These reviews appeared in the June issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Women of Abstract Expressionism
Denver Art Museum

In 1945, two years before Jackson Pollock made his first drip paintings, Grace Hartigan, 23, moved to New York City with Ike Muse, her art professor. Muse was there to advance his career in art. Hartigan was tagging along. One night, they threw a party. Muse had hung his paintings throughout the house. A solitary painting by Hartigan hung on the living-room wall. The guests pointed to it and congratulated Muse on his best painting yet. He was furious. He told Hartigan to stop painting. She didn't and eventually moved out.

Hartigan is now considered one of the most important abstract expressionists for her wild use of color and pop-culture references. (She once joked that Muse taught her more about sex than he did about art.) Several of her most famous paintings—some of which were first collected by the Museum of Modern Art—are part of a new show of more than 50 works called Women of Abstract Expressionism, which opened this month at the Denver Art Museum. Together for the first time are Lee Krasner's voluptuous and explosive The Seasons (1957), Helen Frankenthaler's washed-out and blocky Jacob's Ladder (1957), Jay DeFeo's dense Incision (1958–61), and Elaine de Kooning's violent Bullfight (1959). The show is less comprehensive than its title suggests, focusing only on 12 women from the two coasts. (This is due mainly to space. The paintings—like The Seasons, almost 17 feet long—are enormous). From New York come Krasner, Hartigan, Mary Abbott, and others who worked under the movement's elders, Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But there are also artists from the San Francisco Bay Area art scene, which was more inclusive but less conducive to fame.

In the middle of last century, men—exemplified by Picasso, Matisse, Dalí—got to be great artists. Mistresses were muses. When Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline and other downtown artists started the Club, the famous village hangout, one of the original rules was no women allowed. But there were plenty of them. And they broke the rules. In the words of biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in the excellent De Kooning: An American Master:

The strongest female figures of the period, refusing to be pitied, became remarkably tough survivors. They often did so not by rejecting the macho of the period, but by embracing it, showing the world that they could out-boy the boys... Joan Mitchell had a mouth that could shame a marine and could be especially cutting about other women. She called Helen Frankenthaler, who was known for staining her unprimed canvas with misty washes of paint, "that tampon painter."

The abstract expressionist movement, which attempted to free itself from figurative language, was largely dismissive of the work of these women, many of whom were accused of being too much in the shadow of more representational European traditions. A critic for ARTnews, writing in 1949 about both the work of Pollock and Krasner, said Krasner's paintings could be seen as an attempt to "tidy up" Pollock's more untamed gestures. Yet reading the show's catalog of the same name, published by Yale University Press, it's clear these artists approached painting with radical intuition. They, too, mined their subconscious for distinct styles, creating, as the curator, Gwen Chanzit, writes in her introduction, "painterly expressions brought on through direct or remembered experience": Frankenthaler with her dreamy color washes, DeFeo with her obsessive layering of paint, Hartigan with her vivid sense of scale, and experiments with the traditions of old masters.

The renewed attention given to these painters, thanks in a large part to recent academic scholarship, may help cast abstract expressionism in a new light. These women pushed the boundaries of the movement in ways Willem de Kooning, who continued to play with figuration, and Pollock, who struggled with what to do after his drip paintings until his tragic death in 1956, didn't. For instance, while the work of artists like Pollock tended to be entirely inward—"I am nature," he famously declared—Hartigan turned toward the world. One early work of hers showed a window display of bridal mannequins arranged similarly to Goya's famous portrait of Charles IV and his family. Her Oranges collaboration with Frank O'Hara, in which she made paintings in response to 12 of his poems, incorporating text from each, reflects how seamlessly painting mixed with poetry within the New York School.

Perhaps they were ignored because many postwar American artists struggled to define themselves against the Europeans, who commanded more legitimacy and respect from the MoMA, gallery owners, and influential collectors like Peggy Guggenheim. But as Pollock and Willem de Kooning's careers began to take off in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the competition intensified. An aggressive artistic character was admired. These gestures on the canvas were crowned for their maleness and, in turn, used to eliminate competition in a small market.

Painted by men or women, the work is still breathtaking in its ambition. Consider Hedda Sterne, who is included in the catalog's thoughtful index. She did not quite define herself as an abstract expressionist, and yet she was the only woman in the movement's famous 1951 Life photo shoot by Nina Leen. In it, she stands on a chair, above the men—she claims she arrived to the shoot late, and the photographer just told her where to go. She stands out, as she said later, "like a feather on top."

Her painting New York, NY, 1955, which she made with enamel and a spray gun, came out of storage last spring for the opening of the new Whitney Museum. It blended right in alongside a Pollock, a de Kooning, and a Rothko. It was about time. —THESSALY LA FORCE

The Girlfriend Experience
Starz

To watch The Girlfriend Experience is to witness a young woman slowly destroying her life—or is it?

The STARZ drama, executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh and very loosely adapted from his film of the same name, follows Christine Reade (Riley Keough), a 20-something second-year law student who lands an internship at Kirkland & Allen, a Chicago law firm. As the show progresses, she's drawn into the world of high-priced prostitution by a friend and fellow law student, Avery. Christine—who bangs under the nom de guerre Chelsea—has sex and intimate conversation (the girlfriend experience) with rich businessmen in sleek, antiseptic hotel rooms, making thousands of dollars a pop. It hardly seems like a spoiler to say these two lives intersect with disastrous consequences. But while the fallout clearly ruins the lives of many around Christine, its effect on her is more ambiguous—and it's also one of the most interesting aspects of the show.

There's a deep continuity between the soul-crushingly muted vibe of Christine's office and law school and the fancy hotel rooms where Chelsea takes over, and throughout it all, she's unsettlingly opaque, displaying little or no emotion. In a telling moment early on, before she has started sex work, Christine is at a job fair with Avery, memorizing technical terms from intellectual-property cases on index cards. Avery asks her what the phrases mean. "Doesn't matter," Christine replies. "They just want to hear their own words repeated back to them." Of course, when she uses this technique at an interview with Kirkland & Allen, they see right through it—and hire her anyway. She's already a hooker; she's just not a very good one. Toiling at a major law firm is about spinning bullshit and making money, just like selling sex to millionaires, but at least the latter is sometimes interesting and pleasurable. It's hard to resist: As her life at the law firm blows up, Christine fucks corporate America, literally. She doesn't seem to be leaving much behind at Kirkland— she's just trading up from intern to small-business owner.—SOFIA GROOPMAN

Ratfucked
David Daley
Liveright

How could Democrats win 1.4 million more votes than Republicans in 2012 and still lose the House by 33 seats? Welcome to modern politics in America. In his first book, Ratfucked (a term for political sabotage), David Daley, the editor in chief of Salon, shows how a few Republican operatives and dark-money donors were able to ensure legislative victories that could last through the decade, regardless of the popular vote. It began in 2010, when Republicans flooded local races with cash and took control of a handful of state legislatures, giving them the ability to draw local and congressional district lines that will last until 2022. Using software that compares everything from voters' political preferences to recent online purchases, they gerrymandered districts across the country, allowing them to guarantee Republican wins. But there's more at stake here than just party control, Daley argues. Gerrymandering creates districts so politically uniform that candidates only face a real threat in primaries, which are thought to attract more ideological voters than general elections. Daley believes this forces candidates from either party to become increasingly extreme in order to keep their seats, furthering political polarization. With the new battle to draw political lines approaching, Daley leaves readers wondering what the GOP is up to now. —SARAH MIMMS

Castro's Cuba
Lee Lockwood
Taschen

In 1965, six years after he covered the Cuban revolution, the photojournalist Lee Lockwood returned to document the country's new socialist system. He traveled with the young Fidel Castro around the country in jeeps, boats, and Soviet helicopters, photographing the charismatic leader giving speeches in tropical downpours, playing dominoes, and smoking cigars. Castro's Cuba—first published in 1967, and now reissued with more than 200 photographs from Lockwood's archives—is a diary of these fourteen weeks, accompanied by a transcript of a wide-ranging weeklong conversation he had with the then 39-year-old ruler. Some of Lockwood's photos are surprisingly intimate: a shirtless Fidel, in army pants and Chucks, flexing his muscles and doing pull-ups; in another shot, he lounges in a track suit, lazily pointing an AK-47 at something (or someone). Though he edited the interview before it was published, Castro welcomed Lockwood's pointed challenge to his utopian aims. He countered by accusing the US of hypocrisy over racial discrimination, money-clogged politics, and the suppression of Communist media. "An enemy of Socialism cannot write in our newspapers," he said to Lockwood. "We don't deny it, and we don't go around proclaiming a hypothetical freedom of the press where it actually doesn't exist, the way you people do." —NATALIE SHUTLER

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
Naughty Dog

In this final installment of the Uncharted series, Nathan Drake, the adventure seeker, treasure hunter, and amiable cypher, finds himself stuck, for once, in the mundanity of everyday life. He's married and working for a retrieval crew in New Orleans, when his seedy brother, Sam, shows up. Sam, sunken cheeked and sallow, is fresh from 15 years in a Panamanian jail, where Nathan inadvertently left him for dead after a treasure-hunting caper gone wrong. He's in deep with a Mexican drug lord and needs to find a payoff. Before long, the two are in search of a lost pirate treasure. The game is overwhelmingly beautiful, and the environments—17th-century abbeys, seaside Italian villas, lush tropical jungles—are rendered in almost stupefying detail. Yet for all its technological marvels, it feels old-fashioned. At heart, it's essentially an interactive summer blockbuster, part National Treasure, part Indiana Jones. The attempts to give characters more nuance and maturity are admirable, but there's an absurdity to watching Nathan bicker with his brother and wife about the give-and-take of adult relationships while being pursued by mercenaries through an abandoned pirate utopia on an island chain off the coast of Madagascar. —ROSCOE JONES

The Hatred of Poetry
Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

"So many people have told me... they don't get poetry in general or my poetry in particular and/or believe poetry is dead," writes Ben Lerner in this slender but capacious new book. His response?

"I, too, dislike it," he says, quoting the poet Marianne Moore. For Lerner, "disliking it" is reasonable because "like so many poets, I live in the space between what I am moved to do and what I can do." Sitting down to write means aspiring to achieve one's vision but knowing failure is the only option; sitting down to read a poem means encountering these yearnings and shortcomings. Ranging from Walt Whitman to Claudia Rankine, Lerner (himself a well-known poet and novelist) shows that poetry cannot do everything we want it to do—for example, "express irreducible individuality" or "defeat time"—but is "no less essential for being impossible." Poetry awakens the "desire for a measure of value that isn't 'calculative'"—and is all the more essential for reminding both writer and reader of the need for alternatives to dollars and utils, no matter how unattainable any alternatives may seem. —JULIAN GEWIRTZ

These reviews appeared in the June issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

A mourner in New York lays down 50 roses to honor each victim of the Orlando night club massacre. (Photo by Monika Graff/Getty Images)

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

US News

Orlando Shooter Was on FBI Radar, Praised ISIS
Omar Mateen, the man who shot 50 people in an Orlando nightclub on Sunday morning, called 911 to proclaim his allegiance to ISIS before the attack. However, there is no indication he was in touch with terrorists overseas. Mateen was able to legally buy two guns within the last week, despite being interviewed twice by the FBI for terrorist connections. The 29-year-old killed at least 50 and wounded 53 others in the deadliest shooting in American history. He opened fire inside the Pulse gay nightclub and held several people hostage before he was killed by officers who stormed the building. —NBC News

Man with Weapons was Headed to LA Gay Pride Parade
Los Angeles police say they stopped a man who was headed for the LA Pride festival in West Hollywood on Sunday with assault rifles, ammunition, and explosive-making materials in his car. James Howell was initially reported to have said he wanted to "harm gay pride event," but the police later said this was "incorrect." —Los Angeles Times

CIA Chief Says Saudis Not Linked to 9/11
The publication of classified parts of a report into the 9/11 attacks will clear Saudi Arabia of any responsibility, CIA Chief John Brennan has said. Keeping 28 pages of the congressional report secret has led to speculation that the attack received official Saudi support, but Brennan said, "People shouldn't take them as evidence of Saudi complicity." —CNN

Protest at Stanford Graduation Over Sexual Assault
Students at a Stanford graduation ceremony carried signs denouncing rape culture at the university. A women's group arranged for a plane to fly overhead with the message: "Protect survivors. Not Rapists. #PerskyMustGo." It refers to Judge Aaron Persky, who has been condemned for giving Stanford student Brock Turner a six-month sentence for rape. —CBS News

International News

Air Strikes Kill 27 in Rebel-Held Syria
Air strikes have killed at least 27 people in rebel-held areas of Syria's northwestern Idlib Province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Several monitoring groups accused Russia of conducting these air strikes, but Russian authorities have denied involvement.—Al Jazeera

South Korea Stops North Korean Cyber Attack
South Korea has thwarted a cyber attack that threatened more than 140,000 computers at large companies and government agencies. South Korean authorities have blamed North Korea. The Pyongyang internet address is identical to the one used in a 2013 attack against South Korean banks and broadcasters. —Reuters

Bomb Blast Rocks Bank HQ in Beirut
A bomb exploded outside the headquarters of Lebanese Blom Bank in Beirut late on Sunday, causing two injuries but no casualties. No group has claimed responsibility. Blom Bank is one of the banks that has recently closed accounts belonging to people suspected of links to militant group Hezbollah. —Deutsche Welle

Al Qaeda Leader Pledges Allegiance to New Taliban Chief
Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has pledged allegiance to the new head of the Afghan Taliban, Haibatullah Akhundzada, appointed last month after his predecessor was killed in a US drone strike. Al-Zawahiriurged support for the Taliban in a 14-minute audio message. —VICE News

Comedian Louis CK. Photo by David Shankbone via Flickr.

Everything Else

Hamilton Triumphs and Leads Tributes at the Tonys
Hip-hop musical Hamilton won 11 honors at this year's Tony Awards, including best musical and leading actor for Leslie Odom Jr. Actor Lin-Manuel Miranda paid tribute to the victims of the nightclub shootings in Orlando with a poem: "Love cannot be killed or swept aside." —Vanity Fair

Louis CK Says Hillary Most Qualified Candidate
The comedian said Hillary Clinton was the most qualified person to deal with the "volatile, dangerous mechanism" of the US government. He compared her to a pilot who knows "exactly how this plane works.'" —The Huffington Post

England and Russia Could Be Kicked Out of Euros
Soccer federation UEFA has threatened to throw out England and Russia from the Euro 2016 tournament in France if fan violence continues. The French government said fans fighting in the streets were distracting police from the threat of terrorism. —The Guardian

NASA to Collaborate with the UAE
NASA has announced a "significant" agreement with the United Arab Emirates space agency, one that Administrator Charles Bolden said will help advance NASA's journey to Mars. The UAE wants to send an unmanned probe to Mars by 2020. —Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'How One Man Is Dealing with Life After Leaving His Family's Polygamist Cult'

One of many candlelit sex scenes from 'Game of Thrones' (Image: HBO)

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

Once upon a time, having sex to a backdrop of dragons and swords and humanoid ice creatures was something that happened within the pages of a paperback you'd never admit to reading. But ever since HBO's Game of Thrones entered our lives in 2011, millions of people around the world have been regularly exposed to just that: men and women in medieval armour and natty beige rags fucking by candlelight.

Considering the unprecedented mainstream appetite for what is most definitely a fantasy show, the idea that Game of Thrones "has made nerds of us all" is one that stands up. But what about its effect on our own fantasies? In the same way that Fifty Shades of Grey brought BDSM to the masses, andTwilight inspired reams of fan-fic about sexually awakened wolves, has GoT given us permission to get off to "tits and dragons"?

A rudimentary Google search for "Game of Thrones sex" would point to the answer: yes, absolutely. You need only count the number of reputable media outlets offering montages of every sex scene from every single season. Also telling is what's going on over at PornHub: recent stats revealed that the site saw a steady rise in GoT-related searches in the days before the season six premiere, peaking at a 370 percent increase the day the first episode aired. During that hour-long episode, however, there was a 4 percent dip in traffic – which might seem like a drop in the ocean, but considering PornHub has 60 million daily users, that's more than just a handful of off-duty onanists.

Now, HBO is taking legal action against PornHub for breach of copyright, after it transpired that clips from the show had been uploaded to the site.

A scene from the 'Game of Thrones' porn parody 'This Ain't Game of Thrones XXX' (Image: Hustler)

But fear not: there is much more GoT-related porn to be found elsewhere; given the success and content of GoT, porn parodies abound. However, none are as sophisticated and dedicated to detail as Brazzers' Storm of Kings XXX Parody. True, some of the acting is as wooden as the props, and it's filmed in Hereford, but with a good eight to ten minutes given over to storyline in each of the four episodes, there's no doubt Brazzers is taking the fantasy world seriously.

"I think we were all a little hesitant about making a Game of Thrones parody at first. There had been some versions before, and I think we all decided if we were going to make one it had to have an epic feel to it," explains writer and director Dick Bush (yes, yes) over email.

What, then, does Bush feel is so compelling about the sex in Game of Thrones?

"The sexuality in GoT is relatively new to the TV world, and I think it's definitely brought it into the mainstream – but that's only because of how good the writing, acting and production is," he says. "Without that, it would probably remain being seen as 'nerdy'. In a similar way, if we can make a porn series that stands out above the rest, then maybe we can bring porn into a mainstream, too. I think we're in the middle of a huge revolution in that area."

A scene from 'Storm of Kings XXX Parody' (Image: Brazzers)

Question is: is our appetite for Westeros-inspired shagging strong enough to make us shut down our laptops, pull our hands out of our pants and try out some of these role-plays for real?

There's no doubt the UK's cosplay scene is in ruder health than ever before, with more and more Comic Cons popping up all over the country. Gary Burns, the European PR for MCM Expo Group, estimates that around 75 to 80 percent of visitors who attend their MCM Comic Con events are in costume. However, that's not to say cosplayers are finding a quiet corner of the expo centre and ripping each other's Etsy-bought costumes off. At least, not all of them – it's a family event after all.

"There probably are some inappropriate costumes," says Gary. "I suppose it's similar to Glastonbury in that sense – parents have to be a bit sensible. The bigger our show gets, the more like a festival it gets. There's certainly weird and wonderful behaviour, but, on the whole, they play very nicely together."

In Nevada, meanwhile, Denis Hof – the owner of legal brothel The Bunny Ranch – has come up with what can only be described as an absolute no-brainer.

"Every Sunday, I invite the girls to my house for a Game of Thrones watching party, and the storylines often end up carrying over into our bedroom activities," he said in a press release. "We enjoy having our own afterparty, and I want to share that experience with the clients of my brothels who also happen to be fans of the show."

So there you go: Littlefinger's bordello will soon exist IRL, complete with role-play, a BDSM dungeon and "Walks of Shame".

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: AI Is Learning to Meme

But despite the proliferation of Game of Thrones-themed sex toys and paraphernalia available – dragon dildos, his 'n' hers chainmail loin cloths, an Iron Throne made of silicon dicks – it appears that any fantasy fun in the UK is still taking place behind closed doors.

"I go to a lot of events, and I haven't seen any outfits looking any more particularly medieval than before," says Alex, organiser of London fetish night Camden Crunch. "There's been a lot of new blood in the last ten years on the fetish scene, and I think things like the film Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey have had far more influence than something like GoT or any other TV shows."

Historically, popular culture has long helped lubricate people's imaginations when it comes to exploring their sexuality. "It's always been the way – look at Marlon Brando and his original use of butter; that had a huge impact on audiences in the 1970s," says Daniel Sevitt, Chief Communications Officer for Whiplr, an app that connects people with the same fetishes and kinks. "I think, throughout modern culture, we've seen things that have started on film and sparked people's curiosity. From a role-pay perspective, there's a lot in GoT to love and like and bring into the world. But I'm not sure it's the way into kink. It's not going to get you very far in the club."

So people might not (yet) be heading to Torture Garden trussed up in medieval garb, but what the show has encouraged is a conversation around sex that – in the UK and elsewhere – we're consistently rubbish at having. For all the controversial instances of gratuitous and unnecessary sexual violence, the show also offers depictions of sexuality rarely seen on a primetime TV show.

"I'm always pleased to see more sex on telly, because I think we're so crap at talking about it," says sex bloger Girl on the Net. "As a society, we're still kind of stuck in this idea that sex is either dirty or hilarious. Actually, it's just a fun thing that most of us do, and we should be more grown-up in talking about it.

"I suspect GoT is, especially for younger people today, what Moll Flanders was to me back in the 1990s: the first time you've really seen boobs or sex on telly. There are definitely people who will watch it and go, 'Yeah this is inspiring.' Whether or not the mainstream is getting dressed up as one of the Unsullied, I'm not sure. But the more sex – especially the more varied sex – we get on telly, the more we can have those conversations, and if you like something, then try and recreate it."

@liv_marks

More on VICE:

Why Is the UK Suddenly So Obsessed with 'Chav Porn'?

I Tried to Do Everyday Things in a Full Suit of Armour

A Serious Conversation with a Scientist About How the Dragons on 'Game of Thrones' Have Sex

All photos by the author

When people hear "furry" they instantly think of big, fuzzy animal outfits, called "fursuits." Not all furries have fancy, ornate ones, but many in the fandom go all out when it comes to their second skin. For those looking to take their involvement in the community to the next level, the creation or commission of a fursuit is an act of outward expression and serious dedication (often, a financial one).

Fursuits can be intrinsic to the identities or alter egos that define the lifestyle, and some furries even keep multiple fursuits for multiple personalities. Most furries have concepted characters—referred to as "fursonas"—that they choose to represent themselves, and the suits can help articulate certain aspects of each character. For some, the fursona is an elevated state of self, an expression of an inner animal. For others, it's more fantasy-based, a crafted identity, representing something they aspire to or deem important.

Fursuits are built by specific furries, many of whom make their entire living creating commissioned suites year round. While the cost of most fursuits hover around the $1,000-$4,000 range, they can cost up to $10,000, depending on intricacy, quality, and the reputation of the maker. While at Biggest Little Fur Con—the fastest-growing furry convention in the country, held in mid-May in Reno, Nevada—I caught up with a handful of furrys to find out about the genesis of their fursona and fursuits.

JEBRONI, aka "Certified Love Kitten"
Maine Coon Kitten

I'm Jebroni Kitty, and I come from Chicago. I came up with my character because I was trying to discover what I liked . I took pieces of inspiration from things like Second Life to create my fursuit, and I've always been a cat. It's just how I've always acted and felt.

I love hearts, and I like blue and pink—the colors of my fursuit—because they just mix well together. I'm a big guy, but I wanted to be a house cat, so I'm a Maine Coon. Big, husky, cuddly, and very mild-natured. I became known as the Love Kitten after going out with my stuffed hearts, which I carry around with me a lot. I often give my heart out to people, and then other furries started calling me Love Kitten.

MUKILTEO
Dog

I live on Woodbee Island in Washington State and this is my character Mukilteo. I have a website where I teach people how to make and build fursuit costumes, too. I have been in the furry fandom for a very long time, since 1998 or 1999.

Mukilteo was my first furry character, I had gotten this costume as a trade with another fursuit maker. This character is the bad dog. He wears a shock collar and he's a dog party advocate. He fights for Couch Rights and access to fresh water and walks to the park, and more treats! We want fresh bones and snacks!

I have another character, Matrices, and she's a gray dog, with folded back ears, and has a marking on her forehead. She's the one that really represents myself more so than Mukilteo, and she is the one I have as my avatar online. But Mukilteo is my fun one to take to the dance.

I know I'm a human on the inside, but it's fun to play around and have a different character for a little while. I've had the character so long... it's been about 15 years or longer.

TROUBULL
Bull

Originally came from the ox in the Chinese Zodiac. The ox is the working animal, and I've always felt that in my life I have been the one working long hours, seeing things through, being someone people can count on. The bull and the ox are very similar, with the exception that the ox can be a bull and it also does chores. I've always identified very strongly with that.

Initially I started as a fox, just cause I had no clue what to do. All of my friends at the time were equine or horses, and I kind of felt like I didn't want to do the same thing that they did. I realized that not only was the bull interesting, but it was unique. In addition to that, there are all different kinds of pun-ish humor to it, like being the bull when cows are the ones that make milk—and milk can kind of be associated with something that's not appropriate.

MARTIN FREEHUGZ
Wolf

Furry Martin and human Martin are pretty much the same being. The only difference is that one's human and the other is a blue wolf. Everything I do as a human (mannerisms/actions/sounds) are all stuff I do in my fursuit. I do get more cordial and energetic as wolf Martin. I love seeing people happy and wolf Martin easily fulfills that need.

I decided on a wolf because I've always respected their raw primal power. A wolf is ferocious, yet still has the ability to be charming and lovable. I decided to pick blue as the primary color on me for a couple of reasons. For one, blue is extremely rare in the animal kingdom (a blue wolf in real life would have a very hard time surviving).

I'm a bit idealistic toward the sustainable lifestyle and the struggles of life. Living a normal, stagnant life is not my intention. Living as an outlier humbles me. Experiencing the lows and savoring the highs is what life is about. Being blue in the wild would make life tough... Just the way I want to experience it. Darwin would be disappointed in my fursona. Also, blue is my favorite color.

RABID RABBIT
English Spot Breed Rabbit

I decided on the name a long time ago. My original fursona was a crazy rabbit with a straight jacket. When I got my fursuit, I wanted a happier and toony character that was easily approachable. My name, "Rabid," had already stuck, though. I decided on the rabbit because I've always loved them and felt a connection to them—perhaps because they, like the coyote and fox, are the tricksters in mythology. Unlike the coyote and fox, they are not predatory and are not nefarious.

I identify with my fursona and do consider myself and my fursona as one in the same. I have two new fursuits commissioned from Rabid Rabbit. Between fursuit commissions, conferences, and other activities, I'm sure I will spend about $10,000 this year on my furry lifestyle.

Visit Zak's website here to see more of his photo work.

All images courtesy Psyonix

"Let's play soccer, but with rocket-powered cars"—what a brilliant stoner idea.

Warning: Spoilers if you aren't caught up through season six, episode eight.

My Heart's Been Broken Too Many Times Already

You know it goes. You're squatting in a clearing with a captive audience of fellow wastrels, telling some bawdy tale full of sexual fortitude—perhaps reaching halfway up your mate's bum in lieu a punchline—when a gold-plated giant, a wandering swordthrift or, in this case, a haggard breakfast spokeshound, comes tearing ass out of the trees and lops your head off. If this week's episode Game of Thrones, "No One," felt familiar, it might because we got our usual quota of head crushings, soliloquies on personal honor, and profane character bits, simultaneously fulfilling viewer demand for violent exposition and frustrating our hopes for a more nuanced brand of mayhem.

Yes, this one was a bit of a retread, with plenty of callbacks and do-overs of the show's best dynamics, and precious little novelty to punctuate the hack-and-slash that we've become inured to over the course of a season that is, if not full of surprises, at least consistent with our expectations. Maybe this is to be anticipated from a late installment of a show that succeeded, at least initially, by way of shock value: After a while, chaos becomes the norm.

But it's not all bad news in Meereen, where Tyrion bids a fond farewell to Varys (coming on a bit Morrissey with the "my heart has been broken too many times already" bit), who is embarking on a mission of secret diplomacy. Where is he going? We don't find out, but both Dorne and Highgarden seem like good guesses. There's no debating that the suddenly bustling Slaver's Bay seems to have prospered under Tyrion's custodianship, so we're treated to an oddly dull game of truth or dare in the pyramid, as the Imp teaches Missandei and Grey Worm how to tell jokes and drink some of that old cougar juice. Ah, wine appreciation; the lowest aesthetic standard known to civilized man. That said, when Missandei laughs the Seven Kingdoms laugh with her and even Grey Worm gets to cut the rug a bit ("I make joke").

Naturally the revels are cut short by the invasion of the masters' armada, so we'll probably never know what happens when a man walks into a brothel with a honeycomb and a jackass. But we at least get some smiles out of our supporting cast before Daenerys shows up to break up the party, resume command of the Unsullied, and return the action to its grim standard.

He's Milord, Milord

More temporary levity follows at the siege in Riverrun, where Bronn plays the cad to Pod's straight man in a scene that sounds fun on paper but proves weirdly tiresome. Next we see Jaime and Brienne's negotiations in the Kingslayer's tent. "I'm proud of you," he tells her, and he should be. In a show full of fallible lords and morally corruptible kings, Brienne has been one of the few real heroes, and Jaime seems to see in her the white knight that he might have been but for a bad case of incestuous lust and the odd act of regicide.

Their dynamic makes for rich, often charming dialogue ("We shouldn't argue about politics"), even if Brienne's quest is plainly doomed this time around. The Blackfish reliably refuses to give up the castle, tool-of-the-realm Edmure is reliably weak-willed in allowing Jaime's forces to take it anyway, and that's a good shorthand for the whole episode: Everyone is reliable to the point of routine (though I thought the "He's milord, milord" guy did a great job delivering the most thudding line in fantasy history). Brienne even seems to acknowledge as much when she tries to return Oathkeeper, the sword Jaime gave her, to its original owner: "You gave it to me for a purpose. I achieved that purpose," she says, but the show must go on, so characters don't arc so much as circle round the same solemn chores.

The real upset is that the Blackfish doesn't even get a warrior's death, but, following an atypically bloodless surrender, is reported killed as Brienne escapes the siege (through the secret passage in the conservatory) with Pod as Jaime looks on from the battlements. It's a lovely moment, though it sucks that the Freys are saddled with a staid castle-design crest instead of a bear or a fucking three-headed dragon or something, as well as proof that Game of Thrones might actually be tiring of its own bloodthirsty MO.

Just So You Know, I'm Starting the Rampage Now

One person who certainly doesn't shy away from a bit of the old ultra violence is Cersei Lannister. "I choose violence," she tells Lancel and his press gang of Faith Militant; but actually, I was surprised that Mountain-stein let them off with a single head ripping. In a season that's been pretty cavalier about offing its more tertiary players, doesn't Lancel seem ripe for righteous disemboweling? Instead, Cersei strides into the throne room, endures her uncle Kevan's sexist courtly standards, and hears King "Butters" Tommen declare the barbaric custom of trial by combat discontinued.

Imagine that—could it be that the "rumor" Qyburn reports on is nothing less than the dawn of neoliberalism in Westeros? Will future episodes replace the gold standard with Friedmanian economics and show us the gentrification of Flea Bottom? Or are we just getting cheated out of Cleganebowl? And if that's the case, somebody better tell the Hound, whose rampage in the hinterlands begins with head chopping and ends in barter and sets up... something with Thoros and Ser Beric of the Brotherhood Without Banners. What are our beleaguered band of misfits up to? Beats me, but I smell serious spin-off potential.

Face-Takers Anonymous, or: A Tear for No One

In the run-up to Arya's final confrontation with ballistic schoolmarm the Waif, the internet was ablaze with conspiracies. Was the Arya we saw stabbed actually Jaqen (the facilitator of Face-Takers Anonymous) in disguise? Would the Waif be revealed as an invisible aspect of Arya's id à la Fight Club? Or would the Waif steal Arya's face and wreck havoc back in Winterfell?

Now we have our answer, and it is a resounding "nope." The Waif dispatches poor Lady Crane and then takes off like a T-1000, chasing Arya through Braavos, leaping from balconies, knocking over fruit carts, all for a showdown where... well actually, your guess is as good as mine, since Arya cuts the lights, and we presume that whatever happened must have been some sick shit because the Waif's slashed-up face now adorns the House of Black and White's year-round Halloween display. Arya tells Jaqen she won't be No One because she is Arya Stark of Winterfell and she is going home, at which point Jaqen more or less turns to the audience and shrugs, because whoops, there goes two seasons of training sequences and what did we really get from Braavos? Spilled fruit and a poxy scrotum.

Well, sometimes we all need to tread water to keep from drowning, and if "No One" felt like a placeholder episode, it's at least a place we recognize. And judging from the preview for next week's big Snow-brawl between Jon and Ramsey's armies, perhaps we would perhaps be wise to take Tyrion's advice and smile while we can, though our hearts be breaking.

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

"Chewbacca Mom" in her Chewbacca mask

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

Remember "Chewbacca Mom" from literally three weeks ago? I know you do, because she was completely unavoidable; the four-minute clip of her laughing while wearing a roaring Chewbacca mask quickly became the most viewed Facebook Live video of all time (or at least since people actually started using it about six months ago), racking up over 150 millions views.

Last week, it was revealed that C-Mom – real name: Candace Payne – has made almost £350,000 since streaming her video, reaping rewards in the form of gifts, fees from talk-show appearances and a handful of all-expenses paid holidays.

Of course, Chewbacca Mom is just one of many viral stars who've made serious, life-changing sums following their 15 minutes of fame. In the past year alone, Swedish vlogger PewDiePie earned an estimated £8.3 million via his YouTube videos, while The Sunday Times reports that British beauty vlogger Zoella earns at least £50,000 a month.

But how feasible is it for the average person to make it to that point? YouTube has over a billion users, who collectively watch 4 billion videos every day. According to experts, 71 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube every hour. Since the average clip lasts around 4.12 minutes, from the moment a new video is uploaded, users are competing with over 1.4 million other videos, not counting the trillions of videos already on YouTube and other similar platforms. The odds of going viral are so low that marketing and production company Curveball Media Limited has claimed users have "more chance of getting shot, dating a millionaire or being flown by a drunken pilot than getting 10,000 views" on a video.

But if by some stroke of sheer dumb luck your video does go viral, how do you capitalise on that and cash in? I spoke to viral content studio The Viral Factory's founder, Matt Smith, to find out.

YouTuber PewDiePie in 2015 (Photo by Flickr user camknows, via)

VICE: The Chewbacca mask mum has supposedly made almost £350,000 off a single video – how is this even possible?
Matt Smith: I haven't looked at the last view count, but the first way is obviously just monetising the video. YouTube and Facebook will pay tiny amounts for each view, as long as you've gone into your account and switched on the relevant advertising deals, so effectively, whenever you look at any video with advertising around it, the user is getting paid. So will be getting a cheque from Google because obviously her video's been seen gazillions of times, and that's a decent chunk of change.

In fairness, it sounds like a lot of that sum has been given to her in the form of various gifts, rather than in cold hard cash.
Yeah, I heard that Kohl's sent her some money, and I imagine she will be getting appearance fees. She was on James Corden, and I'm guessing she made some money off of that. There will also be agencies like us who go, "My god, she's really hot right now – what can we get her to endorse?" I don't know specifically about her, but I know there are plenty of other 15-minutes-of-fame internet celebrities who have done quite well out of appearing in ads.

Like who?
Well, for instance, "Overly Attached Girlfriend", the massive meme on YouTube and Reddit with the crazy eyes – we did a video with her for Samsung that she got paid for. We had the initial idea, but she helped us with the execution and the writing, because obviously it was her character. We flew her out to London and she's the main aspect of the video. That's one thing I can tell you about because we did it, but I've seen lots of others, like the Delta Airline inflight safety video. It's got Charlie Bit My Finger, it's got the hamster, it's got the rainbow guy... it's got the bloke from the Will It Blend? campaign – just loads and loads of internet celebs. They would have all been paid quite decent money to be in that, and there's a whole bunch of them. It's a thing now where those people are legitimate celebrities, so they get paid and they get featured in stuff.

READ ON NOISEY: A Pure Conversation with Paul McCartney

Is it feasible that everyday YouTubers and Viners could make this kind of money, or do they need something to go wildly viral before anyone takes real notice?
In theory, anyone could do it. A lot of the people who have had their 15 minutes of fame are pretty much ordinary people. The Chewbacca Mom is so obviously an ordinary person, which is one of the reasons the video is so great, because you're totally with her. She's so obviously just having fun and laughing her head off; there's no agenda behind it, there's no nothing, she's just an average kind of Joe – or Josephine. So yes, it can happen, but you have to do something different. Although she's a normal person, she's done something actually pretty exceptional. That video is gold. You know, if we as an advertising agency who specialise in making viral videos tried to make that video, I think we'd fail. It's almost impossible to conceive of it and direct it and cast it and make it as a film. The fact is it was great because it was completely spontaneous and off-the-cuff.

So it was just one moment of magic?
The odds are fairly stacked against the chances of your average person achieving that. But once it's done, I think increasingly there are mechanisms that there weren't ten years ago. I've met quite a lot of people at various conferences who had exactly that 15 minutes of fame, but a while ago, and they found it very hard to make any money. In fact, some of them were upset by the fact they had all the downsides of fame and perhaps they didn't necessarily want all that attention, but they made zero money from it because the structures weren't in place. Now, they would probably be contacted by agents.

What kind of structures are you talking about?
YouTube has a representation system where they will talk to brands and they will put forward their celebrities, so if you're a girl who does makeup tutorials on YouTube and you're really popular, YouTube will put you forward to makeup brands, fashion brands, etc, and help you monetise that. I know for a fact there's a talent agency in LA that specialises in accidental YouTube celebrities. So these days, if that happens to you, even if you're not that keen on the attention – some people obviously love it, some people hate it – but at the very least you can make a few bucks. I mean, £350,000 isn't bad, is it?

Take me through your working process – how are you able to determine what will go viral and what won't?
As I said before, I think stuff like the Chewbacca mask is really tricky from a creative point of view. What we do is write loads and loads of ideas, and spend bloody hours thinking, and going, "Is that going to work or will it not work? How do we make it work?" We get it wrong sometimes, but more often than not we get it right because we have the resources that the clients give us to spend on production. We can get really good people involved, we can use photo production, special effects, etc. So that's one way. It's not failsafe, but it's decent.

How long after uploading something are you able to tell if it's going to be successful or not?
Well there are algorithmic ways to predict viral content, so Facebook probably knew before more-or-less everybody else that the Chewbacca mask lady's video was going viral, because they would have spotted it even when it was only seen by very few people and shared by very few people. I'm pretty sure it would have shown up on someone's dashboard somewhere, saying, "This thing is going crazy – it's on an exponential curve and it's being shared a lot, far more than anything else we're seeing today." Again, YouTube have that. They can spot something that has been made and that is trending or starting to trend pretty much before everyone else does. So those are the two ways ; one is predicting it by just being very creative and making good stuff, and the other is, once the content is finished, if you're the content distribution platform owner and you've got sophisticated algorithms, you can probably spot it.

What tips do you have for people who want to go viral and make loads of money out of it?
Think very carefully. That's what I tell my own kids. They go, "Oh dad, can you help me go viral?" and I say, "Oh really? You want to go viral? Why do you want to be famous?" It's crap being famous. It's nowhere near as good as you might think it is. Just take a deep breath and go, "Why am I doing this again?" because you'll have the piss ripped out of you. You'll become a target – especially if you're young. But if you're someone who goes, "Well, actually, I just really want to be famous, so I'll put up with the downsides," I think on the internet it's all about being human. Show your real self and then do something kind of exceptional, but as a normal human being.

Thanks, Matt.

@yasminajeffery

More on VICE:

This YouTube Prank Video Is So Appalling It Conclusively Disproves the Existence of God

YouTube Millionaire KSI Talks to Us About Growing Up Online

Rave and Hardcore YouTube Comments Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity

This article originally appeared in VICE US.

In many jurisdictions in the US, weed is so close to legal that you're more likely to get busted for flying a drone in the wrong place than for getting caught with a nug in your pocket. In places like Oklahoma, where it's still super illegal, draconian enforcement of marijuana prohibition is regarded by most of America as an ass-backwards idea. It's pretty safe to start thinking blanket legalization is on the horizon.

So if you live in a legal-weed state like Colorado and you treated yourself to a dimebag on the way home from work yesterday, you probably did so proudly, without having to sneak around at all. But since there's more to having a conscience than legality, did you ever wonder if someone's life got ruined so you could have that dank ass Purple Urkle?

Sure, reports in the last few years have scolded marijuana growers for being bad environmentalists, drinking too much of California's precious water, and endangering its wildlife. And in Colorado, it's recently raised some eyebrows that marijuana growing facilities generate some serious greenhouse gases by hogging more than their fair share of electricity. That just makes cannabis one more industry that hurts the earth, though. And while that sucks, it puts weed on roughly the same ethical footing, environmentally, as almonds.

The question is, is anyone getting well and truly fucked by your weed habit?

Last month, drug journalist Ioan Grillo's New York Times op-ed about free trade in the cannabis industry painted a dire picture. He said despite the shift toward legalization, black market weed still comes from Mexico. "The profits pay the cartels' assassins, as well as corrupt police officers and soldiers, who discard piles of bodies across Mexico," Grillo wrote. I asked him how much violence could be traced to marijuana and he told me, " violence can't really be separated out by drugs—if that makes sense."

It does, but according to Stephen Mumme, professor of political science at Colorado State University, specializing in US-Mexican relations, in addition to violence, there's also the treatment of growers to consider. Mexican marijuana often comes from "scrappy little valleys that are hard to get to, tucked away where very poor campesinos work for not much remuneration from the industry," he told VICE.

Violence against the farmers is underreported, Mumme explained, but that they're doing business with narcos, and "The narcos have a pretty heavy hand." Fortunately, legal marijuana north of the border has been driving down profits, along with weed production and smuggling in Mexico. But as long as desperate, rural farmers are a cheap source of weed, "there will always be some production," Mumme said.

But up here in the US, black markets haven't suddenly just flipped to white. Most of the markets here are grayish—and they can be a pretty dark shade of grayish. "These are folks that have been renegades for thirty years," said Humboldt State University professor of environmental sociology Anthony Silvaggio. A facade of legality is slowly being retrofitted onto the weed industry in California, but in spite of that legality, those new retrofitted elements still reward criminality. For instance, the economics of weed make it more lucrative to export product from a decriminalized state like California across state lines, often through weed-hostile territory. It's a process that amounts, Silvaggio said, to "organized crime."

That means in order to get California weed to your small, weed-unfriendly town in, say, Oklahoma, traffickers have to risk their asses trucking the stuff across thousands of miles. The FBI reported about 701,000 marijuana-related arrests in 2014 across all American law enforcement agencies, the most recent year with such data, and although 90 percent of those were charges of simple possession, that means about 70,100 people that year were charged with more serious marijuana offenses.

But if those weed criminals are in the US, it's not like they didn't know what they were getting into, right?

That's not quite so clear. From time to time—including earlier this month—an illegal marijuana grow in the US gets busted and law enforcement claims there's a link to Mexican cartels. In these cases the workers are supposedly being trafficked and underpaid. However, the federal government has also disputed its own past claims that US marijuana grows are run by scary, scary narcos, as opposed to just being staffed by a few migrant laborers from Mexico who are just in town to do the picking and trimming.

And that's where some nasty exploitation in the weed biz rears its head. "We see the use of Mexican nationals and other foreign-born folks like the Hmong people," said Silvaggio of the workforce in Humboldt County, California, where much of America's weed comes from. Immigrant laborers make up a large portion of the workers known as "trimmigrants," and to hear Silvaggio tell it, they take on the shittiest workload.

An anecdote from Silvaggio about foreign trimmigants—who are paid by volume of output—is telling, if not especially shocking:

"The Hmong work faster and cheaper than everyone else. They're given the crappiest weed to trim. For example, if you have 1,000 pounds for your white workers to trim, and half of it has mildew and small buds, you'll get a bunch of workers quitting and complaining immediately. The Hmong, however, are gonna work through that. And they'll work through it for $50 a pound. That's their job. The white workers will head out onto the street and find another gig."

According to Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, working your fingers to the bone isn't the only hazard of weed work. "Batch after batch after batch is getting rejected for unapproved pesticides," Tree said, referring to Colorado marijuana that's newly being subjected to consumer safety tests. It turns out your hippie uncle with the pot farm may have been exaggerating about how green his buds were. "For all these years, all these organic growers have been lying about labelling," Tree said.

Poison on your weed is potentially bad for your health (there's still some debate about that), but it's definitely bad for trimmigrants, according to another anecdote from Silvaggio. He claims clouds of pesticide have been known to land Humboldt County trimmers in the hospital with rashes and heart palpitations. And of course, when that happens there's no hazard pay. "There's no protections for anybody in this labor market," Silvaggio said.

I doubt any of these tales of worker mistreatment make you feel like a monster for buying weed, and given what I've dug up, I really don't think it should. But unlike cocaine, weed buyers can increasingly nose around and figure out where their weed came from, meaning your conscience can be extra-extra-clear.

Bloggers have written how-to guides on figuring out whether or not your weed comes from cartels. Also, small, local growers have recently stepped out of the darkness, so consumers can meet them, shake their hands, and find out that growing and packaging a legal plant can be wholesome, and even downright boring.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

This article originally appeared in VICE US.

Donald Trump's response to the mass shooting in Orlando last weekend, as you'd expect, was another chance for him to call for a ban on Muslim immigration and emphasize that without him leading the country the US would be at risk for terrorism. But he also went further, bizarrely insinuating that President Barack Obama might be secretly in league with Islamist radicals, an old right-wing conspiracy theory.

His first statement—released only a few hours after news of the shooting broke—reiterating his proposal for a ban on Muslim immigration and amounted to an "I told you so."

"I said this was going to happen—and it is only going to get worse,"the statement read. Trump said that Hillary Clinton, his presumed opponent, wanted to increase immigration levels from the Middle East, and "we will have no way to screen them, pay for them, or prevent the second generation from radicalizing."

"Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism," he later tweeted.

But Trump didn't stop there. On Monday, only a day after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Trump suggested to Fox News that Obama not only botched his response to the tragedy, but he may be intentionally weakening America.

"We're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind," Trump told Fox & Friends. "And the something else in mind—you know, people cannot believe it. They cannot believe that President Obama is acting the ways he acts and can't even mention the words 'radical Islamic terrorism.' There's something going on. It's inconceivable."

Trump seems to be doubling down on his old conspiracy about Obama secretly being a Muslim, going so far as to suggest that Obama might have ties to ISIS himself—a "Manchurian candidate" for radical Islam, as David Graham in the Atlantic put it.

Trump's response to the Orlando tragedy is shocking, but not necessarily out of character. "Since Trump has ascended, it's been clear that his demagogic instincts could be tested precisely by the sort of tragedy suffered in Orlando," New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote of Trump's remarks Sunday.

"When faced with the path of modesty and the path of dark opportunism," Remnick continued, "he has chosen the latter. That's what he is about. It's who he is."

More on the Orlando shooting:

The Orlando Massacre Is About LGBT People No Matter What the UK Media Says

What We Know So Far About Omar Siddiqui Mateen, the Orlando Nightclub Gunman

America's LGBT Community Is Reeling After the Orlando Nightclub Massacre

In Vancouver's overheated market, skyrocketing home prices, and vanishing rental stock are forcing locals to come up with creative solutions. We talked to some of the city's young people to find out how they're managing to continue to live in this expensive city.

Our host meets a microloft resident living in a space that's roughly 250 square feet, two people who share a Victorian-era mansion with eight others, and a couple who have opted out of the market completely by living in a converted camper van with their two dogs.

This video has been made possible by Vancity.

Photo via Flickr user momento mori

The federal government rejected an NDP motion Monday calling for the decriminalization of marijuana possession, arguing that doing so would benefit criminal organizations.

"Canadians, both adults and youth, would continue to purchase a product of unknown potency and quality while fueling the profits of organized crime," said Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould.

The Liberals have promised to roll out legislation to legalize and regulate marijuana next spring. Until then, marijuana remains illegal under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which means Canadians can—and are—still being arrested for an act as minor as passing around a joint.

In the House of Commons Monday, the NDP put forward a motion asking the federal government to decriminalize possession of pot for personal use right away.

"Despite Justin Trudeau's clear campaign promise to immediately fix marijuana laws in Canada, the government has done nothing for eight months except continue the senseless practice of handing out criminal records for personal use," said NDP Justice Critic Murray Rankin in a statement.

According to the Canadian Press, Rankin said Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould could address this problem by ordering the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which prosecutes drug crimes, to stop pursuing possession-based charges.

Read more: If Justin Trudeau is About to Legalize Weed, Why Are We Still Imprisoning People Over it?

But Wilson-Raybould said the government has no plans to do that. Her parliamentary secretary Bill Blair, who is leading the Liberal's pot legalization file, said decriminalizing possession of marijuana prior to having new regulations in place is a bad idea.

"It would be reckless in the extreme and perhaps create much greater risk for our communities to remove all control from cannabis." Blair has previously said enforcement should continue as normal until the laws change.

In an announcement about weed legalization made at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs, Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott said, "We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem."

However, the decision of whether or not to arrest people is left up to a police officer's discretion.

According to Statistics Canada data, a Canadian is arrested every nine minutes because of marijuana.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo by Ryan Duffin

After the worst shooting in American history hit Orlando's Pulse nightclub early Sunday morning, LGBT communities and others around the world held vigils for the victims. In New York City, people gathered at the Stonewall Inn, perhaps the most famous American landmark in gay history and still a center of LGBT life in Greenwich Village.

Photographers Ryan Duffin and Kaz Senju were on the scene, and afterward they sent us the following photos and these statements on what they saw:

Photo by Ryan Duffin

Ryan Duffin:

I expected to reach the Stonewall and feel hit by a complete wall of grief and sadness. There was immense despair for the victims and their families. There was anger and confusion. There were emotions that simply could not be qualified by language. But more than anything, there was an incredible blanket of love. The crowd chanted "Less hate!" and that transitioned into a roaring "More Love!" Friends and couples embraced one another. I saw signs that read "We Are Orlando," "Still Here, Still Queer," and "Love Is the Answer." This community recognized the power of camaraderie and the poignancy of love in the face of tragedy.

The vigil last night brought together young members and allies to the community, as well as lifelong activists. "Pulse was not just a gay club, it was a place of solidarity," a man standing on the steps next to the bar told me. He continued, "A gay bar is the first place I learned to be me. A queer club is the first place I saw people that looked like me. A gay bar started a revolution." –Ryan Duffin

Photo by Kaz Senju

Kaz Senju:

The shooter's father told the media that his son was triggered by the sight of two men kissing. Kissing is a sign of love, not hate, and people should not live in fear. My photos are images of queer couples kissing at the vigil.

There will be another vigil rally at the Stone Wall on Monday, June 13, from 6 to 9 PM.

See more photos below:

Thumbnail image via HBO and Flickr user Jason Persse

HBO's Game of Thrones was already heading toward its third season when Gucci Mane went to prison in 2013, but a lot of heads have rolled in the show since then. Now that he's out, Gucci is getting back into GoT, and he's Snapchatting choice moments as he goes.

"Babe, I love this show," he tells his girlfriend in one Snap, as the Hound fucks some folks up with an axe in the most recent episode.

He's also apparently pretty into Peter Dinklage's character Tyrion Lannister, saying, "This little motherfucking midget is hilarious," in a separate video.

Gucci's stayed pretty busy since he got out of prison last month, grabbing three RIAA gold awards and dropping tracks with Kanye and Drake, but it seems like he's been taking time to relax and enjoy the cultural juggernaut that is Game of Thrones. He should be careful trying to binge watch too much of it at once, though, because that can go pretty horribly wrong.

Watch some of his Game of Thrones Snapchats—one of them captioned "Winter is coming #burrrrr"—in the compilation video above.

Read: 'Game of Thrones' Confirmed My Immigrant Parents' Suspicions That Americans Are Violent Psychopaths

On Saturday, for the first time in years, I rode my bike into town to watch Boston's Pride Parade. It's been a while since I wasn't busy with my young son's baseball games or weekend errands on Pride day—and besides, we won, right? More or less every American under 40, and many over that, yawn at the idea that women now marry women, and men marry men. My 13-year-old doesn't even remember a time that his mom and I couldn't be married.

But ever since the Boston Marathon bombing that put a knife in my city's heart, I've yearned to be part of more community moments, more comings-together that let us celebrate being human. So on Saturday, a friend and I marveled at how very different—how much more ordinary—the contingents are than when we were young.

Sure, there are still the dykes on bikes, the queer activist groups, the wild party guys, the drag queens. But now there are also endless cohorts of politicians looking for our votes and corporate groups looking for our dollars: employees' groups from insurance companies, grocery stores, dental practices, sneaker manufacturers, along with veterans' groups, high school groups, church groups. If you weren't paying close attention, you might have imagined it was a town Fourth of July parade with the rainbow subbed in for the red, white, and blue.

You might have thought the hatred was gone.

But of course, early the next morning we—meaning all of us, around the country—woke up to the news that some lunatic man with an assault weapon had opened fire in a gay bar, executing 20—no, then it was 49—people for the sin of dancing, hanging out with their friends, and enjoying being alive. Terror had already struck my city; now it was striking my other home, my community of queers. It was a punch in the gut, a flashback to those days of being hated and afraid.

The terror is different now than it once was, of course.

I don't think the adorable young lesbian and gay and bi and trans kids I saw in Boston Saturday can fully imagine that time. How we scarcely dared mention our "roommates" at work, how teenagers spat on us on the street, threatening us and calling us vile names. Back then, if you went to the "women's" bar (in my day, we didn't say "gay") and left by yourself, the big butch bouncer would walk you out the door and watch as you headed for your car just in case some homo-hater was lurking there, looking to assault a queer girl or two. On Sunday, thousands of us remembered that there's always someone who wants to murder you just for being gay—or even worse, wants to murder the young ones just coming up, the baby dykes and pretty young men who have the energy and life to be bouncing around at 2 AM on a Sunday.

The terror is different now than it once was, of course. Forty-three years ago, someone set fire to a gay bar in New Orleans, killing 32 people, and the community reaction was revulsion against the homos, dead and alive. Twenty years ago, Eric Rudolph bombed a lesbian bar, and almost no one but the gay press noticed—until he also bombed the Atlanta Olympics. This time the mainstream media and the FBI were on it instantly, grieving with us over the biggest mass shooting in US history. This time, the president of the United States understood that this strike at our bodies and hearts was at a critical space for LGBT people, the place we've always found one another so we could love and organize, "to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live... to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights."

But even if the response to this attack was dramatically different, I don't think that memory of being profoundly despised simply for being who you are ever goes away. It might shift over into a separate compartment, a closet in the back of your mind. You learn to forget about it day to day, to not bring it up, since doctors' offices and government forms and fellow parents have apparently begun to forget that you're an outcast and have lapsed into treating you like a regular person. But it's waiting there, ready to drop you through its trap door when someone decides to enforce that hatred again, dropping you back into isolation and fear and grief.

Which is why, I so urgently hope—no, pray—that my country won't turn this incident into Muslims versus gays. Because I know perfectly well that my Muslim friends and neighbors and fellow citizens and fellow humans are suffering from the same kind of hatred that we've faced for being queer.

Just a little over a year ago in North Carolina, an angry white man shot and killed three young Muslims, two of them students, in what was either a parking spot dispute or a hate crime or some combination of both. Last fall, a nerdy teenager, Ahmed Mohamed, got excited about figuring out how to build a clock and brought it to school—and was arrested and taken out of school in handcuffs for building what someone else thought was a bomb. A handful of weeks ago, a UC Berkeley student was kicked off his plane for speaking Arabic on the phone with his uncle. I could go on. Muslim friends and colleagues of Arabic or south Asian descent could go on even more.

Belonging to some tribe or another seems to be an essential part of being human. All of us are unavoidably part of something larger, some community based on geography, family, ethnicity, sexuality, political persuasion, religion, fandom, profession—whatever. Within every group, there are members who pull either inward or outward, who are tugged by the impulse to be exclusive and reject outsiders or to be inclusive and reach out to all.

Muhammad Ali's Louisville funeral was a heart-soaring example of the latter. That gorgeous man, news reports told us, spent a decade planning his funeral, and the result brought just about everyone together. The memorial speakers were like the cast of a walking-into-a-bar joke: Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, black, white, Arabic, ministers, priests, comedians, politicians, activists. That was a man who could go deeply inward and still reach outward.

He was a Muslim. So, apparently, was the man who brought an assault weapon into Pulse and opened fire.

In other words, what makes people dangerous are not what group they belong to, but how they treat others they don't consider their own. We all know pull-up-the-drawbridge types in our own lives. I don't even have to mention Donald Trump, even though I just did, who of course is using this event to keep spewing racism and hatred and encouraging others to do so too.

In a case like this, the killer's true motivations are typically mysterious. Maybe it was fundamentalist advocacy for a world in which one religion rules over all, as suggested by the fact that the shooter reportedly called 911 and pledged allegiance to ISIS. Maybe it was antigay revulsion, as his father suggested, which does tend to be linked with the kind of misogyny he allegedly displayed in beating his wife and holding her hostage. Maybe it was mental instability and illness. Maybe it was all of the above.

But I fear that, in order to attack Muslims generally, some voices will discover a deep passion for upholding the civil liberties of LGBT people against the threat of the most medieval and extremist strain of Islam—as if it is somehow more real than the all-of-us-together strain of Muhammad Ali. That would almost be like having Eric Rudolph or Dylann Roof or Donald Trump stand for white American manhood generally.

Two lunatic haters attacked my city three years ago as we came together as human: One's dead, one's in prison, and their message of death hasn't infected the rest of us...

The real division is not between gay people and Muslims—or any two groups—but those who hate and those who embrace. Haters of all kinds are on the same side, all working to keep us apart. Embracers are on the other side, trying to open up borders and make common cause across differences. Yes, I am grieving and vulnerable today as someone who's LGBT, an alphabet soup acronym I apologize for being part of foisting on all of you. African Americans know the sucker punch of being attacked in churches, from Birmingham to Charleston. LGBT people know again we can be attacked in our own gathering spots, the place we celebrate being together and alive.

But so can we all, for every sort of group. In seventh grade my son has been studying the Holocaust, which means we've been talking a lot about what it means to mark a group as so "other" that it deserves to be exterminated. When I tried to explain to him that there's always someone who sees the world that way, as a battle between "us" and "them," judging people by their group membership, he was stunned. "I can't even imagine how you could think that way!" he said to me, over and over.

And yet of course some people do. They run political movements on it. They pull out automatic weapons to enforce it. People are dead and wounded and maimed, and we know that it will happen again.

But that doesn't mean we have to give in. In September 2001, a crew of lunatic haters flew two planes out of my city, turning them into bombs that killed thousands. Two lunatic haters attacked my city three years ago as we came together as human: One's dead, one's in prison, and their message of death hasn't infected the rest of us, even if one lunatic murderer this weekend reportedly cited them to authorities. The man attacked my rainbow people during the month we celebrate being proud. Hatred is an infection that's hard to cure.

But the world around me is as horrified and grieved as I am, reaching out, giving blood and money and hope. That's my deepest group, the group I feel most rooted in: the ones who insist that all of us are human today, grieving for those we've just lost.

E. J. Graff is managing editor of the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Follow her on Facebook.

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This post originally appeared on the Trace.

Forty-nine people were killed and dozens of others injured when Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old who worked for a global security firm, opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, early Sunday morning. The rampage, which ended with Mateen dead, is the deadliest mass shooting in US history.

Mateen stormed the club armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and a handgun around 2 AM, according to the FBI. The New York Times, citing law enforcement officials, reports that Mateen shot about one-third of the 300 patrons that had packed the club for a "Latin flavor" event. The cavernous club quickly became a scene of chaos, as terrified people poured out onto the street, some carrying wounded and bleeding victims. The Times adds that the initial attack was followed by a three-hour standoff, with people held hostage until 5 AM, when law enforcement agencies raided the club with armored vehicles. Mateen was killed after a gunfight broke out with police.

The FBI is investigating the attack as an act of domestic terrorism. Around the time of the shooting, Mateen, an American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan, called 911 and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, federal officials said.

Mateen's father said his son was driven by homophobia. In an interview with NBC News, he said Mateen became distressed after witnessing two men kiss in Miami two months ago. "This has nothing to do with religion," Mir Siddique said. "They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, 'Look at that. In front of my son, they are doing that.'"

On Sunday, President Barack Obama, who called the rampage a hate crime, addressed the country for the 14th time in the aftermath of a mass shooting. The president said the attack underscores the need for gun reform. "This massacre is a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school or a house of worship or a movie theater or a nightclub," Obama said. "We have to decide if that's the kind of country we want to be. To actively do nothing is a decision as well."

The toll of dead and injured exceeds the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed, and the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which 26 people were killed. The number of dead also nearly matched the total number of people fatally shot in Orlando in all of last year." At least 51 people were shot and killed in the city in 2015, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that records US shootings by monitoring media reports and police blotters.

"The violence is not normal," Vice President Joe Biden said in a statement issued Sunday, "and the targeting of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans is evil and abhorrent."

Below are four pieces of key context to keep in mind as more details emerge.

The gunman was most likely armed with the kind of high-capacity magazine that some states have banned.

Cellphone camera video footage filmed by a civilian outside the Pulse nightclub recorded at least 20 shots fired in rapid succession in one nine-second stretch. The high rate of fire suggests the shooter used what many jurisdictions call "high-capacity magazines," a term for ammunition-feeding devices that typically hold more than ten or 15 rounds.

High-capacity magazines have been used by many mass shooters. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the couple who gunned down 14 people in San Bernardino, California, last December, used magazines that held 30 rounds each. Jared Loughner used a 33-round magazine to kill six people in the Tucson, Arizona, shooting that injured then-US Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011. When James Holmes carried out a shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, that same year, he was equipped with magazines that held 40 and 100 rounds. A 2013 analysis by Mother Jones found that half of mass shooters between 1982 and 2012 used magazines that held more than ten rounds.

The manufacture of high-capacity magazines was outlawed for a decade by the 1994 assault weapons ban. After the federal law lapsed in 2004, some states and municipalities began instituting their own high-capacity magazine bans; currently, eight states have some kind of restriction on magazine size, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

Gun rights advocates claim restrictions on magazine size are arbitrarily set and unconstitutional. Gun violence prevention advocates, on the other hand, argue that devices that allow users to shoot more bullets before needing to reload results in higher body counts. As an example, they often point to the Tucson shooting, in which Loughner was stopped by a bystander when he had to reload.

High-capacity magazine bans have also been challenged as ineffective, as many ordinances apply to the manufacture of weapons, but not to the possession or sale of the same devices. California politicians have been particularly aggressive in trying to close these sorts of loopholes. Last year, Los Angeles banned not just the manufacture but the possession of magazines that hold more than ten rounds. Gavin Newsom, the state's lieutenant governor, is campaigning to institute a similar rule statewide. He's been criticized by many pro-gun groups, including one, the Pink Pistols, an LGBT organization that advocates gun ownership.

There's data to suggest that magazine capacity bans do make it harder for criminals to obtain the devices. An analysis by the Washington Post found that in Virginia, during the decade the federal assault weapons ban was in effect, the number of guns equipped with high-capacity magazines seized from criminals by police in the state fell by nearly half. When the ban expired, the number of seized guns went back up again.

A large number of hate crimes and domestic terrorist acts are committed with firearms.

The motivation behind the Orlando nightclub attack appears to stem from a confluence of violent homophobia and radical Islamic ideology. While authorities have yet to pinpoint the exact motives—and it's difficult to say which form of hatred was the primary motivation—guns are often used in both hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

According to a report on the use of guns in hate crimes released earlier this year by the Center for American Progress, roughly 43,000 hate crimes in the United States were carried out with a gun between 2010 and 2014. Racial bias was the most common motivator for firearm hate crimes, accounting for nearly half of those incidents overall. Bias against sexual orientation and religion was the second-most common motivator.

Similar trends have emerged in domestic terror attacks, many of which are committed by lone wolf actors, the report found. Nearly 60 percent of domestic terrorist attacks carried out between 2009 and 2015 were done with a gun, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And a report by the Anti-Defamation League examining incidents of fatal domestic terrorism and extremism in 2015 found that 48 of the 52 individuals killed in these incidents were murdered with a gun.

"If you build a bomb, it takes a bit of sophistication and training," said domestic terrorism expert Daryl Johnson, formerly of the Department of Homeland Security. Since 9/11, he added, "law enforcement has become very adept at identifying the technical signatures of bomb makers."

The scope of the horror in Orlando is unprecedented. But there is nothing at all unusual about gun violence in Florida.

Last July, 39-year-old Andrew Chisholm and his 17-year-old nephew, Tarvese Johnson, were shot and killed in the breezeway of an apartment in Fort Myers, Florida. Relatives said that Chisholm was the target, and Johnson was caught in the crossfire.

A few weeks later, at 4 AM on a weekday morning, three armed men broke through a glass door of a small home across the street from an elementary school in Bradenton, Florida. They shot and killed Kantrel Brooks and Esther Deneus, both 29. Five children under the age of 11 were in the house at the time.

And in Daytona Beach last September, two college students, Timesha Carswell, 21, and Diona McDonald, 19, were shot point-blank in the head by one of their roommates, who they had asked to move out. The shooter, according to news reports, was furious about $200 that he claimed the women owed him. He also gravely wounded a third person in the apartment, forcing him into a closet and shooting him six times through the door.

Chisholm, Johnson, Brooks, Deneus, Carswell, and McDonald were six of the 767 people who were murdered with a gun in Florida in 2015. That averages out to just over two gun deaths a day, or 64 a month. The vast majority of these shootings get scant attention.

The 'Gunshine State' has been a testing ground for looser firearms laws.

Over the last three decades, Florida has often served as a laboratory for legislation that expands gun rights, earning it the nickname the "Gunshine State." Its concealed weapons law, drafted in the late 1980s, has been duplicated by 40 other states, and since 1999, the Florida legislature has passed more than 30 pro-gun bills.

One of those laws, known as "stand your ground," was later adopted by 21 other states. During Florida's last legislative session, there was an attempt to strengthen that measure even further, by making self-defense claims essentially impregnable. That effort failed, as did a push to allow guns on Florida college campuses, and an attempt to give licensed gun owners the right to carry their weapons in public in the state.

Florida has issued 1.4 million concealed carry permits to its residents, far more than any other state in the country. That group included the Orlando shooter, Omar Marteen.

This article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo of an AR-15 rifle via Flickr user katesheets

In the first 48 hours since the worst mass shooting in United States history was committed by a gunman in a Orlando nightclub, authorities and the media have scrambled to pick apart the motives of the sick man who killed 49 people before being shot by police early Sunday. He was reportedly an admirer of ISIS and the Boston Marathon bombers, was consumed with homophobia, and, according to a former co-worker, frequently talked about killing people.

The question of what inspires a man—it's almost always a man—to pick up a gun and start shooting will always carry a morbid fascination. Mass murderers are motivated by everything from mental illness to a hatred of the West, but what unites many of them is the gun they carry. Far too often, that gun is a variant on the AR-15, an assault rifle beloved by gun fans for its customizability and derided by gun control advocates for making it too easy to kill too many people too quickly. In the wake of tragedies like Orlando, it's normal to ask Why? It's also becoming increasingly common to ask, Why are these people allowed to buy these guns?

After the shooting, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reiterated her support for "commonsense gun safety reform," including a ban on assault weapons. That call was echoed by many others, including the notably pro–gun control New York Daily News, which called AR-15s a "mass murderer's best friend" and declared that the shooter was enabled by "a gun lobby that has long opposed efforts to keep assault weapons out of the hands of bloodthirsty maniacs."

The AR-15 was banned under the 1994 federal assault weapons ban that was in effect until 2004. Whether that ban did much to curb gun violence is still a matter of debate—most American firearm deaths are connected to handguns, not rifles. The law also focused too much on features that didn't affect a weapon's deadliness like barrel shrouds and pistol grips; generally, efforts to ban "assault weapons" are complicated by the vagueness of that term. Is every semiautomatic an assault weapon? Or just semiautomatic rifles? Does it matter what sort of handle a gun has?

The simplest route for gun control advocates would be a ban on magazines with more than ten rounds in them. It's been speculated that the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, had these high-capacity magazines; in one video filmed by a bystander, he can be heard firing 20 shots in a few seconds. (The weapon the Orlando shooter used was a Sig Sauer MCX, which comes with a 30-round magazine.) A high-capacity magazine ban wouldn't have stopped Mateen from killing people, but if he had been forced to reload, it might have given the victims a better chance of overpowering him.

That argument will never wash with gun rights activists. Some claim high-capacity magazines are necessary in certain situations, like if a gun owner is confronted by multiple attackers or an angry mob. For these Second Amendment advocates, gun control is never, ever the answer. Though the NRA has been silent since the Orlando shooting, Donald Trump spoke on behalf of the gun-loving right Monday, when he told CNN ,"If you had some guns in that club the night that this took place, if you had guns on the other side, you wouldn't have had the tragedy that you had."

The Republican vision appears to be a world in which everyone, from schoolteachers to club-goers, is strapped to a piece at all times. By this line of reasoning, more guns are always better because they'll stop the criminals who will have guns no matter what the laws are. Gun owners, in this universe, are responsible citizens only a bit less virtuous than cops, and denying them access to any type of weapon would be a suppression of their constitutional rights.

On the other end of the political spectrum, the demonization of the AR-15 is only a little less delusional than the right's fetishization of the gun. Orlando was a horror unique in its scope, but the larger problem is the sheer quantity of shootings that take place in the US. As of June 10, before the Orlando attack, VICE estimated that 118 Americans had been killed in mass shootings in 2016. Memorial Day weekend saw an eruption of gun violence across the country; six people died and 48 were injured by firearms in Chicago alone. This sort of everyday death isn't the result of uniquely evil men getting their hands on Bad Guns—it's the consequence of having millions with arm's reach of everyday Americans who, it turns out, don't get any smarter or more sensible when they have a death machine in their hands.

A gun control debate focused on assault weapons is probably not going to end with a reduction in gun violence. The country had exactly that debate in 2012 after Adam Lanza murdered children with an AR-15, and nothing came of it. No mass shooting will convince the American right that guns are the problem—instead, the right will continue to argue that the problem is ISIS, or mental illness, or gun-free zones.

From that perspective, the policy solution seems to be to make sure 100 percent of the country's mentally ill are cared for. Or better yet, to look into everyone's hearts, figure out which ones are totally blackened with hate, and replace that hate with love. Without that sort of deus ex machina, though, Americans are left with a country where a very angry person can go into a store, buy a weapon, and a couple days later use it to kill 49 people.

It seems like it should be uncontroversial to find out ways to make that weapon a little less efficient, if only to make sure that the next angry person can only kill 48, or 40. Because there definitely will be a next angry person.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

This cinéma vérité feature film follows the lives of people in Alberta affected by the powerful opioid fentanyl. The underlying source of the fentanyl crisis in Canada traces back to 2012, when the notorious prescribed painkiller OxyContin was pulled from pharmacy shelves in lieu of a "safer" alternative, OxyNeo. This was the point in time when counterfeit fentanyl disguised as fake OxyContin pills arose, proliferated, and sparked a full-on crisis in the country—with Canada's west being a major epicentre.

This image is a bad sign of the content to come. Photo courtesy Force Four Entertainment

If you've ever been stuck in a shitty motel room with limited cable or been surfing channels at your parents' house after midnight you've probably come across the so-bad-it's-actually-kind-of-amazing show Border Security. It's Canada's trash version of Storage Wars but still somehow less exciting than watching pawn shop owners rifle through dead people's literal garbage. The premise of this, seriously-how-is-this-legal reality show is exactly as boring as it sounds. Canada's finest border guards do their best to keep a straight face and avoid looking into the camera while 'busting' people as they try to cross the border with such innocuous things as a handful of painkillers to suitcases full of restricted meat. As you watch you're left baffled at the legality of filming scared individuals (does anyone not get nervous at the border?) in extremely vulnerable situations, many of whom don't have a strong grasp of the language, let alone their privacy rights. The majority of episodes don't even end in busts, just an unfulfilled promise of danger that is ultimately revealed to be little more than nerves, which makes the ethics around filming even more questionable.

Three years after he disappeared, the trial for the murder of Tim Bosma is finally coming to a close. Photo via Facebook

An innocent young father, killed for his truck by someone who answered an online ad.

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