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Murder, Extortion, and Gelato: a History of the Calabrian Mafia in Australia

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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

Around 3 AM on March 15, the body of Joseph Acquaro was found behind his gelato shop in Melbourne, Australia's Italian heartland of Lygon Street. It's thought Acquaro had locked up for the night and was walking to his car when he was shot in a drive-by attack.

police interview witness joseph acquaro.jpg

Police interview the garbage man who discovered Acquaro's body. Image via

Locals mourned Acquaro as a pillar of the Italian community: a former head of the Italian Chamber of Commerce, a stalwart at the Reggio Calabria Club in Parkville. But media suspicion quickly turned to Acquaro's other Calabrian connection—as the longtime lawyer for the Australian outpost of the 'Ndrangheta mafia gang, the Honoured Society. If this is true, it makes Acquaro the latest victim of one of the country's most secretive and brutal criminal groups, whose violent history stretches back almost a century.

It's possible you haven't heard of "The Society" because Melbourne's other gangland circle, the one headed by Carl Williams, dominated media bandwidth throughout the 2000s. But while Jason Moran, Mick Gatto, and Tony Mokbel were becoming household names, the Society consolidated its power quietly in the background. Between 2004 and 2014, the gang's members amassed more than $10 million in real estate and race horses in Victoria alone, pouring money into wholesalers, cafes, and restaurants, and the La Porchetta pizza chain.

Diverse business interests have been the Society's game since the start. The 'Ndrangheta's presence in Australia can be traced back to 1922, when a ship named the Re d'Italia left Calabria (the boot-shaped southern end of Italy) and docked in Adelaide. The ship offloaded three 'Ndrangheta gang members, and a criminal franchise was founded. The Society's first local business was in fruit and vegetables—for which they quickly became known for extorting farmers and charging market stallholders protection fees. From groceries the Society diversified, moving into drug trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, and the occasional murder.

Those early years were marred by a violent war between the newly arrived Calabrians and the Sicilians, who had arrived some 20 years earlier. While the two groups were neighbors back in Italy, the 'Ndrangheta and the Sicilian mafia were fiercely independent of one another in New York's underworld. This animosity was carried to Australia where, between 1928 and 1940, ten murders in northern Queensland were attributed to infighting.

By the 1960s the Calabrians had a stranglehold over Melbourne's wholesale vegetable and fruit trade, but the murder of a market worker named Vincenzo Angilletta sparked a new wave of violence. As Angilletta sat in his car in the driveway of his Northcote home, he was shot twice through the back window. His wife Maria later found him dead at the wheel, the car still running.

Queen Victoria Markets in the 1960s. Image via archive

The question of why Angilletta was killed comes back to the Honoured Society's ruthless desire for control. It's thought Angilletta had started a faction called La Bastarda—literally the Bastard Society—and with 300 members at its peak, the group became a threat to the establishment. His death was allegedly ordered by the Australian Crimine, which is a sort of board of directors tasked by their headquarters in Italy to ensure the Australian outpost doesn't splinter into chaos. It's believed the Australian Crimine still operates today.

Retribution came quickly. In 1964, Vincenzo Muratore—the Society's money man—met the exact same fate as Angilletta: shot while sitting in his car in his driveway as he headed for the dawn markets.

The Market Murders gave Australian police a glimpse into the criminal underworld that had been forming right under their nose. Support was called in, with US Bureau of Narcotics supervisor John T. Cusack, and Calabrian assistant police commissioner Dr. Ugo Macera traveling to Australia to investigate the group. Neither report has ever been made public.

Leaked copies of Cusack's findings speak of an Italian secret society operating in Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia; with footholds in Queensland and Western Australia. "The Calabrian L'Onorata Societa is well entrenched in Australia," he wrote. "It is already engaged in extortion, prostitution, counterfeiting, sly grog, breaking and entering, illegal gambling, and the smuggling of aliens and small arms."

The Parkville Reggio Calabria Club in Melbourne, a popular haunt for Honoured Society members. Image via

It was more than a decade before the Society made news again, when Liberal Party anti-drug campaigner Donald MacKay was murdered in 1977 in Griffith, NSW, which is the Society's Australian headquarters. MacKay vanished from the parking lot of the Griffith Hotel, where he'd been having drinks with friends, and was never seen again. Investigators found bloodstains on his locked van and three .22 shell casings scattered across the bitumen.

MacKay's fate had been sealed when his name was accidentally leaked as the whistleblower during a trial of four Calabrian men. They had been growing a large marijuana crop in Coleambally, about 40 miles south of Griffith. Robert Trimboli, a Griffith-based man rich and audacious enough to own a yacht called "Cannabis," was charged for MacKay's murder but fled to Spain.

Confronted once again by the brutality of the mob, the government sprung into action, launching the Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking. This two-year investigation brought national attention to Griffith, where the Society was growing massive quantities of marijuana between orange trees or grape vines. Once harvested, their illegal haul was stashed amongst boxes of fruit and veg, and trucked to major city markets. More than 30 years later, a 2011 police report found the group's business model remains largely unchanged.

Anti-drug campaigner Donald MacKay disappeared in 1977. Image via

The Society's racket continued to grow through the 1980s, and members began buying great tracts of land along the east coast. It's estimated their marijuana dealings yielded profits of around $60 million a year. "New South Wales has been turned into a huge mafia corporation," wrote researcher Anna Sergi.

It was money worth killing for. In 1982, Domenic Marafiote disappeared after leaking the names of Society members and the locations of mob marijuana plantations to police. His parents were shot and killed too in their Adelaide home. It took five years for anyone to find Marafiote's body, buried in a shallow grave in a chicken coop in Victoria.

While the Society became more violent throughout the 1980s, it also became more business savvy. Its monopoly had become so vast, the group had the weight to start extorting supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths, charging them 50 cents for every box of fruit and vegetables. In the early 1980s Coles estimated it was paying the group $6 million a year.

Late on the night of December 19, 1990, John Vassilopoulos—a Coles employee who'd been asking questions about these extra fees on the books—heard the bell ring at his Ivanhoe home. "Open the door, John," called a voice through the front door. He cracked it open slightly, and was blasted with a shotgun. Although Vassilopoulos survived, the company had to relocate him and six other employees who feared for their lives.

The supermarket giant turned to businessman and Geelong Football Club president Frank Costa, pleading with him to break up mob control by taking over their fruit and vegetable supply. The Honoured Society offered Costa $1 million a year to leave it alone, and when he wouldn't tow the line, they threatened to kill him.

CSIRO_ScienceImage_4691_Maize_crop_at_Coleambally_NSW_2001.jpgCrops growing in Coleambally, NSW. Image via

In January 1998 Melbourne's gangland war kicked off with the shooting of Alphonse Gangitano, ushering in a decade of infighting between the city's top crime families, and one too many Underbelly sequels. While 36 men were murdered in vicious killings, the Honoured Society remained on the edges of the conflict. Its only major loss came in 2000, when Melbourne boss Frank Benvenuto, a greengrocer by day, was shot in the driveway of his Beaumaris home.

It was around this time that Joseph Acquaro first proved his worth to the Society as a skilled lawyer and networker. In 2005, through special favors and party donations, he was able to secure a visa for Francesco Madafferi, a Calabrian career criminal who'd overstayed his tourist visa 12 years earlier. Then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone was convinced that Madafferi should be allowed to stay on "humanitarian grounds."

But just three years later, Madafferi was arrested in the world's largest ever drug bust: an attempt to smuggle 15 million ecstasy pills into Australia, hidden in tomato tins. He was charged along with 17 other Honoured Society members across the country.

But Francesco's criminal dealings did little to tarnish the reputation of his brother, Antonio, who maintained his status in Melbourne as a powerful businessman with political interests. Last year, as part of a lengthy investigation into the Calabrian mob, The Age journalist Nick McKenzie discovered Antonio had hosted a political fundraiser at his $4 million Docklands venue, attended by Federal Liberal MP Russell Broadbent, and Victorian Opposition leader Matthew Guy, who was then planning minister for the state Liberal government.

Many believe that it was this investigation that led to Acquaro's death. Early reports suggest Acquaro may have crossed Antonio Madafferi by leaking names and information about the Society to McKenzie. Other theories swirl about Acquaro's play to become a boss in the Honoured Society, selling himself as the Godfather of the Calabrian community.

However, as it stands, the most conclusive evidence pointing to the former theory came in December 2015, when a court found "it was reasonable for police to suspect accused Melbourne Mafia boss Antonio Madafferi had put out a $200,000 hit on a man he believed was providing information to The Age."

Follow Maddison on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: We Asked an Expert if Memes Could Determine the Outcome of the Presidential Election

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Image via Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash

At one point during the early stages of the shitshow we're calling the 2016 Presidential Elections, a friend of mine claimed that winner of Democratic primaries would be "decided by memes." He suggested that Bernie Sanders had the leg up in that department. While Hillary Clinton's delegate dominance is proving my friend's theory to be a bit flawed, it's undeniable that memes have become omnipresent in this campaign cycle.

From the "Bernie or Hillary?" memes to the Bernie Sanders's Dank Meme Stash Facebook group (just shy of 420k members), the visual punchlines and internet inside jokes have featured all the frontrunners in both parties, and likely gotten more people interested in the campaign. Through the accessibility and share-ability of memes, it wouldn't be wrong to say they've offered the public a nuanced (albeit passive) way to participate in political campaigns.

But memes aren't just the lifeblood of Imgur and stoners who love to #bern. They're also impacting data science, and have even become the focus of government-funded academic research. In 2014, researchers at Indiana University received several grants, including close to a million dollars from the National Science Foundation, to start the Truthy Project, which is dedicated to studying the spread of information through socio-technical information networks and analyzing how and why things go viral. It's also attempting to make social media data more accessible to researchers.

Truthy is spearheaded by informatics and computer science professors Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer, who is also the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University. The research team aims to eventually make its data public and open-sourced. In the meantime, we got on the phone with Menczer to learn more about the Truthy Project and discuss whether memes could actually change the outcome of this year's election.

VICE: What were you looking for when you started Truthy, and what did you find?
Filippo Menczer: Since 2009, we've been working on studying the diffusion of memes and information on social media, especially on Twitter because we were fortunate to have access to a lot of data from Twitter. We have several grants supporting this research, and some of it is very much towards building systems. For example, to visualize or analyze how information is spread from one person to another, studying what makes memes go viral, and the competition among different memes for the finite attention of users. Is it the structure of the network or is it another factor that make these memes go viral? These are general things we wanted to address with Truthy about how social media affects the spread of information, and also the spread of misinformation.

What else have you worked on since starting the project?
We also built models where we tried to replicate very simplified scenarios in which people use social media. We look at the predictions of these models, like which memes go viral, or how two different opinions compete with each other, and then we see if we can reproduce some empirical patterns from the data. We've looked at if people can distinguish real humans from bots on Twitter, and we've had some success with that.

More recently, we've been studying whether you can detect whether a meme or a hashtag is being promoted by advertisement, versus information that is being spread organically.

What exactly makes a meme go "viral"?
That's a very interesting question. A lot of people have looked at this issue and found that different factors may affect the virality of a meme, such as time of day, color, and pictures included. But we were curious to know if that was, in fact, a causal relationship.

We tried to explore this question in a theoretical way by building some models that simulate people using Twitter or Facebook, where something pops up on a user's screen and you can retweet it, skip it, or create new content that would go to your friends or followers.

What did you find from the experimentation?
What we found in this model was that something almost always went viral when there was an underlying structure of a social network where the users had a finite amount of attention. Yet, in this model, the things that went viral were no different than the things that did not go viral.

So sometimes it is inevitable that things will go viral due to the structure of the social network and because of our finite attention. To say, "This is the thing that makes a meme go viral," you have to prove that it's not just a coincidence. The things that go viral may have some things in common, but that doesn't mean they're the reason why they went viral.

One feature that we did find correlated with virality is whether a meme, in its early stages, spreads through multiple communities.

Meaning multiple platforms, like from Twitter to Facebook?
Not exactly. For example, say you have high school friends, fellow journalists, and people who like tennis who follow you on Twitter, and these are your communities, or commonalities. If a meme, very early on, spreads through many of these communities, it's much more likely to go viral.

Right, so the exposure and interaction with the meme is what makes it go viral, not necessarily the content.
Yes. If [a meme] spreads to 10,000 people very early on who are all in one community, then it's less likely to go viral. But if it goes through 100 people who are all from different communities, and they interact with it, it's much more likely to go on and reach a million people.

How do you think memes and political engagement on social media are affecting this presidential election or the public's perception of it?
In 2012, we worked on a research paper where we looked at the structure of the networks formed by people tweeting and retweeting about words associated with the 2010 midterm congressional elections. This is a slightly dated analysis, but I can summarize something interesting that we found. I assume that it still holds true.

We looked at diffusion networks through Twitter, where a "node" is a user and a "connection" means that a particular meme has been transferred from one user to another person, either through mention or retweet. We did this for all hashtags that were used to talk about politics in 2010.

What'd you find?
We found that there was huge polarization and segregation between the two big communities. The liberals retweeted the liberals and the conservatives retweeted the conservatives, but there were very few liberals who retweeted conservatives, and vice-versa. We use this term "echo chambers" to describe how people are exposed to information that is aligned with their preexisting beliefs. We're very interested in the fact that these echo chambers still exist. For example, if you have a friend on Facebook who has a different opinion, you can just unfollow them, right? So that makes it very easy for those echo chambers to form, and these may very strongly effect the conversation about politics on social media.

Another thing that we found to be true was that each of these two networks, both the liberal network and the conservative network, are very dense. They are structured in a way that makes it very easy for messages to propagate extremely fast. With social media, it is easier to simply disregard people with different opinions.

Based on your previous research in 2010, and the recent research of your colleagues, do you think that the virality of a meme could be directly correlated to a candidate's success?
There are some colleagues at Indiana University who found that you could use Twitter as a relatively accurate poll. There was a clear correlation between the number of tweets about the politician and the number of votes that they received. So that would suggest that yes, if there are memes about candidates that are more popular online, then it's fair to assume that candidate may be more likely to win.

For more on the Truthy Project visit their website.

Follow Gabriella on Twitter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

​The First Virtual Reality Feature Film Invites You to Join the Russian Mafia

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Career Opportunities in Organized Crime, a curious new project by first-time filmmaker Alex Oshmyansky, uses virtual reality to make viewers feel like you, too, can join the mob! The story follows the filming of a recruitment video for Baltimore's local Russian mafia, a mockumentary from the perspective of gangsters looking for new members. To make the viewers feel like they're right there with Vova, the head honcho-turned-recruitment-head-hunter, Career Opportunities was shot in 360-degree virtual reality. It's the first feature film shot entirely using VR tech.

The literally-immersive story follows a crew of Russian gangsters who've fallen on hard times and are scrambling to find new sources of income. They come up with the idea to hire some computer programmers in order to con people out of money on the internet by hacking accounts and duplicating Facebook profiles to solicit money from the fraud victims' families and their subsequent recruitment film details the benefits of joining their sect of the mob. "I'm here to tell you about fantastic opportunity, opportunity that will leave you rich beyond your wildest dreams," goes the sales pitch in heavily-accented English. When an American computer programmer, played by Malcom Mills, joins the mafia, we follow him (from all angles) as he goes from being reluctant about working for criminals to slowly succumbing to the mob's mentality.

The 82-minute feature was self-financed by the director and doesn't boast any big stars, but it's clever use of VR, as well as the project's stylistic quirks (such as a faux website supposedly created by the faux mafia) make Career Opportunities in Organized Crime one of the more intriguing projects to premiere at SXSW this week. Plus, Oshmyansky says all proceeds from the film will be given to a start-up non-profit pharmaceutical company that provides low-cost medicine to those in need. VICE chatted with the 31-year-old director by phone to get the scoop on the project, as well as the challenges he faced as a first-time director making the first VR feature film.

VICE: What inspired this project exactly?
Alex Oshmyansky: I just always thought it would be funny. My background is that of a Russian person, so I've always been interested in the Russian mafia. I always thought it would be kind of a funny if The Office were to with the Russian mafia. What would it be like?

What other movies or cultural items inspired your film? What tone were you going for?
The vibe of the movie I was going for was kind of based on 1930s gangster movies—old black and white movies, like the original Scarface. I was really influenced by The Public Enemy and that whole sub-genre from when movies were first beginning to become popular in the 20s and 30s. The gangster movies were one of the first really popular genres in that era.

How did you approach filming Careers in 360 virtual reality?
We used six GoPros and we used a couple different rigs to hold the cameras together, including a Freedom 360 and 360Heros—mounts that kept the six cameras pointing in the right directions at all the times. Afterwards, we combined the footage from each camera in software like Autopano Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Video Stitch. We had a great cinematographer, Chad Cooper, who did a fantastic job.

What does the tech add to the project as compared to a traditionally-filmed narrative?
The idea is that you can put on one of these virtual headsets and look in any direction and it kind of feels like you're there with the characters while the movie is happening all the way around you. It gives you a sense of actually being there with the characters. When we are told stories, scientists have found preliminary data through fMRI studies that our brains enter a special state. In this "immersive" state, parts of the brain (like the motion and tactile feeling centers of the brain) activate in a way that make us feel like we are actually there in the story. This happens whether we are watching a movie or being told a story around a campfire. It's my theory that VR film will heighten the "immersive" state you get from film, and make the experience more intense and interesting in certain ways.

What challenges did you face by shooting this way?
This was my first full-length film, and it was challenging to try and pick it up all on the fly. I was very appreciative of the support of the crew while I sort of figured things out. At the same time, we had to try and figure everything out in virtual reality while learning to film in general. No one has done virtual reality at a feature-length scale, so there was a lot of trial and error as we were trying to figure out where to place the cameras, how to best capture the artist performing, how to make sure the audience's attention would be focused on the right parts (in the right directions), as well as how to position the camera so that things could be easily stitched together in post-production. We had to take that all into account simultaneously, and there's a learning curve at first.

How long did it take to complete this project from the initial idea and inception to the release at SXSW? How did it evolve in the process?
I had the idea for years, but I actually started working on it about a year ago. The actual filming took over two weeks, entirely on-location in Baltimore. Principle photography was last summer, at the end of July, and we've been working on post-production ever since—the special effects, the sound mixing, etc.

As my first film, it's kind of my baby. It's ultra-low budget, but I think we were able to do some really cool things from a technical perspective by pushing the boundaries with the VR while also maintaining an entertaining narrative structure.

Now that the project is finally being released, how do you feel about the whole experience looking back? What would you do differently next time?
I'm really happy with it. I was amazed we actually got all the footage in the bag in just two weeks, to be honest. There's less of a hurdle or barrier to entry to start doing virtual reality filmmaking than I thought there would be, though. I figured it would be like this technically impossible challenge that you need millions and millions of dollars to do, but that's not the case. I think almost everyone can make this sort of film if they can get their hands on six GoPros. They're even introducing virtual reality cameras that only cost a couple hundred dollars. All you need at the very entry level to shoot in VR is two cameras pointing in different directions with the fisheye lenses on them, so that they can get the 180 degree shots.

In the film's plot, the characters are shooting a doc. Were those cameras on, too? Did you use any of the fake footage?
We did a bit of an experiment where we actually filmed the part of the narrative where the characters are shooting their own recruitment documentary. We got the "documentary" footage from within the film, as well as the virtual reality footage. Viewers will eventually be able to compare and contrast watching the mockumentary as a regular movie, versus the meta perspective seen through VR. The film will be released to the general public this spring as an app available for download through smartphones, Samsung Gear VR, and the Oculus Rift VR Headset.

How do you feel about being the first director to make a feature VR film?
Mostly tired, but it is deeply satisfying to create something. Regardless how things go, I would do it all again in a heartbeat. It's really cool being an independent filmmaker, because you have a lot of control over your project. At the same time, you have to keep your hands on everything simultaneously, so it takes a lot of time, a lot of sleepless nights. I was sleeping an hour or two max during primary filming and felt like I was going crazy towards the end. But it was worth it. I'm not sure what what the venture means for the future—hopefully the chance to make more VR films.

For more on 'Career Opportunities in Organized Crime' visit the project website here.

Follow Seth on Twitter.

I'm Trying to Get Pregnant with a Stranger's Sperm and It's Going Horribly

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An in vitro fertilization (IVF) needle. All photos by the author

I awoke in morning darkness just before the 6 AM beep beep beep and reached for the small clock radio, flicking the alarm off. My goal was to slip out without waking my wife, Sam. She had to be at work in a few hours. I slid my feet into the leggings I'd placed beside our bed the previous night and pulled one of Sam's sweaters over my head.

As I pushed open the door to my building, I was met by January rain cascading through the darkness and the swish of trucks' wet tires rolling up First Avenue. A small chant began in my head to the cadence of the rain bouncing off my umbrella. I kept rhythm as I walked: I'm doing this for the baby. I'm doing this for the baby. I'm doing this for the baby.

It was still dark out when I walked into the office 45 minutes later. The receptionist greeted me by name, "Hi, Laura. You can have a seat."

As I waited, I fidgeted with a fertility bracelet on my wrist given to me by a friend. Just hours before, Sam and I were sleeping next to a fertility Voodoo doll I'd purchased in New Orleans. I'd even pinned a strand of my hair onto the doll's torso. Sometimes I'd stare at the good-luck charms and think, Give me your baby juju.

Two years ago, both of us 29 years old, Sam and I had our eggs tested. I was shocked at my infertility diagnosis, my diminished ovarian reserve, the fact that I could not get pregnant the "usual" way without drugs or fertility treatment. This meant not only would it be difficult for me to conceive, but I would also be at high risk for a miscarriage even if I did manage to get pregnant.

I like to say that Sam has "eggs spilling out of her," but she has fertility issues of her own, including uterine fibroid tumors. Neither of us were the perfect candidate, but our fertility doctor recommended that if I ever wanted to carry, I should try to get pregnant as soon as possible. Shortly after, we picked a sperm donor we considered a fit, and purchased all six vials he had available.

Fertility patients require daily monitoring—blood work and vaginal ultrasounds that measure the progress of follicle growth—so clinics offer testing before normal office hours, meaning there's a lot of time spent in waiting rooms before the day even begins. On that rainy winter morning two months ago, I was being monitored for my third and final IUI—or Intrauterine Insemination, which is when sperm is inserted directly into the uterus to facilitate fertility. I was taking drugs to stimulate my ovaries, but the doctor had made it clear that if I didn't conceive after three IUIs we would need to take more aggressive action.

When that third IUI failed in January, I scheduled a call with a nurse from Oxford Health Insurance's Managed Infertility program to discuss IVF treatment, the next step for us if I ever wanted to get pregnant with my wife. While IUI means injecting sperm into the uterus, IVF (or In Vitro Fertilization) means the surgical removal of mature eggs from the body, which are then fertilized with sperm in a lab. The resulting embryos are then transferred into the uterus and carried like a traditional pregnancy until the baby is born or miscarried.

From the initial egg testing through the third IUI, we spent $9,772.04 on the testing, donor sperm (one of the priciest expenses), sperm storage fees, and other affiliated costs. With IVF, our plan B, the cost can easily exceed $20,000 per attempt, plus more daily visits to the doctor for blood tests and ultrasounds. My odds of conceiving with IVF are 35-45%. They were 8-12% with IUI.

After committing to this next step, we tried to get some of the fees covered by our health insurance. Unfortunately, Oxford Health defines infertility as "the inability to achieve pregnancy after 12 months of unprotected heterosexual coitus (sexual intercourse)." Not applicable for Sam and I. We don't have premium insurance that covers IUI or IVF, but even other health care providers don't provide coverage for same-sex couples undergoing these procedures.

Unlike our friends who get pregnant after letting their birth control lapse, for us "trying" does not involve regular romps. I've mourned my inability to make a baby with my wife. I want to birth a child with Sam's green eyes. Instead, I have to lay on a table with my heels in metal stirrups as a stranger's sperm is injected into my uterus via IUI, or have my body anesthetized for a surgical IVF procedure to create a "test tube baby."

In mid-February I went to my new doctor's office for an IVF consultation, our plan B. The next day, Sam and I had to return for another appointment—a required IVF class. As I waited for the class to start, I heard someone call my name.

"You have a payment this morning," said the girl behind the desk.

The day before we had split $11,250 between two credit cards.

"I thought we paid everything up front?"

She didn't reply as she reached for a color-printed financial packet and circled the words "Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET)," which were written in bold. This meant that when I had my eggs fertilized through IVF the lab would also freeze the remaining embryos from one cycle so they could be used in the next. Tears sprung to my eyes as I read the accompanying number: $4,260. Embarrassed, I told her I needed a minute. We had spent upwards of $20,000 already and IVF wasn't a guarantee we'd get pregnant. Plus, our class hadn't started and we were just grasping these procedures ourselves. It's easy to say how much you'd be willing to spend for a baby until you have to put your money where your mouth is.

After the initial shock passed, we composed ourselves and coughed up the additional $4,260.

During the IVF class Sam and I sat with a group of other overwhelmed men and women in a hospital conference room and were taught by a video from the 90s about the fundamentals of IVF medications. The length of an IVF treatment differs for every woman, but it starts on the day you get your period, after which you have to inject various hormone medications each night in order to stimulate your ovaries into making eggs. Some of the injections would be subcutaneous—injected into our abdomens or thighs—while others would go intramuscular into the upper quadrants of our butts. "What if I hit a bone?" asked one frazzled husband. The nurse passed around needles and a dummy for practice.

When the injections begin, you have to continue making daily visits to the doctor for bloodwork and ultrasounds so they know when your body is ready for step two—a "trigger shot" that catalyzes the release of your eggs. Two days after that happens, the eggs get retrieved (if any eggs are viable) in a surgical procedure in which they're fertilized in a lab, and then the resulting embryo—aka the "test tube baby"—is implanted back into your uterus. Following that, it's two weeks of Progesterone shots to increase the likelihood of pregnancy until you either get your period or a baby is conceived.

I thought we would have time to digest the costs and get a better grasp of what exactly I would be putting into my body through IVF, but my period came the same day as the class, weeks early. I pulled out my wallet and headed home with a pamphlet offering sparse directions on how to begin hormone injections that night.

Hours later, Sam and I cleaned out a kitchen cabinet and filled it with bags of various-sized needles, a red sharps disposal container, gauze and alcohol pads, and vials of medication. My first ovary-stimulating injections involved relatively tiny needles, but Sam stuck me four times in the course of my first two shots. She'd approach, stick the needle in about an inch from my belly button, freak out when she felt it pierce my skin, then pull it out. I stood—unsexy—leaning on the kitchen counter and pinching my belly fat. "Chill the fuck out and do it," I demanded. She came at me. From there we split the nightly injections. I'd do one myself then let her do the next two. Side effects of the medicines include: Bloating, headache, drowsiness, mood swings, night sweats. (Yes, our sex life has been suffering, a wretched irony for a couple trying to conceive.)

There's a chance we might fuck up the injections out of nerves and waste the heroic sum we spent on the necessary IVF medicine. There's even a chance that we're doing everything right but this still won't work. And even if we do get pregnant through this second, more expensive process, there's still a chance of miscarriage. We haven't decided how many IVF attempts Sam and I are willing to withstand. My wife could volunteer to go through the same process as me, but it's tough to imagine us attempting a plan C when we've already spent tens of thousands of dollars pumping my body full of chemicals. Trying to remain emotionally stable through the medical bureaucracy is tough enough, but the hormones surging through my body make it especially grueling.

Roughly a week and a half after I got my period and started the nightly hormone injections, my doctors told me it was time for the trigger shot necessary to kickstart the release of my eggs. The needle was large and we were both anxious. "OK, let's do this," I said. I leaned over our kitchen counter, my butt facing my wife. She cleaned the area the nurse had circled and slid the needle in. Nausea hit and I ran to the bathroom. On my knees, I vomited violently into the toilet. As I wrapped my arms around the bowl to catch my breath I thought, I'm doing this for the baby. I'm doing this for the baby. I'm doing this for the baby.

Laura Leigh Abby's Amazon Kindle Single 'The Rush' was published in January 2016 and her first book, '2Brides2Be,' is forthcoming with Archer in fall 2016. Follow her on Twitter and visit her website.


Smoke Flares and Scuffles: When a Pro-Refugee March Meets Its Far-Right Counter-Protest

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

If you'd only read Evening Standard and Daily Mail headlines about Saturday's pro-refugee march, you might think it was all centered on people "clashing with police" in central London. Really, thousands of people across Europe marched through their city streets to voice their support of refugees and migrants. In London, Labour MP Diane Abbott addressed the crowd after the rally had snaked its way from Portland Place to Trafalgar Square, while the likes of London mayoral candidate George Galloway and actress Vanessa Redgrave made their appearances.

But about those "clashes." The main Stand Up to Racism march was met by an anti-migrant counter-protest, staged by about 30 people affiliated with far-right group Britain First. They planted themselves in Piccadilly Circus, waving Union Jacks and signs reading "VETERANS BEFORE MIGRANTS," and were surrounded by a human shield of police officers when a faction of anti-fascists on the march started to make their way over to the counter-protest, shouting "fascist scum, off our streets."

No arrests were made, and our photographer Chris Bethell was there to check things out.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: New York's Anti-Trump Rally Started Loud and Ended Louder

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All photos by the author

A mass of New Yorkers gathered in Columbus Circle near the southwest corner of Central Park yesterday at noon to collectively share their contempt for Donald Trump, the man who may very well become the first Republican presidential nominee to have previously branded both steak and cologne.

With hundreds of participants in attendance, the Rally Against Donald Trump featured a diverse range of age groups, ethnicities, and rallying points against the presidential candidate. And, much like Trump himself, the spectacle started loud and ended louder.

What began as a messy amoeba of anti-Trump attendees gathering into clusters to deliver speeches, chant stuff like "Fuck Trump," and hold signs riffing off recent Trump talking points ("American Needs Bigger Hands," "Let's Build a Wall to Keep Trump Out," etc.), ended with several New Yorkers getting arrested and even pepper sprayed by police right near the buildings bearing Trump's name.

At around 2 PM, a handful of Trump supporters stood with Trump International Hotel as their backdrop just off Central Park West. A few police officers stood between them and their rivals as they chanted "Build the Wall!"

As more rally-goers began to hear these Trumpers, they swarmed the scene. Curses were thrown, accusations of racism were made, and birds were flipped. Eventually the police escorted the pro-Trump crowd away for their own safety. From there, the protest marched briefly through Central Park toward the Trump Tower at the corner of 56th Street and 5th Avenue.

Once the swarm of people were halfway across the width of the park, the crowd tried to walk back to 59th Street through the middle of the street where they were met by a large police presence on vespas and on foot.

Though unclear who provoked whom, things quickly escalated as protesters and police began pushing each other, and soon officers began arresting people and spraying others with pepper spray.

Almost immediately after the use of force, the energy of the protest changed dramatically. The attitude shifted from distinct groups of people making fun of and criticizing Trump, to a concentrated mass all chanting against the police.

Starting at 5th Avenue, protesters began to sprint toward Madison Avenue, some even crossing through the middle of oncoming traffic. It felt a little bit like the crowd was running away from a giant wave instead of surging toward a shared goal.

A swarm of police officers met demonstrators at the corner on 58th and Madison, and swiftly arrested a dark-skinned man and then a caucasian photographer—the latter of whom the cops pinned aggressively against a taxi cab that had a fare in it.

Soon, myself and others were herded away from the scene. It seemed that the police were trying to make an example and scare the rest of the crowd heading toward us.

As Trump protesters reached the other Trump building on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, the police were waiting with systemic blockades, preventing protesters from entering the streets.

A large group of Trump protesters continued to chant, while another pocket of demonstrators began feuding with a small group of Trump supporters. Moments later, a black man walked by me with a little boy no older than six. I overheard him say, "Son, these are the racist white people you'll have to fight when you get older."

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

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Breaking the Binary in Hillary Clinton's Pantsuits

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Nikki Chasin suit, Fred Perry top, Lady Grey earrings and necklace, L. Jardim brooch

Photographers: Matthew Leifheit
Stylist: Miyako Bellizzi
Hair: Alex Andrade
Make-Up: Jess Plummer


Models: Claire Christerson, Alana Nuala, Leah James, Martine Gutierrez, Dese Escobar, Richie Khan, Erin Meuchner, Mars Hobrecker, Lizz Jardim

Of all the women who've adopted the pantsuit as a symbol of their empowerment (from Katharine Hepburn to Grace Jones), presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is without a doubt the two-piece's biggest champion. This makes a lot of sense considering that when American women usually break into a space typically dominated men, they do it in a pantsuit. And what space has been more exclusive to men than the Oval Office?

That's not to say that we are blind to Clinton's record. She has a troubled history with the LGBTQ community, extending from her husband's misguided support of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell to the 2016 candidate's recent statement that Nancy Reagan helped start the national conversation on AIDS (a claim she has since walked back). However, when we started to develop the idea for this shoot, we weren't thinking about Clinton's politics specifically. We were thinking about her as a symbol for challenging the notions of conventional gender norms, one which we could appropriate and reimagine.

The truth is, despite the very real prospect of a woman taking the White House next year, there are still many more glass ceilings to shatter. The gender struggles in the United States aren't just relegated to cis white females. Instead, they extend out to the entire queer community, including trans men and women. As such, we wanted to honor the spirit of defying gender norms and take it to its fullest extension by casting models exclusively from the LGBTQ community to reclaim the symbolism of Clinton and her pantsuit.

What's beautiful to us about this shoot is that the images exhibit a strength through the fluidness in gender identities represented, showcasing a new kind of power dressing that breaks down the binary that's held us all back for so long.

—VICE Staff


The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Raul Castro and Barack Obama. Obama is the first US president to visit Cuba since 1928. Photo via Wikimedia.

US News

Obama to Visit Cuba
President Obama will meet with Cuban President Raul Castro this morning, having become the first sitting US president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Meetings will focus on trade, but Obama is also set to meet the leader of Ladies in White, a group campaigning for Cuba's political prisoners. —The New York Times

Legal Weed Sales Hit $5.7 Billion
Legal marijuana enjoyed $5.7 billion sales boom last year, according to a new report by ArcView Market Research. It amounts to a 232 percent increase in just one year. The study estimates that by 2020, legal adult use and medical marijuana sales will reach $23 billion.—USA Today

Apple Launches New iPhone
The tech giant will reporters at its Silicon Valley headquarters today for a major product launch. Analysts expect CEO Tim Cook will unveil a new, smaller cellphone—an upgraded version of its four-inch iPhone 5S. The new iPhone 7 isn't expected until fall. —AP

Trump's Campaign Spending Nears $25 Million
Donald Trump lent his own presidential campaign another $6.85 million last month, bringing the total amount he has spent to $24.38 million. Ordinary contributors gave Trump $2 million last month, and more than three-quarters of the money came in amounts of $200 or less.—The Washington Post

International News

Turkey Blames Islamic State for Bombing
According to Turkey's interior minister, a Turkish member of the Islamic State group was responsible for Saturday's suicide bombing in Istanbul that killed three Israelis and an Iranian. Mehmet Ozturk was named as having carried out the bombing. —Al Jazeera

Paris Suspect Planned More Attacks
Salah Abdeslam, suspected of planning the Paris attacks last year, has told investigators he was planning more violence, according to Belgium's foreign minister. Abdeslam was arrested Friday in Brussels, and reportedly told authorities he backed out of suicide attack at the Stade de France. —BBC News

Benin Elects New President
Businessman Patrice Talon has won the second round of Benin's presidential election, as his adversary Lionel Zinsou has conceded defeat. Talon billed himself as the "authentic" Beninese candidate and repeatedly attacked his opponent's dual French nationality. —Africa News

Brexit Could Cost Britain $145 Billion
A British vote to leave the European Union—the so-called "Brexit"—could cost the country's economy £100 billion and 950,000 jobs by 2020, the country's most powerful business group, the Confederation of British Industry, has warned. Brits vote in an in-out referendum on June 23. —Reuters


World tennis No.1 Novak Djokovic, who has dismissed the idea of equal prize money for women for men.

Everything Else

Twitter Turns Ten
The social media network celebrates its tenth anniversary today; the latest stats show it has 320 million users sending 500 million tweets a day. Ellen DeGeneres's selfie from the 2014 Oscars still holds the record for retweets: 3.3 million.—Sky News

Djokovic Snubs Equal Female Prize Money
World No.1 Novak Djokovic has dismissed the idea of equal prize money for women and men in tennis, saying men have more spectators. Djokovic said women "fought for what they deserve," but that the men's game "should fight for more." —ABC News

Antarctic Ship Could be Named 'Boaty McBoatface'
The UK's Natural Environment Research Council launched a poll to let the British public name a $288 million vessel headed to Antarctica, and the clear favorite is RRS Boaty McBoatface. (The RRS stands for royal research ship.) —The Guardian

Virginia 'Habitual Drunkard' Law Punishes Alcoholics
More than 4,700 people have been arrested under Virginia's "habitual drunkard" law, which makes it a crime for alcoholics to buy or consume alcohol. Legal Aid Justice Center has filed a class action suit against the "insane" law. —VICE News

Done with reading today? Watch our new film 'How Britain's Most Notorious Reformed Criminal Is Helping Offenders Navigate the Law'

The Anatomy of a Heroin Relapse

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This piece was published in partnership with The Influence.

After ten years off junk, it wasn't something I thought about much anymore.

In the early days, every morning seemed to begin with an internal debate about whether or not to use. After a while, the voice inside advocating "just one last taste" faded out into a ghostly echo, and then one day it wasn't there at all.

I had been off junk longer than I had been on it. I had beaten it, moved on. I had built an entirely new life. Become a father. Begun a career as a writer. The likelihood of relapse felt as distant and unlikely as the idea of a piano falling out of the sky and landing on my head.

Until, that is, I relapsed.

It started with the accident.

Of course, nobody expects stuff like this to happen to them. And it was over so quickly. One moment my daughter and I were walking out of the grocery store. She'd been working on her fifth-grade class project and we both needed a change of scenery after three solid hours of assisting with glue-sticking, coloring in the lines, and cutting things out. So we went to buy a snack.

I left the house at 9 AM with the vague intention of finding something, and by 1 PM I was back at home with a bundle of smack.

It was a gloomy Monday in January 2014, around 5 PM, when we left the store.

I took her hand and waited until the traffic had come to a full stop, stepped out and checked that there was no oncoming traffic on the other side. We were clear. As we began to cross, the world suddenly turned upside down. I remember feeling my ribs compress and the breath being knocked out of me as I hit the asphalt. In the moment of silence that followed, everything took on a dreamlike haze. Then one of the tangerines we had just bought rolled past my line of vision, and I was jolted back to reality.

I found out later that an SUV had cruised past the car that had stopped to let us cross. Distracted, she had assumed the car in front of her had stopped to make a turn instead of to let pedestrians cross, so she drove around it and creamed us at approximately 20 miles per hour.

When I made it to my feet people were already out of their cars, everything drenched in the harsh beam of headlights, people yelling at me to stop moving, telling me I might be badly hurt.

I remember seeing my daughter's sneakers lying surreally in the middle of the road. She had been knocked clean out of them. A few feet away from them I saw my daughter, lying completely motionless in the middle of the street.

Let me stop for a second to say that she survived the accident and is fine. As I write this, she is running around in the park with a school friend. The extent of her injuries was a concussion, a few teeth knocked loose and severe bruising. She doesn't even remember the accident, only the events before and after. Lucky her.

The doctors later told me it could have been much worse. Apparently, in an accident like this, the most important factor is how you land.

My daughter landed well.

Of course, when I first saw her splayed motionless in the street I knew none of this. I stumbled over to her and saw that she was lifeless and limp as a rag doll. Terrified of moving her in case her spine had been damaged, I begged her to wake up, gently stroking her face.

Luckily enough, an ambulance was on the scene almost immediately (they were responding to a nearby emergency), and as they were strapping her into the gurney she suddenly woke up, gasping as if surfacing from underwater, and began screaming in pain and confusion.

That in-between period—those interminable moments of crouching over her, screaming for her to wake up, begging her to not be dead—all in all, probably lasted no more than 120 seconds. But even now as I remember them, they seem to stretch on forever. With each passing second that she did not respond to my voice, did not open her eyes—all of this as people were trying to pull me away from her—the possibility that she was, in fact, dead began to dawn on me.

I don't know if you have to be a parent to really understand what it is like to face the possibility that your child is dead. The chasm of despair that opens up inside of you. I am a writer by trade, and I have spent the last few weeks writing and rewriting this paragraph, trying hopelessly to capture the awful pain that I felt, even though it lasted for just a few fleeting minutes. I keep coming up a blank. This is the best I can do.

Of course, this isn't a story about an accident; it's a story about a relapse, although the two events are helplessly intertwined in my head. The accident—or those frozen moments of horror following it—marked the dividing line between the Tony O'Neill who wrote some time ago about ten years heroin-free without AA, and the Tony O'Neill writing this piece, conducting a kind of investigation into how this happened.

In the months following the accident I completely unraveled. Had I always suffered from a kind of depression? I think that yes, I had. There are many branches of my family tree that are not talked about, men of my blood who met their demise at the end of a rope or at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I am not completely sold on whether there is a genetic component to depression and addiction, but my family history seems to support the idea.

The transition from pills to heroin happened in the blink of an eye.

For most of my life my lows tended to be extremely low and my highs extremely high, and I went through long periods where a kind of black cloud descended upon me and the only thing to do was hold on and ride it out. But I had never taken any kind of psychiatric medication, fearing that a blunting of those feelings might upset the delicate chemical balance that allowed me to be creative, either as a musician, as I was in the early days, or as an author.

If you don't recognize my name, don't worry—I'm not Stephen King, nor Salman Rushdie. But I have managed to write and publish enough books to call it a career without feeling like a fraud. For someone who depends upon that mysterious creative urge, the fear that antidepressants might somehow upset this delicate balance was very real.

But after the accident, things changed quickly.

There were the nightmares, of course. I had them several times a night in the first few months, repeatedly reliving the accident, often with horrible variations: mangled flesh, a car bearing down on my child in slow motion while I remained rooted to the spot.

But the anger was probably the worst. My wife noticed it first. Despite the fact that our daughter made a speedy recovery with no cognitive impairment, my rage at the driver and the insurance companies and fate and myself did not fade over time—it increased. I found myself unable to write, and several times a day would simply space out, slipping into a daydream, reliving the accident again, heart pounding and drenched in cold sweat. I would force myself to change tack when I caught my thoughts drifting back to that day, but it was often too late, and I was either plunged into pervasive sadness or furious rage.

My wife repeatedly suggested that I speak to someone—a doctor, a therapist, anyone—but I refused. I wasn't crazy, after all, I was angry. And I had every goddamned fucking right to be angry, thank you very much.

And besides... I had a shit-load of painkillers.

I am not a part of this younger generation of heroin addict, weaned from the teat of pharmaceutical dope. I am of the previous generation, the kind of junkie who idolized Johnny Thunders and William Burroughs and Chet Baker and Lenny Bruce as a child, and for whom it was seemingly only a matter of time before they tried smack. I was in love with the mystique of heroin, its outlaw lifestyle, as well as its artistic connotations. I had no interest in pills, except when there was a drought and I needed something to tide me over. In my junkie days in LA I became an expert at scamming doctors for scripts, so much so that it was almost a party trick.

But now I didn't have to do anything: no phony back pain, or spasms, or migraines. Every time I limped into a doctor's office, bruised from head to foot, hunched over like an old man, inevitably they would ask if I needed something for the pain, and inevitably I answered yes.

One pill, taken as needed, became five pills chewed and swallowed two or three times a day, my intake increasing steadily until a bottle of 30 OxyContin lasted no time at all.

While the idea of seeing a shrink terrified me, there was something oddly comforting in the familiar blotting out of feelings that opioids gave me. It was only by numbing myself with pills that I could bring myself to pick up the phone and deal with the long, complex negotiations with the insurance companies, hospitals, and lawyers, all of whom seemed determined to make sure that on top of the physical pain of the accident, our family would feel the financial pain as well.

Due to a quirk in New Jersey law, the burden of our medical expenses fell upon our insurance, and our insurance company made it a point to refuse half of all claims—for x-rays, ambulance rides, CAT scans—leading to a rush of calls from billing departments demanding thousands of dollars that we simply did not have.

I will not name names, but let's just say I have no fondness for geckos these days.

I have written plenty previously about my years of addiction—the initial romance, the day-to-day adventures of a young junkie living in the underbellies of Los Angeles and London, the pains and the withdrawals—so I won't rehash it all here.

What I will say is this: I do not believe that it is a "relapse" if someone who was previously addicted to heroin needs to take opioid pain medication. Many people do so without experiencing any problems at all. And if you take precautions—talking to medical professionals about your history, perhaps enlisting a family member to hold your meds—you reduce your risk. I had occasionally done it myself in the years after I quit junk—when I had my wisdom teeth out, for example—with no issues.

The difference between that and what happened after the accident was slight, but important: Previously, I had used the pills to mask physical pain; now, I used them to mask emotional pain.

The transition from pills to heroin happened in the blink of an eye.

Naturally, there came a point when doctors would no longer prescribe to me: I had no lasting injuries. As the bruises faded, the prescriptions dried up. When that happened, the monkey I had carried on my back for so many years was definitely out of his cage. For a decade I had starved the little bastard, locked him away, and after a decade without food, light, or attention I figured he was probably dead, or near-as-dammit. But after just a few months of tossing OxyContin into its cage, the thing was as big as King Kong.

I lasted a few days without pills, depressed and listless, and finally managed to convince myself that my present condition was untenable. There seemed to be only two options to quiet the noise in my head. One was suicide. The other was heroin.

Scoring was as easy as walking to the corner store to buy groceries, even though I had never done it on the East Coast before and knew no one who used anymore.

I left the house at 9 AM with the vague intention of finding something, and by 1 PM I was back at home with a bundle of smack. People like me have a special instinct, and can home in on junk territory the same way a diviner can find underground rivers.

This time, it was very different: There was no romance period, no pleasurable "getting to know you," no floating through the days on a blissful cushion of narcotic bliss. Instead, I was dropped off at the exact point where I left off heroin all those years ago—a suffocating cycle of overwhelming need and awful self-loathing, hating myself and hating the drug and, despite my hatred, the overwhelming feeling that I had no choice but to keep using.

The biggest difference between the old days and this relapse was that I was a father. My daughter had never known the old me, the person I had put away and only took out of his box when I allowed him to become a character in my novels. I hid my double life well, being an old hand at such subterfuge. But after I fell off the wagon, there wasn't a day that went by when I didn't look into my kid's eyes without feeling like some deformed, hunchbacked, sniveling monster. Even though I was able to keep what I was going through from her through sheer strength of will, I knew that each passing day brought me closer and closer to some kind of disaster that would destroy my family forever.

Now I was the one behind the wheel, barreling toward the wife and child I loved in a car without brakes. There were times, when I'd just scored and was getting ready to get well, that I wondered if this hit might be the one that finished me off.

I have to confess, I sometimes thought it would be a relief.

The wheels came off. Needless to say, my wife was no innocent about heroin, having nursed me off it all of those years ago, and my repeated denials in the face of her mounting suspicion became almost comical toward the end. When she finally confronted me with inconvertible proof—a Suboxone packet, from a failed attempt to wean myself off—I did consider concocting another lie to wriggle out of it.

But I didn't. I was tired, a pitiful beaten dog, and admitting what had happened out loud came as a relief—even though it meant facing that in my self-pitying stupidity, I had almost lost the two most important relationships in my life.

In the mess that followed, as I writhed in the clutches of a violent cold turkey in the spare bedroom, my wife struck a deal with me: I could stay, if I sought treatment. Even then, I was reluctant to enter a clinic again, as my experiences back in the late 90s had been so awful. I begged her to let me tough it out, to lock me in the room and not let me out, no matter how much I begged.

She didn't budge, so treatment it was. After three hellish days of sweating the dope out, I began outpatient treatment with Suboxone and—most importantly—therapy.

Check out our documentary about the shady for-profit rehab industry in America.

People relapse every day. It is, as they say, a part of recovery. But the crux, for me, is that as well as staying off heroin since then (April 2014), I have also decided to seek treatment for the depression that was the underlying theme of much of my use.

At first I saw a therapist. A nice guy, although I remain skeptical of the benefit of talking cures. Sure, it was good to have someone to talk to in those early days, someone who I wasn't worried would be scared if I told them I was still struggling, or repulsed if I let them peer into the cesspool of insanity in my head.

Years ago I saw a therapist in rehab, another nice guy, who told me he was a recovering meth addict. You might assume that he would have been my preferred therapist, and it is true that he had a better understanding of my mentality, but for me, the kind of clinical distance that my therapist had was a benefit, not a hindrance.

For a start, it cuts away at the bullshit. There is no impulse to engage in the ritual of—as my friend Jerry Stahl calls it—"one downmanship." Like it or not, there's a certain twisted pride that most of us have about the depths we plunged to. If we suspect our therapist didn't go as far as we did, we have a tendency to hold their opinion in lower esteem. If they were even more fucked up, more crazy, shot more drugs, robbed more liquor stores, lost more teeth—"You ain't a real junkie unless you lost at least two teeth," one old-timer told me out in California—then we feel insecure. When your therapist's experience with drugs remains theoretical, this kind of junkie-etiquette crap is negated.

It has been a long time, now, since I felt so full of self-loathing and listlessness that it pained me to get out of bed.

But more useful than talk was medication. My old friend Suboxone has saved my life on more than one occasion and was there for me again, managing to stop me from crawling up the walls long enough to try and get better.

I have now weaned down to almost nothing and fully intend to stop when the time is right, probably within the next eight to nine months. I'm glad to have Suboxone vs. methadone for two reasons.

The first is access: With Suboxone you are more likely to be allowed to pick up 30, even 60 days' supply at a time and manage your own medication. This is a huge factor. Back in the bad old days of the late 90s on methadone, it was routine to have to show up at the pharmacy every morning to take your dose in front of the pharmacist. Supposedly intended to stop diversion, this rule seemed to be a thinly-veiled punishment, a way of ensuring that you began each and every day by being reminded of your lowly status on society's ladder. It still gives me the shivers: first thing in the morning, dragging my aching bones to the local pharmacy, people gawking as I glugged my methadone with shaking hands, mothers pulling their children closer, as though my addict-genes might infect them. Hell, I'm surprised they didn't make us all wear a linctus-green star and have done with it.

The second benefit is how Suboxone acts as an opioid-blocker. The honest truth is that as soon as I started treatment, I didn't have an urge to use. After all, the relapse had hardly been fun, and once my cravings were satisfied, I had no remaining emotional attachment to the junkie lifestyle. Even so, it is a good feeling to know that if something were to happen, some weird quirk of fate like walking into a bathroom and finding a dropped bundle of smack—unlikely, I know, but bear with me—then at least with Suboxone, that rapidly starving monkey couldn't convince me to toss him a peanut.

The psychiatric drugs helped me even more, though. I lucked out, found a patient, understanding doctor—one who didn't radiate that cold distaste that I remember from trying to get treatment years ago. These days, she and I rarely discuss addiction and relapse at all. We just talk about life; I guess it's her way of taking my psychic pulse. It took a while, but heroin, relapse, the accident, all that stuff is no longer my main concern. Real life is.

It took a while to get the combination of medication right, but when I did, the difference was stunning. It was as though somebody turned off a blaring radio, a soundtrack of discordant shouting voices that had been on for so long that I had gotten used to it. At first the silence was noticeable, hard to get used to, even. Now it is my new normality—a kind of clear-headedness that I haven't felt in years and years.

It has been a long time, now, since I felt so full of self-loathing and listlessness that it pained me to get out of bed.

Not every day is sunshine and roses. Most aren't. After all, I'm taking antidepressants, not MDMA. But by ensuring that my bad hours, days, whatever, are not so bad, the meds have enabled me to push on with life, put the accident behind me, get back to being the person I was before.

And then there was my big fear. The fear that if I took psychiatric drugs, I would not be able to write. Of course, that was bullshit. A novella I began late last year grew into a novel-length piece of writing (The Savage Life will be released in French in August, and translations into several languages—including English—are slated for later in the year.) My fear was as big a fallacy as the thought that occurred to me when I was 21 and in rehab for the first time, contemplating a life without heroin : But how will I be able to play music?

The answer was, of course, simple: The same way I always had.

My biggest regret is that I didn't grasp it earlier. I did all of the things I was most proud of in my life despite my depression, not because of it.

I have learned, too, in a particularly painful but valuable way, how much I need to fear complacency. In the almost two years since quitting (again), I have immersed myself in the full-time business of trying to fix the mess I left. Slowly, life has begun to move again in the right direction.

Tony O'Neill is the author of books including Digging the Vein, Down and Out on Murder Mile and Sick City. He also co-authored the New York Times bestseller Hero of the Underground (with Jason Peter) and the Los Angeles Times bestseller Neon Angel (with Cherie Currie). Follow him on Twitter.

This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

The President of Planned Parenthood Opens Up About Fighting for Reproductive Rights

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Portrait by Chuck Grant

This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, is no stranger to the violence, intimidation, and legislation that has threatened the women's rights movement. Her mother, Ann Richards, was the second female governor of Texas, a vocal feminist, and a social justice leader. Like mother, like daughter, Cecile Richards is graceful and fierce, and her efforts to provide affordable health care have been both applauded and attacked.

VICE: Have you ever convinced an "anti-abortion" person to become "pro-choice"?
Cecile Richards: I have seen elected officials in office, who may have been elected by saying that they were completely against abortion rights, change; and it's really happened because they have heard the stories of women—women in their own families, women constituents—who have told them about their situations. When people can develop empathy for others, it really helps break down this very rigid formulation that is essentially political.

During a congressional hearing last September, members of Congress cut you off you so many times that a mash-up video of the interruptions went viral. Even the haters were impressed by your poise.
Realizing that I wasn't really there representing an organization, or myself, I was just hoping to channel the millions of women who will never get the chance to speak up. Sometimes when other people are really being ridiculous, you just have to be quiet and let them do their thing. In many ways, I think some members of Congress really exposed, frankly, how little regard they have for women.

As president of the organization, do you think your job would be easier if you were a man?
These issues are always going to be a challenge. I've never thought about that. The majority of folks who work at Planned Parenthood, here in the national office and around the country, are women. Of course, we have amazing men who work here. I feel that any guy who is so together that he can work at Planned Parenthood and help advance reproductive rights is really special. They're guys who really appreciate women.

When politicians put their own politics ahead of the health and well-being of women, that's when you run into trouble.

I noticed when I went to Planned Parenthood last, the patient form you fill out gives you the option of choosing your gender pronoun and identifying your gender. I've never seen that at any OB/GYN.
Now that we're celebrating 100 years, I look at how we've changed. To me, one of the exciting things is we have more folks coming to us—we're opening up trans services all over the United States. We opened a new center in Asheville, and the clinicians talked about how excited they were to be able to provide trans services there—that folks were coming from over state lines because it was a good, nonjudgmental, safe place to go. The pride the clinicians felt, it was palpable.

Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest provider of sex education. Why is this an important initiative?
I think it's an important initiative for the country. It doesn't make sense to me that it's so political. The overwhelming majority of parents want their kids to get sex education, and they feel vastly under-equipped to provide it. I come from Texas, where, right now, its state policy is "abstinence only"—it doesn't really teach sex ed. It's worse now than when I was growing up there.

There's a direct correlation and reducing unintended pregnancy and the need for abortion. That's why we fought so hard for the Affordable Care Act to get no cost contraceptives.

We're at a 40-year low for teen pregnancy in the United States, and it's not because teens have quit being sexually active. It's because they get better sex education now, from a lot of sources, and they have better access to birth control.

So, what's going on in Texas?
It is really scary. There's a big case going before the Supreme Court (Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt), which will fundamentally decide whether the provisions that have been made to protect legal access to abortion still stand. In Texas, only the major cities, with very few exceptions, can provide safe and legal abortion.

So, if you're a woman who lives in rural Texas, you don't have the same rights to go to a local community doctor who you trust for what is a legal procedure in the United States. Now, we've fought these same laws in other states and won, but if Texas is allowed to go through, we will see similar bills across the country, and I think the real concern is then it will be a right but in name only, not in reality. We're already seeing the reports in Texas about the number of women who have tried to terminate a pregnancy on their own.

It's over 100,000.
Exactly. When politicians put their own politics ahead of the health and well-being of women, that's when you run into trouble. That's basically what we're seeing.

This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Indie Puzzle Game 'Hue' Is Unfinished but Still Highly Addictive

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Henry Hoffman and Dan Da Rocha, working under the banner of Fiddlesticks, are the architects behind Hue, a puzzle game that is both reassuringly familiar and fantastically original.

A side-scrolling platformer where a color wheel is used to make foreground objects disappear and reappear against the background, and the central character—the titular Hue—can move some of them around the environment to reach new points or avoid one-hit-kill obstacles, it sounds very simple. Having played a couple of work-in-progress builds of the game, though, in reality, Hue is already striking that same sweet spot that the greatest puzzlers of the modern gaming era, from Portal to The Witness, have successfully nailed.

Hue escalates in difficultly gently, but always makes the player feel clever for solving its problems, at any level of challenge—be that simply spinning the color wheel to remove a crate from your path, or carefully timing jumps with switches between shades to ascend the ledges of an otherwise impassable vertical shaft. Both times I've picked up the pad for a preview, I've been unwilling to put it down again. It's immediately addictive, even in an unfinished state—the final game is due out several months from now, its release date entirely TBD. Sometime in the summer is the aim of Hue's publisher, Curve Digital, the London-based company behind previous indie greats like Action Henka game I still can't get enough of—and The Swindle.

And it's at Curve's HQ, not far from VICE's own London office, where I sit down with Hoffman and Da Rocha to discuss the making of Hue to this point, some months shy of its release to the public. I'll be following this piece up with another conversation with the pair, several weeks from now, to illustrate just what can change in a game's development as it reaches its final stages.

A design sketch for 'Hue,' showing the layout of a potential level

VICE: The game's been shown at expos and the like, and it's already won its share of awards, which you proudly display on your website. That feels like a massive head start for its prospects—but how much of this attention do you put down to the fact that you guys already have a reputation in the indie games field?
Dan Da Rocha: Well, we first worked together on Q.U.B.E. That game was funded by Indie Fund, and Henry was doing his own game at the time, published by Microsoft. And then we came together to form our own company in 2012. And development of Hue began at the end of 2014.

Henry Hoffman: And I think what we've done before has definitely helped with Hue's visibility. Dan's made a huge number of contacts in the industry, which is something that I didn't have. I'd worked closely with Microsoft, so I had them, but Dan knew all the indie contacts. And then when we were putting this game together, it was really about seeing what the reception would be like. It helped to have made another one before this, a very casual one, which we made in three months for the Windows 8 release. That game, Mortar Melon, was really well received, despite being super rushed out.

Da Rocha: That gave us the exposure of us working together properly.

Hoffman: That really tested the waters, to see if we could work together. I was doing a huge amount of development, and Dan was managing the business. We were chasing a few other ideas. There was a food, restaurant simulation game, that was somewhere close to an RPG, but it never came together.

So the getting stuck in and meeting people side of making an independent video game, nowadays, is of massive importance?
Da Rocha: Yeah, definitely. Go to the expos. Enter competitions. If you get lucky, win a few awards. We've been to thirty events in the past year with this game, which is pretty insane. Obviously that costs money, but a lot of these events cover costs.

Hoffman: It's just difficult to know where you can go with your game, if you're just starting out. We used a website, called PromoterApp, which has a database of all the events on its Promoter Calendar. That's been hugely useful. And because we've got me focused on the game and Dan on the business, we've got the resources to make it to all these events. If you're set up with a designer and programmer and you're both making the game together, it's really difficult to justify that time away from the project.

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Related: Watch VICE's documentary, Walking Heavy

When was the first time you showed the game off?
That was interesting, actually. We built a well-rounded prototype of the game in just two weeks. We'd spoken to some investors, and they loved the idea, but I stupidly told them I'd deliver a prototype in a fortnight. But the second they saw that, they were right on board, and that was a real contrast to the other projects they were looking at, which were just pitch documents at that point. And that prototype, built in two weeks, actually won some awards, which was perfect for getting our foot in the door. After we did that, it was another six months before we arranged a deal that enabled us to work on the game full time; and then after that, we moved the game's engine, so we had to relearn everything in that respect, and it was a pretty steep learning curve.

That engine is Unity, which I understand makes it "easier," relatively speaking, to port the game between platforms?
Yes, there was that reason that we considered, as Unity does support a breadth of platforms. And also performance—Unity is good on all platforms. I'd previously been working in Construct 2, which is like an HTML5 engine, and we just couldn't get sixty frames per second on our target hardware.

The first exterior mock-up for 'Hue'

I saw you both tweet very different things, recently: Dan, that Hue had just won another award, and Henry, that you'd gotten trapped in the game, so it still had some bugs to get rid off. So is that where the game's at, five or six months from release—it's mostly all there, just with these creases to iron out?
Well, the framework is all there, and I'm happy with something like seventy percent of it. But there are still bits that need redesigning, that don't fit or work as I want them to. But I would like fewer creases at this stage, too. There's a lot more ironing to do.

But here you are, showing the game off to idiots from the press, like me. And I first saw it last summer, at Gamescom, which is kind of a big deal. Just how intense were things, getting a build ready for an event of that scale?
Gamescom was massive. It was crazy. So with our development schedule, we didn't really account for putting together specific builds for events, so we'd get to a week before another one, and realize that we didn't have that week to work on the game properly, as we needed to churn out this build. The days get longer, certainly.

At the start of development, you have all this energy of creating something that people are excited about; and at the end of the process, you're kind of crunching to get the finished game together. But in the middle, there's this lull, where you lose your motivation a bit, and what keeps you going is taking the game to all these events, and getting the positive feedback. The problem with that, though, is that it becomes easy to get distracted by them, and lose sight of actually making the game. And I think that happened to us, a little.

'Hue' teaser trailer, from summer 2015 – the voice-over is placeholder audio

So what have been the biggest headaches on the game's development to now, and what have been the biggest breakthroughs?
There have been a number of different things. One thing that we're really happy with now is color-blind support. We've been speaking to people and getting feedback. We were trying to match patterns, if people couldn't match colors, but as the art style changed from something a lot more basic to what we have now, which is a lot more detailed, patterns no longer worked. So now we have these symbols, to indicate what matches what. We've done a lot of testing with it, and it seems to be working really nicely after a lot of trial and error.

A big obstacle was having a mechanic where colors could overlap and blend. We liked the idea of creating new colors in the overlap space, and then you change the background to create this negative space. It was really exciting to us for a while, but it just didn't work as a gameplay mechanic, which was incredibly frustrating. It was more of a technical challenge to ourselves than something that really worked to make the game more enjoyable, but we still burned two months on it. It's really easy to get caught up on technical obstacles, because you feel you have to solve this problem.

Da Rocha: Also, we're working with a few contractors on this, three of them, and picking the right people is very important. You can lose a lot of time by picking the wrong people—when their work proves to not be up to par, that pushes the project back in the schedule, and that happened to us a couple of times. You don't want to be the bad guy, though, and you want to give people a chance.

Hue is forthcoming for a range of platforms. We'll catch up with Da Rocha and Hoffman again, soon, to see how the game's progressed. Meantime, you can follow its progress on the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Meet the 15-Year-Old Helping Donald Trump Take Over the World

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Me: "Hey Ed, strike a Trump-power pose." Ed: "What, like this?" All photos by the author.

A few months back, 15-year-old Edward Bourke was at home in Australia, watching TV, when a news segment started about the US presidential race. "I'd always respected Donald Trump's business achievements," says Ed. "But they were running a clip that made him look like a racist, so I did some research and realized the clip had been misleadingly edited."

Ed explained that Trump had been talking about immigration, but the part that best qualified his opinions had been cut out. It was a lightbulb moment. Edward realized Australia was getting only half the Donald Trump story, while no one was properly explaining the candidate's policies. He believed it was a situation that needed changing, and it was up to him to change it.

Ed is the chairman and CEO of his own charity for lion preservation, savingthelion.org.

This might seem an like an odd leap of imagination for a student in Australia, but Ed was already heading up social campaigns devoted to his other pet passions: climate change awareness, lion preservation, and genealogy. Launching another seemed like the natural thing to do.

Edward began with @TrumpTriumph on Twitter, which has over 500 followers at time of writing. Then he followed up with a website, thetrumpcampaign.com, which presents a simple breakdown of Trump's policies and credentials. Both these outlets try to provide information on Trump's campaign, but Edward believes his most influential tactic involves engaging his classmates in conversation. "Then they go home and tell their parents, who tell their friends, and so on."

The Sofitel offers a range of chairs for people who want to be Donald Trump.

Edward lives with his parents on a two-and-a-half-acre hobby farm ("a couple of sheep and some chickens") at the base of Mount Macedon, about an hour northwest of Melbourne. When I sent Ed a text asking where he'd like to meet he replied "the Sofitel," which is where I found him drinking mineral water with his dad at the bar, both wearing suits. "Dad had to drive," shrugged Ed, without any of the embarrassment you might expect.

I started by asking why he likes Trump so much Essentially, Edward believes Trump's economic prowess and management record makes him the best candidate for running America, which would strengthen Australia's economy via proxy. He cites America's $19 trillion national debt as a threat to global stability and claims the US needs a fiscal conservative in power in order to tackle other issues such as climate change. Yes, Ed is concerned about climate change, which he says Trump has recently come around to. "If you read some of Donald Trump's quotes," says Ed, "you'll see how his opinion on climate science has changed over the past years. He's not actually against it as everyone thinks."

History of the Royal Arms according to Wikipedia: Royal emblems depicting lions were first used by the Norman dynasty. Later a formal and consistent English heraldry system emerged during the 12th century.

In this way Ed presents an unusual mix of neoconservatism, environmental concern, and a mighty faith in the British monarchy. "My homeroom teacher once sent me out of the class because I said Australia should never become a republic. I think the queen is the best head of state you could hope for." Ed then pointed to his gold tie clip, cast in the shape of a lion: "the symbol for the British Empire."

I asked Ed about some of the less tolerable parts to Trump's megalomania, such his penchant for racism, jingoism, and general discrimination. Ed agreed that Trump was known for saying dumb stuff, but insisted it was mainly a mix of misquotes and bluster to excite the American right. "They like that sort of talk," he said.

To be clear, Ed supports some policies that might be considered progressive, including marriage equality. Despite this, he sides with Trump on immigration. "Look at Germany," he explained. " Angela Merkel has let just anyone in and it's resulted in Germans feeling a lot more negatively about immigration. They've come to associate Islam with refugees, and I don't think that helps either group." Instead, Ed believes that Trump's policy of strong borders will actually encourage Americans to feel better about offering asylum or foreign aid.

This kind of turned into a fashion shoot.

Ed says that most people at school respect his ideas, and when they don't he walks away. Either that or he tries to engage them in conversation, "and tell them a bit more about Trump." As for partying or drinking from his parents' liquor cabinet, Ed's says he's just not interested. "A big night for me is spent trading gold stocks on the internet and managing my sites, " he said. "I'd rather set myself up now and enjoy life later." As for dating, Ed said it just isn't a priority.

While Ed talked, his dad, Mick, sat to one side and munched on a serve of spring rolls. He didn't interrupt or try to clarify anything, instead he just listened, somewhere between proud and amused. "Ed's always had his interests and his opinions," said Mick, smiling. "Sometimes he can be a real pain in the arse."

Ed had apparently spent hours researching his family history and plugging the names into this intense-looking spreadsheet.

We finished by taking some photos and talking about Ed's interests outside of Trump and economic rationalism. As I took photos Ed opened a spreadsheet of his family history that he'd somehow traced back over 1,000 years. "I've always been very interested in genealogy," he explained. "And I actually discovered William the Conqueror is my 27th grandfather."

"Believe me," said Mick, deadpan. "If you know Ed, you'd know that's 100 percent correct."

Follow Julian on Twitter.

Inspiration, Emulation, and Diversification at the 2016 Game Developers Conference

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Developer Robert Yang's GDC talk was about the games industry's attitude to sex. All photography courtesy of the author

"Something about how GDC makes you feel excited for games would be just super."

I sat in the departure lounge and stared at my phone for some time in consideration of this brief. I've been playing video games for 27 years now, and making them for about eight. In terms of knowing how the sausage gets made, I work in a butchers and spend my weekends abusing pigs at home. What, if anything, still excites me about games in the space year 2016? Amid the echo of ethereal voices ushering travelers on to parts unknown, I boarded a flight to San Francisco in search of an easily communicable answer.

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for people who develop games. That much should be self-explanatory. What's often lost on people is that it's quite a dry, high-level event, organized by and for industry insiders. Free from the commercial razzmatazz of public-facing events such as Gamescom or EGX, GDC carries a sense of peaceful sincerity that makes it far less traumatizing to attend—and, worryingly, harder to relate to consumers at home, whom we train to associate "progress" with exclusive trailers, booth babes, and free T-shirts. What, by comparison, does progress look like from the inside?

Progress is Tasneem Salim's story from the #1reasontobe panel, in which she laid out some of the social barriers facing female gamers in Saudi Arabia (where men and women are often segregated, and gaming conventions were usually restricted to men only) and described how she and her friends pushed back by setting up GCON, a games convention exclusively for women. The situation in Saudi Arabia seems reminiscent of the social bias female gamers struggle against in many societies, albeit more formalized. It's inspiring to hear how Tasneem and her friends worked to effect a practical change, and the question now is what can the global community do to support them.

Progress is the work of archivists and historians like Frank Cifaldi, who delivered a strong defense of emulators (software that makes one computer function as if it were another—such as making your PC pretend to be a Dreamcast) as a means of preserving our cultural history. Emulation has long been maligned by the industry as a gateway to piracy, but with technical standards in this business shifting every five years or so, the cost of supporting old games in perpetuity is prohibitive. This point was illustrated with an eye-opening comparison of two second-string classics from 1989: DuckTales for the NES (which is currently only available—in a sense—by way of a recent HD remake, produced at great expense) and the John Candy/Macaulay Culkin vehicle Uncle Buck (a film that continues to be released on every major format, thanks to the inexpensive nature of re-encoding video).

'Spelunky' maker Derek Yu, reading from his book about said game

Progress is the expanding frontier of games criticism, offering overdue adult feedback on our work. In one memorable session on Thursday afternoon, Katherine Cross read an extract from her forthcoming book about the need for more "immoral women" in games—fleshed-out villainesses who antagonize the player for considered reasons, and not just because they were brainwashed by a magic sword or some such hand-wavy bollocks. As someone who grew up arguing that games should be given the same kind of consideration as books and films and the like, I find it a huge relief to see more people doing exactly that; this growing marketplace of opinions is what cultural relevance looks like.

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Related: Watch VICE talk film with 'High Rise' director Ben Wheatley

These are the highlights, but of course, the bulk of the conference is about people sharing stories about what they learned during their last project, or what they're thinking about doing next. We learned that Rez is about being a sperm, the average American player of the Monster Hunter series is almost ten years older than his or her Japanese counterpart, and that the standard gesture used to quit virtual reality games going forward may be to eat a burrito.

For my money, the most interesting game I saw during the week of GDC was probably Walden. Made by Tracy Fullerton, it's based on Walden, a book by the 19th-century transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.

People playing the new NES game, 'Super Russian Roulette', currently on Kickstarter

The book is a collection of Thoreau's reflections on a two-year period of living in the woods near his home. The game is a slow-paced exploration affair that at first glance seems similar to Dear Esther, but in reality has more in common with survival sims like DaDayZyZyou must forage for food and fuel, maintain your clothes and shelter, and so on. But it marries this earthy, tactile need for basic survival with sudden highbrow skewers of audio log-style extracts from Thoreau's book, and some endearingly forgiving safety net features for players who can't hack forest life. If things start to get out of hand, you can slink back to the family home to pick up a homemade pie and drop off some clothes for your mom to wash and mend. It opens up the possibility of a brilliant alternative telling of Thoreau's story, where he sets off into the woods, bottles it, and starts sneaking back home each night while faking the rest of his experience.

So how does all this help answer our original question? What is it about GDC that makes me feel excited about games? It isn't the technology, or even the games. It's the people.

Be they developers, players, critics, or whoever else, more people are getting into games from every conceivable angle, and they're bringing new perspectives to the table. Competitive gaming, eSports, and spectating play in general, is becoming a major global phenomenon. Virtual reality is set to redefine what it means to be human (or might just sputter out embarrassingly, again). Whatever your interests, whatever your level of experience with games, I guarantee there's something out there you would enjoy. And if I'm somehow wrong, it's easier than you think to make a game yourself. Games culture is becoming richer and more diverse with each passing year, and nobody can stop that.

Owen Grieve is a game designer and co-founder of the mid-brow games blog Midnight Resistance. Follow him on Twitter..

Twitter Is Ten, So Here's a Timely Reminder That the First-Ever Tweet Fucking Sucked

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Wow: ten years, can you believe it. Hell of a decade, hell of a ride. Hey, though: The first ever tweet fucking sucked. It sucked. It was trash. It sucked.

I mean what is that. Look at the way the word "Twitter" is composed here: no capital T, no i, no e, in fact entirely devoid of vowels and vowel sounds, just a bunch of Ts with a w in between, and you have to pull the boy Jack Dorsey to one side here and say, "Jack," say, "Jack, respect to your product, but what are you doing launching like this without a thorough brand image and a confused slurry of consonants instead of a clear and defined product name," leaning closer and saying, "The first thing—I mean, the absolute first thing, day one, is figure out your brand identity and in-house style guide, I mean, this is extremely basic shit." Point two: Selecting the username "Jack" is extremely boring and dull when you had literally every possible username available to you, from @beyonce to @69_liker_420_fuckmaster. Three: The fact that the style guide has changed from "twttr" to "Twitter," and yet Twitter still doesn't have an edit button to actually change this tweet from "twttr" to "Twitter" shows that one of Twitter's most vital and fundamental flaws has been evident for a decade now, and it still hasn't been fixed. Four: The word "twttr," picked free of vowels like a carrion sucking meat from the bones from a skeleton long dead, is the most 2006 start-up name ever. Five: Remember when we used to write tweets in that sort of faux third-person way, like we used to do Facebook statuses, too? Preface everything with a little "is," a little name-and-handle update of what we're doing, when we were all still friends with MySpace Tom. Heady days. If you're a desperate and panicking third-year college student in need of a last-minute up-all-night dissertation topic and wasting time on VICE dot com as some foolish distraction, do it on in the transformation we have all slowly undergone from 2006-era third person status updates to the sarcasm 'n' fuming at @ASOS_HeretoHelp that we have now. Ten years of human change. Ten years of evolution. Ten years. So many years. The first tweet still really fucking sucked, though, and I'm furious about it.

Again:

Look at it, stare into it. It's a wonder anyone ever sent a tweet after that, isn't it? Nothing about that tweet says, "Join me on this endeavor, this epic adventure in wasting time." Nothing about that says, "Join twttr." The first ever tweet was so dry, so underwhelming, a little more than a staff announcement at an empty supermarket.

But then I suppose there is something magical in the fact that history can be so blithely made with a few touches of buttons—that @jack could never have known that this zero retweet, zero fav-worthy inverse masterpiece was to be looked back upon with as much reverence as the moon landing—and to that end, the first tweet didn't need to be good. It just needed to be first. Consider this footage of a train pulling into a station, from 1896, one of the first movies ever recorded:

That's shit. Trash. Supposedly the train pulling into shot used to scare ye olde time audiences, who would yell and run from their chairs, the idiot fools. Fools would would never live to see The Godfather, or Terminator 2. Imagine what Terminator 2 would do to audiences in the 1890s. It would fry their tiny brains to mush. And in many ways, @jack's tweet about setting up a twttr—our own personal "Arrival of a Train"—needed to be exactly as basic as it was: too trailblazing, too hot a take about how liking Adele is actually extremely political, too viral a photo of someone rearranging items to spell out "DICKCUNT," and we'd all die, unable to cope with these hyper-hot future tweets. We had to start from nothing to become something. The first ever tweet—shit in every conceivable way—is a monolith-like statue to what we came from, and what we have become. "Just setting up my twttr" is the monkey from which all this mess evolved.

Twitter is ten today, and its invention has been—as a lot of people are apt to tell you—more or less a good thing. There is the Arab Spring, the fact that it has made us all woke. How it has slowly evolved into the most up-to-date news source on the planet. How people are meeting boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, and husbands on this thing. Getting jobs. When I moved to London seven years ago and knew literally nobody, Twitter was one of my primary sources of making friends, and we are almost—almost—at a point where admitting that isn't deeply, deeply embarrassing. Pretty much every half-decent career break I have ever had is due to the website. I also have a blue checkmark on there now that means when I complain to any companies, they get a little notification. There are something like 6,000 tweets a second sent today, 500 million a day. 200 billion tweets per year. On the whole: Twitter good. But we need to get on our knees and remember where we came from, pay service to our archaic biblical text. We came from a really bad tweet.

Follow Joel on Twitter.


This Woman Is Visiting Every Location of the UK’s Biggest Pub Chain to Honour Her Late Husband

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Mags Thomson in The Mossy Well, Muswell Hill. All photos by Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There's a unique atmosphere in Wetherspoons—the British pub chain akin to Buffalo Wild Wings or Applebees franchises in the US—on weekday mornings. Without music or the bustle of a busy evening, the pub I'm in feels remarkably still, the silence only broken by the occasional plod of pint glass on table.

I'm not here for a pint, though, or a reasonably priced chicken korma. I'm at the Mossy Well in Muswell Hill to speak to Mags Thomson, a 67-year-old from Livingston, Scotland, who at the time of our meeting has visited 992 JD Wetherspoon branches, including 80 that have since closed down. It's her ambition, and intention, to visit every single 'Spoons in the UK.

I drop into a sofa opposite Thomson and her friend Evelyn, who's joining her on this trip. "Aye, I've not been to this one before," she says. "It only opened back in October, but it's lovely!"

The most pressing question, as far as I see it, is just how you go about visiting every Wetherspoons in the country; new branches open up seemingly every fortnight, the majority of them hundreds of miles from Thomson's home. "Well, I'm retired now," she explains, "which is good, because this is basically a full-time job. But before I retired, I was a personal secretary, and I organized trips for my bosses, so I suppose that helps. To make a trip worthwhile, I need to visit at least seven Wetherspoons."

There's a red plastic folder and a pamphlet titled "Wetherspoons Directory" on the table in front of Thomson; the directory contains just under 1,000 pubs. "The ones highlighted in green are the ones I've been to," she says. Scanning the list, which contains Wetherspoons from Leicester to Llandudno, I can't find one that hasn't been marked.

When I ask what's in the folder, Thomson pulls out extensive printed maps of London and Windsor, where she and Evelyn are off to tomorrow for the second day of their south coast 'Spoons tour. "That's nothing," laughs Evelyn, pointing to the pile of maps. "It's normally a much fatter stack."

Evelyn (left) and Mags Thomson

There's something classically eccentric about Thomson's mission. It's the "and finally" segment at the end of the local news—the little boxout on the cover on women's magazines. But sitting opposite Thomson, it quickly becomes clear that this isn't going to be a conversation of wry smiles and ironic remarks about the curry club. When she tells me about the the Watering Barn in St. Albans, or the raised standard of the toilets in the recently-restored pubs, I feel surprisingly involved. These trips to Wetherspoons seem to make her genuinely, profoundly happy, and the more we talk—and the more one name continues to crop up—I begin to understand why.

"My late husband Ian was a railway enthusiast," says Thomson. "I used to stand on platforms with him, but it got quite boring, so I went to wander down Reading High Street. I saw this pub and just thought it looked quite nice. I went in and phoned Ian to tell him where I was."

Ian came to meet her, and they drank a few glasses of beer together. As they left, Thomson noticed the words under the pub sign: JD Wetherspoon. She had found her answer to Ian's trainspotting hobby. "At first, we'd go on holiday, and wherever we went, we'd look for Wetherspoons pubs," she says. "But then we turned it round—we looked to see where the Wetherspoons pubs were and hooked the holiday around that."

For the best part of 16 years, Mags and Ian Thomson traveled the country together, one chasing trains, the other 'Spoons. Then, in July of 2010, Ian died.

"Initially, I was terrified of being in the house on my own, so I had to deal with that first," says Thomson. "Then there was going into the center of Livingston, getting motivated to get up, get ready, and go into town. You lose all your confidence when something like that happens."

Thomson spent two years in Livingston, hardly leaving the house, let alone visiting pubs. However, while she'd taken a break, the ever-expanding 'Spoons empire hadn't—between 2010 and 2012, 13 new branches opened up in Scotland alone. Thomson knew she wanted to hit the Wetherspoons trail again, but it was only when a friend suggested she try a visit to Newcastle—a short train ride away from Livingston—that she felt confident enough to take that first trip away on her own. "There were times on that train journey that I thought, I can't do this, but I put that to the back of my mind," she says.

Happily, the mini-break worked. "As soon as I got back, I couldn't wait to get away again," says Thomson. The Wetherspoons tour was back on.

There's clearly something poignant in all of this, how a pastime Thomson enjoyed with her late husband has now become a tribute to his memory. But as a means of coping with grief, it's also an admirably head-on tactic. Thomson is not distracting herself with these visits. Her trips are unequivocally a celebration of her late husband—a lived expression of their friendship, played out alone over half pints of cider in pubs up and down the country. It allows Thomson to both mourn and move on. "I'm finding now that, in many Wetherspoons I go to, I have my memories from when I visited with Ian, alongside new memories of my own," she says.

We rarely choose the places that matter to us. Perhaps, if we could, we'd opt for iconic landmarks, or beauty spots, or sites of cultural significance. Put simply: We probably wouldn't choose Wetherspoons. But we don't get to choose. We stumble in somewhere to get out of the rain, or because our car's broken down, or because our husband's out photographing trains. And only later, once time has passed, do we realize exactly what some fuzzy patterned carpet and sticky brown tables actually mean to us.

"I met a photographer once for the Wetherspoon News , who suggested we meet at the North Western in Liverpool," says Thomson. "I didn't realize before I arrived that it was the pub on Lime Street station concourse, a pub I'd visited with Ian when it was a steam-rail bar, long before it was a Wetherspoons."

Thomson recalls entering the new Wetherspoons and the moment that connection suddenly dawned on her. "They'd kept all the railway stuff—all the way up the stairwell were these pictures of trains," she says. "I was nearly in tears."

I ask Thomson if she felt like her husband was with her. "Aye," she responds. "And my late son, he was a railway enthusiast as well." She explains that her son died from a sudden pulmonary embolism 18 years ago, at 26 years old. "His name was Brian," she adds. "It should have been spelled with a 'y,' but Ian forgot and spelled it wrong."

As a window into the state of a nation, you could do worse than visiting every Wetherspoons in the country; they're absolutely everywhere. Thomson can't pick a favorite, though, because, she says, the people in each one she's visited have all been equally warm and hospitable. "I couldn't say I have a favorite part of the country, because people talk to me wherever I go—whether they compliment my earrings, or just ask if I'm alright on my own," she says. "They give me space, but are just letting me know they know I'm there."

Before we get up to leave, Thomson and Evelyn eager to continue their tour of north London's 'Spoons, I ask Thomson exactly what it is about the first Wetherspoons that stuck with her. She stops for a second and thinks. "I just felt at ease," she says. "I always feel that way in Wetherspoons."

Follow Angus Harrison on Twitter.


Mohammed Abad, the Man with a Prosthetic Penis, Has Finally Lost His Virginity at 44

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Mohammed Abad. Screen grab via Barcroft TV

At the beginning of this year we reported some very important news: a man with a revolutionary bionic penis was about to lose his virginity. Mohammed Abad, a 44-year-old security guard from Edinburgh, was left without a working penis after being dragged under a car as a child. Making do with a rudimentary fleshy tube for the best part of four decades, he finally underwent surgery in 2012 to have a £70,000 prosthetic penis fitted, which he could pump up via a button hidden on one of his testicles.

By January of this year, Abad's new junk was finally ready to go. He didn't go into a huge amount of technical detail in his interview with the Sun, but presumably you have to give new genitalia a couple of years to "take"? Either way, he said, the eight-inch bionic penis contains two tubes that fill up with liquid from his stomach after he presses his testicle button, and the shaft is moulded out of flesh from his arm.

"I got out of hospital and got a train back up to Scotland. I had to keep it erect for two weeks," he said on This Morning. "I had to do that for it to heal, because that's the way it works. My old penis didn't go to waste—my surgeon used it to make my scrotum."

Excited and eager to use his new equipment, he told reporters in January, "I have waited long enough for this—it'll be a great start to the new year. My penis is working perfectly now so I just want to do it. I'm really excited. I can't wait for it to finally happen."

Tragically, less than a week later, the plan had to be pushed back. Abad was involved in a car crash, scuppering his plans to belatedly get laid for the first time ever, and—you'd imagine—making him really fucking hate cars. A friend told the Sun, "After everything he's been through, this is the last thing he needs. Luckily the middle of his body was fine."

Almost three months later, Abad was ready to get back to it. Political candidate and winner of the 2013 Sex Worker of the Year award, Charlotte Rose, got in touch with him when she'd heard about his plight and had offered to help out, by helping him to lose his virginity.

"I wanted someone who was willing to accept me the way I was," said Abad. "I'm a learner. I've got L plates. I didn't want to go in all guns blazing and make an idiot of myself."

The pair were supposed to hook up before Abad's car crash, so they reconnected sometime earlier this month and spent a couple of days getting to know each other in a London hotel, before finally attempting the main event. Unfortunately, on the first night, the testicle pump didn't work and Abad's penis failed to inflate. The next evening, however, everything went according to plan.

"When Charlotte saw it for the first time, she was silent and I was a bit worried," said Abad. "But then she said, 'It's incredible.' It's nice to hear a lady say that. After it was over, I lay there with a big smile on my face."

Rose—who helped Abad out for free, despite her usual rate of £160 per hour—told the Sun, "In the end, he lasted for an hour and three-quarters." She said she was honored to be asked, "because your first time is a memory in your life you never forget."

Abad still has one testicle, meaning he can produce sperm and, if he wants to, father children.

"I've got an outpatient appointment on October 1, when my doctor is going discussing what he's going to do in future," he said to Phillip Schofield on This Morning. "But he knows what my testosterone levels are, he knows what my sperm count is. It's probably better than yours."

The Greatest Moments of 'BioShock'

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Some will tell you that BioShock is one of the greatest games of all time. Others, that its second sequel, BioShock Infinite, is worthy of such an accolade. A handful of maybe-not-quite-right people—people like VICE contributor Ed Smith—they'll argue the case for the middle entry in 2K's dark, dystopian first-person shooter series.

But the fact is this: BioShock, as a series, is far from infallible. How it plays isn't unlike a hundred other titles in its genre. The original game's revival system made it too easy, while the morality at play—do you save or "harvest" its Little Sisters—was too basically black and white for it to be an effective mechanic after a third encounter. The sequel begins incredibly slowly, taking too long to connect the player with the cause of Subject Delta's mission; while Infinite trod dangerously close to aligning, basically, all religion with nefarious intentions.

BioShock is, however, a collection of games featuring a number of stunning moments, memorable enough to have players forget the weaker aspects of their adventures both underwater and in the clouds. Moments like these.

Spoilers, obviously.

The Rapture reveal ('BioShock')

Where else to begin but at the beginning? BioShock's opening finds the player character, Jack, in great peril, seemingly the sole survivor of a mid-Atlantic plane crash. Fiery debris is all around him; and in a gap in the flames, a lighthouse. Or, at least, that's what it looks like. Inside is a bathysphere. Jack gets inside, and it automatically takes him down to the seafloor setting for games one and two: Rapture.

It's hardly uncommon to read about certain game worlds being as much a character as any playable avatars, or individuals they meet on their journey from titles to credits. But with Rapture, BioShock writer Ken Levine realized a truly intoxicating environment, a utopia built in the 1940s, by the Objectivist Andrew Ryan, far away from the reach of government control. By the time Jack reaches it, and us with him, it's 1960 and something terrible has happened in Rapture—but all the same, it remains a place where player daydreams can dance through ruined corridors. As the game proceeds, so the story of this once-fantastical city beneath the sea unfolds. But it's how it's revealed to us, physically, that lasts longest in the memory.

And later, the return to Rapture ('BioShock Infinite')

BioShock Infinite takes place in the floating, militant city-state of Columbia, decades prior to the events of the first game. Columbia drifts through the skies above America—and beyond—carried by blimps and balloons and driven by reactors and propellers, and something called quantum levitation. None of that really matters, though, because save for being a bit closer to the clouds, little about Columbia made it feel different to any settlement built on terra firma.

It was natural to be missing Rapture as you played through Infinite's save-the-girl, stop-the-despot plot. While you're never fearful of the pressure of so much salt water coming down on top of you, navigating Columbia nevertheless carries other stresses—it's a terrifically racist place, where people of color are forced to work menial jobs, and, in some locations, kept as nothing more than slaves. So when the game reached its ending, a sudden "return" to Ryan's underwater refuge was both a surprise and incredibly refreshing.

That aforementioned girl is Elizabeth, and she has a unique power—she can open "tears" between dimensions. She's also not all she seems, and is closer to the player character, Booker DeWitt, than initial appearances could ever have you believe. But that's another highlight of the games; this one is the snap back to Rapture, which serves both to destroy a boss enemy, trapped outside the city and crushed by the pressure, and move the plot onwards to its wonderful ocean of lighthouses. "What do you mean, 'This is a doorway'?"

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new film, 'Walking Heavy'

An ocean of lighthouses ('BioShock Infinite')

"See? They're not stars. They're doors. To everywhere. All that's left is the choosing. There are a million, million worlds. All different, all similar. Constants and variables. There's always a lighthouse, there's always a man, there's always a city."

And just like that, we're back to Jack. We're back to the lighthouse, the bathysphere. We're back to Rapture. Constants, and variables. More on that, in just a moment.

The first Little Sister ('BioShock')

BioShock came out early in the life cycle of the previous generation of consoles, back in the distant haze of summer 2007. Gamers were quickly getting used to a new level of realism in visuals, but there was something so very unsettling, so queasy and discomforting, about how the Little Sisters were depicted.

These are children, all girls, who've been genetically altered by Dr. Tenenbaum using a substance called ADAM, obtained from sea slugs—and they each have one of these slugs within their stomachs. Long story short: they're not sweet, innocent things. Their eyes alone give that much away.

The Little Sisters' ADAM is of great value to Jack, so upon doing away with the Sister in question's guardian—the cover-featured Big Daddy is just one of many, and almost every Little Sister is trailed by one of these bullet-sponge brutes—he's given a choice. Murder the girl to extract all the ADAM she has; or remove her slug safely, for less of a reward but the satisfaction of knowing you did a good deed. It's a decision you have to make several times in BioShock, but the first time carries with it real cause for pause. Can you kill this terrified creature before you? Perhaps it'd be better that way. She's not a real girl after all—but perhaps she could be, in time? And do you want to make an enemy of Tenenbaum? It's up to you.

And then there's the Big Sisters ('BioShock 2')

The Little Sisters have no way of protecting themselves should their Big Daddy fall. The second BioShock featured new female characters, though, that could very much take care of themselves. The Big Sisters are the result of their smaller relatives growing up, reaching puberty, and going a tiny bit off the rails. Which is one way of saying they're incredibly aggressive, and you, as the Big Daddy Subject Delta, have to be prepared to face one. Thankfully, BioShock 2 notifies you when there's one on the way, giving you just a little time, seconds really, to lay traps and secure entry and exit points. That screeching: that's her, coming for you. Get ready, or get dying.

Elizabeth dancing, without a care in the world ('BioShock Infinite')

If you watched the video above, you'll see the violence that's so prevalent across the BioShock games. Infinite is perhaps the most visually distressing of the three main entries, causing some critics around the time of its 2013 release to consider it a detracting factor in the game's overall appeal. It's easy to argue that the game's graphic imagery, be it thematically justified or otherwise, adversely affects the effectiveness of its compelling storyline, because it does.

But amid the carnage—well, before it kicks off, really—there are wonderful asides of calm, like this one. Down by the "beach," Elizabeth kicking up the dust, her eyes filled with wonder. As well they should be, given she'd previously been locked away in a tower her whole life, like a Rapunzel without the whole hair problem.

"God Only Knows" ('BioShock Infinite')

And here's another of those calm-before-the-storm moments that's just a bit, melt. You're just minding your business, having recently arrived in Columbia, and a barbershop quartet, The Bee Sharps, shows up on a floating barge, as church bells ring out in the distance. The game doesn't make you stick around for the entire song. But you will.

Every second in the company of Sander Cohen ('BioShock')

BioShock is mostly go here, get this, kill them, open that. But for a small section, you, Jack, get to spend time in the company of the Rapture's most uniquely twisted resident, artist Sander Cohen.

Also a musician, playwright, and poet, Cohen interrupts Jack's communication with Frank Fontaine to begin some puppet-master fetch-questing around Fort Frolic, Rapture's decayed social space once full of bars and boutiques. But where there was once life, now death has become art, as Cohen trapped the area's inhabitants before coating them in plaster to create sick, squishy-on-the-inside statues. He makes Jack roam around taking photos of the recently deceased for an art installation, his masterpiece. "It seems you've got the eye of the shutterbug, little moth."

Cohen's a rarity in video gaming: he's a major character in a massive title, and a homosexual. He refers to Rapture founder Ryan as "the man I once loved," while his make-up is directly inspired by Joan Crawford in 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. He's also absolutely mad, and fairly hilarious. But, mostly, he's terrifically, terrifyingly insane, and a complete original. Do not test the attention span of his muse, little moth, or he'll put Tchaikovsky on, and then you're fucked. (Skip ahead to the two-minute mark in the video below.)

Elizabeth's little finger ('BioShock Infinite')

Right, so, in case I wasn't clear earlier, there's a much more intimate connection between Booker and Elizabeth than Infinite lets on, until its final phases. The "AD" tattooed on his hand? That stands for Anna DeWitt, his daughter. Elizabeth is Anna DeWitt. Look, "spoilers" was written in bold up there, so you can't say you weren't warned.

Booker, at the lowest of low points in a life of downers, hands his daughter, his one child, over to Infinite's primary antagonist, Zachary Comstock—who's also Booker but, well, this article's long enough already—in exchange for having all of his debts paid off. But his better self takes over, and he struggles to grab Anna back, just as a tear—a portal between dimensions—is closing around the clashing parties. Anna reaches out for her father, but she disappears on the other side of the tear—save for her little finger, the end of which is sliced off. As a result, she's able to move between dimensions, between realities—as a part of her exists in more than one of them.

This revelation comes right at the end of the game. Before then, Elizabeth will talk about her smaller-than-usual pinkie. "It's as much a mystery to me as anyone else," she says. "I get to wear this stylish thimble to cover up my hideous deformity. I hear they're all the rage in Paris." And when we learn the truth, this, this on my cheek? It's just... I just came inside, and it's raining out. What?

When it all links back to Jack ('BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, Episode II')

Burial at Sea is the two-part DLC for Infinite, casting you first as a version of Booker, operating as a PD in Rapture, and later as Elizabeth, who's been killed in an alternative reality but continues to live as all her "other" selves have collapsed into one. Yeah, the story gets pretty timey-wimey, to lift an expression from the scripts of Doctor Who.

At the end of episode two, Elizabeth comes face to face with Atlas, aka our old "pal" Frank Fontaine, who wishes to bring Andrew Ryan's son to Rapture to do away with the dad he doesn't yet know he has. See, Jack's had a phrase implanted, an activation code, and on seeing or hearing it, he will begin a rampage that can only end in cracking pop's skull open with a golf putter. Atlas makes sure Jack gets the message, right when his plane's above an access point to Rapture—and so the final passage of play in the BioShock series (to date) loops back to its starting point.

"Would you kindly?" ('BioShock')

We have a whole other article on this. Go have a read.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Stalkers, S&M, and the Secret Cabaret: Inside London's 'House of Magic'

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All photos by Jake Lewis unless specified otherwise

Somewhere in the darkest reaches of the district of Kennington, an oft-forgotten speck near the bottom of London's Northern Line, is a house. A place that has remained secret for the best part of 20 years, only revealing itself to those with a taste for the occult and arcane (and a confirmation email in their inbox).

It is Simon Drake's House of Magic, a hush-hush dinner and show spectacular inside a grandiose and peculiarly-decorated converted pub. The attraction is the brainchild of Drake, a magician who appeared on television in the early 1990s in his macabre, S&M-tinged Channel 4 program The Secret Cabaret.

"I wrote a proposal for a late-night thing for Channel 4. It involved the dark side of magic—secrets and vampire hunters. It involved S&M and brutality," says Drake when I ask about the show. "With that character I could do very violent, malevolent things without it seeming cheesy. It was very minimal—I didn't say anything. Not smiley or, 'Tah dah!' It was a completely new format."

The Secret Cabaret. Photo courtesy of Simon Drake

However, life on TV wasn't for Simon; a series of unfortunate events forced the now 59-year-old performer to call it a day.

"People were recognizing me, and for the first week that was fantastic, but then after that it was a pain in the arse," he says. "I couldn't go anywhere without people shouting, 'Show us a trick, Simon!' There was also loads of fan mail and weird stalker stuff. One was last seen stabbing a poster of me on the wall of the Hackney Empire with a kitchen knife because I refused to take her home with me."

The problems didn't end with the obsessive fans, or the shouty strangers, or the random mugs asking for free card tricks in the street. Ultimately, it was the inner workings of TV that irked Drake to the point of leaving it all behind.

"I got fed up of making millionaires out of people I considered to be unprincipled," he says. "If you want to be exploited, go into TV—somewhere where people make millions from your idea and you only make thousands. It's nothing new."


The garden at the House of Magic

Simon Drake's foray into the world of magic began long before all this, as the result of a childhood illness.

"I was sick when I was young—I had perforations in one ear, and when it burst I was quite ill for a long time," says Drake. "It was painful and I was deaf for quite a while; my nickname was 'What?' when I was a kid. I became fascinated with visual things because talking, reading, and hearing was difficult for me. My first was to be a clown, and then a stunt man. I was falling down stairs at five years old very proficiently."

While Drake had always wanted to get involved in the performative side of the entertainment industry, his first real taste of the business came in the form of a job plugging records to radio stations for Decca Records—the "dirtiest job in the music industry," he says.

Working his way up the ladder, he began performing low-paid magic shows to help pay the rent. Then, eventually, came the TV show and the subsequent decision to give it all up.

The House of Magic, Drake's altar to the strange, filled with trinkets, collectables, and a chintzy basement featuring zip-wire floating heads (a direct jab at the expensive organized terror of The London Dungeon), came about by chance.

"I didn't even plan this," he says. "I had so many props and illusions after The Secret Cabaret ended. There was a couple of tons of stuff, and I couldn't keep it all in my semi in Chiswick, so I sold and looked out for a warehouse or an old church hall. I looked up the council housing list, and at the bottom there was this pub called the Surrey Garden Arms. We had a look at it and it was awful, full of crack pipes and dead rats. But it had this huge function room upstairs, so I put an offer in and got it. I was up against a property developer."

Drake speaks fondly of Kennington, and bemoans the systematic desecration of community that's been taking place across London as councils continue to put profits above the interests of their residents. "I like the authenticity of the people here," he says. "I was sent to a military school at seven, so everyone spoke very plummy—young David Cameron types."

Part of what makes the House of Magic a special night out is its classicism. There are bawdy, Carry-On-esque gags, and as it's Drake's actual home there's a distinct family feeling to it, especially among the staff and table magicians who've been hand picked and molded over years of service.

As for the show, I don't really want to spoil it. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the place is its total secrecy, something that—in a time where everything is subjected to a Time Out star rating and trending topic supernova within minutes of opening—is nothing short of a miracle.

British showmanship has a special kind of easy-going quality to it—the kind of approach that wouldn't work in the US, where loud, flashy brashness tends to be favored over subtlety, especially when it comes to magic shows (Penn & Teller being a good example).

Simon Drake knows this, which is why he's dedicated his post-TV career to entertaining in a way that utilizes that sense of secrecy he's worked so hard to cultivate, inviting his audience into this mysterious converted pub and making them feel like they're witnessing something they shouldn't be witnessing.

And, he says, he has no plans to change: "America's Got Talent rang me up and asked me to be on the show. I said, 'I'm not American, fuck off.'"

Follow Joe on Twitter.

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A Winnipeg Teen was Disciplined for Wearing ‘Gang Paraphernalia’

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This is the kind of "gang paraphernalia" the Winnipeg School Division is worried about. Photo via Urban Planet

A special needs high school student from Winnipeg was reportedly suspended for wearing "gang clothing" that turned out to be a baseball cap sold at Urban Planet.

Cadan Walterson, 17, is a Grade 12 student at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate. His mother, Victoria, told the CBC he recently went to school wearing a hat featuring a "black and white bandana pattern" that she'd purchased for him at Urban Planet inside the local mall. But Cadan was pulled aside by school administrators, his mother said, and was told he was violating Winnipeg School Division's clothing policy by wearing "gang paraphernalia."

"He was really upset about it," Walterson said, noting her son has an intellectual disability and functions socially at the level of the sixth-grader. "He's not a gang member, he's a special needs student in a special ed class."

Radean Carter, a spokeswoman Winnipeg School Division (WSD), told the CBC the hat was taken away from Cadan, and he was warned not to wear it again but wasn't suspended. She said the WSD updated its code of conduct in 2014 to include the following clause:

"Gang involvement or gang insignia will not be tolerated on school sites or WSD property."

Carter said the reference to "insignia" is "to protect students from inadvertently putting themselves or other students at risk."

In response, YM, the company that makes the hats and also supplies apparel to racy companies like Suzy Shier and Bluenotes, said it's simply keeping up with a "popular print... that can be found on everything thing from running shoes to women's swimwear."

"We are selling mainstream fashion, not gang clothing."

Organized experts have pointed out that most gang members are smart enough not to brand themselves in obvious ways these days.

"They're not the street gangs of West Side Story," Robert Gordon, a Simon Fraser University criminology professor, told VICE in an interview about Calgary gangs.

"The last time there was any significant street gang activity with people running around wearing different colours—that sort of classic American inner urban street gang activity—we haven't had that since the late 80s, early 90s."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

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