10:00 AM

When I walked into the emergency room at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Jerry Springer was playing on a flat-screen bolted to the wall.

"Do you think your boyfriend or girlfriend is having sex with one of your family members?" Jerry asked.

The rows of metallic chairs in the small, DMV-drab room all faced the TV, and the theme of the show, at one point, was "Tranny Take Downs," in which the introduction of a transgender man or woman is the surprise in a love tryst. The studio audience was loving it, and for the next few hours, as kids ran around and one woman wiped away tears, this trash television was our sole source of entertainment.

As I quietly took my seat, I glanced up at the posters on the beige, brick wall. One reassured patients of security measures taken with the New York City Police Department to keep this room safe (there have been brawls in the past); another advised patients on what to do if they didn't have health insurance. A ticker up front endlessly scrolled by, like a neon sign at a bad cellphone store: "ACTIVE SHOOTER SEMINAR. GANG AWARENESS."

Sitting at the eastern edge of Brooklyn, far from the waterfront condos of Williamsburg, Brownsville is best known to the rest of the city for carrying two troubled trophies: its generations-long low income levels, and its historically high crime rates. Nearly 40 percent of its citizens live below the poverty line—an enduring economic degradation that is apparent the minute you get off the subway here. In the first half of 2014, there were more shootings in Brownsville's 73rd Precinct than all of Manhattan. So far this year, there have been five—and there were six this time last year.

It is amid this backdrop that Brookdale—the only hospital in a two-mile radius, with its patch of plain-beige, no-frills facilities—operates.

Amongst its residents, who are proud of living in Brownsville, but not the grim realities that come with it, Brookdale has a bad rep, and I knew that going in. When I told a friend of mine, who was born in Brownsville, what I was doing, he smirked, and replied, "I was born in Brookdale... well, somewhere in Brookdale. I don't think it was in a delivery room." And online, the reviews were just as harsh: "If I could give no star at all and pull the switch to shut this bitch down...," one patient wrote on Google, ominously.

In many ways, Brookdale's emergency room—which is one of the busiest in New York City, with 100,000 visits annually, a hospital spokesperson later told me—acts as a bizarro microcosm of the world outside those doors.

At my other job, as a crime reporter for the New York Times, I had been here twice before. The first was two summers ago, after the stabbing of a six-year-old boy in nearby East New York. A group of reporters, myself included, stood outside of Brookdale at 1:00 AM, watching as the boy was rushed inside from the ambulance, covered in bedsheets so no photos could be taken. He would die of his wounds a few hours later. Then, in February, I returned to the hospital after a man who shot two police officers was brought here. He would survive.

In many ways, Brookdale's emergency room—which is one of the busiest in New York City, with 100,000 visits annually, a hospital spokesperson later told me—acts as a bizarro microcosm of the world outside those doors. It serves as another cog in these cycles of violence and poverty, offering a front-row seat into the struggles of an underprivileged neighborhood in modern America. Here, you can actually see the inequalities of a healthcare system that favors the highest payer, burdening an area which, arguably, needs it to work the most.

As the morning rush began, I met an older man named Mark Thomas*, who lived in nearby Crown Heights, and was waiting outside for a friend to get off work. When I told him that I was staying at an ER for an entire day, he quickly replied, "Well, you came to the right place."

Thomas said he stopped coming to Brookdale years ago, after his mother and father both died here, situations he argued could've been avoided had it not been for long wait times and faulty medical care. In the past, the Brookdale ER has been assailed with claims of malpractice like these: One 2011 investigation said a patient had to wait over three hours to be given pain medication for a back and knee injury, amongst other horror stories. That same year, a newborn died to an apparent antibiotic overdose in the ER.

Now, Thomas goes to Kings County Hospital, in East Flatbush—a city-run hospital two miles away that numerous patients later referenced to me as a reliable Plan B. "They don't care about anyone here," Thomas told me. "And it's been like that forever."

He continued, voicing the same sentiments that I'd hear throughout the day: "Honestly, at this point, they need to shut this place down."

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4:00 PM

By the afternoon, I was anxious to hear the results of the lie-detector test. It was the third or fourth mind-numbing episode of Springer, and the room had grown interested. Several individuals who were waiting, along with the security guard on duty, chuckled to themselves and jeered as fights broke out onstage. They had become part of the studio audience—which, in this room, was a surprisingly solid way to pass the long lapses of time.

The ER waiting room in Brookdale has four service windows. Most of the time, two or three employees are seated there, behind glass, fielding the stream of incoming patients, most of whom, from what I heard and those I spoke with, had little to no healthcare. Once they take their seat, a door to the rest of the hospital eventually opens, and a nurse calls their name. Those with something urgent, or those who arrive by ambulance, are prioritized, or what the hospital calls "fast-tracked."

That is, of course, if everything goes smoothly. By most accounts, that doesn't usually happen.

According to data gathered by ProPublica between April 2013 and March 2014, Brookdale's figures—for wait times, transfers, and ultimately securing a room in the general hospital—were way above the national and state averages. Specifically, in the ER, a person typically had to wait 53 minutes before being seen by a doctor. In New York, the average is 27 minutes. Across the country? 24.

I started to notice this distinction in real-time by the early afternoon, as a handful of people who were seated on the uncomfortable rows next to me had been there for over an hour. My questions of wait times were met with an eye roll and a sigh, as if this delay were expected. One woman went up to the door leading to the ER, and asked, in a hollow tone, "Hello?" Others just bided their time, watching Jerry Springer.

Outside, I spoke with a 28-year-old named Steward Rhodes, who was here with his friend, Shawn, to apply for disability. Rhodes told me that in 2006 he was shot at a barbecue in Brownsville, and he had been treated here, at Brookdale. Two years later, he said, after suffering from back pain, he discovered that one of the bullets was accidentally left in him, and the wound was now infected. Years later, he still walks with a limp. (Due to federally mandated privacy restrictions, the hospital cannot disclose patient histories.)

"If you want to die, you come here," Rhodes told me. He added, "It's always been like that. But where else am I gonna go?" His friend Shawn interjected: "It's Brooklyn!"

One woman went up to the door leading to the ER, and asked, in a hollow tone, "Hello?" Others just bided their time, watching Jerry Springer.

There are many people who have been blamed for how Brookdale got like this. The patients told me it's the hospital's management, not the doctors or nurses themselves. In 2011, the New York Daily News reported that the hospital was cited in inspections as having a litany of infractions, ranging from infants being left unattended in rooms to privacy infringements. And, in 2012, the former CEO of the hospital's parent company was even convicted of bribing state legislators to gain profit.

Earlier in the day, Thomas recounted the troubles that the community hospital has faced financially over the past few years, starting first with the 2009 layoff of 240 doctors, nurses, and medical workers. "That was huge," he told me. "People came back from the weekend and found out that their jobs were just gone." That was followed by an additional cut of 114 employees the following year. The millions of dollars in long-term debt that the hospital had incurred led employees to even reportedly swipe toilet paper from patients' rooms in 2012.

The employees themselves have previously said poor financial planning is at fault for how the hospital operates—or, perhaps, doesn't operate. The healthcare employees union, 1199 SEIU, which represents thousands of Brookdale workers, has had issues with the administration in the past: In 2011, SEIU workers temporarily lost their own healthcare as a result of backed-up payments on behalf of the hospital's parent company. Patients also voiced complaints of personnel—something I heard from the staff myself while I was eating lunch at the hospital's diner: "We're always either understaffed, or overstaffed here," two nurses behind me grumbled.

As talks of closing down Brookdale have recently intensified, the hospital received $158 million in state grants to stay afloat in 2014, which, a hospital spokesperson told me, was used for capital projects and ongoing operations. There have also been murmurs from Governor Andrew Cuomo's office, which set aside $700 million in capital funds for this purpose last year, to build a brand new plant to replace Brookdale and two other failing facilities in eastern and central Brooklyn—a proposal that SEIU, according to its policy and legislative director, Helen Schaub, is working toward.

"It's really a vital hospital, and I think everyone understands that it needs to continue to be there, and there needs to be a high-quality emergency room, in addition to other medical services, in that community," Schaub told me in an interview, days after I visited Brookdale. "Because it's quite far from any other facility.

"I think the members recognize a lot of problems with the physical plant, and many are there because they live in the community and are very dedicated to providing services to the community," she added later. "But I think they understand that it's difficult to do that because of the financial and physical condition the hospital is in."

A new hospital attached to a larger network, Schaub argued, could lead to higher reimbursement rates and the return of old clients who were displeased with Brookdale, like Thomas. But, she continued, it must also be coupled with the support of neighborhood clinics and primary care physicians (of which many patients I spoke with did not have), so people aren't sitting in the ER for antibiotics. In the meantime, Brookdale has created a grant-funded urgent care unit—which offers medical assistance to non-life-threatening and less serious illnesses, like the common cold and the flu—across the street.

A spokesperson for the hospital said that roughly 86 percent of Brookdale's patients were Medicaid and Medicare recipients. And, under new Affordable Care Act provisions, doctors are incentivized to stay away from Medicaid programs, thereby setting off a chain reaction, which puts the average Brownsville resident—and taxpayer, for that matter—in a perpetual bind: less primary care doctors, worse care, more people ending up in the expensive emergency room.

And, since hospitals rely on their patients' healthcare spending, Brownsville's overall poverty is almost structurally designed to inhibit Brookdale. In turn, richer Brooklynites balk at the idea of coming to a place like this. And that is why white, middle-class folk like myself rarely see ERs quite like this.

Throughout the night, the two lone vending machines in the waiting room weren't enough, so I would leave the ER, and head to the hospital's diner around the corner to refuel with coffee and food. The main lobby of Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center exists in direct contrast to the ER. Actually, it's like what the ER of Brookdale should look like: the colors, lively; the aesthetic, refreshingly modern—according to a spokesperson, it was repainted by the hospital itself, and a local assemblyman paid for disability upgrades. (The diner, which was created and funded by a tenant separate from the hospital, is also solid, offering a variety of wraps and salads that you can enjoy alongside doctors stuck on the graveyard shift.)

But going back and forth between the lobby and the ER was a constant reality check. The ER is the most important room here, and as a result of circumstance, the worst one to be in. And you can feel that dismal dichotomy: While this nicer facility exists in the very same hospital, it's not what most Brownsville residents will get to see. Some told me they didn't even know it existed.

I thought about this when discussing hospital care in New York with a woman named Donna, who wouldn't give her last name, around sundown. Donna had been waiting for an hour to hear back about a debilitating stomach ache she had. The Brownsville resident, who lived in a public housing project nearby, generally liked Brookdale—she gave birth to her two sons here—but spoke nostalgically of the times she's visited Columbia University Medical Center, in Manhattan's Washington Heights. "It's just so clean, and beautiful," she said, admiringly.

"Why is it always in Manhattan?" Donna asked, sternly. "Why can't we have that here?"

10:00 PM

Every so often during our conversation, Victor Rivera, 21, would hop on one foot to the window and ask the nurse what was going on. Rivera's ankle was the size of an avocado; he had sprained it playing basketball, and one of his friends brought the Brownsville native to Brookdale immediately after. Rivera had hopped his way in here just before 7 PM, as the room started to fill with the evening crowd.

When I asked if he had been here before, Rivera replied, "I was born here!" We then dove into all sorts of random shit—he was a big Bernie guy, so, naturally, we spoke at length about the prospects of a Trump presidency. Our conversation then shifted to video games, movies, and how his ankle would affect his new lifeguard job.

Rivera, I quickly learned, knew that you had to pass the time somehow here. But nearly two hours of Trump talk later, I had almost forgotten that we were in an emergency room, and this kid was still sitting here with a sprained ankle—no ice pack or meds to hold him over. (Although there are no stats for sprains, according to ProPublica, the New York State average for seeing a doctor with a broken bone is a little less than an hour.)

"I call this shit the death room," he told me. "This is worse than the DMV. I'd have my license and be driving by now."

As the night dragged on, Rivera joined the growing chorus of discontent in the waiting room. He asked a security guard to see if the doctor was coming in. (His response: "That's not my job.") One young mother, whose two sons were running around with Easter eggs, said that when she delivered her kids here, she knew to avoid the ER at all costs. Another older man named David told me that he was in the middle of having his vitals tested when a shooting victim was brought into the trauma unit. "So then they threw me back in here," he said, shrugging.

After a while, the wait times grew darkly comical, and the ER began to resemble an unruly after-school detention. Rivera would laugh with the other women when they heard no response from the staff, but eventually the laughter turned to anger. One woman started to get loud with the nurses, asking why it was taking "so fucking long." Rivera shook his head to me, and added, as a matter of fact, "There's always something crazy happening here."

I posed the same question to Paulette Forbes, an advanced imaging technologist in Brookdale's ER (and not an official hospital spokesperson), later in the week. Forbes, who is in charge of X-rays, MRIs, and other imaging procedures (which the hospital just recently upgraded), works right next to the trauma unit. "What," I asked her over the phone, "is the hold up?"

"The main reason is the sheer volume of patients we get here," she explained to me. "Let's say we're short staffed. Even if you gave us all the staffing that we need, that wouldn't resolve the issue." (According to a hospital spokesperson, the square footage of the Brookdale ER "accommodates roughly one third of the capacity that it currently sees on an annual basis.")

"Because where we're located, there is no hospital around us within a fifteen-minute radius, or timing," she continued. "The population we're serving is so vast that on any given day, even with the right patient-staff ratio, it would not solve the issue. It's just Brookdale here, and that's why Brookdale is so important to this community."

In the past, Brownsville was cast as one of the most densely populated districts in the city. And remnants of that overpopulation still remain: The massive public housing community itself serves about 21,000 people, which, according to the Nation, in 2013 was more than the entire neighborhood of Tribeca. And Forbes, a 28-year-old veteran at Brookdale, said the problem of crowding is only getting worse: With new migration to Brooklyn—a 17 percent increase between 2000 and 2013—the influx of patients is increasing, but the resources to accommodate are not.

There was a sense of ownership and pride that I heard often from patients about Brookdale.

Her fellow employees, she added, are doing the absolute best they can to keep Brookdale going. "It's not getting better here ," she argued. "That's why we're begging the politicians to release that money to us, so we can rebuild or remodel. The sooner, the better."

There was a sense of ownership and pride that I heard often from patients about Brookdale—that even Rivera, someone who was born here and passionately dislikes it, knows that this is his hospital no matter what. That, amidst its deep fissures and flaws, Brookdale could, and should, be better. That the community deserves better than this.

"Brookdale is a critical institution for our community, and we take our commitment seriously in providing high-quality healthcare to those who need it," a hospital spokesperson told me over email. "There is simply no alternative hospital in the area that could accommodate the volume of patients we treat on a daily basis. Our challenge is to continue providing first rate medical care while stabilizing our finances so that we can continue to meet the needs of our community for years to come."

I heard this from Forbes, too.

"I'm not just speaking only as an employee, but as someone who lives in the community," she told me. "If I get sick, this is where I go. I raised three children in this community. This is where we feel at home when it comes to healthcare."

She added, later, "There is no hospital right now that is as needed as Brookdale."

4:00 AM

At some point past midnight, I turned around from my seat—which was located directly in front of a marathon of Blue Bloods, the pro-cop drama starring Tom Selleck (perfect post-Springer fodder)—and realized that everyone in the waiting room was asleep. One couple on the back perched their heads on each other's shoulders. A guy behind me was passed out, drooling. And a young boy was on his mom's lap, snoozing.

Shortly after, Rivera hopped out of the waiting room with a cast on, holding crutches. He had spent a total of five hours here, and now, it was time to go home. Outside, we said our goodbyes, as police cars and ambulances rolled up.

I had been in the ER for so long that I half expected to hear my name called out. That's when I knew it was time to go. The stream of new patients began to dry up, as nurses awoke those who were sleeping, and the room slowly began to clear out. The cab drivers waiting outside were even asleep in their cars. One driver with sleepy eyes, who hung around in the foyer of the waiting room, told me, "Some nights are slow; others, not so much."

This, he said, was a slow night.

Follow John on Twitter.

*Names of non-hospital staff have been changed to protect their identities and medical records.

Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari in American Beauty

This probably comes as a shock to no one who has ever seen a film where a topless women straddles a fully-clothed man or there is an entirely irrelevant female shower scene plonked in the middle of a thriller, but this week a study revealed that women are nearly three times more likely than men to appear either nude, or partially nude, in Hollywood cinema.

We wondered whether that was also true in the UK—or does the British thespian world of well-meaning sitcoms and classical training mean that women are less likely to be asked to strip off? We spoke to three women about their experiences.

ANNA SHAFFER

Anna played Romilda Vane in the Harry Potter films and Ruby Button in Hollyoaks. She has since appeared in a range of TV shows and films in the UK including Cuckoo and Glue.

VICE: When you're reading scripts or going up for roles, do they tend to contain nude scenes?
Anna: I wouldn't say that it's typical of all scripts but it's definitely present; maybe 25 percent of the scripts I read will explicitly request nudity. Or not really request, demand. Something like, "MUST BE OKAY WITH NUDITY" in bold at the bottom. Or, lamely, "small but pivotal role, some nudity." I suppose they think breasts are usually the catalyst for a lot of really great narrative.

So do you think there's a disparity between male and female actors when it comes to nudity in roles?
In my experience, yes. Or it's a woman, fully naked, guy with his top off, which just isn't the same thing. At all. I also think, because there are so many more leading male roles than there are for women, men are able to stipulate whether or not they are willing to be nude in a production. There's a decision-making process, whereas for women it's just written like that and there's already an expectation.

Do you have a problem with it? Do you think the demand for female nudity is rooted in sexism and titillation, or is nudity just part of being an actor?
I think there's a fine line. I totally accept that nudity is part of being an actor. Everyone is nude at some point, it's rooted in reality, but when it's gratuitous it's just frustrating. You never see a gratuitous penis flapping about on-screen but I've seen so many boobies. And boobs are great, don't get me wrong, but are they always necessary? I think there's an imbalance and that's the problem.

Is there wiggle room? What happens if you request for nudity to be taken out? Have you ever felt you lost a part because of stipulations about nudity?
I was offered a role, two scenes in a "hot new show." One speaking scene and one explicit sex scene, where I needed to be topless, straddling an extra with just my skirt while he remained clothed, or at least more clothed than I was. It was a tiny role, but the production was great. My agent went back to them and said she'll do it, but is there any room on the nudity? No. No room on the nudity.

So you didn't take the role?
Such a small percentage of actors are working and I wasn't working at the time. I knew if I didn't say yes they would just offer it to someone else who would say yes. Actors are so desperate for work because it is such a grossly oversaturated and elitist industry. So I said yes. On set, I debated with the director and managed to get him to agree that I could wear my bra but wouldn't be allowed to wear my top. At the screening of the first episode, the director came up to me and said, "Hey, I'm really sorry we ended up cutting that scene." So this one scene, that I was so nervous about doing anyway, in a forest full of extras, with my top off, straddling a terrified extra who I had never met before, was cut. That was definitely a learning curve, and I think that experience is so typical to the industry. For women, nudity is expected of you as though it is no big deal. That you should want to take your top or bottoms off if it means you get the part. And usually, as it was in my case, the nudity is so gratuitous. It's used to shock the audience. People say they have to include it because sex sells, but maybe just write a better story, one that doesn't need a nervous 18-year-old's tits.

EMER KENNY

Emer is a television writer and actress. She played Zsa Zsa on EastEnders before taking roles in a string of British sitcoms including Pramface, Badults, and Beaver Falls.

VICE: So is nudity just part and parcel of going for roles?
Emer: Of course. It's normally partial nudity and it's a part of the job—your body is your tool and all that, and some characters require it. Then there are some nude scenes that feel gratuitous. It's about discerning between the two, which can be very difficult. I did my first sex scene when I was 17 and it was a partially topless scene. It was scary but it was essential to the script, the script was brilliant, and there was no way I was getting that part if I didn't do it.

So how do you do that discerning?
The good, and odd, thing is that you can negotiate what you are willing to show in the contract—you can film my lower bum cheek but not my whole ass, or, as has happened to me before, yes I will do a sex scene in a cupboard, but I want to do it from this particular angle. It's how actors protect themselves from being put in an uncomfortable position. Literally.

Do you think there's a disparity between male and female actors when it comes to all of this?
I think there certainly used to be, but then you watch something like The Affair and see that Dominic West is just as naked and having just as much sex on-screen as Ruth Wilson. Or you watch Trainwreck and John Cena is butt-naked and playing the disposable boyfriend character. I think it's changing. But if you look at the statistics, it's certainly not equal yet. Only something like 28% of speaking roles are played by women, and 56% of actresses appear in "sexualized attire." That doesn't reflect real life.

But if you're a working actress, is there much you can do about that?
If you want to work, you have to be open to it, and I don't think that any actress who chooses to do nudity should be judged for that choice, or vice versa. I remember reading that Margot Robbie said she'd never do nudity in her career, but then Martin Scorsese persuaded her otherwise for TheWolf of Wall Street. She was brilliant in that role, and it has probably brought her a huge number of opportunities, so who can blame her for adjusting her boundaries? I think you also have to look at why you don't want to do nudity. Is it because you feel like you're being taken advantage of and you disagree with it morally, or is it because you're uncomfortable in your body? Although everyone has insecurities, you have to try and let that second reason go.

MARIAH GALE

Mariah has been a stage actress since 2000. She has appeared in many Royal Shakespeare Company productions, as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet , Wendy in Wendy & Peter Pan, and as Ophelia alongside David Tennant in Hamlet. She has also had roles on radio and TV.

Read: A Bernie Sanders Victory Just Got a Little Less Impossible

Hillary Clinton has been many things: secretary of state, first lady, Grammy winner. But on Thursday morning, as she fought through the futility of swiping her Metrocard, she revealed herself to be a mere mortal—a woman struggling through the same tiny tragedies that befall all of us who have ridden and will continue to ride the New York City subway system.

It took Clinton five tries to finally get through the turnstile during her latest visit to New York. She swiped and swiped again, first too slow and then too fast and then glacially slow, all while shameful eyes and a crowd of cameras stared down upon her.

Hillary's fifth swipe was just right, so she pushed through the entrance and attempted to regain her presidential poise, but the world had seen enough.

Hillary and Bernie may face off in New York for a debate next week, each vying for the Democratic nomination with sights set on the White House, but deep down they are both just those people who hold up the lines at subway stops, Clinton struggling to swipe and Sanders just trying to cram old tokens into the machine.

Image via Flickr users sfreimark and Paula R. Lively

Contrary to the words of a late jazz great, we do not have all the time in the world. That pressure, that weight on your shoulders that you carry around with you everyday: that's your body's way of telling you that Other More Important Shit Needs Doing. You do not have hours and hours to commit to staring at a screen, navigating a fantastical virtual world, slaying monsters or flying spaceships or disassembling androids or whatever the fuck the Next Big Game demands of you.

At least, that's my situation; and I know it's one reflected by hundreds of thousands of other players of these wonderful things we call video games. It's a rare day that I finish one that can't be "beaten" in a handful of sittings, adding up to anywhere between eight and 15 hours. I manage one so-called epic game per year, usually. In 2015 it was The Witcher 3. In 2016, I suspect it might be Final Fantasy XV. You know the games I mean: the long-haul, deep-dive, life-consuming experiences that eat up evenings like they're the best Battenberg cake tasted this side of the 19th century. Or whatever sweet treat takes your fancy. I'm not about to discriminate on confections.

But we do all need a disconnect from the real world, from those stresses that twist our stomachs into knots and tense up our chest like we've got car batteries attached to our nipples. And we all pull a lazy day from time to time, right? You gotta, sometimes, just peek through the curtains and decide: fuck going out there. It's full of people, most of whom I don't like, and who smell odd. Today, it's just me, several cups of tea, and anything to do that isn't work. Which is where Awesome Games That You Can Finish In An Afternoon come into your doss-about-doing-"nothing" equation.

I've never been someone who sees a "short" video game as representing poor value for money—if I've had an absolutely glorious, genuinely moving, or palpably perplexing time with an interactive experience, hands on pad and brain engaged, then whatever the price, it's been worth it. (Within reason, of course—I'm not sure I can abide some of the pre-order, special-edition pricing we've seen lately.) I don't want my games padded, stuffed with pointless #content, meaningless collectibles, and irrelevant side-quests. I like them lean and mean.

Which is why Firewatch is one of 2016's best games—"so far," obviously, but almost certainly in another eight months, too. From start to finish, the debut from small San Francisco studio Campo Santo won't last much more than four hours, if that; but it's a narrative-focused, first-person adventure in which not a second is wasted, brilliantly scripted and excellently engineered of steadily rising tension. If I could recommend just one game of the year that everyone should play, regardless of previous experience of the medium, or expertise, it'd be this one. No spoilers, even now, but its compact story, told with minimal physical interactions and a whole lot of player supposition, is exemplary. With very little, it delivers a whole lot; and that it looks stunning is merely the proverbial icing.

A screenshot from 'Oxenfree'

Of a comparable length is Night School's Oxenfree, another excellently written indie title of 2016, with point-and-click-like gameplay. Whereas Firewatch teases you with the possibility of supernatural happenings, Oxenfree makes them a clear and present danger very early on, as a group of teenagers explore the haunted present and harrowing past of a former military island. Its appealingly snappy dialogue doesn't have quite the same emotional bounce as Firewatch's walkie-talkie back-and-forths, but both games provide the illusion of choice in your responses, with Oxenfree delivering a variety of endings against Firewatch's locked-in finale.

And if ghosts are your things, also check out Bloober Team's Layers of Fear from February, a linear-enough walking simulator set in a mansion full of creepy clichés and jump scares. It's the very epitome of a solid six out of ten: you'll play it, enjoy the silliness inherent in its phantoms and freaky dolls, and likewise the contrastingly brutal backstory to the protagonist's current state of mind and body, and then never play it a second time. And that's fine—while it lasts, which is around three hours, Layers of Fear is a skin-prickling diversion from the grey everyday that switches all the right horror buttons, albeit without revealing any new ones all of its own.

There are three games of 2016 to keep you busy, all of which focus on story over slicing enemies in half with futuristic ninja swords. But, if it's that sort of experience you're after, you need only regress one console generation and pick up Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. And you really should.

Trading the Metal Gear series' emphasis on stealth for theatrical hyper-violence, Revengeance is the work of celebrated action studio Platinum Games, and the bearer of one stupid-as-all-fuck title. But get around its name and Revengance is a delight—by which I mean a devastatingly awesome hack 'em up in which "you" are the cyborg Raiden, whose Blade Mode-enabled katana can chop enemies to pieces with manually controlled 360-degree freedom (then you consume their insides, for health, obviously). Truly, there is little in melee-combat gaming quite as satisfying as precision-dissecting the opposition in this title—and if you want all the thrills without the difficulty, just pop it on easy and accelerate through its bananas story of a US President wannabe going nutso with nanotechnology. You'll slam into the credits in less than five hours.

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Related: Watch VICE's film on competitive gaming, 'eSports'

Another PS3/360-era game from Platinum that's well worth the paltry sum it sells for these days, and can be finished between lunchtime and teatime news broadcasts, is Vanquish, in which you fill the metal boots of Sam Gideon, a guy in a cutting-edge combat outfit with boosters attached to his ass. Sort of. Basically: this is third-person bullet-hell histrionics with a bombastic soundtrack and enough on-screen explosiveness to fill a dozen Call of Duties. And, again, set its challenge to minimal in order to drink in the carnage without constantly restarting the furious battles. It has a totally needless stealth section that drove me as close to ruin as your average Dark Souls does, but if you can overcome that, you're gold. And the credits are a mini-game, bonus.

I don't want to wallow in nostalgia, but it should go without saying that there are a vast number of 8- and 16bit games available through various online stores (and several not-quite-legal emulators) that can be started and finished inside the length of an average Disney movie. M2's 3D Classics series for the 3DS is worth checking out for short-play handheld sessions—there's the evergreen Streets of Rage 2, which can be "clocked" in 90 minutes, and the original Sonic the Hedgehog, beatable in around the same time. Nintendo kids can get their throwback kicks with Super Mario Bros. 2 coming in at about two and a half hours, and there's a lot more NES games on the eShop's Virtual Console.

Imagery from 'Journey'

Perhaps you don't want to be tested, though? You just need to unwind. There are short games to fit that mood, too. The PlayStation-exclusive Journey, for one, which is a beautiful two-hour trip from shining desert sands to snow-capped mountains, your character drawn towards the summit for reasons that make themselves clear through unspoken cutscenes. It's one of gaming's more interesting multiplayer experiences, with only two players able to connect with each other at any time, and communication between same-journey companions restricted to chirp-like noises that don't mean anything.

Gone Home is a tender story about a family divided by a daughter's love for another girl, seen through her sister's eyes—previously PC only, it came out for Xbox and PlayStation 4 in February, and you'll finish it in about two hours. Or for something equally "risk"-free but a lot more inventive, try The Stanley Parable, a darkly humorous game of fourth-wall breaking exploration, which can take multiple paths. You'll want to see all the endings, and you can fit them all into around 70 or 80 minutes. I appreciate there are a lot of episodic games that fit the single-sitting model, but what I've tried to do here is highlight releases that follow stories that can be seen in full without breaks between installments. Hence no Life is Strange, or Kentucky Route Zero, or anything from Telltale.

A screenshot from 'Grow Home'

Now, I could go on with recommendations, but let's keep this to the very best, and wrap with a summary of just a few more. Play Dead's Limbo is a deliciously nasty puzzle-platformer, with around four hours' worth of play time. Thomas Was Alone is a much happier platformer that will convince you that rectangles have feelings, too. First-person explore 'em up Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is the most beautiful vision of a video game apocalypse you'll ever set your eyes upon. Grow Home (it's not a typo) is a peculiar-of-physics semi-platformer in which you guide a robot up a beanstalk (it's better than I just made it sound). Her Story is a murder mystery that ingeniously restores full-motion video to the status of a viable storytelling device; Monument Valley and 80 Days are two of the best mobile games ever made, and neither will take up a great deal of your time; and To the Moon is a retro-styled role-playing game that looks like something from the SNES and will make you cry like a child for four full hours.

And who doesn't enjoy a blub in front of a bundle of pixels, arranged into little people, little people with so-fragile relationships, once in a while? Let it out, let it all out, and that weight, it just lifts.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Image by Sarah MacReading

So you think you know about the Panama Papers. You've read the explainers, you've browsed the website set up by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), you've talked to your friends about it and you all agree that this is important stuff. The largest leak, data-wise, in history! A window into the lives of the rich and powerful, who hide their ill-gotten gains even from their spouses! A worldwide scandal that has the potential to reveal devastating dirt on politicians all over the globe! This is journalism at its finest, a revealing of one stream in the strange, secretive flow of money that the powers that be would rather keep hidden.

Or so you think, if you are one of those simplistic fools who gets his news from outlets like the Guardian and the German newspaper Süeddeutsche Zeitung, two of the ICIJ's most prominent partners. Why would you trust the reporting and expertise of dozens of experienced journalists when everyone knows the news—the real news—can be found scattered throughout a handful of mostly pseudonymous blogs that will tell you all about the Panama Papers, and toss in some top-notch stuff about 9/11 and Atlantis for good measure?

To break through that mainstream media blockade that is preventing the world from knowing the truth—which mainly boils down to "Vladimir Putin is totally a good guy"—I've compiled some of the theories about the Panama Papers that the Man doesn't want you to know:

All Those Attacks on Putin Are Pure Media Bias

Let's start with the top layer of the onion, the easiest counternarrative to swallow, which is that the outlets with access to the leaked data aren't interested in going after the real bad guys but will instead direct their attacks toward the opponents of the US and UK like Putin, who has been linked to this story because several of his closest associates were named in the leak. One of the most popular posts on the subject comes from Craig Murray, a former British diplomat turned activist who was denouncing the media's treatment of the Panama Papers from the moment the first stories about the leak appeared.

"The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires—the main customers," Murray wrote. "Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished."

That post was written Monday—later that week, the corporate media had published information about Americans, many of them white-collar criminals, as part of a continuing rollout of information contained in the leak. That would appear to put to rest a lot of concerns about how there weren't any Americans in the papers, but it's all a smokescreen, or something. Probably.

The Panama Papers Are a US Hit Operation on Russia

That layer of the onion is just the tip of the iceberg though, but as we peel back another we learn that the media isn't just biased, it's in the pay of the US government. See, the ICIJ is partnered with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which is funded in part by—duh duh duh—the US government. It's right there at the bottom of the OCCR's website!!! Hat tip to Wikileaks, who always scrolls all the way down:

John Marston, the protagonist of Rockstar's 'Red Dead Redemption'

Exploring a present-day setting like New York, as we see in The Division, can be captivating, but video games aren't short of mammoth cities for players to get lost in. What is largely missing from the medium is the American frontier, one of North America's most interesting and tumultuous time periods. Lasting for a little over 300 years, from English colonial settlements in the 1600s to the Wild West's demise in the early 1900s, the era is filled with violence, romance, wars, infamous and beloved leaders, and even genocide. Issues and events wise, there's the fall of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Civil and Indian Wars, slavery, and the mistreatment of Native Americans to name just a few.

This definitely isn't the case with other entertainment mediums, most notably movies and TV shows. The film and television industries, for several decades now, have taken advantage of this era's intrigue, providing viewers with a slew of captivating content based on frontier life and the Wild West. Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains one of the legendary director's best works. HBO's Deadwood series is a cult favorite, with several Primetime Emmy Award nominations and victories. The Leonardo DiCaprio-starring The Revenant, based on the brutal experiences of frontiersman Hugh Glass in the 1800s, was one of 2015's highest-rated films. It received 12 Oscar nominations, winning Best Director, Best Cinematography, and finally netting DiCaprio his first Academy Award for Best Actor.

Looking at the success both movies and television have enjoyed with the American frontier, it's confusing why game developers haven't tapped into this time period more often. Rockstar's critically acclaimed Red Dead Redemption of 2010 shows that this setting actually works in a video game. (Yes, other games tried before it, but none as expertly.) As one of the very few titles that lets you play as a cowboy-like character and explore the Wild West in all its glory, Red Dead continues to be enjoyed years after its release. It's regarded as one of Rockstar's best works, but instead of it paving the way for more American frontier titles, especially in the open-world genre, things have largely remained quiet.

It's not like there isn't enough interesting material to delve into. The fall of the Hawaiian Kingdom and, ultimately, its colonization by the United States in the late 1800s is an unusual, but interesting, time and place to set a video game in. This event led to the end of Queen Lili'uokalani's rule, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, with the US taking land and control away from indigenous people. It was essentially a violent coup d'état that resulted in the demise of a culture and a counter-revolution. Playing from the perspective of either a US or Hawaiian soldier could make for a game that touches on hot-button issues and sheds light into the harsh repercussions that resulted from the States' obsession with Manifest Destiny.

The entire westward expansion was horrific for indigenous people. Native Americans have, and still are, suffering a great deal at the hands of white supremacists. Their culture and people are moving closer to extinction every day. Video games rarely touch on this issue. The Trail of Tears and the American Indian Wars (of which there were quite a few) resulted in the deaths of thousands of Native Americans. Similarly, the United States' history with slavery is also surprisingly missing in games. While there are some titles that set in the Civil War, like Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, none of them really discuss racism and what life was really like for black slaves.

Leonardo DiCaprio in 'The Revenant.' Still via Fox Movies

Mechanically, a game similar to The Revenant would work. Set it in the brutal frontier, with lush forests, harsh weather, and a focus on stealth, survival, and melee combat over stereotypical gunplay. Of course, there's also the Wild West. Who doesn't want to play as a cowboy or bounty hunter, with your horse and revolvers close by?

However, there's a risk involved with making games set in the frontier, especially the Wild West. Limited precedent means an uncertain market, and developers and publishers won't have guaranteed demand for these types of experiences. The only major example to go by is Red Dead Redemption and, while it was a huge hit, that can actually put others off exploring the same period of history. Rockstar nailed the Wild West setting so well that any developer and their game would inevitably be compared to what's seen as perfection. Rockstar set a high standard for Westerns that very few others will ever meet.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch a film from a very different frontier: 'On the Front Lines with Volunteers Fighting ISIS'

The argument can also be made that Red Dead's commercial success is not just down to it offering players a different time and place to explore. The fact that the game was made by Rockstar, the company behind the Grand Theft Auto series, certainly helped. The studio has earned its reputation and the trust of millions of consumers over the course of several terrifically popular GTA games. Realistically, the next Wild West-set video game is probably Red Dead's sequel, which fans have been clamoring for. Rockstar has a wealth of options to choose from with the time period(s) and geographical settings it would want to explore, and Red Dead Redemption 2 will most likely consume the majority of the open-world market when it releases, just like Grand Theft Auto V did.

But without risk, there's no reward. Developers still have plenty of ways to differentiate their games from Red Dead. The American frontier has over 300 hundred years' worth of material. Red Dead was set in such a specific period, during the waning years of the Wild West and its cowboys. It was when technology and industrialization was finally taking over the United States, drastically changing the way of life for plenty of people, especially those not living in the original Thirteen Colonies. Technology was a mainstay much earlier out in the East, especially in cities like New York and Boston.

What's stopping developers from setting their games during the Wild West's golden years, when it truly was a free-for-all? Developers shouldn't fear Rockstar's dominance. This era of American history should be a source of inspiration, challenging for game makers to finally start exploring a largely untapped period, and enlightening and educating players in the process.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Once Upon a Time in the West are all regarded today as near-perfect Spaghetti Westerns. But that didn't stop directors Clint Eastwood and James Mangold from making the excellent and award-winning Unforgiven and 3:10 to Yuma decades later. Games need to make a similar move, stepping out of Red Dead's shadow to tell their own unique stories, drawn from a place in history overflowing with them.

Follow Alex on Twitter.

After Donald Trump's disastrous performance in the Wisconsin primary this week, political commentators are starting to talk seriously—or perhaps wishfully—about the possibility that the frontrunner might not actually winning the Republican Party's presidential nomination. That means it's time for us all to brace ourselves for an unpredictable mess of a convention in Cleveland this summer, and maybe even an out-of-left-field nominee that will send the media into some kind of vetting psychosis.

Over the course of this interminable primary race, you've probably heard a few passing mentions of phrases like "brokered convention," or "contested convention," or "open convention." But if you're like most people with real lives and a passing fascination with Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, you don't know what the hell those terms actually mean, and have only a vague understanding of the chaos that they imply.

For most of modern political history, the GOP's national conventions have been predictably boring, besuited affairs, sort of like Comic Cons for America's white, vaguely racist uncles. The frontrunner gives a speech, kisses his wife, and locks arms with his chosen running mate, in front of a hysterical crowd of people in American flag hats. In previous election cycles, there's usually been a moment when political reporters fantasize about the possibility of a contested convention, but its been kinda like how flight attendants talk about oxygen masks popping out above your head, in the sense that everyone knows they will likely never experience such a dramatic event.

Then Trump came along and became the party's runaway frontrunner, which was weird, but to the GOP Establishment's chagrin, it still looked like everything would unfold as usual. With Ted Cruz's win in Wisconsin, though, it now looks like the reality-TV star might not get the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright. And suddenly, there is a real possibility that that oxygen mask might pop out of the panel.

Below is a brief guide that should get you up to speed on just how and why this could all go down.

Trump could fall short In the delegate count

Garden variety party conventions are more like coronations—there's just one vote on the floor, and it's largely symbolic, because the frontrunner has already clinched enough delegates to win the nomination outright. What makes the 2016 convention so ripe for a shitshow is the possibility that the frontrunner won't have actually won the nomination by the time the delegates arrive in Cleveland, giving the party an eleventh-hour chance to rid itself of the Trump scourge.

To backtrack a little, it's worth noting again that the fact that Trump has won the majority of states in the 2016 GOP primary—as well as the majority of delegates—isn't necessarily enough to win him the nomination. As it stands today, after Trump's defeat in Wisconsin, he has 755 delegates, and he needs 482 more—about 58 percent of the remaining delegates—to breeze his way to the nomination.

On Wednesday, political prognosticator Nate Silver wrote that "with Donald Trump's path to 1,237 delegates looking tenuous," a contested convention is "a real possibility." Moreover, in Wisconsin, the party establishment finally seemed to unite behind Cruz as the candidate who isn't Donald Trump, suggesting that the party forces may still be able to deny the mogul the delegates he needs before the convention.

If Trump falls short of the magic number, there's a real possibility that he won't win the nomination on the first vote. That means that there would likely be at least one more vote on on the convention floor—and that's when the convention becomes "contested," or "brokered," or "open." What that really means is that it becomes a party convention, where the 2,472 delegates will settle on a nominee themselves, just like in old-timey times before parties bothered with primaries.

Primaries aren't 100 percent democratic processes, and they don't have to be

One thing that tends to trip people up about contested conventions is that the idea of tossing out a candidate chosen by the people seems a little undemocratic. But it's important to remember that unlike general elections, primary races are only as democratic as the parties want them to be. That's because in America, political parties determine their own nominating processes.

As long as those processes follow the guidelines set by the Federal Election Committee—which are mostly about preventing fraud—parties can do what they want, unbeholden to any kind of constitutional process. (In fact, political parties aren't even mentioned in the US Constitution).

In short, Republicans run their own show, according to their own arcane rules and bylaws—as do the Democrats.

WATCH: Bun B reports on the fight to stop Donald Trump in Wisconsin

Convention rules can change whenever the delegates feel like it

If you watched the free-for-all Democratic National Convention in season four of House of Cards, you have a fairly accurate picture of just how loose the proceedings can be at these conventions. The rules the party makes to govern the actual convention are far from ironclad; in fact, there are arguably no rules at all.

According to the Republican National Committee website, "Every Republican National Convention is responsible for adopting the rules that will govern that convention." Moreover, the rules can change during the convention itself; those changes are decided by quick-and-dirty voice votes, and can stack the deck for or against a particular candidate.

For instance, in 2012, Republicans at the convention voted to strip away a bunch of Ron Paul's delegates by inventing "Rule 40," which said a candidate had to win the majority of delegates in at least eight states to be eligible for the nomination—which meant Paul was out of the running. To say that rule change came about via a fair process is a bit of a stretch. Here's then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, the chairman of the convention, putting it to a vote:

It's worth noting that Rule 40 would likely prevent anyone but Trump and Cruz from securing the nomination this time around. But of course, the delegates don't have to keep the rule alive in 2016 if they don't want to.

If no one wins the first vote, the convention becomes a free-for-all

At this point, we should backtrack a little and talk about the primaries, which award delegates to each candidate depending on the results. The rules vary by state, but in all cases, these "bound" delegates arrive at the convention with a mandate to vote for the candidates selected by their state's primary voters.

Those "bound" delegates get freed of that obligation at various points during a convention, according to the rules set by their respective state parties. At the second vote, the percentage of of bound delegates drops from 95 to 41, and at the third vote it drops to 20. And when bound delegates are released—in other words, when they are allowed to vote for the candidate they personally support—that's when the fun begins.

Theoretically, a frontrunner without a clear lock on the nomination could realize on a second vote that states he won in the primaries is represented entirely by delegates who support his opponent. And in fact, that's exactly what the Cruz campaign is trying to make happen in 2016.

Someone who isn't running could become the nominee

In a fantasy scenario for Republican elites, a white knight could come swooping in at the convention, and join the mix of potential nominees. Let's say, for instance, that an impassioned speech from Trump-hating Nebraska Senator Bob Sasse brought all of the frontrunner's fans to their senses. If the idea caught on, Sasse himself could, in some universe, find himself under consideration at the second or third vote.

In theory, this last-minute candidate could be anyone. One possibility floating around out there are former nominee Mitt Romney. But the most popular idea out there is Paul Ryan, who as the Speaker of the House will also have the unenviable task of chairing the convention.

An even less likely scenario is that third-place candidate John Kasich could turn out to be the overwhelming second favorite, and a surprise victor among bound delegates when they're suddenly freed. Back on Earth, though, a contested convention would more than likely remain a contest between Trump and Cruz.

Every possible outcome stands to make people very angry

A poll published by Vox on Tuesday showed that 55 percent of Republican voters would be pissed off if anyone other than the current frontrunner (as in, Donald Trump) won the party's nomination; 63 percent said they'd be mad if someone who isn't currently running made off with the nomination.

With emotions already running high over the outcome of the convention, there will also be a dispute over whether or not to be armed. 53,720 people agree with an anonymous—and it turns out, fake—blogger called "The Hyper Rationalist" who created a petition to allow open carry of firearms at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland during the convention. The Secret Service has stated that guns at the convention are a no-go, but America's most ardent gun fans don't exactly have a reputation for just backing down when the federal government tells them what to do.

Of course, this is just an idea of what might go on inside the arena. If everything plays out normally, and Trump actually does clinch the nomination, protesters outside the arena will likely turn the convention into a shitshow anyway. So no matter how things shake out, it's safe to expect chaos in Cleveland this summer.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A Ron Meuck sculpture of a cuddling couple, not a paid cuddler. Photo via Flickr user Paul Stevenson

I met my first cuddling client at Hot Tubs by the Hour, an innocuous-looking beige building on a busy street. The lobby was dark, and from behind the cash register, a round white woman, indifferent, watched me approach my client, Ron. He was pale and balding, with a pot belly spilling over ironed khakis. I introduced myself, shook his hand, and led him to the rented room.

The rented room was small with white walls and no windows. A simple bed abutted the wall and a hot tub released steam in the corner. He sat on the bed. We made a bit of small talk, then I said the line I'd rehearsed: "I'm looking forward to exploring different kinds of touch with you, but in order to feel safe, I want to remind you of the rules—no nudity, no kissing, and no sexual touch." He agreed.

A week before, desperate for money as an underemployed artist, I'd combed Craigslist job ads and come across one seeking cuddlers: $40 per hour, no sex, no nudity. I needed the money, but I was also curious: What kind of person pays for cuddling? What would it feel like to cuddle a stranger?

Ron wore his boxers and I stripped down to my sports bra and shorts (I would later learn that stripping down isn't required, but is often requested by clients).We embraced on the bed, my head nestled in the crook of his arm, and I rested my arm across his round belly. We talked while entwined. He owned a construction company, worked seven days a week, 17-hour days, and used this to relax. He asked me just to talk to him, so I told him stories about bicycling through my city when I first moved there. Then he asked if he could lie on top of me.

I could feel his boner pressing against my thighs. "You're so beautiful," he said, brushing my face with his lips. I reminded him there was no kissing. He grazed his hands along my breasts, and I gently pushed him away. "I just want to remind you of our agreements," I said, over and over.

Cuddle Time, the agency where I worked,opened in New York and now has branches in 19 different cities. Their website is a quilt of mixed messages. At the top of their landing page is a photograph of two young blondes, smiling and leaning toward the camera, revealing dramatic cleavage. There are subtle reminders that the service is about platonic touch, interspersed with photos of young, sexy women. One of the FAQ answers reads: "Think of this like making out with your girlfriend, only this is not your girlfriend, and no making out is allowed."

Cuddle Time was inspired by Cuddle Therapy, an earnest service offered by Travis Sigley in San Francisco. Eight years ago Sigley became the first cuddle practitioner in the country, offering touch without sexual exploration. He wanted to push back on the cultural belief that people can only find touch, affection, and intimacy through sexual pursuits. His service, he told me, is valuable precisely because of its platonic nature: It deconstructs cultural messages that sex is the sole avenue to connection and allows clients to rebuild their relationship to physical touch.

Related: The Science Behind Cuddling

Sigley is clear to articulate both his boundaries and his intention to provide a healing practice. He sits down and drinks tea with each new client, discussing his techniques and asking the client to talk about their needs and goals. He's worked with women and men, gay and straight, and says in his eight years of practice, no client has ever crossed a boundary.

But other cuddlers have had different experiences. Casey Nin, who's worked as a cuddler-for-hire at Cuddle Time for the past seven months, got into this line of work to "destigmatize the activity of touch." She begins every session by discussing her boundaries, always wears stretch pants and a loose T-shirt to cover up, and gently corrects people when they cross a line.

And lines do get crossed "most of the time," she told me. Her clients have asked her on dates, requested she wear less clothing, and even tried to solicit sexual services from her. Each time, she turns them down as compassionately as she can.

"To people who don't have access to intimacy or connection," she said, "finding it is so rare. When they meet somebody and they can really open up , they feel they've found something extraordinary and they want to follow up on that connection." When I asked if she fakes the intimacy, she told me the money is her primary motivator, but "when I'm there, I'm all theirs."

Watch: VICE visits Tokyo's cuddle cafes to learn about the Japanese industry for recreational love and affection.

When Sigley began his cuddling venture, he dreamed of creating an entire industry of non-sexual intimacy and connection. He did succeed in inspiring an industry—but not the one he wanted. Many spinoffs, including Cuddle Time, "are totally missing the point of what this is all about," he said, by using a cheap capitalist trick to sell sex rather than filling the need for human connection.

Browse and cuddler-for-hire site and you'll find photos of women in lingerie or skimpy clothes, cleavage exposed, blurring the line between a truly platonic service and under-the-table sex service. Cuddle Time's cuddler bios, embellished by the agency, include descriptions like "submissive," "great figure," and "high quality gal."

When Nin first started at Cuddle Time, she saw the photographs on other women's profiles and deliberately chose images of herself "in a turtleneck, in the forest, looking like someone's little sister." She's considered starting her own cuddling business, since "there's lots of opportunity for a more wholesome-looking service," but she's not sure she could make as much money if there wasn't "that hook of a potentially sexual service."

Still, she's happy to stay in the cuddling industry for now.

"Some clients don't know what they want," Nin told me. "People think the only way to get touch is through a sexual relationship. Hooking them into being there, with an insinuation of something sexy—maybe it's good for them."

Follow Rachel Cassandra on Twitter.

Photo via Wikicommons

Read: College Admissions Officers Describe the Wildest Applications They've Seen

A prospective college student in Delaware managed to get into five Ivy League schools thanks in part to an application essay about how much Costco means to her, NBC reports.

Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell all went apeshit over 18-year-old Brittany Stinson's love letter to all things Kirkland-brand, and now she can take her pick. She also got into Stanford which, while not an Ivy Leaguer, has two Costcos within a five-mile radius of the campus.

Stinson's essay prompt was to write about "a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it."

She used this as a springboard to dive into how the cornucopia of product choices helped shape her blossoming curiosity for the world, how bearing witness to a seemingly infinite stock of Nutella opened up her mind to philosophical quandaries extending beyond hazelnut spreads, and how buying smoked ham led to an illuminating conversation about Andrew Jackson with her father.

Her 2,200-word Costco treatise also includes the line, "Costco fuels my insatiability and cultivates curiosity within me at a cellular level."

This seems like some sort of Hamburger Helper mixtape-level branded marketing scheme, but it's all too real. You can read the entire thing on NBC right now.

Photo via Flickr user JamesZ_Flickr

Vancouver will be easing up on undocumented immigrants and those lacking citizenship papers thanks to a new policy greenlit by city council on Wednesday.

Black Lives Matter Toronto members outside of the city's police headquarters (all photos by Jake Kivanc)

Yusra Khogali, Janaya Khan, Alexandria Williams and other Black Lives Matter - Toronto organizers stand in a semi-circle facing Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne. Their brows are furrowed as she tells them she and her ministers are willing to meet with them.

(Photo by Roger H Goun via)

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

• Poll Reveals 7 of 10 Don't Like Trump
  Donald Trump is reshuffling his campaign team as a new poll shows 7 out of 10 Americans hold an unfavorable view of him. The Associated Press-Gfk poll shows an "unprecedented unpopularity" for a presidential candidate, with Trump's unfavorability climbing from 58 percent in February to 69 percent today.—CBS News
• Nevada and Wyoming Linked to Leak Scandal
  An analysis of more than 1,000 American-based companies registered by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca shows Nevada and Wyoming have become havens for corporate secrecy within the US. At least 150 companies set up by Mossack Fonseca in those states have ties to corruption scandals in Brazil and Argentina.—USA Today
• Uber Pays $10 Million to Settle Vetting Case
  Uber has agreed to pay $5 million each to San Francisco and Los Angeles to settle a dispute over its background checks. Uber was sued in 2014 after claiming its vetting process was better than traditional taxi firms. District attorneys said Uber's claim to be "the gold standard" for safety was misleading.—BBC
• Bill Clinton Clashes With Black Lives Matter Protestors
  Bill Clinton defended his wife Hillary's use of the phrase "super predators" to describe young black drug dealers back in 1996. During a heated exchange with protestors, who held signs saying "Black youth are not super predators," he said: "You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter."—ABC News

International News

• British PM Admits to Offshore Shares
  British Prime Minister David Cameron has admitted he personally benefited from a tax haven trust set up by his father. Three days after his father's name appeared in the Panama Papers, Cameron admitted he had shares in the offshore trust, which he sold for around $44,000 just before becoming prime minister in 2010.—The Guardian
• Pope to Explain His Marriage Views
  Pope Francis will today announce the conclusions of his two Synods on the family. Eagerly awaited by 1.3 billion Catholics, it will outline this pope's views about marriage, divorce and contraception. Many hope it might allow the church to offer communion to people who have remarried after divorce.—BBC News
• Israel Increases Demolition of Palestinian Homes
  Demolitions of Palestinian-owned homes by the Israeli military in the occupied territories has tripled over the past three months, according to a United Nations report. From an average of 50 demolitions a month in 2012 to 2015, the number rose to 165 a month since January.—Al Jazeera
• Greece Sends Second Migrant Boat to Turkey
  A second group of migrants has been sent back to Turkey from Greece as part of an EU deal to reduce the number of people coming to Europe. A ferry carrying 45 migrants left the Greek island of Lesbos early Friday. At least two activists jumped into the water to try to stop the ferry leaving.—Reuters

NWA in the early days

Everything Else

• Hall of Fame Awaits NWA
  NWA will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Kendrick Lamar this evening, but the group will not be performing. "We really didn't feel like we were supported enough to do the best show we could put on," said Ice Cube.—The New York Times
• Venezuela Gives Three-Day Weekends
  President Nicolas Maduro has given all government employees Fridays off for the next two months. It is an attempt to reduce Venezuela's electricity use as the country battles with power grid problems.—CBC News
• Panama Papers Reveal Secret History of Painting
  The ownership of a Modigliani painting worth up to $25 million, "Seated Man With a Cane," has been disputed because of the Panama Papers. A French estate wants the Nahmad Gallery to return the painting, claiming there is evidence that the Nazis stole sit in WWII.—VICE News
• Anti-LGBT Mississippi Governor Inspires Band Name
  A punk band called Fuck Phil Bryant named itself after after Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, who recently signed a bill allowing anyone with religious beliefs to deny service to LGBT people. Fuck Phil Bryant's first EP is called "Fuck Phil Bryant".—Noisey

Done with reading for today? That's fine—instead, watch How 'Sailor Moon' Fandom Became a Refuge for 90s Queer Kids.

Former President Bill Clinton got emotional when confronted by a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia Thursday, getting into a heated exchange with the activists while campaigning for his wife's 2016 presidential bid.

At issue was the Clintons support for the 1994 crime bill signed into law during his presidency—legislation disproportionately affected black males, and which played a big role in driving up US incarceration rates in the subsequent decades. According to CNN, the protesters shouted that "black youth are not super-predators" at the president, an apparent reference to Hillary Clinton's 1996 remark that those affected by the law were "often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators,'" who needed to be "brought to heel."

"I like protesters, but the ones that won't let you answer are afraid of the truth," Clinton said, after his speech was interrupted by the Black Lives Matter demonstration. He went on to defend his own record, a when the protesters answered his rebuttal with more shouting, the former president became visibly irritated, zeroing in on his wife's use of the volatile phrase.

"I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children," Clinton snapped. "Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn't. You are defending people who kill the lives you say matter."

This isn't the first time the "super predator" comment has come up during Hillary Clinton's campaign. In February, after a protester named Ashley Williams showed up at a Clinton campaign event in South Carolina with more or less the same complaint, the 2016 Democratic frontrunner conceded that she regrets using the phrase. "Looking back, I shouldn't have used those words," she told the Washington Post, "and I wouldn't use them today."

Needless to say, her husband's remarks today aren't going over well.

As of this writing, neither the candidate nor her campaign have commented on the former president's remarks.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A Deathclaw from 'Fallout 4'. You get this close to one of these, you'd better have ammo.

It's the evening of April 7, at London's Tobacco Dock, and the gaming industry's great and just-sorta-OK-I-suppose are gathered for the annual BAFTA Games Awards. This is a big deal event—a glitzy celebration of everything amazing about the medium of video games. I'm a fan. The assembled have seen several awards given out already, to worthy winners—Game Design goes to the fantastically nightmarish Bloodborne; the winner of Original Property is Until Dawn, a terrific new IP; and jet-powered-cars-playing-football extravaganza Rocket League takes home three awards, for Family Game, Sport Game, and Multiplayer. Rocket League is amazing, and you need it in your life. The room hushes. It's time. The big one's here. Best Game. Arses shift on seats. Armpits get a little stinky. Someone stifles a sneeze for fear of being ejected.

The winner is Fallout 4.

Now hold up, oh super-keen sorts, eager to rush to the comments (or more likely Twitter and/or Facebook, which you'll find us on here and here respectively). I am not saying that Fallout 4 is a bad game. Or that it's an average game. It's a very good video game carefully crafted into its final, many-fans-satisfying form by a team that has quite clearly devoted a shitload of time and care to the process. Yes, it's by Bethesda, so it's a bit broken, but I'm told that's part of the charm. (I mean, it shouldn't be, but whatever, I'll get to that.) But its world is invitingly hostile, its scope—uh, there's a cliché, but you know what I mean—is admirably epic, and people are really into the lore of the whole thing. I totally get why people like it, and learn to love it.

But it's not the best game of the year, of the past 12 months, since the last Gaming BAFTAs wrapped and everyone got wobbly on champagne and the rush of sharing air with other real-life human beings who aren't the three hirsute gentlemen locked in a small room with them for 18 hours a day crunching code until this thing is finished. Here are ten reasons why.

It's not the best game in BAFTA's best game category, IMO

I don't vote in the BAFTAs. Cripes, imagine if I did, and now I'm writing this, what a pickle we'd be in. But if I did, and I saw the shortlist of games up for being the best game of all the games, of the games that came out in the past 12 months (or whatever the eligibility period is), I'd have Fallout 4 way down my personal ordering.

Rocket League, as I've already made quite clear, is amazing. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is just the most gloriously rich interactive world I've seen on my TV screen in years. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is like a sandbox of chocolates, where you can pick a different flavor for any mission, at any given time. Life is Strange took the Telltale Games model for storytelling and improved it, and the result was one of the most moving narratives in the medium, of recent times. And Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was a stunning-looking meditation on religion and the afterlife created by a small team who really do deserve props for their efforts. Where does Fallout 4 fit amongst these great games? Right at the bottom, for me. Sorry. But naturally, this is just my opinion, man. Don't get angry because one person doesn't think the same way you do.

Only, seriously, look, the numbers don't lie

I hate doing this, but, Metacritic's overall "metascores" would imply that a great many reviewers out there mirror my feelings on Fallout 4 "versus" the other titles in the Best Game category.

The metascore for Fallout 4, on the presumably-best-performing PC version, is 84. Not bad, not bad at all. The Witcher 3, on PC, scores 93. Rocket League on the same platform, 86. Life is Strange, which is episodic so the number's a little less locked in, scores 85 on Xbox One and PS4. Rapture, a PS4 exclusive, is the only contender to dip beneath Fallout 4's PC score, coming in at 78.

But the critics, eh? A bunch of paid-off leeches, am I right? That score for The Witcher 3? Ha! Its makers took a herd of journalists to a Scottish castle and wined and dined them all in "support" of the game's release. How is that not influencing their review marks? (I mean, that happened, I went, and it didn't, because we're professionals you absolute morons; but nevertheless, some people will think that way.) So let's check the user scores for Fallout 4. Oh dear. That's a 5.4 out of 10 for the PC version, against 9.1 for The Witcher 3, 8.1 for Rocket League and 8.6 for Life is Strange.

But numbers, what do they even mean? You can't measure the happiness a video game gives you using easily understandable scoring systems. What a load of baloney. That'll never catch on.

Love 'em or hate 'em, but the critics are baffled by the decision

Apologies for using Metacritic like that. I know, it's a barbed thorn in the side of the games industry, a site that can make or break studios, depending on that overall out-of-100 figure. It's a cancer eating into a phenomenal artform. But, also, it's a handy barometer for seeing who likes what, and why, so whatcha gonna do?

More pertinent than weighing up metascores is the response of the games press when Fallout 4 was announced as BAFTA's big winner. So, let's see some of those:

Tweets don't lie, friends. Tweets don't lie.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film on Guatemala's drunken horse race

It didn't win in any other BATFA category

So you're the best game, out of all the games. Stands to reason that you absolutely excel in several areas. Your art design, maybe. Innovation within the medium, or the genre at least. Your music is incredible, and voice acting absolutely exemplary. Yeah, about that.

Fallout 4 didn't win in any other category at the BAFTAs. Audio and Music awards went to Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (it does have a most amazing score). The Game Innovation gong was handed to Her Story. Story, to Life is Strange. Artistic Achievement was won by Ori and the Blind Forest. Design, as previously mentioned, went to Bloodborne. So, Fallout 4 doesn't play the best of the available nominees; it doesn't have the greatest story, or sound, and it's nothing much to look at against a bunch of other games. What did it win for, exactly?

Can we address the fact that game is glitchy as fuck, and that is a problem?

Let me quote from Rich Stanton's review of the game, for The Guardian:

"Bethesda is a studio with a reputation for delivering buggy games, and with Fallout 4 it delivers once again. In the PS4 version we tested, minor issues include NPC allies getting stuck in walls, conversations ending but leaving you stuck in conversation mode, enormous load times when leaving interiors, and inescapable-deathtrap autosaves that ruin several hours of progress. Occasional manual saves are a must."

So, you need to constantly save your progress, just in case the game breaks on you? See, to me, that doesn't sound like the kind of quality you'd expect from any sort of "best game." The game locks you into inescapable situations that essentially loop your demise for an eternity, unless you go back to a previous save? Characters get stuck in walls? Now, real talk, let's have it. I know that there's something briefly appealing about a massive-money video game having the same amusing visual quirks you find in productions running on an eighth of such a budget, and less, but after a while this shit becomes tiresome. I know it played a part in me halting my own playthrough. Look at this tweet. See that shit one time, and it's okay. Any more than that? Your game is broken, guys.

Related, on Motherboard: Just How Realistic is 'Fallout 4's's Apocalypse, Anyway?

All those dead-eyed, doughy-fleshed NPCs are pure nightmare fuel

But even then, they're nothing compared to the very worst of the player-crafted creations running around the wastelands. What the actual fuck is going on here? You evil, evil people. (Screens via this terrifying Kotaku article.)

The shooting is piss poor—and there's a lot of it

It is. If you've played it, you know. I don't feel any need to elaborate. But fine, sure, here are some words from Forbes:

"...gunplay is better than it was in Fallout 3, but the entire system—this time a slowed-down V.A.T.S. mode rather than pause-and-play—leaves a great deal to be desired... V.A.T.S. feels more like a crutch than smart game design. This isn't a game that needs to be all about combat all the time, but when it is about combat, the shooting mechanics should be a lot more fun and a lot more polished."

They sure should, but they're as janky as the NPCs who can't walk through doors properly.

Why am I building a house for someone I don't know when my kid's out there, somewhere, waiting for me?

The Big Addition to this Fallout, in comparison to the ones before it, is the option (but it's not always optional) to build up settlements for other folk trapped on the wrong side of a nuclear apocalypse. It's a badly explained system, but if you get into it, you can soon construct some quite wonderfully shabby shacks and close-to-collapse condos, to keep all of these drone-like, conversation-lite NPCs happy. Because...

Wait. What the hell am I doing? I'm decorating interiors, like this is Happy Home Designer: The Wasteland Years, when they've got my kid? Whoever "they" are. I appreciate that Lots of Other Games have this disconnect between main-plot urgency and A Bunch of Other Shit You Can Get on With, but bloody hell: They have my son. I need my son. I am only doing this to get my son back. Fuck this shanty bollocks.

You wanted it. You paid for it. It was crap.

That much-lusted-after special edition actually wearable Pip-Boy turned out to be a load of plastic tat

I know I'm clutching at straws somewhat here, because it turns out that ten points was a bit of an stretch. But seriously, it was terrible.

Can we all just accept that it's basically the eight-years-old Fallout 3 in disguise, please?

"I can't shake the feeling I'm really playing Fallout 3 season two." –Time

"If you hated Fallout 3, then there's not much more to get you onside here. If you loved it, then you'll love this all the more." –VideoGamer.com

"It feels there's not much truly new here... So here we go again. It's not war, but Bethesda that never changes." –The Guardian

"Fallout 3 was an excellent game, but it was released almost a decade ago. Every time I turn off Fallout 4, I'll sit there thinking to myself: 'Shouldn't there be more to this, somehow?' This is it? Really?" Kotaku

I'll see myself out, so you can crack on with calling me a dickhead. See ya.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Crack and cocaine. Photo by Paul Howell/Liaison

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

John Lovell began his legal career in the early 1990s, at the height of the war on drugs. First, he was an assistant district attorney in upstate New York, where he prosecuted drug crimes. Then in 2000, he was hired as a special assistant to the US Attorney's office in Atlanta. During those years, he prosecuted a man named Lewis Clay, who was found guilty of drug trafficking in 2003 for selling 57 grams of crack.

Clay, who was 36 years-old at the time, was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of life in prison.

Over the years, Lovell's* stance on aggressive drug sentences evolved. After leaving prosecutorial work in 2006 to become a defense attorney, he wrote a letter to Clay, whom he thought of often, and set about finding a way to get the man out of prison.

On March 30, Clay was one of 61 prisoners whose sentences were commuted by President Barack Obama. Below, Lovell talks about his days as a prosecutor, what it was like sending Clay away for life, and his eventual desire to get him out.

This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia

It's a universal truth that there's nothing more boring in this world than hearing other people go on about a dream they had last night—except maybe (just maybe) if the dream is about you. As a rule, other people's dreams are usually incoherent and meaningless. The one thing I've always wondered though is what people who've lost their sight dream at night—what do you dream if you can't see? To find out, I got in touch with Ivana Zivkovic, teacher at the Dragan Kovacevic Elementary School for Visually Impaired in Belgrade, who told me that blind people "dream exactly how they live."

She explained: "Dreams are experienced differently by different people. There are blind people who say they don't dream, while some insist that other senses are primary when they dream. People born blind have no visual impressions while dreaming, while people who have lost sight later in life do have them. Those visual impressions weaken as time goes by, though. Research indicates that hearing is the most prevalent sensation in the dreams of blind people, followed by touch, smell, and taste."

To learn more, I spoke to Ana Jovcic, Dragisa Drobnjak, and Nikola Zekic. Ana and Dragisa lost their sight at a later age and still have visual sensations in their dreams, while Nikola lost his sight at birth.

Ana Jovcic was born prematurely, and while fighting for life in an incubator, her optical nerves were destroyed by the large dose of oxygen she received to survive. Her sight was impaired when she was younger, but she lost it completely at age 9. Today, she studies Serbian Literature at Belgrade University.

Dragisa Drobnjak lost his sight when he was 11, in the sudden blast of an unexploded bomb from World War II. He graduated with a law degree in 1973, and worked as a legal administrator for the Association of Blind in Serbia for 35 years. He is now retired.

Nikola Zekic is currently studying Ethnomusicology at Belgrade's Music Academy. His parents expected him some time in November 1995, but he was was born prematurely on August 22nd. Like Ana, he was given large amounts of oxygen in the incubator, which made him completely blind.

VICE: How do visual impressions appear in your dreams?
Ana Jovcic: My sight has never been good—I don't remember certain objects clearly, but I do remember colors, my parents' faces, and my sister. I don't remember what, for example, the color turquoise looks like but I have relatively strong memories of basic colors like red and blue.

If I saw someone once, I'll dream about them as I remember them. They'll probably have changed in the meantime, but they'll stay the same for me. When I meet someone new, I'll have to imagine them first—I make a mental image of his or her look—and that's what they'll look like in my dream.

Dragisa Drobnjak: Up until I was 11, I dreamt with all my senses. After I lost my sight, I had two types of dreams for a while. One was in color, with people, objects, and places I had seen before. The other type of dream was linked to when I had a new experience or met someone new—in these dreams I heard or felt something, like a voice, or a pat on the back from someone. I had both kinds of dreams for several years but gradually the dreams in color began to disappear. I now never have those anymore.

Nikola Zekic: I have been blind since birth, I can only see changes in light. I went to Moscow twice for surgery but this is as far as they could help me. My dreams mostly consist of sounds. I used to dream that I was reading a book—scenes were unveiling in front of me but when I woke up the next day, I couldn't remember anything.

How detailed are the features of the people you met after losing your sight, in your dreams?
Ana: When I've imagined what people look like, I can even dream the color of their clothes. I imagine the structure of their face, the lines on it, as well the color of their hair. Not the color of their eyes, because I couldn't tell that even when I did have my sight. When someone tells me that the way I imagine him or her isn't at all what this person looks like, I try to adjust the image I have and remember that.

Dragisa: I'm the same way in dreams as when I'm awake: We're talking now, but I have no image of you. I'm a legal administrator—I'm not very imaginative. I don't think about how Ana is dressed, or Nicola, or you. My dreams are about what someone says or does, not about what he or she looks like.

What's the worst nightmare you've had?
Ana: I had a dream once, in which a couple of thieves came and hid a package with drugs in my house. I have no idea what a package of drugs looks like but in my dreams it was a box that looked like a Christmas gift. They had hidden it under an armchair in my room and I was very scared. When I woke up, I had to check that nothing was there.

Dragisa: Sometimes, I dream that I'm on the toilet or in my apartment in my pajamas and then suddenly I find myself in a public place. That obviously feels very embarrassing.

Do you have any recurring dreams?
Nicola: As a child, I would often dream that I was falling. I would just keep falling all night long. I used to like it because it made me feel like I was flying. And if I lay awake in bed in a certain curled up position, with my head below my neck, that would feel a bit like flying too. Something to do with the way the blood flows to the brain, I guess. I used to be a weird kid.

Dragisa: I grew up in a village in the mountains and I used to dream that me and my brothers and sisters were picking wild strawberries in the forest. I remember the green of the forest and the red of the strawberries. But then it started to rain, but it was a storm—with thunder and lightning. I'd wake up convinced that that had really happened, but it never had.

Ana: I often dream of Paris, even though I have never been there. Everyone calls Paris "the city of lights," so I imagine it with lots of light. But when I dream about it, it's always nighttime. There are lights all around me and above me, there are big squares, so many people and beautiful buildings. I can hear the water fountains on the squares. That's Paris for me. I have never seen the Arc de Triomphe but I've read about it. There used to be a gate in my parents' yard, in the house I grew—I imagine the Arc de Triomphe exactly like that gate.

What is the strangest dream you've had?
Nicola: This one time, I dreamt that I was walking with my dad through a forest and the trees had no leaves, but trumpets. We were there to pick the trumpets from the trees. I picked one and blew on it but it only gave a whistle, so I said to my father, "It's not ripe yet, we'll take another one." It was just me and my dad picking trumpets in a forest. It was lovely, actually.

All illustrations by Lidija Delić

Image via.

Brocialist: a guy so in love with his own progressiveness or radicalness he is convinced he can do no wrong. This extends to being a sexist jerk.

I befriended my first brocialist at the tender age of 18. He was staunchly left-wing, creative, charming, and articulate—all of which drove the ladies wild. I was the only female in our hall of residence debating team. Challenging, yes, but I suppose I was a wannabe hipster Helen Clark at the time. We would argue constantly. His argument was that he wasn't a brocialist, I was simply misguided. When I pointed out that he regularly patronised and undermined women, he would dismiss it as banter and argue I was hung up on something less important to "real issues," such as climate change.

Master Brocialist eventually kicked me out of the debating team. In his defence, I'd told him a day earlier that I took issue with most facets of his personality. Or rather it wasn't his personality that bugged me, but his total contradiction in values. So that was the end of my political career.

In an article in the New Statesmen, Penny Laurie singles out Russell Brand as a classic broacialist in the way he uses his celebrity status (with irony and comedy as his weapon) to educate the masses about worthy causes. In Brand's web-series The Trews he waxes lyrical about the perils of capitalism, same-sex marriage, and gender politics. All the while he has a long, swaggering record of objectifying women. And then there's the untouchable Leo DiCaprio who used his long awaited academy award speech as a platform to bat for "the voices that've been drowned out by the politics of greed." This sits pretty awkwardly alongside his bias towards young bikini models and his alleged tendency to brag about his conquests.

But Hollywood is a long way from New Zealand. We were the first country in the world to give women the vote and we prided ourselves on female empowerment ever since. But I beg to differ. Since my first bruising rub up against brocialism, I've developed a radar for guys hiding sexism beneath a progressive smokescreen. Like the time my friend told me about a great guy she had met. He was in a band and worked in the left-wing political arena, but he wasn't a hipster robot type. He was a nice guy. He even trolled misogynists on social media. Despite this it soon came to light that he had a girl in every port. Then, not long after that discovery, his workplace had to introduce a new anti-sexism policy simply because of the guy's questionable behaviour around the office.

In my experience there are two kinds of brocialists. Type one uses their outwardly progressive values to woo women, particularly in the public realm of social media, while secretly maintaining their non-progressive values. Type two views women as expendable objects and treats them poorly to hide their insecurities. By pretending to the world, and probably themselves, that they're all about liberating the underdog, they get an angelic reputation while staying snuggled into dominant patriarchal structures. In both cases it's the combination of arrogance, yet empathy for everyone and everything—on their terms—that's the true signifier of brocialism.

Image via Flickr user Steven Depolo

Brocialists might sport Dr Martens, Vans, or boat shoes sans socks, and they're partial to skinny jeans. They're drawn to quality over grunge, thus Scandinavian brands such as Fjallraven, Acne Studios, and Cheap Monday Jeans are the flavour of choice, which is suitable seeing as the Nordic countries align with their egalitarian values. It's no surprise, therefore, that they cycle and enjoy public transportation over anything that might be considered a carbon-emitting abomination.

Music preferences are self explanatory, but brocialists are drawn to broody emotional tunes and local music so as to present a down-to-earth, enthusiastic disposition. Furthermore, they have no qualms with ironic beats from the 90s, as they can freely make fun of themselves.

Their palate is an interesting one. While they're inclined to exercise vegetarianism, they don't indulge in veganism for fear of coming off as too hardcore or opinionated. And they're into Kiwiana motifs so mince pies without meat or cheese rolls might be the plat du jour, alongside a breakfast of black coffee and organic bircher with fruit from their local community garden, for example. They refuse to conform to gender roles so they'll cook these dishes and complete the clean-up with gusto. After dinner, they drink whisky and craft beer in excess. Brocialists smoke socially but would never reveal this to their doctor. They're anti smoking, if anything. Instead, they smoke after a good political debate once they're convinced they've enlightened their ignorant company. A millennial's after-sex smoke, if you will.

On a broader level, these often educated individuals work in the public or non-for-profit sector. For the creative brocialist, you'll find them crafting beautiful Scandinavian-style furniture, designing charity-focussed advertising campaigns or launching a startup. While they're into technology over cars and sports, they're not your traditional "cos-play" "world of warcraft" types. Rather, they geek out by way of social media. They're insufferably vocal about their beliefs, more so than your everyday feminist. They're the first on your feed to post about International Women's Day.

There's no denying they're out there, yet of all the women I asked to comment on their experiences with brocialists, all were worried about coming across as disgruntled, crazy, or tragic. It's hard to target a guy who outwardly appears to have such noble intentions. As one young woman told me, "no is going to be convinced to check their sexism, or even acknowledge the fact that they or their behaviour is sexist. For guys that think their politics are in order, this gives them free reign with their dicks."

Follow Sasha on Twitter.

Everyone loves orgasms, right? If we didn't, we wouldn't go to ridiculous lengths to achieve them like pirating porn alone or going through the exhausting process of romancing a special someone just so we can have one in the company of another human.

Well, what if I told all of you straight guys out there that there is a secret orgasm that you don't even know about, and it's much better than relieving yourself into a wad of Kleenex while your computer burns your bare thighs? This is an orgasm so good that it will make your whole body shake, every inch of your skin tingle, and your voice erupt with spontaneous screams like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. There's only one catch: To achieve this orgasm, you have to put things up your butt.

Yes, it's true. This kind of orgasm—which lasts longer and is far more intense than a penile one—only comes from massaging the prostate. The most efficient way to get there, as anyone over the age of 35 knows from going to the doctor, is through your poop chute. The prostate is a small, walnut-sized organ between the end of the penis (the part that's inside your body, not the end of your exterior shaft) and the bladder. When a guy blows his load, a big part of that load is fluid from the prostate to help the sperm swim toward an egg, though in most cases it just lies on your stomach and turns into a sticky mess.

The best way to find your prostate is to stick a finger up your butthole. Short fingernails, clean hands, and some lube are essential. Once you're inside, try to touch the underside of your belly button, and you should feel something like a golf ball. That's it. You're gonna want to diddle that P-spot just like you would a nice wet clit, and you'll really start to feel something amazing. If you're playing with yourself at the same time, you might cum before achieving the full prostate orgasm; however, it will probably be a better orgasm than usual. If you want the full experience, try giving your shaft the day off and see what you can do without it.

Also—and this sounds kind of like something from a new age self-help book—you want to focus on the feeling inside of you. Too many people get caught up thinking about the butthole or the fingers. Don't spend all your attention there; you want to find the ticklish parts in the deep inner reaches of your body (and maybe your soul).

I know you have two big worries right now: poop and gay stuff.

Fingers are of course just God's butt plugs, and there are all sorts of other things you can stick up your ass that will make it feel amazing. (However food and other household items will end up giving you the worst ER visit of your life, so stick to things that are meant to be put up there.) Butt plugs are the obvious choice, but use something skinny to start with. The folks at the Sweethome did a ton of research about which toys are the best, and I fully recommend their picks, especially for beginners.

There is one line of toys by Aneros meant specifically to get at just the right spot. They're a little pricey and take a bit to figure out how to use, but practice makes perfect, and once you get over the idea of putting something in your butt, you won't mind the practice.

The other great thing about butt plugs is you can pop one in when laying some pipe in a nice lady and double your pleasure. And if you really want to get into some group butt play, getting a lady to strap one on for a pegging session might be just what you need. It worked on Broad City. Just make sure her pleasure is as taken care of as your own. Even when receiving, you still need to give.

I know you have two big worries right now: poop and gay stuff. Poop shouldn't be a problem so long as you have a healthy diet and you don't have a big loaf of ass ham ready to come out of the oven. If putting your fingers up there really grosses you out, wrap your digits in a condom or use a rubber glove, but as long as you don't subsist on a diet of Taco Bell and Fritos, you're probably fine. If you're super, super grossed out, give yourself a Fleet enema and wash it out down there. Otherwise just cleaning the surface in the shower should suffice.

As for gay stuff, there is nothing about taking it up the butt that makes you gay. Prostate stimulation is just one awesome thing gay dudes figured out way before straight people, like boxer briefs and brunch. You're down with both of those, right? None of the toys recommended above look like dicks anyway, so if someone stumbles upon one next to your bed they won't even know it's been in your butt. You play with yourself anyway, so what's the big deal about going in through the back door?

Look, let's bet honest, this is all about opening up a whole new world of pleasure and cumming your face off. If there's something gay about that, then download the full season of RuPaul's Drag Race and just go with it.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

Administrative Palace (1976), all images from the Vasluiul Comunist project.

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

In 1968, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu chose the small community of Vaslui as the new capital of the district, because Barlad—the largest city in the region—was the birthplace of his former rival Gheorghiu Dej. Ceaușescu couldn't stomach giving Dej that pleasure. On a whim, he turned the small community of Vaslui into a thriving regional capital city within five years. Large numbers of peasants were brought there overnight and relocated to apartment blocks, transporting their chickens to their balconies. A combination of communism and Ceaușescu's spite brought Vaslui architecture, industry, education, running water, and heat.

The Communist Vaslui project restores old archival photos and videos from the heyday of the city. The project is run by Andrei Beşliu—an art director born and raised in Vaslui—along with his architect father and a local museum curator. I asked Beşliu about the communist glory days of Vaslui.

VICE: Why did you start this project?
Andrei Beșliu: I grew up in Vaslui, in the 70s and 80s, when it turned from a dusty trade town of seventeen thousand people to a county capital of ninety thousand. My parents worked at the Design Institute, and I know how much work they put into making this place into a beautiful and functional city. But I've seen all that work being ruined by local authorities since the 90s.

Dictator Ceaușescu visiting Vaslui (1975)

What was the atmosphere in Vaslui in those early days?
In the 70s, it was a hip city. A lot of people from Bucharest and other big cities were forced to move to cities like Vaslui, which was sad for them, but helped the region grow. There were Italian and French tourists in the city, who were pen pals with Vasluian women and came to visit. The city produced clothing for Italy and furniture for IKEA. My parents would throw these house parties for local architects and artists. Everybody wore Levi's and had an improvised photo development studio at home. We received foreign magazines. I guess I was in a privileged position.

Orpheu were a band who sung in the lobby of the main hotel in Vaslui

How has the city changed since then?
In the 90s, there was suddenly no more money for the intellectuals who were sent to this city. The economy, the culture, and the development in Vaslui were all artificial. Those things need a couple of generations to take root, that doesn't happen with just twenty years of forced urban life. Nobody invested in anything anymore, so the population halved, and those who stayed became a cheap labor force for the west. The mayor is trying to restore some of the city's shine, and he's doing an OK job. But I hope our project can help Vaslui a little bit.

Packets containing synthetic cannabis. Screen shot via YouTube

Turns out young people in Ireland are more into weird new drugs than anyone else in Europe. According to the "2016 EU Drugs Market Report" released this week, 9 percent of Irish 15- to 24-year-olds have tried a "new psychoactive substance" (NPS) at least once in the last 12 months, followed by 8 percent of young people in both Spain and France.

The NPS category is fairly broad, but mostly consists of research chemicals and "legal" alternatives to traditional drugs—pills and powders with names like "GoWhizz," "JawShatterer," and "Colombian Banter Fuel." The stuff imported from Chinese labs and sold online in colorful vac-pack bags that look like they might contain pop rock candy. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction currently monitors 560 of these substances, but that number is steadily increasing, at a rate of around two a week.

The most common type of NPS seized by police across Europe was found to be synthetic cannabinoids—fake weed—which currently makes up 60 percent of all NPS seizures. The second largest group was synthetic cathinones, like mephedrone, generally sold as a replacement for MDMA and amphetamines. They made up 22 percent of all seizures. If seizure data is a broad indication of the NPS marketplace, then demand for synthetic cannabinoids is on an exponential rise, while demand for other substances has been gradually falling since 2013.

In 2010, the Irish government attempted to confront the rise of NPS use by introducing a bill which made all substances that had a psychoactive effect on the brain illegal, excluding (of course) caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. The bill was similar in purpose to the Psychoactive Substances Act currently proposed in the UK, and led to head shops around the country being closed down.

Activists like Daryl Sullivan, who works as Policy and Communications Officer at LEAP UK (Law Enforcement Against Drugs), believe that while an outright ban might change how accessible these substances are, it ultimately pushes the market underground and into the hands of criminals.

"These drugs are made more dangerous by their newfound illegal status," he says. "Organized crime gangs completely control the market for most illegal drugs, thanks entirely to the illegality itself. Simply making something illegal doesn't mean that there will suddenly be no market; it just means that criminals will move in to fill that demand. And where you see a market controlled by criminal gangs, you don't tend to see regulation—you don't see harm reduction, and you don't see quality control. All of this makes the drugs being sold more dangerous, and the potential harms of using them more serious."

Graham de Barra is the director of Help Not Harm, an organization committed to changing drug policy in Ireland from a criminal justice approach to a health-based approach. He says the blanket-ban legislation of 2010 hasn't helped matters at all.

"The environment for consuming drugs on the island has become so dangerous that people are overdosing because of misidentifying substances, which would be solved with the introduction of drug testing labs," he says. "It's taken devastating events to push the issue out to the public, and people are beginning to think more about drugs.

"However, as drugs enter into mainstream discourse, it's essential that the conversation is rooted in evidence and backed up by research, rather than giving platforms for ignorant views. With campaigns such as our own calling for more harm reduction and decriminalization, it has drawn more light in the public domain about safer drug practices and policies that reduce harm."

For now, decriminalization is far from a realized government policy in Ireland—but activist groups and experts continue to try to inform strategy by bringing attention to drug use and the substances themselves.

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Alongside other experts, de Barra helped implement the National Student Drug Survey last year. This study explored Irish drug use and the motivations behind it, using the responses of 2,700 people in third level education. Researchers found that the most common reasons Irish students consume drugs are: to have fun, to explore their curiosity, and to simply switch off. Interestingly, the survey also presented a decline in NPS use since the ban in 2010.

"Our survey... suggests that drug use is high a gram, which may be the highest among the EU.

"People using drugs may consume differently, and legal high survey."

The disconnect between reality and the response of lawmakers is clear, with activist groups often appearing to grasp the situation much more clearly, using relevant and current information.

"Any strategy that is rooted in the criminal justice model is unsatisfactory at reducing the harms of drugs," de Barra explains. "We need a full reform of our drug laws and to treat drugs primarily as a health issue, rather than the current situation of giving priority to the gardaí and keeping doctors secondary. Therefore, the laws in Ireland are out of touch with the reality of Irish society, which has a largely misinformed relationship of drugs, including alcohol."

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