A box of red roses, left by the owners of the place I'm renting. I haven't come across the missing pieces from this set. Yet.

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Two years ago, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Bucharest with two girls from school. The place was in a rough state: I had to use Coca-Cola to get the grime off the walls and piping. There was something that looked like blood in the fridge's vegetable drawer and on the mattress. The former owners had also left some of their stuff in a cupboard, but we weren't allowed to throw anything out because the bank had foreclosed on the apartment, and we were renting it in the meantime. So instead of throwing it out, I decided to take pictures of it. All the pictures below—unless stated otherwise—are of things I found in that cupboard.

Since I was sure I wasn't the only one who'd ever come across dildos and x-rays left behind by former owners or renters, I asked some of my friends in Bucharest what they've dealt with in the new places they'd moved in to.

Claudia, 23

"My boyfriend and I moved into a studio flat in the Dristor area of Bucharest in April 2014. The owner was a retired cabbie, who was weirdly interested in us—he even asked me what schools my parents had gone to. I have this habit of flipping my mattress twice a year, and because I didn't expect the owner to have done that, my boyfriend and I decided to flip the mattress before we did anything else. That's how we came across a used condom under the mattress near the top of the bed.

We guessed it probably wasn't the owner's. I figured it had belonged to this girl in one of my economics classes, who I knew used to live there before me. I can see her having one last fuck with her boyfriend before moving, out but marking her territory with it. It had to have been done on purpose—I don't see how you'd spontaneously lift your mattress and leave a used condom there, forgetting about it afterward. I faked a spine condition to the owner and convinced him to buy me a new mattress."

Cristian, 25

"I was studying at University College London when I moved to a studio in Shepherd's Bush in 2011. A woman in her fifties or sixties we called Angie took care of the floor I lived on. When I had a first peek under the bed, I found a collection of English vintage porn rags. About ten or fifteen of them—all from 1952, '53, or '55. The babes in the magazines were all pretty well-clad. One lady with blond curly hair and enormous tits stuck with me especially—she wore a black one-piece bathing suit and lay stretched out on the beach in the English seaside. I took the mags to Angie, who only had one thing to say: 'Oh my!' There had been a philosophy major living before me, so it kind of figures."

Laura, 23

"About five years ago, I moved out of my mum's place and into a three bedroom flat some of my friends were renting. The flat belonged to a girl who had moved abroad—it was actually her parents' place, who had died. When we started refurbishing, we found a small closet in the living room that none of my flatmates had opened yet. In it, was a photo album with very old black-and-white photos. There were a lot of kids in the pictures, and I'm guessing they were of a traditional Christian Orthodox christening. Most pages had two or three photo's on them, one had a lock of brown hair scotch taped on it. We threw it away—the girl didn't mind at all."

Treasures from the two apartments where Clau lived

CLAU, 26

"In 2014, I moved out of the dorms I had been living in for four and a half years and into an old villa in Bucharest. Some friends of mine had lived there before some other friends, and I moved in. In the attic, we found a box full of foam peanuts, there to protect an enormous glass bong. It was unclear which generation of renters before us it had belonged to, but we carried on its tradition and kept it around the house.

Earlier this year, I moved to a beautiful house in another district. It belonged to a lady in her fifties, who teaches physics in Germany. In her bedroom, we found a teddy bear—stuffed with the exact stuff your worst nightmares are made of. It's still where we found it, sitting on a cupboard in her bedroom, staring into the darkest corners of your soul. I don't usually go into her room, but I know it's there. It'll probably be there for many, many years to come."

Andrei, 20

"I moved to a new flat in 2014, because I wanted to be closer to school. The place belonged to a woman in her forties, who had left the country a while before. In her bedroom closet, I came across some whips that seemed to have been used extensively—their ends were worn out. I threw them out and never brought it up.

When I moved to a different flat last spring, I found something from a completely different order in an apartment that belonged to an elderly couple. When I tried to rearrange the furniture in the bedroom, I found a pile of vomit behind the bed. It was completely dried up—must've been left there about two days before. I just gave the place a thorough cleaning—I didn't really know what else to do."

Ema, 23

"In 2014, I decided it was time to move in with my boyfriend of three months. He had lived there with his ex before—a fact I was confronted with when I was hanging my clothes in his closet and came across a girly bathrobe, some tops, and socks. Elsewhere in the apartment, I found some photos of a girl in sunglasses in the back of a drawer full of Kinder egg toys.

The photos and the toys all belonged to his ex—who he had been done with for six months. My boyfriend said he never noticed that stuff was there, and I believe him. I threw everything of hers out, and I made a mental note that if I ever moved out like she did, I'd keep everything I left at his flat in one place, so the next girl wouldn't have to go through all that hassle. But my boyfriend and I have been quite inseparable."

Eduard, 23

"Two years ago, I went back to university in London after my summer holiday. I moved to a new place in Forest Gate, owned by a very short, very arrogant guy. The flat was new and perfect but one day I had to go to the basement to fix a power outage. When I came down, I saw a used mattress, a pram, and six huge plastic bags filled with kids' toys. There was also a painting on the wall with writing in Arabic on it. When I came back some time later, there were more cobwebs there, but it seemed like there were also more bags of stuff."

Andreea, 23

"This year, I've been looking to buy a property, and I found a place I wanted to check out in Bucharest. A real estate agent gave me a quick tour of the house, but I explored on my own while she was on the phone. I knew a lady had died in this flat, but I didn't expect to find all her things in the bathroom. There was an old, striped orange shirt with a pattern straight from the Communist era on it hanging on the door—but old as it was, it looked spotless. The whole bathroom looked like she could come back at any moment. It was creepy and beautiful, and I don't think the agent saw it. I didn't end up buying the place—I might have, if not for that shirt."

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Carnivals are the best. They're brimming with fun and decay, nothing ever changes, and everybody's welcome. French photographer Manolo Mylonas decided to document French carnivals for his series Attraction terrestre (Terrestrial attraction). It took him about a year and a half to finish this project—he visited big carnivals near Paris but also the ones in smaller French cities like Saint-Denis, Montfermeil, Pontoise, Dieppe, Rouen, Angers, Saint-Omer, Calais, and Dunkirk.

About that year and a half, Manolo says, "It was wonderful rediscovering the slot machines, dodgems, and old merry-go-rounds I loved as a child. The Rotor, for example—that ride was created in the late 1940s but still manages to look extremely futuristic. It was funny to see that these rides hadn't changed a bit—they are still run and maintained by old fairground workers and their grandchildren.

But carnivals are gradually disappearing from city centers. Fairground workers don't want to be relocated to the absolute outskirts of towns, but it's happening. It'd be a shame to see those fairs die out."

See more of Manolo's work below and on his website or Facebook page.

As of today, legal highs are no longer legal in the UK. The Psychoactive Substances Act—a Home Office bill that bans any and all of those vac-packed bags of synthetic drugs with weird names—came into effect at midnight, the hope being that banning all of these substances will stop people from doing them.

Yesterday, alongside hundreds of online and high street head shops, one of the largest and oldest legal high outfits in the UK, Herbal Highs, shut down for good. Herbal Highs began selling herbal ecstasy, magic mushrooms, and hippy highs at Glastonbury 23 years ago, but went on to became the biggest legal high wholesaler and distributor in Britain.

I spoke to owner Donal O'Dwyer to get the inside story on the rise and fall of the much-maligned legal highs game, and how it was ruined by the very people set to benefit from the ban.

VICE: I've noticed on your website it says "Closing Down Offers" and "Last Orders." Is it really all over?
Donal O'Dwyer: The Home Office have again made a massive mistake in creating a blanket ban on the sale of legal highs, closing down all the legitimate businesses and giving clear way for the unscrupulous criminals. When will they learn prohibition just doesn't work?

You've been selling legal highs for twenty-three years—you must have been one of the first on the scene.
When we started selling legal highs from a tent at Glastonbury in the early 90s, it was a different world: Opening up a video rental shop seemed like a great idea, the internet was just a concept, and festivals were held in places full of smelly hippies.

What did you sell?
We used to sell a range of ethno-botanical products and khat tinctures. All our legal highs, such as Druids fantasy, EX-1, and Bliss, were herbal, made from morning glory seeds, mahung, and many other herbal extracts. We also sold herbal ecstasy, blue pills with a butterfly on them, which contained Sida cordifolia, made by Shaahin Cheyene. But herbal highs were considered to be ineffective by the masses. Like many good ideas, legal highs and herbal highs seem very obvious now, but they took a long time to catch on. In fact, in the early days, people used to stand and look at our stall and point and laugh. The most asked question for the first ten years was, "So, do they really work then?"

But you were onto something?
During our first months doing mail order, back in the "please allow twenty-eight days for delivery" era, we printed something like ten thousand leaflets, distributed them out at Reading Festival and took just £28 in the first month. Hardly a brilliant start, but it was a start nonetheless, and I believed the world would eventually catch on. Because we were out there at festivals, people who possessed knowledge were drawn to our products: herbalists, chemists, people who had created samples and read about various chemicals. Our business didn't really take off until the success of broadband during the 2000s, where the masses could buy things successfully online.

So the internet acted as a catalyst?
The digital age allowed information to be exchanged easily, and this provided access to lots of previously hidden papers and journals that had been developed and shelved by pharmaceutical companies, from as early as 1910. Now people including ourselves were looking at how to get these products produced and distributed. There were already lots of people trying out various research chemicals, and the internet allowed them to write blogs and share their personal experiences.

Not only had the products changed, but the way these were consumed changed too. People read reviews, looked at forums, and knew what they wanted. They expected consistent quality, unlike like the old days when people just bought something in a dirty public toilet and hoped for the best. Our business was founded on customer satisfaction and repeat sales, and the laws were changing every day to keep us on our toes and ensure all of our products remained legal.

This is where synthetic weed and stimulants came in. How did you make them?
Around the mid 2000s, we were looking for something to replace a very popular and expensive powder that was sold on the streets that has a terrible human rights record relating to its chain of production and importation. As our community expanded, we met people like Dr. Zee from Israel, who helped with developing one of our most popular products, Charge, which contained a cathinone—and this was a synthesized version of khat.

On synthetic cannabinoids, we had experimented with thousands of compounds and extracts and did a huge amount of research. We already knew where to source the plant matter and the active compounds required to add to that. We got them synthesized in labs in China and India we had built up relationships with.

We had a team of people who did clinical trials who actually wrote reports on the effects of the products, and this was a long, drawn out process. We eventually produced fantastic, safe products such as Green Dream, Skunk, and Big Buddha. They were manufactured in lab conditions, and when we received the raw materials, we would hand them over to contract manufacturers in Britain who would put the products together and package them.

And this is how you became the biggest supplier of legal highs in Britain?
By 2009, herbalhighs.co.uk was being compared on a BBC documentary to Amazon; it was a proud moment. We never sold mephedrone, which didn't fit in with our ethos because we thought it was dirty and unsafe. Charge became an almost overnight success, and we just couldn't make it fast enough.

In 2010, the business grew ten thousand percent within six months, and we were dealing with huge deliveries every week. Because of our rapid expansion, we automated much of the packing process, but with a team of twenty to thirty packers finishing things by hand. We therefore didn't have time to carry out an interview process or assessment of employees, but hired anyone regardless of ability or acumen. These were exciting, crazy times.

We sold our products to a growing number of online and high street head shops, and this made previously poor people very rich; lots of people bought houses because of our stock, and I was told our business model inspired others to get into this business, and I mentored everyone I could.

A letter Donal received from the NCA, telling him to cease his operations

But then the market became flooded with cheap imitations?
Unfortunately, the things that positioned us well for success at one point . For every one packet of Charge we produced, there were at least five forgeries on the market. We became a victim of our own success, but unlike Nike, trading standards didn't seem to be interested in our plight. We were very concerned that people would buy substandard or dangerous products believing them to be ours. We looked at ethical and legitimate ways to demonstrate the herbal highs standard to our customers, including the introduction of holograms.

There was an attempt to organize an industry association to monitor the quality of legal highs, but people in the industry had their own agendas, and, in the end, it was impossible to even arrange where to meet, never mind an outcome. It was a bit like OPEC.

How would you compare the synthetic weed you sold to the stuff that's out there causing people to collapse and become addicted today?
Consistency and strength. Our products were far less potent. We had consistent suppliers and a consistent manufacturing process. You will struggle to find a negative comment about the Herbal High Company on the web. Maybe people said our products weren't strong enough, but they never said they made them ill. But what they are selling is nonsense, like selling one thousand percent proof beer. You won't enjoy it; you'll just use it to get totally numbed.

Synthetic cannabinoids were never the problem; the problem was the fact people have been selling stronger and stronger products to get ahead of their competitors, such as Annihilation. Our products were mild.

So the competition to make legal highs as strong as possible has ruined it for everyone?
Many of the fly-by-night sellers are ex-drug dealers, and after the law change, it will go back to being drug dealers. The irony is that those who created these problems come from the illegal side and people who were never cut out for legitimate business, but they are ones who are going to benefit from this new law. It's like the banking crisis, as the people who caused all the problems are ultimately the ones who will gain from it.

Donal O'Dwyer hopes to turn the Herbal Highs story into a movie and a book.

Disclaimer: Herbal Highs only sold products not for human consumption.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.

This piece was published in partnership with the Influence.

Yes, marijuana testing is an actual career. You might not be shocked at that fact in 2016, with several states across America having legalized recreational pot use. And testing weed sounds like fun, right?

But major life decisions should be made soberly and thoughtfully. To help you with this, I spoke with a real-life professional weed tester about her qualifications and experiences.

Beth Cantrell, 32, has made her career in testing cannabis products at a company called Confidence Analytics in Washington State. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound, where she majored in communications and also studied calculus, physics, and statistics.

So her skill-set includes some pretty in-depth stuff: " of all our data before it leaves the lab and is submitted to the customer or the lab for approval. I also assist with insuring our transportation program runs efficiently, scheduling all of our employees, making sure we pass audits."

Got that? While this may all seem surprisingly bureaucratic to some, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with the stringent regulations that Washington State puts on growers and distributers. Confidence Analytics is authorized to conduct tests on behalf of both the state and customers.

Now, what about the actual testing?

"When we do it for the state legal marijuana, we do it when the product is ready for market," says Cantrell. "So it's been cut, it's been trimmed, it's been dried. It's ready to package and to go out to the consumer."

And before that, you just need to find out how stoned it makes you, right?

Not exactly. "We do final checks—to see, Hey, is there E.coli? Is there salmonella? Is there any contaminant in the sample?—as well as verification of potency, because our state has certain limits, particularly with edibles where a serving can only be so potent," Cantrell explains. "They don't want anyone to consume something that makes them so high that something bad happens, like has happened in Colorado."

The dispiriting potential for mold growth after a product is shipped is also examined. "They want it to be less than fifteen percent moisture by weight, which is a fairly straightforward test. The other thing that we look for in extracts that are processed with hydrocarbons—so like, butane hash oil or propane hash oil—they have a limit on how many residual alkanes, so how much left over gas is in the product of five hundred parts per million. So we test for that in a gas chromatography flame ionization detector device."

This gas chromatography flame ionization detector device is necessary, but not sufficient. All the equipment and processes used to detect contaminants and assess quality sound absurdly technical—including something called HPLC. "We have a wide variety of equipment in our lab; we use HPLC—high pressure liquid chromatology—for all of our potency analysis for any cannabinoid." If this sounds complicated, that's because it is: "It uses a diode light array. The tested product is put into a solution, which is then injected and passes through the detector and the light. Then based on its response and its response time, we are able to calculate how much of that particular analyte is in the sample—based on percent by weight or milligrams per gram, based on how the math is done."

But now it's about to get interesting. After the product is determined to meet state standards, discovering its potency and quality is crucial. And its smell.

While most marijuana enthusiasts have heard of THC, most probably haven't heard of terpenes. "Terpenes are commonly found in pretty much all plants and some animals actually generate them as well," Cantrell tells me. "They are an organic hydrocarbon, so it's a volatile chemical that evaporates at room temperature. It's the reason that we smell things—so you walk past a rose, and you smell that signature rose smell, that's because bisabolol,which is a terpene, and maybe geraniol are coming off of that flower and evaporating into the air. Those tiny molecules hit your nose, and your olfactory system processes them and recognizes them as smells. So terpenes are the actual chemicals that created the various smells that we perceive in our environment."

Terpenes also have an effect on the way the brain processes cannabis products, according to Cantrell. "Each terpene affects the way you interact with the cannabinoids, and some of the terpenes have an effect on the body in and of themselves, which would be kind of behind the science of aromatherapy—that those chemicals actually do interact with our neural network and our body and create a specific response." This is why many growers pride themselves on having high terpene counts in their product, and why Confidence focuses so heavily on verifying these counts.

If a grower's crop does not meet state standards, they are forbidden from selling it in an unprocessed form. As a result, testing can be a very stressful experience for growers.

"Washington State has made it very hard for customers to remediate and retest and still sell product," Cantrell says. "So for growers, anytime they do a test they are at risk for having to destroy what could potentially be thousands of dollars of inventory based on the test results—or sell that inventory at a huge loss, because it can't be packaged and sold in its current state. It has to be sold processed. I think that it makes testing really scary for growers each time that they send it in. They run the risk of losing a pile of money if the results aren't what they want them to be."

Beth Cantrell has a great deal of experience of contending with the fallout of failed tests.

"Anger is definitely something we deal with," she says. "People do get upset when they fail, when their results aren't what they would expect. We do pride ourselves on providing really good customer service and a lot more consulting than necessary. We will talk to people about their process: What kind of sprays are you putting on? Maybe this is why you have a microbial problem? Maybe this is why your potency numbers are varying more than you would expect? Have you changed lighting? Have you changed your air intake system?"

Confidence Analytics recognizes that it holds a unique position between the regulators and the growers, Cantrell says, and tries its best to be a streamlining factor throughout the process.

As you may have gathered by now, professional weed testers like Beth Cantrell don't personally consume the product on the job. And, of course, ethics forbid the acceptance of bribes.

Still feel like weed testing is the job for you?

Patrick Hilsman is an associate editor at the Influence. Follow him on Twitter.

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

Photo via Flickr user Gastón Gaiduk

Native New Yorker and artist Sean Vegezzi is a longtime friend of VICE. In the past, he's focused on the ever-changing shape of his home city in the face of an out-of-control real estate market. But in his latest project, Snow Cab, he went in a different direction, turning a vacant retail unit in Manhattan into an art installation. The piece, which appeared last November, turned ordinary objects from T-shirts to debris into eerie sculptures.

He documented all of this and put the resulting photos into a book, which he's selling Thursday at a special event at 1 Crown Court, an empty office in London, where his work will also be on display. You can check out photographs from the book below, and read more about the event here. If you miss the event in London, you can buy the book here.

Sean Vegezzi has mapped New York City's landscape through photo, video, installation, and recreational practices-turned-performance-art since 2001. His first book of photographs, I Don't Warna Grow Up, was published by Fourteen Nineteen in 2012.

Canadian Ambassador to Ireland Kevin Vickers wrestles with a protester (left) during a State ceremony to remember the British soldiers who died during the Easter Rising at Grangegorman Military Cemetery, Dublin. Photo via Canadian Press

Canadian Ambassador to Ireland Kevin Vickers, who rose to national prominence for his role in the Parliament Hill attack nearly two years ago, tackled a protester in Ireland today. Vickers, who previously served as a Mountie and Parliament's sergeant-at-arms, has now apparently added freelance tackler to his résumé.

Image by Nick Scott

One Friday morning last fall, I texted my partner to ask when he was heading my way. We live five hours apart, and I was waiting for him to visit. Instead, he told me he'd had a bad night and was checking himself into a behavioral health facility in Bloomington, Indiana. "I'm not doing well," he said, simply. My partner had a drinking problem—that I knew—but I didn't realize at the time how depressed he was.

Later that day, he texted, "They didn't check me in. Just referred me to a therapist. I guess I didn't use the right words. I'm taking time off work. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Recently I asked if he knows why they didn't admit him. He doesn't remember that day at all. He looked back in his journal, at the sloppy fragmented text he'd scrawled, and told me he was drunk all weekend. He said, "I can tell from my writing I just felt despair."

A few days later, he tried again at the public hospital. This was the first time since he was sixteen that he sought psychiatric care. He told them he was considering killing himself, and they asked him to wait an hour for the next available intake specialist. He messaged me while sitting in his car and told me he was confused by the wait after being honest about how suicidal he felt. To top it off, they warned him it was illegal to smoke on hospital grounds—even in his car.

When he was finally admitted an hour later, he sent me a picture of a piece of paper with the ID number I'd need to call him on the psych ward, during the couple of hours a day when patients can receive calls. He would stay in the ward for five days. When he got out, he told me it saved his life.

Six months after his stay at the hospital, my partner is still having a hard time finding a psychiatrist to help manage his depression because of his accompanying issues with alcoholism. This dual diagnosis is more difficult to treat because the conditions feed off of each other, and many psychiatrists don't want to touch it.

But today, a number of senators, both Republican and Democrat, are trying to make it easier for those in need to get the help they deserve with the Mental Health Reform Act of 2016. The bill stands to make a difference for people who, like my partner, need help with substance abuse or suicidality. This Thursday, May 26, Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) will host a Senate Mental Health Summit to urge leaders to push the bill through the Senate.

The new bill is the center of a large bipartisan effort to improve the mental health care system. It's supported by smaller bills that focus on substance abuse treatment and an increase in outpatient and crisis care clinics. It could help people in need get more consistent care by enforcing a current parity law, which requires health insurance companies provide equal coverage for behavioral and physical health matters, as well as ensuring more funding gets to state- and community-level programs. This funding would mean more treatment options and more qualified health professionals on staff. Currently, the US spends $130 billion a year on mental health, but as Congressman Tim Murphy pointed out in an interview with the Hill, "it's not getting to communities or states—and certainly not getting to the families and individuals who need it."

The bill would also directly address the rising suicide rate, which, per the most recent data, is the highest it's been in 30 years. The bill proposes full funding of the National Violent Death Reporting System, which would keep track of suicide deaths nationwide. "Until all states report fully about suicide deaths, we won't have a complete picture of who dies," Nancy Farrell, board chair of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, told VICE. "Because of incomplete reporting, we don't know about marital status, veteran service, LGBTQ, and other information that would help us better understand trends and challenges." She added, however, that the reform "can be a beginning, but as a nation, we need to invest substantially more in research and treatment options."

Of course, not everyone is happy with the legislation. Per Modern Healthcare, some advocates are disappointed that some of the changes they think are most important have been left out. "If this were to pass as is, it would be of no benefit to severe mental illness," said John Snook, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Missing also are efforts to support court-ordered outpatient treatment alternatives to incarceration, and fixes to the limited mental health care access for Medicare and Medicaid patients (though there's still hope to expand the influence of the legislation through amendments like one that would remove a Medicaid restriction to certain mental health facilities).

Asking someone who just admitted he was suicidal to wait patiently for the next available intake specialist is akin to asking an individual mid-stroke to just hang out in the E.R. waiting room. If people like my partner need to know the exact words to use to be taken seriously, then something is wrong with the system. If the bill passes in both the Senate and the House this summer, the new law would require most changes to be in effect by the end of 2017. I can't help but imagine that things might have gone more smoothly for my partner last fall if this reform had already been in effect. With more funding, staff might have been less burned out. The new legislation requires more accountability, so the private facility might not have been so quick to turn him away. As for psychiatrists who are wary of treating patients with dual-diagnoses of depression and substance abuse, a line in the legislation promises to make this very issue a matter of "regional and national significance."

Regardless of what impact the legislation might have made—or might still make—for my partner, this is bigger than him. More than 42,000 people ended their lives in 2014. Over half of adults with mental illness weren't treated in 2013. Something is obviously wrong, and this legislation is at least an acknowledgement by our lawmakers that something needs to be done.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I've been addicted to everything except positive thinking. Currently, the obsessive focus of my tyrannical mind is crystals. Not crystal meth, just crystals. I've only been in the crystal game less than a year, and already my thoughts and well-being have become so controlled by quartzes, amethysts, tourmalines, and calcites that I've had to set boundaries to rein in my obsession, including: no seeking out crystal stores, only purchasing crystals if I feel the "universe" has put them in my path, no moving the crystals around the house more than three times a day, no talking about crystals, no healing crystal YouTube videos, no planning trips to Arizona gem shows or Arkansas rock mines.

I was hesitant to get involved with the crystal world. I spent my early 20s going to psychics drunk, shopping at new age stores on opiates, and reading self-help books so fucked up on over-the-counter speed that I highlighted every word. What began as a weed and psychedelic-fueled journey to connect with something greater than myself (and perhaps unearth some cosmic truths about existence) had descended into a desperate grab at just trying to be OK.

Eventually, I got sober, and in doing so, I had to find something to rely on that was not my ego, drugs, or alcohol. I tried on various philosophies and gods: some found in the new age stores, others in the forms of sex, food, the internet, and anything else remotely pleasurable. Ultimately, through trial and error, I came to discover that if there is an answer, a thing that will "fix" me, it probably isn't in some glittery thing outside myself. This was an annoying realization. It sucks that the answer has to come from within.

For the past decade, I've been learning to live as though the answer isn't outside me. I try to spend a little time in the beginning of the day, about ten minutes, in stillness. I've intentionally left my meditation practice open, not tethered to one religion or tradition, so as to avoid turning any one object, book, or guru into the answer. When you're as easily seduced by the promises of spiritual materialism as I am, it's easy to mistake what the hand is pointing to for the hand itself.

Having lived in Venice Beach for almost three years, this means resisting the siren songs of countless psychics, juice cleanses, mystical healing journeys, and, yes, crystals. But last year, I found myself talking to a beautiful bohemian woman in a parking lot about her spread of quartzes and apophyllites. She was so fun and light, so free, that I thought, It can't hurt to just buy one. This will be purely beautiful and decorative. It will just be for fun. But I am so not a person who can keep things fun. If I had a past life, I spent it at Jonestown.

After returning home with my new quartz, I put it on the windowsill for "protection." Then I wondered about the other windowsills. So I purchased a few more quartzes. And a few more. Shortly thereafter, I was told that clear quartzes "do nothing" unless they are paired with another stone. So I got an onyx. Then I needed an amethyst to help me sleep. I got a blue calcite to put in my bra for anxiety (it didn't work). I bought a little rose quartz stone to celebrate a moment of self-love (or more specifically, a refusal to sext a bro with whom I used to sext). I was given a smoky quartz and a piece of pyrite that were said to be grounding and protect from negative energy. Then the lady at a new crystal store I began frequenting said my pyrite was of poor quality and that I should invest in a shinier one. So I did. Suddenly, all of my prior crystals seemed shabby, too. I began hiding the old crystals and replacing them with newer ones. In the middle of the night, I would move my lithium quartz from my nightstand to the kitchen and back again, panicking that something wasn't right. During meditation, I worried that I'd chosen the wrong crystal for the day. I began getting really fucked up about the crystals. I couldn't afford to buy any big ones, so I just kept accruing little, tiny crystals—small bumps of my drug. They covered my house. They were everywhere. Apparently, the first quartz in that parking lot had been the gateway crystal.

One day, after nearly causing an accident while sifting through my crystal pouch for the right stone (it's like texting and driving but woo-woo), I decided I'd had enough. Weren't these crystals supposed to be helping me? Now I needed a crystal for every fucking thing. But I wanted the power, the juju, to come from inside me, not some bullshit outside. Deep down, I'd already learned the hard way that spirituality was not a magic trick. So why was I trying to dumb myself down in order to make these crystals work? Why did I want so badly to turn to something outside me when the power was already within?

I decided then: no new crystals. But two days later, I relapsed. One minute I was not even thinking about crystals, and the next, as though in a blackout, I found myself standing in the middle of a pricey metaphysical shop in Santa Monica. When I went to pay for some tiny stones, the woman who worked there made me feel shitty for their size—as though I wasn't "spiritual" enough for the giant geodes. This, I decided, was my rock bottom.

There comes a point in every woman's journey when she has to ask herself: Is the person who can afford to spend money on giant fucking crystals more spiritual than the person who can't afford to buy any? The same goes for $960 mantras and $2,000 retreats to holy places. Not to shit on anyone's path, but I don't think this is the way the universe works.

Also, it's not really about the crystals. Anything I hope will set me free always ends up imprisoning me. It's probably because I want so badly for something else to do it for me that I become so dependent. I think we all want something to believe in, to rescue us from the terrestrial. But some people are able to be more casual about that thing—to simply let beauty be beauty, and a moment be a moment—whereas I can't help but cling.

Now I see people around me with the crystals and I'm like, I don't get it. How do they just get to be casual crystal users and not me? It's triggering. I am triggered by fucking crystals. I'm like, Let me go buy just one crystal to prove I don't have a problem. If they can do it, why can't I? But it's not for me to know exactly why. What is for me, I suppose, is to remember that an opulent inner life is worth more than anything shiny outside myself—at least until my next obsession.

Buy So Sad Today: Personal Essays on Amazon, and follow her on Twitter.

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump turned an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! into an opportunity to suck up another news cycle when he agreed to debate Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders "for charity," a bizarre move that underscores just how far this campaign season has spun out of orbit.

Trump, of course, has the Republican nomination wrapped up, while Sanders needs a miracle landslide in California and an unlikely win in New Jersey to overtake Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates. The two men are not running against each other in any real sense—and even if Sanders somehow wrested the Democratic nomination from Clinton, it would be strange for general election candidates to debate before being officially crowned as the nominees.

As the Atlantic's Matt Ford pointed out, intra-party debates are usually organized by the parties themselves, and general election debates are sorted out with the help of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The terms of a Sanders–Trump debate, on the other hand, would have to be agreed upon by the individual campaigns without the help of an arbiter. Reaching across parties like that would be pretty much unprecedented.

By Thursday morning, some Trump campaign sources had told Major Garrett of CBS News that the debate would "never happen" and that it "was only a joke." But Sanders's campaign clearly wasn't joking when it challenged Trump to a debate in an open letter. And when Kimmel asked Trump about it Wednesday, the Republican didn't seem to be goofing around, saying he'd be open to the idea in principle. Sanders's tweeted reply was completely straight-faced as well:

All of this comes after Clinton declined to debate Sanders before the California primary on June 7, a move that naturally upset the Vermont senator's supporters. At this point, Clinton is clearly looking to forget her primary opponent, and pivot to the general election battle against Trump; Sanders, however, would obviously welcome any opportunity to air his views before voters one last time. Appearing onstage with Trump would also give Sanders, a frequent critic of the "billionaire class," a chance to show how he would take on a guy who claims he's a billionaire.

Sanders has argued that he's the candidate best positioned to beat Trump, and that Democratic Party's unpledged superdelegates should therefore back him even if he fails to overtake Clinton in delegates before the Democratic National Convention. Giving the Republican reality TV star a good dose of the Bern on a national stage could bolster that argument, particularly as Sanders continues to narrow the gap between him and Clinton in California polls.

Trump's angle here is also fairly obvious. On Kimmel, he told the host that he sympathized with Sanders's fight against a "rigged" primary system, and increasingly, he's been repurposing the Vermont senator's arguments into his own attacks against Clinton. Trump also admitted to Kimmel that he thought Sanders would be easier to beat than Clinton, and he has previously encouraged Sanders to stay in the race, so the Republican is clearly operating on a kind of enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend theory of politics.

And with some polls showing that a not insignificant number of Sanders supporters hate Trump less than they hate Clinton, it's not difficult to imagine that some Sanders Democrats might become Trump Republicans—or at least the real estate mogul can hope.

On Thursday morning, many pundits argued that the prospect of Sanders and Trump teaming up to unite #NeverClinton voters would be, as one USA Today headline put it, "Clinton's nightmare." But Trump and Sanders are not allies by any stretch of the imagination. Sanders has called Trump a "pathological liar" and a "nutcase," while the Republican has nicknamed the senator "Crazy Bernie Sanders."

A head-to-head between these two men, if it ever happened, would be as unpredictable and likely as vitriolic as any of the notoriously aggressive GOP debates this year. So it's far from clear that Clinton would be damaged in the long run by this hypothetical debate. In fact, Trump's responses to Sanders's attacks could give her a preview of how he might react to similar jabs from her campaign. If Sanders faltered, or got flustered by Trump's bullying, it would damage the electability argument he's been using to justify his continued campaign. On the other hand, anything Sanders did to hurt Trump would likely help Clinton.

Only one thing is clear, at this point: "We would have such high ratings," Trump told Kimmel. Whatever you think of the guy, his claims about his own ability to draw eyeballs are usually not wrong.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

We are now exactly as far removed in time from the 1986 release of Heavy Metal Parking Lot as its sleeveless truants and zebra-print daytrippers were from Elvis Presley's gyrations on The Milton Berle Show. In other words, the world's greatest 16-minute documentary about Judas Priest fandom currently stands at the precise midpoint—almost to the day—of the filmed history of rock 'n' roll.

HMPL is one of the VHS era's unassailable cult classics, although it's hard to know what that term means since the creation of YouTube and the evergreen availability of nearly everything. The thrill of discovering a copy in a friend's tape collection or at a rare DC-area screening is gone. That the film continues to reward viewers in its freely available .MP4 incarnation is a testament to its weird goodness, its good weirdness, and the unscripted enthusiasm of its stars: a Chaucerian succession of hilarious caterwauling youths. It's hard to imagine a less cynical group of people. The underage beer-guzzling is as quaint today as the lines of pristine Mustangs and Firebirds or the public displays of devotion to Judas Priest, a devotion that remained unshaken and sincere even after the definitive anti-hagiography that was 1984's This Is Spinal Tap.

Two novice filmmakers named John Heyn and Jeff Krulik shot HMPL in the hours before a Priest show at the since-demolished Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, not far from the Baltimore suburb where I grew up. My childhood was ordinary—not in the least metal—although at 12 or 13, I had a best friend who loved any form of self-serious rock music. One summer, after renting Detroit Rock City on videotape, Mike convinced his father to drive us all the way to Camden, New Jersey, to see KISS play with Ted Nugent. Probably the quality of experience we were hoping for was something akin to HMPL's metal-head hajj, since we actually brought Mike's family camcorder along with us. It was a major moment of teenage disillusionment to discover an audience of balding divorcés and middle managers in peasant blouses. Years later, after seeing HMPL, I realized that it didn't matter anyway. Our idea had been done a generation earlier.

Once you join the church of HMPL, you start to see its influence everywhere: Beavis and Butthead, found-footage festivals, this website. The film's concision, disinterest, and speed prefigure the form of the viral video. You could describe it to your niece or nephew as a long collection of Vines.

I spoke with Krulik as he was preparing a new exhibition, Heavy Metal Parking Lot: The 30-Year Journey of a Cult Film Sensation. The show opens this Friday at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland, which has recently accepted the Krulik Archive.

VICE: Before we start, I should tell you I grew up in Laurel, Maryland.
Jeff Krulick: No kidding! Cool.

Parts of my suburban Maryland milieu really remind me of films of yours like HMPL and Obsessed with Jews.
I like to say I've built a career—or let's call it a body of work—by staying put. Most of my subjects are local to Maryland and DC. But they have widely divergent interests. I have a big body of work, but all roads lead back to HMPL.

Could you talk a little about the film's genesis?
John Heyn and I were in our twenties and both living in Washington, DC. Unlike John, I didn't go to film school. I got an English degree at U. of Maryland. But I did a lot of college radio at Maryland and a fellow DJ turned me on to public access through local cable television. He was like, "You can make free-form TV!" That was really appealing to me.

When I was twenty-five, I became the public access director for this little studio called MetroVision Cable in Southern Prince George's County. That's where I was working when I met John. We were both aspiring filmmakers. We gravitated toward documentary because of its immediacy. You could capture something with just the resources you had. John was an assistant to John Waters; he worked on Polyester. I was a fan of John Waters. We had similar sensibilities.

Maybe a year after we met, John had the idea to do a video about metal fans. We weren't connected to that culture, but we grew up going to the Capital Centre. Everybody knew it. You had the Baltimore Civic Center, and you had the Capital Centre, where you could pack in these big arena shows, and metal was big at the time. We weren't metal heads, but we were curious. And I had access to this professional quality equipment from the public-access channel. Very few people had video cameras back then. It was certainly light years before you had video on your phone, this modern era when everything is documented to death. It was dumb luck that we caught Judas Priest, because they're still pretty iconic.

"We had no plan. No game plan, no preproduction. It was basically just 'don't drop the camera.'"

They weren't Cinderella.
Exactly. So on this beautiful Saturday night in May, John picked me up at my studio, a mile away, we drove out and paid to park, then got out with these clunky cameras. I wish to hell we had pictures of us, but we didn't turn the camera on ourselves. It wouldn't have even occurred to us to do that. I had this thing called a three-quarter-inch U-matic deck, a big three-quarter-inch camera, and a separate microphone. We would trade off holding the Portapak and the microphone. The tapes were twenty minutes each. We used up three tapes and a bit of a fourth, sixty-five minutes of footage in total.

Did you have strategies for getting people to open up to you?
No, we had no plan. No game plan, no preproduction. It was basically just "don't drop the camera." We were also worried people might take offense at our being there, but we couldn't have been more wrong. Everybody, to a person, was very friendly and into it.

It's clear that people enjoyed the novelty of being filmed.
Yes, that had a lot to do with it. People knew what cameras were, of course, but they didn't necessarily see them very often outside of special occasions. So people would mug and carry on. They wanted to know where we were from, what we were doing.

At one point, you say you're from MTV, as a joke—
—and Nathaniel goes, "Bullshit!" That's one of the popular phrases from the film. We weren't trying to fool anybody. What happened was, the channel where I worked was a public access channel called 6A.

So it was between channels six and seven?
Yeah, of course! So we're trying to tell people, we're with channel 6A, the public-access channel. And nobody understood that. I started saying, "We're with MTV" out of exasperation. We never set out to impersonate anybody.

We never went to the concert. We went back to my studio to watch the raw footage, and I came up with the name right then. The edited version premiered in October 1986 at a club called d.c. space.

Do you think that you could replicate the film now? Or are people too image-savvy to deliver that kind of unbridled enthusiasm just because a camera is present?
Oh, absolutely. You could never do it today. Unbridled enthusiasm encapsulates it. Everybody was in rare form. That fanaticism does still exist, but I think as far as getting taped and recorded, everyone's so used to that. In fact, you can't even get away from these things now. You go to concerts, and everyone's recording.

"We never went to the concert. We went back to my studio to watch the raw footage, and I came up with the name right then."

That's the other thing that struck me while re-watching the film. Nobody has cellphones. Everybody is hanging out, waiting, drinking. The absence of phones dates the scenes even more than the fashion or music.
You're right. It's funny, I never thought of that, but you're absolutely right.

You know, all the characters have been given nicknames by fans. Somebody made trading cards. One of the guys—the one named "Graham of Dope"—actually wrote a memoir, he got so popular. We did a " where are they now" feature in 2003, where we tracked down a lot of the people who appeared in the original film. I liked that everybody turned out OK, more or less.

At what point did you recognize that the film had picked up a cult following?
First of all, we never showed it on public access. That's a misconception. And we didn't screen it at festivals. You couldn't show video at film festivals. It wasn't done. So we were basically giving out tapes. We showed it in our living rooms and had parties and screened it. We showed it at record conventions and nightclubs, at the 9:30 Club. And we "retired" the film in 1990. Then we moved on with our lives.

The vanished culture of tape-trading is another aspect of the HMPL legend.
Absolutely. It's such an ancient, forgotten concept. You had to have lived through it to understand it. You had to get it from analog tapes, VHS to VHS. Unbeknownst to us, it got passed around and copied, especially on the West Coast, in the entertainment industry. There was this cult video house named Mondo Video a Go-Go [in Los Angeles] whose owner, a guy named "Colonel Rob" Schaffner, was a fan. He never reached out to us—this was before the internet—but he recommended it frequently, and in 1994, John got a call from Sofia Coppola. She'd rented it from Mondo Video and looked up John's number with directory assistance. That's when we figured out that there was something going on.

Was it then that you made the sequel, Neil Diamond Parking Lot?
Yeah, in 1996. We went back to the Capital Centre, which was now called the US Air Arena. We wanted to do something that was the polar opposite of HMPL. Still, we ended up getting great stuff. The fans were every bit as charismatic, excited, and passionate as Judas Priest fans. Ironically, Neil Diamond has become kind of a cool cultural figure now, but at the time, he was pretty schmaltzy. Both Judas Priest and Neil Diamond have come to possess this cachet that neither had at the time.

And several years later J. K. Rowling was doing a signing in my neighborhood, and we did Harry Potter Parking Lot, so I guess by then it was a franchise. We even turned it into a short-lived TV series called Parking Lot.

How about your more recent projects?
The gallery exhibit has been a big focus these days. The Mass Media and Culture Collections at the University of Maryland is taking my archives. I'm also working on putting out a screener DVD for Led Zeppelin Played Here, which is a feature-length documentary I made a few years ago about Led Zeppelin's first area concert at the Wheaton Youth Center . It's kind of a phantom show.

You seem to like to document these liminal spaces—sidewalks and lots where people are waiting for events—without documenting the event itself.
You're right, that's true. I guess it's a way to breathe some importance into something that doesn't feel important. So I'm happy whenever we can spin gold from straw. But like you said, the waiting—not the event—is what we were there to document.

Follow Ben Mauk on Twitter.

"Heavy Metal Parking Lot Exhibition, Film Screening, and Discussion" will take place on Friday, May 27 at 6 PM at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Artwork from Hello Games' forthcoming 'No Man's Sky,' via playstation.com

If Kotaku is to be believed, and we've no reason to not believe the report in question, the incredibly hyped space-faring epic No Man's Sky from Hello Games will not be released, as expected, at the end of June. The countless procedurally generated star systems of the game, enough to fill 585 billion years of play before you'd feel confident of having seen absolutely everything it can produce (good luck with that), are supposedly on hold until July, or even August. But as the work of a small, independent team, that's completely forgivable. And, mostly, gamers have been accepting of the longer wait.

Reactions on Kotaku's Facebook page, where I first spied the news through misty morning eyes, inevitably incorporate some cheesed-off consumers absolutely livid that their best-laid plans for a summertime of interstellar immersion have been dashed—supposedly. But there's plenty of good will too, and refreshing patience. "Let them take all the time they need to perfect the game," writes one poster, " better to delay and fix problems than release it with a ton of bugs." Another comments: "Take your time, devs. Make it a masterpiece."

A screenshot from 'Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithfulness'

Of course, until either Hello Games, or No Man's Sky's distributors Sony Interactive Entertainment (for PS4) and iam8bit (PC), confirm that the game is indeed moving backward in the release schedule, this is effectively only speculation. Kotaku's report is based on an anonymous but "reliable source," and a Gamestop employee's claim that NMS's marketing materials have had the June 21 date (its US release) covered by a "coming soon" label. But, if the game does shift a few months, I don't see that as a bad thing whatsoever. PlayStation 4 owners have been spoiled so far in 2016, and I bet that a whole bunch of those with NMS pre-orders placed have a fair few untouched greats in their backlog.

Before I refresh your memories as to what's been, let's take a paragraph to highlight what's yet to come out, which could fill this now potentially vacant space in your gaming future. Assuming you like your sci-fi, PS4 users can take a swim in the JRPG-styled Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithfulness (trailer), featuring a Final Fantasy–style real-time battle system. The tri-Ace developed adventure's already been warmly received in Japan—it's out in the US and UK at the end of June and beginning of July respectively. Another sci-fi-themed title out in June for PS4 is The Technomancerfrom French studio Spiders, a more action-based RPG set on Mars, 200 years after mankind has waged war over water resources. Sounds bleak, and honestly what I've seen of it so far is just that: Check out how grayly generic this gameplay trailer is. More striking of aesthetic and similarly future-set, albeit very much on Earth, is the free-running gymnastics of Mirror's Edge Catalyst, out on June 9. But again, my own first impression wasn't exactly amazing.

Of course, you could fill your time between today and No Man's Sky's release, whenever that may be, by playing more hours of Overwatch than are probably healthy. (I'm already finding that's easily done.) Over 9 million people took part in the May open beta for Blizzard's newly in the wild team-based shooter, adding up to 81 million hours of play logged. It's already quite the big deal, and having categorically destroyed the chances of its closest-in-the-calendar genre rival, Gearbox's Battleborn, making it as a genuinely competitive online shooter with MOBA genes, Overwatch seems set to continue as the premier game of its ilk across 2016. And most likely beyond, because Blizzard is an absolute juggernaut when it comes to this sort of thing, and you're safest by simply staying out of its lane. Make a different game, guys. This scene's taken.

But if online multiplayer shootybangs with scientist gorillas and robotic monks aren't your thing, now's a great time to catch up on what you've missed in 2016 so far—which you should, as there's been no shortage of bona-fide gems across the first five months of the year. Sticking strictly to PS4-available games, given that NMS isn't ever likely to ever be ported over to Xbox, we've seen The Witness, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Firewatch, and Ratchet & Clank all rate highly with reviewers and sell in impressive numbers. (Click each title to read more on the game in question.) Speaking non-exclusively, I expect that a great many gamers are yet to see the deepest time-sinks of 2015 through to their conclusions, be that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (game of the year on VICE), Fallout 4 ,or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

A screenshot from 'Ratchet & Clank'

Alternatively, look to your PlayStation Plus collection. I know most of you have one on your PS4 dashboard, all these games just sitting inert in there, yet to be downloaded, waiting for a little love. So, offer some their way. May's free-to-play (after the PS+ fee, obviously) games included Tropico 5, a construction-cum-government sim set across four distinct historical eras, from pre-WWI colonial times to the present day; and spaceship lovers should look to March's lineup of titles, as Galak-Z is quite the compelling blast-around, a roguelike-ish shoot 'em up set amid asteroids and industrial-looking manmade environments. Your ship can transform, too, from a standard vessel into a sword-wielding mech. (And sword-wielding mechs are cool.) And if shitting-it is your default position of play, April's Zombi—a GamePad-free version of the Wii U's intensely unsettling survival horror ZombiU, should fill your pants without a problem.

Basically, there's loads to be trying out. So don't mourn the delay, and start playing something awesome. Me? I'll be on that Rocket League. Still. Forever, and ever. Come find me in Beckwith Park. Bring your own balls.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

The author, not enjoying himself in a pub

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

Pubs: they're a staple of British life, almost to the point of cliche. Celebrating? Go to the pub! Commiserating? Go to the pub! Wiling away the hours on a Tuesday night because you have a mild alcohol dependency to sustain and absolutely nothing else to do with your life? To the pub!

Having reached an age where "outside McDonald's" is no longer a viable hangout spot – and not yet old enough to spend my free time feeding ducks and writing angry letters to people who couldn't care less – my social life largely consists of going to pubs. And that would be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a Muslim – a religion that not only prohibits drinking, but also even being in the same place as alcohol.

For the majority of Muslims – even those who smoke weed, go to clubs and have sex – alcohol still remains one of those taboos you can't quite shake off. Which makes going to pubs a weird, awkward and, in some cases, even slightly traumatising experience. 

So here's what I've learnt about what happens when you go to a pub and just happen to also be a Muslim.

PEOPLE ALWAYS COMPARE YOU TO THE MUSLIM FAMILY FROM EASTENDERS

The first time I went to a pub was when I was 17, which was also the same kind of time that the Masood family started appearing on Eastenders. 

Like all brown families on Eastenders (and no real Muslim families in east London), the Masoods drank and socialised in the Old Vic. Despite this having absolutely no grounding in reality, they were immediately the benchmark of every brown person's experience in a pub. 

And, for me, that brought with it another consequence: constantly being compared to Tamwar Masood, the awkward, bespectacled, cardigan-wearing Asian guy I went to the pub for precisely not to be compared to.

"You're just like that Asian bloke from Eastenders," I have been told on several occasions, purely because I am Asian and sitting on a pub stool. On other occasions, the Masood family have been used as a case study by my white mates as to why it's OK to drink. "Don't worry, you can drink – that Asian kid on Eastenders drinks all the time," says my friend, Dave, regularly.

IT FEELS REALLY WEIRD TO ASK A BARTENDER FOR A PINT OF WATER

Pubs are huge on alcohol. It's their special little thing, and they like to let people know about it by putting signs with big photos of pints on them outside, or suggesting via a blackboard behind the bar that you try their guest IPA, which always has some sort of terrible dad-joke name like Randy Badger or Hoppy Bastard. For non-alcohol drinkers, this presents a problem; in most pubs – bar the fancy ones with juice machines and J2O – your options are usually limited to: orange juice, water, flat Coke out of a tap or a some locally-made lemonade thing that tastes like watered down drain cleaner.

I tend to go for the blander – but certainly more practical – choice of water. 

Thing is, ordering a pint of water is more of a nightmare than you'd expect. First, you must wait in line for up to 20 minutes as other people buy actual drinks. Then, squeezed between impatient punters, grab the bartender's attention and mumble: "A pint of water please."

"And what else?"

"Oh, just the water please."

The bartender sighs, filling a pint glass with tepid water from the tap. "That's £15," he jokes, spitefully. You let out an awkward laugh, spill some of the water down your shirt and shuffle back to your table. And repeat, ad infinitum.

READ ON NOISEY: Watch A$AP Ferg and A$AP Mob's "Yammy Gang" Video Celebrating A$AP Yams

BUYING A ROUND IS MORE CHALLENGING THAN YOU'D THINK

You may be surprised to know that, as a lifelong Muslim, I know next to nothing about alcohol, which makes abiding by pub etiquette an extremely daunting task. "Who's buying the next round then?" asks Dave, looking directly at me.

"Umm – me, I guess," I mumble, as everyone fires their orders at me. These orders, however, are not just "a beer", but a specific type of lager, or a combination of liquids: a mixer and a spirit, but the spirit has to be the specific one they asked for because, apparently, after six rum and cokes, their palette is still alert enough to discern between Bacardi and Captain Morgan.

You might think, 'You've just got a shit memory, mate.' But imagine if these brand names and drinks weren't a common part of your everyday vocabulary. If, as they are for me, they might as well be words from the travel section of a Key Stage Three French textbook. I think I might just have to start making voice memos.

YOU'RE ALWAYS SCARED YOUR MUM WILL FIND OUT

Growing up in a Muslim household, the pub is generally the trope used to illustrate the dangers of decadence in sin. "See that fight outside the takeaway?" my dad will ask. "They probably got pissed first down the pub." How about that couple noshing each other's faces off next to a puddle of sick? Yup, they probably also got hammered down the pub. Or that guy having a shit in an alleyway? I highly suspect it had something to do with the pub.

In fact, according to your Muslim parents, going to the pub will not just distract you from your religion, but also bring shame on your family. It'll stop you from getting married. People will recoil from you aggressively when you go to the mosque. And worse, your dad will no longer be invited to play in the mosque's cricket league.

YOU'RE EVEN MORE SCARED YOUR COUSIN ABDUL WILL FIND OUT

The only worse scenario is that you cousin Abdul discovers you've been relaxing in this house of sin. Every Muslim has a cousin like Abdul; he went to religious school with you, grew a longer beard than you did and tends to bombard your Facebook timeline with quotes about sin and the hellfire. You don't speak much to Abdul, but somehow he knows about literally everything you do.

Remember that time you uploaded a picture of you and your female friends to Facebook? 

"Brother, you shouldn't be free mixing with women who are uncovered," said Abdul, instantly, popping up in your Facebook messages, before inundating you with various links to stories about how going to parties leads directly to hell.

Abdul's also close to your dad. Upon hearing that you went to a pub, he'll find your dad at the mosque and tell him he's concerned that you've gone astray, and that you're probably "smoking drugs" and spending money on prostitutes. "Just check his Facebook," Abdul will say. And his intervention will work: until you've moved out and put a bit of distance between yourself and you dad's weaponised slipper, you'll never step foot in a pub again.

@HKesvani

Cannawide marijuana dispensary is raided by Toronto Police officers on Thursday, May 26. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston

President Barack Obama embraces an a-bomb victim at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. (Photo by Atsushi Tomura/Getty Images)

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

US News

Obama Visits Hiroshima Memorial
Barack Obama has become the first serving US president to visit Hiroshima in Japan, laying a wreath at the peace memorial park and embracing an atomic bomb survivor. He did not apologize for the US nuclear attack in 1945, but called on nations to pursue a world without nuclear weapons and "ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again".—NBC News

Superbug Resistant to Antibiotics Found in US
Scientists have identified the first known case of a superbug that cannot be killed by antibiotics in the US. A 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania was found with an E. coli infection that is resistant to an "antibiotic of last resort" (a drug used after all other drug options have failed). According to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it could signal "the end of the road" for antibiotics.—The Washington Post

Trump Pledges to Cancel Paris Climate Agreement
Donald Trump has pledged to cancel the Paris climate agreement, support offshore drilling and allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built from Canada's oil sand to the US Gulf Coast. "I want it built, but I want a piece of the profits," Trump said of the pipeline. "That's how we're going to make our country rich again."—The New York Times

Louisiana Governor Signs 'Blue Lives Matter' Bill
Louisiana's Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards has signed legislation that makes the targeting of police officers, firefighters and EMS workers a hate crime. The legislation, dubbed the "blue lives matter" means Louisiana is the first state in the country to add anyone's occupation to hate crimes statue.—CNN

International News

UN Says Syrians in Danger of Starvation
The UN has called for greater humanitarian access in Syria and has warned that "plenty" of civilians are "in danger of starvation." More than 400,000 Syrians are trapped in areas besieged by the government or armed groups. UN humanitarian assistance has only been able to reach 160,000 so far throughout May.—Al Jazeera

South Korean Navy Fires Shots at North Korea Boats
South Korea's navy fired warning shots after a North Korean patrol boat and fishing boat crossed a disputed sea border called the Northern Limit Line. According to the South Korean military, the two vessels from the North retreated about eight minutes after the South Korean navy ship fired five artillery shots.—Newsweek

Mass Rape Social Media Video Shocks Brazil
Brazilian police are searching for more than 30 men suspecting of raping a teenage girl in Rio de Janeiro and posting images of the attack on social media. The attack reportedly took place at the victim's boyfriend's house in western Rio. Campaign groups have called for protests against the culture of rape in Brazil.—BBC News

South Africa Passes Land Expropriation Bill
South Africa's parliament has approved a bill allowing the the compulsory purchase of land by the government in the public interest. Although criticized by opposition parties and farming groups, the governing ANC party said it would tackle historical injustices and place more land in black ownership.—Reuters

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by Mexican security forces at a Navy hangar in Mexico City in January. (Photo by Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Everything Else

Rapper Troy Ave Arrested After Shooting at T.I. Show
Rapper Troy Ave has been charged with attempted murder, after shots were fired backstage at a T.I. concert Wednesday night and 33-year-old Ronald McPhatter was killed. NYPD released a video it says shows the rapper firing inside the venue.—ABC News

FDA Approves Implant to Control Heroin Addiction
The FDA has approved a new option for those struggling with heroin addiction: a matchstick-sized implant that curbs craving for six months at a time. The probuphine implant is a new delivery system for buprenorphine.—CBS News

El Chapo Wants a Say in Netflix Series
One of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's lawyers said the imprisoned drug lord will sue Netflix and Univision if they do not obtain his permission to air a drama series based on his life. El Chapo "is not dead and is not public property," said Andrés Granados.—VICE News

Toronto Police Raid Dozens of Pot Shops
Police raided dozens of pot dispensaries across Toronto on Thursday, the largest crack down of its kind in Canadian history. Cops searched shops believed to be involved in trafficking of marijuana, part of an investigation called Project Claudia.—VICE News

Done with reading today? Watch our new film'How One Actor's Ambitious Demo Reel Became a Cult Film Masterpiece'

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

As I virtually pass by each house on Google Maps Street View, I grow increasingly disheartened. Not that one, not that one, not that one. No, not that one either...

I've been in Orlando for almost two days now, and I'm worried that I'm not going to find this witness—and this witness is huge. She's the only person who may have seen the 1989 murder that I'm working to solve. I'm an investigator with The New England Innocence Project, and we believe that our client, Jimmy, is innocent, even though he was convicted 23 years ago.

I've spent hours driving back and forth across the Florida city, trying dozens of addresses. Every so often, I run back to my hotel room, get on the computer, and use my locations program to find more options: I try old neighbors, old roommates, old friends—anyone I can find.But no matter who I talk to, no one can help me.

"Yeah, so-and-so lived here about a year ago, but I don't know where she's at now," someone says. Another door closes in my face.

Jimmy was 16-years old when he was arrested for the murder of a young woman. He was convicted, primarily on the eyewitness testimony of a teenager. We're pursuing DNA testing in the case, but it would be helpful to know whether or not that one eyewitness is sticking to her story.

That's where I come in, working under the direction of the prisoner's attorney. In post-conviction innocence cases, the options are narrowed, limited by what the court will even consider. That means my investigations are tailored to specific legal strategies.

I start by reviewing the original "discovery"—a.k.a. the evidence. Then, once I've put together a case, I read the trial transcripts. Was I right? What'd I miss? What did they miss? What evidence can we test? Where is this evidence now, 20-plus years later?

That's why finding this witness is so important. I can't control evidence that's gone stale; I don't have control over the amount of time it takes to run DNA testing; and I don't have control over hearings and motions. But I can find people.

In 2016, the chances someone is living completely off the grid are pretty slim. I can find a person based on a cookie-recipe comments thread, records in a county assessor's office, or from talking to your old acquaintances. It's amazing what's tied to an individuals' Social Security number, including email addresses, and the information you put down on a lease agreement.

Finally, I catch a clue, and find someone who knows my witness. In fact, he just talked to her a few weeks ago—and she's moved into a new house. "She lives on Orange Street, or was it drive...?" I quickly run back to my car and type "Orange Street" into the GPS, positive this is the big break I've been looking for. I'll just knock on doors until I find her...

Bu there are at least seven variations of Orange Street there are in Orlando? I head back to my hotel room and spend the next two hours scouring my witness's Facebook page, looking for anything that could point me in the right direction. I finally settle for a picture of a dog in front of a tree. I don't even know if it's her dog, or if the picture was taken in her yard, but it's the best I've got.

In the background, across the street from the dog and the tree, I can see a bright pink house. How many pink houses can there be in Orlando on a street named Orange. I use Google Maps' Street View to virtually drive down every street named Orange. I find five pink houses on five different Orange streets.

With each hurdle I encounter, I can see Jimmy's face again. He's almost 44 now, but still seems like the 17-year-old who was sent to prison more than two decades ago. His development almost completely halted when they locked that cell door behind him. After 26 years in prison, inmates get abandoned—a lot. People stop writing, friends stop visiting, and prison slowly becomes your home.

At each pink house I find on the computer, I turn the map to look across the street, searching for the tree. Nothing. I'm down to my last pink house. Suddenly, there it is.

Immediately, I grab my keys and hop in the car. Walking down the street upon arriving, I look at the pink house and then at the tree. It's been trimmed, but still looks right. I jot down the license plate of a van in the driveway, to look up later, and continue up the walkway to the door. I hear a TV from inside. I ring the bell, and a dog starts barking.

A guy in his thirties with straggly hair answers the door, just a little, and squeezes out so the dog can't come outside with him. I tell him who I'm looking for. There's a pause, and he looks me over—before deciding he can tell me that he's the witness's cousin and she lives next door. More importantly, she's home right now.

I thank him and quickly run next door to ring the bell before he can warn her I'm on my way. The door opens, revealing a little girl who's about nine years old. I ask if her mom is home, and without an answer, the girl turns around and walks off, letting the door swing open widely behind her. Then I see a woman—her—sitting on the couch.

The woman comes outside. There's always a frozen look when you explain to a witness that you want to talk to them about something that happened so long ago. I can almost see her processing the information, trying to take herself back 27 years. We talk for a long time, and even though what she tells me does not amount to a recantation of her testimony, it's valuable.

For the first year after the murder, the witness says, she never mentioned Jimmy in any way to the homicide detectives. But the lead detective kept coming back to her, even when she was locked up in a juvenile detention center. Each time, she added more and more to her story.

Finally, the detective came back and wouldn't accept no for an answer. That's when she gave in and told him about Jimmy.

This new statement alone will not be enough to overturn Jimmy's conviction, but I never expected her to be my golden ticket. There are no golden tickets in America's criminal justice system. Post-conviction proceedings are weighted heavily against the defendant, with the courts strongly favoring the finality of the original judgment. These things take time, often years.

But I found her, and we're closer than we were before.

Lorea Gillespie is an investigator for the New England Innocence Project. Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

(All photos via Gumtree)

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

What is it? A cupboard under some stairs, literally described on a Gumtree advert – as though this is a positive thing, as though Harry actual Potter wasn't deeply unhappy and unloved when he lived in a cupboard, and that wizardry was the only thing that saved him from a life of abuse-level misery – as a "Harry Potter room";
Where is it? Seven Sisters, the bit that got really on fire when the riots happened;
What is there to do locally? Everyone I've ever met who lives in Seven Sisters gets this really faraway grey look in their eyes whenever I ask what it's like round there, they sort of flinch as if they are about to get hit, and so the only answer I can derive from this question is "become a victim of knife crime";
Alright, how much are they asking? £350 per calendar month, plus the odd £10 here and there for house stuff, e.g. a baseball bat to hide under every single housemate's bed just in case, some padlocks, a panic button.

There was no end game when we started the popular franchise "London Rental Opportunity of the Week". It was just a way to document the various weird rooms in London – they always tended to come in threes, the rooms, in fits and spurts, a bunkbed here, a camping bed in a kitchen there, a single room in a 15-person house that somehow costs close to a grand, then silence, then the dark circle began anew – just a little insight into this crazy city 8.5 million people call home. But then the dread started to build. An inevitable climax, building like a storm. We came close – there was an advert for something similar that turned out to be some crap viral for a new rental website – but now it seems that the inevitable has actually happened. People, it's on. The Harry Potter Room:

Sweet dream m8

Deck £200 at a that hippy shop your mum gets her incense from and you can make it feel approximately like home

'Be prepared for new friendships' truly is a warning, here, isn't it

When someone offers you a chance to sleep under their stairs for £350 a month, you have to ask some basic questions e.g. is this advert, in any way, legit? In my professional opinion: it is legit, yes. Evidence towards legitimacy:

i. The photos of the room aren't just of a single mattress wrapped tightly in a sheet and a lamp – like, this room has been lived in. Someone has spent about 10 months living in this space and trying to make it as nice as it is possible to make what is essentially a murder scene. Paper stars. Fairy lights. Pink paper pompoms. What appears to be a big bra made for walls. Little jar of cotton balls. A unicorn headband, which does – I'm afraid – indicate that the current occupant is insufferable. These are the details of a room that can't be faked, they have to be real: nobody pretending they are renting out a cupboard under their stairs goes as far as putting a can of Elnett in shot;

ii. The effort taken to describe the rest of the flat as fun – "the gang", "we often (almost every weekend) go out together", "you can always find someone to talk about everything and not lock yourself in the room" – is just over and above the call of a flatmate search advert. You really need a cool gang to fall back on if you're going to be living in a fucking cupboard;

iii. The words "It's generally used for a few months by people who want to save up for a bigger room or to go off travelling" which truly is a very nonplussed and straightforward way of describing why someone would want to pay money to live in a cupboard;

iv. The fact that both of the photos of the Harry Potter room are taken in portrait mode and then uploaded entirely sideways indicates a level of inept idiocy that it is impossible to synthesise;

And so it can only be gathered that we have a genuine Harry Potter cupboard for rent in Seven Sisters. With eight other people. You live in a cupboard and you have eight housemates, sharing one shower. Eight housemates who don't like super-regular but mostly regular parties. Eight people who live in a warehouse – already cheap – and share the rent among eight of them – even cheaper – and yet still need the financial relief of your monthly £350, because someone decided to rent a fucking cupboard out, and if it wasn't a financially-led decision then what the fuck was it. Lots of gatherings, indoor and outdoor. I know I am projecting but: at least one of these housemates doesn't wear shoes, ever. At least one of these housemates has visions of running a "pop up food stall" and uses the entire kitchen space at once and doesn't wash up afterwards. At least one of these housemates listens to MRA podcasts first thing in the morning. I know because I have lived with all these people. Imagine the mess this nine-person house-wide WhatsApp group is like. So many, "guys, can you be quiet if you're waking up between 5.30am and 9am? It's when I do my sun salute yoga routine and all the clanking is really messing with my vibe" messages. "Guys, I know we all like to gather both indoors and outdoors, but someone did blow off my mango wood chopping board and that's super uncool". Recall that you will be living in a space under some stairs that eight other people will clatter up and down every night and every day. Consider the messages you, yourself, will be sending before long. What's the worst thing? Your housemates? The space? Or the fact that I looked at this advert and literally thought, 'You know what? I could probably live like that, if I had to'?

Sometimes I like to depress myself by playing this game where I ask all my friends back home what they pay in rent or, in some cases, mortgages. It makes me feel alive in the most horrible way possible. Example: one of my friends back home lives in a five-bedroom new build with three others – they have two (two.) spare rooms, a kitchen about the size of my current flat, and a garage – and they pay £250 each. For a mere £100 more, they could be living in a cupboard in Seven Sisters. Then go travelling, or whatever! The world is your oyster when you live in a cupboard in Seven Sisters!

Ah, who am I kidding. London isn't really a viable city now, is it. And this means, unfortunately for your home town, there are about five million young people and a shitload of Pret a Manger's that are going to flood out of London and into the next city du jour over the next couple of years. I don't know where: could be Birmingham, could be Leeds. Could be Sunderland, for all I know. But what I do know is we will bring is our fancy London ways – our food markets, our immersive theatre, flashmobs and contactless public transport system, cafes that only sell cereal – and then we will spread our Franco Mancas and shops that only sell artisan greetings cards, and then the house prices start to creep up, and we petition the opening of a new Sainsbury's even though a new Sainsbury's would be really useful, and slowly, perniciously, we will wreck your home town, and the town after that, and the town after that. Until we are a country of people proud to call a cupboard our home. Until we are a country full of Harry Potters.

(h/t Simon Cereda)

@joelgolby

More from this alarmingly frequent series:

A Kitchen-Toilet in Hendon Central!

A Toilet-Shower in Stoke Newington!

A Completely Tiled, Wipe-Down Hellscape in Walthamstow!

Earlier this week, the Washington Post published some recent interviews with Donald Trump, in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee brought up Vince Foster, a White House lawyer whose 1993 death spawned one of the first truly crazy conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Calling the circumstances surrounding Foster's death "very fishy," Trump told Post reporters that the Clinton aide "knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide." Then, despite having brought up the 20-year-old scandal himself, Trump demurred.

"I don't know enough to really discuss it," he said. "I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don't do that because I don't think it's fair."

For those of you who don't remember the early days of the Clinton White House, or who have, understandably, lost track of the details of this 20-year-old conservative fever dream, Foster was a childhood friend of Bill Clinton from Arkansas, who accompanied the Clintons to the White House as deputy counsel when Bill was elected president.

Four months into the first Clinton term, Foster found himself at the center of a partisan blowout over the mass firing of staffers in the White House Travel Office, one of the first of approximately 1 billion Clinton-era scandals.The Wall Street Journal wrote three op-eds about the firings, calling out Foster specifically, and the lawyer—who admittedly didn't have the stomach for partisan warfare—took the criticism to heart.

He reportedly became checked out at work, at one point starting to write a letter of resignation and then tearing it up. On July 19, the day before Foster died, the president called to check in and invite his friend to see a movie, but thought he sounded fine at the time. The following day, Foster left work early and was found dead at 6 PM that evening, his body resting on a Civil War cannon near the Potomac River. He had a bullet hole in his head and a revolver in his hand.

Over the next few years, at least three separate investigations—including one by Kenneth Starr, the attorney who later probed Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky—concluded that Foster's death had been a suicide. But in the conservative imagination, Foster's tragic suicide quickly morphed into a tabloid murder scandal and political cover-up, fueling an enduring conspiracy theory around the secret life of America's most powerful political couple.

But even as far as Clinton scandals go, the basic premise of the Vince Foster Conspiracy—that the Clintons were somehow involved in Foster's death—is pretty incoherent, largely because no one has ever been able to explain why someone supposedly wanted the White House lawyer murdered.

From there, it's easy to get lost down the Vince Foster rabbit hole, if you really want to. The National Enquirer ran a cover story last year claiming that Hillary Clinton was "facing jail" over her alleged involvement in Foster's death. The Enquirer also takes it as gospel that Clinton had an affair with Foster. Articles I'm not going to link to here claim that Foster had a second wound in his neck. Another common claim is that his wife, Lisa, only pretended to recognize the gun found at the scene—which was an antique family heirloom.

Naturally, Congress got in on the action as well. In 1994, then-Indiana Congressman Dan Burton claimed in a floor speech that he had staged a reenactment of Foster's death in his backyard by shooting a watermelon, and concluded that it had to be a murder. Burton, it should be noted, is an anti-vaxxer who now lobbies for an organization founded by the Church of Scientology.

Foster's name also came up in connection to a handful of other White House scandals and conspiracies, most notably the early-90s clusterfuck known as Whitewater. More than 100 pages of the Senate Whitewater Committee's official report on its investigation into the real-estate scheme focuses on Foster, including an extensive examination into the circumstances around his death.

In the years since the Foster case, relatively mainstream right wing figures have brought up Vince Foster from time to time. In 2005 for instance, Rush Limbaugh implied that the Clintons use their friend's death to intimidate any defectors who threaten to reveal the couple's dark secrets. In that context, the fact that Trump—a consummate troll with a documented affinity for hoaxes and conspiracies—has resurrected the 20-year-old ghost of Vince Foster is not at all surprising.

But while Trump may have briefly hijacked the news cycle with an unflattering reminder of the early Clinton years, the reality remains unchanged. The fact is, Foster did commit suicide, and his death—though tragic and avoidable—had basically nothing to do with the Clintons.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

After several failed attempts to break into the film industry, aspiring actor and screenwriter Laz Rojas decided he would try to capture Hollywood's attention with an ambitious demo reel. He showcased his talents in a four-hour film in which he played 102 different characters—men, women, children, and aliens—creating a universe populated entirely by himself. He submitted the tape to every producer, studio, and manager he could find, but never received a response.

Check out a selection of scenes from Rojas's famous tape, which he single-handedly wrote, shot, directed, edited, and acted in while making it between 1992 and 1994. Be sure to check out our documentary about Rojas as part VICE's OUTSIDER series—uncovering the singular minds behind the world's strangest movies.