Photo via Flickr user yoppy

My online stalker broke up with me this week.

He left me a voicemail from a random phone number because I had blocked him from calling me. Sounding weary, he told me he'd been trying unsuccessfully to get ahold of me and was now giving up.

"This is not working out for me," he said. "You have such sick articles and you sound interesting but why are you so boring to talk to?... I need someone who can actually have a stimulating conversation, an intellectual one."

Then he wished me good luck and said bye. I hope it'll be the last I hear from him, but based on our history, I have my doubts.

This man and I had no relationship to speak of. We've never met and up until a couple weeks ago, I had never replied to any of the messages he sent me on OKCupid—messages he's been sending for a year and a half, occasionally changing user names and pretending to be a different person when he had no luck eliciting a response.

When I complained about his aggressiveness to my single girlfriends, I realized I was in good company. Many had similar, and in some cases much more frightening experiences to share about being hounded online by men they'd outright rejected. According to a Pew survey, 26 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've experienced online stalking and 25 percent say they've been victims of sexual harassment on the web compared to seven and 13 percent of men, respectively.

It got me wondering—who are these dudes who can't take "no" for an answer? And what causes them to remain so fixated on women they don't know?

One of my best friends blocked a man from OKC who was explicitly sexual with her right off the bat, telling her he wanted to "ride her wild." Instead of taking a hint though, he started following her on Twitter and private messaging her work Facebook profile, referencing things he'd seen on her Instagram feed, including a pair of joke underwear that I'd bought her for Christmas.

"Knowing that he knew where I worked and my full name was pretty scary actually," she told me. "It felt like he was violating my privacy from behind his computer screen. I could imagine him just sitting there creeping through my social media profiles at night and for the first time I became uncomfortable about the extent of material about me that was available online."

The messages from my own suitor started out corny but innocuous enough before becoming increasingly desperate and finally, unnerving, when he correctly "guessed" my full name and where I worked, and starting giving me feedback on my articles.

Then, after 14 months of silence on my end, he sent an apology for messaging me "too much" and said he hope he hadn't ruined online dating for me.

That's when I gave him my phone number.

Women who have these types of encounters are not expected to engage, and to report and block men who won't leave them alone, sometimes repeatedly. If it's extreme enough, we're told we should speak to the cops. But frankly, those options are time consuming on our end and will likely have very little net gain in terms of stopping the behaviour. If anything, the guy will just find a new target. Given that reality, I was itching for an IRL confrontation, in which I could ask him why he thought his actions were OK in the first place.

Even though I made it clear I was only reaching out for the purpose of doing an interview, he immediately began texting and phoning me several times a day, acting as if we were a couple. He greeted me good morning and goodnight, called me on his work breaks, and punctuated his texts with nicknames like "beautiful" and "pretty brownin.'" He left voicemails—the only person besides my parents to do so—repeatedly asking my schedule, whereabouts, and when I wanted to meet up for "pad thai and ice cream."

My editors ultimately convinced me meeting him would be too much of a risk, and while I understand their position, it was frustrating. Throughout this whole scenario, I'd served as some kind of fantasy for this guy who was seemed to think that just because he was physically attracted to me, I was obliged to reciprocate. Then, when I tried to assert some control over the situation by facing him, I was told it's too dangerous.

Had I faced my stalker, I could've explained that he's not entitled to go out with any of the women whose profiles he comes across, even if they are an "87 percent match" and that no one owes him an explanation for their lack of interest.

I would have stressed just how disconcerting it is to have a stranger throw personal information about you in your face, under the guise of wooing you, when you've made it clear you don't want a relationship with them.

And I wanted to tell him he was right, he did sour online dating for me, and guys like him do that to women all the time.

Unfortunately, I won't have the chance to achieve that kind of catharsis, and most women probably don't, though there's some comfort in knowing lots of us have been through the same nightmarish experience. But really, it's just one more violation of safety and space we can add to a list that's already painfully long.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Scott Penner

Read: Prince Was a Genius No Matter How You Define It

Police have launched an official investigation into how prescription medication may have played a role in Prince's untimely death earlier this month, as the Associated Press reports.

A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told the AP investigators are looking into whether a doctor was prescribing the musician drugs in the weeks before he was found dead at Paisley Park in Minneapolis. They're also said to be looking into whether a doctor was on the plane that made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois, six days before his death.

TMZ previously reported that Prince's plane had to make that emergency landing after the star allegedly overdosed on Percocet. The official confirmed to the AP this week that Prince was, in fact, administered a "save shot" of Narcan, which is often used in cases of opioid overdoses, on the tarmac in Moline.

The pop giant's autopsy results are expected to be released within the next three to four weeks. Until then, investigators are probing what kinds of drugs may have been in Prince's home, recording studio, and plane, leaning on the search warrant issued after his death.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In 1970, an anal sex-fearing fundamentalist preacher set the cogs in motion that would hold back Northern Ireland's progress on LGBT rights for decades to come. Dr. Ian Paisley, of the infamous "Save Ulster from Sodomy" campaign, moved from the church to politics, establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 1970—now Northern Ireland's biggest political party.

Fast forward to 2016, before the Assembly election on May 5, and "it's accurate to say that the Democratic Unionist Party have been the main obstacle to moving the marriage equality debate forward in Northern Ireland," gay rights activist Stephen Donnan tells VICE.

This month Donnan launched the #VoteProudly2016 campaign, aiming to "empower LGBT+ people and our allies to find the information they need on which candidates in their constituencies support marriage equality," Stephen says. Basically, Vote Proudly is setting out to use tactical voting to squeeze out the DUP and a veto loophole that the party's used for years to boost moralistic conservatism—but more on those specifics in a bit.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom where same-sex marriage is against the law, and Love Proudly, the organization behind #VoteProudly, is just one part of a broader marriage equality movement that's been mobilizing for some time. The motion on same-sex marriage had been brought before the Northern Ireland Assembly five times, repeatedly defeated by chamber vote alone. That was until November of last year.

Just six months after the Republic of Ireland's May vote on marriage equality by referendum, Northern Ireland's Assembly voted through same-sex marriage in majority for the first time. But because the DUP controversially deployed what's known as a "petition of concern," they were able to veto the democratically approved proposal.

Now for that loophole. The petition of concern is one part of more complicated political scaffolding that has helped Northern Ireland emerge from its conflict. It was included as part of the peace deal in 1998, known as the Good Friday Agreement. The aim was to lay out a way for the new power-sharing Assembly to do government that would allow for the fair representation of both British unionists and Irish nationalists.

To make sure that one political group wouldn't rule discriminatorily against the other, all votes made by the Assembly would depend on cross-community support. A petition of concern could be used to veto a vote that didn't have the mutual approval of both communities—a sort of emergency brake for legislation. The problem has been the vague conditions for the petition's use, leading to what critics have called misuse.

"Instead of enhancing and protecting human rights the veto has become a tool of LGBTQ oppression," says Danny Toner, editor of The Gay Say, a local LGBT news blog that's taken a prominent role in the Vote Proudly movement. "Marriage and human rights do not fall under the underlying rationale for the veto's existence." Dr Alex Schwartz, a lecturer from the School of Law at Belfast's Queen's University, wrote an article last May outlining practical reforms that he believes would improve the veto. He seems to agree with Danny.

"I think the DUP's use of the veto to block marriage equality is definitely an abuse of the procedure," he says." As I understand it, the rationale for having the veto in the context of a place like Northern Ireland is to protect the two main communities' particular group interests qua unionists and nationalists. There is nothing inherently unionist or nationalist about the question of marriage equality."

The use of the veto as a last line of opposition indicates a change in the Assembly chamber that more closely reflects the attitudes of the actual electorate, particularly younger voters. An Ipsos/MORI survey in July 2015 showed that 68 percent of adults in Northern Ireland and just under half of DUP's electorate supported same-sex marriage. The data indicated that massive 89 percent of young adults, aged between 16 and 24, were in favor. The shift in perspective picks up speed as Northern Ireland's peacetime generation come of voting age, forcing new accountability from parties whose electoral monopoly previously relied on the tribal ethno-nationalistic politics of the old conflict.

In a BBC televised election debate for first-time voters last week, the young audience demanded clarity around policies relating to employment, education as well as abortion and marriage rights. Questions about the future left the panel visibly unsettled, leading veteran journalist Eamonn Mallie to tweet that "young ... are clearly leaving the politicians behind."

Some of the campaigners out leafletting for marriage equality. Photo courtesy of Love Proudly

Other parties, including the Greens and nationalists Sinn Fein, have voiced total support to marriage equality (though they haven't been immune to abusing the petition themselves). As the second largest party in the Assembly, Sinn Fein launched their election manifesto on Thursday, April 28, pledging commitment to bringing forward marriage equality legislation again.

And the DUP? Here's what they had to say in a statement to VICE. "The DUP does not believe marriage should be redefined for same sex couples. Civil partnership is available in Northern Ireland for homosexual couples and brings with it all the same rights as marriage does for heterosexual couples. The petition of concern is a mechanism which was democratically voted for in 1998. It has been used by all parties on various issues."

So much for that, then. We're yet to see whether Northern Ireland's current constitutional set-up can deliver the kind of society that the peacetime generation want, and whether a tactical LGBT voting bloc will be able to enact the change they want on May 5. Until then, preacher Paisley's legacy lives on.

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I felt a little alarmed as I watched a guy wearing a pith helmet and a pickaxe pop a yellow dandelion into his mouth. I'm pretty sure my mom told me they were poisonous when I was a kid. A few minutes after swallowing, he showed no sign of vomiting plant matter or dying, so when he picked another from the ground and asked me to try it, I couldn't help but accept. It didn't taste bad—the texture reminded me of a brussel sprout with a surprisingly mild flavour.

On a cold Saturday morning in Connecticut, a group of ten bundled-up people gathered to listen to "Wildman" Steve Brill talk about weeds. For the last 35 years, the self-taught forager, tour guide, and author has been bringing people into fields, parks, and even onto roadsides all over New England to show them food they can easily find in the wild to eat or cook. Though he doesn't have a college degree in botany, environmental studies, or ecology, the outsider naturalist bills himself as "America's go-to guy for foraging." He was once arrested in Central Park for eating a dandelion in front of undercover park rangers, a story he loves to retell and one that, he said, made him famous. "Before that, I was an unknown. I think it must have been a slow news day because every TV station picked the story up."

"There are tons of herbs, berries, greens, mushrooms nuts, seeds, and roots growing all around us," Wildman Brill told me at one point during the tour. "People don't know what they are, so I teach them how to identify, collect, and cook them.

He thinks foraging is important to help people connect with nature, understand the food they eat, and make sustainable, environmentally-friendly decisions. "This is no different than going to a supermarket and noticing a carrot or a tomato—foraging just isn't part of our culture. So I teach people what wild plants they can use, how to protect themselves from eating the wrong plants, how foraging fits into life, and anything else I've been able to pick up about plants," Wildman Brill said. "Also," he added, "how it lowers your grocery bills."

He's not a survivalist or a doomsdayer. Instead, he's a realist with a passion for understanding the natural world, a knowledge he thinks more people could benefit from. When I asked why more people don't know that you can eat widely available plants such as dandelions, he popped another one into his mouth and answered, "because there isn't any plastic packaging and there aren't any commercials on TV; there is no dandelion marketing campaign."

After swallowing the weed, Wildman Brill added that he thinks the best organic food is found growing wild. "The stuff you buy in the health food store has been genetically modified by conventional breeding to make the plants more durable. They are nicer looking, but they don't have the flavor that the corresponding wild foods have," he said as he handed another dandelion to a tour-goer, adding, "This bud's for you."

He pointed out daylily stalks and asked us each to take a bite and told us how we can prepare them at home. He pulled out a container of daylily stalks that he roasted at home and lets us try them. Wildman Brill mentioned that you can also eat the plant's tubers, which taste a little like turnips. He suggested roasting them with herbs and oil and serving them like a baked potato. "It's not something anyone would turnip their nose at," he concludes with one of the many bad jokes he's known for. Among the other edible things we found on our tour were Garlic Mustard, Dandelions, Violets, Cattails, Wild Carrot, Sweet Oak, Bitter Dock, Wild Lettuce, Spice Bush, and Field Garlic.

During the rest of the three-hour tour, neophyte foragers collected bags full of greens, tubers, and flowers for eating or planting later at home. When people sign up for tours, they are told to bring plastic or paper bags for collecting food and pens to mark the bags. Every few feet, Wildman Brill stopped and pointed out another plant, adding puns and jokes whenever he could. The tour-goers ate it up, both literally and figuratively.

Wildman Brill has talents beyond just foraging. He's also an artist. When I went to interview him a few weeks later, he showed me the mushroom sculptures and plant drawings he uses to illustrate his finds. The art, hand-drawn illustrations worthy of vintage botany books, can be seen in his books and through an app he created that offers an on-the-go foraging guide with information on how to identify and properly eat over 250 common plants available around the country in different regions, climates, and seasons.

"I got into this because I was hungry and I was into health, cooking, and nutrition. When I discovered there were wild plants you could eat, I started teaching those to myself," he said.

His first discovery came when he was riding his bike through a park in his native Queens in the 70s. He saw a group of orthodox Greek women collecting plants. He stopped to ask them what they were doing but didn't understand a word they were saying. "It was all Greek to me but they sent me home with a bag of the grape leaves they were picking. I stuffed them and cooked them and they were delicious. After that, I had to know more about these foods growing in the wild.

"I started getting books. The bad thing was that the books weren't very good, which made it hard to learn and to use what I learned. It was good because I saw big opportunities to write about the plants once I knew them," he told me. He learned via reading and a whole lot of trial-and-error, though he's never been sick from something he ate in the woods. "I'm very careful. I've sometimes waited several decades before I've eaten a plant I've seen in the woods."

His favorite foraged food is the Wild Common Violet, after which his daughter and foraging partner is named. His favorite violet recipe is his Violet Saag Paneer, an Indian curry that replaces spinach with violets and paneer with a tofu-based equivalent. "I think I'm just scratching the surface of the culinary possibilities of wild foods." He gets about half of his food from foraging, the rest is bought at the store.

"My thing is gourmet wild foods, no reason for me to go without my brown rice, lentils, and spices," he clarified.

He avoids all processed foods and a typical day's diet for him might include only two meals. On the day we met, he'd had brown rice with Japanese Knotwood for lunch, and salad with a mixture of foraged and store-bought greens with a side of fruit salad for dinner. He doesn't garden either. "The whole world is my garden. There is always something in season and new to find," he said.

When asked if there are others out there who do what he does, he answered, in typical Wildman style, "Yes, all the animals in the woods."

For more on 'Wildman' Steve Brill, visit his website and check out event calendar.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Big, brash game shows may be on their way out. After 13 series and an obligatory celeb spinoff, British tabloids recently reported that The Million Pound Drop has been axed by Channel 4 in March. A spokeswoman for Endemol told VICE that it hasn't definitely been culled, but did confirm that there are no plans for Davina McCall and her gigantic bundles of cash to return to our screens for now, after its last airing in March 2015.

With rumors towards the end of last year that Deal Or No Deal might also be coming to an end after ten years, the death of the overly theatrical, big money gameshow could be here. Looking at ratings alone, once niche quiz show Only Connect—miles away from the razzle-dazzle of The Million Pound Drop—evolved into a sleeper hit on BBC One last year and didn't need a "shiny-floor" format or official hashtag to do it.

Frankly, I'm gutted. I've long been a fan of the see-you-after-the-break tension and big, visual elements of shows like The Drop and Deal; with the latter it's those mysterious red boxes with their faux superstition, while on the former it's big stacks of pinkies teetering on trap doors as perma-tanned couples try to hold down their vomit. Post-grad student and one-time game show contestant Alex Fraser admits being attracted to the drama of it all. He was once on BBC Two's Eggheads and describes it as "very dry."

"It's just a shot of the contestants' faces, a shot of the Eggheads' faces, a shot of Jeremy Vine, on a loop," Alex says. "The viewer doesn't get as much opportunity to know the contestant, or to get involved." Conversely, The Drop was one of the first shows to integrate playing along at home with an online site before quiz show apps became the norm, snagging a BAFTA for digital creativity back in 2011.

Rather than just write a heartfelt farewell letter to The Million Pound Drop, I decided to speak David Flynn, its creator, to find out what he makes of its possible demise. A quiz mogul and former UK creative chief for Endemol, who also masterminded Pointless, he reckons there's a winning formula to The Drop that will lead to its return.

"Everywhere it's gone it's done very well, because there's something very pure within the format that people like," he says. "They love that sense of people risking it all to try and win big, seeing people lose it all at different stages or take those risks and get through to that final question and win the cash." He's also keen to stress that the format is still licensed in some 54 "territories" worldwide, so even if British broadcasters aren't game, TV audiences in other countries from Afghanistan to Vietnam may still be.

Andre Sousa, a quiz show developer and assistant producer at ITV Studios, is also optimistic about the future of these sorts of shows. "Alongside talent shows, heavily formatted quiz shows have got a lot more potential to travel around the world, as they're easy and cheap to make," he says, as someone who's worked on entertainment formats in both the UK and his native Portugal. But with The Drop currently on ice in the UK, will we ever see another show on the scale of, say, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

"As with everything, it's cyclical," he explains. "While it's hard to come up with something that really takes off, I would expect it to happen sooner rather than later. As humans, the tendency is to go bigger and better, so I won't be surprised if there's a show in the future with much bigger prizes than £1,000,000—especially if you manage to start charging players at home to engage with the show."

Likewise, barrister-turned-quiz champion Shaun Wallace, from ratings favorite The Chase, doesn't think audiences are tiring of the genre either, citing the longevity of shows such as his own. "I think that a key part of The Chase's success are the theatrics and the rapport that Bradley Walsh in particular has built up with the viewers," he says. "Our viewers love testing themselves, but if the show was merely a quiz I don't think it would be as successful as it is." That said, like Sousa, he understands the need to innovate.

"It's a shame that The Drop has seemingly been cancelled, as it was a fun show," he says. "While it was fast-paced, having a time slot of 8 PM on a Friday can make it difficult to build a loyal fanbase. I also think that as with all successful game shows, such as Millionaire, they have to be changed up to keep the audience's attention. Thirteen series is a long time."

Even if glossy, garish game shows might not be in as much trouble as it first appeared, it will be interesting to see how things develop. If austerity worsens, I'd find it hard to justify formats that demand that we pay for privilege of playing along, and celebrating huge sums may move from light entertainment to tacky bad taste. Will the next big hit seize some of the cerebral nature that's made Only Connect so big, or will questions still revolve around 90s sitcoms and the royals? Can The Drop just bounce back? I know what I'd prefer. But in the words of former Millionaire host Chris Tarrant—now promoting an off-brand lotto in the ad breaks—the questions are only easy if you know the answer.

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In this week's edition of First-Person Shooter, we gave two cameras to Emily, a Denver-based "budtender" who runs the counter at Magnolia Road, a dispensary that operates both a medical and recreational marijuana storefront, as well as a grow house. A huge weed enthusiast, she smokes about an eighth of dank nug a day (even on the job) and helps upwards of 300 customers pick out a variety of strains, edibles, and other pot products.

On top of shooting the inside of Magnolia Road, Emily snapped #weedporn-worthy pics of the company's massive warehouse filled with budding buds. She also talked to VICE about the inner-workings of a commercial pot dispensary that she says makes anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a day.

VICE: What was your day like Friday? Where did it start? What'd you get up to?
Emily the Budtender: I started my day by getting high before work—the critical wake and bake. Open to close shifts are normal in the industry, so a typical day usually goes from 8:45 AM to 7:45 PM. It was a normal Friday in the stores after that. Our recreational and medical locations are right next door to each other, so I'm usually the budtender jumping between both shops. The medical side has been up and running for three years and the recreational side just under a year.

Later in the day, I popped over to the grow warehouse to take photos of a different side of the dispensary operation. Very few people get a true, inside look at the grow facility, as it's off limits to customers. This is where all the growing, transplanting, cloning, and trimming of the weed happens.

I see all these different jars full of weed in the shop, what's the difference between them?
Those are the strains we currently have on our shelves. The jars with the black labels represent the indica-dominant strains and white labels represent the sativa-dominant strains. I also took photos of the plastic containers, which is the back stock, or inventory we keep in the safe.

What type of people do you serve at the medical shop versus the recreational one?
On the medical side, we serve people 18 years old and up if you have a medicinal marijuana card and matching ID. Recreationally, we serve a totally different crowd. We can accept visitors above the age of 21 from both in and out of state. have a purchase limit of one ounce, while out-of-town visitors are allowed to buy a maximum of seven grams per transaction. We see a way different audience on this side, including a huge amount of out-of-state visitors checking out a dispensary for the very first time.

Can you tell me about the difference between your cheapest and most expensive products?
We try to remain super competitive by pricing our specials nearly identically in both our medical and recreational shops. Typically, a quarter ounce of flower (seven grams) will run around $45 out the door on each side. The most expensive will come from our top-shelf weed on the recreational side, running at $15 a gram, or nearly $300 for the ounce. These top shelf strains have our maximum THC levels, at 20 percent or above.

What's the weirdest thing that has happened at the shop?
We have a regular customer that comes in rocking his pet cat perched on his shoulder, parrot-style.

How did your night end? How did you feel the next morning?
At the end of the night, I went out with a coworker. We hit the bar scene down in Denver, but not without a substantial pregame beforehand. I ended my night by taking a fat dab right before bed, which is the best kinda nightcap. Weed is truly the best hangover cure, so I felt great the next day.

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website for more of his photo work.

Photo via Flickr user Joe Gratz

On June 1, 2014, a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl were drinking in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, park. The girl drank such large quantities of vodka that her blood alcohol content rose above .34––over four times the legal limit for drivers. As she slipped in and out of consciousness, the boy carried her to his car, and at some point, the girl performed oral sex. Later, she woke up at her grandmother's house and was eventually taken to a hospital, at which point she regained consciousness.

At first, prosecutors charged the boy with first-degree rape and forcible oral sodomy, but there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. And as the Guardian reported this week, the state appeals court in March issued a stunning declaration when upholding the non-conviction: Forcing oral sex on someone who is unconscious doesn't count as rape.

The legal loophole is actually pretty easy to explain: In Oklahoma, there are five very specific definitions of forcible oral sodomy, and none of them mention alcohol or drugs. Therefore, the judges wrote in their decision that they would not, "in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language."

John F. Wilkinson, an attorney at the legal group AEquitas, which helps prosecutors build sexual assault cases, says that when he heard about the decision, he "literally gasped." But he tells me that the law isn't necessarily a reflection of the prairie state's archaic viewpoints on sexual assault. Instead, he suggests this may have just been an accident. Wilkinson points to the state's statutes, which say that a person can't consent to vaginal or anal sex if they get drunk to the point of "unsoundness of mind." The problem is that language simply doesn't appear in the definition of "forcible oral sodomy," which is classified as its own distinct crime.

"Every state's weird," Wilkinson says. "Some states don't explicitly cover voluntarily intoxication and only surreptitious intoxication––someone slipping you something. It might have been people were expecting the court to find that this obviously would be covered, but it literally is not explicitly stated in the statute."

Wilkinson suspects this is probably the result of the "patchwork" way America has constructed laws governing sexual assault. As views on rape evolve, the definition becomes broader, and fixes are applied state by state. For instance, marital rape is still quasi-legal in a handful of states, and laws are slowly being created to address LGBT rape.

The attorney believes Oklahoma is the only state with this bizarre exception for nonconsensual oral sex and drunkenness, but says it could easily be closed. Indeed, State Representative Scott Biggs posted on Facebook Thursday that the loophole could be closed as soon as next week.

"There are a lot of consequences that come from getting voluntarily intoxicated," Wilkinson says. "You get drunk, you fall down, you get a hangover. But getting raped is not a consequence of being drunk."

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Inside a refugee detention centre on Nauru Island. All photos courtesy Eva Orner

Whether you look at the disastrous US election campaign, or the European Union's debate over how to handle the Syrian refugee crisis, it's obvious that the world is struggling with a deep-seated identity crisis, one that calls into question ideas of race, religion, and nationalism. And for the most part, Western countries haven't handled this very well.

Photo by Matt Mangum via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Summer, a 28-year-old London sex worker, is pissed off. She wants to know why, despite outcry from her colleagues, the UK may be lurching towards legislation that would criminalize buying sex. Or why a high-profile report into implementing the law was carried out by a team that didn't include one current sex worker, off the back of an ongoing inquiry into sex work law that felt skewed from its outset.

"It's a joke," she tells VICE. "Those on the side of the Nordic model talk about giving 'a voice to the voiceless,' but won't listen to those of us who are shouting at the top of our lungs, who these laws will directly affect." Summer moved to London from England's south-west and turned to sex work as a way to provide for her two children. She says she's been having "sleepless nights" thinking about the threat of a new form of criminalization.

"Criminalizing my clients would make a massive difference to my personal safety. Right now I'm able to ask for detailed screening information. I can check clients are who they say they are, request deposits, and make sure my security buddy knows where I am and who I'm with. Under criminalization, insisting on strict screening every time wouldn't be an option."

Already, Summer's working conditions leave plenty to be desired. She can't, for example, work together with a friend as this would be classed as a brothel and is illegal. Her colleagues who work outdoors can be charged with soliciting. These are major stumbling blocks when it comes to creating a safe, fair working environment. So how did we end up with such awful laws? And are we about to stumble into making another more?

It's worth noting, you'd think, that most current legislation was created without consulting the workers themselves. The main laws governing prostitution in the UK are still the 1956 Sexual Offenses Act, which makes brothel-keeping an offense, and the 1959 Street Offenses Act, which criminalizes solicitation.

The Street Offenses Act was created on the back of a 1957 document called the Wolfenden Report, best-known for its calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Setting a precedent we still see today, the report didn't include testimony from a single working prostitute. In fact, the committee behind the report found the words "homosexual" and "prostitute" so distasteful they substituted them—"for the sake of the ladies on the committee"—for "Huntleys and Palmers," a 1950s biscuit manufacturer.

The result was the 1959 Street Offenses Act, put to immediate use in a crackdown on street prostitution. This triggered an increase in off-street sex work such as massage parlors and escort services, says Dr. Julia Laite, a lecturer in British history at Birkbeck, University of London, and an expert in the history of UK prostitution law. More worryingly, she says, it also led to an increase in violence against sex workers.

"In the 1960s, there was a rise in violence and a rise in the police being unable to find perpetrators of violence as women moved into more clandestine work," Laite says. "There was also a rise in the prevalence of sometimes-exploitative third parties ." Laite says it had all happened before. "It may have been only a coincidence that three years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 instigated a crusade against so-called brothel keepers, Jack the Ripper became known as the first serial murderer of prostitutes," she has previously written, "but it is a symbolic coincidence."

Since sex workers began to demand a voice in law-making, there have been victories—the 1984 defeat of a dangerous bill; 2014's quashing of another—but the pattern of legislating over their heads continued.

"The 2003 Sexual Offenses Bill consultation largely ignored what sex workers had to say," says Niki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes. "It increased sentences for working together in premises and introduced an offense to stop the consensual movement of people across international borders, disguised as an anti-trafficking measure. Immigrant sex workers were targeted for raids and arrested as a result."

And here we are in 2016, discussion raging once more. Sex workers sidelined, once more. When the current UK inquiry gathered oral evidence there were three main witnesses: just one current sex worker, Laura Lee; a former prostitute and survivor of abuse within the industry, Mia de Faoite; and UK Feminista's Kat Banyard who admitted not having actually worked with prostitutes but "with women with involvement in prostitution."

WATCH: England's Lord of Fraud – Wolf of the West End

"We've had 150 years of this bullshit," Laite says. "And there's a depressing pattern to it all. Ironically, while calls to criminalize are predicated on the idea that prostitution is harmful, what I'm seeing is that the more criminalized it gets, the more harmful it becomes.

"What really bothers me is that these people present the idea of criminalizing buyers as a brand-new, feminist, revolutionary idea. Really, the idea is very old. It wasn't originally considered feminist; it was far more connected to the moral reform movement."

Then again, if this wasn't really about moral reform, the aim would be improved working conditions and safety, not abolition. Those already working under similar laws tell us repeatedly that criminalizing sex buyers means that they too are criminalized and endangered. In Northern Ireland, since the Sex Buyers law was passed last year, three sex workers—but only one buyer—have been arrested.

We've been here before. In 1898, an amendment to the Vagrancy Act made "living off the earnings of a prostitute" an offense. But, lo and behold, in 1900, only 165 pimps were sentenced while 7,415 women were convicted under the solicitation laws.

By legal definition, under the Street Offences Act, Summer can still be classed a "common prostitute." "I feel powerless," she says. "Nobody is advocating for me and my colleagues throughout this. We are being silenced."

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Prince circa 1985. Photo by the LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

It's now been a little over a week since a jealous God rescinded Prince Rogers Nelson, universally beloved musical polymath and lyricist, patron saint of ectomorphic sexuality, human synecdoche of the colour purple, noted keytarist (he held a US patent on the instrument) and the last human being to be given a pass for replacing words with numbers. These are but a few of the endless accomplishments that flooded obituaries over the course of the last week.

Indeed Prince was so influential and prolific, and so mercurial as a personality, that he fuses neatly with his myth, making it impossible to tell the truth from the fiction. Which makes the recent tabloid coverage of the days leading up to his death—that he was reportedly addicted to Percocet, that he allegedly had AIDS—doubly upsetting. Whatever the truth turns out to be, it's worth remembering that Prince's very inscrutability was always his strength, and the facts always manage to upstage what we think we know for sure. We're talking about a man who became a devout Jehovah's Witness after penning lyrics so filthy they were directly responsible for the creation of the Parents Music Resource Center, the group that distributed Parents Advisory stickers.

How can you summarize the life of a man who changed his name to a symbol, dated Audrey from Twin Peaks, and tried to convince Vanity to change her name to "Vagina"? What legend could possibly contend with the paradox that was Prince?

What follows is a short list of prevalent but fallacious rumours, malfeasances, and misapprehensions that needn't clutter the Purple One's legacy, much as that legacy seems designed to keep us wondering, as Prince himself asked, "Is this reality or just another façade?"

Prince Designed the Air Jordan Sneaker

Sort of makes sense, right? Prince clearly knew his footwear (and his hosiery, and his tassels, and his cravats), but the idea—widely promulgated online—that Prince invested in Nike in 1971 (when he was 12), got Michael Jordan to sign with the shoe company in 1983, then designed his eponymous shoes is just as crazy as it sounds. Whatever sneakers Prince was using, we all know that cat could ball.

Eric Clapton Called Prince the World's Greatest Guitarist

This is a public service announcement: You needn't revaluate your sense of Eric Clapton's humility based on this spurious internet item, which claims that, when asked how it felt to be the world's greatest guitarist, Slowhand replied, "I don't know. Ask Prince." He said no such thing and in fact the whole thing's a throwback to a quote Jimi Hendrix was supposed to have said about Rory Gallagher, which isn't real either. It's turtles all the way down, this one. You know what Clapton did say? He said, "Her name is Aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell." Big deal.

Prince Hated the Internet

It's true enough that Prince said, "The internet is over" in 2010, but he probably meant the internet he had helped to create by being one of the very first recording artists to take advantage of the fledgling technology in 1994, when he embarked on a "virtual tour" via 1994's Interactive CD-ROM. He made a boxed set (1997's Crystal Ball) available through a website, started a digital subscription to compete with Napster, and went on to win a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Prince was heavily identified with the internet circa 1995 when jokes about the nascent Information Superhighway were as ubiquitous as rapping breakfast cereal characters, hence his appearance in a Simpsons episode where he is seemingly part of a Radioactive Man newsgroup. Which reminds me...

Photo courtesy of Fox

Prince Was on The Simpsons in the 90s

And he was. For about two seconds, in a non-speaking role. But this turns out to have been but a glimpse of things that might have been, as Prince turned down a chance to guest-star in a Conan O'Brien–penned fifth-season episode that would have served as a sequel to "Stark-Raving Dad," with Leon Kompowsky convinced he is the Purple One in the yellow flesh after being cured, The Ruling Class-style-style, of his delusion that he is Michael Jackson.

Prince and Michael Jackson Were Rivals

It may not be long before we start to hear spooky Jacko/Prince coincidences à la JFK/Lincoln. Both died at home under mysterious, possibly pharmaceutically-induced circumstances; both were flamboyantly-coiffed leading artists of the 1980s; Michael was called the King of Pop, while Prince was called... Prince. So it might be natural to assume, as has been claimed, that there was some wrinkle in the two's relationship, perhaps dating back to Prince turning down Jackson's offer to collaborate in "Bad." (Prince biographer Touré relates a charming anecdote about Prince rerecording the song to send back to Michael as a "kind of superstar way of saying, 'Fuck you.'") But lest this turn into a classic Beatles/Stones dichotomy with rival street gangs wearing frilly scarves or single sparkly gloves, let's be clear: The two respected each other's output and were, according to Prince's keyboardist Cassandra O'Neal, as amiable as you'd want two massively-talented thin-waisted superstars to be.

Prince Recalled Every Copy of an "Evil" Album After a Bad Trip

I think this one is reductionist—not to mention that it seems to be a variation on the time that an LSD-addled Brian Wilson, yes, shelved the track "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" during the Smile sessions because he was convinced it had pyrotechnic powers. Drugs or no drugs, Prince probably had perfectly good reasons for disowning The Black Album (finally released by Warner Brothers in 1994). Although it makes for a fascinating listen now, it's clear that it was no kind of follow-up to Sign o' the Times and reveals an artist somewhat uncomfortable with his success and image, as well as the alarming Prince-bashing "Bob George," in which an in-character Prince lashes out at his critics.

Prince Needed Hip Replacements After Years of Dancing in Heels

Another mean deduction, along the lines of Bon Jovi's stomach pump or Marilyn Manson's rib. Obviously, the dust has yet to settle on Prince's health issues in the last decade of his life, so we won't know if there's anything to the rumours that Prince's faith caused him to refuse the blood transfusions he needed to survive—but at least we can stop blaming the shoes.

Prince Once Ran a Personal Ad Looking for "the Most Beautiful Girl in the World"

Actually, unlikely as it seems, I can't find any evidence that this one is false, so if you want to believe that Prince ran an ad with a blurry picture asking you to spend holidays at Paisley Park, be my guest.

Prince Doesn't Believe in Time

Assuming he wasn't thinking of Morris Day, this stems from what is probably the best Prince interview of all time, in the pages of Notorious, where he answered a question about his Adonis-like youth by saying, "I don't believe in time. I don't count. When you count, it ages you." Look, Prince said a lot of crazy things in interviews. He also sang a lot of crazy things, and those are the words we should abide by. In other words, it's not the time that matters—it's the sign o' the times.

Prince Was a Solo Artist

And he was, of course. But something that can't be said enough is what a collaborator Prince was and how much of his work was shaped by his ability to recognize and surround himself with talent. Not only did he share songwriting credits with members of the Revolution and the New Power Generation and mentor Shelia E. and the Bangles, he wrote songs for Chaka Khan, Paula Abdul, and Sinead O'Connor. Nor did he forget his origins in the Minneapolis funk and soul scene, as catalogued in Numero Group's superb Purple Snow boxed set, continuing to work with the members of Minneapolis stalwarts Flyte Tyme and recruiting his childhood roommate André Cymone (who took in Prince as a teenage runaway). Like Bowie before him, he remained active in producing and promoting music up to the time of his death, all of which should be an inspiration to all of us still trying to get through this thing called life. And life is the word that means forever, and that's a mighty long time.

Recent work by J. W. McCormack appears in Conjunctions, BOMB, and the New Republic. Read his other writing on VICE here.

Ken Livingstone is surrounded by a media scrum after his comments about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party (Photo: Anthony Devlin / PA Wire)

Right now in the UK, there are a lot of people policing the boundaries of anti-Semitism. And there should be—but they have a tendency to stray out of their jurisdiction. As an ongoing crisis within the Labour party has shown, it can be hard to criticize Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. Case in point: Ken Livingstone, who went on the BBC's Daily Politics show to defend his party members from accusations that they're anti-Semites, and in the process got himself suspended from the party. Watch the video—at no point does he ever actually voice a personal hatred towards Jewish people, but even if he had it's hard to see how he could have made things worse.

READ: The Naz Shah Scandal Shows the Right Has an Anti-Semitism Problem

Ken should have known. The more he croaked on, the redder his big round face grew, until it started shining like an enormous Stop sign. But he didn't stop. As far as I know, he isn't an anti-Semite, but his comments were crude, thoughtless, and incredibly stupid. Basically, he was being a dick. If you want to criticize Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism, not being a dick isn't a guaranteed defence—even being Jewish yourself doesn't really guarantee anything—but if the accusation is false, it's a pretty good start. Here's how.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP TALKING ABOUT HITLER

I get it. The cruel historical ironies, that Israeli minister threatening Palestinians with a "Shoah," the fact that Israel retains the Nuremberg Laws in its definitions of Jewishness, the enormous prison camps for African migrants they've built in the desert, the sheer rhetorical heft, the fact that nothing makes your point quite like dropping a big fat-bottomed Hitler into the conversation. Just don't do it. What got Ken Livingstone in the worst trouble was his line that Hitler was actually working with Zionists to expel Jews from Europe until he "went mad and ended up killing six million Jews." This is pretty objectionable—is a policy of mass deportation now tolerable? Was the Holocaust really just all about one person's insanity? And while it's not entirely inaccurate (there was an agreement between Hitler and Zionist groups to facilitate Jewish emigration; at the same time the Lehi, a Jewish paramilitary group in 1940s Palestine, tried to form an anti-British alliance with Germany), it's not helping anyone.

At no point in a conversation about Israel or anti-Semitism is it a good idea to start talking about interesting facts about the Holocaust that not many people know. This isn't just a matter of looking bad in front of the cameras: the Holocaust was a monstrous, shattering cataclysm, a memory that's still incredibly painful for millions of people, an evil far, far greater than anything Israel has done since, and it should not be used to score an argumentative point. Yes, there are supporters of Israeli policy who like to sift through the cemeteries in the hope of silencing any opposition. Be better than them. Don't talk about Hitler. Don't talk about the Holocaust.

DON'T RE-DEFINE "ANTI-SEMITISM"

Well done. You've done your research, and you now know that Semitic languages are spoken by over three hundred million people, including Saudis, Somalis, Ethiopians, and, yes, Palestinians. But it's also true that usage determines meaning, and that by a series of historical accidents the term "anti-Semitism" has come to refer to just one branch of that big happy family. Pointing out that the Palestinians are also Semites isn't a devastating truth, it makes it sound like you're trying to semantically weasel yourself out of an argument, and it makes it sound like your accuser has a point.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, DON'T SAY "THE JEWS" EITHER

The definite article is a strange thing. You can use it for most household objects without raising an outcry, but start applying it to groups of people and you're immediately deep into crank territory. This might be because unlike "the table", "the Jews" are not a single, fixed, homogeneous object that you can lay things on top of. There are quite a few of us, we tend to disagree with each other a lot, and we can hear you.

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MAYBE EASE UP ON THE "ZIONIST MEDIA" STUFF

It's not as if you don't have a point here. It's true that media in the UK has an occasional habit of focusing unduly on Israeli casualties in any outbreak of violence, while ignoring Palestinian ones (or of devoting equal time to both in an attempt at impartiality, when deaths on the Palestinian side tend to massively outnumber those in Israel.) In the United States, it's a lot worse; it's only relatively recently that a lot of American media has started covering Palestinian suffering in any depth at all. It's true that there are many passionate Zionists working in news organisations. But it's also true that allegations of Jewish control of the media are a common and pernicious feature of anti-Semitic discourse, and one that's pushed in particular by white supremacists and other assorted idiots.

The media as a whole do not have a structurally Zionist agenda: many outlets will tend to tilt towards the Israeli government, but it's for the same reason that they'll give more airtime to bosses than to unions, more invitations to Nigel Farage than to migrants in Calais, more column space to politicians than protesters. Powerful people have more money and influence than the powerless, and that tends to get them a better press. In this instance, most of the power is on the Israeli side of the equation. This should be why you're in solidarity with Palestine—because you're in solidarity with the powerless. An unfair media goes with that territory. Fight to change it, but quit kvetching.

@sam_kriss

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Weeds on Main was among the first to be ticketed. Photo via Facebook

The City of Vancouver has started writing tickets to pot shops that violate new city bylaws.

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Nolan North plays Nathan Drake (on the back of the bike) in 'Uncharted 4', and Troy Baker his older brother, Sam (at the front).

When director Michael Mann brought Robert De Niro and Al Pacino together to star in 1995's crime thriller Heat, he was doing something remarkable. It remains rare indeed to see two headlining actors, arguably at the peak of their careers and box office potential, split the starring role on a new production pretty much straight down the middle. The two had appeared on the big screen together before, in Francis Ford Coppola's immortal The Godfather Part II of 1974, but had never shared a scene. When they do in Heat, it's movie history, indelible and electric.

Troy Baker and Nolan North have starred together in video games prior to Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, but never in a manner that's seen both play such pivotal roles in the same production. Baker, having won awards for his work as Joel in The Last of Us and Talion in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, is emerging as the preeminent male in video game voice overs and performance capture. Other recent credits include Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, LEGO Dimensions (in which he played Batman, having also portrayed The Joker in 2013's Batman: Arkham Origins) and Far Cry 4. He's getting more big gigs right now than any Hollywood star in their respective line of acting. And North's CV is something else: from Call of Duty to Assassin's Creed via World of Warcraft, he's been involved with some of gaming's most played franchises. He was The Penguin in Batman: Arkham Knight, re-recorded Peter Dinklage's lacklustre lines as Ghost in Destiny, and played Captain Walker in 2012's unforgettable Spec Ops: The Line.

Oh, North has also played Nathan Drake, the Indiana Jones-like treasure hunting protagonist of Naughty Dog's Uncharted series, since game one, Drake's Fortune, back in 2007. But you probably knew that already. For Uncharted 4, Nathan's long-lost, assumed-dead brother Sam returns into his life, played by Baker, and the two set out on what is being sold as the final adventure for the avatar who made the half-tuck his own.

'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End', gameplay trailer

I'm definitely not the first person to draw the parallel between what Baker and North are doing in video games with De Niro and Pacino in Heat. And it's not like the two haven't physically faced off against one another in a motion-capture studio – they did just that on Shadow of Mordor. But Uncharted 4 is such a commercial juggernaut, a game that's going to be played by millions, that it's worth asking the question: who's Pacino in this field, in this relationship, and who's De Niro?

"You know, that's a really good metaphor," Baker says, immediately deep in thought on the subject. If he's ever been presented with the comparison before, he's hiding it well. "I've got to say that Nolan is probably De Niro. You look at those two people, and we don't have anyone else in the film industry who's like that anymore. No matter what they do, they'll only ever be De Niro and Pacino. They can do the worst movies in the world and their reputations will stay intact. I'd love to have that recognition."

North is quick enough to agree, albeit with a smile and a brief De Niro impression. "It's not bad, I'll take it," he says, adopting a familiar accent, arms crossed and shoulders hunched, face scrunched into an approximation of the New York-born actor's features. He slips back into himself – which, unsurprisingly, sounds a lot like Nathan Drake. "Pacino, bless him, like Troy, tends to overact. So De Niro's always been subtle. He can do comedy and drama. So yeah, I'll take that. The fact that you just equated me to anyone like that is a huge compliment. That's brilliant. It's funny. It's one of those things that you don't really reflect on, but thank you."

North is in a position to enjoy a little reflection, though – on the journey that he's been on as the leading man of Uncharted, a journey that's ending with A Thief's End, and what it's meant for his career.

"The first games I did, I did them because I was out of work," he tells me. "Voiceover people I knew told me not to get into games. They told me to get into animation. But I needed the money, and I wanted to work, so I started doing it. And it was fun. One job led to another, and then things evolved, and I became that guy. People call me a pioneer for voice acting in gaming, but am I really? Maybe, but it's just kind of worked out that way. I've been in the right place at the right time.

"I get caught off guard when someone asks me to reflect, but then you think, 'Oh wow, this has been amazing.' This is one of the few jobs where, after ten years, you get the chance to stop and reflect and go, wow, we did something really special. I have friends who've done TV, and they don't get the time that I've had with my family, with my kids. I've made the football practises, and gone to the plays. I've picked them up from school, y'know, the simple things. Because I've been afforded this life.

"This is the greatest job I've ever had. To be the Indiana Jones, the John McClane, the main guy in something that has lasted so long. There's no such thing as 'Uncharted 1' – we didn't know we were going to do two. We just did Drake's Fortune, and that was it. Then I remember getting the call confirming we'd do a second one, and I thought it was going to be so great. And then that blew up, so we sort of knew there'd be a third game. But I'd be lying if I said that we should keep going. There's a part of you that wants to, because this is fun. But you also don't want to jump the shark; you don't want to make Drake In Space. So you're always looking ahead, but because Uncharted has been such a great success, I have projects lined up. There are new challenges ahead."

Article continues after the video below

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North's pre-existing relationship with Baker, forged through a handful of previous projects on which they interacted without having to play close roles, has undoubtedly helped the rapport between Nathan and Sam in Uncharted 4 appear so effortless, so natural. "Nolan and I see each other quite a bit," Baker tells me. "And I'm fortunate enough to be able to have access to him, in the sense that I can come to him honestly and he can to me, too. We sit down and talk about projects, and more than anything else about what we're wrestling with, more than what we're excited about. We spend more time talking about our fears."

For Baker, coming into a series as massive as Uncharted brought with it a heap of uncertainty, doubts about how he might complement the vibrancy of the franchise, and the fanbase's appreciation of Nate and those closest to him. "With The Last of Us, we all knew that it could fail. With Uncharted 4, though, the feeling I had was: don't be the reason this fails. I told Neil Druckmann, the co-director, that I didn't want to be the reason this game sucks. He sat me down and just said: 'It's a really good game. Don't think too much of yourself that you could be the one that brings it down.' I think part of that is down to the natural ego that actors have, though. I moved from a position of fear into faith, through trusting these other 300 people making the game. I listened to who they wanted Sam to be, and then all I needed to do was get myself out of the way."

"But I didn't want to come in and try to do it my way," he continues. "I wanted to do it in a way that I fitted into the DNA. So it was the coolest thing to walk onto the set on the first day. I wasn't first up for a shot, so I got to sit back and watch. So I'm watching Nolan, and Richard McGonagle, and Emily Rose, play Nate, Sully and Elena respectively, and I can totally see them as those characters, in my mind's eye. And it's like, you watch these people transform, without them really having to do anything. They're just being themselves."

Where North ends and Drake begins is something of a blurred line, that's for sure. Nowadays, even with the physical anonymity that voiceover work tends to provide, North is frequently recognised as the wisecracking hero of what is, unquestionably, an interactive entertainment behemoth. "People will shoot me a look, when they hear my voice," he says. "I'm also on this show in the US, Pretty Little Liars, and I people tell me: ''My girlfriend's watching the show, and all of a sudden I hear this guy talking and I'm like, that's Nathan Drake.'"

"I don't do this to be famous, though," North continues. "I once asked Bill Murray if it's great being rich and famous, and he told me: 'Rich is good. Famous, not so much.' It's such a ridiculous term. I've always strove to be respected in what I do – and to just keep working, and to be a good soldier. This is a job. You first get into acting and you're thinking about Hollywood and all this stuff. But then you realise it's a job like anything else, and you have to go and deliver a performance."

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"A friend of mine told me, 'Fame is when people know you, notoriety is when people know your work'," Baker says. "And that's what I want to do. Actors always say bullshit like this, but it's really the truth. I don't want to do this so that I'm famous; I want to do this so that people see what I'm doing, and think: 'I want to do that, too.' If I can do the best, and inspire someone who really should be doing this, to do this, then I've done my job.

"I think that there's been a stigma attached to games in the past, that's put actors off getting involved. But I was sat down with a friend of mine a while ago, who'd been offered the role of the lead in a little show on HBO called True Blood. He turned it down because he said it was TV. And I said: 'That's not TV, that's HBO.' But at that point, the feeling was that TV was death, for an actor. You go to TV to die. But now look at it. That's where everyone is clamouring to be. Kevin Spacey is on a Netflix show? What? So you have this paradigm shift, where now people want to go to where the art is being made, and if cinema is doing big, pulpy, popcorn spectacles, but TV is getting into the minutia of the form, and building characters, then people will flock to that. And I fully believe that games are the next iteration of that.

"I've seen people like Kevin Spacey and Kiefer Sutherland look at games and realise that they're really, really interesting. This is a compelling medium for actors, as it allows them to stretch in ways they've never experienced before. So I think that stigma has lifted. We've put it in a coffin and set it on fire."

'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End', Madagascar preview footage

Whether or not Drake himself – hell, be that Nathan or Sam, or both – ends up casket-bound come the end of Uncharted 4 remains to be seen. Even if I'd reached the end of the game (I've not; I'm four and a half hours deep at the time of writing), of course I wouldn't spoil the climax here. Baker calls his time working with Naughty Dog, on The Last of Us and now Uncharted 4, "life changing", and for North, there can be no doubt whatsoever that playing Nathan Drake totally transformed his career, and his way of living. Now that his run as Drake is over (at least according to the game's makers), how does that feel?

"Well, I don't ever have to say goodbye, because I can always pop that disc in, and play again. I do believe that we've created something here. Gaming now is a true art form, and the place that I would say is pushing the boundaries of entertainment more than any other medium. We have a decade of work within it that will live forever. This has been fantastic, and the feeling is bittersweet now, sure, but I'm not going to shed a tear."

Instead, he shoots another smile, infectiously sincere. While Heat showcased Robert De Niro's inimitable intensity, the movie is only ranked 13th on his highest-grossing projects to date, with The Godfather Part II way down at 24. If North truly follows suit, it could be that what he does next, with Uncharted behind him, becomes even bigger than what he's been a part of with Naughty Dog. I don't know what the gaming equivalent of Meet the Fockers might be, but if anyone's going to be in the right place, at the right time, to make it happen, it'll be North. And you just know Baker's going to be bagging the plum roles for the foreseeable future, too. He'd be wise to learn from missteps in Pacino's filmography, though: nobody needs gaming's own Gigli.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is released, exclusively for PlayStation 4, on May the 10th. More information at the game's official website.

@MikeDiver

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Writer's Block is a semi-regular column that zeroes in on graffiti legends, street bombers, and modern-day vandals with a mixture of stories, off-the-cuff interviews, and never-before-seen pictures.

All photos by the author

Behind Citi Field in Queens, home of the New York Mets, sits an industrial wasteland. Once populated by over 100 bustling auto body shops and junkyards, an eerie quiet has now settled over its pothole-riddled streets. Overhead, planes take off from nearby LaGuardia. Seagulls scavenge in the rubble. The area is so heavily polluted from decades of run-off grease and oils that on bad days you feel like you'll get tuberculosis just from walking around and breathing in the air. But dig among the abandoned garages, piles of trash, and skeletal remains of cars and you'll find a treasure trove of tags, painted characters, and colourful, intricate letters forming an almost-natural bond with the desolate scenery. This is Willets Point, a.k.a. the "Iron Triangle," and it's become a playground for some of the most talented graffiti writers in New York City over the last few years.

This is nothing like 5Pointz, the late Long Island City graffiti mecca, which for better or worse was a tourist attraction and selfie spot. Casual enthusiasts have never come out to Willets Point, where, in contrast to 5Pointz, the graffiti is done without permission from property owners. For years, the area has been embroiled in a fight between developers, city government, and local merchants over what its future should be—the plan was to build a mall there, then affordable housing; now it seems like it will become a parking lot for LaGuardia Airport. In the process, the city has used eminent domain and buyouts to push out the businesses, creating a lot of abandoned and semi-abandoned buildings—a perfect graffiti canvas, in other words.

The Triangle has been particularly attractive to some of the younger and more ambitious writers in the city, many of whom stumbled upon it by accident and quickly realized its potential. (Banksy left a sculpture here as part of his New York residency in 2013.) Queens local and burgeoning graffiti wiseass KLOPS, known for his use of comic-book-like characters and Instagram-friendly puns, says he's been visiting the "jungle of fences and wood and metal" for a few years.

"You would think it was a third-world country when you were there," says graffiti writer SEFU, whose pieces can be found in abandoned spots across the city and whose tags and throw-ups line the streets from Queens to lower Manhattan. "No laws. No rules. No cops."

"Willets Point is a place where you do pieces," says a writer who goes by DONUT. A piece, in graffiti lingo, is a layered, multicoloured, letter-based design that requires time and precision—something you couldn't pull off on a Manhattan block without risking arrest. He remembers painting in the Iron Triangle for the first time in the middle of the winter a while back. "I was blown away. We did pieces inside a building, which was chill obviously, and as we were leaving I was like, 'Why don't we just paint street-side? Clearly no one cares about graffiti here.' And so we did."

DONUT is one of many young hardcore writers who think that legal graffiti is an oxymoron—"I enjoy doing pieces during the day, and stress-free, but I don't think graffiti should be done with legal permission," he explains. Even though "permission walls," where property owners let graffiti flourish, allow artists to take their time, part of what makes graffiti exciting to many of its practitioners is the risks and rule-breaking. Many writers occasionally paint legal spots, and some tend to transition to more accepted forms of art as they age, acquire arrest records, and may want some recognition from the wider art world—but the graffiti writers who have come to Willets Point want to stay outlaws.

That is, this spot offers most of the rewards—virgin walls, street cred from illegal painting, and plenty of photo ops that writers widely tease out on Instagram—with little potential downside.

The writers I talked to have all done their share of street bombing, but Willets Point offers them space to do nicer, more playful, or more experimental work. The result is an impressive variety of styles influenced by everything from Dalí and modern art to NYC's style masters and cartoon characters—all for an audience almost exclusively comprised of other writers (why else would someone make the trip to this sequestered scrapyard?), and those who know where to look online.

HOME, who started out painting more traditional-looking graffiti and now draws inspiration from a variety of art movements, including pop art and abstract expressionism, was first introduced to the area by fellow writer RODA on the way back from a different spot in 2013. "We weren't even looking to paint," he told me. But once he realized that no one cared if they did, he kept coming back every weekend and brought others along, including SEFU, DONUT, ETHAN, and CYAH—all young writers with growing reputations in the New York graffiti community.

"One of the most striking things about Willets is the contrast of the brand new stadium against the makeshift village cinderblocks and corrugated metal," HOME explains. "That might be why I loved painting there so much. It's the juxtaposition of superficial versus authentic."

"When there is a game across the street at Citi Field and you can hear the announcers and the crowd cheering—it's just a really great time," adds CYAH. While thousands of fans enjoy an afternoon in the stadium, writers navigate toxic slush, rusty metal, and human excrement just steps away in order to paint at any hour of the day. "There was literally pieces of shit everywhere," CYAH recalls.

Probably thanks to its isolation, Willets Point is the scene for all sorts of oddities. "I've experienced junkies getting their fix, three-dollar payaya, talking with some real nice hard-working folk, the filming of a softcore porno involving a large Mexican guy in drag dancing with a few mechanics, loose pit bulls, storage-containers-turned-shelters for many homeless people, garbage cans on fire, and the list goes on," elaborates MATEO, another graffiti writer and frequent visitor to the area. "Many young writers want to connect with a piece of NYC history. The Iron Triangle is one of the very few raw and forgotten places existing in NYC, so I think young people see that and really desire to be a part of the experience."

But Willets Point's status as a graffiti oasis won't last forever, and some say it's already over. DONUT, for one, has heard that the cops are looking to catch graffiti writers hitting the area and is ready to move on. But CYAH says that the scene will simply shift to another spot—and there'll always be another spot, despite the continuing development and gentrification of New York.

"There's so many undiscovered places out there," CYAH says. "So you just gotta keep lurking around."

Ray Mock is the founder of Carnage NYC and has been documenting graffiti in New York and around the world for ten years, publishing more than two dozen limited edition zines and books. Follow him on Instagram.

A stretch of road in rural Ohio was shut down after two shootings killed eight family members last Friday. (Chris Russell/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

VICE is tracking mass shootings in America in 2016, and comparing the numbers with their European counterparts. Read our rationale for the project and the metrics we're using here.

Since last Friday morning, America has endured 13 mass shootings that left 15 people dead and 44 more injured. The attacks bring the US mass shooting toll in 2016 up to 91 incidents with 99 dead and 332 injured.

Europe, meanwhile, suffered just one mass shooting —the first on the continent since an attack on April 2 in Marseilles, France. The new shooting came last Friday night in Naples, Italy, where an alleged hit by the notorious Camorra crime syndicate on a neighborhood crime family killed two and injured three. The brazen incident, which drew a fair amount of regional press coverage, brings the continent's death toll in such attacks so far this year to 14 incidents with 13 dead and 55 injured.

But for all the attention garnered by the bold violence in Naples, it was dwarfed by ongoing coverage of last Friday's mass shooting in Piketon, Ohio. The killer or killers carried out a two-stage execution-style assault on a stretch of rural road, targeting three of the same family's nearby properties and another one miles away. The massacre left eight dead. The mass shooting stage of the spree, which accounted for seven of those deaths, was the single deadliest such attack in America so far this year.

Piketon's media dominance makes sense, given what Jaclyn Schildkraut, an expert on the way the news processes mass shootings at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oswego, recently told us. Attacks that target what the media tends to consider typical victims—like young black or Latino men in cities—seem revoltingly routine to us by now. But attacks that deviate from the norm, hitting or endangering atypical victims, often in displays and scales of violence that don't fit with the sloppy drive-by and street dispute narratives of most mass shootings, garner intense scrutiny in the national press.

Most of this past week's attacks, a series of drive-bys and escalated confrontations, fit roughly within the category of shootings America chooses to ignore. A couple of incidents did stand out: Friday's attack in Naples was noteworthy thanks to its potential ties to crime families and imagery of well-armed, masked assailants storming a public square. And an attack on Monday at 3:30 PM in the crowded Music City Central bus terminal in Nashville, Tennessee, drew its fair share of attention as well. Although seemingly targeted violence allegedly perpetrated by one young black man against a minority victim—something the mass media might usually barely cover—the public location of the shooting, in broad daylight, endangering all manner of people (although fortunately injuring just four people) made it uniquely attractive for media coverage and terrifying to viewers.

But neither of these incidents held a candle to the unique and horrific spectacle in Piketon. An execution-style shooting that claimed many members of the same family with one shot to the head, some as they slept, sparing only two infants and a three-year-old child, at least one right next to their murdered parent—the assault seems singularly precise and cold-hearted. The decimation of a family in a small town also deviates from the norm, as does a shooting with only deaths and no injured survivors. And grim flourishes, like the money reportedly strewn at one of the victim's feet, and the potential connection to a marijuana grow operation—and the fact that the as-of-yet-unknown attacker(s) in the case remain at large despite a massive investigation—all add up to a distinctive spectacle of human suffering that reporters and readers alike can't look away from.

Piketon, paradoxically, both is and is not the quintessential image of a mass shooting. Although not a public rampage, this is the kind of tragedy many Americans think of when we think of that term—an aberrant, unexpected terror wiping out many people in a gruesome manner. But the catching, brutal facets of the crime that make it so outstanding to us also make it a poor representative of the bulk of mass shootings, which kill one or two at most and injure a handful, usually in communities that routinely struggle to contain violence. Urban shootings might seem low-grade and banal to some Americans, but by the standards of many places in Europe, they're all exceptionally bloody—and the fact that such attacks could even become banal, shifting our definitions of tragedy toward something like the Piketon massacre, should be cause for national reflection.

Our fixation on Piketon over the past week makes sense, going by media theory and human nature. It was a catastrophe almost made for fearful rubbernecking—not just in America but in the wider world as well. But the price of that fixation, the marginalization of somehow less newsworthy American mass shootings and the wider ignorance of a grinding epidemic of a unique style of violence, one that has wrought a heavy toll on the nation this year alone—that is borderline criminal.

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Riaz Khan, an early Baby Squad member, as a youngster. Photo courtesy of Riaz Khan

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's 1982 in Leicester. Gary Lineker is playing football rather than selling crisps. Leicester City Football Club languish in the Second Division—miles from the position they've soared to, currently at the top of the Premier League for the first time in their 132-year history. And a crew of Leicester supporters known as the Baby Squad hooligan firm are clashing with Derby fans before an away game.

"A big mob of us went up on the train early in the morning for the 3 PM kick off in October 1982," says Paul Allan*, who counts himself among the Leicester Baby Squad founders. "We got ourselves in this pub called the Castle and Falcon and we were playing pool and having some beers, when a load of the Derby fans started coming in.

"This was their stronghold—like the Snooty Fox was to us in Leicester. When they noticed us it was carnage. There was fighting, bar stools being thrown, pool cues being used. It all spilled out into the streets and the police just couldn't control it. You could hear all the sirens going off," and he pauses. "It's not something I'm proud of—I'm just telling you how it was."

Eighteen years later, the relatively unknown Baby Squad—never as big as the major London firms—had Leicester voted the UK's second most-violent football club, in a survey published by the National Criminal Intelligence Service. So just who were they, and what did they stand for?

Years under the radar have turned the gang into the stuff of urban legend. Most people from Leicester have an uncle's girlfriend's brother who was definitely in the Squad, or a fourth cousin who was involved in the fight against Millwall fans in 1987 that saw a police officer's nose and cheekbone shattered. The Baby Squad, like the Foxes, were the underdogs, born from a mob of casuals who lived for three things: football, fashion, and "absolutely having it at the weekend," as one ex-member—who didn't want to be identified—said.

"Baby Squad was first formed in 1982, when a group of young lads walked past a copper and the copper said: 'What's this? The baby gang?'" says Riaz Khan, a 50-year-old ex-member who's written a memoir about his time in the gang. "From there, it just sort of stuck." As word of the police officer's quip spread, the gang embraced the name.

"We got labeled it, so we adopted it. I was a youth," says Paul, now 52, "full of bravado and adrenaline, and it was just a product of the time. It was part of the culture of growing up. You had this loyalty to Leicester and you wanted to mark your territory and be bigger and better than other cities."

The Baby Squad quickly became bigger than turf wars and football. Leicester was a stronghold for the National Front, and past members now say that the unity the gang provided helped to mend the divide that gripped the city. "There were a few people in the firm who didn't like Asians," says Riaz, "but as time went by and more and more Asians started coming to the football, we were just accepted. Leicester is unique. The Baby Squad, and the casual scene—especially in Leicester and Birmingham and cities like that—broke down more racial barriers than any government think tank or any racial equality organization ever could."

Other members speak from that oddly utopian perspective in other ways. Bev Thompson started hanging out with the Baby Squad when her parents relocated to Leicester from Yorkshire. and remembers the way the gang navigated gender.

"I started going to matches and trying to infiltrate the group. I was nicknamed 'Aquascutum Girl' because I was one of the best-dressed out of a group of fiercely competitive older males, but I was never an official member—more of a groupie. The Baby Squad were violent and I wasn't into getting sliced with a Stanley knife! I couldn't protect myself with my fist like the blokes."

Bev Thompson, back in her Squad days. Photo courtesy of Bev Thompson

Bev also says she made a handy look-out for the Baby Squad, who would have her wait at the train station for rival fans to arrive and scope out the location of the police before big matches. At the end of the game, she'd collect jewelry and money from the lads before it could get lost in the inevitable post-match brawl.

Now aged 47, Bev says that her time with the Squad was a big influence on her life. "I witnessed a group filled with courage, loyalty, and purpose. It gave me the confidence to be a strong female in a man's world."

To gang members it was all fun and football, but to Leicester City's club directors the Squad's reputation was becoming a problem. The football club got tougher on violence within the stadium after local papers reported that "violent fans could kill off local soccer."

With safety concerns heightened, the police were forced to chaperone rival fans back to Leicester train station in buses after home matches at Filbert Street, leading to a riot in 1986 that saw 64 fans arrested for attacking the buses and causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.

Riaz Khan, second from the right, with friends—not necessarily members of the Squad

The club's crackdown pushed the violence flooding out of Filbert Street, where the Foxes grounds remained until 2002. Riaz says that the smaller stadium nestled in the city center, with its rows of terraced streets and back alleys, provided the shelter for fights hidden from the watchful eye of the police.

"Nowadays it's much more controlled. There are CCTV cameras everywhere and banning orders on people who've been involved in anything dodgy. Plus, the Leicester ground has moved now so it's harder. The Walkers Stadium is in such a big area; you can see the fights happening from a mile away."

While the post-football fights are few and far between in Leicester now, the original Baby Squad members still frequent the matches. Their era is over, and a new gang, the Young Baby Squad, are trying their luck at filling their shoes—but not very successfully.

*Name changed to protect source's identity

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It's not easy finding people with face tattoos, even in New York. There's a lot of baggage that comes with having one—people may see you as a "freak," think you've been involved with some shady stuff, or assume you've been to prison. That's not always the case, though.

While prison tattoo culture is very real, face tattoos are just as prevalent in the tattooing community at large, and often spread beyond it. It can still be difficult to get one—some tattoo shops make patrons wait on the decision or require them to already have a face tattoo, and the tattoo artist might even give customers shit about their desired design to see if they'll back out. But if you know where to look, the barriers between that taboo and "civilized" society are thinner than a stick 'n' poke needle.

There is a wide gamut of reasons for why people get face tattoos, from reminders on how to live and symbols representing personal history, to culturally significant icons and just plain bad decision making. Regardless of the impetus behind getting them, face ink requires a deep dedication to a lifestyle, a culture, a career, or personal expression that can't be reversed cleanly. VICE spoke with five people with face tattoos to discuss the stories behind their modified mugs.

Casey
25-Years-Old
Tattoo Artist at Collar City Tattoo
Troy, New York

Casey is a tattoo artist who works at a shop called Collar City in Troy, New York. Previously, she worked at a shop called Fast Lane in neighbouring town Castleton, where an artist named Mitch Sousa gave Casey her first face ink. The bird on the left side of her face is to remember to let herself be free, while the anchor on the right side signifies the opposite. Together they're also a tattoo joke (swallows seamen/semen). She's also given a face tattoo of a goddess symbol to one of the shop girls at Tiger's Blood Social Club, another tattoo shop Casey worked at, in Alameda, California.

She generally doesn't get too many reactions to her face tattoos—people who gawk, she believes, are typically responding to her overall appearance—including tattoos on her arms, chest, and neck, as well as her various facial piercings. That being said, the face ink sometimes leads to "gross guys" hitting on her. Out of all the tattoos adorning her, Casey doesn't have any regrets about her face tattoos. "They're a commitment to my career and the lifestyle."

Follow Casey on Instagram.

Lucy
26-Years-Old
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

Lucy's two face tattoos are fairly fresh, having gotten inked just two months ago by an artist named Luka at Ink It Up Tattoo in the Bronx. The number nine, under his right eye, is a number that has consistently shown up during different phases of his life. In numerology, it's the number of completion, fulfillment, spiritual awakening, and enlightenment, as well as self love. The choice of 09 instead of just 9 "makes it more complete," Lucy says.

He got this tattoo around the same time as he started going by Lucy, which is tattooed on his left forehead. The birth of Lucy, who he describes as a persona, is very important and is inseparable from his artistic forays, which include photographs of BDSM culture, which he shoots on disposable cameras in both private and public places.

Tattoos serve as a means of expression for Lucy, no different from his sometimes-shocking art. Despite tattoo culture's rise in popularity and acceptance in mainstream culture, Lucy often thinks they're still seen in a negative light, and getting inked on your face is a way of going against what society expects.

But more importantly for him, they are a way towards body positivity. He tells me it took a while for him to accept his own body, especially when it came to featuring it in his art work, which some see as "weird," but he sees as beautiful. "I had to get comfortable with the idea of taking my clothes off around other people. It meant allowing myself to be vulnerable and put in a situation I found uncomfortable." His face tattoos are testaments to the persona that has allowed this personal growth and creative fulfillment to take place.

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Gavin
24-Years-Old
From Houston, TX
Lives in Troy, NY

Gavin got his first face tattoo in his teenage years, consisting of three dots and a cross under his right eye—a stick 'n' poke done by a friend. Later, the image would be covered by a new tattoo of a ship. The 24-year-old told me he used to sail when he was younger, and sailing is one of the happier memories he has from a difficult childhood growing up in Houston, Texas.

He covered the original tattoo after moving to Oakland, where the three dots and cross were mistaken for a gang symbol. He got the nautical cover-up face tattoo while working as an apprentice at a tattoo shop he can't remember the name of. The artists at the shop originally didn't want to tattoo his face, but since he already had the stick 'n' poke, they agreed to cover it up. Gavin still gives stick 'n' pokes to people, but he doesn't work as a full-time tattoo artist.

"I got my face tattooed 'cause I thought I was invincible," Gavin says. His other facial tattoos include an old nickname ("Stardust," a reference to the drug dealing days of his teenage years) under his left eye, a double arrow tattooed below that, and praying hands with the words "It's all worth reaching for" going across the left side of his head—a tattoo he and a group of friends got, memorializing a friend who passed with the same tattoo on his arm. When asked about any regrets, he said, "I wish I looked more like a dad than a convict."

Eddie
Tattoo Artist at Armageddon Ink Gallery
Brooklyn, NY

Eddie has no regrets about the "CS" tattooed on the side of his face. Standing for "con safos" the letters have a long history with Chicano culture. It can be translated as "with respect" and originated in graffiti culture, specifically within Chicano communities that used it as a sign-off in their tags and as a code of conduct (anything tagged with a "CS" was considered off limits to be tagged over). Though Eddie says the lettering has leaked past Chicano communities to a slightly broader audience, those who are still culturally connected to the graffiti symbol take a lot of pride in it.

Eddie got this tattoo done on his birthday by Aaron Garcia (a close friend and fellow tattoo artist at Virginia Class Tattoo in Manassas, Virginia) this past February at the Philadelphia Tattoo Arts Convention. According to tradition, the CS tattoo can only be given by a trusted friend who also has a CS tattoo to ensure they understand its cultural weight. While this is his first face tattoo, he plans on getting his other sideburn tattooed, as well. As to why he got the tattoo in a highly visible part of his body, Eddie says, "Because I was honoured to have it, and what better place to show how true I am to the game!"

The reactions to his tattoo have been positives. He says he's gotten compliments for the "dope lettering," and having a "fresh tat." For Eddie, the tattoo is meaningful in an artistic light, too. It's about giving and receiving to the tattoo community and being aware and proud of his own personal history. "It shows that my fellow artists or homies respect me, so I am honoured to know I have real pride in what I do and knowing my homies will always have my back."

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Luka
29-Years-Old
Tattoo Artist at Ink It Up Tattoo
Bronx, NY

With a face covered by 12 tattoos, including both eyelids, Luka has been involved in tattooing, on both the giving and receiving ends, since his late teenage years. Having apprenticed and worked in various tattoo shops in both LA and the Bronx (the latter, his hometown), he didn't get his first face tattoo until 2008 at age 22. His friends and body art colleagues Spider and Joel of Tuff City Tattoos have done the majority of Luka's face tattoos, as he is close with both and has seen their progress as artists throughout the years. "I wouldn't just trust anyone to tattoo my face," he says.

The first one he received, which lies on his right brow, says "LA 1986." The letters reference both a former girlfriend, a nickname, and the Californian city where he spent some of his life, and he was born in 1986.

The tattoos have various significance, with some of them chosen for their aesthetic qualities, while others were picked for more personal reasons. For example, he has an Arabic phrase on his left cheek in red that means "Empty of fear," chosen as a reminder to not be scared to live life. "It's a permanent reminder to live more freely," he says. "Most people, including myself, are often too afraid to live and even more afraid to die."

The AK-47 under his right eye has nothing to do with gang affiliation, but rather is a gesture of respect for Kalashnikov's engineering marvel. As Luka puts it, "It's kind of a metaphor for the person I strive to be. Unbreakable."

The rest of his face tattoos include a shark wearing a top-hat and monocle (a symbol of duality: "I'm really a kind soul, but because of my surroundings and upbringing, I also have that shark side in me."), the lip lines inspired by Sylvia Ji (an artist known for her Day of the Dead paintings), and the logo for the movie 300 above his left eyebrow (a movie that Luka thoroughly enjoyed and thought was "cool").

Sometimes, having what others consider to be an abnormal appearance can lead to unsavoury comments. Once in a train station, a man shouted at him that he was the devil, completely out of the blue. "That's mean, just a mean thing to say," remembers Luka dejectedly.

As he's getting older—he turns 30 this month—Luka is taking tattooing as an art form more seriously and plans to try to win awards at conventions and the like. While he doesn't regularly do face tattoos on others, he has given about a dozen or so over his whole tattoo career. He generally refuses to do anyone's first face tattoo, though. As for his own face, he says he has no plans to get more. "But that's always subject to change," he adds.

Follow Luka on Instagram.