I have a problem with emojis, I think. What I mean is, sometimes I think in emojis. When I'm looking for a word or phrase to respond to things outside the contexts of texts or Twitter what pops into my head are emoji characters. My girlfriend Sarah first pointed out that this was happening to her a few months ago after she found herself unable to produce any alternative to " [body_image width='28' height='22' path='images/content-images/2015/04/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/17/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315170.png' id='47296']" as a response to an email from her boss.

I didn't realize that this was happening to me until the other day when I was reading an article for the class I'm teaching by the notoriously dry poetry critic Cleanth Brooks. In the article Brooks is trying to argue that literary critics shouldn't take into account an author's judgment about the quality of their own work when performing criticism. His example is a take on one of Hemingway's lesser novels: "Ernest Hemingway's statement in a recent issue of Time magazine that he counts his last novel as his best is of interest to Hemingway's biography, but most readers of Across the River and Into the Trees would agree that it provides nothing at all about the value of the novel—that in this case the judgment is simply pathetically inept."

My immediate mental response to this sentence was " [body_image width='63' height='23' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315223.png' id='47297']". But the more I thought about it, the more my reaction turned into [body_image width='26' height='17' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315247.png' id='47298'] and I actually ended up drawing the eyes themselves in the margin next to the sentence. Obviously Brooks's shade is not subtle, which I think is why the fire emoji was my first reaction. You don't just call someone's judgment "simply pathetically inept" without meaning to hurt their feelings, especially in 1951 when this piece was published. Brooks is taking a cheap shot, and it's hilarious, but the inappropriateness of the venue for a statement like that is what made the emoji eyes feel more correct. What does it mean that my first conscious response to an English sentence was a series of cartoon images? Has my mind been so thoroughly saturated by my use of emoji in certain contexts that I am actually generating cognitive content in emoji?

Related: "The Digital Love Industry"

The surprise of thinking in tiny cartoon images comes from the expectation that language is going to pop into your head when you think. So what makes emoji different from written language? How do emojis mean and is it different from how words mean? Obviously, emojis are pictures of things for the most part, and the history of the development of emoji is an interesting read. Sure there are emojis like[body_image width='29' height='22' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315269.png' id='47299'] and [body_image width='24' height='22' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315336.png' id='47300']and [body_image width='21' height='21' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315364.png' id='47301'], but for the most part emojis represent people and common objects that their developers felt most required graphic shorthand for digital communication.

The apparent difference between emojis and words is that the meaning of a word is not caused by some inherent link between the word and the thing or concept that it names or means. Linguists call this "the arbitrariness of linguistic signs." Even apparently onomatopoetic words (words whose pronunciation imitates sounds) are arbitrary. For proof of this, check out this Australian guy's insanely comprehensive chart of the ways different languages onomatopoetically represent animal noises.

Emojis seem to violate the rule of arbitrariness because they aren't words. They seem to very clearly represent something distinct and real about the world—a face, or a certain gesture. From habit, we associate these faces or gestures with emotional meaning and social significance. The fact that emojis have names further complicates things. If you browse emojipedia you start to notice that most of the emoji names are exceedingly literal. This causes some complication when the literalness of the names is applied to the face emojis. Oddly, the attempt to produce as literal a name as possible means that face emojis ended up getting named in two ways: the name either describes what the face looks like or indicates what emotional state the emoji is supposed to represent. Often two emojis that look similar to each other are named differently from each other. So for example [body_image width='23' height='23' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315431.png' id='47302'] gets the descriptive name "face with open mouth and cold sweat" while [body_image width='22' height='20' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315448.png' id='47303'], which is the only emoji I ever use to convey sad tears, gets the name "disappointed but relieved face." To a certain extent, both of these names are descriptions, and both involve elements of implied emotional content (is that little emoji's blue forehead making his sweat "cold"?). The second emoji apparently represents the facial expression of the complex feeling "disappointed but relieved," which is probably the feeling you have when you have been afraid to ask someone out for a long time, and when you do they say no, but it feels good to at least know for certain. But would you ever send [body_image width='22' height='20' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315523.png' id='47305'] as the capstone of a text conversation that ran along those lines? Who would you be communicating that emotion to? Your mom?

If you look at another pair of emojis, [body_image width='23' height='21' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315551.png' id='47306'](frowning face with open mouth) and [body_image width='25' height='23' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315581.png' id='47307'] (anguished face) the same problem appears. On the one hand I'm not at all convinced [body_image width='25' height='23' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315581.png' id='47307'] is what anguish looks like, but on the other there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what emojis get descriptive names and which get representative names. The only difference between these two emojis are the eyebrows. What does that have to do with how the name is assigned? Things get even weirder when you get into the more realistic human emojis. The woman in pink series is particularly troubling. Sure, I can get behind [body_image width='22' height='25' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315617.png' id='47309'] being named "happy person raising one hand." That's a solid mixed descriptive and representative name. She is happy because she is smiling, and she is raising one hand. I get that. But [body_image width='22' height='24' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315640.png' id='47310'] is named "information desk person" which... [body_image width='22' height='22' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315654.png' id='47311'].

The more I thought about it, the more that thinking about the names of emojis seemed to be getting me away from the problem I was really worried about: the fact that I've been thinking in emoji. I ended up calling a linguist, Neil Cohn, a post-doc at UC San Diego who researches visual language and cognition in order to get to the heart of the problem. I explained my problem to him, that I was freaking out because I didn't have language for the emoji thoughts I was having, and he told me that my problem wasn't thinking in emoji, it was how I was thinking about language itself. "Humans have three ways of communicating, really only three," he explains, "we can speak, making words with our voices, we can sign, like with sign language, and we can draw." As his website explains, "drawing—especially sequential images—is structured like language. Just like words in sentences are used in spoken languages, sequences of images can create a visual language."

Cohn's work is the kind of research you read that is at once deeply familiar and deeply mind-blowing. His website includes some easy to follow summaries of his pretty radical linguistic theories. His big idea is that drawing, far from being a mere supplementary form of communication, is actually an intrinsic aspect of human communication and cognition.The kicker, and this is what makes Cohn's theory unique, is that visual languages obey "similar principles of cognition" to those that we already know govern our understandings of verbal and sign languages. Cohn explains that visual language, though different in its specifics from verbal language, is likewise made up of distinct observable rules in our common practice of creating and reading pictures. "A really common thing is for people to say that they 'can't draw'," Cohn tells me, "but what that really means is they have under-developed capacities for expression within visual language."

But this isn't a personal failing. Instead, Cohn insists, we live in a society where visual language development is not a priority. The result is that we have what seems like an intuitive sense of how to read images, but most people don't develop the dexterity within what Cohn calls "American visual language" to produce pictures that look like the ones they are used to reading without any trouble. "If you ask someone to draw a house," he tells me, "Most people will draw a triangle on top of a square. That's 'house' in American visual language, but that's not what houses look like in real life," Cohn explains. We are able to recognize objects in drawings partly through visual similarity, but that isn't necessary and may not even be a primary component of the way our brains process images.

[body_image width='640' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/04/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/20/' filename='what-does-it-mean-to-think-in-emojis-body-image-1429556352.jpg' id='47876']

Image via Flickr user designmilk.

This is true even for human faces and emotions. In a blog post from way back in 2009 Cohn discusses an fMRI study that revealed that, in the authors of the study's words, "Remarkably, emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces." Researchers scanned the brains of subjects looking at non-rotated emoticons like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and digitally averaged photos of faces and found that while the photos of faces triggered both facial recognition and emotional recognition areas of the brain, the emoticons lit up only emotional recognition areas. Cohn writes on his blog, "this finding has very interesting consequences for understanding how brains process varying degrees of complexity in images. The implication here at least is that more simplified faces become tied more explicitly to a "symbolic" meaning as opposed to their iconic meaning of resembling what they look like. That is, more simplified images strip down the meaning to its core meaning disconnected to the iconic reference that they are framed within." In other words, when we look at emoticons our brains don't process faces (emoticon as iconic representation of a real face), but, once we are habituated to the rules of emoticon use, we take emoticons as symbols of emotional content. When it comes to emoticons, they convey emotional content the same way that words or signs do, abstractly, not through their representation of emotion on a drawn face.

Web content like GIFs give us moving images. Our brains assemble the images the GIF provides frame by frame, producing the effect of movement. When you are limited to still emojis, you can only accomplish this by having time play out like it does in written language, proceeding from left to right across the visual field. This is my favorite kind of emoji play. I like to send people this: [body_image width='71' height='21' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315697.png' id='47312']. Typical emoji grammar would have us perceive this as three separate faces positioned next to each other. That's the logic of the see/speak/hear no evil monkeys [body_image width='75' height='24' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315715.png' id='47313']. We don't typically perceive this sequence as the same monkey making all three gestures. But if you insert the plain monkey face between each of the other images, you might perceive the series as a temporal sequence: [body_image width='169' height='18' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315732.png' id='47314']. You can accomplish this with other emoji series, like the pink shirt woman. Here she is thinking she recognizes someone, realizing she is mistaken, and then feeling embarrassed: [body_image width='72' height='26' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315754.png' id='47315']. It's OK lady, that happens to everybody.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/04/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/20/' filename='what-does-it-mean-to-think-in-emojis-body-image-1429556884.jpg' id='47880']

Image via Flickr user The All Nite Images.

What's happening in the way we perceive these strings of emojis as time-sequenced images is governed by two constraints that Cohn argues determine how we make judgments about the identity of images and where our attention should go from image to image. These constraints, the continuity constraint and the activity constraint, account for how we make sense of more complex sequenced images, like comic strips. Cohn explains, "The continuity constraint is the idea that, in order to understand things in sequence, you try to establish continuity between them buy assuming that things repeat across panels." The effect for the sequences of emojis means that we tend to judge that "the smiley faces aren't all different faces, but are one face connected across time. The activity constraint would then say, of the things that maintain continuity, you'll care about the ones that change more than the ones that don't change." So in the series of monkey emojis, we focus on the position of the hands because they are so obviously active, though we might fail to notice that the plain monkey face emoji has a slightly differently shaped head than the other three.

The typical way that most people think about writing, Cohen says, is that the written word is the transcription of a verbal word, which somehow comes first or is more authentic. The written word "dog" is a form of the spoken word "dog," which is then linked in our brain to a conceptual meaning. Cohn says this description of the state of things is basically correct, but what most people don't understand is that this is profoundly unnatural.

"Writing is basically a kind of culturally learned synesthesia," Cohn explains. When we read we force visual content through verbal cognitive channels before they can connect to conceptual content. In effect, the written word triggers a verbal response that then proceeds to connect to the meanings we have for that word. Learning to read and write takes so much effort precisely because connecting the visual and verbal pathways isn't something that happens organically. When it comes to writing, we make visual images obey, or approximate, grammatical laws of verbal speech.

Inserting emojis in place of words basically explodes the grammar of the written sentence, because not only does it produce confusion about the meaning of the particular word, but also destabilizes the syntax of the entire sentence because aspects of language like part of speech and tense determine the way that other words in the sentence produce meaning together. Our speech is highly adaptive and capable of expressing new and complex emotional content because it is endlessly combinative, so new meanings are always popping up as we need them. Emoji, on the other hand, is an incredibly limited visual language. It's basically just a set of nouns, and we manipulate them through other visual grammars in order to produce complex meanings like movement, tense, and intensity.

So I'm not crazy for thinking in emoji for the same reason that I'm not crazy for flipping off refs when they don't call travels when I'm watching basketball. All of what we should really call our thought finds multiple outlets in our verbal, gestural and visual capacities, and as Cohn suggests, "we are designed to use all three at once." [body_image width='26' height='17' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315825.png' id='47318']means something very particular to me, just like [body_image width='28' height='22' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315847.png' id='47319'] means something very particular to my girlfriend. It turns out there's even an emoji (in a sense) in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, where a character encounters a sign outside of a town that reads:

[body_image width='330' height='31' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315780.png' id='47316']

For Faulkner, as the critic Nicolas Tredell suggests in his book on The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, there is a pun on the French word "mot" (meaning "word") and in the phonetic similarity between "son" and "sound" in the name "Mottson." Tredell argues that Faulkner's sign means, "keep your eye on the word-sound, on the sound of the word that does not appear, 'I'." The eye emoji disrupts the very idea of language because it is neither a word nor a sound, and in doing so it challenges the coherence of our language, thought, and being. The graphic image that disrupts the text for Faulkner has become part of our everyday pragmatic use of language, but the apparently sure-fired connection between sound, image, and meaning can still catch us by surprise and remind us that even as our communication technology promises seamless identification with what we produce, we are still figuring out the basics of how language makes our thought possible. And that might make you feel [body_image width='26' height='17' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429315800.png' id='47317'].

Garrett Gilmore is an English grad student at UC Irvine and considers "[body_image width='19' height='18' path='images/content-images/2015/04/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/18/' filename='emoji-tk-body-image-1429316163.png' id='47322']" to be the Drake Emoji. He's on Twitter.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/LLC8uch1900' width='640' height='480']

Anti-drug public service announcements have a long history of missing the mark. From the classic, to the racist, to the admittedly kind of funny, the efficacy of these campaigns have always been dubious at best, and counter-productive at worst. This isn't to say drug awareness and education is not a worthwhile investment of government resources, but as any millennial who was pushed through the wildly ineffective DARE Program will tell you, the choice to use or not to use recreational drugs is a personal one, unlikely to be swayed by thinly-veiled propaganda.

Today marks the 25-year anniversary of the largest anti-drug PSA effort in history: the Saturday morning simulcast of Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue broadcast on the ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox networks respectively. This monumental anti-drug (and, to a lesser extent, anti-alcohol) collaboration came at the acme of Nancy Reagan's "just say no!" era, the message promulgated by then-sitting President George H. W. and First Lady Barbara Bush at the video's intro.

For the uninitiated, a YouTube stream is available here, and yes, that is as HD as it gets. The cartoon was released on VHS after the initial airing and most of the uploads of this feature contain all the charming A/V distortions of the medium.

For those without 27 minutes to kill, here's the basic rundown: The year is 1990 and our protagonist Michael is a wayward teen, whose experimentation with marijuana raises the concern of his little sister, Corey. Corey, fears for her brother's life, so she enlists the help of all our favorite Saturday-morning cartoon heroes like Garfield, Bugs Bunny, Baby Kermit the Frog, and ALF, the sitcom puppet who was ostensibly rendered into a children's cartoon. The gang rescues Michael, A Christmas Carol-style, by showing him his grim future as a ghoulish heroin junkie/crackhead. Michael apologizes to his sister, throws the anthropomorphic James Woods-ish pot smoke baddie (voiced by George C. Scott!) into a garbage truck, and goes to ask his parents for help battling his pot addiction.

As a child, I practically melted the tape running this thing through my VCR so many times. Who among us can deny the appeal of characters crossing over into each other's universes? It's a sweeps tactic still used today by the likes of The Simpsons and Family Guy and is a major component in the success of video game franchises like Super Smash Bros. As an adult, however, I'm burdened with viewing Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue through a more jaded lens, forced to grapple with both the creators' presumed noble intentions and the Machiavellian levels of deception by which they pursued those ends.

[body_image width='664' height='1207' path='images/content-images/2015/04/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/20/' filename='looking-back-on-cartoon-all-stars-to-the-rescue-421-body-image-1429569695.jpg' id='47942']

Should we expect government and corporate sponsored mission-based programming to delve into the nuance of what contributes to drug use and addiction? Of course not, when the medium is a half-hour animation spot aimed at elementary school kids. Even less so when this is all taking place in the same "don't blame me" epoch that brought us zero tolerance school district policies and "three strike" legal system punishments. That in mind, some of the bullshit awkwardly forced through the mouthpieces of beloved children's cartoons is too egregious to let pass by unchallenged.

Some choice cuts:

• Michael steals from his baby sister's piggy bank to score money for pot. This is not a product of cannabis usage. This is the product of Michael being an asshole.
• Many of the cartoon characters are hip to drug slang. Bugs Bunny easily identifies a joint, which isn't too far a stretch given his drinking and smoking cigarettes for decades in the Looney Tunes universe; watching a much more innocent Simon (of the Chipmunks) identify marijuana on sight and describe the effects is a bit jarring.
• Michael begins his decent into reefer madness the way so many after-school special and so few real-life children do: by stumbling upon some older "cool" kids smoking behind a building and being peer pressured into taking his first hit. The characters constantly assert that nobody has every tried drugs of his or her own volition.
• Seeing these cool kids doing their thing, Michael obnoxiously greets the group with "You guys cruising for lung cancer or what?" Fuck off, Michael.
• One of Michael's frenemies offers him crack as the next step up from smoking pot. Everyone in this group is completely on board to smoke crack with no hesitation.
• A girl in this friend group later offers to get them some crack if they can scrounge $10. The group points out that Michael has $10, right? They grab his wallet and run off with it, as is the norm for drug buys between friends.
• Michael apparently keeps an ocarina in his drug box.
• The Cartoon All-Stars escalate from berating Michael (ironically, using peer pressure) to coercing him to change his ways to physically to assaulting him and threatening his life with drowning and buzz-saws in the final segment.
• Michael's future is presented as that of a shriveled up heroin junkie, since the Cartoon All-Stars are a staunch propagators of the "gateway drug" narrative. Modern government websites acknowledge that isn't actually a thing.

For the sake of full disclosure, I'll admit that I've done drugs. I've even written about doing them for this very site. I do believe they should be decriminalized, if not legalized, with the government's role focused more on treatment of addiction rather than draconian punitive measures. But you don't have to share my beliefs to see that talking down to tweens and just beginning a recursive bleat of "drugs are bad because drugs are bad because drugs are bad" is not just ineffective, but can often work counter to the goals of the PSA.

Research into the efficacy of these ads has been percolating for decades and, to their credit, "Above the Influence" and other modern campaigns of that ilk that focused less on calling a drug user a bozo, and more on encouraging the viewer to assert their individuality by not following the crowd and partaking have proven more effective at stemming the tide of new pot smokers.

Related: The Secret History of Cabbage Patch Kids

While the PSAs have adjusted their strategy, the pendulum of public opinion seems to be swinging towards outright legalization for marijuana. With 23 states plus DC allowing for medical possession, and four states permitting recreational pot smoking, the America of 2015 is pretty much Amsterdam compared to the zeitgeist that birthed Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. Who knows where we'll be in 2040?

But have the voice actors changed their tune along with the hoi polloi? Well, ALF voice and puppeteer Paul Fusco certainly alludes to some experience with hard drug usage in this outtakes clip. (Warning: heavy usage of the N-word.)

As for the less bombastic characters, I spoke with Jim Cummings, the man behind Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger, to see how he felt about the project in retrospect. Jim told me the one-day, solo recording session was fun and, unlike many of his colleagues, he had the foresight to nix any lines that would have Pooh articulating an intimate knowledge of the seedy world of drugs.

"He's an innocent. It makes no sense for him to even know those words," Jim told me.

While Jim admits he'd smoked pot in his early years before the taping of Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, he doesn't share the opinion of over half of Americans who'd like to see the plant legalized.

"No, it shouldn't be allowed. I don't want everybody walking around two feet off the ground at all times."

A betting man would've picked the perma-chill Pooh as a proponent for change, but let the stark contrast between Jim and his character be a testament to his acting abilities.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

[body_image width='680' height='478' path='images/content-images/2015/04/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/21/' filename='i-watched-the-nightmare-the-terrifying-doc-that-i-could-have-starred-in-671-body-image-1429636386.jpeg' id='48261']

Still from The Nightmare.

I've seen and done and said a lot of really strange stuff in my sleep. I've screamed about pap smears and walked around "delivering" subpoenas. Once my sister found me curled up in a closet under the stairs. Another night, I barrelled out of bed, hell-bent on kicking ass, yelling "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" to the man I "saw" peering at me through my third-floor window.

And then there was the time I watched my duffel bag crawl across the floor. I had just woken from a short nap; my bedroom was dark, but there was enough early-evening light filtering through the curtains to see my large black bag skittering across the room. My mind was foggy from sleep, but still I knew there was no logical way that this bag was actually moving. And yet, because I was there watching it move, I decided to disregard logic. (I remember actually deciding this.) So I picked up a shoe and hurled it across the room, stopping that sneaky bag in its tracks. And then I sat up in my bed, quietly worrying that I'd lost my mind, before getting up to make some dinner.

So, yeah, I have some sleep issues. And I'm concerned enough about these sleep issues to never speak about them seriously. I nervously laugh off the fact that I frequently wake up in the night, see a spider in front of my face and run through my apartment screaming expletives. What's so serious about night terrors? Once, I interviewed a doctor who said I might someday become violent in my sleep: "Your partner should know this and know that they're at risk," is what he told me. That's a tad dramatic, is what I thought. Screaming at invisible strangers in the window once made for a funny story to tell at brunch. Now I hardly mention it. I put my energy not towards treating what could be a serious problem, but towards maintaining a more comfortable avoidance.

Then VICE made me watch The Nightmare and confront my worst fears. And now I'm doomed to never sleep again.

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So not creepy.

Rodney Ascher's The Nightmare is one of the most frightening films I've ever seen. The documentary recounts the experiences of eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis, a phenomenon that leaves its victims feeling completely immobilized. They wake up to find that they can't move a muscle, speak, react, or sometimes even breathe. Throughout all of this, they feel like a dark presence is in their room, taunting and terrorizing them. Sometimes this presence is seen, other times it's just felt. In one case, that evil presence is a red-eyed cat sitting on their chest speaking in tongues.

If you're someone who regularly gets a relaxing eight hours of sleep and whose biggest sleep problem is having "that dream where your teeth fall out," I'm sure this sounds completely absurd. But given my history, The Nightmare convinced me that I'm just one more crawling duffel bag away from having a demonic cat try to kill me.

I planned to watch The Nightmare on a Friday evening. I thought a gin and tonic (or several) would make the viewing experience easier to handle. I couldn't do it. I decided to just enjoy three G&Ts and watch literally anything else (a compilation of "Best Hurling Saves" on YouTube, even). Subjecting myself to this horror show in a dark apartment, at night, alone was the kind of bad call that characters in scary movies make.

So on a dreary Saturday morning, I sat down and finally, reluctantly, pressed play.

Ana was in her late 20s when she had her first experience of sleep paralysis. She woke up to hear tapping at the bedroom window. It was as if someone was knocking, trying to get in. She wanted to investigate, but she realized that she couldn't move. After a while, she felt like something monstrous was in the room with her. This became a regular nighttime occurrence. "I would feel this presence right next to me, trying to take my soul out," she tells Ascher. "I would try to fight it but my body felt paralyzed."

The film features interviews with people from all over the world who have had similar, equally awful experiences. They even use similar language to describe how sleep paralysis feels ("You will get an electrical shock just as you're falling asleep," says Stephen. Ana says she'd feel a tingling sensation coursing through her body). Most describe seeing three-dimensional "shadow men" creeping toward them during these attacks. Often these shadows would scream at them, crawl into bed with them or tell them they were about to die.

The point of the film isn't to explain why these attacks happen, but simply to make the viewer understand how it feels to experience them. Ascher does this through vivid, deliberately frightening reenactments. He uses all the classic horror-movie techniques to manipulate and terrify you—jump scares, long shots, an ominous score. (It works!) Shadowy figures slowly approach a paralysed victim. Close-up of the victim, her eyes wide with panic. Cut back to the room, and there's no one there. Then the shadowy figure steps directly in front of the camera, staring at you.

It's horrific.

Like a true professional though, I was taking notes and trying to document my experience—these notes consist mostly of swear words like "Fuck" and "Jesus" emphasized with underlines and exclamation points, as well as desperate pleas like, "OMG, I don't want this to happen to me".

I couldn't handle this alone. I grabbed my cat and forced her to cuddle.

Forrest recalls an episode from his childhood where the shadow men were verbally abusing him, telling him he'd won the "giant insect of the month club." We see a child, frightened but frozen in bed, shadows outside his door. Then, very suddenly, a massive spider is dropped on little Forrest's face. That was enough for me. This was my experience only magnified. Is this what's in store for me next?

I needed to take a break. I went on Instagram and liked a photo of jeans that cost $84. I texted my friends for reassurance. I convinced myself that this was a level of fucked-upness I would never experience. Deep breaths.

Then someone talked about an old man appearing at the end of their bed (I've seen him too). They discussed sleep paralysis lore and the various characters that can "visit" victims at night, including "The Old Hag" (the star of my most vivid nightmare). Every weird experience and bad dream I've ever had were now evidence that I had symptoms of sleep paralysis. There were no interviews with smart doctors who explained in dull, soothing tones the scientific reasons for these experiences. No talking head told me how this occurs (or if it could be cured).

"Symptoms of sleep paralysis" was something I'd dreamed up in my rattled brain and convinced myself that I had.

And then there was Jeff. Jeff said it's almost as if sleep paralysis can be passed on to someone else just by talking about it with them...like a goddamn STI.

At this point I was practically hysterical. Notes include: "Don't freak yourself out," and "This is too fucking scary."

I reminded myself that I have never woken up paralyzed. It's cool, you're fine, I thought—well, actually, remember that time when you were a kid and you woke up and your legs didn't work and you dragged yourself up a flight of stairs to your parents' bedroom crying? REMEMBER THAT? Or remember when you went to the doctor because your arms felt like dead weight right before bed? You are totally screwed, Regan.

I was losing my mind at noon on a Saturday.

The film mercifully ended and I rushed to get out of my house and walk amongst normal people. I'm just like you! I swear. I sleep! I called my dad to say hi. We joked about what a weirdo he raised. We laughed. Everything was fine.

I went about my day, forcing myself to feel better. And eventually I did. I'm okay, I thought. Scary shadow men will not hover over my frozen body screaming "You know who I am!" Completely unlikely. Certainly not going to happen.

And then I tried to go to bed.

It was true; sleep paralysis is contagious and I'd fucking caught it. I was sure of it. I lay wide-eyed in bed, panicked, just waiting for that infernal cat to saunter in.

The Nightmare plays at Hot Docs Film Festival on April 27 at Hart House Theatre.

Follow Regan Reid on Twitter.

If you want to be a good person, you generally have to rip off your unconvincing teenage façade of ironic detachment and feel real feelings. People hurt other people, and shame and regret can really fuck with your head. That's the territory Elvis Depressedly explores in their new video for the song "Thou Shall Not Murder." The track is off their upcoming album, New Alhambra, which comes out on May 12 via Run for Cover Records.

It's a beautiful, melancholic video, and director Micah Van Hove had this to say about it: "For me, the words and melodies on New Alhambra are bathing in a sense of reclaimed innocence that compelled me to explore how a child internalizes the notion of death for the first time."

Preorder New Alhambra here.

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Jane Flavell Collins/AP

On July 10, 2013, Dzhokhar "Jahar" Tsarnaev sat inside a secluded cell overlooked by a security camera. He had already been charged with killing three people during the Boston Marathon bombing and shooting a police officer between the eyes to steal his gun and vehicle. But rather than focus on any of the violence he committed, Assistant US Attorney Nadine Pellegrini chose to make this moment the climax of her opening argument in the sentencing phase of the convicted terrorist's trial, which began this morning around 10 AM.

Pellegrini quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson about how destiny is the sum of one's decisions. "His destiny was determined by him," she said of the bomber. "Jahar Tsarnaev was determined and destined to be America's worst nightmare." Behind her was a presentation board covered by what looked like black cardboard.

The mop-topped college kid hasn't been heard from since he was apprehended. Except for reporters and jurors, much of America hasn't seen his face except for the bewildered-looking one that was on FBI flyers, the one on the cover of Rolling Stone that got the magazine all that flak, and the grainy ones from surveillance photos. Photographers aren't allowed in federal courthouses.

But the image Pellegrini eventually revealed behind the black cardboard was menacing. It was a closeup of him giving the finger to his cell's security camera, his face contorted in a sneer that, in context, was genuinely frightening. "This is Jahar Tsarnaev," she said as courtroom observers audibly gasped.

The guilt phase of the trial was pretty much over as soon as it started with famed defense attorney Judy Clarke immediately clearing the air by saying, "It was him." Unsurprisingly, Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 counts, 17 of which are capital offenses. Starting next Monday, defense will argue that Tsarnaev should get life in prison rather than the death penalty because he was under the influence of his radicalized older brother, Tamerlan, who died after Tsarnaev ran over him during a police shootout.

During that first portion of the trial, the prosecution hammered home the gritty details of how victims, some as young as eight, died. This time, Pellegrini said, they're going to focus on the people the victims left behind.

In order for Tsarnaev to get the death penalty, the US government must prove one of four "gateway" factors, the judge said in his instructions, including that he intentionally took a life or intentionally inflicted seriously bodily harm that resulted in death. That's kind of an already foregone conclusion.

Next, then, the prosecution has to prove a statutory aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt and have all the jurors agree on it. The government is alleging six of these, including that the defendant behaved in a cruel manner and that he engaged in substantial premeditation when planning the attack.

In contrast, the defense just has to show that a mitigating factor (such as Tsarnaev being impaired, under duress, or a "minor participant" in the bombing) is more than likely true. The defense will put forth these mitigating factors on Monday, the jurors will then weigh these factors, and if they decide unanimously that he deserves the death penalty, he will be executed.

Of course the biggest question of all is whether Tsarnaev will testify in an attempt to save his own life. It's unclear whether he was coerced by his older brother, as the defense alleges, or if he is a political terrorist who wished to die a martyr. All we know so far is what he wrote inside of a boat as he was waiting to be apprehended by police.

"Know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that," he scrawled. "We are promised victory and we will surely get it."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Today's video - Montreal's anti-Uber squad takes action, a challenge straight out of the gate for Toronto's first black police chief, part two of the new Canadian Cannabis episode and diving into the deepest trench in the Atlantic Ocean.

Exclusive: Canadian Cannabis: Cash Crop, Part 2

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The author, getting to grips with blood transfusion.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Age 13, as a perennially conscientious little homo, I knew if I wanted to come out of the closet any time soon, I'd better do my homework. For the next two years or so, I devoted my life to reading everything and anything the internet had to say about being G-A-Y.

I learned about everything from the history of homosexuality's classification as a mental illness to collating a list of rumored gay celebrities going as far back as Ted Heath. By the time I burst out the closet, there were few who could claim to have had as many pink-points already in their handbag.

Against that backdrop I was being slowly convincedthat being gay wasn't going to be as hard as I'd imagined. After all, this was the 2000s: Section 28 (a law that forbid any local government in the UK from promoting homosexuality) had been repealed; it was generally agreed that the gay-panic defense wasn't really a legitimate defense; and house music—a genre that owed its genesis to a gay club in Chicago—was having a resurgence.

So it came as a bit of a slap to learn about the MSM blood ban—a law banning men who have had sex with men from donating blood in the UK.

The rationale is fairly straightforward: sexually active gay men are at a significantly higher risk of contracting blood-borne diseases like HIV, and although all blood is carefully screened before it is cleared for use, there is a three-week window where HIV may be undetectable. As a result, until as recently as 2011, all men who have ever had sex with a man were banned from donating blood for life. The new law has reduced that time to 12 months, but a blanket ban is still retained, refusing to take account of criteria such as whether the man is in a long-term monogamous relationship, whether he uses protection, or if he's recently been tested and cleared.

To give blood as a monogamous gay man you have to resist from engaging in protected or unprotected sex with your partner for a year. The Stonewall activist organization thinks this is a step in the right direction, but it isn't, really. It's just a more cleverly disguised form of homophobia.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating making the process riskier. If even one supply of infected blood got through the screening, it would be an absolute tragedy. But a blanket ban on men who have had sex with men makes no sense. Rather than protecting us from HIV-transmission, it's simply demonizing gay sex.

As a society of medical service users, we are being protected from a gay straw man—some clichéd sexual deviant who has a handlebar mustache and spends every Saturday at gangbangs in Lidl car parks. I love that man, but he is a stereotype, not a representative of the entire gay population. It's an archaic implication, more in line with the homophobia of the earliest days of the HIV scare (when screening technology was unavailable) than 2015.

Maybe it seems minor; maybe I'm being over-dramatic. Gay men make up, what, less than 5 percent of the population of the UK? Surely it's just sensible to cover our backs and ban them all—after all, that quantity of blood is too negligible to make a real difference anyway, right?

No doubt this is the justification used by plenty of officials. But after centuries of institutionalized persecution, marginalizing homosexuals for simplicity's sake doesn't really cut it.

Consider for a moment the symbolism of this ban. That this is all phrased through the semantics of "pollution" and "blood" and then verified by science is not insignificant. Blood is a powerful metaphor, one that is embedded in our culture to mean affinity, love, attachment. Blood is the life-force, it is the substance of being, it is what connects us to our loved ones, it is what constitutes a family.

Ideas of "pollution" and "cleanliness" have been used to the effect of marginalizing individuals in almost all known societies. During menstruation, women in some cultures are still banished to marginal territories in order to prevent infecting the rest of the group. "Pollution" was the metaphor used to normalize the relegation of the lowest caste Burakumin to the most unpleasant and worst paid tasks in feudal Japan. It's the same one used by the Nazis to persecute the Jews.

By labeling gay blood "unclean," we are not only talking about medicine, we are talking about politics. We are demonizing a sector of society, characterizing them as subhuman, unworthy of even the privilege of sacrificing themselves for the benefit of society. Unworthy, in the simplest sense, of integration. Chuck in "science"—the God of atheism—to back it all up and you've essentially been granted divine endorsement.

For more on LGBT issues, watch our doc 'Gay Conversion Therapy':

Let's get one thing straight (no hetero): I had no intention of giving blood when I first came across the MSM controversy, nor, being under 17, was I of an age where I could have done. Moreover, I'm not sure I would do now, however easy that might be.

The reality of me donating blood would be to turn up at a clinic and tick a box on a form saying I have not had sex with a man in the last 12 months. But why should I have to tuck in my rainbow bandana and lie on a form in order to donate my 100 percent uncontaminated, have-never-had-unprotected-sex blood to a person in need? Why should I have to lie about my sexuality when my blood is going to undergo the same screening as a man who has had unprotected sex with hundreds of women and not had to lie about it?

Surely a more sensible setup would be to tailor the criteria, distinguishing more precisely between people who engage in high-risk sexual activities and those who don't. Everyone, whether they have sex with men or not, could be directed to a set of criteria determining risk-factor, such as whether you are in a long-term monogamous relationship, whether you regularly have unprotected sex, whether you have recently been tested... Based on this, they could decide whether or not they deem themselves suitable for donation. It might be based on trust, but so too is the current system. If anything, this way would create less risk of transmitting disease, as well as achieving the not-insignificant task of stemming a prejudice that is systemic.

Changing the donor register is about more than just laziness. It is about more than just a medical responsibility for the long list of patients in need of transfusions. It is about a social responsibility to change an institutionalized and archaic attitude towards gay men. It's about homophobia.

Follow Joe on Twitter.

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Civic Center Park during yesterday's 4/20 celebration in Denver, Colorado. All photos by the author

There are a handful of qualities I treasure in a person, and one of them is a dependency on marijuana. I have befriended people for decades based solely on the fact that they enjoy the occasional resin hit. Once, when I was 19, I sat down on my dealer's couch to watch an episode of Dragon Ball Z and remained there comfortably for a cool three months. I'm the kind of pothead who drools over zoomed-in pictures of crystallized bud, who frequently finds weed crumbs in the folds of her skin, who still fucking listens to Sublime. I never know when to stop packing bowls. I'm always the biggest stoner in the room—at least I was, until I attended this year's 4/20 celebration/protest at the Capitol Building in Denver, Colorado.

Denver is, of course, the crown jewel in the great bastion of natural beauty and legal weed that is the state of Colorado. You can buy pot here without even having to pretend it's for your anxiety or insomnia or whatever, and because of that, the city has experienced a tremendous boom in weed tourism, particularly on 4/20 weekend. This year, while city officials did allow heavily sponsored events like "Cannabis Cup," the Civic Center Park, which sits directly between the city and state capitals, was officially closed for pot smoking. But that didn't stop thousands of weed activists/life inactivists from congregating there for a traditional 4:20 PM smoke out, as they had on so many years before.

I arrived at around 3:00 PM and followed a gentleman in Beavis and Butthead pajamas pants past a sign that flashed the words "Marijuana Is Illegal." The sign was half burned out; across the street, at the heart of the park, so were thousands of people.

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Sunburned middle-aged men with long greasy hair lay prone in the dirt, celebrating their freedom by staring comatose at the sky. "I Got Five On It," played over PA speakers as a woman with a megaphone pointed to photos of men who were in jail for pot-related crimes and was completely ignored by a group of teenaged girls taking selfies of themselves wearing sparkly glasses shaped like pot leaves.

I made my way to the front of the festivities and looked for a place to sit and smoke a bowl when a short man wearing an earpiece physically restrained me with his arm. "You can't go in here. This is reserved for Miguel." I looked around and noticed, for the first time, a velvet rope that had been placed around the planter where we stood and realized that I was, in fact, standing in a VIP section in the middle of a public park.

"Who the fuck is Miguel?" I asked.

"The organizer," Ear Piece replied, rolling his eyes and gesturing towards a large man in a weed leaf cap and a bright yellow shirt that did in fact read "Chief Event Organizer." I was about to attempt contact with Miguel when a stranger in a fishing vest passed me a bowl. I took a long drag and looked out at the sunlit crowd before me: a convergence of virtually every age and race and economic status, all united in this defiant and peaceful moment.

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"Excuse me," a girl in an American flag hat tapped politely on my shoulder. "I'm trying to see the fight." I turned to see where she was pointing, but it was too late. The fight had already been broken up, and two state troopers were hauling a teenaged boy through the crowd, who watched on, transfixed by the hypnotizing power of unexpected violence.

I came across a man with a weed top hat and weed scepter and a Colorado flag that he wore as a cape. He smoked from a bowl the size of a large lobster and told me his name was Weed Wizard. I offered him a hit from my bowl, which he turned down on the basis that he was "afraid of herpes," and then proceeded to tell me about his plans to learn how to make acid. A younger guy standing nearby took a hit from my bowl and sagely advised me "never to talk to the guy in the flashiest costume."

Behind us, a circle was forming around a belligerently drunk man, who stumbled with all of his weight on one leg like an elephant who's just been tranquilized. "He's a YouTube star!" exclaimed a guy next to me, "His name is Shoenice. He'll eat or drink anything that people tell him to. He's eaten four condoms. Old Spice. Cigarettes."

"Do you have to pay him?" I asked, as Shoenice stomped his feet behind us and yelled to no one in particular, "I'll suck your tits in front of your boyfriend. I don't care."

"No," said the dude. "You just have to give him attention."

Shoenice then waddled up to the cluster of teenaged boys near by and muttered, "I'll never forget you guys. Or any black people."

The boys all high fived. "I can't believe he wanted to hang out with us!" exclaimed one of them.

Related: VICE meets Arjan Roskam, 38-time Cannabis Cup winner and self-proclaimed King of Cannabis.

The 4:20 hour was drawing nigh and in Miguel's VIP section, a charismatic man in a cheap suit successfully captured the attention of the half-sentient crowd before him by announcing, with a twinkle in his eye, that it was "ten minutes to 4:20!" We all stopped our individual conversations and joined to cheer when he announced that his weather forecast for ten minutes from now was "sunny with a chance of a giant cloud above us!" He went on to quote a Bible verse about God giving us seeded plants and then asked us if we knew what kind of paper the Declaration of Independence was written on.

"Hemp!" chanted 2,000 people, all of whom were "that guy" in college, in unison.

It was then that he announced that we had in our midst a presidential candidate. Green Party candidate Jill Stein, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, then took the stage in a purple pantsuit and wished us all a happy 4/20. She then attempted to shoe horn in some business about the importance of access to health care and education before appeasing the glassy eyed crowd with some exciting news, "I've just been informed that it's two minutes to 4:20!"

I finished smoking the bowl I was already smoking so I wouldn't miss out on also smoking at 4:20.

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Then, it was time for the countdown. In broad day light, at the foot of the state building, we counted down in unison "5-4-3-2-1!" It was our own New Year's Eve. It was our payback for the oppressive years we'd spent in hiding, getting stoned in our cars, and being forced to blow smoke through dryer sheets and toilet rolls like some kind of animals. We took a collective hit before exhaling "Happy 4:20!" and then gleefully cheered for the thick fog above us that we had created with our very own lungs.

The music swelled, the smoking continued, and a genius marketing man from the Kettle Chips company showered us in free samples of potato chips.

On my way back to the car, I miraculously remembered which parking structure I was in, but could not find a pedestrian entrance anywhere. I circled the entire city block twice and remained calm. I decided long ago that the inability to retain important parking information was a small price to pay for the joys that marijuana has brought to my life. On my third trip around the block, I came across a group of people, all in various marijuana themed head gear, who were staring, confused, at the auto exit of the structure.

"Are you guys looking for the entrance too?" I asked.

"I thought there were stairs," offered a man in weed Mardi Gras beads, knowing he wasn't bringing anything to the table

"I'm really high," I told him unnecessarily.

Behind us, a van had pulled up out of the structure and had somehow become perpendicular at the exit.

"I think they are too," said Mardi Gras Beads, as none of us stopped the van from backing into a pole. The driver of the van flashed us an undeserved thumbs up before finally successfully peeling out of the driveway.

I turned to my newfound compatriots. "Are we doing this then? I think it's safer as a group." We all sized up the ramp ahead of us, where a steady stream of cars was driving out, and charged up hill as a pack, like a phalanx of soldiers going head first into ammunition.

Together, we made it safely upstairs and I bid the group adieu. I sat in my car and decided I'd read some literature I'd been given by a woman in a Guy Fawkes mask until I was sober enough to drive. I looked up from my reading to see that next to me, a librarian looking woman was contentedly sitting behind the steering wheel of her Volvo, also with no plans to go anywhere soon. Her seat belt was caught in the door of her car, and I knew it would remain that way until she finally got home.

Follow Tess Barker on Twitter.

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Beautiful Nunavut is 100 percent reliant on diesel fuel for energy. Photo via Flickr user Mike Beauregard.

What would you do with an extra $30 million dollars? That's the question currently facing the Government of Nunavut.

The recent drop in oil price means that the Arctic territory is set to save up to $32 million in fuel costs. This offers a unique chance to invest in green energy argues George Hickes, Iqaluit-Tasiluk representative in Nunavut's Legislative Assembly.

"Very few people have actually brought up the topic of renewable energy, so I want to highlight the fact we have an opportunity now, with some of the potential savings and fuel resupply, to invest in alternative energy pilot programmes," Hickes explains.

"It gives us an opportunity to show ourselves, and the federal government, and the rest of the world, that we're serious about alternative energy solutions as well."

And so should they be. The territory is 100 percent reliant on diesel fuel for all of its electricity, importing roughly 45 million litres each year. With no grid infrastructure, each community is served by its own diesel-fired power plant, the majority of which are at, or near, the end of their lifecycle.

This is compared to the other northern territories, which are almost entirely powered by renewables. The Northwest Territories (NWT) produces about 80 percent of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, while Yukon sources 99.5 percent of its electricity from hydro and wind power.

"It's a challenge," says Hickes of greening Nunavut's energy supply. With 25 communities totalling almost 32,000 people spread out over an area the size of Western Europe, Nunavut is a "big landmass with a small population." It is Canada's largest, northernmost, and newest territory.

Understanding this context helps explain, in part, its lack of renewable energy infrastructure. On April 1, 1995 Nunavut was officially separated from NWT. Prior to that, when money was spent investing in renewables for the territory, it was directed towards the biggest populations—western parts of NWT such as Yellowknife, not the sparsely-populated eastern portion that is now Nunavut.

But 16 years later, not much has changed. Poor infrastructure and a low level of financing are the main challenges says Hickes, not to mention pretty serious competing interests such as food security, health centres, waste treatment and management, and a severe lack of housing.

"We have communities in Nunavut that are unable to meet the demands of growth, such as housing, due to being at maximum power capacity for the generation infrastructure available. Until such a time as Nunavut expands or replaces those power plants, no growth to meet demand is available," Hickes explains.

In the first year of Nunavut's separation, two small-scale renewables projects were launched. First, the Nunavut Power Corporation installed five wind turbines in various locations. But today, only one small turbine continues to operate in Rankin Inlet. The 50 kilowatt (kW) unit is connected to the local grid and helps save about 40,000 litres of diesel fuel each year.

The Nunavut Arctic College also installed a 60 panel 3.2 kW photovoltaic (PV) system on its south wall in 1995. The electricity produced there feeds into the local grid, generating roughly 2,000 kWh of electricity annually. This is enough energy to power the lights in one large classroom for almost 80 days straight. Though the aim was to prove solar could be a viable power source in harsh Arctic conditions with little sunlight during the winter months.

But more of these sorts of initiatives are needed, Hickes argues: "What I'm thinking is if we invest in things that are going to save us money in the long-run, or offset some of our fuel expenditures and greenhouse impact, it's a win-win."

"If we start off with some smaller projects in some of the outlying communities it would show that we're serious about it and, to me, it would help our government negotiate with the federal government [by showing] that we are taking steps and we need them to assist us in taking bigger steps."

So just what could Nunavut do with $32 million dollars?

Solar technology has become incredibly inexpensive these days. Since 2008, the price has dropped 80 percent. Today, the average cost of installing solar panels on a mid-sized home in Canada is between $30,000–$40,000 for about 30 panels (connecting off the grid is typically a bit higher). This produces roughly 8,350 kWh of energy a year, or 22 kWh per day, just below the average household use of about 30 kWh per day.

Based on these numbers, at least 800 solar arrays could be purchased for homes with Nunavut's fuel savings. While transport costs would also need to be factored in for delivering the infrastructure so far north, the potential is staggering.

Grant programmes are also viable options. For example, in 2001, a grant scheme in NWT saw off-grid homeowners install 36 renewable energy systems over a two-year period. This was the first incentive scheme for solar in the territory, one that gave 50 percent rebates for panels. Its success meant that similar alternative energy schemes have continued with a base funding of $300,000 per year.

Wind technology has also improved dramatically. Last October, Quebec developer Tugliq Energy commissioned a $23 million single-turbine project in Nunavik, located 800 kilometres above the treeline at the northernmost tip of the province.

The 3MW turbine is designed to withstand Arctic conditions and climate change; features include oversized components, an elevator, heated blades and a specially-designed steel base elevated a metre above ground on piles drilled into the earth to avoid problems should the permafrost thaw.

The turbine is expected to reduce diesel fuel consumption at Glencore's Raglan nickel-copper mine by 2.5 million litres a year.

Typical large wind turbines produce about 1,000kW (costing anywhere between $2,000–8,000 per kW) and can displace 17,800 gallons of diesel fuel per year. This would save almost $55,000 based on a utility rate of $3.10 per gallon of diesel fuel according to the Renewable Energy Alaska Project.

Alaska is often looked to for its success with wind turbines. Like Nunavut, rural Alaska is largely powered by diesel fuel but over the past few years it has seen rapid development of community-scale wind-diesel systems.

The Kodiak Electric Association (KEA) project gives a sense of what could be achieved. In 2009, it installed the state's first three 1.5MW turbines for a total USD $21.4 million. The wind farm doubled in size in 2012 to six turbines—these supply more than 18 percent of the community's electricity. Combined with hydroelectricity, KEA can shut off its diesel generators almost all year.

The options abound. But at the moment, there has been no commitment by Nunavut's government to use any of the anticipated fuel savings for alternative energy, says Hickes, who notes that the final amount saved could still fluctuate up or down.

Most of the focus has been towards building a large-scale hydro project in Iqaluit, which is responsible for almost a third of the territory's fuel use. But with a price tag of $450 million, this is a long, long way from completion.

Pilot projects are therefore needed as proof of concept. "We can't fund that [hydro project] ourselves, it's just not possible with our revenue," Hickes explains. "Until literally hundreds of millions of dollars are identified, it will not be realized. The opportunity now available with resupply savings to leverage further Federal investment is here and now."

"In the grand scheme of things, maybe our footprint isn't that large. But if we're to be defending our environment and our communities against climate change we have to show that we're participating in solutions," he concludes. "It's just time I think that we take some steps, we need to control our own fuel destiny."

Follow Kyla Mandel on Twitter.

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Photo by the author

This article is part of our continuing coverage over the next week of the Tribeca Film Festival 2015. Check back as we serve up essays and interviews on the festival's films, stars, and directors, and give you access to everything, from the red carpet to the after-parties. Or read our previous coverage here:

Last night I attended the highly-anticipated Tribeca Film Festival screening of Montage ofHeck, the new film about Nirvana frontman and 90s cultural icon Kurt Cobain. The event was the first documentary screening where I felt I could've used earplugs, which either shows how loud the thing was, or how old I am now, or probably both. That said, if there has ever been a documentary that deserves to be screened at eardrum-rupturing decibels, it's Montage of Heck, with its footage from live Nirvana shows, album recordings, home demos, and score composed by Jeff Danna. Following the screening, there was a conversation between Cobain's widow Courtney Love and director Brett Morgen, moderated by Rolling Stone contributing editor Neil Strauss (AKA the guy who wrote the pickup-artist bible The Game).

The film itself was uproarious, seamlessly edited, and very intimate, navigating between interviews with Cobain's parents, tour footage, and home movies featuring bathroom and bedroom scenes as well as clips of the couple with their child, Frances Bean. The documentary also draws from Cobain's personal notebooks, which Love gave him unrestricted access to, and drawings and paintings he created throughout his life, which were then animated for the film. Through these animations we learn other names he was considering for the band including "The Reaganites," "Elvis Cooper," "Erectum," "Smell Fish," "Man Bug," Novacain," and "Breed" before settling on Nirvana.

For a film about the formation of a grunge god, Montage of Heck doesn't linger on Cobain's early musical heroes. In a quick scene featuring one of his notebooks we see a list of albums Cobain admired including eponymous ones by the Stooges and the Raincoats, but the film focuses more on his cultural foundations. Cobain had a hatred of Reaganism, homophobia, sexism, consumerism, ableism, and racism, and while those values undoubtedly helped shape his art, he was also deeply influenced by psychological and emotional issues, such as being shuttled between homes as a young teen and feeling unwanted at times by both of his parents and his grandparents.

We also learn about the bands Cobain and his bandmates didn't care so much for. Peppered throughout the film are numerous digs at artists like Aerosmith and Jerry Garcia, both of whom receive memorable jabs: "Let's send him a tape," one of them suggests. "Sprinkle it with patchouli," is the response. Later, we see the young family in the bath, the Nirvana singer performing a sneering Bob Dylan impression for his bemused audience. The word Mobile is about all that's intelligible.

It's interesting to note that some of the remarkably intimate scenes were not, as Love disclosed during the Q&A, typically shot by a tripod as one might have assumed, but by Eric Erlandson, Love's guitarist in Hole and former boyfriend. Even more surprisingly, this fact doesn't seem to have fazed Cobain, despite the pointed jealousy he possessed, according to Love (another insight: Cobain's overdose on sleeping pills the month before his death was, Love says in the documentary, caused by feelings of extreme betrayal at her "thinking about" cheating on him).

During one less unhappy moment in the documentary, Love stands in the bathroom, adjusting her towel. Cobain is seen from the back, naked from the waist up as he shaves in the mirror. We are shown an extended view of his sinewy, pimpled back before he suddenly turns to face Love, exclaiming, boyishly: "Look, mustache!" Love laughs and tries to get him to keep it—"No way," he responds. Moments later she strips off her towel to display her "big tits" to the camera; a little later in the scene, she does it again. After the film Love told the audience that Erlandson was the cinematographer that day.

Those disarming moments are plentiful in Montage of Heck, and do a fantastic job of letting the audience in on Cobain and Love's relationship. Onstage, when Strauss asked her to quantify how much she thought Morgen got right in the film, Love answered, "This is as close to the truth as it's going to get."

Their relationship was a favorite talking point of the media at the time, and was often painted as turbulent or compared to those of Sid and Nancy or John and Yoko (or both simultaneously, as was the case of Lynn Hirschberg's famously unflattering profile of Love in Vanity Fair). Yet Sunday night Love summed up their love as "that punchdrunk thing" where "you're just talking, and fighting, and fucking." Of Cobain, he was "this beautiful man I was married to 21 years ago."

When asked by Strauss about what parts of the story the film didn't show, Love became visibly uncomfortable. "Let's take another question," she said.

Toward the end, Morgen talked about how making the film felt "very personal."

"I found myself amazed at how much I related to him," Morgen said. "It felt like a film about Kurt, but also about our whole generation"—an interesting connection to be made about a musician who vehemently resisted such pressures his entire career.

When asked why it took so long to make the movie—eight years of various legal and interpersonal wrangling—Love answered, smiling a little, "There was a tsunami of shit in the middle. And I caused most of it."

An audience member asked the panelists about Cobain's stomach ailments, a recurring theme throughout the film. Even in the early days of touring, pre-heavy drug use, he describes the pain as excruciating, including one diary entry in which he says it makes him want to "kill himself."

"He had serious, serious stomach problems," Love said. "He had Crohn's disease, he had multiple endoscopies," she continued, rattling off the list before arriving at the fitting, maybe inevitable note: "He had Cobain's disease."

Montage of Heck plays at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday, April 23. The film premieres on HBO on Monday, May 4, and is scheduled for a DVD release in November.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

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Image by Frans de Waal via Wikimedia Commons

UPDATE: According to Science Magazine, the judge who made this decision has just amended the court order, removing the crucial phrase "writ of habeas corpus." That means for the time being, any indication about whether or not chimpanzees have legal personhood has been stricken from the record.

In a potentially huge, watershed moment for proponents of "nonhuman personhood," two research chimpanzees were just given a form of legal recognition usually reserved only for people. It's the first time this has ever happened in the United States.

By issuing a writ of habeas corpus to two research animals, a judge is essentially granting caged chimps the same privilege as a human prisoner yelling "I demand my day in court!"

The ruling comes from New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe, and says that on May 6, Stony Brook University must respond in court to the petition filed by the Nonhuman Rights Project. The petition argues that by keeping the chimps, Hercules and Leo, in cages, Stony Brook is unlawfully detaining them, and they should be moved to an animal sanctuary.

Related: For more on the lives of caged animals watch our documentary about the exotic animal trade.

This has been a long time coming. Legal scholar Steven Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project told us last year that he and other activist lawyers have been building up to a case like this since at least December of 2013. Their lawsuit on behalf of a chimp named Tommy was thrown out of court last year.

When he spoke to VICE, Wise pointed to the 94 percent genetic similarity we share with Pan troglodytes. He also noted their intelligence, which in some ways matches a human toddler's, but in other ways exceeds that of human adults.

Wise's organization isn't downplaying the potential significance of this ruling. Natalie Prosin, their executive director, told Science Magazine, "We got our foot in the door. And no matter what happens, that door can never be completely shut again."

Being heard in court about unjust imprisonment is one person-y right that this particular judge thinks these chimps do have, but she's not necessarily releasing them. Richard Cupp, an outspoken opponent of the whole chimps-are-people thing told Science Magazine that by granting the writ, the judge isn't making a broad statement about personhood, but instead, attempting to hear both sides of the story in court.

With different kinds of animal cruelty opponents now in opposition to each other on this issue, the arguments are about to start getting interesting. Cupp wrote about animal rights in The New York Times last year, arguing that in curbing cruelty to animals, we should focus on human responsibility, rather than arguing about animals having "rights" at all.

But Steven Wise's position when he spoke to VICE wasn't that all animals should immediately be granted rights, just that animals' legal needs should be evaluated on a being-by-being basis. Legal personhood for Tommy, the chimp he was talking about at the time, just meant acknowledging "the right of bodily liberty—that he would be able to physically move around."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='425' path='images/content-images/2015/04/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/21/' filename='the-tories-are-making-it-really-hard-for-haiti-earthquake-survivors-to-stay-in-canada-812-body-image-1429640287.jpg' id='48298']The aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010. Photo via Flickr user Colin Crowley.

Montreal community groups say the federal government's refusal to ease off the red tape could lead to the mass deportation of Haitian refugees.

After the deadly 2010 quake in Haiti that killed more than 200,000 and displaced about 1.5 million people, thousands of Haitians sought refuge in Canada—a country with an already massive ex-pat community.

Most were not granted official refugee status and have since been living in an administrative limbo that allowed them to live and work in Canada insofar as their country was deemed unsafe.

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Laurin Liu, MP for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles in Quebec. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This past weekend, my roommate and I went to the mall. When we separated briefly to get drinks a little after lunch, I found myself trapped behind four tiny teen girls. They may have been tweens; I have a teenage sibling, and these girls were much smaller than her. They were so small I think I might have been able to abscond with them in my pockets if I'd really wanted to. As they decided what they wanted, the apparent ringleader leaned over to one of the others and said, "Well, we're not eating for the rest of the day, are we? So should I get some food?"

I have no idea what these girls were spending their day doing. It's entirely possible they wouldn't be eating for the rest of the day by necessity: maybe one of them had an important medical test the next day, and her friend was fasting in solidarity. Maybe they're young political activists doing a half-day hunger strike to bring awareness to Omar Khadr's ongoing detention (something I myself did when I was around their age; that guy has been locked up for entirely too long). Maybe they just knew they were going to be too busy to eat. That happens.

But it's also distressingly likely that they were starving themselves, which all too many young girls and women—and some boys and men—do. A 2002 study cited on the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC) website found that just under 30 percent of grade nine and ten girls "engaged in weight-loss behaviours." Another study, from 2008, found that 40 percent of grade ten girls thought they were too fat. These appear to be among the most recent studies done in Canada on the prevalence of eating disorders.

Laurin Liu, 24, one of the many young NDP candidates elected to Parliament during the 2011 "Orange Crush," wants to bring national attention to the problem of eating disorders, and one of her focuses is the lack of research into the issue.

"I wanted to use my voice and my position of power in this really male-dominated political space to talk about issues that particularly affect women," Liu told VICE, "and eating disorders are one of those issues—although they affect men as well, 80 percent of those suffering from eating disorders are women."

The "Be Real" campaign that she's started is, right now, essentially a website with a petition you can sign if you also want more funding and attention focused on eating disorders in Canada. But Liu wants to use this to create the social and political will to do more, including implementing a national strategy on eating disorders and having a serious conversation about body diversity in the media.

"This debate has happened in a lot of countries," she said, "most notably in France and Israel, and I think it's time that we examine this issue in Canada as well."

As it happens, some regions in the country have already begun the work Liu is talking about. Quebec, from whence Liu hails, has a "Charter for a healthy and diverse body image" and a comprehensive approach to eating disorders.

Aside from the best-known iterations of disordered eating—anorexia and bulimia—there is an entire range of unhealthy eating habits, and they're often tied to a person's self-image and mental health. That's part of why Liu wants the federal government to both allocate funding for research into eating disorders, and discuss the role of media portrayals of body diversity.

Right now, we're a far cry from where Liu, along with many organizations that work with eating disorders, would like us to be: she says the federal government has cut spending for research and women's health in recent years, and she was disappointed by the recommendations the Conservative-majority's Standing Committee on the Status of Women issued after a hearing on the issue.

Liu says the committee "put out a very watered-down report, with very watered-down considerations, more kind of suggest and propose and encourage recommendations, you know what I mean? Recommendations that don't actually hold the government to account."

The first three recommendations from the committee's report are a good example of that:

Recommendation 1
The Committee recommends that the Government of Canada consider supporting research on the impact of media messaging and marketing directed toward children and the impact and consequences of society's current, narrow definition of beauty.

Recommendation 2
The Committee recommends that the Government of Canada encourage academic institutions to promote media literacy for young children to help them to view media content critically and question the messages therein.

Recommendation 3
The Committee recommends that the Government of Canada collaborate with the provinces and territories to consider adjusting medical criteria for defining normal weights beyond quantitative measures such as Body Mass Index.

Encouragements and suggestions aren't enough without political willpower, as Liu well knows. She said she wants to introduce a bill to Parliament on the creation of a national strategy. It's hard to say what kind of effect a national strategy on eating disorders would have on the kids in malls across Canada deciding how much they want to allow themselves to eat, but if Liu manages to make it happen, it can only be a good thing.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='a-dog-has-caused-chaos-in-scotland-after-driving-a-tractor-on-a-motorway-901-body-image-1429697406.jpg' id='48426']Incredibly, there was an appropriate stock image to go with this story. Photo via Flickr user Chris Breeze

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Delays were caused on a stretch of busy Scottish motorway after a dog took control of a tractor and drove it into the road. Feels very biblical, this, doesn't it? As though the dogs are finally realizing their destiny by rising up, claiming our heavy machinery as their own, and decking it cheerfully into a big row of Peugeots. I, for one, welcome our new dog overlords, and the reign of turd-ridden streets and terror that they will inevitably bring.

As the BBC reports, the incident was reported by Traffic Scotland this morning with a tweet saying: "M74 (N) J13-RTC due to dog taking control of tractor... nope, not joking. Farmer and police at scene, vehicle in central res."

After the dog was pulled over and asked to please stop driving a tractor down a motorway, Traffic Scotland added: "M74 (N) at J13 – Route is clear from earlier incident and dog is fine. Has to be the weirdest thing we have ever reported! No delays in area."

Police joined the dog's human master—who it's thought is being earmarked for mercy in the upcoming dogpocalypse—in huddling around the central reservation where the tractor ended up and just being really Scottishly confused about the whole thing. It's thought the dog leaned on the tractor controls at some point while the farmer was out of the vehicle, or at least that's the story, anyway. In reality, the dog probably hypnotized the farmer with a loving look and then, as thousands of years of evolution came to a natural conclusion, clasped its paws in the vague approximation of opposable thumbs, smoothly changed gear, and then took off towards the M74, with joy in its tiny dog heart and the sun on its back.

Related: Watch our documentary "How to Hack a Car":

What mysteries lie inside the gem-like mind of a dog? Dogs are innocent and they are wise. Dogs enjoy small tins of bad meat and being told they are good. They like walking and turning their necks awkwardly and excitedly to look at humans. They like panting and naps. They, apparently, like driving without a license and taking prohibited vehicles onto and across British carriageways. The mind of a dog is a precious diamond that it is impossible to mine. It contains magnitudes, all of them untold. What tiny spark of naïve genius inspired a Scottish dog to drive a tractor into a motorway? We may never know.

But sometimes, in life, I think we all feel like a dog driving a tractor down a busy stretch of Scottish motorway. We don't know what's happening or why, but we're behind the wheel and we're fucking motoring. Our happiness is both infectious and full of extreme and lethal possibility. We don't know how we got here but we're enjoying the ride. Thank you, Scottish Motorway Dog. Thank you for showing us that life is full of possibility and wonder. Thank you for teaching us that a single moment of vivid joy can make our day anew. Thank you for not killing us with a tractor while you were on your rampage.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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Photo by Natalie Olah

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The rapidly increasing death toll of migrants attempting the crossing into Southern Europe is a catastrophe that should spur us into action over so called "anti-immigration" rhetoric. The UNHCR estimates 1,600 deaths so far this year and without action, thousands more will die. European government leaders are due to hold a too-little-too-late crisis summit on Thursday. We should take this opportunity to point out that the deaths can be attributed to their politically motivated inaction so far, based on anti-immigration rhetoric. We must demand an end to the cruel policy of favoring border control and surveillance over search and rescue.

Last October, Italy announced the end of its year-long naval search and rescue operation Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea"—a Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea revived by 19th century Italian nationalists). The mission had rescued 150,000 migrants making the crossing mainly via Libya. Many human rights groups warned at the time that paring back the operation would only lead to an increase in the already startling number of deaths. In 2014, 3,500 people died trying to enter Europe via the Mediterranean. At 1,600, this year's toll is already well on its way to exceeding last years.

When announcing the end of Mare Nostrum, Italy called for other European nations to step up their contribution to efforts in the region. The response was Triton, an operation much smaller than its predecessor and focused on border surveillance as opposed to search and rescue. A deliberate policy of maintaining border controls for Fortress Europe then, not a humanitarian effort concerned for the safety of those making the extremely dangerous crossing. In hindsight, the decision was cruel and disastrous, but in the scramble for some European leaders to lament the tragedy of the recent (entirely predictable) deaths, it is hard to see any change in the broader hostile narrative toward those risking their lives for the promise of a better future.

Related: VICE News - Europe or Die

The British government's response in 2014 was to resist at every turn the possibility of aiding in search and rescue operations. Foreign Office minister Baroness Anelay described such efforts as an "unintended 'pull factor,' encouraging more migrants to make the dangerous sea crossing." The government's position, according to Anelay, was an unequivocal—"We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean." Theresa May supported Operation Triton on the basis that it would "reinforce border surveillance in the waters close to the Italian shores." This was followed up by the Home Office seconding at first a single immigration officer, now increased to five, in order to aid with gathering intelligence on those making the crossing.

David Cameron is now calling for a "comprehensive" approach ahead of Thursday's meeting of EU leaders. Thus far this seems to be yet another down playing of the urgent need for search and rescue operations, with Cameron instead putting his emphasis on dealing with "instability in the countries concerned" and by doing this "trying to stop people from traveling." Not only does this ignore the very recent history of Cameron's own contribution to creating that instability—say through the intervention in Libya—it more urgently ignores those continuing to drown.

Britain then, alongside its European counterparts who have also, to put it mildly, done less than their best, has contributed to the killing of these migrants. They have not simply died—they have been killed by the duel factors of immiseration that caused them to flee and a Europe so averse to them settling here for a new life that it would cynically ignore people drowning off its own coasts.

It is difficult not to put such an unforgivable approach down to a generalized and pernicious disdain against migrants. Here in the UK it is bad enough when free movement within the EU means that eastern European people might choose to live here. The prospect of a mass influx of refugees and asylum seekers from the global south is practically unconscionable. The three main political parties (and of course UKIP) all promise tighter immigration controls if they are elected. Our long history of immigration acts dating back to the 1960s is a history of self-serving policy, dictated by economic pulls and perceived, as well as often manipulated, public opinion. The very same attitude is at play today also—until it was too late, British politicians were satisfied with their stance against immigrants. Now that the deadly consequences have been borne out, we see further trepidation lest we inadvertently encourage further attempts at migration into Europe.

Related: Inside Britain's Busiest Food Bank

Though perhaps we should, it is hard to ignore the comments of Sun columnist Katie Hopkins. The headline emblazoned "Rescue boats? I'd use gunships to stop migrants," as well as the further horrific comments are, on the face of it, unbelievable. It would be easy to pretend that these views have little public traction, but as a first generation Somali asylum seeker in this country, I feel like they do. The attitude towards asylum seekers can be hideous—there is no other word for it. Hopkins-esque views may be far from the lips of our political leaders, but at the end of the day aren't the consequences of their two approaches remarkably similar?

This is an opportunity for many of us to give the lie to this bigotry masquerading as right-thinking policy. Rescue operations restarting at the very least on the scale of Mare Nostrum is a must. This is what politicians should be pushed towards ahead of their summit. But they must also be pushed towards providing asylum for these people rather than shipping them back to Africa. Being "tough" on immigration has deadly consequences. This bloody protectionism should have no place in our society. Rather than being quick to moralize about "people smugglers" (who are no doubt exploitative) we should concentrate on seeing that what they are smuggling is people, not goods that can be lost at sea. To borrow from a recent struggle: #BlackMigrantLivesMatter.

Follow Wail on Twitter.

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Photo of Jason Woliner via Wikimedia Commons user Gage Skidmore

For anyone in their 30s, the notion that comedians Bob Odenkirk and David Cross might get back together to do anything is a big deal. So when news came at the beginning of April that the duo behind the legendary Mr. Show were joining forces again to make a brand new sketch comedy show for Netflix, called With Bob and David, the internet rightfully freaked out.

Mr. Show introduced a generation of comedians and comedy fans to the world of "alternative comedy." Tracking its legacy backwards is kind of like linking the lineage of Greek gods. Tenacious D, The Sarah Silverman Program, Key & Peele, Comedy Bang Bang, everything Tim & Eric have done, and nearly the entire landscape of comedy podcasting all owe a debt to Mr. Show.

The program also left undeniable mark on Jason Woliner, a director who's been behind some of the best and weirdest TV that's aired over the past few years. So it's only fitting that Woliner is now set direct large parts of Odenkirk and Cross's latest endeavor.

One look at Woliner's gut-busting resume and it's clear he's the perfect person for the job. He started as the "non-performing fourth member" of the sketch comedy group Human Giant, handling a majority of the visual aspects during the group's two-season MTV run. Since then, he's directed the mockumentary short series RAAAAAAAANDY based on Aziz Ansari's character from Funny People, the live-action version of SNL's The Ambigiously Gay Duo with Jon Hamm and Jimmy Fallon, the best episode of Nathan for You ("The Claw of Shame"), two insane Brett Gelman dinner specials for Adult Swim, and most of the brilliant and under-appreciated three-season run of Eagleheart, which may actually be Woliner's finest work to date. The third, and probably final, season of Eagleheart nearly reaches the creative and comedic heights of the original Mr. Showwith its transcendent and gruesome season finale.

I gave Woliner a call the other day to talk about his new gig directing his heroes and his own incredible work.

VICE: It's OK to talk about With Bob and David?
Jason Woliner: Yeah. I'd been working on it in complete secrecy for a month, not even allowed to say it existed. When it came out [earlier this month] that it was happening, we were halfway through shooting the stuff I was doing. It's not a secret anymore.

So, shooting is done?
I directed all but one of the—they call them "pre-tapes." The filmed pieces. It's like Mr. Show, where it's half-filmed, half-live. But it's specifically called With Bob and David. There's all this, "It's not Mr. Show." But people who are fans of Mr. Show will be very happy with this. It's not extremely different from what people want.

How did you get involved?
I don't know. I'd casually known Bob and David for years just by being in the comedy world, and I've done work with other people from the show. Early on my name came up when they'd need someone to direct the filmed stuff. It's kind of like... How old are you?

I'm 33, so it's right in my wheelhouse.
Right. So, Mr. Show, that's the reason I was like, This is what I want to do with my life. You see something at a certain age and [it can] blow your mind in a way that... can't happen once you're past a certain age. Even now I can see something that's amazing and love it and think about it, but it really can't hit you and shape who you are [like it does when you're] in your teens. I feel like everyone our age, for people who like comedy, that was the thing.

We're in this era of reboots now, where these great things from our youth are coming back. New X-Files, new Twin Peaks...
Maybe.

Who knows. But are there other projects to work on that would blow your 14-year-old self's mind?
Honestly, working with these guys would be it. And then working with Chris Elliot [star of Eagleheart] would be the other one. So, I've been crazily fortunate. There's really not many people left. I've hit that sweet spot. For me, this whole thing has been very dreamlike, because I didn't ever think this was something that would exist. There's just a very good vibe to the whole thing. Everyone's so funny, and no one's really old-looking yet.

That was such an entryway into this whole world. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and it was like, Oh, here's this whole comedy world that exists, this whole scene.
I grew up in New York in the Bronx, originally in the suburbs, but I was the only kid I knew who stayed up late and watched this stuff on HBO on a Friday night. The internet's changed all that because it's easier to discover your own little subculture. You really had to put in more work back then.

I remember seeking out Eraserhead, spending $50 for a VHS copy from like Russia. Then a month later it was everywhere on DVD for $20. Now, you can stream it from wherever.
It makes things less special. I had this videotape of shorts Sam Raimi made when he was a kid. You had to go somewhere to find it, buy it, ask around, look around, or mail something. Obviously, putting in that legwork you really earned the stuff more. Same thing with music. This has been said to death, but now every record is so accessible. It used to be you hear about something, buy something, and it's yours and you own it. I would put in so much more of an effort to like something. I paid $19 for this CD, so I'll listen to it a few times. Now, I just feel like I give a lot of stuff less of a chance, and connect to stuff less than I would back then.

When you were watching the old Sam Raimi movies, if you didn't like it on the first or second listen, you'd still gave it a few tries.
Things become more rewarding if it does not connect right away. There really isn't that anymore. There's so much more shit. It's like this waterfall. Also, back then, the reason stuff made such an impact on our generation was there wasn't really that much. This was it. Now, if you are into comedy, there's a million sketch shows, there's so much live comedy and improv. People 20 years from now will be less unified on what their thing was, because everyone kind of has their own thing and it's more segmented. I don't know that we'll have that kind of thing again, where everyone our age is like, "Oh, Mr. Show."

I remember when A Special Thing [message board] was a big source for comedy news and show info. At some point, you need filters to make sure the best gets to you. The Best Show with Tom Scharpling is another place, where you're taught what you should listen to.
Tom acts as a filter. I've discovered a lot of stuff I liked through that. That's what I feel like the next step is, some kind of curating system. It hasn't really emerged yet, I don't think. On Twitter there's people I like who post cool things and I discover through that, but it's also a waterfall of garbage.

To get back on track, the next thing I want to talk about are the Brett Gelman dinner specials. Where did that idea come from?
We were at this dinner party with other people we know, and certain people were kind of performing. We were thinking of an actor guy having a dinner party where he wouldn't let anyone else speak. It was originally going to be called Five Courses, Five Voices, and it was just going to be Brett inviting actor friends and celebrities to a dinner party, which they realize was a taping—they didn't know that going in—and he proceeds to do five character pieces. There was a bit of him making them feel trapped, but it wasn't as much of a horror thing. We wrote that script and Adult Swim liked parts of it, but didn't like just watching a guy at the head of the table, not letting anyone else speak. They encouraged us to follow a horror movie thread. Then they said we could do more, so we wrote another one, but they said it was too extreme for it to air. So we wrote the one about his family. Just last week we were told that we can do another one, so we're getting to work on that now.

It's a difficult line, going over the top without becoming incoherent. Do you pull things back if you have to?
We try to keep everything grounded in its own specific logic or reality. We try to avoid doing anything that's shocking. As extreme as things get, hopefully they're grounded in a way that, on some level, you could see where these characters are coming from. No one's just acting goofy, I would say. We're also—and we got into this trap on Eagleheart, too—we're really afraid of repeating ourselves. We try to change the formula for each one. We're thinking of maybe not doing a scary one because that's what's expected now by anyone who's seen the first two. With a lot of horror or shock or weirder comedy stuff, it's easier to just be fucked up. Hopefully with these, you're actually invested in the story.

That takes me right to the last season of Eagleheart. The ending was one of the most gut-wrenching things I've seen.
Aww. That's really the nicest thing you could say to me. [Laughs] That means so much to me.

Why did you decide to do one long storyline as opposed to standalone episodes?
We had done one-offs and wanted to do something else with it. Season one was a really difficult process. But by the end, we figured out a place where everyone was happier. In the second season, I think we got pretty good at doing these 11-minute stories that spiraled off into different things and came back. We really liked setting these really annoying challenges for us. So, me and Michael Koman and Andrew Weinberg, we were trying to figure out what to do to keep it interesting. We [wanted to make something you] could appreciate not only conceptually, but also actually invest in the story and the characters. We also wanted to make something that was. I love Adult Swim, but you don't see a lot of things on there that are genuinely sad, so we thought that was a fun challenge. [That season is really about] the futility of jokes as a weapon against the world, and what the end of that is. Which is, you know, your severed head in a toilet while a bum shits on your face.

Are you happy with how it ended?
I think [the ending] works. It sweeps you away, and there's a gut punch. But the other thing is, we worked really hard on it. I gave it years of my life, we're so proud of it. But there was something about it preventing it from connecting with other people. I still don't know exactly what it is. I don't even know if it's a cult hit. It's such a strange little show. We only hear from people who are like, "I love your show, I can't get any of my friends to watch it." Something about it seems to turn most people off.

Any talk about a fourth season?
Not currently. Maybe in ten or 20 years there will be another wave of nostalgia. Whoever saw Eagleheart when they were 15, they'll try to make another season.

Follow Rick on Twitter.

[body_image width='1440' height='912' path='images/content-images/2015/04/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/21/' filename='the-death-of-awe-in-the-age-of-awesome-394-body-image-1429633258.jpg' id='48233']

The Northern Lights, which are generally agreed to be an awesome thing. Photo by Flickr user Image Editor

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It was a seemingly innocuous YouTube clip that got me thinking. A fellow parent of a toddler showed it to me, with the accompanying explanation that it had become a highly effective way of quietening her daughter, like a sort-of video tranquilizer.

"Look," she said, and, presenting her phone to our pair of two-year-olds, invited me to watch as their expressions began to glaze over. On the screen, a dozen or so Kinder-egg-style treats were arrayed in two neat lines. Then a woman's manicured hands—belonging to "a Brazilian ex-porn star," my friend informed me, absently—reached in and began to open egg after egg after egg.

And there, in the mesmerized, near-drugged toddler faces, was a glimpse of something that's been niggling me for a while. I'm talking—somewhat pretentiously, I'll admit—about the death of awe.

Travel writers like me spend a lot of time contemplating why people venture abroad. Not just the obvious enticements—relaxation, winter sun, cheap pilsner—but the emotional, soul-stirring stuff: the sustenance of the new. The awe. It has, I think, become one of the main incentives of our traveling lives. As spirituality wanes, experience is the new faith, and we are refugees from the mundane.

But behind this quest for the big, beautiful, and baffling is a disconcerting sense that wonder in the age of the bucket list is under attack. From technology, from information overload, from the anti-spiritual cynicism of the post-hippy world. In an era where a child only has to hold a five-inch screen in front of their face to gorge themselves on the apparent miracle of a one-inch Dora the Explorer hatching from a two-tone chocolate shell, awe has started to feel increasingly elusive.

It doesn't take a philosopher to understand that this diminution of the human condition is an inevitable price of social progress. Awe, after all, used to be much easier to come by. Imagine you're a Stone Age hunter witnessing a solar eclipse (not like last month's anticlimactic, cloud-snuffed eclipse; a proper one). Suddenly, the sun is extinguished. You don't know it's a temporary phenomenon, an orbital idiosyncrasy. So you tremble, piss your mammoth-skin pants, invent gods! That's proper awe right there.

Travel, for many of us, has become a means of trying to resuscitate that sense of humbling incomprehension. Awesome places, whether natural or man-made—the sort that are endlessly catalogued in a thousand "things to do before you die" books—have become lodestars for the restless mind, places to light out for. But it's harder to feel awe when your eclipse is preceded by a 24-hour news preamble sucking every last grain of mystery out of the process.

The result is a uniquely modern malaise in which awe has become fugitive: desperately sought yet ever harder to wrest from the claustrophobic clamor of our overcrowded little planet. Our culture is all grown-up. And like the adult who realizes that the illusionist is a con-man, not a conjurer, we're becoming dulled by over-discovery and over-supply.

Real-life awe barely cuts it any more. We have Photoshop and CGI outdoing the actual. When the Lumiere brothers premiered their 50-second movie in a Parisian theatre—of a flickering locomotive chugging towards the camera—people fled the auditorium. Now we watch The Hobbit, where armies of orcs, trolls, and warmongering dwarves appear utterly, compellingly alive, and shuffle out of the multiplex feeling lobotomized.

The city-dweller's connection with nature—the most prolific wellspring of earthly wonder—is diminished, near-severed. Romanticizing landscape is barely allowed. Wordsworth would never get away with that lonely cloud shit now. People would just call him a narcissistic hipster wanker. Familiarity breeds contempt. And cynicism withers all. When was the last time you witnessed something special without seeing a photo of it first?

Perhaps the greatest problem, though, lies in the paradox that genuine wonder becomes more slippery the more you pursue it. You can have a bucket-list as long as your arm, but any inveterate awe-chaser will tell you that the planned event, loaded with its adherent expectations, is too open to disappointment.

Say your great traveling aspiration is to witness the Northern Lights (and if you subscribe to bucket-lists, there's an 80 percent chance it is). You've made it to the Arctic Circle, journeyed out to some gloaming Nordic fastness. And there! The ethereal vision of electric green ripples oscillating across space—curling, coalescing, painting great glyphs in the sky. Your imagination unfurls: one moment you see a charging horse, the next a crashing wave. What could it mean, this incandescent tumult, these billion motes of cosmic dust carried on the solar wind? You reach for your camera, then pause. No. You just want to breathe this in (there are good photos available on Google Images). Hair on end, eyes agog, soul vaulting, you shiver. But wait—what's this? The couple from your group tour have marched into your field of view. Backs turned to the light, they hold the phone aloft. Pout, snap; pout, snap. "This is so awesome," the man breathes, returning to your side. And   your reverie is gone.

What's the answer? For some, it lies in pushing further. As awe diminishes, peril has become coveted. In the pre-industrial world, few people felt drawn to mountains. They were foreboding places you ventured into only out of necessity. Now, people fling themselves from their summits wearing wing-suits. Craven to adventure, adrenaline junkies knows that moments are lived more fully when stood on the precipice.

Recommended: 'Nest of Giants,' our doc in which superhuman men do awesome things:

I have a friend who's spent the last five years cycling around the world. His sublime dispatches from the road, which I read with equal doses of envy and joy, speak of a journey rife with awe—of danger, chance encounters, and vast tracts of unknown land.

Though he spends much of his time in discomfort—cold, knackered, and apocalyptically alone—people constantly tell him: "You're living the dream." For he has left tire tracks across more unusual places on his 40,000-mile bike-ride than most of us will see in a lifetime.

Yet, when I wrote to him to ask his views on awe, his reply, tapped out in an internet café somewhere in west Mongolia, confirmed what many of us probably already know: "Real awe is still attainable, still delights, and still keeps me pedaling," he wrote. "But it never comes from the stuff the Lonely Planet informs me I should be awestruck by. It's the stuff that arrives unannounced."

So perhaps Yeats had it right when he wrote: "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." Most of us will never witness a crystalline dawn from the summit of Everest, a 40-foot swell on the Southern Ocean, or a pride of lions without a dozen other safari vehicles bundling into our peripheral vision.

But, in a humbler way, the feelings such experiences would elicit are still attainable, just as soon as we admit that true awe is probably more easily encountered by accident, spontaneously, often in something simple you'd never stopped to contemplate before.

It may be closer than you think.

The other day, in the park, I came across a wren sat on a conifer-branch. For ten minutes it stood on its twig, chest puffed-out but still barely bigger than my thumb. And as it sang its high-pitched warble, it occurred to me that this little creature, half a mile from home, was just about the most awesome thing I've ever seen.

So let's keep looking, but not too hard. Only then might we hope to recapture that simple childhood wonder, of a toy inside a plastic capsule, enclosed in a chocolate egg.

Follow Henry on Twitter.