The Norwegian Newspaper Varden reported on Tuesday that an unnamed man in Telemark, Norway, was fined late last year for agreeing to perform a contract killing and then not following through with it. Essentially, they're punishing someone for not committing murder.

The person behind the deal was a 21-year-old who wanted to kill the 17-year-old who had rebuffed his romantic advances but apparently lacked the nerve to go through with it himself. Instead, he offered 60,000 kroner, or about $8,000—along with some knives—to a friend, who agreed to perform the murder, but then apparently kept delaying it, until it became clear he wasn't going to do it.

Records show the "principal" badgering his would-be assassin over SMS, sending texts (in Norwegian) like, "Why's he still alive??? Can't you do your job!!!" "He should have been killed!!! Quit making excuses. Why the hell isn't it done?"

It can take some doing to figure out how to charge criminals with crimes against other criminals, but the law often finds a way. In 2010, a North Carolina man was sentenced to 24 years for defrauding a drug dealer. But in that instance, the crime involved making counterfeit money and illegal possession of a firearm. Perhaps a more similar case was that of Bill Simon Jr., a California politician who mishandled a drug dealer's investments and was sued by the dealer. A jury ruled in the plaintiff's favor, and told Simon to pay $78 million, but that jury's ruling was eventually overturned.

According to the Varden article, the Norwegian would-be Léon eventually said he could only beat up the 17-year-old, but that he knew someone who would do the job for an additional $5,000. Vestfold-Telemark District Attorney Per Halsborg said that the man didn't just get cold feet, but deliberately entered into a contract under false pretenses, and is therefore guilty of fraud.

That wouldn't pass muster under British Common Law, where such a contract would be termed an "illegal agreement," and typically both parties would be considered in " pari delicto," or equally at fault. There are circumstances where an illegal contract might be honored, such as when there's a formal contract, and the "impact of forfeiture outweighs illegality." You can see that it gets pretty murky.

What's not murky is that it's illegal to hire a hit man no matter where you are, and the 21-year-old was found guilty of attempted conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to two years in prison.

The fine that the would-be contract killer was hit with, according to a story in Sunnmørsposten,was 10,000 kroner, or just over $1,200.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Rehtaeh Parsons. Photo via Facebook

A Nova Scotia man who texted a photo that showed him penetrating a 15-year-old girl and flashing a thumbs-up while she vomited won't see the inside of a jail anytime soon. Instead, today a judge sentenced the man to 12 months probation.

The girl in the photo, Rehtaeh Parsons, faced vicious slut-shaming and harassment as a result of the photo. She later locked herself in a bathroom and attempted suicide. Her parents took her off life support three days later. She was 17 when she died.

Until recently, Parsons' name was smothered by a publication ban as she was underage when the photo was taken, and thus it qualified as child pornography. Her parents lobbied NS Justice Minister Lena Diab to lift the ban so her story could be publicized. In December, Diab removed the ban on the condition that Rehtaeh's name is respected. The young man who posed for the photo was also underage at the time. His name is still covered by the ban.

VICE Canada respected the ban while it was in place. You can read our previous coverage of the court case here and here.

Today, Rehtaeh's mother Leah Parsons said she was relieved the ban was lifted. "This morning when I started to get ready, that was the first kind of big relief I felt off my shoulders," she said. "I thought, 'Oh, today I don't have to remind people, I don't have to send out a notice to say her name today, we're actually allowed to say her name.' That was very debilitating. It's a relief."

During the sentencing hearing, the courtroom was packed with reporters tweeting Rehtaeh's name.

"Her voice was not heard when she struggled to be heard, but it sure is now," Leah Parsons told the court during her victim impact statement. "I was unable to console her as she crumbled emotionally after that photo was taken."

The man who appeared in the photo "displayed absolutely no respect" for Rehtaeh, judge Gregory Lenehan said in his ruling. "Ms. Parsons was treated as no more than a prop for his enjoyment."

In November, Lenehan handed a second young man, who snapped the photo, a conditional discharge. At today's sentencing, he said posing for the "sexually degrading" photo and texting it to two people warranted a harsher penalty.

"You lit the wild fire, so to speak, and it got completely out of control," judge Lenehan said to the man who appeared in the photo.

The young man cried when he first heard Rehtaeh died. "You should have been crying when she was alive," the judge told him.

When given a chance to speak Thursday, the man who posed for the photo said, "I have already apologized to Rehtaeh a few days after the picture was sent." He said he would like to apologize to her parents through his lawyer.

"This has had a huge negative impact on me," he said. He was bullied as a result of the photo, his lawyer told the court.

"Humans make mistakes," said the young man, who turned 20 yesterday. "I will not live with the guilt of someone passing away, but I will live with the guilt of the photo."

He said he hadn't failed Rehtaeh, but the justice system had failed her.

"This will be a life sentence for me," he concluded. "I am truly sorry."

Listing mitigating factors in the case, his lawyer said the man became well known after Anonymous activists in Halifax publicized his name. As a result, "he has to likely move away."

Following the sentencing, members of Halifax anonymous wearing Guy Fawkes masks yelled inaudibly at the young man's supporters as they left the courthouse.

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Two Anonymous protesters and Ivan Herritt, supporting Rehtaeh Parsons and her family at the Nova Scotia courthouse. Photo by Hilary Beaumont

Ivan Herritt, who showed up to support Rehtaeh's family and wore an Anonymous-branded hoodie but said he wasn't part of the group, said the court decision was "absolutely disgusting."

"That kid pled guilty to having sex with her while she was vomiting out a window," he said. "Where's the consent? Where's the rape charge? How do you give consent when you are vomiting out of a window?

"The public had the right to know who the creeps are amongst them. Everybody has a right to know, in all honesty, even a young offender. And now he's not a young offender, so everyone should know who he is. Do you want to send your child to school with him? Would you trust your family members to be around him in a public spot? No. So the public has a right to know who these rapists are, who these sexual deviants are. I'm proud of Anonymous for doing what they did."

Now that the court case is over, former Ontario chief prosecutor Murray Segal is free to conduct his independent review of how police handled Rehtaeh's case. Leah Parsons said she planned to meet with Segal as soon as he's back in town.

"We've been waiting for [the review] more so than we've been waiting for the sentencing results," Parsons said. "We are curious and we've been wondering for three years now what are in those reports and what are the reasons that nothing was done when it should have been done and why no sexual assault charges. We look forward to seeing what the results are of the review."

Follow Hilary on Twitter.

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Moving into the mountains is starting to look a lot more desirable now that we know you're less likely to get lung cancer there. Photo by Flickr user Ian BC North

Just about everything will give you cancer these days. The condoms you're using? Cancer. That plastic water bottle you're drinking from? Cancer. Your shampoo, your makeup, your household cleaning products? Cancer, cancer, cancer. It seems like the only pure, non-carcinogenic thing left in the world is the very air we breathe.

But no, not even the air is safe. All that oxygen you're inhaling is slowly poisoning you, according to a new study published in the journal PeerJ that links higher oxygen levels to incidences of lung cancer.

When oxygen metabolizes inside your body, it creates a byproduct called "reactive oxygen species," or ROS, and too much of it can result in damage to your cells and damage, DNA damage, and something called lipid peroxidation (for a sciencier explanation, see here). It can also contribute to the formation of tumors.

At higher altitudes there's less oxygen in the air, of course, which is why athletes who aren't used to it have a hard time competing in those environments. The PeerJ researchers analyzed the incidence of cancer in 250 counties in the United States with varying altitudes—and lung cancer, they found, was negatively correlated with elevation. For every kilometer above sea level, lung cancer incidents decreased by 7.23 per 1,000 individuals. That's significant.

They drew these conclusions after controlling for other factors that contribute to lung cancer—smoking, obesity, exposure to radon—and other factors that are influenced by elevation, like exposure to sunlight and pollution. They also studied the effect of elevation on the three other most common types of cancer—breast, colorectal, and prostate—and found that it was only lung cancer that was significantly affected by oxygen levels. That last bit suggests that it's the process of inhaling oxygen, not just being in a higher altitude, that's carcinogenic.

So, what does it mean? As the study puts it, "Were the entire United States situated at the elevation of San Juan County, Colorado (3,473 meters), we estimate 65,496 fewer new lung cancer cases would arise per year."

Time to run for the hills? Kamen Simeonov, one of the study's co-authors, told me that "people shouldn't be making life decisions based off this research," since all they've established so far is that "there's a trend with lung cancer and elevation, and it's atmospherically dependent." But if you're one of those people who religiously avoids all known carcinogens, then maybe it's worth considering a house upon a hill (as long as it's not in a city, because the polluted air there will give you cancer too.)

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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Artwork by Sam Taylor

This article first appeared on VICE UK

People need to back the fuck up and leave Bruce Jenner alone. Go to any newsstand across America right now and you'll be able to buy a copy of InTouch magazine with Bruce on its cover, photoshopped to look like a woman. I say photoshop—it looks more like it was done in MS Paint. They've basically taken his head and superimposed it onto Stephanie Beecham, who used to be in Dynasty. I mean, how fucking rude? They could have at least chosen Joan Collins.

Kris Jenner is "outraged," if you believe the gossip all this gossip has generated. A "source" that's "close to the family" told TMZ that Kris "has contempt for the magazine jumping to conclusions and then altering the image to fit its story." It's a pretty extraordinary thing for a magazine to do—even for a shitty tabloid, to a reality TV star—but it's the culmination of a wider media harassment against Bruce based on nothing more than the way he looks. Look, everyone! Long hair! Pink nails! What a pansy! What a freak!

This harassment has been going on for years now. It's so offensive that it's hard to imagine it happening to pretty much any other person in the public eye, but the fact that Bruce is part of a family that thrives on gossip and publicity means we've allowed it to go way too far. It's the awful, "Well, he agreed to appear on a huge reality show, so he asked for this," argument. He might court publicity, but he certainly didn't court—or deserve—this.

This isn't your usual celebrity gossip. This isn't a tabloid commenting on a publicity-hungry celebrity's weight in a mutually beneficial, unspoken arrangement that helps said celebrity sell more weight-loss books when the time comes. This isn't plain old whispers about who's fucking who—the sort of thing that folks like the Kardashian Klan actually might not mind you whispering about.

No. This is pure bullying. It is looking at someone else, seeing that they are different and then pointing at them and laughing. It's transphobia, on the cover of a gossip magazine that sells nearly 400,000 copies a week.

Look, I get it. Gender incongruence can be funny. I laughed along when people said Bieber looked like a lesbian. He did—a really cute lesbian called Justine. Ha ha. Good one. And yes, lots of men do look rather ridiculous when they dress up as women for fun—which seems to be all the frikkin' time here in the UK. Seriously, it's a national pastime.

So, if seeing someone who doesn't quite meet your gender expectations is really scary, confusing or hilarious for you, don't worry. I won't judge you. After all, what could be funnier than a man wearing pink nail varnish? Something like that could keep an intelligent human being laughing for days.

But – and sorry to put you on a downer here—I can't help thinking about Leelah Alcorn, the transgender teen who took her own life just a fortnight ago. Do you have any idea how fucking depressing it is looking for people like yourself in public life when you are trans? And seeing the constant barrage of bullshit they have to put up with? The stupid questions, the jokes about their appearance, the relentless, merciless need to point and laugh?

Some people are outraged by the cover, but they're outraged in the wrong way if you ask me. You know it shouldn't actually be offensive for a man to be made to look like a woman. The idea that femininity is humiliating is pretty offensive to women, to be quite honest. And feminine men. So don't be mad because InTouch "humiliated" Bruce by making him look like a woman. Be mad because they completely and utterly trounced his right to self-determination.

If Bruce Jenner is a woman inside, she will be frightened, hurting and tired, frankly, of a lifetime spent trying to please other people's gender expectations.

How could someone as masculine as Bruce be a woman inside, though? That's the question many people are asking. Bruce is a sports hero. An Olympian. He's the patriarch to a huge brood. He wrote a book called Bruce Jenner: Finding the Champion Within back in the 70s. But what if that champion is a woman?

I don't want to join in the is-he-or-isn't-he game, but what if he is, in fact, planning on transitioning? Yes, there are signs he may—not least those reports that he has undergone surgery to remove his Adam's apple. But until Bruce makes a public statement that's a little more emphatic than pink nails, that's really none of our business.

There was a time when tabloids obsessed over who was and wasn't gay. It still happens, of course, but it's not quite as crazed as it once was. Take the Daily Mail's coverage of Kirsten Stewart's New Year's break. It implies she's a lesbian, but christ, does anyone really care anymore?

Trans people are awesome, but we're also a pretty vulnerable bunch. And guess when we are at our most vulnerable? During that fucking horrendous period right before, during and just after you take the decision to transition from one gender to another. This is also the time that you are more likely to a) experience huge relationship difficulties, b) get dumped by your family and c) have a load of shit thrown at you at work. LOL.

If you're a regular person this may well also be the moment that a pack of journalists start pestering you, but that's nothing compared to the pressure someone who is already in the public eye will feel. Look at Christine Penner, for fuck's sake.

If Bruce is a woman inside, she will be frightened, hurting, and tired, frankly, of a lifetime spent trying to please other people's gender expectations. If the gossip press wants to make money out of Bruce's identity, I suggest that, on a purely cynical level, it backs off and waits to see how he chooses to identify. In his own time.

If anything happens to Bruce, if he is trans and became, one day, another name on the already outrageously high number of trans people who take their own lives, every media outlet that has harassed him over the last few years will have blood on its hands.

A suicide might sell magazines for a few weeks, but you can't keep reporting on someone's nail colour, week-in-week-out, if they're dead.

Follow Paris on Twitter.

[body_image width='800' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='pay-my-own-fun-body-image-1421337435.jpg' id='18403']McQ skirt and Honour Skirt

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLOTTE RUTHERFORD
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Make-up and nails: Daisy Harris-d'Andel using Mac Cosmetics
Hair: Sharmaine Cox
Stylist's assistants: Thomas Ramshaw and Rachel Williamson
Set design and props: Marisha Green
Model: Hilda at NEXT Models

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Billionaire Boys Club shirt

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Honour dress, Office shoes

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McQ suit

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John Lewis pyjamas

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Honour dress

[body_image width='800' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='pay-my-own-fun-body-image-1421338627.jpg' id='18425']Billionaire Boys Club shirt and Honour stockings

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Anglomania shirt and Alexander Wang skirt from Harvey Nichols

Cipriano Chianese, a reported mastermind of Southern Italian waste rackets. Illustrations by Jacob Everett

My homeland was called Campania Felix, or "Blessed Campania," by the ancient Romans, who felt the heavens had smiled on the region by giving it a mild climate, fertile soil, and magnificent scenery. Then the land committed suicide in a dramatic fashion—by taking poison. Campania's fruits and vegetables gave way to an illegal economy of waste—much of it toxic—that is burned out in the fields or buried beneath them. Wine grapes, apples, peaches, and almonds were destroyed to make room for illicit landfills. A new word was born— biocidio, or "biocide"—to refer to the extermination of the environment.

Campania Felix has become the "Land of Fires," as it is popularly known. When people travel here, they see continual columns of smoke and flames, signs of the garbage that is torched in the countryside. They are like the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who baptized the archipelago off of South America "Tierra del Fuego" because of fires along the coast that he spotted from his ship. If you look around while driving on the highway between Nola and Villa Literno or on the road from Giugliano to Acerra, you will see smoke rising from the ground on all sides. Lower the window and you'll breathe in an acrid scent that sears the throat and coats the mouth in a sour film. It's an odor and taste you'll never get used to.

How could this happen? How was it possible to bury so much toxic waste that it became difficult, if not outright impossible, to make the soil arable again?

For 30 years various companies from Northern Italy have contracted out the disposal of their waste to apparently legal firms that are actually run by the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. These firms are able to give enormous discounts to their clients, which, in the region's current economic situation, can mean the difference between the survival and failure of a venture.

According to the Anti-Mafia District Directorate of Naples, Italian stakeholders (the middlemen between industrial waste producers and disposal companies) in 2004 were able to guarantee that 800 tons of hydrocarbon-contaminated soil, property of a chemical company, would be disposed of for the price of 25 cents per kilo, transport included. That's an 80 percent discount on normal prices, made possible by a variety of cut corners. Though the companies that use these methods are guilty of despoiling the land, they are legally protected because their fixers produce what appears to be legal documentation showing the waste cycle has been respected.

The mob magically transforms loads of toxic waste into innocuous garbage that can be sent to landfills by doctoring waybills, or packing slips. It works like this. Each barrel of industrial sewage is accompanied by a document that states the level of toxicity of the substances. The companies that wish to save money turn to a middleman who ships the sludge to a storage center. There, all it takes is a simple stroke of the pen to modify the waybill so the contents of the load appear to be ordinary refuse. Another step taken at the storage centers to save money is mixing the toxic waste with harmless trash to dilute the concentration of toxins and lower its classification in the European Waste Catalogue's scale of hazardous wastes.

The cost-conscious middlemen also have a more obviously criminal way to dispose of the trash: combustion. They burn tires, clothes, plastics, and copper cables lined with insulation. They stack pyres with every kind of waste imaginable. By incinerating it, they decrease its mass and mix the ashes into the soil.

The land here is simply thought of as space—space to fill, space to profit. In Southern Italy, particularly in Campania, it's common to see parking lots piled high with garbage. The first thought many visitors have is that the residents are uncivilized, since, instead of recycling their trash or collecting it in a dumpster, they haul it to the roadside, making a shameful spectacle of themselves and their homeland. Nothing could be further from the truth. These parking lots are—for the companies run by the Mafia—simply space, acreages in which to dump garbage. All this is the opposite of primitive—it's the invention of organized crime and an extremely clever way of making profit.

It's also a sign of the disaster's final, most troubling stage. The garbage is no longer identifiable, circumscribable. It has invaded everywhere, penetrating even the soil. The waste has invaded our lives and entered our very bodies. It grows until it starts to take over, to subsume us, so that even the everyday waste cycle is affected. Just ask the inhabitants of Naples, where, a few years ago, judges ordered the closing of landfills outside the city because of the illegal refuse dumped there, causing a garbage crisis in which the city was practically buried under its own trash.

***

How did we get here? How did this rich agricultural land become a cemetery for trash? Tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, chicory, cauliflower, fava beans, bell peppers, oranges, mandarins, apples, pears—Campania was a bounty for all these crops. Then the large food distributors started to pay farmers smaller and smaller amounts for their produce. If the growers didn't accept the low prices, they risked losing their business entirely, as the fruit could be bought abroad, from Libya, Greece, or Spain.

When agriculture ceased to be the primary source of income for local farmers, they began to sell or rent portions of their land to companies for the illegal disposal of waste. The growers stay afloat with that money, using it to maintain their crops because they have been deceived with assurances that the waste is not pernicious. They quickly learn this isn't the case. In fact the waste often consists of dioxins and a variety of toxic solvents that either destroy entire harvests or poison the produce that manages to grow there, which, in the long run, becomes dangerous to those who eat it. According to the Italian National Institute of Health, the fruits of the land and the acrid smoke blanketing it have contributed to much higher rates of illness and mortality than those elsewhere in Italy. Studies have shown the area has a significantly higher incidence of birth defects, leukemia, soft-tissue sarcoma, and cancer of the liver, stomach, kidneys, and lungs. Local politicians are so complicit in this matter that it seems impossible they haven't been brought to court, but history will be their judge.

Equal to the physical devastation of the pollution is the perception it's created. People believe that everything here is poisoned. In Italy, all of Campania's products—from the strawberries to the tomatoes, from the world-famous mozzarella to the apples unique to this region—are considered polluted and compromised. Simply tracing the origins of the product or labeling it as "organic" and healthy is no longer enough to save the Neapolitan agricultural economy. Now specific, detailed information must be given to dispel any doubts. A label has to explicitly state that the product comes from unpolluted land, from healthy soil, and give the address of the farm. Frequently, Campania's produce is grouped together in the supermarkets and sold at low cost, while signs nearby boast that this or that product is not from campania.

When this happens, the Camorra's illegal economy benefits even further. As Campanian products become unsalable, they are handed over to the black market. Contaminated produce is mixed with safe goods and brought to fruit and vegetable vendors often run by the mob, according to federal investigations in the Lazio region and Milan. Secretly, wholesalers covet these goods because they can buy them cheaply and resell them for higher prices as products from Northern Italy, even stamping them with the prized label of not from campania.

I have always been struck by the story told by a member of the Esposito clan turned state informant. It clearly reveals the reasoning of criminal organizations. This man recounted that one time, during a meeting about the Camorra's waste trafficking, a boss—perhaps overcome with a guilty conscience for a moment—noted: "If we bury the waste that deep, we risk contaminating the aquifers." The don quickly responded: "And what the fuck do we care?! We drink mineral water!"

Farming and pasture land, in a region known for its tourism and its beauty, is systematically being poisoned in broad daylight. This is taking place before the eyes of residents who have become convinced that reform is impossible. All that is left is the cowardly pleasure of wanting to destroy things rather than change them in hopes of a new and marvelous world that will never arrive. And in the name of this new world, everyday life has been made into an unlivable hell. Robert Musil describes this mechanism well in the novel The Man Without Qualities. It is the "unspeakable enjoyment"—that, I would say, many of us experience—"of the spectacle of how the good can be humiliated, and how wonderfully easily it can be destroyed."

Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler

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Photo of Shane Ward via YouTube.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

If you're lonely and need someone to talk to, or if somehow you cannot find it in your heart to forget the 2005 winner of the second season of The X Factor, I have a great deal for you. Shayne Ward, of eponymous Shayne Ward 2006 album fame, is available to talk to you on Skype for ten minutes, for the price of $75.

News of Shayne's descent has served as backhanded press for his new album, called Closer, to be released this coming April. He's crowdfunding it through a site called PledgeMusic where, for $170, you can buy Shayne's cardigan by a brand called "Izzue," for $7,600 you can have a private Shayne show, and for $75 you can purchase those ten sexy minutes on Skype.

It's a troubling career move for the man who had the UK's third-fastest selling single of all time, That's My Goal, which stayed in the charts a full 21 weeks. (Nope, me neither.) PledgeMusic, for all the independence it grants artists, marks a curious new level of licensed privacy invasion, with celebrities selling their time, their phone numbers, and levels of access in the manner of camgirls. With auctions for clothes, pictures, and the space in his album liner notes, it's hard not to think that Shayne Ward's star has crashed to earth and he's selling off pieces of the rubble.

Then again, Ward has always belonged, in a sense, to the public, as with any product of a TV talent show. In his first appearance on X Factor back in 2005, he's a 20-year-old shop assistant wearing baggy bleached denim and giant cubic zirconia earrings. "I like the fact that you don't look stage school," says Simon, smelling the possibility of money. "You look real."

It's a gorgeously creepy thing to tell one of the earlier stars of reality TV. Ward was blandly agreeable as the X Factor's second winner, a crewcut-topped, silky-voiced vision of generic masculinity groomed to triumph over Andy Abraham. It was acknowledged from the start that he would trade on his looks, hamming it up in a succession of topless calendar shoots which remain in production to this day (it's not too late, readers—2015's calendar features Ward in a wet T-shirt!).

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Ward forever treads the line between Mancunian-next-door and campy, oiled-up Adonis, catering to young gay men and straight women as well as their mothers. In pictures he is forever pulling his clothes off, or inexplicably getting them wet. In some, Ward's shirt and jumper appear to have been awkwardly photoshopped back on again, while in others he is drowning in knitwear.

He served as an early prototype for the peculiar brand of twee male objectification allowed for in TV talent shows: Matt Cardle, Gareth Gates, Will Young, Jedward, Joe McElderry... a succession of inoffensive boys who ran succinctly alongside the show's female "divas." The line reaches its apex in Harry Styles, and its nadir in Frankie Cocozza (who's a delight on Twitter, by the way).

Many of these TV boy-men have since vanished. Where do you go after you've sold your life's story by way of introduction, after you've given away, as Louis Walsh put it, "one million percent"? It's as if we knew from the start that Shayne and his ilk were one-trick acts, indulging them as Christmas number ones with seasonal goodwill.

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None of the X-Factor's stars ever tried to keep their lives secret from the press: they gave their stories away early, accelerating the process of getting to know them. Before reality TV we were allowed to grow up with pop stars and follow them from their inception on crappy soaps or children's daytime TV to international stardom. The X Factor, along with its precursor Popstars, condensed this process into short, hyper-emotional TV cycles, sealing the deal with the overpriced phone call you inevitably made to vote.

We'd grow tired of their products similarly quickly, leaving former stars relying on overpriced Skype calls to get by. X Factor has bred so many lower-tier celebrities that no tabloid can contain them. Perhaps Ward owes it to his fans to remain accessible, and perhaps we owe it to him to pay for his too-tight designer shirts.

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Photo of Simon Cowell via Wiki Commons

Dissent in the X Factor ranks is minimal, even long after their fame fades and Simon Cowell's Syco label drops them. Even after he was excluded from X Factor's ten year reunion show along with Leon Jackson, Matt Cardle, and Series 1 winner Steve Brookstein, Ward claimed that he was "not bitter." Brookstein only voiced his complaints a decade later in his book, Getting Over the X, which sold with a quote printed on the cover from Max Clifford: "Talk to the press and we'll bury you." He has since taken to Twitter to attack Louis Tomlinson and his legion of rabid fans, as if leveraging the public's X Factor bitterness into a surrogate career.

For all the ups and downs of his career, Ward appears to have remained a good egg. Last year was a busy one for him: He turned 30, posed for his calendar and Attitude magazine, recorded an album due for release this year, and starred in a stage production of War of the Worlds alongside Brian McFadden and Jason Donovan. In September he judged a girl band contest in Manchester, where he was billed in a newspaper as "Ex Factor"'s Shayne Ward.

Shayne Ward's Twitter profile has a blue verified tick and 262k followers. Even if only a fraction of that figure are hardcore, he retains a steady fan base. PledgeMusic, the "Direct-to-Fanplatform" facilitating his Skype calls and wardrobe sale, crowdfunds artists without retaining rights to their music. Its list of alumni and current users is bafflingly varied, ranging from Peter Andre to Erasure to Stiff Little Fingers to LCD Soundsystem. They claim a 90 percent success rate.

Maybe it's not so ignoble a fate, to sell your time in ten minute increments. Maybe Ward is just one facet of modern celebrity, where it's acceptable to crowdfund a tour and weather the criticism, or blithely practice the "art of asking" more than you practice your actual songs. Music has regressed into a form of high-profile busking: it's needy, but commendably independent at the same time. Beyonce even nods to her past in TV talent shows at the beginning of "Flawless," if only to stamp all over it later with a hymn to her own power.

Whether a celebrity selling their time on Skype a sign of humility, or one last hubristic act of delusion, it's hard to grudge them a certain pragmatism. Ward always had the ear of the public, and he still does today. It just happens to be one ear at a time now.

Follow Roisin on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='323' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-sex-789-body-image-1421420603.jpg' id='18745']Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

In the last year, I have received a blowjob from a machine, wore a spandex diaper to a strip club, slept with a dude I met on Instagram, and fucked at least 14 guys I met on Grindr. Yet somehow, according to sex experts my love life is about to get even better in 2015 and beyond, largely thanks to sexy robots and more apps devoted to getting people laid.

Citing the Future of Employment, a 2013 study stating that robots will replace half of all jobs in the next ten to 20 years, Robin Elenga, the founder and CEO of robotic sex toy company Revel Body, believes sex toys will eventually become robotic sex toy partners. He believes we are increasingly using robots for all sorts of things because they're "better at performing tasks than humans."

"Roomba has already sold over 10 million housecleaning robots—the age of robots is here," she said. "New materials, sensors, motors, and software will continue to evolve to make sex with machines more appealing to the masses."

A recent Newsweek feature explored how entrepreneurs have already laid the foundation for robotic fuck buddies. Female dolls with "fixed or removable" vaginas go for $5,000 to $8,000, and a chess champion and artificial intelligence fanatic named David Levy wants to embed sex dolls with "I-Friend," a software program that adds "emotions, personality, and moods" to the dolls. Many smaller technological advances have already begun to affect both ordinary masturbators as well as porn stars and sex workers whose job is to help Americans bust their nuts. Over just the last few years free porn has become readily available to anyone who wants it, and you can get a hummer from a robot for around $180. The days of DVDs and prostitutes are rapidly fading away. It's a brave new world.

"I think we can all agree that the internet seriously changed the game," porn star Carter Cruise told me in an email. "And by that I mean it could possibly be the most important thing to ever happen to mankind, besides, like, the invention of pizza."

"It's not exactly robots... But I mean, sexting with porn stars is probably the next big thing."– Sydney Leathers

To combat the lost income, adult actors and companies have started to make their own technological advances. Porn company Naughty America, for example, has released the Dreamlover app, which allows users to pay to sext porn stars. One of the participating stars, Sydney Leathers (Anthony Weiner's infamous sexting partner), describes the app, along with Skype sessions, as an easy way for her to make extra money. (Full disclosure: Sydney lived with me for a week for a previous article, and we have since become close friends.) She sets her own price, which men pay to text or talk on the phone with her.

"It's not exactly robots," Sydney said. "But I mean, sexting with porn stars is probably the next big thing."

Sending porn stars sexy texts and fucking robots may sound edgy today, but just ten years ago most Americans viewed online dating sites and setting up anonymous hook-ups through the web as an icky fringe movement. Today, even straight people find random sex through their iPhones.

"I don't really think [sexting is] different than flirting. It's just a different medium and not in person," Sydney said. "I don't think it's bad, and I think it makes more sense to be open about it now than, you know, really hush-hush and ashamed of things like in the past. I think it's probably a healthier way to deal with things."

But what if all this robot fuckery and smartphone nonsense leads to a sexy Terminator situation where our automated lovers rise up and commit mass genocide against the human race? Could our slutty ambitions for the future lead to armageddon? I asked Sydney.

"Only if you could get AIDS through a text," she said. "That would be terrible."

Thankfully, technological advances have begun to better sex education and STI prevention methods. New York entrepreneur Josh Rosenberg has founded a company called Porn Star Sex Life that makes videos of porn stars explaining sex. He hires entertainers with medical backgrounds and big personalities to teach online tutorials people pay to watch. In a recent video, Alexa Aimes, who has a nursing degree, teaches viewers the science behind squirting. Teens are already online watching porn, the thinking goes, so instead of learning about sex from unrealistic San Fernando Valley videos, hopefully they will stumble across the Porn Star Sex Life films and learn how intercourse actually works.[body_image width='640' height='448' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-sex-789-body-image-1421420626.jpg' id='18747']

This advance coincides with the widening use of Truvada in gay communities. The medication, also known as PREP, prevents users from contracting HIV. According to the Center for Disease Control, the drug can prevent the risk of infection in high-risk patients by up 92 percent. Michael Lucas, a Russian gay porn star turned Zionist, has been outspoken in promoting Truvada in the gay community. He believes the medication will decrease the anxiety surrounding HIV and AIDS in the gay community.

"[Truvada's] given me piece of mind," Lucas said. "I used to be incredibly, very, very worried that I would become HIV positive. And that's definitely something to do with people of my generation [who came of age] through the disaster of the 80s and 90s. I was always living with fear, with this horror that I would be tested and I would test positive."

The medication has also affected Lucas's sex life. "I do not have to have sex with a condom with my boyfriend, who is HIV positive," he said. "That is very, very important because I believe that a condom is not the most pleasant thing. It derives you from pleasure, and it derives you from intimacy. I personally don't know anyone who would prefer to have sex with condoms."

Some gays disagree with Lucas's stance. Michael Weinstein, the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, told USA Today, "If something comes along that's better than condoms, I'm all for it, but Truvada is not that... Let's be honest: It's a party drug."

In Weinstein and other older gay men's eyes, younger people are using Truvada instead of condoms as an excuse to have promiscuous unsafe sex. Lucas and other Truvada advocates have disagreed with this sentiment, because it's common for people to "slip" with their condom usage.

"[Weinstein's] an asshole in general, and there are way too many reasons for that. Why would the person who lived through HIV [criticize Truvada]?" Lucas asked me. "So many millions of people wouldn't have died if [Truvada existed in the 80s]."

Other sex work insiders I spoke to described the change in sexual health and porn as part of the society-wide disruption caused by the internet. In an email Carter Cruise described how the internet has caused upheaval in her industry, creating gateways for anyone to become a porn performer while killing jobs. This forces performers to find more creative ways to make money, but has also coincided with a rise in diversity in porn.

"Today people want anything BUT basic," Cruise wrote. "By throwing out the business models and personas of the past, we can also begin to throw out the stigmas, restrictions, and outdated perceptions of being a sexual woman. We are proving that a woman can be sexual as well as smart, talented, and poised: the true definition of the modern woman."

Whether we're making love to robots, and whether we're using condoms when we do so, in ten years, our motives will probably remain the same. We'll continue to try to fill whatever voids we have in our lives by getting it on. We may do that by putting our junk in machines or living with multiple partners, but at our core we'll still be searching for orgasms and love. In the future, we'll just be able to do it in more user-friendly ways without worrying about the moral judgements of a less plugged-in generation.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

Every January, the town of Kastoria in Northern Greece experiences its own version of Halloween. Ragoutsaria is a three-day carnival during which people dress up as animals or the opposite sex and then drink and dance in the streets till the early hours of the morning.

Ragoutsaria is said to have its roots in an ancient Dionysian ritual—the Rural Dionysia, which would take place in Attica after the feast of the Nativity of the Sun, on December 25. It is assumed that its name comes from the Latin word rogatores, which means "beggars," because those in costume tour the village and knocked on people's doors to ask for treats in exchange for scaring away the evil spirits. If the spirits are successfully driven away, then the year's crop is expected to be fruitful.

And so this year, on January 6 and 7 people of all ages took to the streets of Kastoria with a bottle of wine or raki in hand. Some were holding signs with slogans referring to the upcoming elections in Greece, while others wore "Je suis Charlie" pins. Everyone danced and sang together to the sounds of the many brass bands until their feet were covered in blisters.

On the third and last day of Ragoutsaria, those who were still standing marched noisily on the streets of the town along with students from local schools. But I was already in bed nursing my hangover.

-Maria Louka

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Staples Mill Road Baptist Church[body_image width='1000' height='650' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='cry-baby-of-the-week-mill-road-baptist-school-bus-pentagram-lights114-body-image-1421343431.jpg' id='18454']

Screencaps via KFOR and Google Maps

The incident: A woman delayed marrying her fiancé.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: She claims she was fired for being pregnant and unmarried.

Up until earlier this week, 21-year-old Apryl Kellam had worked at the daycare center of Staples Mill Road Baptist Church in Henrico County, Virginia.

Kellam says that she received a call on Monday telling her she was fired, and she apparently thinks the reason she was let go was because she was not married to her fiancé. "I was told, 'You are not Christian if you decide to keep taking your life this way,'" she said to the Daily Mail.

According to Kellam, she had been warned several times over the course of her employment that she would either need to marry her fiancé, or announce a date on which they intended to marry.

Kellam lives with her fiancé James Coalson and their children from previous relationships. She is also expecting another baby in April. She said that she the couple intends to get married eventually, but didn't want to set a date until they could afford a large wedding. "I want to wait until we can have all our family and friends there and have a big wedding," she told local news station KFOR. "I just don't want to go to the courthouse and have someone marry us."

KFOR spoke to James Booth, the pastor of the church, and he denied that Kellam had only been fired for not being married, but went on to explain that employees are expected to sign an employee code of conduct when they start working at the church that lays out moral expectations for workers.

"People are calling us judgmental, but that's judgmental when they don't know us," James said, describing one of the many dangers of being judgmental.

"We're just following our personnel handbook which is rooted in our statement of faith and biblical beliefs," he added.

James did not specify who had authored the employee handbook.

Cry-Baby #2: Robyn Wilkins

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Screencaps via WMC Action News 5 and Google Maps

The incident: A woman thought she saw a pentagram in a brake light.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: She called her local news station because she thought it looked Satanic.

Last week, a woman named Robyn Wilkins was driving behind a school bus in Memphis, when she noticed that the brake lights resembled the shape of an upside-down star.

Wilkins snapped a photo of the brake lights, which you can see above, and sent it to her local news station, WMC Action News 5, complaining that the brake lights resembled a pentagram (which WMC Action News referred to as a "satanic symbol.")

Speaking to the station, Wilkins said, "Anyone who fears a god, if not God and Jesus Christ, should be outraged."

Pointing to the fact that Walgreens pulled some wrapping paper from stores last month after someone complained the pattern looked like swastikas, Wilkins asked, "Would we allow a swastika, for instance, to be on the back of the bus?" That's a provocative question!

The news station approached the bus company and the school to hear their side of the "story," but both declined to comment.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A guy who threatened to sue a paper if they printed his name vs. a guy who sued New York City because he fell off a bike

Winner: The name guy!!!

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on Twitter.

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Image via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In the late 90s, Russell T. Davies introduced gay sex to British TV not with grunt-y rutting or a sleazy blowjob scene, but with rimming.

As anyone who was a teenager then and stayed up to giddily watch Queer as Folk on their little bedroom TV will attest, the scene where Charlie Hunnam's character, 15-year-old Nathan, experiences the awakening of his life as Aidan Gillen's character, Stuart, puts his face between his glistening, softly-lit buttocks was—still is—one of the most exciting screen moments for a generation. Nathan's eyes bulged along with the rest of us.

Queer as Folk brought 3.5 million viewers to Channel 4, along with truckloads of complaints. But the excitement around Davies lead to the BBC giving him Doctor Who to rescue from fustiness and turn it, once again, into a primetime smash. Next week, Davies returns to to Channel 4 ("We wouldn't be Channel 4 if we weren't planning to lightly outrage the Daily Mail, says the channel's chief creative officer, Jay Hunt) and the gays with a new comedy drama about gay life in Manchester, which premiered at the Barbican last night. Only, we're not just getting a single show from Davies. We're getting a threesome.

A new series, Cucumber, will be on Channel 4 on Thursdays at 9 PM, followed by Banana—a collection of one-off stories from all sexualities and persuasions—at 10 PM on E4. Then there's Tofu, a set of short films about the lives and sexual escapades of "real people" that will run on Channel 4's website. Davies says a scientific study on the erection that divided the hard-on into four categories, from soft to hard—"One, tofu. Two, peeled banana. Three, banana. And four, cucumber" – was the inspiration behind the titles.

Queer as Folk was famous for breaking ground with its celebration of gay sex at a time of fierce campaigning to get the age of consent lowered from 18 to 16, but while Cucumber, Banana, Tofu may not be set to cause quite as much fuss (men can legally marry each other now), it's an ice bucket challenge of gayness (with a lot of sex and naked penises) at a time when gay lives are still, for the most part, a television wilderness. As Davies says on the phone from his Manchester home, "we still have a way to go."

VICE: Hi Russell. Fucking hell, Cucumber is good.
Russell T. Davies: That's the best response I think I've ever had. It is good, isn't it?

It's nice to be absolutely flooded with gayness because, apart from the soaps, gay TV in Britain is pretty lacking these days. Was that a big drive in making the series?
Well, from my point of view there are a lot more gay characters than there ever used to be. Don't forget, soap operas have the highest viewing figures every night in this country, and they have lots of gay characters. You can't bloody move for them. I'm 51 now, and remember the days when you wouldn't see a gay character in 365 days of television programming. Now, shows like Hollyoaks are full of them and gay presenters like Graham Norton, Alan Carr, and Paul O'Grady rule the roost. However, I know what you mean, and I do try and do my bit. You have to keep fighting.

Let's not forget that you're the man who made a bisexual superhero—Captain Jack—kiss Doctor Who on primetime children's television. When I was a kid, "gaylord" was a taunt that would have you running for the legs of a dinner lady. Now, kids might be bolting around the playground actually pretending to be a bisexual superhero.
Well, I've done a lot of protesting in my time. I've signed hundreds of petitions. Sometimes, throwing a brick at things works. But often a joke carries just as well as a brick does. If you can do these things with a sense of humor, with a lightness that sort of defies anyone to have a problem with it, great. Sometimes, when everyone is shouting, no one is listening. If you come into the middle and laugh, you're going to get somewhere. I think I've proved that. I've done that.

Have you heard about the uproar of the straight-washing of the Pride DVD in the US?
Yes! I was amazed.

Amazed, as in, horrified?
No, I actually found it funny. There are worse things in the world, to be honest, and it's not going to get me flying the torch. Sometimes the insistence of gayness can quite naturally turn an audience away because, if you showed me a drama about golf, or something, I just wouldn't be interested.

Right. Surely the fact that a film about the history of the gay fight can be brought to a wider audience that may have never chosen to watch it is a good thing.
Yes, I agree with that.

You're really punching us in the face with gay in Cucumber, Banana, Tofu, though, aren't you?
Well, if you get me talking, it's all gay, gay, gay all the time, because, quite simply, it's what fascinates me. It's what I love. It's why I'm writing. Going back to what you said about gay characters, though, it's true that you can scroll through 300 channels of an evening and not find a single one.

It feels like one of Cucumber's biggest strengths is how it's removing the other-ness of gay lives, too. It's just a load of friends going to the bar and being funny.
Exactly. It's just people getting on with life. It's about relationships and their break downs, about getting to know why people's lives are taking the paths that they are.

But you're also touching on how men of a certain age may have explored their sexuality when they were young compared to how young men do now. You've got a load of middle-aged men sitting around a pub table in one scene, talking about cumshots being shared on Grindr as a modern chat-up line.
Well, yes, and they're not even sitting in a gay bar. It's just a bar. Grindr is an interesting subject because, really, it's just a modern expression of what was always a subtext for men my age. You can get on a soapbox and talk about the commodification of sex, and there are merits to that, certainly. In later episodes a younger character uses Grindr and we explore all the problems that ensue, but, you know, these are the problems you'd have with any bad hookup. A bad hookup is a bad hookup. Equally, a great hookup is a great hookup, however it happens.

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Russell T Davies. Image via Tony Hassell

Right. Presumably, if a gay man has ever wanted a shag, he's found one. Grindr feels like a heightened version of what once was.
Yes, and it shows how inventive gay minds are that we'd build something like that. Where will we be with it all in 20 years? I have no idea. I dread to think. But Grindr isn't the mechanization of sex. It's a subtext of what we were always thinking.

Did you have any idea about the different stages of erections—tofu, banana, and then cucumber—before writing the show?
No! I'd never had that conversation with my friends. The world sees it as simply hard or soft. But there's a million sort of erections! I did think the titles that we chose could have been seen as a bit crude, a bit Carry On, but they're so accurate. I mean, we're talking about men, cocks, and erections, aren't we?

One of the stand-out scenes in the first episode of Cucumber is when the lead character Henry and all his mates are sitting in a taxi line, in the rain, and he goes off on this charged monologue about how Ryan Reynolds becomes gay when he wanks in front of a mirror.
Right, yes. Well, no matter who you fancy—no matter how handsome or beautiful the man—they must wank. It's true. Doesn't matter who it is, they've all got it out and had a wank in front of the mirror.

Do people still come up and ask you about Queer as Folk?
Less and less. But to this day I still can't believe we got away with it.

The rimming scene?
Yes! God. It was a very carefully selected scene, actually. It was a sexual experience that a young boy wouldn't have even imagined experiencing, because these kinds of visuals just weren't available back then. He would have sat in his bedroom wanking his head off thinking about men and sex and cumming, but probably would have never imagined being rimmed.

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Aiden Gillen and Charlie Hunnam in 'Queer as Follk'

I remember the lighting being really beautiful.
It was. It had to be. It couldn't just be fucking, because fucking can come across as cold, mechanical, and aggressive. The two men fucked later on, but this scene was so important. It was pivotal. And, if you watch it now, it hasn't dated. Every detail was gorgeous.

Now, though, a gay teenager will definitely know what rimming is. They'll have watched it on the internet.
Yes, if you talked to a young boy now, they're more likely to have seen it than not seen it. It's amazing really, because I'd have sat through anything to watch sexy gay men have sex! It's a bit heartbreaking.

What would you hope a young person watching Cucumber, Banana, or Tofu took from the shows?
Well, I'd like to think that, although a lot of strong thing happen in Cucumber, it's not there to shock. It's there to create a world full of great people who you'd want to spend an hour with, and then go and watch Banana and meet more people afterwards. There's no drug dealing. No one is sold as a sex slave. It's not judging anyone—even when their behavior is monstrous. It's saying: bad behavior is bad behavior. If you behave badly, you're bad as a man. Not because you're gay.

Do you hope it normalizes things more? Because we're obviously still living in a time where gay education is desperately needed. Same-sex sex education in schools, for example, appears to be abysmal.
I do hope it normalizes things, yes. But it's hard. I absolutely appreciate what you mean but I'm glad I never think like that when I'm writing. I don't think I've ever thought, I'm going to educate you now. I'm much more in the moment, sitting on the couch and contemplating, and believe that the end result can educate. Life is complicated for everyone—this is the point. It's just life, no matter what your choices are. I hope the shows provide a step away from polarization, a step away from the shouting. They're saying, "Come and have a laugh with us."

Follow Eleanor on Twitter.

Usually, when Jennifer McQuerrey Rhyne's truck pulls up to a property, it's the first time neighbors have seen any activity there in weeks.

Even though the decals on her hulking Tacoma read "www.wvmethcleanup.com"—literally spelling out why she is there—she becomes a magnet for anyone looking for information about the former proprietors of the meth cook sites she cleans for a living. Along with a bevy of shady characters, the business offers a window into the changing drug habits of rural, white America.

When I join her for a day on the job in December, Jennifer is standing outside a ground-floor apartment in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Though she hasn't suited up yet, her two associates, Heath Barnett and Joe MuQuerrey—her father—are already dressed head-to-toe in white chemical hazard suits, their faces buried in gas masks. They haul furniture from the apartment into the bed of Jennifer's truck. The door is ajar to reveal the checkerboard tile in the kitchen. Jennifer waits for the mother of the building owner to arrive with payment for the job.

A guy in a sweatpants and a hoodie tattered by cigarette burns approaches, mentioning the apartment's former tenant, a woman I'll call Rachel.

"She was into some bad stuff," he says. "She was advertising as an escort on a site called BackPages.com and was going all across the county."

Jennifer, 43 years old and about five feet tall with crimson-colored hair and a stud poking out of the upper right side of her lip, quietly absorbs the story. She's used to this. They come to her hoping to gather gossip, ease their worries, or collect debts.

"Over her time here, I loaned her over $1,000," the man says. "I heard she was at a rooming house in Bridgeport, but I was wondering if you knew anything."

"No, I don't know anything," Jennifer replies with a polite smile as she checks her phone.

"Well, I'd like to at least like to get my air mattress back," he says.

"I'm sorry but all this stuff has to go to the dump," Jennifer explains. "There's been a meth contamination here."

"Well, that figures," the guy says, wandering off.

It's because of encounters like this that Jennifer keeps a Ruger 380 in her truck. The gun usually stays there. Only once, in a run-down "apartment building full of tweakers" in Elkins, did she conceal it beneath her Hazmat-style suit as she cleaned.

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Photos by the author unless otherwise noted

This cook site in Clarksburg is a rarity in that it wasn't busted by the police. Rachel vanished and, after a rent check failed to materialize, the owner sent a maintenance man to check on her. He unlocked the door and found spoons and needles strewn across the living room and, in the basement, all the signs of amateur meth-making: salt, icepacks, Drano, and two-liter soda bottles with tubes sticking out of the tops.

"Once I called the police, they said to get out of there," the maintenance man, who declined to give his name, told me. "I started to get headaches and nausea."

It's not an uncommon scene in the Mountain State. Like rural populations all over the US, West Virginians are smoking a shit-ton of meth. Two years ago, 533 meth cook sites were uncovered in the state, though as of the end of November, 2014's numbers were down 40 percent, with just 290 reported busts compared to 500 at the same time a year earlier. Still, the drug is entrenched in this land of arch bridges and rolling hills, where the population density rarely reaches 500 people per square mile. Increasingly, West Virginia meth comes not from the makeshift labs of yore but a crude "shake and bake" process of packing cold medicine, anhydrous ammonia, water, and a reactive metal into a bottle to make a sludgy but effective product. It doesn't take Walter White to do this, and it makes it possible for a meth operation to be cloistered into a closet, a car trunk, or even a backpack.

No matter how large or small, once a cook site is busted, state law dictates it be " remediated" by a licensed company after police determine there is no immediate threat of an explosion. This has meant steady income for Jennifer's company, Affordable Clean Up, LLC, the only one in West Virginia dedicated solely to cleaning meth cook sites. (There are also general industrial cleaning companies that can be contracted for the job.) Since starting in 2012, they've cleaned about 20 sites a year. The average job rakes in $10,000, usually paid by a landlord or mortgage-holding bank.

This apartment in Clarksburg is netting Jennifer only a shade under four grand. She tested surfaces in each room with a kit and only three of them had enough meth residue to meet West Virginia's standard for contamination, 0.1 micrograms per 100 square centimeters. Then she filed paperwork with the state Department of Health and Human Resources and awaited an OK to clean, a process that can take weeks, much to the annoyance of landlords.

These owners "did the right thing," Jennifer says. "Most landlords would have just tossed everything and never said a word."

Jennifer is a landlord herself who's been flipping houses for nearly 20 years and has dozens of rental units across the state. It was in that capacity that she got the idea for this side business. She attended a seminar lead by an official from the state Department of Health and Human Service's Clandestine Drug Laboratory Remediation Program. He explained how to spot the signs of a lab and what the landlord is obligated to do when one emerges. It was one offhand comment in particular that stuck with her.

"He said, 'When I retire from the state, I'm going into [the decontamination] business,'" Jennifer recalls. "'I'll make a killing!'"

Jennifer had a business administration degree and was always looking for flexible forms of work as her daughter moved through adolescence. So why not clean up old meth labs?

She began researching the qualifications needed to tidy up after tweakers and recruited her father, a retired elementary school principal, and Heath, a maintenance man for her rentals. They moved through the trainings and certifications: a $350 class on handling hazardous materials, an $800 multi-day program on the risks of meth sites specifically, an annual $300 methamphetamine remediation license for the company and $50 yearly meth remediation technician certificates for each person on her crew. In West Virginia, you need all this to even walk through the door of a site after a meth bust.

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Despite this accreditation, the process of cleaning up a meth site is not all that complicated, chemically speaking. The solution Jennifer and her crew use is a mix of carpet cleaner, degreaser, and dish soap. Like the ingredients for meth itself, all that can be bought at Lowe's. They spray it onto every surface. "Then, we scrub the shit out of it," Jennifer says. It usually takes three sprays and scrubs before the residue is below the state standard.

That standard might be overly cautious. In 2009, the federal Environmental Protection Agency concluded that 1.5 µg/100 cm²—15 times the amount of meth residue allowed by West Virginia—was the threshold for health hazard and set that as its own recommended standard. But that's only a suggestion, and the laws of meth contamination are a patchwork from state to state. Minnesota, Kansas, Virginia, California, and other states use the EPA's recommendation. Some—like Nebraska, Washington, Alaska, and West Virginia—go by the harsh 0.1 µg/100 cm² standard, and several set it somewhere between.

All of these measurements are lighter than the weight of a single grain of rice, but between them is a difference of tens of thousands of dollars if a cook site is found on any given property.

Take for instance, an elderly woman whose home Jennifer cleaned. She lived with an adult grandson who cooked and smoked meth. By West Virginia's 0.1 µg/100 cm² standard, the whole house was contaminated. In addition to the hefty cost of the cleaning, everything she owned had to go to the dump.

"She lost everything, all her belongings she collected her entire life," Jennifer remembers. "I would petition the state to raise the level. I don't even care if I lose business. I've seen too many people pointlessly lose everything."

Anthony Turner is director of the West Virginia Department of Health's Clandestine Drug Laboratory Remediation Program. He's sympathetic to property owners, but tells me, "I'd rather err on the side of caution when it comes to public health. These are residential units where children might live."

Rachel's apartment yields only one truck load of tattered furniture for the dump. While Heath and Joe get lunch, Jennifer drives it there.

Just like the cleaning, the disposal of meth-contaminated stuff is surprisingly simple, albeit hampered by bureaucracy. Jennifer deposits everything she takes from a site at a municipal landfill, where it is buried, but first she has to photograph each item and file an accompanying form, all of which goes to the state.

After conferring with a few sanitation workers sitting in a trailer, she drives the truck to a set of metal dumpsters full of tires, stoves, bedframes, and five-gallon buckets. The place smells like gasoline and burned plastic.

Jennifer puts on gloves, photographs each item, and tosses it into a dumpster.

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"Ha, look at this," she says, grabbing a meth pipe from the bed of her truck. She hauls these around so often she doesn't know if it's from the Clarksburg apartment or leftover from another job. "I could have been driving around with this for weeks. I could have picked up my daughter from school with it." The bed is also littered with seashells—she found a basket of them at a cook site and it fell over in her truck.

We drive back into town. The houses are quaint, small and well kept, almost cottage-like. Plazas shine with signs for Dairy Queen, Little Caesar's, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Clarksburg is unpretentious Appalachia, and it doesn't resemble the burned out, boarded-up former factory towns ubiquitous to stories about "the meth scourge"—though two meth sites were busted in Clarksburg the week Jennifer and I drove through town.

Jennifer and her crew come in and view meth users' surroundings after they're busted or vanish. In other words, when they've hit rock bottom. Though she's seen a few places that resemble the drug dens of Breaking Bad , most, she says, look utterly normal. And that's what haunts her.

"There's religious stuff everywhere, Jesus posters and all that. We go into kids' rooms and see the usual SpongeBob sheets. I'd say the greatest myth is that meth heads live in filth. Most of these places are immaculate. Meth heads can stay up all night cleaning. They have the energy."

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Photo courtesy Affordable Clean Up, LLC

Beneath the surface in every case, there's evidence of hardcore drug use. It's almost a game when the three cleaners walk into a house to find the hidden syringes. They're under carpets or flood boards or sewn into mattresses. "We've found them in baby bottles," Jennifer says. "We found them in a hollowed-out Bible once."

"Where there are children involved, that's the worst part," offers Heath. "That affects me a little bit. Otherwise, it's just work." Kids live in 80 percent of the places they clean, he tells me.

Stories about meth often come with theories on why this particular drug has such a foothold in the boonies: Coke and heroin seem exotic and taboo. Meth helps with manual labor. Barns and remote, abandoned buildings provide cover for labs.

A lifelong West Virginian, Jennifer says she knows people who've used meth, "people I would have never expected until they told me. Contractors use it to stay up three days to finish a deadline." She's never had a bust in one of her rentals, though.

Jennifer notes the exploding popularity of some hard drugs in general, like heroin. She's seen enough pill bottles and dope paraphernalia in busted meth sites to think all these drugs are rising in popularity together, and she's seen enough Jesus tchotchkes and throw pillows to know they're all working their way into the banal fabric of normal life here.

"Why is meth popular?" she asks. "Because it gets you high."

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The new short from Swedish auteur Ruben Östlund, Autobiographical Scene Number 6882, starts appropriately mundane—a group of friends are walking across a bridge, discussing the finer aspects of alcohol, when they begin cajoling each other into jumping off the bridge into the river, approximately 100 feet below. It's all laughs and good times even as a group member named Martin, decides to go for it. The scene unfolds until, moments before Martin takes the leap, an old man bikes by to lay a bit of information on them: A guy died two years ago, jumping from that exact spot.

All of the sudden the dynamics within the group shift and societal expectations kick in. Their opinions on the safety and plausibility of the whole thing are up for questioning again. Most of the group decides outright that it's not worth the risk, while Martin is reticent to believe the old man. Regardless, the moment seems to be over, and the group heads back across the bridge towards land. But this is the precise moment things starts to get interesting. Östlund is a masterful observer of groupthink, and he deftly shows his different characters fall victim to various pressures, be them machismo, ego, fear, peers, spontaneity, morality, and more.

The short is cold and calmly observed, shot entirely in widescreen—we see nothing but body movements. It is through this distanced style that Östlund hopes we can see the absurdity of our own compulsion to construct meaning and justifications for our actions.

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Ruben Östlund is the director of four feature films and as many shorts. He's also made a documentary and a number of skiing films. His work, including the recent feature film, Force Majeure, explores many of the same themes found in Autobiographical Scene Number 6882. Force Majeur is in theaters now and is also Sweden's entry to the Academy Awards.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the Senior Curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Calling a burger joint in uptown Tehran "Bobby Sands," after an IRA hunger striker, might seem a little tasteless. But in Iran they take martyrdom very seriously, so paying homage to a man who died on a hunger strike by plastering his face across a greasy takeaway isn't completely out of place.

The burger shack, founded in 1982—the year after Sands's death—is almost as famous in Iran as the man it's named after which, you may be surprised to learn, is pretty famous. Even with my butchered Farsi, people knew exactly who I was on about when I mentioned Sands. "Ah Babbi Sandz! Good man," people would say.

Basically, if you say "Ireland" in Iran, you are met with blank stares. But, say "Babbi Sandz" to the over-50s and you'll get free taxi rides, free meals, and even the odd tear. Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, even venerated Sands on Twitter recently.

Tired of what they felt were oppressive internationally focused regimes, in 1979 Iranians revolted against their western backed Shah and declared themselves the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the same time, the troubles in Northern Ireland raged on with IRA prisoners protesting their treatment in the infamous H-Block prison by carrying out "dirty protests," refusing to wear their prison uniforms, and eventually going on hunger strike.

Both groups shared vaguely similar revolutionary ideas, so when IRA member Bobby Sands died in 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike, Iranians in their thousands held a moment's silence for a man they'd never met. At that moment, a 27-year-old from Belfast who'd never been outside of Ireland became another martyr of the Iranian revolution.

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The author on Babbisandz Street

After Sands's death, Iran's young revolutionaries felt changing the address of the British Embassy from Winston Churchill Boulevard to "Babbisandz Street"—complete with phonetic spelling—was more in keeping with their revolutionary ideals.

Embassy staff, fearing all official correspondence would be sent to the "British Embassy, Babbisandz Street, Tehran" bricked up the old entrance and smashed through an existing wall to a side-street, creating the new Ferdozi Street address. I guess Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, no fan of Irish republicanism, really didn't want to send her letters to a street named after a dead IRA prisoner.

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Mohammed, owner of Bobby Sands Burgers and one of his workers. A portrait of Bobby Sands is in the top left of the picture

Sands, who came from the Belfast ghettos would definitely have looked out of place in the area of his eponymous burger joint. While the restaurant looks like the sort of place you'd stumble into after happy hour at an Irish themed pub, it's nestled in a salubrious, tree-lined street that has more of a soccer mom feel than a revolutionary one.

The shack's bright orange interior only adds to the irony. Orange is a color associated with Unionism in Northern Ireland, something Sands—coming from the other side of the conflict—was fighting against.

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Inside, the neon signs glare down with loads of different burger options all served with walnuts and a huge choice of condiments. Friendly Mohammed, owner of Bobby Sands Burgers chatted to me about opening his kiosk in 1982, the year after Sands's death. "Bobby Sands was a great man and I wanted to honor his memory," he said. "In Iran we think highly of the sacrifice Bobby Sands made for his people. Our goal is to honor him and show respect for his courage," he said while flipping burgers in the tiny orange room.

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Bobby Sands Burger delivery menu, with a picture of Bobby Sands in the center

While Mohammed talked IRA martyrdom, I looked up at Sands, smiling down at me from every corner. Beside the burger menu, behind the grill, above the fridge, Sands seemed even more out of place than the Coca Cola logos—many American brands are subject to sanctions but some manage to make it through.

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The author's friend Tia outside Bobby Sands Burger

The "holy martyr" in Shia Islam is almost as old as the religion itself, with millions flocking every year to Karbala, Iraq, to remember Husayn the religion's first martyr who died in the 7th Century. Since the Islamic revolution there has been a resurgence in martyr veneration on an epic scale. Pictures of martyrs line most boulevards and city squares—a phenomena almost as widespread as advertising in the west. Parks are dedicated to them, and having a martyr is the family will benefit future generations.

During the Iran—Iraq war this intensified, with streets were renamed to remember those who died. And Sands, despite being thousands of miles away, was no treated no differently.

Well into his 60s, Mohammed was part of Iran's revolutionary generation, who linked people like Sands with the Islamic revolution's martyrs. As his staff flipped burgers on grills plastered with Sands's face, Mohammed took me aside and I asked him whether he thought it was right to remember a man who died on hunger strike through the medium of fast food. He completely ignored my question and kept talking about "the brave martyr" who was "a credit to the Irish people, an honorable man—a man a nation should remember."

Despite the weird walnut burgers and strange spiced soups, the food wasn't awful. In a country where martyrs images are as mundane as clothing ads, it's not surprising that Iranians reached out to others they felt fitted the martyr ideal. Maybe Bobby Sands's lonely veneration in a Tehran burger shack isn't as strange as it seems.

Follow Norma on Twitter.

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'Shovel Knight'

Last year wasn't exactly a banner one for video games. Big developer layoffs, death threats, and games launching completely broken to name but a few. However, amid all the gloom, there were several shining beacons of hope. Games like Jazzpunk, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and Shovel Knight brought a little joy to our hearts. So let's take some time to celebrate the comedy.

In a pretty dark year, it was a surprise to see some of the most rib-tickling games ever released. Developers have been trying to create funny games for decades, but very few ever actually get it right. But why's it so hard? There are plenty of funny television shows and films—why not games? A good place to start is at what everyone knows is at the root of comedy, and that is.

Timing. This is what actors on screen and stage rely on to get laughs. The writing could be hilarious, but if it's not delivered properly then part of the magic is lost. Introduce a little audience participation—like that found in, say, a video game—and it becomes hard to get the timing down. If the player is looking somewhere else while the joke happens, there's not really any point in having the joke.

So if the main purpose of your game is to be funny, you have to either write your jokes and put them in a cutscene, or you let the player discover them themselves, which runs the risk of them not seeing them at all. The cutscene is the obvious choice, of course, but at that point your audience might as well be watching a movie. Alternatively, you could try and be clever about it by having subtle jokes written here and there, or simply a funny concept.

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The launch trailer for 'Shovel Knight'

Take Shovel Knight, for example. Sure, it's one of the best games of last year, but it's also surprisingly funny. First of all, you play as a knight who uses a shovel for a weapon—pretty funny, right? Then you've got the goofy village area where it seems like everyone you speak to has a little quip. I spoke to David D'Angelo, one of the developers at Yacht Club Games, who worked on Shovel Knight.

"We were always interested in setting a goofy tone with sombre overtones—obviously the idea of a knight wielding a shovel is a little silly," he told me. "I can't speak for other developers, but I think funny games come most naturally to us. If we can make each other laugh, then we think it'll work for players."

It's not enough for your game just to be funny, of course, as it needs the substance and gameplay to back it up. "We've learned from games like Mother 3 that a game becomes much stronger when graphics, story and tone work together to unify the gameplay experience. Beyond Mother 3, our inspirations are vast. From Miyazaki films to Disney to every NES game you can name. Finding a character that felt unique and interesting in our game was the most important aspect."

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'South Park: The Stick of Truth' launch trailer

A game like South Park: The Stick of Truth was always only going to survive based on how funny it was. The actual gameplay was slightly nuanced, if a little basic, but thankfully the writing was excellent (if South Park is your thing, of course). The cutscenes and item descriptions were funny, but the visual humor while you played was probably where the game shone the most. For as vulgar as it is, being shrunk down and fighting gnomes while you try to avoid your dad's swinging ballsack has a certain amount of humor to it, right?

Then you have Jazzpunk, which just happens to be my favorite game from 2014. The developers, Toronto's Necrophone Games, avoided the aforementioned risk of letting the player discover the jokes for themselves by making literally everything in the game a joke. I've played it through twice and watched two friends finish it, and I still find extra little gags from time to time.

I mean, a game where one minute you're playing a fake version of Street Fighter where you're beating up a Honda car (get it?), and the next you're using a fly swatter to knock over undercover agents while they make bowling pin sounds, is probably worth game of the year in my book.

With hundreds of jokes in the game, the list of influences for Jazzpunk is probably endless, but Luis Hernandez—one half of the game's two-person development team—gave me a short list.

" Blade Runner, The Difference Engine, Neuromancer, Raymond Scott, Josef Albers, Gerd Arntz, Tito Puente, Antonio Prohías. I grew up on a steady diet of Mad Magazine, Monty Python, Alexei Sayle, Weird Al, ZAZ comedies like The Naked Gun, Hot Shots, etc. The 80s and 90s were a special time for spoof comedy, I guess—I see less of it nowadays."

As for games? "The first Portal, there's some dry GLaDOS stuff that was pretty good. There's some really awkward, surreal, hilarious moments in Deadly Premonition that made me laugh, but it's always hard to know what's intentional, and what's perhaps translation error. I feel like a lot of good video game humor is like that; it's often the unintentional things—the glitches, bad dialogue or multiplayer or physics chaos—that gets me to laugh."

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The trailer for 'Jazzpunk'

I ask him why he thinks writing good comedy games is so difficult, and why so few games pull it off well. "I have a few theories about this," he said. "A lot of game developers have been taught to think about design in a very economic way, so that most games revolve around one or two 'core mechanics' for the duration of the entire game, with a difficulty ramp. I don't think this approach is conducive to comedy. It's akin to a comedian going on stage and only telling knock-knock jokes: You will never get surprised by a punchline this way."

That's because "comedy requires an element of the unknown, not knowing what's coming or how things will play out exactly—it relies on that neural tension. Most core mechanics are centered around giving the player predictable, desired results, as they master a mechanic throughout the game. Also, if the player only has one form of interaction in the world—i.e. shoot stuff—it's hard to get more than a few jokes around that mechanic before you're just reusing them."

Another issue could be the size of game studios these days: a case of too many cooks spoiling the comedy broth, perhaps? "The teams are often just too large to allow for gags to make it in without being picked apart, or getting designed by consensus," Hernandez agreed. "The more hands a joke has to go through, the more diluted it's going to end up. Contrary to popular belief, Jazzpunk was made by just two people: Jess [Brouse] and myself. There are plenty of jokes in the game that were implemented directly by me or Jess, and weren't filtered through anyone else. This allows them to remain pure, and a product of a sudden whim, inspiration or serendipity. I feel that's how comedy thrives.

"If you're talking about an AAA company structure, I'd have to send schematics or a design document of my banana peel joke to a level designer on a different floor of my office building, and then they'd have to requisition some piece of code from a programmer on another floor to implement a physics interaction so that the banana will function in-game. Ad nauseam. If it takes three months to get a banana in the game, it's not going to be funny at the end of the line. Jess and I can throw that stuff in—in hours, not weeks. And we also have the luxury of pulling something out again if it ends up not being funny. The amount of cutting room floor we ripped out of Jazzpunk is absurd."

There must always be a worry that what you're creating simply isn't funny, a problem that stretches beyond game development into all forms of comedy writing. "Absolutely, it's impossible to know if a joke is going to land with an audience," says David, "besides having a lot of practice making other games, and seeing what works and what doesn't." I asked whether it was a case of testing jokes before putting them into the game. "Yes, we sent the game to our friends and family, and tested lines on anyone and everyone we could find."

However, Luis and Jess took a different approach with Jazzpunk. "People—and their senses of humor, especially—are just far too varied and subjective. We tried our best not to think about some gray-mass aggregate audience when we were designing stuff. We're our toughest critics: If a joke wasn't making us laugh, or didn't cause us to laugh upon initial conception, we'd scrap it, or try and retool it if it seemed worth salvaging."

Complete and utter nonsense was actually a theme of 2014 (both in terms of events and the comedy found in games). Recently, we've witnessed the rise of wacky "simulator" games, with Goat Simulator leading the way last year. As you might expect, you play as a goat. But that's pretty much where the simulation aspect ends. The game involves you doing as much dumb shit as possible, whether that be attaching yourself to a moving car using your tongue, or doing flips off a trampoline and blowing up a petrol station.

That wasn't even the stupidest game of 2014. On a scale of one to total ridiculousness, I Am Bread is pretty high up there. It's not some clever name with a double meaning—you're literally a slice of bread. And you have to become toast. While making sure your "edibility" meter doesn't go down. You also get points for "deliciousness."

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The trailer for 'The Jackbox Party Pack'

Another trend has been the rise of the local multiplayer game. Samurai Gunn, Nidhogg, TowerFall, Sportsfriends, the list goes on. Of course, these are designed to be fun rather than funny, but get a group of friends together and play silly competitive games against each other and see if you don't start rolling around with laughter. Or throwing controllers at each other, depending on what kind of friends you have.

As an extension of this, 2014 saw the release of The Jackbox Party Pack containing You Don't Know Jack, Drawful, Fibbage, Lie Swatter, and Word Spud. Not only do you get five games for a very reasonable price, and not only does it have an excellent control system (you don't need a bunch of controllers, players can use their phones), it's funny! The writing in the You Don't Know Jack trivia game has always been... decent, and host Cookie Masterson's delivery has been unwaveringly stalwart for some time now, but you'll probably get a laugh or two out of it.

As for the other games in the pack, you'll be making your own humor, just like with the local competitive games I mentioned earlier. Fibbage gives you a sentence with a word or phrase missing, and it's up to the players to fill it in with a lie that they hope will fool the other players into thinking it's the truth. Now, you can try and win, or you can take the same route as I do and simply try to make your friends laugh when the choices come up.

Oh, and there were those horrifying, yet hilarious, facial bugs in Assassin's Creed Unity. It was an odd year, but there were certainly some thigh-slapping moments. As David says to me: "Games, in general, are too serious."

Very true. Let's hope for lighter hearts in 2015.

Follow Matt Porter on Twitter.

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Alex Garland with Alicia Vikander on the set of 'Ex Machina'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

"We don't have an example of consciousness that doesn't have a sexual component," says Alex Garland of Ava, a character played by Alicia Vikander in his directorial debut Ex Machina. "Maybe there's a correlation—perhaps sentience comes out of the need for communication, and sex is part of that."

Garland's slick sci-fi movie—visually beautiful and informed by the latest scientific theories—is a three-hander. Its main characters are Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a wealthy tech genius; Ava, a sexualized artificial intelligence; and a lowly coder, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who's won a company competition to spend a week with Nathan at his isolated Alaskan lad-pad and test out his latest invention: Ava.

There are few female robots in cinema who aren't an object of sexual desire, be it the machine-gun breasted fembots in Austin Powers, or the latex clad T-X of the abysmal Terminator 3. Ava is equally sexualized, but in Garland's hands this concept is more about undermining the way in which women can be objectified by men.

Garland's film is as much a comment on ever-advancing techology and what that means for humanity (spoiler: It's really fucking bleak) as it is a comment about how society presents and views women in their early 20s. In the film, Nathan quickly illustrates one of the reasons he created his AI masterpiece: Robot Ava has a fully functional vagina. Robot Ava is for men to dominate.

"There is something weird going on with social structures and gender," Garland continues. "I think there's an argument that there is no difference between a male and female brain—I think brains are genderless."

[body_image width='957' height='641' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='we-talked-to-british-filmmaker-alex-garland-about-his-new-film-ex-machina-322-body-image-1421340892.png' id='18438']Still from 'Ex Machina'

The other primary issue, as with almost any movie about AI, is what exactly defines a consciousness, and whether or not it can be created as genderless. Garland's been fascinated by the nature of consciousness and technology for years. He recalls how, in his younger years, he would mess about with computers, creating simple programs that mimicked conversation, making it look and almost feel like you were having a chat with a machine. Years later, the idea for Ex Machina came from an argument he had with a friend who thought that we, as a species, would never be able to create a fully formed AI. Garland disagreed.

Before making films, Garland was a novelist, and first explored the idea of consciousness (separate from tech) with his third novel Coma, a delirious literary exploration of the mental landscape of an unconscious man following a brutal attack on the London tube. For Garland, whether it's a book, a video game or a film, it all comes from the same passion.

"I write out of compulsion about what I'm obsessed with—there's no real choice; it happens," he tells me. "Then I try to persuade people to fund the project and cope with the fallout. There seems to be a pattern."

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A still from 'Ex Machina'

Garland tells me about his 15 years of experience in the film industry, which began in 2000 with Danny Boyle's adaptation of his first novel, The Beach. I ask how he feels about the cult hit. "When you say The Beach is cult, what you mean is that it is something that doesn't work commercially, but some people really take to their heart," he answers.

I get the sense he's talking more about Boyle's film than his novel, which remains a near-biblical text to any perpetual backpacker.

"I'm concerned how people are receiving my work, but more so where film is concerned," he tells me. "My experience of working in film is either surviving by the skin of my teeth or losing a lot of money."

While his films may not have always been successful at the box office, he still has an impressive list of credits, including writing the screenplays for 28 Days Later and Sunshine (his third collaboration with Boyle); adapting Kazu Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; and the highly underrated Dredd. Besides 28 Days, they've all remained relatively underground.

I ask if he's even really searching for commercial success. "The problem with commercialism, and how people view it, is that they think that it's a choice," he says. "The reality is that it's either in you or it isn't. I don't need my films to be gangbusters."

[body_image width='942' height='637' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='we-talked-to-british-filmmaker-alex-garland-about-his-new-film-ex-machina-322-body-image-1421340950.png' id='18440']Still from 'Ex Machina'

"I would really love if Ex Machina didn't present me with the same problem, so I don't have to turn around and say, 'Sorry guys, I know last time didn't really work out, but this time I'm really sure.' I feel like I'm constantly doing this tap dance routine," he says.

But surely being in the director's chair means he had more control?

"There's a strange deification of the word 'director,'" he says. "I just can't be bothered with it. If there is a deification of something, it's usually hiding something. It's all gibberish. All I can say from my experience of working in film is that it's a collaborative process; it's a group of people working together. I can't see why people have a problem with this idea. The thing I love about film is that it's a collaboration."

Ex Machina is in theaters on January 21 in the UK, and April 10 in the US

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Photo via Megan Koester

We're long, long past the point where social media seems new or particularly novel. Even the term social media itself is beginning to feel dated; the communications it refers to have become so ingrained into our everyday existences that the phrase seems redundant, like "color TV" or "cordless phone." I don't know, grandpa, wasn't media always social?

What is new is an apparent shift is toward anonymity. If you want to reveal your innermost thoughts to the internet at large, you can use Whisper; Secret lets you confess things to your friends; Yik Yak is popular among students in high schools and colleges who want to spread gossip and sex tapes while bullying each other. Artist and filmmaker Miranda July may have been trying to combat the impersonal nature of these platforms when she came out with an app called Somebody, which lets you use strangers as human carrier pigeons to deliver messages to other people (it's not much use unless a bunch of other people around you are using it).

Social media has expanded so much in the past decade-plus that it's easy to forget that early social media platforms, like MySpace or Friendster, seemed like a passing novelty at the time. Looking back, though, it's clearer to see the early 2000s as social media's infancy. Sure, the conception and development of the idea can be traced to early-internet connectors like BBSes or AOL's emphasis on member profiles and chatting, but it wasn't until Facebook rolled out during the middle of the last decade that we had entered what could be said to be a new era of human communication. Between February 2005 and August 2006, the use of social networking sites by young people jumped from 9 percent to 49 percent; today, Facebook says it has more than 1.35 billion active users. To say social media has grown into being the backbone of the internet is an understatement; at this point, it feels like the backbone of society. But is anyone still impressed that they can keep up with Aunt Judy through the computer? What's the next step?

Amy Miller, a comedian and marketing director, sees the shift toward the impersonal and the anonymous continuing. "Seven to ten years ago, we were like, 'Oh my God, so I can just, like, be friends with my fourth-grade sweetheart?' Connecting to people from your past actually felt like meeting a celebrity," she said. "In the near future, we will use social in order to completely avoid or delete our past."

In other words, we used to be impressed with how many people we could share our lives with, and now we're more interested in limiting what we share with who.

Jen Goldberg, a digital strategist for ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, agrees. "We'll continue to see a trend towards micro-communities and one-to-one or one-to-a select few sharing over the one-to-an-anonymous many," she said. "We've cycled away from blogging and broadcasting, towards anonymous sharing and small group messaging."

People have also clearly shown that they like looking at pictures and short bursts of texts, not reading Twitter novels or your self-involved Facebook notes. While Facebook remains the world's largest social network, the fastest growth is happening on Tumblr, Snapchat, and Instagram. Tumblr's active user base grew by over 120 percent this year, Instagram is incredibly popular among teens, and Snapchat has gotten so big it rejected an offer to sell to Facebook for $3 billion.

Alec McNayr and Alan Beard, the co-founders of McBeard Media, a social creative agency, don't see any of your favorite social media networks shrinking anytime soon. "We're bullish on every single major social platform—this is still the beginning of the age of social content," they told me. "The most intense competition in the space is obviously for video consumption—everyone wants to be in YouTube's game. Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest—they all are optimizing for video consumption on mobile devices. Brand-supported short video content is an unstoppable force, so Google/YouTube clearly have targets on their backs."

Dan Dominguez, a writer and producer for YouTube-based Shut Up! Cartoons, envisions a bigger shift. "Facebook's gonna shrink because it's not cool anymore," he said. "Snapchat will grow and then shrink as some other venture capitalist's dream of how to make $800 million catches on, and then that too will be replaced. YouTube will probably be around forever because you can actually tell emotionally rich stories on there."

Goldberg of Wieden+Kennedy sees another trend: People are sharing and curating content far, far more than they create it, though with Snapchat letting you create images for your friends and share them instantaneously, the lines between those activities are getting blurred. "The next wave may be shopping apps that make consumption into a sort of creation and communication as you and your friends collaborate on outfits or Christmas presents," she said.

Along with creation, communication, and consumption comes another C-word: capitalism. Though social media began as a way for people to share things that they had made themselves or stumbled across, more and more viral content is sponsored in some way, often by a massive corporation. New media's model is beginning to look very similar to old media's model: If you want to play, you're going to have to pay.

This shift will mean more things that straddle the line between advertising and simple entertainment. "No one shares 'marketing,'" said McNayr and Beard, "but lots of people will share branded content experiences that entertain them."

Goldberg sees further blending between brands and celebrities: "In the way that celebrities have to behave like brands, brands are having to behave like celebrities," she said. "They will ever increasingly be cultural entities as well as business ones and will need to have the breadth of attention, interests, and output that any famous person would."

"When our eyes are a video camera, our ears a microphone, and we are wearing clothes with code in the fibers, we'll likely share our lives on a biorhythmic scale." –Jen Goldberg.

If all that talk of #branded #content bums you out, here's something to terrify you: Social media is going to become more and more invasive and more and more a part of our bodies. Last year, Facebook paid billions for Oculus VR, a company gearing up to mass-produce virtual-reality headsets . In May, Google Glass became widely available, if not affordable for most. This means that soon, you'll never have to not be looking at a computer.

"It'll be like Minority Report without jetpack policemen," said McNayr and Beard. "Everything pushes to targeted video content, localized/personalized/contextualized on truly ubiquitous content screens. Ads, awareness, content, relationships, communication, meetups IRL. Devices fall away—everything you touch is an interface for your communication and content workflows/apps."

"When our eyes are a video camera, our ears a microphone, and we are wearing clothes with code in the fibers, we'll likely share our lives on a biorhythmic scale," Goldberg said. "You can imagine waking up from a dream and sending a clip where your friend appeared straight to them, or capturing your dance moves during a club night and uploading it to a gallery of animated avatars."

Dominguez is less optimistic: "In ten or 15 years social media will probably just be a 3D hologram of a Coca-Cola bottle angrily shouting at us to buy Coca-Cola, then rewarding us with a meme .GIF if we buy Coca-Cola, or shocking us with a high-voltage electrical current if we don't."

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