overdose: whites aged 45 to 54. Between 1999 and 2013, the known suicide rate in this population rose by nearly 10 percent and the poisoning death rate increased 22 percent. If many of the "accidental" OD deaths are in fact suicides, that rate would clearly have risen even higher.

For obvious reasons, efforts to prevent suicide often require different tactics than those aimed at stopping accidental overdose. Teaching people that avoiding drug mixing dramatically reduces death risk also suggests that if you want to die, mixing is the way to go. Information about not shooting up alone and having the opioid antidote Naloxone on hand could similarly be abused.

This is not to suggest that such efforts shouldn't be made—it would be absurd to argue that we should let some people die of ignorance in order to prevent others from killing themselves. Instead, we need to look at why so many people clearly are seeking oblivion and what we can do to make their lives better.

Discovering suicidal intent is of particular concern for pain patients, who are now reporting awful experiences of not being able to get needed opioids as doctors and pharmacists become more cautious and suspicious. The rate of suicide in this group is already high—and intractable pain due to denial of medication is one cause. In our rush to prevent deaths from addiction, we need to be sure that we aren't increasing suicides in pain patients who are benefiting from medication.

Suicide has gone practically unmentioned in most discussions of the overdose problem, whether they focus on pain treatment or on addiction. And this isn't exactly surprising when the conversation is focused on or led by families who have suffered such great pain.

Rockett has made the case to the CDC that we need better ways of classifying overdose deaths, arguing that a category called "death by drug self-intoxication" would help distinguish between people who took the wrong dose and those who clearly wanted to get high, suicidal intent notwithstanding.

Rockett says officials have expressed interest in the classification. But I think the CDC should embrace this idea—and other ways of encouraging medical examiners and coroners to look a bit more closely at the possibility of suicide in overdose cases.

In order to spare other families from heartbreak, we need better data on just how bad the suicide problem is among people who overdose—and what's making so many people feel their lives aren't worth living.

*Not their real names.

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Bun B's Super Tuesday Dispatch, Part 1: Cowboys and Cow Patties at the Republican Goat Rodeo

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Editor's Note: You might know Bun B as the Texas–based rapper, professor, and activist who's one half of the legendary Houston duo UGK. He's also VICE's newest political correspondent, reporting on the ground from the campaign trail of the strangest presidential election in recent memory.

I'm finally back in the Lone Star State. As much as I enjoyed my travels in New Hampshire and South Carolina, there's nothing quite like the sublime pleasure of a Bacon & Cheese Whataburger in the comfort of my own bed. For some reason, though, I can't get quite comfortable. There's a foul smell in the air, and it ain't the cow patties. The GOP candidates have also come to town.

Thursday was the opening night of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, the largest in the country and a local tradition. Throughout the month of March, folks from all over the world descend upon NRG Park, home of the Houston Texans, to indulge in all things country. There's a huge carnival outside the stadium akin to a state fair, and inside, the daily rodeo competitions are followed by nightly concerts. Cowboys in 10-gallon hats and dusty leather chaps ride half-ton steers and badass broncos, run steel wagon races, and hogtie calfs. Cowgirls in sequined-covered tops and Daisy Duke cutoffs drink Bud Lights and take selfies. Kids dressed as mini John Waynes run around the petting zoo and ride sheep in the Mutton Bustin' contests.

The rodeo doesn't start until Tuesday, but the festivities kick off with the World's Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, a three-day competition where the best burners in the country bring out the beef and show their skills. It's the rodeo party of the year. There are margaritas and Miller Lites as far as the eye can see, along with an endless supply of some of the best food you'll ever taste. Live bands and DJs keep the floors packed with people showing off the newest line dances. Once the drinks kick in, though, the cowboy boots might as well be roller skates, and the dance floor turns into a country-western roller derby.

Photo courtesy of Pitmaster

Usually, I have a front row seat for the foolishness. But the biggest clowns in town today aren't wearing overalls and paint and dodging raging bulls in NRG Stadium—they're in suits and ties, lobbing insults at each other on the campus of the University of Houston.

I head to the Republican debate straight from NRG Park, so I'm dressed like a typical Texan on Rodeo Day. On the drive into the debate, I see a group of Latino kids in the middle of an organized protest, marching off of the university campus with a police escort. Closer to the site, another group, the Students for a Democratic Society, is holding another protest; it's triple the size of the first group, with more than 100 protesters chanting and waving signs that say "Dump Trump."

I get the sentiment. While we were all waiting for the punch line, this national joke turned into a dark comedy. Donald Trump, in all likelihood, is going to win the Republican presidential nomination. America is ready to give the keys to the ship to Gilligan.

Security is tighter than knat pussy. The ghetto bird hovers above me. Police are on every damn corner, starting four blocks out. Driveways are blocked off by dump trucks. We pass through four checkpoints before we find the media filing room. Shit is no joke out here. On the way in, we see a man being put into a police car, and Secret Service loading shit out of a U-Haul van. Inside, the first thing we see is the catering, and the entire room is almost all cops. There's a coffee shop courtesy of Google (a partner in the debate) and a stand where YouTube's demonstrating its 360-degree camera.

Police watch protesters outside the Republican debate at the University of Houston Thursday. Photo by Thomas B. Shea/AFP/Getty Images

The filing room is crazy—there are more than 200 people here, and that's just the press. That's when it hits me: This is a presidential debate. This is a much bigger deal than the rallies I've been to, which have been open to the public, and have only featured one candidate. The debate audience is mostly invite only, and each of the candidates is on stage. It's a huge fucking production. There are a dozen flat-screen TVs in here, and an LED screen the size of my Escalade. I'm impressed, but I shouldn't be. We grab the last seat in the last row and listen.

The show starts, courtesy of CNN's Bearded Wolf. Before the candidates are announced, Blitzer makes a show of introducing former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara (say what you will, but that fucker is a survivor). Then one by one, the band comes marching in.

As the debate starts, the first thing I notice is how loud the cheers are for Donald Trump. I would have thought Ted Cruz would have the crowd on his side, but I was wrong—even in his home state, the Texas senator isn't getting the same kind of support as Trump. His recent endorsement from Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a good look, but it's far from a deal closer. In addition to Trump, Cruz, and Marco Rubio, Ohio Governor John Kasich is on stage taking up space, while Ben Carson is simply staring off into it. This shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-fucking-S.

I'm the only one in the room responding to this shit. Photographers are taking pictures. Writers are typing. Videographers are focusing their lenses. But no one laughs. No one sighs. No one grunts. No one does shit. Maybe it's not professional for journalists to react to the candidates; it's only when Wolf says "f-ing wall," quoting the president of Mexico, that I notice a chuckle or two in the room.

The media filing center. Photo by Thomas B. Shea/AFP/Getty Images

On stage, Trump says the Mexican president should be ashamed of using such a filthy word on television. This is the same guy I personally heard say the word "pussy" in New Hampshire. That I'm surprised at Trump's audacity at this point is frankly naive on my part. But Trump's rhetoric falls short Thursday night, and Rubio is jumping at the opportunity, cracking wise and calling Trump out left and right. It's the lowest I've seen Rubio let his nuts hang during this whole campaign. He seems very sure of himself, and his conservative swag is off the charts. Then Rubio states that with two descendants of Cuban immigrants and one black American on stage, the Republican Party is clearly the party of diversity. I exclaim "what!" Then I quickly contain myself before "the fuck" comes out.

As candidates use certain phrases, Google analytics pop up on the flat-screens, keeping the press updated on how many times a term has been searched during the debate. The phrase "Great Wall of China," for instance, saw something like an 800 percent increase in searches Thursday. Why that's necessary information for the press to know, I have no idea. Maybe Google just wants me to include it in my piece. Different stats like that pop up from time to time, most of it seemingly useless to the reporters in this room.

Watch Hot Air in the Deep South: Bun B Talks God, Guns, and Politics in South Carolina:

Now, I know this is Texas. I know we're generally regarded as a Red State. I know that there is an audience for the Republican candidates here. But to see how loudly and willingly the people of Texas have responded to a quack job like Trump reveals just how many Texans don't have all their ducks in a row. I wanted to believe we know better. We don't. I wanted to believe we are smarter. We're not. I wanted to believe that even conservative Texans, having experience with literal and figurative bullshit, would be able to see through the bullshit spouted by this guy. They can't. I was certain that once Trump hit Christian country, he'd lose steam. He hasn't. The inevitable reality that Trump will be the GOP candidate is getting harder to deny. We've laughed too long. We thought this shit would go away by itself. Instead, it has festered in the armpits of America like a boil. And now as painful as it may be, we gotta lance that bitch.

Rubio kicks back into gear. He calls The Donald out repeatedly on his shit, and I almost find myself applauding. Blitzer is losing control of the room. Cruz and Rubio attack Trump from both sides. But the best line comes from Carson, that mumble-mouthed motherfucker, who, unable to get a word in edgewise, jokingly pleads, "Can someone attack me please?" Hilarious.

After more than two hours, the debate eventually winds down, although it's not soon enough for me. The candidates and their surrogates make their way to the spin room, shuffling down a red carpet to the stage where CNN is hosting its post-debate interviews. Most of the press is on the carpet behind the CNN cameras. The journalists position themselves for the post- debate commentary from Anderson Cooper & Co. I see reporters circle around former Texas Governor Rick Perry and try to slide in for a question. Down the line, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another Cruz supporter, talks about how his guy had another resounding victory against Trump. According to Patrick, Ted had his best debate, and Donald had his worst. But I think it's too little too late.

Ben Carson works the spin room. Photo by Thomas B. Shea/AFP/Getty Images

Kasich works the the lines to little fanfare. I ask Carson which states he thinks he can win on Super Tuesday, and he replies that he's been getting "mail" from fans in some of the Southern states. Mail? Like in the mailbox, mail? In 2016? Bruh. We ask Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee's spin man, about Trump's dismissal of Thursday's debate audience as "the lobbyists," implying that everyone who'd jeered at his responses was some kind of shill for the insurance and oil companies. Spicer proceeds to try and count out how many tickets were given out, eventually reaching a number, but never an answer.

Eventually, I'm waiting for Trump, but so is everyone else, and there are about 100 guys who've crowded in line before me. It ain't that serious. Or isn't it? This dude is the clear favorite. He has the momentum. He has America's ear. His answers are as vague as possible, and yet people swear they are the answers. He is the man to beat, on both sides. No one claims to know how he got this far. But I do—everyone here thought he was a joke, but no one's laughing now. This shit ain't funny. This is a war. Strap up.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

Photos of Spirits and Snake Charmers at Haiti's Largest Voodoo Carnival

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Voodoo, generally, doesn't have the best reputation. Turn to your left and ask the person sitting next to you what voodoo is about; it's likely he'll tell you it has something to do with pin dolls and hurting people. Or zombies. Or rituals where you wear skull necklaces and sacrifice voles.

But—unsurprisingly, given that most of that information is garnered from TV shows and shitty horror films—there's a lot more to it than that. Vodun originated in West Africa, where practices and rituals revolve heavily around spirits that govern the forces of nature and humanity. Other belief systems with similar names—Dominican vudu, Cuban vodu, Haitian voodoo—share many similarities with vodun, but they tend to be syncretized with Christianity to create a slightly different take on how things are done.

In Haitian voodoo, there is a divine creator, Bondye, who rules over an army of spirits, the loa, kind of like God and his angels in Christianity. The loa you're most likely to have come across in film or TV is Papa Legba—the guy in American Horror Story with the top hat and red eyes—the spirit who can facilitate chats between loa and mortals.

Voodoo works its way into the daily lives of many Haitians, but the loudest and most visual display of its importance takes place during the annual Haitian Carnival—a festival held from January to February, in the run-up to Mardi Gras. The photographer Benjamin Eagle went this year to document the street processions for his new project "The Spirits of Jacmel." I had a chat with Eagle about his time there.

VICE: What drew you to voodoo in Haiti?
Benjamin Eagle: After brief encounters with voodoo ceremonies in West Africa, I started to research other countries where voodoo was practiced. It quickly became apparent that voodoo is embedded in the culture of Haiti, and I was curious to get out there and meet the people. Voodoo, to me, seemed an extreme form of expression, and I was intrigued to see how this translated in Haiti.

What made you want to go over there and photograph it?
I think, as a documentary photographer, you're always looking for a project that interests you personally, and for me, voodoo is fascinating. It is something that is celebrated and expressed in certain countries—yet, in the West, is very much taboo. Being brought up in Europe, voodoo is seen to be a morbid topic, but in Haiti, it's the opposite.

What challenges did you face while shooting the project?
Haiti can throw up all sorts of challenges. Firstly, the tourism infrastructure is non-existent, so getting from A to B means having a driver and planning ahead—you need to know where you can and can't go. As safe as I felt Haiti to be, anyone caught in the wrong place at the wrong time could potentially run into trouble if he or she were unlucky. I was caught up in riots when trying to get to the airport to return in London—these aren't uncommon.

Shooting the carnival itself was a whole other thing; you can't just walk up and pull your camera out, expecting people to dance. Haitians are proud and demand respect. You need to be welcomed as a photographer before taking the shot. I've definitely taken the odd waistline photo along the way, but in Haiti, I respected my boundaries and always approached anyone before shooting. Not speaking French or Haitian Creole was restricting, but it led to some amusing interactions.

Do you think cultures and forms of expression similar to voodoo are dying out elsewhere?
I don't think voodoo is one that could die out. Yes, it has its challenges, like other religions and cultures, but voodoo is deeply rooted in Haiti's history. Someone in Haiti said to me once, "Haiti is 30 percent percent Christian, 100 percent voodoo." And the fact that Carnival happens is proof that it's alive and kicking, and that it's being passed along to the next generation.

The photo of the guys carrying the coffin—can you explain that one?
This group was one I hadn't managed to meet before the carnival had started, so it was more of a snap shot among it all, so my knowledge here is limited. But the carnival is made up of hundreds of collectives of people displaying their own themes. This one was a team of men all painted in black tar, which they cover themselves in, head to toe. It was as if they were a funeral parade, and they frantically ran though the crowd, breaking into fights amongst themselves, occasionally dropping the coffin, and generally causing chaos for show. If you got caught up in the middle of it they treated you as their own, throwing you about like a rag doll.

Follow Tom on Twitter.

Check out Benjamin's website.

See more photos from Benjamin's project below:

An Army Sergeant Is Charged with Killing His Wife and a Rookie Cop on Her First Shift

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A Prince William County police officer, Mike Lomanaco, walks by a home Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016, following a fatal shooting at the residence Saturday evening in Woodbridge, Virginia. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Twenty-eight-year-old Ashley Guindon's first full day on the job as a cop was also her last.

Guindon was one of three police officers in Prince William County, Virginia, to be shot when responding to a domestic incident a little after 5:30 PM on Saturday. While the other two officers—David McKeown, 33, and Jesse Hempen, 31—are expected to make a full recovery, Guindon succumbed to her injuries a few hours later at Fairfax Inova Hospital.

Army Staff Sergeant Ronald Williams Hamilton allegedly shot the officers when they approached the front door of his single-family home in the town of Woodbridge. Before the three arrived, police say Hamilton shot and killed his wife, 28-year-old Crystal Sheree Hamilton, after she called 911. The 32-year-old sergeant later surrendered when additional cops surrounded his home.

The couple's 11-year-old son was physically unharmed during the incident, but he was visibly traumatized, according to 18-year-old neighbor Zacarius Harris.

"He ran so fast I can't even imagine how scared he must have been," Harris told the Washington Post. "It broke my heart."

Hamilton, who was employed at the Pentagon's Joint Staff Support Center, was arraigned on Monday morning on charges that include first-degree murder, murder of a law enforcement officer, two counts of malicious wounding of a police officer, and two counts of use of a firearm during a felony. He's being held at a county jail without bond, and Paul Ebert, the Prince William County prosecutor, has indicated he's considering the death penalty.

"Ronald has always been a calm person and a very friendly person," his father said. "He had a bright future with the army and military."

Although there's no clear motive, Crystal Hamilton's friend Shayna Colunga recalled that the alleged killer would get jealous of the men his wife helped at the Wounded Warrior Regiment in Bethesda, Maryland. Colunga didn't know what specifically sparked the fight that escalated toward Crystal and Guindon's death, but the woman never expressed any fears about her husband harming her.

"That was her munchkin," Colunga told the paper. "She called him her munchkin, her best friend."

Guindon, meanwhile, is described as a dedicated person who gave her life to service. She interned for the department in 2011 while she studied for a master's degree in forensic science and served in the US Marine Corps Reserve for six years. She later started training to become a police officer but resigned last June for personal reasons, according to Fox News.

Guindon eventually reapplied, and her past experience and passion made her a prime candidate for the job.

"She did share with us, when we rehired her, she felt like she still wanted to do this job," said Prince William County Police Chief Steve Hudson. "She couldn't get it out of her blood. It was something she felt she could pour herself into."

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

We Talked to People Who Have the World's Sexiest Jobs According to Tinder

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Image via

Tinder has been around for long enough that we know who to swipe left on without even using our brains. When you see someone doing yoga on a beach or at a full moon party, your thumb moves with unthinking knee-jerk speed the same way it would if you touched a hot kettle.

But what makes you right-swipe? How can you in a split second, think, yes, I can foresee a future in which me and this person might have sex and a sweater we both wear and Christmas together and an apartment and a baby and a life insurance policy?

Conventional wisdom is that it's all about being looking good in your pictures. Millennials are base creatures, and dating apps have taken our tastes and desires down to the lowest common denominator. We want casual sex with attractive people, and we want it within five miles and with minimal conversation.

But perhaps it's not as simple as that. New data released by Tinder shows that certain professions get a lot more right swipes than others. For men, the jobs most likely right-swiped are: pilot, entrepreneur, firefighter, doctor, or TV personality (so basically the jobs you read about in kids books). For women it's physical therapist, interior designer, founder-entrepreneur, PR, and teacher.

Who knows why these jobs get the most attention. What is intrinsically sexy about an interior designer? The only way to find out what really makes these jobs attractive is to talk to the people who do them. So prepare yourself guys, some red hot professions coming your way.

THE MEN

NICK PATEL—PILOT; ALSO WORKS AT VICE WEIRDLY

VICE: So Nick, pilots are the most right-swiped for dudes. Why do you think that is?
Nick Patel: It's desirable in terms of profession because being a pilot is one of the very few things that's very high in terms of skill, alongside doctors and lawyers. It's not something everyone does or skills everyone has.

So it's niche and people dig that?
Yeah, a lot of people are impressed by it. You don't meet many people who have the ability to fly. Every time I've mentioned it to people they're so wowed about it.

Has it helped you get people into bed in the past?
Yeah. I'll definitely bring it up more if there's someone hot around.

Would you be impressed if you met another pilot?
Hell yeah. With flying, it's a passion. You have a lot of things you can talk about when it's someone with a similar interest. It's a job that's so different; that aspect of being in the air, for me it's a thrill. When I meet other pilots, you definitely have an understanding. I love planespotting and all of that, and you find that with pilots.

Oh my god, I just realized you have a plane sticker on your laptop.
Hahaha. Yeah...

Mike Buonaiuto, Founder Of Shape History

VICE: Your job is one of the most attractive out there for a human man. How does that make you feel?
Mike Buonaiuto: Your job says a lot about you. The fact we've gone out and done our own thing is attractive. I've gone off and set up my own agency, and that says a lot about me. Everyone wants to find someone who has job freedom and has the guts to go and do what he loves.

Is that willingness to take a risk sexy?
Definitely. I guess taking a risk is what I find attractive in other people and not just in partnerships but in people you work with too. You want to know people who are passionate.

Hypothetically, would you want to date a founder of a company?
I would but alarm bells would ring, because I know how workaholic and slightly crazy I am over work. I'm not sure I'd want to. The idea of dating a me is more attractive than actually the reality of it.


Billy Tarr—Junior Doctor


*This is not a real photograph of Billy Tarr, the doctor we spoke to; this is a stock image. Billy didn't want his picture in this because of all the junior doctor strike stuff, which is fair enough.

VICE: So doctors are hot. Top five level hot.
Billy Tarr: I was surprised that it's in the top five. You work 56 hours a week, minimum, and almost every weekend. I'm surprised people would put up with us coming home in the middle of the night or weekends or whatever. I guess we're portrayed as quite compassionate. We're nice people generally. We spend all day talking to people, so we're good at conversation.

Have you found potential lovers have gone crazy for it?
I go out with girls who are also medical students, so I've never really had a chance to find out.

So you all keep it within the community?
I've dated two medical students, and they've both been my kind of age and level of training. We're quite busy. They say that in every cohort of trainee doctors going through there'll be a few marriages within the class. But then we do spend six years together. I know a couple of my friends have been going out since first year, so there must be some truth in it.

The fact you've studied and actually been bothered to commit to something for so long is quite attractive.
Yeah, I guess. I'd never though of that. It's fair to say people do hold a certain amount of respect for it. That's nice.

THE LADIES

Lottie Hunt —PR, Devil PR

VICE: Your job is very likely to get you right-swiped. Well done. What qualities do you think PRs have that make them attractive?
Lottie Hunt: I suppose being a PR requires great interpersonal skills, confidence, creativity, and an ability to "attempt" to stay cool in high pressure and ridiculous situations. I mean, I would find those qualities attractive in a guy, so I guess that's why we've come out at the top of the list.

Have you ever used it trying to flirt with a guy?
Definitely not. In my experience, working in music PR, the interest is more in the music and artists that we work with, rather than what I actually do. I don't think people actually understand what PR is half the time. I get a lot of, "So what do you actually do?" I prefer to stay illusive than let on that I actually spend most of my time running up and down millions of flights of stairs in the backstage of venues that have no phone signal, manically looking for journalists and disappearing band members and trying to connect them together.

Would you ever date a PR yourself or has being one turned you off them?
Well never say never, but I guess the only thing is knowing how full-on the job is, and how many extra hours you work in the evenings and weekends at gigs and festivals. I'd probably never see them. Maybe I'd need someone with a bit more balance and calm in their job, like a carpenter, or wildlife photographer? Please direct all enquiries or applications my way of course.

Sophie Finch (pictured waving with her team)—Interior Designer; Finch Interiors

VICE: Why on earth do you think you lot get right-swiped?
Sophie Finch: Maybe because we're creative? We're intelligent but a bit more free thinking. We seem fun. It sounds a bit pretentious, but we're not stuck in a bank working nine to five. We also have sense of style.

That makes sense. If you make interiors look nice, you're not going to look bad.
Yes. And maybe we push things a bit more sartorially. For instance, I like a sequined jacket of the bomber variety. That might be what it is: They can spot us in the pub.

I thought maybe they think you're going to make their horrible apartment look better?
I hate the idea of that, us being the one that makes the nest, but maybe it is that. My other half is actually an interior designer as well. I've only ever been out with designers. One of the other girls here—her boyfriend's in fashion. I think designers as a whole bracket just go for each other. Creatives wouldn't likely date corporate people.

Edwina Eddleston—Founder of creative agency LDR

VICE: Why do you think your job is so right-swipeable?
Edwina Eddleston: As a founder, you get problems thrown at you from all angles. You have to constantly be on your feet. You have to actually rally people around you and have confidence. You're very problem-solving. That must be very attractive to people because you don't wait to be looked after. Or wait around for someone else to clear stuff up.

Do you think they find it intimidating—and they're kind of into that?
Yeah. I definitely do think guys find it intimidating. That intimidation factor also comes from the passion levels rising a bit too high when you know what you're talking about. Just the level of knowledge.

Founder-entrepreneur was number two for guys. Would you date another of your own?
There are two types of founders: an A type and a B type. The A type is hugely creative, and the B type is the organized, more process driven. I'm a B type, and I think if I met a creative, chaotic type, maybe yes if it worked well. But I'd be inclined to say no...

What do guys say when you drop the title in there?
A lot of intrigue. A lot of questions. There are no rules as such for a founder. Not to sound egotistical, but people are sometimes in awe that you have to wear so many hats.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.


Meet the British DiCaprio Fanatics Who Celebrated His Oscar Win at 5 AM

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All the memes were worth it, then. After 35 years as an actor and five Oscar nominations, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his first Academy Award for his role as bear-mauled Hugh Glass in The Revenant. But you already knew that. You may not have known that a bunch of London-based fans had planned to celebrate his win late on Sunday/early on Monday, in London's Leicester Square.

According to Facebook, 11,000 people were meant to be there, before the event time was changed last-minute to make it a Monday evening celebration. So much for the Sunday die-hards. We headed over to the barren scraps of the "party," at about 2 AM on Monday morning, and found two street cleaners and one guy lingering outside the rebranded "Leodeon" cinema. There were more fans inside the cinema, passing the time before the best actor award announcement—but first, we quizzed the lone guy hanging about outside.

VICE: So how did you hear about this celebration of Leo?
Alexander: I stumbled across it amongst many other stumblings ...

Do you think he's going to win, then?
I hope so. Yeah he's Leo—he's got to. Leos always win. Leos are like lions, and lions are important—that's why there are lions in Trafalgar Square, that's why there are lions all over the place.

He deserves to win because of lions?
Not really, but that suggestion... you know what I mean.

Thanks! Inside, I found actors Joe, Amy, and Simeon sitting in the front row, watching the last 10 minutes of Titanic.


Amy, Joe, and Simeon, from left to right

VICE: So what do you think the outcome will be? Sixth time lucky for Leo?
Joe: I mean, it's gotta be—it's long overdue. But not only that, The Revenant itself was astonishing.
Simeon: Yeah—Leo's year. Leo's year!
Amy: I'll cry if he doesn't get it.

Why do you think the Oscar has eluded him for so long?
Simeon: Well, I think the Academy itself has a certain bias toward particular actors...

Isn't Leo the kind of guy you'd imagine the Academy would love?
Simeon: No. I don't know why, but I don't think he is. I think it would be fantastic if he won this year, but if he didn't, again, I wouldn't be surprised. It's like the whole thing about black actors not being nominated for any acting awards this year. I'm not surprised by it because I think the Academy has been overdue a shake-up for quite a while. This just goes to show that you can have a guy who's acted his ass off in so many films and still is yet to achieve this ultimate accolade.

The cinema staff kept us updated with the award wins as the night wore on.

Then—elation. News of Leo's win came in, and people clutched their cell phones and looked at their screens in excitement.

Bella and Paris took some time to chat to me about it.

VICE: There we go. Was that worth it?
Bella: I mean, the group reaction of Leo winning is just... It's better than sitting at home on your laptop alone in your room.


Paris, on the far left, and Bella, giggling center right

Were you expecting the celebration to be a bit bigger?
Bella: I was actually surprised—I was expecting a big party. We came here at 8 PM because we expected there to be people. We expected to line up, and then its like...
Paris: The doors didn't open until midnight either, so we were just sitting in the cold.

VICE: How do you feel about the exciting news now, though?
Bella: Great! We can now say "Academy Award WINNER Leonardo DiCaprio."
Paris: I definitely need to celebrate. I'm glad I brought my rum with me, so I can celebrate on the way back.
Bella: Yeah, I'm going to bed.

Me too.

Follow Theo McInnes on Twitter.


How to Watch VICELAND

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For the past few months, all of us at VICE have been working hard to put the finishing touches on VICELAND, our new TV channel. The time has come to share it with you all. VICELAND is now live, and you can soak up all the new and classic shows through your television (and other ways too), 24 hours a day. We're all pretty excited.Some old favourites from VICE.com like BALLS DEEP and WEEDIQUETTE will be premiering new seasons on VICELAND. We'll also be dropping new shows, like GAYCATION with Ellen Page and Ian Daniel.Spike Jonze, one of our oldest and dearest VICE friends, has been masterminding VICELAND from the beginning. We asked him what he is most excited about when it comes to the channel as a whole:"It feels like most channels are just a collection of shows. We wanted VICELAND to be different, to feel like everything on there has a reason to exist and a strong point of view. Our mission with the channel is not that different from what our mission is as a company: It's us trying to understand the world we live in by producing pieces about things we're curious about, or confused about, or that we think are funny."Are you as pumped as we are yet? For those of you wondering how to tune into VICELAND, we put together a helpful little guide.



How to Get VICELAND

Check this page on the regular to find out how to order VICELAND from your TV service provider.

VICELAND.com

If you're a VICE reader from way back, you might remember the old days of 2011 when our site was VICELAND.com and VICE.com was something entirely different. Well, we're pulling that old URL out of retirement and making it the online home for all things VICELAND.Once the channel launches on February 29, VICELAND shows will be available on VICELAND.com. A free preview is on until May 31.


Starting June 1, you'll be able to login to VICELAND.com with your TV service provider information.

See you all on February 29!

Follow VICELAND on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

The New 'Call of Cthulhu' Horror Game Is a Trip into Insanity

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Even in a super-early, so-far-ahead-of-pre-alpha, hands-off presentation featuring placeholder art and a lot of imagination filling in for completed work, Cyanide Studio's Call of Cthulhu looks wickedly alluring.

Set in the twisted reality that is the Lovecraft universe, this set-for-2017 title, a digital reinvention of the 1981 pen-and-paper game, will star frightening, grotesque creatures and test players' nerves as they stumble into insanity, irreversibly scarred by the supernatural extraterrestrial imposing on the world they thought they knew. But there's one word notably absent from the preview pitch of lead game designer Jean-Marc Gueney and narrative designer Maximilian Lutz: "horror."

"A lot of people have asked us if this game is like Amnesia, or Outlast, games like that," Lutz tells me, once I've seen all that the Paris-based team has to show so far. "Those games are really horror games. But for us, we want the atmosphere of a horror game but not all the time. You'll be able to catch your breath in this game—it won't always be stressful. Sure, in some sections, you won't be happy to be there. But this isn't a game of jump scares—we're going more for atmosphere."

"Exactly," says Gueney. "This is an investigation game, set in the Lovecraft universe. That means you will encounter horrific creatures, and you'll have to work out how to defeat them. But it's not a horror game—it's an investigation game, in this particular universe."

Cyanide has the official Call of Cthulhu license in hand, meaning that its game is more closely related to the 1980s role-player published by Chaosium than any single one of Lovecraft's many novels and novellas. Penned between 1917 and 1935, several of the writer's works combine to create the Cthulhu Mythos—a fictional universe of cosmic entities and ancient deities that authors continue to mine for inspiration.

Video games have regularly leaned on the Mythos, too. 2015's Bloodborne has its share of Lovecraft-inspired nightmares plaguing the player; 1992's survival horror cornerstone Alone in the Dark was heavily influenced by all things Cthulhu; and the GameCube's Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem of a decade later used an array of techniques to imply the avatar being controlled at the time was losing his mind to the visions around him.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, developed by the now defunct British studio Headfirst Productions and published by Bethesda in 2005, was based on Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but they reduced its story of the Deep Ones and their hold over a small Massachusetts town to a buggy and bastard-hard first-person shooter. Which isn't to say it didn't succeed in several respects, but Dark Corners's difficulty was its greatest flaw. Many Lovecraft admirers couldn't see it through to its climax.

Cyanide's game is different. It doesn't want the player to fail. The heart of this experience is the narrative, the investigation, which first attracts the player character of Edward Pierce, a Boston-raised, 45-year-old First World War veteran turned private detective, to the small community of Darkwater Island. He's here to discover the truth behind the death of an artist, Miriam Hallows, who'd only recently settled on the island. The year is 1924—prohibition is in full effect, so these odd glimpses of things that aren't quite right in Pierce's peripheral vision probably can't be attributed to booze. There's definitely something wrong with this place, with this reality.

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"The Lovecraft universe is always, in the classic novels, about a common person who finds himself discovering something more, something beyond our world," Gueney explains. "And beyond our world, there are monstrosities. We want to present Lovecraft's vision to players. So we start the game as a classic investigation, but as you arrive on the island, you will discover that there is more to it. There's more beyond the reality that you initially see."

"The real issue in the Lovecraft universe is that the moment you begin to see this other reality, this real truth, you start to completely go insane," Lutz continues. "Because you're not prepared, as a human, to see that. Even in the sounds that the creatures make, the language they speak, it's not meant to be heard by humans. So all the characters in the Lovecraft novels become completely insane."

And it's insanity that poses the greatest risk to the player in Call of Cthulhu. "You can see a sanity system, and you begin your mission with a full amount," Gueney says. "You have to manage it across the game. And if it drops to zero, that's game over. Between missions, you can regain part of your sanity—you have a safe haven, to take time out. So the sanity system works like that. But when you refill your sanity, it won't completely regain, to the amount you began the game with—so you have less and less as the game goes on, making it harder."

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Unfortunately for Pierce, going slightly mad is essential to progressing in Cyanide's game. He'll need to see certain things in order to really understand what's afoot on Darkwater and will therefore have to sacrifice some of himself to further the investigation. "It's a bargaining process," Gueney states. "You're faced with this situation: I know there's something more than I see, than I perceive. So I want to know more—I need to know more—but it will cost me. It will cost my own sanity."

Pierce can visit a police station to examine the clues he's discovered on the island—some of which can be attained by befriending residents and sending them off on missions (not that their return is guaranteed). Here, he's safe—"There will be no monsters coming out of the closet," Lutz says. "It's a regular station, full of regular police officers who you can talk to." He then explains that the game's system of processing evidence and coming to conclusions isn't set up to lead the player down any dead ends.

"For the investigation parts, you can't really fail—the story will always push you forward. But we really want the player to feel smart during the investigation. You'll have a lot of documents to read, a lot of facts to find, clues to find. And if players have all the documents, they can have everything they need to for working out the investigation. The player has many answers to choose from—but if you're paying attention to the other characters on the island, you will always ask the good questions. Ask the wrong questions, and you can affect your relationship with the other characters. The only fact that we want you, him, to know is that you might lose complementary information about the case."

Which is a way of saying that, basically, the choices you make in pursuing the case of Miriam Hallows won't have an impact on the way this story ultimately concludes—Call of Cthulhu will begin in the same way for everyone, and all will see the same ending. However, how you get from A to B will vary wildly from playthrough to playthrough. "The choices you make are important, and they will define who helps you," Gueney explains. "Every player will experience the same final scene, but the way they manage to get there will depend on their individual decisions."

Making their game so accessible should allow Cyanide to appeal to players who aren't already familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos. "We need the game to be fun for everyone," Gueney says, before Lutz adds: "A lot of people know Cthuhlu—it's in the geek culture to know the creature. But we are not targeting only Lovecraft fans, of course. Even people who haven't read the novels can get into the game. And we'll also have a codex that will help the newbie to learn some things—even things that won't be shown in the game but is useful background for the story."

Personally, I'm more into horror games that present a sustained atmosphere of dread and discomfort over cheap jumps scares. And if I learn a little more about Lovecraft's bizarre world in playing this one, that's a bonus. Cyanide isn't making Call of Cthulhu to get gamers into the inspirational fiction, but Gueney admits that if its game sells a few more books, and creates more fans of Lovecraftian lore, "that'll be a great reward." It's too early to say for sure that what the studio's making will transcend the existing Cthulhu fanbase (and as you can see here, there's not a lot of publicly released artwork to get excited about). But so far as first impressions go, this not-your-average-horror affair is making all the right wrong moves.

Call of Cthulhu is released in 2017. Follow the game's development at the Cyanide Studio website. VICE Gaming conducted this interview in Paris at the "Le What's Next de Focus?" preview event, with transport and accommodation covered by Focus Home Interactive.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.


The New Game from 'Life Is Strange' Developers Is an Ode to the Classic Vampire

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Having seen their episodic, time-bending adventure Life Is Strange sell fantastically and attract a shedload of critical acclaim in 2015, Parisian studio Dontnod Entertainment is in a pretty good place in early 2016. But the team's not resting on its laurels. A new title, the studio's third after Life Is Strange and 2013's sci-fi action affair Remember Me, was just beginning to blink into existence in 2015, and it's the company's main focus for 2016. That game is Vampyr, and I've got to say, it's looking a bit tasty.

Vampyr is, on paper, an action-RPG, with all the skill trees and side-quests and item crafting that come with that territory. But just as Life Is Strange echoed the Telltale Games approach to narrative progression but made your choices even more important to the overall story, and Remember Me borrowed some of its combat from Rocksteady's Arkham series while twisting the formula via its "combo lab," so Vampyr is bringing singular features to a familiar genre. For one thing, this isn't a game about hunting down the undead—it casts the player as a budding creature of the night, newly turned, and asks him or her to decide what to do next. Kill everyone in sight, leveling yourself up rapidly in the process? Or be calmer, slower, and more selective? Or, just perhaps, find some other way of sating your thirst that doesn't involve tearing apart the throats of Whitechapel's residents.

Our setting is London, initially east, not long after the end of the First World War. The city is in a bad way—hell, the world's pretty shaken. And an outbreak of influenza, so rampant that it'll soon spin into a global pandemic killing as many as 100 million people, is only adding to humanity's dire situation. Vampires are taking advantage of the distress, preying on the sickly and insecure. But you, you're a doctor, a surgeon, a man of medicine. It was only recently that you were helping people, not dragging them into dark alleyways to drain them dry.

I watch a pre-alpha demo of Vampyr, guided by game director Philippe Moreau, which shows off some of its dialogue options (including opportunities to "seduce" victims, for either feeding or information), different paths of action and activation of some early vampire powers, including a "spring" for immediately traversing short distances, horizontally or vertically. The game's visuals are far from the finished article, but they are already attractively atmospheric. I learn that you're not the only vampire in town—indeed, you'll quickly befriend others—and that the city has its share of vampire hunters, who won't hesitate to end your corporeal afterlife. And your actions matter—tread lightly through London, and the city won't be scarred; run rampant, and it'll turn against you all the quicker.

Once Moreau's presentation ends, I sit down with Vampyr's art director Grégory Szucs to learn more about Dontnod's alluring adventure in waiting.

All screenshots courtesy of Dontnod Entertainment/Focus Home Interactive

VICE: We've got this gloriously grim setting here, of post-war London in 1918, with flu raging across the city. But as impressive as the game's location is, within known history, I'm guessing the desire to make a vampire game preceded discussions regarding where, and when, it would be set?
Grégory Szucs: Yes, the vampire thing came first. And then we began to get into how we were going to wrap the story around that starting point. We looked for the best setting, and we had to find a time when humanity was in a really weak position. So here we are, right after the First World War, where we saw killing on an industrial scale. People are alienated by industrialization, and the Spanish influenza has taken hold of the world, the worst pandemic we've ever known. So, this is a perfect time for vampires to strike again—to take advantage of the weakness.

In terms of going to London, we felt it was the perfect setting as it's this nexus of all the elements we needed. It's very gothic, and it can be a very dark city. It has very different neighborhoods, and social layers that we wanted to explore. There were also all the new inventions, like electrification, and advances in medicine and surgery happening. So this background makes sense—it has all the tools we need for our story.

The game's teaser trailer of 2015 had this striking, stylized look to it, but the in-game art is a lot more realistic. What's the ultimate approach the studio is taking with this, aesthetically?
The stylized art is something you'll see in the game, in the cutscenes. What you've seen in the demo is still work in progress, too—we are aiming for a realistic approach in many ways, like lighting, but we have an impressionistic twist to things. At the moment, the character models are still very rough. It won't be like Dishonored, where the characters had a sort of cartoon-like look; we're going to keep all the proportions of our characters anatomically correct but emphasize this chiseled, sculpted look to faces. From a distance, the game might look perfectly photo real, but if you get closer, you'll see that we've got our own signature in our reality.

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Can you tell me more about who the player is cast as, this new vampire who's coming to terms with his situation?
You're a doctor, Jonathan Read, who's just come back from the war. He's a high-ranking surgeon—actually, he's at the top of his game, and he has pioneered some blood transfusion techniques, which might give you a clue as to how he's found himself in this situation. Actually, when you begin, you wake up in a mass grave. You remember everything about your past—except for how you became a vampire. And that's part of your quest—who made you this way and why, exploring all the intricacies of vampire politics.

The demo you saw, that's pretty early in the game, and you're still coming to understand your powers. You've just made your first few vampire acquaintances, and you're running errands for them. To be honest, maybe they're being a little manipulative.

So, do these vampires work like we know them to traditionally? I'm wondering if we can stroll around during daylight hours.
We definitely went back into vampire fiction, to the romantic type of vampire—not in the Twilight sense but to when they were dark, doom-filled figures, who are always questioning what they're doing. These are predators with consciences. So not all of them embrace the beast inside them. And as you can see in the spelling of the game's title, we've looked back at how the word was first used, in its Romanian spelling. There's a huge lore, and we've picked and chosen particular characteristics to build our own vision of a vampire.

The studio must be in a pretty upbeat frame of mind, after the success of Life Is Strange in 2015?
We're definitely charged up. Many of the people who worked on Life Is Strange have come across to Vampyr—we're a relatively small team. I think, right now, there are about 60 of us working on this game. We've brought in some new faces, too.

Life Is Strange was a game of choices, and I notice in the demo that Jonathan gets to decide between targets—or, rather, victims. And whoever he chooses to kill will have an impact on how the story plays out, won't it?
Well, you can play as a cold-blooded killer, maximizing your XP by feeding on loads of people. You can even try to heal injured or sick people you meet, getting them better so that when you feed on them later, you get more out of it. People in bad shape, feeding on them won't be so rewarding.

So Jonathan is struggling to come to terms with his situation. He's conflicted, so it's down to the player how he or she steers his bloodlust?
Yes. You can decide to not kill anyone, as hard as that will be. You can deciede to embrace your vampire nature and—well, not go on a rampage, as that's difficult and you need your cover of being a doctor to remain, but pretty much kill everyone. This isn't quite an open world—it has large hubs to explore, and there will be a lot of NPCs in each one. And I feel that's the best way to approach this sort of game. You're still free to roam, free to meet whoever you like—and to come back later on and visit people again. A fully open-world game can have spaces with nothing in them—or you see the filler space.

'Vampyr,' 2015 teaser trailer

And is it just set in eastern part of London?
No. There are different districts of London in the game. I spent time in the city, taking a lot of photographs, doing research. I find it very rewarding to work on a place that's real, somewhere you can go in your own life. We're definitely using some artistic license, but there's so much wonderful Georgian and Victorian architecture in London, and even in the poorer neighborhoods, there are amazing buildings. The glamour and the squalor, it's all in there in London.

It feels to me like that the player's moral compass is going to be tested. There was the suggestion, made by Philippe, that the more you kill, the worse shape London can find itself in. So, by growing yourself, and expanding your vampire powers, you could actually be destroying your home, right?
Sure. You can make things worse for yourself and for the city. You will have to balance things—but Jonathan himself isn't really going to be punished, either way. You can proceed using quick kills for small amounts of experience, and you might gain more powers early on that way—but doing things that way will restrict you in other areas. Once you kill someone, their family will drift out of the game. However, maybe you'll help someone, and their family in turn will help you to accomplish other things in this world. There are some deep systems at play in the game, which we will elaborate on later this year—but if you kill someone, you never know what's going to happen. Kill someone's son, and what is the father going to do? Is he going to break, and maybe go and hang himself? Or is he going to come after the person who did it?

Which is on top of the vampire hunters, who have been mentioned?
Yes. You're not the only vampire in town, and they're being hunted down. Now, you might just happen to stumble into the path of these vampire hunters when they're tracking another vampire entirely. We want this game world to feel like it continues without you—everybody has their own stories, their own activities, which are going to happen even if you're not there to witness them. If you go and disturb that equilibrium, you're going to feel how everything falls out of place.

OK, so where are we in terms of production, and a release date?
We're still very early on in the production process, and the game is scheduled for a 2017 release, though I can't be any more specific than that. It's that early in development that we're not really sure yet. It'll come out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, and we'll show more of the game at E3. We're going to be there with more things to reveal.

Vampyr will be released in 2017. Follow the game's development at the Dontnod website. VICE Gaming conducted this interview in Paris at "Le What's Next de Focus?" preview event, with transport and accommodation covered by Focus Home Interactive.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Catholic Priest Snorted Cocaine Surrounded by Nazi Memorabilia While on Camera

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In a story that hits nearly all of the British tabloid sweet spots, a Catholic priest in Northern Ireland was caught on camera snorting coke surrounded by Nazi memorabilia during a party at his house on church grounds, the Sun reports.

The priest, 37-year-old Father Stephen Crossan, had allegedly been out on a bender for two days before inviting people back to his parish house to keep things going. In the video, the priest can be heard saying "I shouldn't," before leaning over and sucking down a line off a silver platter.

Things got weirder when Crossan reportedly started playing dress-up with some Nazi memorabilia he had around his house—including Nazi flags, a hat, and a statue of an eagle and swastika on his mantle.

" was all over the house," an anonymous source who was at the party told the Sun."At one point, Stephen put on a cap and did the Nazi salute."

"The house was lovely, but we were stunned to see the Nazi stuff," adding the source, who is apparently down to do coke with a priest but draws the line when the Nazi gear starts to come out.

Crossan has responded to the video by admitting to doing coke but saying that "it was just the one night and that was it. I do not have an issue with drugs." As for the whole "house full of Nazi paraphernalia" thing, Crossan said, "I'm no Nazi. I collect historical stuff."

Crossan was apparently on leave from the church for depression when the party took place. On Monday, the BBC reported that he had asked for a leave of absence from the priesthood and isn't living at the house any longer.

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