This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

It's been a sobering couple of weeks for colleges in Sydney, Australia. First, students at Wesley College came under fire for harassing sex workers and publishing a slut-shaming journal. Then St. Andrews College was laid out for a weekly radio broadcast that recounted hookups and personal stories, including the alleged sexual assault of a student.

As someone all too familiar with stories like these, these sorts of headlines don't stir outrage or incredulity. More so, it's surprise. I'm surprised that of all the depraved shit that goes down in colleges, only a handful of stories come out.

I spent 18 months at the University of Queensland's all-male King's College. There, flippant sexism and collective shaming was the norm, almost identical to the sad culture unearthed in Sydney. In fact, it may have been even worse.

Most Australian colleges are steeped in tradition. It makes sense they're good at keeping secrets. If you throw a bunch of young kids from a wide array of backgrounds in the same living space and knit them together with the illusion of a shared history, they'll adopt a collective identity.

This indoctrination starts from the very first week. For first year students living off campus, O Week is a period of joining social clubs, working out where lecture theaters are, trying to make friends, and going to parties. For guys living on campus, it's much more brutal.

Our first week at King's started at 4 AM. Us "freshers" were rattled awake with with blaring death metal and herded into the quad by the college executives. They all wore aviator sunglasses, and most had dyed blond hair. They taught us the college song, and they explained that our university degrees were just a formality—our true calling was being a Kingsman. You're told that having sex with Women's College girls is significantly stronger currency than Grace College girls, and that St. Leo's boys (UQ's other all-male college) are brutish scum. Basically just the enemy.

Young brains adopt these ideologies easily—especially those who have never lived in the big city. Kingsmen come from all around the state to Brisbane, bringing their parents' money and a newfound excess of free time with them. The lucky ones even have a vague notion of what they want to study.

The freedom is dizzying. To be told what to do (drink and go to the gym), where to go (college club nights and sporting events), who to sleep with (Women's girls), and who to hate (St. Leo's boys) is a relief.

You even get a new name: a King's moniker, which makes you feel like the difficulties of your old life no longer matter. It is a forced cleansing, but guys take on these identities fully and completely, even changing up their names on Facebook. I went to college with guys named "Dress-Ups," "Jetty Jerk," and "SWAT," which was an acronym for "Sister With Awesome Tits." I was "Jessie," as in "I wish that I had Jessie's girl." The president of King's had taken a particular liking to my then girlfriend.

I wasn't immune to much of it. Here's one example, from a pool of many. A dozen Kingsmen and I designed the "Trifecta Challenge." It was a competition to be the first to sleep with a girl from each of UQ's three all-female colleges. The Sunday night before my last semester at King's, we all stood with a beer in my room and swore an oath to the "Golden Cock" (a gold rooster trophy that, along with bragging rights, would be the prize). Then we signed a document listing the rules—fourteen of them all up.

Some aimed to ensure the challenge ran smoothly (Number Seven: Sabotage on any level will not be tolerated) while others sought to make the challenge more difficult (Number Three: All sexual acts must be completed at the college of the female, not on home territory). They all had one thing in common: They illustrated the way we'd been trained to view women—as apparatus to be utilized in the development of our male friendships. They were territories to be seized in games of RISK, pieces to be taken in chess, spaces to be swiftly conquered in an affirmation of brotherhood.

Image by Ashley Goodall

I can tell you that a girl's walk home from a boy's room was a walk of shame, while a boy's trip was a stroll of success. I can tell you that at St. Leo's freshers weren't allowed to have girlfriends because they were viewed as corruptive threats. I can tell you that at every King's general meeting an award was given for the "best" sex story, and that in the winning tale the girl was almost always the punchline. She was the troll too ugly to fuck sober, the canvas on which the storyteller vomited, the slit, the gash, the meat. We were spoken to in this new and abrasive vocabulary. We were young and permeable, so we soon read from this hostile dictionary like it were our native tongue.

I had a decent amount of sex at college, but not much of it was any good. This was usually my fault. I had insecurities, and I had been taught to affect a public bravado I couldn't live up to come copulation.

And yet, I always twisted the story to make women the butt of my jokes, simply because I wasn't ready to admit weakness or vulnerability. That's exactly why I think a lot of adolescent misogyny and sexual aggression aren't problems, they're symptoms. Symptoms of inflexible expectations of manhood and repressed individuality, symptoms of trying to be someone you're not. Feelings of inadequacy easily morph into bitterness.

For some boys, the King's identity fit like a glove. It was natural for them to aspire to the triumvirate of masculinity: sporting success, sexual conquest, and the possession of a steel liver.

But more often I saw boys for whom college didn't fit. Boys like me: from sleepy coastal towns, with stutters, pigeon chests, and acne. Boys who were introspective, gay, or asexual. Those who didn't particularly like drinking, or know what a coxswain was. Most of all, boys who learned quickly that in order to fit in they would need to erase themselves—and project something entirely different through alcohol.

It took more than a year for me to realize that King's mystical reputation—that it was a sort of hedonistic Shangri-La free from responsibility—wasn't real. For it to be real, all men would have to be born the same, and women, well, they'd have to not take up space at all. It would've meant going back to a crueler, harsher time.

That's where this issue really comes from: the past. Any institution too heavily invested in the past loses sight of the present. And for colleges, this is painfully clear in their ideas of gender.

Oxford University's last all-male college, St. Benet's, opened its doors to women in 2015 with little fanfare or backlash. When queried about the perceived loss of tradition, the master of St. Benet's Professor Werner Jeanrond said, "It depends on how you view tradition. Is it something that you contribute to or something that is an exhibit in a museum?"

Still via 'Crash'

When I was 14 years old, my parents took it upon themselves to share the movie Crash with me.

As peaceful as this walk on an autumn day may look, are we sure we want to be like these people? Photo via Flickr user matryosha

Canadian Press photo

The Calgary man who killed five students at a house party has been found not criminally responsible for his crimes by an Alberta judge.

Justice Eric Macklin said Wednesday he accepted expert testimony from two psychiatrists and a psychologist who said Matthew de Grood, 24, was psychotic when he stabbed five students to death in April 2014.

"He did not know or appreciate that his actions were morally wrong," Macklin said in his ruling.

During de Grood's murder trial, the court heard he believed he was the son of god and heard voices telling him to kill his victims— Lawrence Hong, 27, Joshua Hunter, 23, Jordan Segura, 22, Kaitlin Perras, 23, and Zackariah Rathwell, 21. He told police and doctors he believed they were vampires and werewolves.

Macklin ordered an Alberta Review Board to hold a hearing within 90 days, determining how de Grood will be sentenced. In the meantime, he'll be detained in a psychiatric facility.

Crown prosecutor Neil Wiberg said he may seek a high risk not criminally responsible designation for de Grood.

De Grood's lawyer Allan Fay read aloud a statement on behalf of his client apologizing for the stabbings.

"I feel the sorrow I have caused and will carry it for the rest of my life," it said. "I realize that through my illness I have done something horrible and wrong. The victims never deserved to die."

Following the ruling, the families of the five victims released a statement calling the not criminally responsible finding a "recurring nightmare."

"There will be no peace for us; our wounds never fully heal because every year our families will have to wonder, what will be the fate of the man who damaged so many lives. Every year we will be forced to relive details of our family's deaths, the anguish and sorrow."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Before the construction of the Channel Tunnel, which was opened for passengers on November 14, 1994, the French tended to see England as a strange, distant land where mohawked punks, drunk teenagers, and conservative grandmothers were living together in perfect harmony. Or that's at least how French photographer Gil Rigoulet saw England. He didn't change his mind when he actually went over in the 70s and 80s, wanting to document the many emerging social and musical movements. "In my eyes, England was the birthplace of amazing musical subgenres," he told VICE. "First, I went there to cover the Reading Festival, where I was surprised to see rockers and bikers happily fight one another. That's something I didn't get to see in my country—extreme movements contrasting with a very traditionalist society."

At that time, loads of French people came to England by ferry. According to Rigoulet, the trip itself was half the adventure. "It was quite a long trip, and people were getting wasted on the way there. Because of the pitching of the boat, there would be vomit everywhere. When we finally arrived, we felt like we were discovering a whole new world with completely different people, cars, and customs." His photos, mostly in black-and-white, aim to show the contrasts that characterized England for him at that time—with the humor and compassion that are distinctive of his work. Rigoulet left these pictures in his archives for 30 years, but he's finally exhibiting them in the galerie 247. in Paris. Here's a selection he sent to us.

The active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, has been used in a clinical trial as an antidepressant. Photo via Wikipedia

The science of antidepressants, is not, as it goes, an exact science. Two patients can react differently to the same drug. For some people, many of the existing drugs won't have any effect at all.

Science is still struggling to work out why certain drugs only work for certain people. According to one study from Chicago's Northwestern University, doctors treat the causes in a crude way, with drugs "aimed at the wrong target," often focusing on reducing stress rather than depression itself. Others have suggested that commercial interests are skewing results when antidepressants are being tested. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that some drug companies were selectively publishing studies on antidepressants that showed the drugs had a benefit and shelving others that showed there was no overall effect.

"There are a distinct proportion of patients who don't get better despite taking lots of different antidepressants," says Dr. Mark Bolstridge, an honorary research associate at UCL and a clinical psychiatrist. "That's frustrating as a clinician, that even though we do have a lot of drugs at our disposal, for some people, none of them work."

Bolstridge is already in the process of searching for alternative and unusual treatments. In particular, he's been looking into the hallucinogenic compound found within magic mushrooms: psilocybin.

Bolstridge, alongside David Nutt, president of the British Neuroscience Association and former government drugs advisor, initially applied to run a psilocybin trial in 2013. Nutt had previously conducted small experiments before more stringent regulations around psychoactive substances were put into place. He felt that psilocybin had the potential to alleviate symptoms of depression and wanted to carry out further experiments.

Despite getting approval and funding from the UK Medical Research Council, there remained a number of roadblocks in doing the trial, because magic mushrooms were a class A drug. "We had a lot of problems getting the drug itself, because you need a special license to be able to use it... and it had to be imported from Europe," Bolstridge told us. "Ethics committees tend to wave things through the first time you present your case to them. We had to meet with them three of four times before they were prepared to approve our study."

He says he can see why they were met with resistance. "Your average person on the street is very skeptical of these drugs because they're classified in the A category, which means, as far as the general person on the street is concerned, they're dangerous, as they're the same category as heroin and cocaine."

But the red tape comes from more than just moral panic around class A drugs. Researchers in psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s ran many studies linking psychedelic drugs with various therapeutic effects, including the treatment of alcoholism, depression, and even autism. But many of the studies were poorly controlled and controversial, particularly when LSD was given to the children of vulnerable people. "Studies were not performed to the contemporary standard of rigor," says Bolstridge. "The methodology was a bit suspect."

Since the 1970s, it has been very hard to get approval for LSD-based studies, but Bolstridge and colleagues were able, for the first time in decades, to run a clinical trial testing the effects of psilocybin on depression. They recruited 12 patients with a moderate to severe form of depression, and treated them in a controlled environment.

Unlike many clinical trials, there was no financial incentive for partaking in the trial. Bolstridge described how people were motivated to participate by a "sheer desperation," saying, "Some patients had been on a whole load of different antidepressants, and nothing had worked. And they were still just feeling really shitty and really low, and they weren't functioning in life. They were severely incapacitated. They weren't working. Their lives just hadn't planned out as hoped, as expected."

Kirk Rutter, one of the participants in the trial, agreed to speak with us about his experiences. He told us he participated in the trial because he "thought it might help me clear the grief and get out the emotion."

"The only way I can describe it is like when you drop a heavy object into a body of water where it kind of goes under and leaps back out, and it eventually steadies and finds its level."

After his mother's death, Rutter suffered with ongoing depression that resisted the treatment of antidepressants and psychotherapy. He believes the drugs prescribed to him were designed to "deal with the symptoms, not the problem" and was keen to get his hands on a more effective treatment. He volunteered.

After the treatment, Rutter says he felt "very, very positive. In the first week, I felt great. And then I felt like I was moving backward. It was like, Oh crap, you know, that didn't last long. And then I felt OK again. The only way I can describe it is like when you drop a heavy object into a body of water where it kind of goes under and leaps back out, and it eventually steadies and finds its level. It's kind of like that."

Rutter says he now "doesn't feel depressed" and is "certainly not stuck in the grief that I was," although nine months after the trial, he is now experiencing "a slight decline" in his mood.

Rutter's experiences seem to match the tentatively positive results from the trial. "The vast majority responded well," says Bolstridge. "For the vast majority of people, the pressure 'lifted.' And there were some persisting changes as well, because this is very different to administering antidepressant drugs, which you take on a daily basis. With the psilocybin, there were two doses, separated a week apart, and people responded even six months afterward. They were still better than when they first participated in the study."

Publicity around these studies comes with its own dangers. Once people hear that magic mushrooms may treat depression, it won't be long before all kinds of spurious headlines are seen to encourage people to self-medicate. Bolstridge says that will always be a possibility. "But I suppose we have to get out the message and disseminate it widely that people shouldn't be messing around with these drugs, and not trying to self-medicate, because we know exactly what dosage we were giving. Someone foraging, trying to find which mushrooms to take—it's really difficult to identify exactly how much they need."

The psilocybin study could one day be remembered as a radical breakthrough in treating depression, but for now, there remains a lot of research to do. "This is such a preliminary project. This hasn't been done for donkeys years, because it's been so difficult getting hold of the drug," explains Bolstridge. "We're still trying to identify the best course of treatment."

Hitler in Nuremberg in 1935. Photo (cropped) from the Charles Russell Collection, NARA, via Wikimedia

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Adolf Hitler has been dead for 71 years, but history's biggest villain still manages to capture the almost uninterrupted attention of German people. For news magazines, putting Hitler on the cover is still the easiest way to sell copies whenever they're out of ideas for a cover story—which is why German periodicals like Der Spiegel are notorious for doing exactly that basically every four weeks. Every year, countless new biographies, history books, and documentaries dedicated to the worst person ever see the light of day. Only the better ones manage to reveal some new aspects of Hitler's life and his tragic role in history. But—until recently—they all had one thing in common: All these books and films at some point had the dates wrong.

Harald Sandner got so annoyed by seeing the wrong dates being thrown around in historic works that he decided to take on the task of reconstructing each day of Hitler's life. Sandner, who makes his living being a salesman and IT expert in a logistics company, spent 25 years collecting pictures, documents, and archival materials and traveling across Europe on his own expense.

The result of all this is Das Itinerar (The Itinerary)—a 2,400-page book that lists where the Führer spent each day of his life and documents the means of transportation he used to get there and what he did in each place—down to the number of audience members at speeches and events.

I called Harald Sandner to find out how someone ends up documenting each day in the life of Adolf Hitler.

VICE: How long did you work on this book?
Harald Sandner: Well, I've worked on it on and off for twenty or twenty-five years. It wasn't the only thing I was doing during that time, of course. I've also published four other books on different subjects in the last fifteen years. In the meantime, I worked on Das Itinerar—and now I've finally finished it. When I start something, I finish it—but I'm happy that at the outset, I had no idea how much work would be involved with this particular project.

Where did you get the idea from?
I've always been interested in history. At some point, I started to notice how many discrepancies there were in terms of dates in Hitler's life. And the more I researched, the more mistakes and inconsistencies I found. So I thought, There should be a complete log out there somewhere. But there wasn't.

So then I started gathering dates myself. I did it for 1933 to 1945 first. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I gained access to more archives in the former East Germany and in the Eastern Bloc. So I reworked everything I'd done up to then.

Excerpt from 'Das Itinerar' via Berlin Story Verlag

How did you go about it exactly?
Basically, I started by creating a matrix of data comprised of everything I could get my hands on. For example, it's widely known that Hitler was in Berlin on September 1, 1939 and gave a speech in front of the Reichstag. So then I tried to fill in the gaps. I wrote to archives and looked for certain places.

You're not a historian by profession. So why did you do it?
I do data processing for my real job—making sure that data is correct is a vital part of it. So the more mistakes I discovered, the more I felt the need to clear things up once and for all. I'm happy that my work exists so that historians now have a reference to avoid making mistakes.

Is it really so important to get Hitler's timeline right?
Let's take Hamburg, for example. For decades after the war, rumors circulated that Hitler hadn't liked Hamburg, that it was too cold and Hanseatic for him. But then Werner Johe wrote the book Hitler in Hamburg, which turned everything around. Johe was saying that after Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg, Hitler didn't visit any city in the Reich as often as he visited Hamburg. But of course, that's also not true. Obviously Hitler visited other cities more frequently—Bayreuth and Weimar to mention a few. But he didn't avoid Hamburg.

Excerpt from 'Das Itinerar' via Berlin Story Verlag

Do you think you've gotten to know Hitler better after completing this work?
You get a feeling about how he liked to move around, of course. Hannah Arendt once said that the definitive characteristic of totalitarian dictatorship is the ambiguity of the center of power—and Hitler personified that center. He didn't have a private life. He traveled around and ruled from wherever he was at the time. You can't attach his decisions to one place.

What else did you find out about Hitler?
It was interesting to see how slowly it all developed. He gave a speech in front of fifty people in 1920, then it was one hundred, then three hundred, then five hundred, and so on. The whole drama unfolded really slowly—and nobody realized where this trip was going to take them. You can really see this now in my book.

You often hear that Hitler was pretty fickle when it came to his work. Sometimes he would work all night, but then he could step back and not do anything for weeks but go on walks. Is that true?
In principle, yes. He wouldn't do anything for weeks at a time. He was the kind of guy that put off making decisions for a long time—but once he'd made them, they were set in stone. That's what was so fatal.

Would you say that you have a fascination with Hitler?
My fascination is correct data. For me, it was all about facts because I'm sick of hearing things that aren't true. My hometown Coburg, for example. Around the year 2000, it was said that Hitler had only been in the city twice. But in reality, Coburg was the first German city to make Hitler an honorary citizen. Coburg was the first Nazi city, with the first Nazi mayor and the first Nazi newspaper. Until very recently, they tried to sweep that under the carpet, and they've only recently appointed a board of historians in the city. If I put the truth on the table, then nobody can try and dispute it. I just want to dispel myths.

Do you think that this work is gaining importance today?
Klaus von Dohnanyi once said that we have to finally realize that Goethe is our Goethe, Bach is our Bach, and Hitler is our Hitler. Once we get that, we'll have the chance to move past it. And a lot of heads are still infected. Take the NSU , for example. One of its key figures, Tino Brandt, worked around the corner from me for years. It's not abstract—it's right outside your front door.

What will you do next?
With Das Itinerar, I've written about ten books—eleven kilos of books if you take them all together. I think I'm going to relax for a bit now.

"Music by Captain Sensible!" (And not actually Ruud Gullit, but, obviously, it sort of is.)

It's the end of another soccer season, pretty much. The Premier League has finished in a fashion nobody could ever have foretold. The major domestic cups have been awarded, and now there's simply the small matter of the Champion's League final to get through before it's the Euros in France and widespread feelings of complete indifference as to the fortunes of our national squad. Does Roy play Rooney deep, or as the tip of an attacking spear, straight through the center of the opposition backline? The latter, of course, but also: Who cares, given we'll be home by the start of the last 16.

And at the end of each and every soccer season, my mind instinctively turns to virtual versions of the beautiful game, in order to maintain my connection with the sport during the lean summer months. This time last year, I had one eye on the imminent Pro Evolution Soccer 2016, given its preview billing as a FIFA-beater. It was too, you know, and with a complete Master League campaign behind me, winning the league, "English Cup," and officially licensed Europa League with the I-went-and-changed-their-name-and-the-uniforms-because-I-am-that-guy Southampton, I can confidently say that Pro Evo 2016 is one of the finest soccer simulations ever created.

But it's not the soccer game that can always put me in a happy place, given its dogged determination to be realistically scrappy, tactically deep, and reliant on player compatibility to bring the best out of any team. It can take forever to get a game started, with so many negotiations to see to, contract discussions to conclude, and national team distractions (after my first season, I was offered the Spanish job on top of staying with Saints, and naturally took it). It's not the game that, in the same vein as the sort-of-soccer-but-obviously-not Rocket League, I can just power up for a half hour of pure fantasy soccer. Nope. That game will forever be the top-down, super-zoomed-out, massively-exaggerated-of-slide-tackle Sensible Soccer.

"Of all the games we ever made, this was the one that, within a month or two, you just knew it'd be a hit." So says Sensible Software's Jon Hare, reflecting on the success of Sensible Soccer in this great "making of" article on Read-Only Memory. He explains that the creation of the original Sensi, which came out on the Amiga and Atari ST in 1992 and was ported to just about every system under the sun, was prompted by dissatisfaction with soccer games on the market, at the time.

"Chipper , and started work on Sensible Soccer straight away."

A screenshot from 'Sensible World of Soccer'

The me of 2016 remains thankful that Dino Dini's furiously fast but frustrating kickabout sequel of 1990 wound Hare and company up so much, as without that provocation, the most instantaneously accessible, fun-for-all soccer game of all time might never have been made. What Sensi did differently was subtle, but vital: better ball control, enabling quick shifts in direction; a wider view of the pitch, encouraging ranged passing; and smoother physics that had even its over the top actions seeming perfectly possible. The me of 1992 didn't know that what he was playing would still shine so magnificently almost 25 years later, but here we are: Playing Sensi today remains both intuitively enveloping and dramatically different from any other alternative, from both its own era and beyond.

I'm not here to say it's "better" than Pro Evo has become. But it certainly satisfies different urges. Whereas Pro Evo's flood of game modes, countless rosters full of close-to-photo-real avatars, and highly detailed statistics brings out the number-crunching sports-science geek in many a player, Sensi is the very friendliest face of soccer gaming, as approachable as actually going down the park for some Volley, Parry, Dickhead. (Surely that wasn't just a southern thing? Let me know if you had different names for it, elsewhere in the world.)

One button. Plus a d-pad or a joystick, obviously. But just one button, that's all Sensi needs. Even when the game moved from Amiga to Mega Drive, where one button became three, you didn't need the full spectrum of boot-to-ball options. That one would shoot, that other one side-foot a pass the way of another player. But by pressing the center button at different pressures, for different lengths of time, and mixing that up with the very real delight of aftertouch, you could play your way through any league or cup without the slightest oscillation of your right thumb.

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A diving header in the six-yard box, a 35-yard screamer into a near-torn-free net: Both could be scored with the same button and just a little left-thumb/clenched-fist-around-a-Zip-Stick gymnastics. Hold "backward," opposite the direction of the ball's flight, to loft it skyward; either side of its trajectory to influence a little bend. Hard and straight: Keep that kick-all input depressed for just long enough, and there it goes, drilled into the bottom corner where even the average keeper's superhuman athleticism can't keep it out. Never have number ones dived so far, so fast, so frequently, as the ones in Sensi do.

Soccer is, of course, a game of two halves—and that applies both to the format of the matches, in which the duration of the competition is divided in two, with teams swapping their direction of play at half time, and to the ebb and flow of the contest, too. In today's FIFA, or indeed Pro Evo 2016, defending is rarely a heap of fun, though. In my experience, it's a case of pressing the opponent in possession, watching their progress carefully and putting a boot in at just the right time. That, or getting desperate in the final few seconds of a tight match, where a draw is enough, and flying in with a sliding challenge knowing that it's worth a yellow card to quell the growing momentum. When defending is done "right," it's exacting, demanding, and just a little stressful.

Players line up before kick off

This isn't the case in Sensi. Defending is hilarious, with slide tackles covering several yards and poleaxed players commonly heaped atop one another. Sometimes the whistle blows, but often it doesn't, as advantages are played and the game's AI refereeing fails to appreciate what would pass for a straight red by today's standards. When I spoke to Hare about his new project, Sociable Soccer, he recalled how putting the fun in defending was absolutely essential for the Sensi team.

"I think what Sensible Soccer did better than other football games was that it made defending fun. It was always fun to tackle, and you spend half the time defending in a football game, so it's important that you're still having fun when doing that. And I think defending is genuinely fun in Sensible Soccer, with the slide tackles, and the hacking of people down."

He also feels that Sensi's attacking play is capable of eclipsing the neat-and-tidy one-twos of Pro Evo 2016's defense-splitting moves and expertly timed through balls. "Honestly, I think the finishing is better on Sensible Soccer than it is most football games, because you really can curl the ball into the corner of the net."

That you can, although aftertouch's implementation does lead to annoyances, too, as it's easy to run a freshly activated player into the path of a long-range shot, and subsequently walk it through to the keeper. Penalty box pileups can lead to the ball being lost amid the bundle of pixels, when a corner drops on the six-yard line and eight tiny sportsmen simultaneously fall on it. But that lends Sensi, otherwise quite a systematic game of diagonal passes and long-range blasts into the snug-like sweet-spot of crossbar meeting post, a feeling of frenetic drama and clumsy panic, as deflections from upright to helplessly prone center-back spread genuine fear through the defending player's ranks, and spark a flame of opportunity in their attacking counterpart.

A replay screen from 'Sensible World of Soccer'

And all the time, it's simple. It takes seconds to learn Sensi's controls—and nowhere close to a lifetime to master them. Four, five matches, and you'll have it—you'll know how best to time your tackles, and from what distance you can realistically land low-detail bonce on old-school size five with a marvelously over-the-top diving header animation. Each player might be the same model in a different color scheme, but that doesn't mean these are personality-free drones. How their heads drop on receiving a red card, all other players having stepped away from the guilty party, is a magic moment of 16bit body language, and because each player is named, over the course of a competition, it's natural to develop favorites through their/your in-game contributions.

And that's just as true of Sensi's screwed-up player rosters as it is the titles in the series that carried official squads. One of the versions I still have at home is this plug-in-and-play model, which also has Cannon Fodder and Mega Lo Mania built in, two more classics from the Sensible catalogue. It looks scratchy on an HD TV, like any old system does (have you plugged an N64 into a 1080p TV recently?). Its d-pads are distractingly stiff in comparison to the old Competition Pro controller that ran into my Mega Drive, and it features no battery back-up to save lengthy sessions. But Sensi is Sensi, and it's easy enough to get over these relative annoyances. Equally, only the truly pernickety gamer is going to be bothered by the attitude taken to listing each team's playing staff, and the team names themselves.

In the plug-in, Arsenal are called Highbury (which is fantastically nostalgic, isn't it?), with Devid Siaman in goal and Juhn Jinsen marshaling the midfield, while Elan Smoth pops up with the occasional back-post header. At Rangers, named simply Glasgow (Celtic are billed as "Glaswegians"), Merk Heteley leads the attack, which sounds more like some sort of instruction to really get in an opponent's face than it does an actual human being. Sensible World of Soccer, my Amiga favorite, never had this "problem," given its many authentic leagues, but it doesn't bother me now. After all, it's not like PES hasn't had its share of licensing shortcomings over the years, as you lined up an up-to-date, uniform-accurate Newcastle United against West London White, Lancashire Athletic, or West Midlands Village.

"I think what's kept people playing Sensible Soccer is that immediacy," Hare told me, back in November 2015. And while most quick-fix gaming experiences do dull over time, Sensi, for me, has always been there, always a beacon of the very best time to be had. Last year, a brief VICE Gaming debate concluded that Pro Evo 2016 probably is the greatest soccer game of all time. But when I need that shift of gear, from complex commands and TV-style presentation to cruise control gameplay and the barest interface, there's only one perfect game that I turn to.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Czech cops reveal a compartment used to conceal cocaine at a local airport in 2006. (Photo credit should read HO/AFP/Getty Images)

America is the world capital of mass incarceration, but life for former criminals doesn't get any easier once they're outside prison. Getting a job with a criminal record is often a nightmare. Schools will sometimes ask about your criminal history when you apply, making the process of getting new credentials or training awkward at best. And finding a place to live as a convicted felon isn't always simple, either. In fact, there are nearly 50,000 state and federal statutes and rules that impose penalties of various stripes on criminals in the United States.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced a woman convicted of drug importation with intent to distribute to probation rather than prison time, basically on the logic that the restrictions on felons outside bars are punishment enough. Judge Frederic Block suggested anything more would be overkill, as the New York Times reports.

The defendant, Chevelle Nesbeth, was 20 years old last year when she got arrested at JFK Airport in Queens with 600 grams of coke in her luggage. Nesbeth claimed friends gave her the baggage, and she had no clue coke was inside—a classic Locked Up tale if ever there was one. Jurors didn't buy it, though, and when they convicted her, Nesbeth was looking down the barrel of as much as three years in prison.

But rather than an aberration by one rogue jurist, some experts see the sentence handed down as a sign of a possible trend where judges look at a broken criminal justice system and take matters into their own hands.

"This has been ignored for a long time, what they call the collateral consequences, the things that happen to you besides criminal punishment when you get convicted of a crime," says Eugene O'Donnell, a former Brooklyn cop and prosecutor. "How many pounds of flesh do you want for one mistake that somebody makes?

What remains to be seen is whether judges in other jurisdictions—Brooklyn's federal bench has something of a reputation as an outspoken one—follow suit. And of course, there's always the possibility that a backlash follows. Enacting reforms by passing laws is always going to be preferable to relying on individual judges to make decisions like this.

"No matter what you think of the drug war, it is a problem if judges start individually doing this kind of personalized interpretation of what the law should allow," O'Donnell says, pointing out most blacks and Hispanics arrested over drugs barely have enough on them justify a conviction on possession grounds, much less intent to distribute or trafficking. "To me it's more an indictment of the Congress that they haven't fixed this yet."

The Brooklyn judge went so far as to quote Michelle Alexander, a favorite of the criminal justice reform crowd who recently suggested Hillary Clinton "doesn't deserve the black vote."

"Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living 'free' in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow," Judge Block wrote in his opinion, citing Alexander's The New Jim Crow.

If nothing else, the ruling is a reminder that whoever's in the White House next year, and regardless of what federal or local lawmakers decide to do about the ongoing national panic attack that is the war on drugs, it's people—judges and prosecutors—who run the justice system. A fresh injection of humanity into the lifeblood of American law enforcement seems like a welcome adjustment.

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Photo courtesy Flickr user Dank Depot

Liberal MP Bill Blair was highly critical Tuesday of Canada's grey market medical marijuana dispensaries, accusing their operators of being reckless and indifferent to the law.

"The current licensed producers are competing with people who don't care about the law, who don't care about regulations, don't care about kids, they don't care about communities, don't care about health of Canadians. They're pretty reckless about it. And so they're selling anything to make a fast buck before we get the regulations put in place," Blair, who is heading up his party's marijuana legalization file, said at an event in downtown Toronto attended by lawyers, investors, and representatives from licensed producers, according to the Globe and Mail.

Blair has up until now been mostly silent on the issue of dispensaries, which are illegal under federal law. (The feds plan to roll out legalization legislation next spring.) But cities like Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto have experienced an influx of pot shops and are now in the process of regulating them municipally. Crackdowns are underway in both Vancouver, where at least 22 dispensaries have closed since the end of April, and Toronto, where fines of up to $50,000 are expected to be handed out as early as this week.

Blair said the country's 28 licensed producers have been "exhaustive" about adhering to government regulations.

Queens of Cannabis, a Toronto dispensary operated solely by women, held a press conference Wednesday to respond to Blair's accusations.

"While Big Business is having a huge stake in legalization, dispensaries and patients across Canada are under threat," said Lisa Campbell, chair of Women Grow Toronto at the event.

"Dispensaries have been described as the 'heart' of access for most patients in the Supreme Court of Canada Allard Ruling. If dispensaries are the founding backbone of cannabis access in Canada, why is big business and government lobbying to shut them down?"

The Allard ruling, released in February, said forbidding medical cannabis patients from growing their own weed is unconstitutional.

Dispensaries have been providing marijuana to medical patients since the 90s, while the federal government has been "failing since 2001", Campbell said, adding the city of Toronto should wait until the Liberals legalize weed before handing out hefty fines.

"As women leading this industry as dispensary owners, bakers, nurses, doctors, lawyers and other professionals we are contributing to making our communities safer and healthier places."

The conflict over dispensaries has highlighted a battle between federally licensed producers who supply the government's medical marijuana program and local pot shops.

Yesterday, Canopy Growth Corporation, which owns two major licensed producers, Bedrocan and Tweed, held its own press conference at Toronto City Hall, where it announced "true compassionate pricing" of $5 a gram for certain strains of weed, and same-day delivery for registered patients.

Under the federal program, weed is only available through mail orders.

"Torontonians who are seeking a reliable supply of medical cannabis can now turn to the most affordable solution in the City, delivered same-day to their door, and rest assured there is no question about the legality and origins of their cannabis supply," Bruce Linton, chairman and CEO of Canopy Growth, said in a statement.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has asked the city's licensing department to provide a report on ways to potentially give dispensaries business licences—the same process that's currently being carried out in Vancouver.

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Who knows what will happen next on the Game of Thrones television show? Only the cast and crew, and they're not talking, because they probably have to sign pretty hefty nondisclosure agreements! But then the people who watch it find out later, because everything that happens is right there, on the screen. What an age in which to live!

Every week the people in charge of the Game release some photos of the upcoming episode as if to say, "We know what happens and what doesn't, only we know whose genitals will be cruelly exposed to the nation and which actors have to look for new jobs because their character's body parts will become separated." These photos—which are like the show except they don't move—are posted on a variety of websites, including this one, because people like to look at them. I hope they make sense to you, because I don't really know what's going on! Enjoy:

All photos courtesy of HBO

Did people in the past spend a lot of time doing stuff to their hair, or is that one of the show's fantastical inventions, like dragons?

I bet that symbol on the wall over there provides some pretty interesting clues about what's going on here, if you know what you're looking for.

One of the most impressive things about Game of Thrones is that everyone is riding horses around like it's no big deal or anything.

See what I mean?!?

I bet this guy, whoever he is, is looking at something pretty surprising!

Here's another photo from the popular Game of Thrones television show, which you can watch on HBO this Sunday if you like.

Look at Simon's Instagram, check out his webstore, and buy his new book from Fantagraphics.

Image by Kit Neuschatz

When I was 16, I started to wake up feeling the way people feel after a night of hard drinking: woozy from nausea, desperately thirsty, bleary-eyed, and barely able to stumble down the stairs. At first, I thought it was the stress of my exams, but when I got worse—when I realized I'd lost 35 pounds in two months, I couldn't quench my thirst with any amount of water, and even paper-cuts took weeks to heal—I realized something might be seriously wrong.

It turned out I had Type 1 diabetes, and I'd been suffering from critical diabetic ketoacidosis, a serious condition caused by lack of insulin. I spent eight hours in the hospital that night, while a revolving door of doctors and nurses stuck various foreign objects into my veins, including a sliding scale of insulin. By the time I returned home two days later, I was bloated, bruised, and sore from the IVs, but ready to adjust to my new normal: I took my insulin. I ate three meals a day. I felt better.

Very quickly, my body began to recover, and with recovery came all the weight I'd lost. Pre-diagnosis, I had been sick, but effortlessly thin. Post-diagnosis, I couldn't zip any of my jeans. I resented the injections almost immediately.

"When you don't have insulin in your body, your body can't absorb any calories. So if you're a Type 1 diabetic and you don't have insulin, you are eating thousands of calories and still losing weight because your body isn't processing any of the calories," said Asha Agar Brown, the executive director of We Are Diabetes, an organization for Type 1 diabetics suffering from eating disorders. "When you re-introduce insulin, there's an immediate bloat to the body as your muscles and your tissue are able to finally get nutrients back. If you've lost twenty pounds and then you immediately gain it back, there's shame attached to that."

As Brown herself discovered after she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, there was a simple way to drop the weight again: Just stop taking insulin.

It didn't take me long to realize that this worked. It started as an experiment, taking less and less insulin, until I wasn't taking any at all. If I withheld insulin, I could drop 15 pounds in three days, easy. I could still eat what I wanted without gaining weight, because without insulin, my body couldn't process any of the calories. Insulin restriction became a ritual as my hip bones and ribs became visible, and I fell into a stupor I can only describe as completely addictive.

Sondra Kronberg, an eating disorder specialist and spokesperson for the National Eating Disorder Association, told VICE that diabetics already have a heightened focus on food, calories, and portions, since every meal has an effect on insulin levels. If someone is already predisposed to having an eating disorder, "this extra attention given to the food, initially for medical reasons, can turn into a disordered fixation."

In my case, the condition is called diabulimia, a portmanteau of "diabetes" and "bulimia." There's very little research about diabulimia, but according to Brown, it's startlingly common. "Among Type 1 diabetics, it's one in every three," she told VICE. One study, which followed women with Type 1 diabetes over the course of 11 years, found that 30 percent restricted their insulin (sometimes, but not always, for the purpose of losing weight). Other research suggests Type 1 diabetics are twice as likely as non-diabetics to develop an eating disorder.

Related: Should Weed Be Used to Treat Eating Disorders?

Without insulin, my body started to shut down. On mornings after I hadn't taken my insulin, I would wake up with hideous nausea. Concentrating at school became impossible as my eyes would blur from raised blood sugar levels, which were often so high that they didn't even register on my meter.

My eating disorder became more important than my diabetes. One sickness had trumped the other.

Brown, who also suffered from diabulimia for over a decade before ultimately founding We Are Diabetes, said the consequences can be devastating. She considers herself lucky—"I still have my eyes and my feet, although I have severe muscle pain, called myofascial pain syndrome"—but has worked with others through her organization who have gone blind or developed heart disease from restricting insulin. Six individuals she worked with ultimately died from complications of the disorder.

"Withholding insulin for the purpose of weight loss is very dangerous," Kronberg told VICE. Short-term symptoms include frequent urination, excessive thirst, dehydration, and diabetic ketoacidosis, the condition that put me in the hospital when I was first diagnosed. In the long term, Kronberg said withholding insulin can also cause nerve damage, heart attacks, stroke, gum disease, and infertility. And if you do it for long enough, you will die.

And yet, I didn't really care. There was nothing parallel to the feeling of losing so much weight so easily, and my eating disorder became more important than my diabetes. One sickness had trumped the other.

After about a year of withholding insulin, when I couldn't make it up the stairs without my heart spasming, I finally told my mom what I had been doing. I spent the several days in the hospital, plugged into IV drips; later, a psychologist would diagnose me with diabulimia.

Slowly, I began reintroducing insulin into my life. I still struggle, admittedly. There have been relapses and days when my anxiety about my body is so crippling that I can't leave the house. But these days are becoming fewer and fewer; every day, I'm trying my best.

And right now, that's good enough for me.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please visit the National Eating Disorders Association's website or call their helpline: 800-931-2237.

Follow Helena Busiakiewicz on Twitter.

Ben Hatfield after a tragedy at his coal mine in West Virginia in 2006. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Bennett K. Hatfield decorated his wife's grave every Memorial Day for the past seven years. He won't ever do so again. The former coal company executive was killed in broad daylight Sunday as he prepared the plot at Mountain View Memory Gardens Cemetery in southern West Virginia for the upcoming holiday. So far, three people have been arrested in connection with the bizarre shooting, which has roiled Appalachia and flummoxed industry players.

The 59-year-old was highly regarded within the fading world of American coal, but mostly known to the public for his connection to the 2006 Sago Mine disaster. Hatfield was CEO of International Coal Group, which owned the mine, when it exploded and trapped 13 miners underground. A series of miscommunications led company officials to report that a dozen people had survived, when in reality only one had. Hatfield cried during a press conference while apologizing for the error––and for not correcting it immediately, as families of the workers rejoiced for naught.

The man went on to carve out a reputation as something of a maverick in the industry, decrying the negative impact of strip-mining on rural communities and calling for modernization amid surging global antipathy for coal, according to the Charleston Gazette Mail.

After Hatfield's girlfriend reported him missing Sunday, police tracked his cellphone to the graveyard. On Tuesday, they arrested Anthony Arriaga, a 20-year-old from Ohio, and charged him with first-degree murder. He had apparently emerged from the cemetery wearing only his underwear and paid someone $45 to take him to a Rite Aid in another county.

"Once he heard what was going on, He was a true Southern gentleman."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo via Tom Moses' Facebook account

Read: Meet the Florida Woman Fighting the Authorities to Keep Her Pet Gator

Nearly 20,000 bees latched onto the back of a car for two straight days in the UK after the hive's queen got trapped in the trunk of a Mitsubishi Outlander, the Telegraph reports.

Carol Howarth, 65, had no idea she picked up the little hitchhiker while she was out running errands on Sunday until she returned to her car to find thousands of bees covering her rear windshield. While many of us would go all Wicker Man in this situation, a few brave souls—including park ranger Tom Moses—sprung into action.

Moses was just driving by when he saw the dark brown blob on Howarth's car and decided call the professionals. "I was really worried that someone could get hurt by them or that someone might damage them in their bid to clear the car, so I stopped to help out," he told the Telegraph.

It took Moses, a team of three beekeepers, and a few fearless members of the public to corral the bees into boxes and try to free the queen. Finally able to see out of her rear window again, Howarth returned home thinking the whole mess was behind her, but when she woke up the next morning, the bees had returned. She had to call the beekeeper squad once more and finally got rid of the buzzing army later that evening.

One beekeeper said the whole thing was "quite amusing," but that's easy for him to say, since he isn't being hunted by a cloud of pissed-off bees.

Priests hold up their smart phones at a Pentecost mass in the Vatican. Photo by Giuseppe Ciccia/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the wake of scandals in the Catholic Church and a growing rejection of traditional values, a record-low number of young people consider themselves religious. Millennials are less likely than any previous generation to pray, attend services, or consider religion an important part of their lives, according to the Pew Research Center. And attempts to connect with young people—like "rock churches," or the priest who started accepting confessions via Snapchat—haven't exactly sparked new interest in religion.

And yet, at the same time, there's been a resurgence of millennials becoming priests. Since 2000, the number of 25- to 29-year-olds studying in seminary schools in the United States has increased by 36 percent, according to research from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. Now, more than 75 percent of priests are 34 or younger.

VICE interviewed several of these millennial priests to understand how they approach religion in 2016. These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Photo courtesy of Parker Sandoval

Father Parker Sandoval, 34
Resurrection Church, Los Angeles

VICE: Do you see a generational gap within the priesthood?
Father Parker Sandoval: I'm thirty-four, and the other two priests in the house are seventy-four. It's like working with your favorite grandfather. I see some great blessings in that, because they come with so much experience and wisdom from many years of priesthood. At the same time, I'll make some suggestions, and they're open to it.

They can look back at fifty years and say, "Oh my gosh, what a mess. I remember when twenty years ago masses were full, thirty years ago couples were still marrying in the church" and so on. I'm entering into this situation and I say, "Wow, what opportunities. The old system is broken. Can we try something new?"

"If the people are out there in cyberspace, then the gospel should be there, too." — Father Conor Sullivan

Catholicism seems alienating to a lot of young people. How do you get around that?
sense of alienation from the church, especially among our young people. If you look where we invest much of our resources, our space, our time, it's to adults. We spend our time answering questions that nobody's asking, especially for young people. Their questions are a lot more difficult, and a lot more fundamental. And I don't think we, the church, are really in tune to all of their questions.

Do you see the perception of the church or the priesthood changing?
I think Pope Francis has projected a refreshed image of what it means to be in the church, in a language that people can understand. He speaks by gesture. He speaks with images. I think he's rebranded the image of the church—not its content, but our image. But ultimately, I'm convinced the future of the church—including its perception—is largely in the hands of the laity. I hope my generation can continue to infuse in the life of the church.

Photo courtesy of Conor Sullivan

Father Conor Sullivan, 27
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Louis, Missouri

VICE: I've heard you read your homilies off an iPad—is that true?
Conor Sullivan: I'm a product of my generation. I use all of this technology because I know what I'm up against. I come from a generation that has grown up with nearly constant stimulation. We live in a very noisy, nonstop culture, so every occasion to speak publicly is actually a competition for people's attention. While I don't use technology during mass—even I have my limits—I typically spend a lot of time trying to write homilies that will capture people's attention, engage them, and communicate the gospel effectively. Outside of mass, I use whatever means I can in order to get that message across. Social media is definitely on that list. I have my own personal accounts that help me evangelize. If the people are out there in cyberspace, then the gospel should be there, too.

What do you think young priests bring to the church?
You might expect me to say, like: "Young priests bring a lot of energy to the church." Sure, true enough. But on the other hand, if you ask a young priest why he became a priest in the first place, you might find that there is more depth than that. Entering the seminary right out of high school these days is difficult. We have to swim pretty hard against the current of the culture, and a lot of people discourage us along the way. Our generation doesn't like commitment. I think we grew up seeing a lot of people fail in their commitments, and we ask ourselves: What's the point? I think a young priest is a contradiction to that mentality.

Do you think your generation of priests approach the church differently than older generations?
If there is a difference, it probably stems from the different atmospheres we were in when we entered seminary. These days, younger guys are typically more traditional. You'll see young priests in their cassocks , and you'll find that a great many of them like Latin in the liturgy and beautiful old art and architecture. Some critics of this new crop of seminarians and young priests have objected to me, "You young guys just want to take the church back in time, back before Vatican II." I typically respond, "I'm not interested in going backward or forward. Just upwards, toward heaven."

Photo courtesy of Brad Doyle

Father Brad Doyle, 28
St. George Catholic Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

VICE: What do you see young priests bringing to the church?
Brad Doyle: I think I see young priests bringing an energy, definitely. That's one of the reasons I entered seminary and thought about the priesthood. Any kind of person who's new in a profession tends to be a little more relatable to the youth and maybe just, you know, fresh. My goal is to stay fresh, to stay relevant, to stay on fire.

Do you see a generational gap in the church?
I think there's a generation gap understand a different language. It's the language of digital, the social media, very quick soundbites. I think the style has to be different. It's got to change, because people change. We see that with Pope Francis—and that's interesting because he's not of my generation—he's on Instagram, on Twitter. He realizes people want to hear directly from him. I think that style has to manifest in the priests.

Watch: The Priest for Gangbangers

What is something you've learned from an older priest and something you've learned from one your age?
One of the older priests told me, "No one will remember by the time the week's over." A great homily someone might remember for like, a month, but you go visit people in the hospital, and they'll remember it for their entire life. It's the importance of being present to people in moments and not just speaking to them. I've taken that to heart.

What I've gathered from the experience of younger priests is that people desire truth. They desire to hear what the church teaches, and not your own interpretation of it. A lot of the younger guys are realizing that the young church and young people in general, they're sick of being told what they want to hear.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Kerns

Brother Bryan Kerns, 27
The University of Chicago Divinity School

VICE: Do you think people coming into religious orders and the priesthood are different than their older counterparts?
Brother Bryan Kerns: I think that there are two main differences: The first is that the younger cohort was largely not formed in the kind of wars in the church after the Second Vatican Council, and elsewhere in the culture. We don't have that history. We're just living in the church of 2016.

The second main difference is that the older priests and brothers that I know were formed entirely in a world where the church was everything—the church was school, it was social life. It was an enclosed system, for lack of a better term. People of my generation are much more comfortable in a world that has a lot more pluralism religiously, culturally, ethnically, socially, politically. I mean, in the 50s and 60s, Archbishop Fulton Sheen had one of the highest-rated television shows, every week—that would never happen today. People don't even watch TV. Maybe if he were on Game of Thrones, but that's about it.

Many young people today have opinions contradictory to what the church teaches. How do you handle that?
Those are important topics to be discussed and debated, but that's not everything that the church teaches. There's this idea of three transcendental notions: the true, the beautiful, and the good. Bishop Bob Barron wrote an article once, and he said something like, "You can't start with the true, with propositional truths. You have to start with something else." He proposed to start with the beautiful. You bring people into churches, you bring them beautiful liturgies, and then you bring them to the good—to community, to conversation, and only then can you start talking about truth. And I think that provides a good enter into how to engage with young people.

I was at a parish recently that would be considered pretty traditional liturgically, and the place was packed with mostly young people, which was fascinating to me. I wasn't expecting that. There's a spiritual yearning in our generation that needs to be addressed, and I think the church can address it—it just has to figure out how. And I think we're still trying to sort all that out.

Follow Alyssa Girdwain on Twitter.

Harper gazes dreamily into his future. All photos via Facebook

Stephen Harper will be quitting politics before the fall session of Parliament, the Globe and Mail reported this morning.

A man drinking on the street in Harlem. Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

For most of New York City's recent history, law enforcement has been a numbers game.

Take the 2.7 million summonses that, according to a Daily News analysis, were issued to people for nonviolent offenses between 2001 and June 2014. A lot of them were for really petty offenses, by the way: publicly consuming alcohol, urinating in public, riding a bike on the sidewalk, being in a park after dark, littering, or even making unreasonable noise.

Then there's the racial divide: 81 percent of violations issued between 2001 and 2013 hit African-Americans and Latinos. And you can't forget the 1.5 million arrest warrants floating around the city for crimes as insignificant as walking through a park past dark.

These figures are the dregs of the notorious "broken windows" policing model, clogging nightmarish criminal courts and leaving permanent records for thousands of New Yorkers. But now, after 15 months of negotiations between the New York Police Department and local politicians, America's largest city is beginning to change course.

On Wednesday, NYC lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the Criminal Justice Reform Act of 2016 (CJRA), which has been tagged by Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito as one of the "most expansive packages of criminal justice reform legislation ever passed in New York City." The legislation, which is a collection of eight individual bills, should help stymie the onslaught of human beings that grind through the criminal process every day, often with tragic effects.

Under the new rules, which VICE reported on back in January, a city cop will now be advised to impose a small civil penalty, rather than a criminal one, for these petty offenses. While all of the various infractions are still technically illegal, the punishment citizens actually pay will change drastically, with a standardized set of fines staggered based on past history taking effect.

For example, a public urination or littering ticket used to cost you either ten days in jail, or fines between $50 and $450. But starting a year from now, these infractions will cost you $50 to $75. Then, if you're caught again, that jumps to $250 to $350, to be paid within 12 days. A similar scheme exists for making unreasonable noise, or breaking park rules.

Now the only jail time anyone will have to serve for these offenses is a single day. And in New York City parks, seemingly carefree acts—like walking over newly seeded lawns, or even climbing a tree—will no longer be criminal offenses at all.

"Our policies just weren't fair," Mark-Viverito said at a press conference before the vote. "And they weren't making economic sense either.

The Speaker mentioned the effort over a year ago in her "State of the City" address, saying then that the city had to rethink how it punishes its citizens—not only out of respect for individual liberty and justice, but also because the status quo is so damn expensive.

"It was New Yorkers who were paying the bill," she said then. "Whether it was the cost of locking up someone for at least 24 hours, if not longer; for one of these 1.5 million warrants; or the public assistance many found themselves on after being given a permanent criminal record."

The package of bills is expected to be signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in the coming days. Under his tenure, summonses and the use of the controversial tactic known as "stop and frisk" have decreased significantly (although they still are applied in racially disparate fashion). The mayor, who was elected in 2013 on a police reform platform, has also put measures into place to reform the hellish court system, the more hellish Rikers Island, and, more recently, the bail problem.

"The Criminal Justice Reform Act will play a crucial role in building a fairer criminal justice system for all New Yorkers," de Blasio said in a statement. "We pledged to reduce unnecessary arrests while protecting the quality of life of all our residents, and this legislation is an important step toward this essential goal."

When the reforms were first proposed, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton was hesitant, saying civil penalties "don't have any bite to them." But a spokesperson for Bratton told the Wall Street Journal the bill "allows the NYPD to use the full range of enforcement tools that we currently have."

It is important to note, however, that a police officer is not legislatively required to settle for a civil penalty instead of a criminal one—it's still up to them how much of a dick to be when they catch you pissing in an alleyway. But now, cops will at least be encouraged not to, with guidance from their superiors that will be made public.

The limited nature of the reform has some advocates arguing the new law will duck the heart of the problem.

"The CJRA has potential to advance needed criminal justice reform, but it is not police reform and does not disrupt discriminatory broken windows policing that propels racial disparities in policies and outcomes," said Monifa Bandele, a member of Communities United for Police Reform. "Whether its impact is beneficial to New Yorkers in the long-run lies in the details, since the NYPD retains ultimate control over most of its implementation and the direction given to officers."

Bandele added that the Council left out the Right to Know Act, which would require cops to explain themselves when stopping and searching people. Not including the bill in the final package, Bandele said, "is a missed opportunity that leaves New Yorkers just as vulnerable to police abuses continuing to occur in neighborhoods throughout the city."

In fairness, the CJRA isn't necessarily about changing policing. Instead, it focuses on the facts that in some boroughs, criminal courts are open past midnight, lines for warrant forgiveness events are known to scale an entire block, and that in 2015, cops gave out 297,413 criminal summonses.

"We will divert over 100,000 cases from the criminal justice system every year, save almost 10,000 people from a permanent criminal record, and prevent approximately 50,000 or more arrest warrants from being issued for these low-level offenses," said Speaker Mark-Viverito.

The new law "will ensure proportionality and fairness on a grand scale," she added, "all while keeping our city safe."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Raw horse meat, prepared as sashimi. Photo via Flickr user TAKA@PPRS

Randy Musick is 70 years old, and he's spent most of his life delivering horses to slaughterhouses.

"I started with five or six at a time, and that turned into 50 at a time, and before long, I was moving hundreds," Musick told me over the phone from his home in South Dakota. "Through the years it just kept growing and growing and growing."

Musick was what you'd call a "kill buyer"—someone who visits livestock auctions around the country and buys horses specifically for their meat. It's hard to find horse on menus in the United States, but it's a delicacy in places like France, Belgium, and Japan (where it's often eaten raw, as sashimi).

Musick's operation bought up live horses, then had them butchered, packaged, and sent off to market. He made a good living like this until 2007, when the government got involved.

At that time, there were three major horse slaughterhouses in the United States—two in Texas, and one in Illinois. Between the three slaughterhouses, about 90,000 horses were processed for meat in 2006. But in January 2007, a federal appeals court ruled that horse slaughter was illegal in Texas; later that year, the governor of Illinois signed a bill banning horse slaughter in the state. As a result, the last remaining plants in the United States were shuttered and horse slaughter was effectively ushered out of the country.

"My mother always said that horses are one step away from being worthless. Their only value is their meat." — Janine Jacques

But that hasn't curbed the industry. Today, kill buyers take their product across the borders to meat-processing plants in Mexico and Canada to get around domestic red tape and statewide bans. 150,000 horses are still taken from the US and slaughtered every year, according to statistics from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The federal government is hoping to change that: A bill called the Safeguard American Foods Exports Act is currently being debated in the Committee of Energy and Commerce and, if passed, it will stand as the first federal prohibition on the sale and transportation of horse meat. That would mean no more kill buying, no more long trips to Canada or Mexico for processing, and an end to the industry without moving it back stateside.

Musick, who is no longer in the business of buying and selling horse meat, said conditions for horses have worsened significantly since the industry became all-export. Back when horse slaughter was legal in Texas, he told me he'd "buy the horses and send them out to Fort Worth, Texas, where they'd be butchered the next day." Now, he said "they're hauling them to Canada and Mexico where they're spending twice as much time on the truck. We didn't want to abuse the animals—they were our property, we didn't want them all bruised up. We wanted to take care of them. Now, they're traveling 2,000 miles to a plant in Mexico."

That's raised red flags for Janine Jacques, who started the Equine Rescue Network in 2009 to coordinate efforts to plug the pipeline of slaughter-bound horses. Just like Musick, Jacques became concerned after learning that horses were being sent to plants south of the border.

"I grew up around horses. It was a natural course of action in my mind that horses get slaughtered after a long life," she told me. "What didn't make sense to me was shipping them to Canada and Mexico. A couple days stuck in a trailer, no food and no water, and because of regulations, truck drivers aren't allowed to open the doors. So a lot of horses are kicked, and trampled, and dead by the time they get there. It's horrific to think about." Similar allegations were detailed in a 2013 report from Animals' Angels Investigations & Advocacy, a non-profit dedicated to improving conditions for livestock.

Jacques explained that owning a horse takes a lot of upkeep, and even the breeds most expensive to purchase can end up en route to a slaughterhouse very quickly.

"Let's say I have a $100,000 horse that blows a tendon and can no longer perform at the level I bought it for. It's worthless now," she told me. "My mother always said that horses are one step away from being worthless. Their only value is their meat."

While Jacques is an active voice in anti-slaughter activism, she's also a realist. This is a systemic issue, she said, and dismantling an entire economic network comes with plenty of repercussions.

"I would never say I'm pro-slaughter, but I'm anti-horse suffering. Unless you can come up with a plan of what to do with the 150,000 horses that get slaughtered each year, you're going to create more horrible conditions for horses regardless," said Jacques. "It's a pretty amazing little puzzle to fix."

Related: I Followed Horse Meat from the Slaughterhouse to the Butcher Shop

The Safeguard American Food Exports Act, which was re-introduced last April after it failed to pass in Congress in 2013, hopes to solve that puzzle by making a health argument. Horses aren't held to the same health standards as other livestock, so consumers can't be sure the meat isn't tainted with chemicals used on the horses, or that the horses have been properly medicated to prevent disease, like other animals. As such, the bill would prevent Americans from exporting the meat.

"Congress finds that unlike cows, pigs, and other domesticated species, horses and other members of the equidae family are not raised for the purpose of human consumption," the bill states.

But others argue the bill singles out cruelty toward one particular type of animal, while ignoring the way other species are slaughtered every day in the United States. If Americans turn a blind eye to brutal, corporatized factory farming as a whole, what makes horse slaughter any different?

"Is the horse any more noble than the kind and gentle cow, with its soft eyes and gentle moo? To say it's OK to exploit a horse in one way and not another is a very limited way of looking at things," said Shamez Amlani, co-owner of La Palette, a high-end restaurant in Toronto with several horse dishes on the menu. "If you can think objectively about it, you might be tempted when a delicious horse steak appears in front of you."

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The word meme was invented by evolutionary biologist and future atheist heartthrob Richard Dawkins in 1976. It originally meant something like a cultural version of a strand of DNA—an idea that can move from person to person and generation to generation—but now, thanks to the internet, a "meme" is a joke that shifts and evolves at a frightening rate as it speeds from Something Awful or 4Chan to the wider world of social media.

For a long time, no one was cataloging where these jokes came from, or how they spread, or the permutations they went through before ending up on your mom's Facebook page. It wasn't until 2008 that three employees of the online video studio Rocketboom––Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Wilkinson, and Elspeth Rountree––started producing videos on the history of things like LOLcats and the catchphrase "I like turtles." Know Your Meme was born.

Today the site is an invaluable resource for people who care about web ephemera and is a step above most wiki-type portals, employing researchers to track down the origin of the strangest non sequiturs floating in the ether. This can get tricky, since meme culture has expanded to include basically the entire internet, with Hamburger Helper's marketing employees putting out viral mixtapes, presidential candidates getting social teams to promote multi-panel image macros, and people like FuckJerry carving careers out of photoshopping stuff like this.

In an effort to learn about the future of memes—and figure out how to explain dat boi to my grandma—I called up KYM cofounder Cheese (who now works at Everybody at Once, an internet consulting firm) and chatted about the state of internet culture and whether we should take memes seriously as art.

VICE: How did you get the idea to start cataloging memes?
Kenyatta Cheese: We started seeing like Adult Swim starting to use advice animals in their promos on TV, or on the internet, and not give credit where credit was due—like, not give credit to the community where it originated. And so we thought, let's just start tracking this. Let's just start a database. And so we did.

So the early episodes were like crappy, crappy, crappy. There were a bunch of things we got right, which was explaining not just the origins, not just where something came from, but where it spread to. The other part was actually doing the hard work of tracking down a bunch of that stuff.

We called ourselves the Rocketboom Entity for Internet Studies. And then, because no one else was doing this, all of a sudden people started paying attention.

When you started this website, memes weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. Did you have any idea it would take off the way it did?
We saw it as a way to create a research project disguised as a startup. And so, as it grew, Rocketboom put more resources toward it, and all of a sudden there were two coders, and there were three interns, and there were people who were dedicated to doing nothing but pulling stuff from the community and figuring out how to turn that into information that would fit the site. About that time, it was the golden age of 4Chan and Cheezburger and all that shit, and all of a sudden that meant there was a bunch of attention around it, and the motivation for us was how to create something that was going to be useful.

But for lots of reasons, Rocketboom fell apart, and Know Your Meme was caught in the middle of that. And so in late 2010 OR early 2011, Cheezburger had to buy Know Your Meme.

What do you think was the first meme?
I have no idea what the first meme was. I think it depends on context. There're a lot of people who would say the first meme was, if you're talking about web, cat macros. People have said the smiley was the first meme. If you want to go back and expand it past the internet even further, you know, the jokes that get passed around, not necessarily through large media outlets, but word of mouth.

So how would you describe what a meme is in words? What's the difference between a meme and a piece of "viral content"?
For me, and this is the definition we use—meme and viral were two separate things. "Viral" would be one video being shared over and over again. Maybe someone downloads it and re-uploads it, but no one's making any substantial change to the content of it. Memes are things that are not only replicated, but you can actually make of them.

The other definition has to do with how these things spread. You see them start off in subcultures, where the purpose of an image is to contribute to a conversation that's already going on. And then it gets pulled out into other spaces because: Holy shit, I saw something hilarious, or it's something that pissed me off, or it triggered me in some way, and I want to make sure that other people see this.

But it's become a lot more complicated, because everybody's covering internet culture now. There's such a race to be on top of this stuff that things that felt organic and naturally occurring can be accelerated and maybe even burn out faster because they're exposed to a very large audience at an early stage.

So what do you think about memes that are made by political campaigns or brands? Can those actually be memes, by your definition? They're not naturally occurring phenomena like classical memes.
Yes and no. I think the shell looks the same. The shell still looks like it's an image macro, but it may not have a reach beyond its own audience, or it may not have enough to spread beyond the people who were already attuned to it. It's a totally arbitrary and artificial boundary. When does something have enough cultural currency, have enough meaning attached to it, that all of a sudden there's a value that causes somebody to want to share it to another space? I mean, you can have macros that are completely insincere. But if they're still effective in spreading a particular idea, then I don't know. I guess they're memes.

How would you even describe a meme in words? Like if I had to describe what "dat boi" is to my grandmother, what would I say?
Have you ever tried it?

No. It's just occurring to me right now. Would you be able to describe some meme to somebody who was completely unfamiliar with internet culture?
It's a piece of culture that's recognisable to other people, that has a certain cultural meaning that you and the other people around you get. I wouldn't, say, use the word meme to describe an image macro. Meme to me is more the process, the thing that happens with that media within a network. My grandmother would still probably look at me and say, "That's nice. I have no fucking idea what you're talking about."

It's like the golden age of rap music. You listen to rap music from the 90s, and half the lyrics were references to TV shows or commercials, or whatever, different cultural signifiers that meant something to them and to other people who may have had the same experiences as them. But if you exposed somebody to them now, they're gonna have no idea, they may not get those references. I think a lot of internet culture is like that. You need the context of the culture. It's like the virality of "the dress," you know, people giving different answers to whatever color they thought it was––yes, that's interesting, but the thing that made it fascinating was the network.

What do you think makes a good meme?
I think that there are two things that make a good meme to me. The first one is something that's meaningful to the culture in which it was made. If a meme stays local to a particular LiveJournal, and people have a particular reaction to it, that is a successful meme. In terms of memes that have an effect on cultures beyond their point of origin, it's where some person, somewhere, is able to identify something in that image, or in that video, or in that joke, and know that there's another audience for it, and is able to pass it on. You can't make a meme. The meme part is the phenomenon, and is a function of the network into which it is placed.

How did you decide which meme-like things are worth inclusion on KYM?
Early on we were looking for things that seem like they're important to a subculture and are starting to pop up in other places. That was the criteria. So, I think because we were all young, we all gravitated to stuff that was in communities that we were already in. Which is why the early stuff is, like, nerd culture. But near the end of our run of the original group, we started incorporating memes in other languages, from other cultures, and started to go: How do we actually expand the site to deal with stuff and verify a bunch of stuff? And so, there might have been something that had been floating around since 2000, or '98 or whatever, that somebody might be coming to for the first time in like, 2008, and come to the site going, "Oh, I just found this new thing. It's amazing!" And there would be some people who'd be like, "Oh, that's great. Good for you. That's been around for a long time," and other people who would be like, "Who the fuck are you?"

All of a sudden your meme knowledge became like a badge of honor. And so that meant we had to figure out how do we actually document, and accept, and verify memes from other cultures.

What do you think is the best meme right now?
I pay a hell of a lot less attention to traditional internet memes . I don't feel like I can even say that there's one that I absolutely love right now, but I think if I were to go for one for all time, it would have to be cat macros.

That's really your favorite?
Well, I think it's the most fascinating, because nobody's fucked it up. I mean, people fuck it up now and then, but nobody can do something so fucked up, that is so large, that it erases everything that's come before it. And so the cat macro lives on. I think that makes it brilliant in a way that's really hard for other things to be.

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