"Who likes titties? I do!"

A bearish dude with an orange ZZ Top beard hollers at me as he squeezes the breasts of the brunette butterball beside him through her sheer red shirt. They're guzzling beers on the back of a golf cart, and I'm straddling a Harley Road King Classic behind a 54-year-old man I just met. My driver, Greg, chuckles and his peach curls quiver inches from my nose. We accelerate, moving up in the Republic of Texas Rally biker parade—an anarchic swarm of motorcycles, thousands of us, circling a massive field for hours. Some bikers pile in golf carts to booze, cruise, and make out all at once. Most folks take breaks to mingle on the sidelines and mosey around the 128-acre madhouse.

This is the 20th annual ROT Rally, a bacchanal held each summer in Austin, Texas, replete with a daredevil stunt ride over two Budweiser trucks, a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, tattoo booths, and dozens of motorcycle gangs. About 40,000 bikers from around the country bring RVs and baby pools to the Travis County Expo grounds, camping out and stripping down for three nights.

"It never gets old," Greg, an electrical worker who lives about 90 miles north of Austin, tells me, his backwoods twang oozed across syllables like barbecue sauce.

It's only five o'clock, and the mostly-middle-aged mob is already raving: We pass a huddle of topless chicks with airbrush-painted chests, a line of men gyrating in thongs and Mardi Gras beads, a naked balloon lady sucking a giant rubber penis, and a 300-pound Marilyn Monroe impersonator draping her bare boobs on an ice sculpture, all within about two minutes.

Related: Welcome to the Sausage Castle, Home to Florida's Most Free-Spirited Freaks

Engines cough up smoke and roar. Mariachi, country, rap, and Kelly Clarkson jams melt together in the Texas heat. We almost run over a lobster-colored drunk passed out on the grass, cowboy hat smothering over his face. A gold bike with a "just married" cardboard sign swerves to a stop at the Port-a-Potties.

"This is freedom," says Greg, his eyes finding mine in the rearview mirror. "Ya got da wind, air, ya got it all."

"Who's your daddy? Where'd your daddy find you?" a guy with a buzz cut and referee outfit yells at us through a loudspeaker from the sideline. I cringe and Greg speeds on.

Where's Patrick? I wonder, checking my phone for a text from Patrick Bresnan, VICE's photographer here. Sure enough, he's messaged me: "I found the Bandidos."

The Bandidos are just who we're looking for. Texas's biggest motorcycle gang—and the second largest in the world—the Bandidos hover over this year's ROT Rally like a dark cloud, after the group's horrific shootout against rival clubs in Waco last month. The May 17 face-off in a Twin Peaks restaurant, which killed nine people and led to more than 170 arrests, incited a heated debate, especially in Texas, about the violence of biker culture and law enforcement's sweeping response.

Regulars at the ROT Rally told me that attendance plummeted at this year's event, which took place almost exactly a month after the Waco incident. Patrick, who has covered the ROT Rally for years, estimated that about the 2015 crowd was about half the size of the one last year.

"I have friends who were too scared to come this year," said Lenny Galvon, a longtime ROT Rally biker from Corpus Christi who's sipping a beer on the grass while we wait for Bubba Blackwell, a sort-of modern-day Evil Knievel in an American-flag jumpsuit, to jump his Harley. "But they don't need to worry. Here, everybody respects everybody."

Most folks I talked to leapt to defend their motorcycle "family," vehemently admonishing the cops for detaining so many people in Waco. The Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents, a group of individual bikers and clubs that was holding the meeting at the Twin Peaks when the shootout erupted, was at the rally selling black T-shirts with the slogan "Innocent Biker" to raise money for the families of those in jail.

"I was supposed to be in Waco that day," a confederation member who identified himself only as Ty told me by the stand. Ty, who teaches children's karate in Austin, is tall and baby-faced, and wears a leather jacket with Texas and American flag badges. The Waco meeting, Ty told me, was called to discuss pending state legislation that could affect bikers and to teach motorcycle safety.

"We've been having meetings every other month for ten years and there's never been a black eye or bloody nose. What erupted was, there were some bullies," Ty told me, explaining that he missed the meeting because he got caught in traffic. "The spirit of the meeting is to move the community forward."

Ty tells me the bikers' "constitutional rights were stepped on," since cops arrested so many people without evidence of their involvement. An attorney for two of the bikers is seeking to lower the $1 million bonds, claiming they have been used as an "instrument of oppression." One Waco arrestee is suing the city and police for detaining him without probable cause. Meanwhile, riders around Texas have been holding protests around the state, arguing that most of those swept up in the mass arrests were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"They violated our right to peaceful assembly... They call bikers gangs because they wear a uniform," Ty said. "But I teach karate and we wear a uniform, and I'm a president of West Austin Lyons Club and we wear uniforms. Does that make us a gang?"

Watch: Inside a Biker Gang Full of Former Nazis

Conspiracy theories also swirl around the ROT rally, the most popular of which is the idea that it was the cops that actually fired the first shot. Frank Eckrode, a retired biker with emphysema who looks like he belongs in The Grapes of Wrath," seethes from his lawn chair when the shooting is mentioned, and his bulging blue eyes look like they're about to slingshot out of his gaunt face.

"I think it was all the cops. I served in the Army 20 years, and it upsets me they would come in and do this right before Memorial Day. Why would you disservice me on Memorial Day you dumb fucks?" he says, shaking his unlit cigarette. "It's bullshit. What's happened to my country?"

Since so many bikers are eager to talk, Patrick and I stride optimistically up to the Bandidos with Patrick. Unlike other tents, the Bandidos' area is enclosed with neon orange netting. Two hulking security guards in black sunglasses stand by the entrance, which is blocked off with yellow rope. I approach smiling, and tell the guards I'm a journalist, and soon several other huge men in black leather and skullcaps march up to the rope, careening over it to get in our faces.

I ask if they have any thoughts about what happened in Waco. "What happened in Waco?" the tallest, brawniest one barks. "You know..." I reply, still trying to coax something out. "I don't know what happened in Waco. Nothing happened that I know of." His dark beady eyes stay wide, and a toothy smile flies to his lips.

We step back, and I wander back into the debauchery, while Patrick sticks around to try to get some pictures of the white Bandidos tent. A little while later, as I try to stake out a spot on the lawn for the Lynard Skynard show, Patrick calls me. The cops have kicked him out of the rally, but won't tell him why.

I race back up to the Bandidos tent, inhaling fumes from the grills and spilt beer and cigarettes and grinding naked bodies. When I get there, I ask if they had a photographer kicked out. A bearded man in black seated by the orange netting invites me in, and grins at me like I'm a dumb dog.

"No, the cops came to us and asked if we were being bothered, said they heard someone was bothering us. I just said y'all had come by but then you left."

A testosterone-foaming herd in leather storms up. A man I met at the Confederation of Clubs and Independents booth is in the pack. He'd refused to talk to me earlier, but then hovered around me, telling me he'd been a news anchor in the past. "I'm telling you, as a reporter you better tread lightly," he says now, stepping closer. The bearded man calms him down.

"I don't want any trouble, I know," I retreat, and head to the tent of another motorcycle club, Blackett Arms, whose members were also at the Waco meeting according to a petition that the bikers are passing around. "The cops came to us too, you're not supposed to be reporting around here," a woman in the Blackett Arms tent tells me. "They asked for your description. I'm pretty sure they're looking for you too."

Shaken, I shuffle back down the parade route through the stampede of bikes, engines keening louder by the second. I scream at what I think is the sound of a gunshot, but it's actually a firecracker by my sandals. Christmas lights strung on golf carts blink warnings. Nearby, veiny legs braid a cold metal strip pole, fleshy breasts smashing against the silver. Glow-in-the-dark devil ears and a skull flag float by in the dark. The scene that had seemed pleasantly wild hours earlier is now terrifying.

I return to the lawn, now maniacal with Lynyrd Skynyrd onstage and crimson light beaming over crowd. "Texas how are y'all? Fuck its a Saturday night how are y'all? How many die-hard Lynyrd Skynyrd fans are out there?" howls Johnny Van Zant, throwing around his hair and waving an American flag hooked to his microphone stand. "By the way we still think the USA is the best damn place on Earth!"

Next to me, a wasted rotund man in a yellow tank and rock 'n roll bandana pulls out air pistols and sings along, and an emaciated woman with a cancerous, leathered hide sucks down a Jell-O shot, then squints and squinches her nose. "It's time for the south to rise again," Van Sant yells, now pulling out the Confederate flag. The band rolls into "Sweet Home Alabama" and then "Free Bird," and I can't help but chant with the mob. I realize I've got to get out of here. I wind through a maze of escalating chaos, trying to find an exit.

A few days later, the cops and ROT Rally organizers confirmed that Patrick was kicked out for photographing the Bandidos. "The ROT Rally folks notified our guys saying there was a disturbance around the Bandido area," said Roger Wade, a spokesman for the Travis County Sheriff's Officer. "They said Patrick was insisting on taking pictures and asking questions and there was some type of verbal disturbance."

A spokesman for the rally who identifies himself only as Matt (he refuses to give his last name) said the organizers had received calls from the bikers complaining about a photographer around the Bandidos' tent. He won't tell me who made the complaints. "We received complaints from campers saying he was causing problems. They didn't want him to take pictures. If anyone is taking photographs or harassing rally attendees we reserve this right," Matt said. "It's a private event."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Patrick Bresnan, a.k.a. Otis Ike, is a photographer, installation artist, and filmmaker based in Austin. Check out his website here.

How do young black men see themselves in America today? This is the formidable question buried under the high-top fades and Cross-Colour jeans of Rick Famiyuwa's natty new film Dope. It's the story of Malcolm, a retro-obsessed hip-hop geek with Harvard aspirations navigating senior year in a rough section of Inglewood, California. He and fellow squares Jib and Diggy have built an entire identity out of subverting expectations of blackness. He is befriended by local drug dealer Dom (whose own blackness is of the canonical Menace II Society/Juice/Belly variety), and after things go pear-shaped at a party, the trio find themselves holding one of Dom's packages. Malcolm must contend with the weight, the weapons, the friendships, the rival gangs, and, of course, the girl—all while trying to complete his admissions essay. It's a straightforward "teenage boy has to find out who he really is" kind of a plot. We've seen it a million times. And yet we've never seen it at all.

Maybe the best single quote on the Black Experience in America is in Ralph Ellison's 1952 masterwork, Invisible Man. The titular character makes the dizzying observation that "black is and black ain't," a contradiction central to the madness of race in America. It's real. But it's bullshit. People only see black when you want to be human, but as soon as you're being beat, shot, and shit on for your blackness, suddenly it's all "race doesn't matter," and "we're all one." We've taken a biological lie and forced it into a centuries-deep social truth. The mere effort of both maintaining and denying this charade has made America maniacal and Blackness insane.

This contradiction drives Famuyiwa, like many black storytellers, to undertake a number of strategies that shouldn't be revolutionary, but are. He uses the cinematic language of 90s indie teen comedies like Rushmore and Go! to tell a story in a setting where moviegoers more likely expect to see Boyz n the Hood. Here he captures the "black ain't" side of the Ellison quote. If Max Fischer can be charming, resourceful, and arrogant, so can Malcolm. If Ronna and Claire can have a slick, madcap adolescent drug caper, so can Jib and Diggy. Race and class do not trump the universally understood panicked weightlessness of a fading American adolescence.

But Famuyiwa pulls off an even craftier stunt. He starts off with a movie about a black kid whose whole thing is that he's anything but a drug dealer. And then he becomes a drug dealer. Moreover, his dealing is treated as a slick heist. We hope they win and get all the money. But why do we feel that way about Malcolm, and not Dom, played with easy charm by A$AP Rocky? Is it because Dom is dressed as every hood movie bad guy stereotype? Braids and grills, leaning on a '64, surrounded by enforcers? Is it because Malcolm has been established as closer to white, and therefore closer to our understanding and sympathy? Closer to human?

Here's where race does matter. Here's where black is.

There is a moment near the end where we finally see a gun in Malcolm's hands. It's a stark departure from the rest of the film's relative Scooby-Doo-isms, and it lands sharply if unexpectedly. We are staring down the barrel of a Boyz n the Hood Red Hyundai moment—a scene we have unconsciously been waiting for. A black teen with a gun is a fate you can't seem to escape no matter how many early De La Soul songs Dope's soundtrack has. And because Famuyiwa has spent the previous 80 minutes establishing that Malcolm is essentially just Ferris Bueller with a flat top, the gun moment hits hard.

When a dark-skinned teen wearing a hoodie is holding a gun in a movie, we are comfortable because it's a normal movie thing. It's the Italian grandmother saying "you should eat." It's the middle-aged Jewish guy having a hilarious existential crisis. It's a trope. Devoid of specificity and therefore bankrupt in meaning.

But when a human child is holding a gun, it is something else entirely. It is fear. It is hate. It hurts. In movies, a black kid holding a gun is nowhere near as meaningful as a human kid holding one.

And that's the goal of Famuyiwa's brilliant genre play—to trick the audience into seeing Malcolm as the human that he actually is. It shouldn't require a trick. But it does. And that's the point.

But that's also the problem for Dope. In importing film language from white teen movies, Famuyiwa also imports the tropes that make those movies frustrating to begin with. There is no woman in Dope who is treated as a complete person. Some are nice, some are treacherous, but all are effectively made of cardboard. Malcolm falls for the romantic interest, (played with distant winsomeness by Zoe Kravitz) without knowing anything about her other than she's pretty and bad at math. Eye-roll inducing too, is Chanel Iman's treacherous rich girl, breathily stripping out of a terrycloth onesie and seducing Malcolm despite having just met him 30 seconds ago. (Also, were all the dark-skinned actress given the wrong audition time?) Even Diggy, the crew's resident stud who promises to dispel every hood and lesbian stereotype ever, is left, in the end, with only a few quips and an unnecessary titflash. This is especially frustrating given Kiersey Clemens's wise and playful screen presence.

Another problem arises when you set Ferris Bueller's movie in Inglewood's streets. The funny part of the White Teen Comedy is that there are no real consequences, but everyone thinks there are. "If I don't make it to this party, I'll die." "If I don't get laid before senior year I'll die." "If I don't get into Harvard I'll die." No you won't, we laugh, that's just life in your teens. The difference with Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib, is that they actually might die. Like for real. That's what it means to be who they are where they are. And it seems that the movie has an awkward go of moving back and forth between these two realities. We are kept at such comedic distance that it is well into the film before we ever feel what Malcolm is feeling. We have no real cinematic or viewing language for a life that is as real as it gets, but is still just another teen movie.

All of us humans are infinitely more complex than movie tropes would suggest. We may sometimes act just like everyone else who looks like us. But that's not all we are. We also take ideas of how to be from every place and person we encounter, add them to our basic understandings, filter them through our own languages, and create infinite variations on how to be human. This wonder of real life is also the failure of movies, for studios aren't likely to finance a movie about the Infinite Variations of Being Human. Instead, we're left with films like Dope that murder some expectations while failing to even question others. And until we as an audience learn and accept that every fucking person is complete, complex, and self-defining, then intelligent filmmakers like Famuyiwa will always have to trick us into seeing people as humans. And we'll always have to make do with movies that both are and aren't dope.

Follow Carvell on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Early Thursday morning, housing and education activists occupied a London pub in the lead-up to the "End Austerity Now" demonstration scheduled for Saturday. The Elephant and Castle pub is now in the hands of the campaigners, who say the building will be opened up today. The plan is to use it as a social center—a space for talks, meetings, events, and political organizing, as well as a community center for those in the area. In the UK it is not uncommon for radical activists to squat a building for an HQ in the run-up to big demos.

I saw the building get occupied this morning. I arrived in a quiet South London street, just after midnight. All I knew at this point was that some kind of activism was happening involving a building "right at the heart of London's gentrification program," and that I was invited to tag along.

Arriving at the street I had been told to meet at, I found myself unnervingly alone. I had been given a number to call, but nobody was picking up. Before I could get too paranoid that this was all some elaborate practical joke at my expense or a police sting, the front door of a house across the street opened and I was ushered inside.

I'd expected to be greeted by the usual crusty-squatter archetypes, but I found myself surrounded by mostly students, egged on by a spurt of occupations across the city earlier this year.

The first order of business was how they would announce the opening of the social center to the world. "The difference between this space and a squat is that we want people to know about this," said one of the activists, who wanted to go public as soon as possible. "Squatters often want to keep a place under the radar, so they can live there for as long as they can, but we want to open the doors and get people in there."

As the meeting progressed, the target of the action became clear. Why the Elephant and Castle pub? "Because it was a pub for, like, 250 years, and now it's turning into a Foxtons. And fuck Foxtons," someone said. I guess it sucks for Foxtons PR people that they've become a byword for crappy gentrification. At a recent demonstration in Brixton, activists smashed the façade of the local shop. Now a new branch was being occupied before it's even been built. These guys just can't catch a break.

Elephant and Castle—the area—is currently at the center of a £1.5 billion ($2.3 billion) regeneration project, which has been criticized for turning the place into a gentrification theme park and kicking the locals out of their homes in the process.

Like many others up and down the UK, the Elephant and Castle pub has taken its last orders. Thirty-one pubs closed every week last year in the UK, ripping the heart out of communities. Unlike most of those, which closed due to the rise of parasitic "pubcos" or were bought by asset strippers, the Elephant and Castle lost its license in March, after one drinker was stabbed in the head with a pen.

A banner inside the pub reads, "Rent strike now."

The group numbered off, splitting into groups to work out who would do what. From what I could gather, each team was in charge of securing one of the pub's entrances. "There might be movement sensors inside," one of the guys explained. "If they go off, don't panic."

A number was read out to text if there were any issues and a legal notice—explaining to any passing cops or bailiffs that the squatters would have some legal rights to stay in the building once inside—was handed out.

As we headed out there were some final words of advice: "It's not criminal, what we're doing, it just might be a bit unlawful." I couldn't tell if it was meant to be reassuring or not. Since September 2012, squatting in a residential property has become a criminal offense, but squatting commercial buildings is still just a civil offense. You can't get arrested for it, although the police might still try to charge you for aggravated trespass, criminal damage, using violence to secure entry, or a whole load of Public Order offenses.

It was well past 1:30 AM when we finally headed off to Elephant. After about 20 minutes of waiting outside a Nandos, sleeping bags in tow, the teams split up, and I stood with some student types who were keeping an eye out for cops.

As we waited, I asked a guy who was sweeping up the street, who happened to live nearby, what he made of the changes in the area. He, like old ex-punters from the pub that was being taken over, was pretty jaded.

"You know what? It just doesn't surprise me anymore," he said. "They kicked me out my house, you know, and say the place needs redevelopment. The same people pay me, but not enough so I can live here. It's an active choice, they don't give a shit what it costs, in people or cold hard cash."

Time passed and we kicked our feet up. A car pulled over and the activists wondered if it was the police. Instead it was a guy in red shorts, who vomited out of his taxi onto the ground next to us.

Related: Watch our film about the battle to live in London, 'Regeneration Game'

By about 3 AM, it was time to make a move. A couple of the guys jumped over some bamboo fencing into the beer garden. Everyone else waited outside for a signal. There were some loud bangs from inside. The pub had been "cracked," but at first there was no call to run in after them.

I decided to check out what was going on, so scaled the fence into the garden. Somebody waved at me through the darkness, and after hopping over another fence I was by a side door. I beelined for the entrance, but a man in a vest called down from a neighboring window. "I'll give you ten seconds to get the fuck out of here, or I'm calling the police. GO."

I ran away, heading back through a private car park to join the other waiting activists.

The cops didn't show up and about 20 minutes later, a shout to come inside came over the fence. This time we headed to a different gate, quickly made our way through it and into the pub.

Once inside, people started putting bike locks on the doors and sticking legal notices up on windows. The water was found to be working to the relief of a woman who desperately needed a slash, and the still-working lights were dimly lit.

Just after 4 AM, the police arrived—a van and a car. They looked through the windows, had a chat with someone who popped outside, before driving off, apparently saying, the owners would have to take the occupants to court before they could do anything, "and that could take months."

Before I left, I asked one of the activists what the point of the occupation was. "Obviously there's a big national anti-austerity demo on Saturday, but we are not the kind of activists who treat a march like this as the be all and end all of our activity," she said. "Opening up a space in parallel to this march means that hopefully we can generate some excitement about a whole set of alternative forms of resistance. "

So far those alternative forms of resistance are scheduled to include a meeting about student debt, some talks by London's lefty academics, a social, and a craft afternoon.

As Britain's unruly left plots what the Daily Mail described as a "summer of thuggery" resisting the government, it seems like a whole load of tactics are going to be used to supplement bigger events like the anti-austerity march on Saturday. I can think of worse ones than hanging out in a pub.

Follow Michael Segalov on Twitter.

We're touring German prisons with The Marshall Project. For behind-the-scenes photos and observations from the road, follow Maurice Chammah on Twitter.

Neustrelitz Prison is a juvenile facility, but whereas in the United States the word "juvenile" usually refers to those under 18, the 150 men and women at this German institution are almost all between 19 and 25. They're housed in a collection of small white buildings with pitched, shingled roofs that sit behind a wall in the countryside of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a large but sparsely populated state along Germany's northern coast about the size of New Hampshire. (It's even got the same tall trees and crisp air.)

There are horses for the prisoners to ride, and dozens of rabbits, including one that—according to a prisoner who cares for him—has done well in some sort of national rabbit competition.

Wednesday's tour of Neustrelitz represented another moment in which US corrections officials, prosecutors, activists, and researchers— in the country for a week—could witness the extent to which Germany's prison system differs from their own. Here, administrators emphasize therapy (the rabbits are part of "animal therapy") and eschew the retributive impulse that has defined American justice for decades.

But because Neustrelitz houses young men and women who have committed more serious crimes—more than half of them violent—there was a familiarity that made the contrast easier to digest. "This is the place for violence because they are young, they are aggressive, they have no control," said Jörg Jesse, head of prisons in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

We saw the familiar sights of incarceration: surveillance cameras, blue sweatsuit uniforms, steel-reinforced bars over windows, and tall, white walls topped by spools of razor wire. And in both Germany and the US, there is a widespread recognition that young brains are different: they are less mentally culpable for their crimes, more open to rehabilitation, and more vulnerable to exploitation in the culture of prisons. (That last point has reached the US more slowly; while the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act demands that anyone under 18 be separated by "sight and sound" from older prisoners, it has not been fully implemented).

The difference is that in Germany, they take these ideas further. Throughout Europe, juvenile sentencing laws cover people until they are at least 18. In Germany, that age is 21, and there is currently a political debate underway about extending the juvenile law to cover men and women up to 24. (They already stay in juvenile prisons until they are 24 or 25.) This is in sharp contrast to the US, where 16 and 17-year-olds are regularly placed in adult facilities. "We do not transfer juveniles to adult courts," said Frieder Dünkel, a criminologist at the University of Greifswald in northern Germany, with a brisk matter-of-factness. "It is not possible."

Check out our documentary on Giwar Hajabi, a.k.a. Xatar, a German rapper of Iranian descent who was released from prison in December 2014.

Kai Schulz is 40 days away from the end of his four-year sentence for attempted murder. He's 23 and wears his hair shaved on the back and sides with a fashionable little ponytail on top, along with a thin goatee. He's a brawny guy, a middle linebacker when he plays football—the American version—for recreation. (When someone asked if he tackles, Schulz replied, "Yes, I tackle. I'm 88 kilos [194 pounds].")

Schulz works in a metal shop, and learned how to weld here. He plans to find a welding job when he gets out. "There's probably a big demand for this skill in the German economy," noted Gregg Marcantel, the head of New Mexico's prison system, referring to the country's car industry.

When he got here, Schulz was like most violent young men when they enter prison: He was angry. He tried to escape twice, and was forced to stay for short periods in more locked-down rooms. Like many young prisoners I've spoken with in the US, he was initially afraid and tried to toughen up so nobody would mess with him.

The difference was that he eventually realized he didn't need to.

I did not get to see the early version of Schulz or the transition, but the man I met was strikingly self-assured and used words like "re-socialization" while fielding questions from dozens of curious foreigners. Marcantel joked that the young inmate could probably run the facility.

Schulz's redemption narrative was so clean and heartwarming that it was easy to be skeptical, and many of the young men who leave this prison do, in fact, return after committing additional crimes. (We did not get the exact figures, though Schulz implied the number was high.)

But you can't underestimate the power of a success story to push along American efforts to think more seriously and broadly about prison reform. If prosecutors are worried what victims and the general public might think if a man—who attempted to murder someone—got less than five years in prison, they could trot out Schulz, who talks about the letters of apology he sent to his victim. Did she respond? "No," he said. "I fully understand why she wouldn't be in touch, and it might influence her for the worst to talk to me. But I know I'll never forget what I did."

When Schulz gets out, he plans to move far from his home and the location of his crime, the island of Ruegen, off Germany's northern coast, to escape his reputation and what he describes as a culture of criminality. The prison will help him find a job and an apartment. He knows he is getting a far better deal than he would in the US, and spoke of seeing documentaries on television about solitary confinement, "where you go years without touching even another person's finger—it's unimaginable." (Solitary confinement is used in Germany, but sparingly, and never for more than four weeks at a time).

When asked what advice he would have for the American justice system, Schulz was ready.

"Make prisoners realize, like they do here, that they only have one life," he said. "I realized through therapy that I had a second chance."

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Still from the VICE Canada documentary The New Era of Canadian Sex Work

In an unprecedented move, Montreal's police force—bolstered by the Harper government's new puritanical prostitution laws—decided to create a special operation to crack down on the well-documented influx of sex tourism during F1 weekend.

There is no doubt about the Montreal's reputation as a hub for porn, Tinder orgies, and boozy dining, but it's also the only city in Canada to host a Formula One Grand Prix race, which means that every year tens of thousands of tourists descend upon our fair city, eager to catch a glimpse of the world's most elite sport and to get a taste of Montreal's famously depraved nightlife.

This overlap means big bucks for the city's service industry, with hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants raking in around $90 million in one weekend—a weekend when downtown Montreal is transformed into a grotesque circus of bottle service, miniskirts, and rented orange Lamborghinis. And that's not even the worst part.

The real dark side of this economic boom is its impact on the oldest service industry of them all—the sex trade.

More specifically, this investigation took place within an evolving legal landscape. Montreal's police have been changing their tactics as well as their language regarding prostitution lately. At a press conference in May, they said they would now be treating sex workers as "victims" and not criminals.

This is in keeping with a federal policy of criminalizing the demand side of the equation with the advent of Bill C-36, or the "Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act," which targets buyers and makes it illegal for third parties to advertise sex workers—all in the name of keeping society and sex workers safe from sex trafficking and dirty, dirty johns.

C-36 is the federal government's legislative response to the 2013 Supreme Court case R. v. Bedford, which struck down Criminal Code provisions prohibiting prostitution on the basis that the articles were "overbroad" and "grossly disproportionate" to their aims. Simply put, the Court ruled that criminalizing prostitution endangers the lives of sex workers more than prostitution endangers society.

This logical and rational idea was obviously at odds with Harper's "tough-on-crime" agenda. So when the Supreme Court gave Parliament one year to come up with a new legislative framework that was constitutional, no time was wasted in enacting a new set of Criminal Code articles which are proving to be a handy law enforcement tool.

VICE spoke with Johanne Paquin, Chief Inspector of Montreal's specialized units team, earlier this week shortly after she read the preliminary findings of the probe.

"C-36 was very useful in dealing with one of our main targets—the buying of sex," Paquin said. "The fact that the client is now criminalized has given us more discretion to investigate the purchase of sexual services."

Though the final results of the unnamed operation will not be shared with the public, Paquin confirmed that several arrests had been made in targeted areas and that she is quite satisfied with the results of the F1 investigation. "We definitely reached our objectives and we are happy with the outcome of the investigation."

Not surprisingly, police focused on the usual dens of inequity where one would expect to find sex workers. "We targeted and investigated all of the areas commonly associated with the sex trade on F1 weekend: motels, websites, hotels, massage parlours, and strip clubs."

For sex work advocacy group Stella, the new Criminal Code articles are unnecessary and actually potentially dangerous for women in the sex trade. "Our mandate at Stella is to make sure that they work in health and safety and dignity. We're obviously against exploitation, violence and forced work. But there are already laws for that."

Their spokesperson, Stéphanie, told VICE that there is a big discrepancy between the reality on the ground and what law enforcement and media are reporting. She questions even the basic narrative of Montreal becoming a huge brothel for one weekend every year.

"Formula One weekend is not as good for sex workers as it used to be. Every industry is busier that weekend. Restaurants, hotels, bars. Everybody wants to make money, not just sex workers. For Stella and the sex worker movement, we're a bit annoyed: why is the media only focusing on sex work?"

But according to police, the scope of the investigation went beyond the mere purchase of sexual services. It was also aimed at prostitution rings which exploit minors and closely monitored the online activity on escort sites.

"The specific F1 investigation was coordinated by our special investigation unit squad because they have specialized investigators and a team that focuses on the sexual exploitation of minors within these rings," Inspector Paquin said, adding that these teams provided crucial support to the morality squads who are "on the front lines in matters of street prostitution and the buying of sex work."

And law enforcement wasn't the only group with sex tourism in its crosshairs.

"Slavery is not a choice:" FEMEN's Neda Topaloski crashing Montreal's F1 party and scaring tourists with her femininity. Photo courtesy of femen.org

For the second year in a row, topless sextremists FEMEN stormed Crescent Street, the tourist epicenter of F1 weekend. Armed with a bottle of prosecco and bare breasts, their goal was to raise awareness and sensitize tourists about F1 weekend's underbelly by mock-masturbating on a car and repeatedly shouting "Montreal is NOT a brothel!", a stunt that garnered national headlines.

VICE caught up with FEMEN activist Neda Topaloski, who was arrested and charged with assault on a peace officer and "indecent acts" for parading around bare-breasted. Topaloski sees the city of Montreal as hypocritical and complicit in the exploitation of women during F1 weekend.

"By not talking about the fact that it's human trafficking that is behind it, and the rest of the year we pretend like we are fighting human trafficking in Canada and in Montreal. But then during this one weekend we do absolutely nothing to talk to people or girls about it. It's a whole system in which for money we'll all shut up," Topaloski said. "This whole industry is a huge part of Montreal's revenues. If you take the sex trade away from Grand Prix there is really not that much left."

Interestingly, FEMEN is actually on the same page as police when it comes to the Conservative crime bill, at least as far as it criminalizes buying sex. "We agree absolutely with it. It's all about criminalizing the client because they are the ones keeping the business alive and they are the ones buying humans. Without the consumers, there would be no business."

But sex workers are not quite as excited about Bill C-36. For Stella, criminalizing the client is part of the problem, not the solution and the perverse effect of the law is that it just shifts the risk to another group and actually makes sex workers more vulnerable.

"The good clients who have no criminal records are very scared because they have good jobs and a wife maybe, they don't want a criminal record, it's pretty scary," Stéphanie says. "And then they're stuck with the bad clients who don't give a shit and the women will be more at risk because financially the pressure is still there. Before they could screen and say, 'That guy looks kind of violent, I'm not going to do him.' But now, if they have no money and less clients, they'll take whoever."

For Stéphanie, clumsy efforts to control and regulate sex work neglect the fact that there are many women who do it willingly and depend on it financially.

"It's stupid to say we're not going to criminalize sex workers because they are victims, but we are going to criminalize everything around it. It makes no sense. It's not helpful. We want women to be able to do their work. We want everything to be decriminalized."

"Bedford was a great decision. It was a unanimous decision saying that the law is not safe for women. Unfortunately we have a Conservative government that legislated in a way that is not helpful at all for sex workers. It's still going to put them at risk."

Follow Nick Rose on Twitter.

All illustrations by Adam Waito

With the recent trend of real-life escape rooms as weekend entertainment, my group of friends—composed of overgrown ravers—came to the conclusion that this is the prefect sort of adventure to experience while off their faces.

Before entering the escape room, they meticulously planned in advance which substances each would be responsible for using. One of my friends would do cocaine, another would roll on MDMA, yet another would trip on mushrooms, and a fourth would smoke as many bongs to his face (approximately five) as he could before leaving for our adventure. I would remain sober, so as to gauge everyone's performance on said substances and be able to recount the experience for everyone involved. Agent Coke agreed to bring a random dude who would be sober with me, but when they showed up, the plan was foiled: turns out she had given this guy lines for the first time in his life.

For those who aren't aware of what escape rooms are, these are IRL games done with groups of people—anywhere between two to 20 individuals depending on which one you go to—where you are locked inside of a room and told of a terrifying plot from which you must escape. You have a specified amount of time in which to do so, and the contents of the game usually consist of a series of riddles, puzzles, and a fuckload of locks. This type of scenario originates from Flash games popular on the internet in the early 2000s.

At a nearby bar, my friends go through the drill of what is about to go down as I chug a glass of lemonade sangria, my only defence against dealing with being around my drugged-up friends.

"Should I bring the blow with me? Should I do more? I already did a bunch!" Agent Coke asks the group, staring around intently. She disappears downstairs to the bar's basement.

Agent M is already coming up and decides at the last minute to pop another cap. Agent Shroom is already doing her signature tripping-balls cackle after eating two grams some time ago, describing objects on the table as looking "really cool" or "swirling around." Agent Weed has already eaten two dinners and is still hungry.

There's no going back now. We're there. We enter the makeshift lab-hospital room hybrid reminiscent of many bachelor apartments I've been in, complete with standard cheap hardwood flooring and plain white walls. There's a desk with an aging netbook placed on it, a metal lab table directly across from it scattered with props (most of which we are told not to touch), and a sink that isn't hooked up to plumbing. Behind a curtain splattered with red paint taking the form of various symbols is a cot so flimsy it wouldn't support a well-fed cat. There are scientifically themed posters covering most of the walls, and of course, there is a camera in one corner paired with a glowing red digital timer.

Following our facilitator's uninspired tale warning us that we were in the midst of a zombie-vampire invasion, we are locked into a dead mad scientist's lab and tasked with finding an antidote to the disease that has apparently overtaken the world. As she clicks on the timer and we watch the digits start to cascade below 45:00, all of us immediately crack up looking around at each other's dilated pupils and skin increasingly beading with sweat.

44:59–35:00
The timer next to a camera recording our every move is blinking red as each minute drops.

"Do you think they can hear us?" Agent Coke asks of the camera, her eyes darting around the room.

Though we were instructed to simply search the room to start, we begin completely ransacking it. Agent Coke puts on the dead scientist's lab coat and ID tag, proclaiming herself a doctor, encouraging Agent Shroom to don a white coat as well. Agent Shroom is wandering around the room with the innocent curiosity of a child, carefully picking up lab equipment and closely inspecting for the deeper meaning she is certain must be enclosed.

Agent M unlocks the first clue, a pill cabinet. When I ask him how, he only shrugs and smiles, then saunters off to take a seat in front of the ancient netbook on the desk and begins typing in random numbers. Agents Coke, Shroom, and I tear apart the cabinet.

Agent Shroom finds a blacklight and begins to crawl over every inch of the small bedroom-sized room giggling.

34:59–25:00
Agents Coke and Shroom have cleared just about everything off of the metal lab table onto the floor. After stripping the cot in the corner, Agent Shroom envelopes herself in the bloodied curtain separating the bed from the rest of room, dancing around slowly and cooing within it as if she is a caterpillar trying to metamorphize into a butterfly.

Agent Coke is onto something at this point. She found a mention of periodic elements on a letter at some point in between tearing apart the lab and is convinced that the numbers associated with these on the periodic table must be a password. Frantically attempting to make use of this knowledge, she nearly jumps up on top of the desk to see the periodic table posted above.

It turns out she is right—some combination of numbers related to the periodic table unlocks two boxes, which, of course, have more locked boxes inside.

She lets out an enormous sigh upon seeing more locked boxes inside. "What the fuck is this shit? That's so lame!" Agent Coke says, animatedly shrugging.

24:59–15:00
After entirely too much time and attempt after attempt, Agent Weed, though the most silent of the bunch, is finally being useful. He thinks a number sequence puzzle found within one of the unlocked boxes may contain the password for a document on the laptop's desktop.

Assisting Agent Weed, Agent M punches in phrase after phrase that he's come up with off the top of his head before entering the one that Agent Weed gives him. Once he gets access, he immediately starts playing minesweeper. Then solitaire, until he realizes he doesn't know how to. Then he finally gets around to opening the document we're supposed to get more clues from on the desktop.

Somehow getting into the text-only file of the document, he adds Word Art circa early Windows 98—that wonderfully orange italic option—that reads "Crashed the Whip."

At this point, he gives up and goes to lie on the cot, folding his arms and staring up placated at the ceiling.

Feeling disheartened, we ask for our first clue from the facilitators, which helps us with one of the puzzles, rendering us able to open a drawer containing a deck of cards. The random dude Agent Coke brought, who luckily is really good with math, immediately figures out the pattern and use of the deck of cards. Following this revelation, Agent M immediately grabs the deck and asks if anyone wants to play Go Fish. Pending silence, he outstretches once again on the cot, his arms folded behind his head.

14:59–5:00
We're all in agreement by this point: by far the worst part about this experience is the stifling heat we're in enclosed in that rivals even the most packed of raves we've attended. We start shedding layers; Agent M abandons his black-and-white Nikes in the middle of the floor. The girls previously wearing lab coats ditch them as well. We start fanning ourselves with photos of zombie specimens, and eventually resort to screaming into the box used to contact the coordinators begging for non-existent air conditioning.

Agent Coke is holding a key that appears to go to nothing, fantasizing about using it to do bumps. "Why the fuck didn't I bring my stuff in? I should have, but I just didn't want to get us kicked out and fuck it up!"

Agent Shroom opens the door to go out, peeking into the hallway and announcing, "GUYS, I GOT IT, WE CAN ESCAPE!" A resounding shriek from the rest of my group ensues, as we forget that the point of the game isn't to escape but to find the antidote, and we talk amongst ourselves trying to determine if the coordinator forgot to lock us in or if we were never truly locked in at all due to city fire codes.

We return to tearing the room apart.

Agent Shroom flips the cot, convinced that there are more clues under it or within it that we haven't found (not true). She then attempts to turn on a prop LG burner flip phone circa early-2000s in an attempt (I can only assume) to either find a non-existent clue, order more drugs, or speak to god.

4:59–0:00
We finally unlock the box with the antidote in it, thanks to Agent Weed and the random dude Agent Coke brought. The antidote looks like green slime à la Nickelodeon in a plastic test tube. Agent Shroom thoroughly inspects and shakes the tube, a smile stretching across her face, surely seeing dancing geometric patterns within that do not exist to the rest of us. Though we've found the antidote, we were told in our initial instructions that this is only enough to save us—we must find the recipe to ultimately win the game and rescue all of humanity.

With just a few minutes left, I mutter, "Humanity is fucked." We discuss who among us would be responsible for repopulating the world.

Most of us frantically put in random numbers on the remaining padlocks; a couple of my friends coming down on their drugs do not give a fuck at this point and are sitting on the cot muttering complaints under their breath.

The facilitator comes in moments after our timer hits zero, and congratulates us: "Wow, you guys were SO close!"

Those on coke promptly run out to the lockers containing our belongings eager to do more lines in the washroom.

After taking an Uber XL at peak surge pricing in the rain, we get to my friends' apartment; they immediately break monogamy with their respective substances. As we're about to exit the apartment to go out to a party for the rest of the night, Agent Shroom suddenly sits crosslegged on the bathroom floor with a look of utter confusion upon her face. We escort her to her bedroom; the only thing that can soothe her four grams deep on shrooms is music from Chrono Trigger.

Reflecting back, I'm somewhat impressed at how well my friends were able to do despite their level of inebriation. Agent Weed was surprisingly useful at times and essential to our partial success; Agent Coke was helpful before she started coming down, and I doubt we would have gotten as far as we did without the mathematically skilled cocaine virgin she brought along. Agent M, though the most entertaining, served limited utility. And as for Agent Shroom, I'm just proud of her for getting through the experience—tripping can be terrifying even when you're not locked in a room and told that zombie-vampires have taken over the world.

Admittedly, as well as some of my friends did, mind-altering substances probably aren't the best method of surviving an apocalypse. After a night of herding cats attempting to do math, I'm pretty sure this is my last escape room experience

But hey, if your idea of a good time is being trapped in a cramped space with your sweaty, fucked-up friends trying to undo luggage locks for 45 minutes and attempting to flee from an unconvincing horror story, then maybe escape rooms are for you.

Photo by Jennifer Rovero/Camraface

At 24, Lauren Wasser had the life. She was the 5'11" child of two models, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and bone structure that looked like Santa Monica's androgynous answer to Lara Stone. She'd given up a full-ride basketball scholarship at a Division I school in order to pursue modeling—a career that started auspiciously when she was two months old and appeared in Italian Vogue alongside her mother. When she wasn't modeling, she was taking improv classes at the Groundlings, playing basketball for fun, and biking 30 miles a day. She had an apartment in Santa Monica and was embedded in Los Angeles's flashy social scene.

"Everything was based on looks," she says. "I was that girl, and I didn't even think about it." Lauren had so many friends, in fact, that when they gathered around St. John's Health Center a few weeks later to say goodbye to her, the line stretched all the way around the hospital.

It started on October 3, 2012, when Lauren says she felt a little off—almost like she was coming down with the flu. She was also on her period, and ran down to a nearby Ralph's to stock up on her go-to brand of tampons, Kotex Natural Balance. The errand felt completely unrelated to the vague malady permeating her body. After all, Lauren had been dealing with the logistics of her period for 11 years at that point, and Kotex was just part of the ritual. Like most girls, her mom had walked her through the ins and outs of tampon usage when she was 13, showing her how to use the applicator, warning her to change the tampon every three to four hours. The rule was a no-brainer; on that day, Lauren says she replaced her tampon in the morning, afternoon, and again in the evening.

Later that night, she decided to stop by her friend's birthday party at the Darkroom on Melrose Avenue. "I tried to act normal," she says, though by that point she was struggling to stay upright. "Everyone was like, 'Dude, you look horrible.'" She drove herself back to Santa Monica, took off all her clothes, and fell into bed. All she wanted to do was sleep.

The next thing she remembers is waking up to her blind cocker spaniel perched on her chest and barking aggressively. Someone was pounding on the door yelling, "Police, police!" Lauren dragged herself to the door, and a cop came in to inspect the apartment. Lauren's mother, fresh out of surgery, had been worried at Lauren's lack of communication and called in a welfare check.

"I hadn't been able to take my dog out, so there was piss and shit everywhere," she says. She has no idea how long she was in bed, and can't remember if it was day or night. The cop eyed the situation, told her to call her mom, and left.

Lauren managed to feed her dog a few carrots from her empty refrigerator and then contacted her mom, who asked if she needed an ambulance. "But I was so sick that I couldn't make that decision for myself," Lauren says. "I told her that I wanted to go to bed, and that I'd call her in the morning. And that was the last thing I remember happening." The next day, her mother sent a friend over along with the police. They found Lauren facedown on her bedroom floor.

She was rushed to St. John's with a fever of 107 degrees—ten minutes from death, they said. Her internal organs were shutting down and she'd suffered a massive heart attack. The doctors couldn't stabilize her, and nobody had any idea what was going on until they called an infectious disease specialist, who immediately asked, "Does she have a tampon in?" She did, and they sent it to the lab. It came back positive for Toxic shock syndrome.

Photo by Flickr user Brad Cerenzia

TSS, which got its name in 1978, is basically a complication of bacterial infections, frequently involving staph bacteria (or Staphylococcus aureus). It isn't a female-only condition, but there's been a link between it and tampon usage for decades, due largely to a spike in TSS-related deaths in the 1980s. (A tampon alone is not enough to cause TSS—a person must already have Staphylococcus aureus present in his or her body. About 20 percent of the general population carries the bacteria.)

Watch: The Warrior Women of Asgarda

Tampons and tampon-like objects have been used by women during their menstrual cycles for centuries, but over the past 50 or so years, their composition has changed from natural ingredients like cotton to synthetic ingredients like rayon and plastic, especially among the big tampon manufacturers—Playtex, Tampax, Kotex. These synthetic fibers, along with a tampon's absorbency, can create an ideal environment for the bacteria that causes TSS. When Proctor & Gamble debuted an extra-absorbent tampon called Rely in the 80s, it created the perfect storm for TSS. According a study conducted by the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, "the gelled carboxymethylcellulose" in Rely tampons "acted like agar in a petri dish, providing a viscous medium on which the bacteria could grow."

"It's the most excruciating pain I've ever—I don't know how to describe it to you." –Lauren Wasser

At the hospital, the doctors were telling Lauren's mom to pray—and to prepare her casket. Lauren was put into a medically-induced coma. The news of her hospitalization leaked onto Facebook, and friends and acquaintances lined up outside the hospital to pay their last respects.

Lauren, of course, remembers none of this. Not the "pray for Lauren" Facebook posts, or the friends shuffling nervously into her room, or even the moment when her long blonde hair, matted after days in a hospital bed, had to be shaved off. What she does remember is waking up with 80 pounds of fluid being pumped into her body, disoriented and convinced that she was in Texas.

"My belly was huge. I had tubes everywhere. I couldn't speak," she says. Next to the bed, there was a tube of black toxins that had been flushed out of her bloodstream. She looked out the window and saw a series of little houses outside, which her brain groggily associated with the Southwest. Her body was bloated and felt completely foreign. "I thought maybe I overdosed on food," she says. "I had no clue what was happening."

Far worse than the disorientation was the burning sensation in her hands and feet that wouldn't stop, no matter what she did. The infection had turned into gangrene. Three years later, as she tells me her story in a Los Angeles coffee shop, Lauren still doesn't have the words to explain how this felt. "It's the most excruciating pain I've ever—I don't know how to describe it to you," she says. She was rushed to UCLA for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, where she was placed in a pressure chamber in an attempt to get the blood flowing back into her legs.

As Lauren waited for treatment, there was a moment when she was alone in the room. Her mother and godfather had stepped out for a bit, and she was sitting in a big chair. There was a curtain, and behind the curtain there was a woman talking to someone on the phone. Lauren could hear her conversation. The woman was insisting that something was urgent, that something needed to happen ASAP. And then she said, "I have a 24-year-old girl here who's going to need a right leg below-the-knee amputation."

"I thought, Oh my God, she's talking about me," says Lauren. "I'm going to lose my leg."

Photo by Jennifer Rovero/ Camraface

While Lauren was in the hospital, her mother began a massive lawsuit involving Kimberly-Clark Corporation—the manufacturer and distributor of Kotex Natural Balance tampons—as well as the grocery stores Kroger and Ralph's, both of which sell Kotex Natural Balance. Kotex-brand tampons don't necessarily carry a higher risk for TSS than other major brands, but are named in the suit because they're the brand that Lauren used; ultimately, the family's legal team hopes to make a point about the use of synthetic materials in the tampon industry as a whole. The complaint insists that all of the defendants are "negligently, wantonly, recklessly, tortuously, and unlawfully responsible in some manner" for Lauren's hospitalization for TSS. (A spokesperson for Kimberly-Clark declined to comment for this article as the company "does not comment regarding ongoing litigation.")

Lauren's lawyer, Hunter J. Shkolnik, is accustomed to seeing the darker side of products that most people assume are safe. For example, he handled the litigation over an ingredient in cough syrup that gave people strokes. "I wish I could say [Lauren's case] shocked me, but it doesn't," he says. "The tampon has not been changed since the day of the original TSS epidemic. All they did was put on the label, 'Oh, you can get toxic shock.' The material has gone unchanged for decades." To avoid the wrath of the FDA, he says, companies simply put a warning on the outside of their tampon boxes. He calls this a "get-out-of-jail-free card."

Tampon boxes have been required to print these warning labels since the 80s, but Shkolnik argues that the warnings on Lauren's tampon box weren't clear enough, especially about leaving tampons in at night. Here's the language: "Change your tampon every four to eight hours, including overnight." The family argues that these instructions are unclear. They plan to argue that "overnight" can mean longer than eight hours, especially when it comes to young girls, who can easily sleep nine or ten hours on a weekend. "[Tampon companies] should be telling you, 'Don't sleep in it. Use a pad,'" says Shkolnik.

Of course, most women will recall that there is a warning about toxic shock syndrome on all tampon boxes and though they probably don't process it every time they use a tampon, or even purchase a box, they know, however vaguely, that it's there. It reads:

Tampon use has been associated with toxic shock syndrome. TSS is a rare but serious disease that may cause death. Read and save the enclosed information. Use for eight hours maximum.

Shkolnik admits that the existence of this FDA warning label will be the hardest part of the case. "Part of our job is to show the jury that it's not about the warning on the box—it's about the fact that they've had materials available for 20 years that could make [tampons] safer, and they've chosen not to use them. They call these tampons 'natural,' when in fact it's the man-made materials that make them dangerous. Their marketing makes young women think, 'Oh, these are the natural cotton ones,' but they're not natural, they're not cotton, and if they were, the chance of toxic shock would be down to almost nothing."

Dr. Philip M. Tierno, a professor of microbiology and pathology at the NYU School of Medicine who has done serious independent research into the link between tampons and toxic shock syndrome, agrees that cotton would be safer. "Most major tampon manufacturers make tampons with either mixes of viscose rayon and cotton, or pure viscose rayon, and in either case those tampons provide optimal physical-chemical conditions necessary to cause the production of the TSST-1 toxin if a toxigenic strain of Staphylococcus aureus is part of the normal vaginal flora in a woman," he says. "Toxic shock syndrome may result if a woman has no antibody to the toxin or low antibody. Therefore the synthetic ingredients of a tampon are a problem, whereas 100 percent cotton tampons provide the lowest risk, if any risk at all."

Photo by Jennifer Rovero/ Camraface

In the hospital, Lauren was confronted with a nightmarish situation: signing the papers to authorize the amputation of her own right leg below the knee. "Both of my legs were starting to mummify," she says. "I had to act quickly." The heel and toes of her left foot were badly damaged and doctors thought about amputating her left leg as well, but Lauren fought to keep it. "I saw it as a 50/50 chance," she said. "We did two baby foreskin grafts, which—miraculously, thank God—were the only thing that saved my foot. Today, my toes are gone. My heel finally closed up, but it's super sensitive, and I have no fat pad there."

Since Lauren is still young, her body is producing calcium in an attempt to fix her damaged foot, which is ironically increasing the damage done. "I'm walking on rocks, basically," she says. She goes in for frequent maintenance surgeries, and is still in pain three years later. Doctors have told her she may need to have another amputation later in life, when she's 50 or so.

"It took me a while to figure out if I was still worthy, if I was still pretty." –Lauren Wasser

"I wanted to kill myself when I got home," she says. "I was this girl—and then all of a sudden I don't have a leg, I'm in a wheelchair, I have half a foot, I can't even walk to the bathroom. I'm in a bed, I can't move, and I felt like those four walls were my prison." She would occasionally spring out of bed, tricked by phantom limb syndrome, and immediately fall to the floor. The only thing that kept her from self-harm was the thought of her little brother, who was 14 years old at the time. "I didn't want him coming home, finding me, and knowing that I gave up," she says.

Lauren says it took her a long time to come to grips with her new identity. "I would cry on a little stool in the shower, with my wheelchair outside waiting for me," she says. "It fucks with you. You live your whole life and think, 'I'm an athlete,' or, 'I'm a pretty girl,' but this was something physical that I had no control over. It took me a while to figure out if I was still worthy, if I was still pretty."

She was helped along by her photographer girlfriend, Jennifer Rovero, who took hundreds of pictures of Lauren as she recovered, treating the process as a sort of therapy. While shooting around town, the two make a habit of asking young girls if they've heard of toxic shock syndrome, or if they even believe that it's real. Most say no.

Related: Why are tampons still a thing? Motherboard wants to know.

In the fall, Lauren hopes to appear in front of Congress with Representative Carolyn Maloney. The New York Congresswoman is trying to pass the Robin Danielson act, named after a woman who died of TSS in 1998. It would "establish a program of research regarding the risks posed by the presence of dioxin, synthetic fibers, chemical fragrances, and other components of feminine hygiene products." It has been blocked before coming to a vote nine times already.

To be clear: It's transparency, not necessarily zero-tampon-usage, that Lauren and her lawyers and Maloney are seeking. Tampons are convenient, and when it comes to stopping up menstrual flow, they make sense.

But to this day, Lauren can't stand watching tampon commercials—the girls frolicking on the beach or shimmering down a playground slide in spotless white shorts—because they usually have no warning about toxic shock syndrome. "I can't go on a slide, I don't really want to be in a bathing suit, I couldn't go jump in the ocean if I wanted to," she says. "That product fucked me over."

Like cigarettes, she wants tampons to be marketed with a bigger, clearer warning about their potential risks. "You know cigarettes can kill you, so when you use them, it's your choice," she says. "Had I known all the info about TSS, I would never have used tampons." And she'll never use them again.

Photo by Jennifer Rovero/ Camraface

Lauren and her girlfriend don't usually shoot photos of her prosthetic leg, choosing instead of focus on her face. But today, they show me pictures of their latest shoot. In the portraits, Lauren wears heavy black eye makeup, and she's standing on her feet. Her prosthetic leg is framed in New Balances. She's got the alert, dispassionate stance of a model-who-plays-ball. It's been three years since the black vat of toxins next to her hospital bed, the hyperbaric chamber, the prosthetic-limb salesmen coming into her hospital room to present options that she couldn't even bring herself to think about. Today, she can even crack jokes about the situation—she calls her legs "little leg" and "little foot," respectively.

I ask if she still plays basketball, thinking of lives split into before and after and wondering if there's any leeway there, any way of bringing some parts of yourself across that great divide. "If you have game, you have game forever," she responds.

Follow Tori Telfer on Twitter.

Sony's Project Morpheus on display at E3 2015. All photos courtesy of the author

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The final day of E3 offers time for reflection, breaks for naps, and the sight of many an attendee popping a cheeky Berocca. This is the day where we all do the most apathetic dash around the conference, mopping up the straggly games with anything bready. Or sugary, or with caffeine.

First up I head to Sony's smorgasbord of virtual reality titles running through their Project Morpheus kit. I'd heard from other journalists to try out something called Kitchen. It didn't take long for me to realize that it's not a VR Moben demo—rather, it's a deeply disturbing horror experience from Street Fighter creators Capcom.

The author trying out Project Morpheus

It begins a little like the start of the first Saw movie. You wake up in what's apparently a serial killer's kitchen, reminiscent of the Gluttony guy's apartment in Seven: rank, putrid, and with weird green mould all over the walls. Bit similar to my first-ever flat, really. (Which I made even worse for the next tenant as my snake escaped. Not even joking. Someone got a fright when installing new cupboards, that's for sure.)

You look down at your hands—which are moved by tipping the controller—and they're tied up. You can't move. You look down at your VR body, a surreal experience at the best of times, and become even more aware of the peril you've found yourself in. This is fairly well signposted by the dead man in a pool of blood in the corner of the room, and the video camera in front of you. Unless you've just come around from a weird sex game gone wrong, and this guy's merely suffering a moderate nosebleed that looks far worse than it is, you are truly fucked.

I'd go into more detail, but I don't want to spoil it for you, as you really do need to play this. It's the most intimidating and engaging horror experience I have ever had. Kitchen makes you feel incredibly vulnerable. The real room that usually separates you from the horrors on your screen is gone—here, they're right in front of your eyes and you have no way of escaping them. It's the horror ante thoroughly upped, a video game equivalent to dressing Nosferatu's Count Orlok in a Jim'll Fix It T-shirt.

The next VR game I try is London Heist, which I went into expecting nothing special but came away from thinking it was one of the best titles that I played all E3. Not because it was groundbreaking in theme—you're a shotgun-riding passenger in a car chase, shooting assailants from your window, and there's nothing that fresh about that. It's how it's executed that makes it stand out.

London Heist uses Move controllers, which correspond to your gloved hands in the game. You can change the radio station, which is easy enough, or amuse yourself by doing big fish, little fish, cardboard box. You can turn on lights, open the glove compartment, and even open the car door and look behind you. It's all very Tech Demo until a swarm of identikit Jason Statham "lads" in cars and bikes show up and begin to turn your vehicle into an oversized colander courtesy of a hail of bullets.

Well, what else can you do? Pick up a fucking gun, you fucking numpty, and start firing back. Even now, writing this down, it really doesn't sound all that exciting. But to play it was to experience what I always dreamed of from something like GTA: me being a badass, shooting my way through NPCs like Ted Nugent plugged into Xbox Live by his balls. Using Move to aim and fire is what all games strive for but so many fall short of: that ability to control your character in an entirely intuitive way. The game controller as we know it was always a compromise, a necessary evil that's stuck around as technology's progressed—this is how we were meant to pop headshots.

Watch: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

From the VICE video archive: French Drag Queen Dance Battles

Now I can shoot out tires with a flick of my wrist, and be the gangster I've always wanted to be in a game. I find myself barking some messed-up shit to the NPCs who can't really hear me, and laughing like a tyrannical dictator. Thank god I've got the kit over my eyes, as I think the reaction of the staff nearby might have otherwise scarred me for life. But it's like that weird thing when you fart when wearing headphones—you only get half as embarrassed if you don't actually hear it.

I was actually quite shocked at just how visceral my reaction was to this game. Suddenly my eyes were open, and it all seemed so obvious. The more we can reduce the distance between us and the game, be that visual or physical, the more heightened our reaction will be. And London Heist on Morpheus has just taken it to the next level for me.

Approved

Suitably moved, I staggered over to the Warner Bros stand to get some hands-on time with Batman: Arkham Knight. Rocksteady Studios are back at the series helm after taking a break after the immense Arkham City of 2011, and hoping to bring you more Gotham City, more baddies and an immense slice of more Batman. This time out you're up against the sack-wearing, drugs-slinging Scarecrow, as he launches a gas attack on the city. You've got to wonder when he's going to quit failing at conquering Gotham, and switch his sights to a city that isn't home to a famous comic-book crime-fighter sporting a cape who always gets the better of him. If he dropped his "fear gas" on London during Notting Hill Carnival weekend, for instance, it'd be a full three days before anyone noticed something was wrong.

With a who's-who of villains on show, Arkham Knight is a Batfan's dream. And after getting some hands-on, I can say that it doesn't disappoint. The hefty, delicious yet cerebral, bone-crunchy combat is back, making you feel like an unstoppably dexterous tank. The world is bigger, and finally seeing it on screen was a delight. Gotham looks incredible, like a wet, medieval Tokyo, full of neon signs and dark corners for criminals to get bat-fucked in.

Yes, it's largely following a formula that might breed fatigue, but ask yourself a question: can you ever really tire of being Batman? I mean, you're Batman. If you don't find that awesome, you must be dead inside.

Want more Batman? Check out our interview preview of Arkham Knight here, and come back next week for a clutch of comic-book-related content.

Whatever could this be about?

From one massive films-and-that-to-games crossover franchise to another, as it's time for some Star Wars: Battlefront. After all, it'd be a bit stupid of me to forget something that's has made more shorts-wearing schoolboys cream their pants over the years than all the world's pre-teen crushes combined. Yes, there have been previous games based on the legendary sci-fi movies, but it finally looks like we'll see a Star Wars game that lives up to all our childhood fantasies. The ones about being in Star Wars at least, not the other ones. Even E3 will look at you funny if you start acting those out in the middle of the LA Convention Center.

Battlefront is a love letter to the fans, folding in every possible quirk and tick from the movies and capturing the ridiculous scale of their battles. And this time you're absolutely balls-deep in them.

I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan you'll ever meet—I once saw George Lucas saying that The Phantom Menace was the best movie of the six main ones so far "as it made the most money." Fuck that attitude. In fact, fuck the Star Wars legacy, as it doesn't matter a damn when coming to Battlefront—you can appreciate this as an entirely standalone experience, even if you hate the filmed adventures of Luke and Hans and that hairy one that talks funny. And as that's the case, there's no doubt that EA's game has every chance of being The Shit in the eyes (and hands) of the hardcore faithful.

And then it's over. I pack up my bag and take a final walk through the gigantic hall that's served as a home for the next wave of video gaming brilliance. And it's really hard to feel negative about any of it. E3 2015 has been tremendous, and I leave it excited for the future of gaming. I've some post-event analysis to follow, which will be on these pages in due course. Meantime, here's all of VICE Gaming's E3 coverage so far—thanks for checking it out.

Follow Julia on Twitter.

The author, pictured. All photos by Charlotte Hancock.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As someone with a keen interest in having an absolute fuck-ton of money, the grim reality of my personal earning power has been getting me down. As time trundles by, I've slowly begun to realize that the closest I'm ever going to get to summering in the Bahamas is spraying my greasy roots with Batiste Tropical. But the other morning, I got an invitation that would make my dreams of joining the elite set of people who have Dyson Airblades in their own home a reality, if only for one night.

It was an invitation to a dating event aimed at "ambitious and elite professionals." The event was called "Inner Circle" and it promised a "network based" dating service through which I could meet the "most successful and attractive singles" in town. Code words for filthy rich—like "inspiring" and "ambitious"—were strewn across the website.

In preparation for the big night, I decided to do some cursory research on the kind of people who go to Inner Circle. I signed up to the website and checked out some of the guys' profiles. I found James*, the "curious about life" stock broker, Ricardo*, the "ski bum fashionista," and of course, Humphrey* the "sock aficionado" with a "huge interest in Spotify." There was a newsfeed on the site dripping with promises of things I didn't understand, like "casual bevs at Bodo's Schloss," as well as "candle-lit suppers in an old, Mediterranean fishing port," and—of course— Tatler picture opportunities.

The proprietors pick a new "exclusive" venue every month, but this month the venue was to be L'Escargot—one of those weird private members' clubs in London's Soho that I'm not sure anyone has ever wanted to be a member of. When I reached the top of its swirly carpeted stairs, the party wasn't exactly "going off," so I grabbed my free flute of fizz, bubbling with the hopes of a better life, and headed into the first room. Nobody elite in here, just a photographer looking bored next to a pile of quirky props.

Obvs, no self-respecting fun event of our time would be complete without a wacky photo-booth. I presume these are to provide some sort of insurance, so that when you're wandering the deserted corridors of old age, you can pull out a Polaroid of yourself in a pair of giant sunglasses, nudge your spouse awake and say, "Hey, we had fun, didn't we?" as you realize your spouse isn't actually sleeping and will never wake up again.

I mean, how can you not have a laugh when you've got a fez on your head? Somehow, wearing it really enhanced the sense of extreme privilege. I felt like I was at an Oxbridge Conservative Society ball.

It was just past 9 PM. I resisted the urge to pick up the nearest drinks tray and scanned the room helplessly looking for someone who felt as uncomfortable as me. I spotted him immediately: a man in an expensive suit and shiny shoes bobbing around like a buoy in a marina full of super-yachts. I wandered over to him and we exchanged firm, clammy handshakes. He told me his name was Edwin*.

Edwin's eyes were full of warning, his smile strained across his thin lips. He said he owned a string of hotels and has made his zillions in the commercial property "biz" but he was palpably too uncomfortable to talk shop. I slipped his business card in my pocket and shimmied away.

TBH I'm not half surprised Edwin was feeling the pressure. Amid the pinstripes and loafers and signet rings, it dawned on me I wasn't going to have the right chat for these banter-stallions. I felt as though, far from flying under the radar, I was going to be careering across it in an EasyJet airbus.

The women were immaculate and intimidating. One of them was wearing an Aspinall neckerchief with kitten heeled court shoes and fancy Kate Middleton shifts. Others were wearing those thin silky shirts that poor girls get sweat patches in. They smelled like scented candles. I can tell you without asking that none of these women have ever eaten hummus with their fingers.

One steely blonde lady's legs looked so smooth and Madame Tussaudesy that I heard myself asking her if I could touch them. And then, there I was, touching the strange lady's legs. Changing the subject after the touching, I asked if she'd seen Edwin on the Inner Circle "scene" and she rolled her eyes. "Oh that guy," she says, exhausted look on her face. "He's, like, FIFTY, he's just had A LOT of surgery."

When I glanced back over, Edwin had moved under the spotlights where he had that weird sweaty-but-not-sweaty sheen, like he might be melting. The strained expression, I realize now, was just his old skin, stretched across his face, filled with pillows of collagen warming under the lights on his tear-chapped cheeks. We all watched him "work the room" with horrified and thrilled ambivalence, like you might watch a discarded grocery bag pick up wind and fly toward you on the highway.

About 10 PM is when L'Escargot really gets pumpin', and by this time even Edwin had got his shit together and was this close to clashing veneers with a sexy Spanish señorita. In the corner of the room a saxophone player in a pair of wayfarers was getting stuck right into a soulful rendition of Mr. Probz's "Wave After Wave (Slowly Drifting)."

Elsewhere, a large bovine man with a paisley tie around his head lumbered about talking loudly about an app. He then actually pronounced "legend" as "leg-end," hard G. Apart from this, everyone was really international and tall and nice. Blame the bubbles, but despite my better instincts I was having a good time.

At a packed bar, I got chatting to a mom-brand-of-handsome and absurdly tall man with a firm handshake and warm areola perfectly in my eyeline. Hugo*, we'll call him, was a really, really nice young rich man with the cheerful but weary resolve of a guy who is quite ready to settle down.

He was one of the world's most enthusiastic cheerleaders for posho singles' nights. He had come straight from a busy bar in Canary Wharf. Now in the embrace of Inner Circle, no longer was he hopefully pinning frozen margaritas on girls that turn out to have boyfriends. Here he could hang out in a place with "likeminded" people—in other words, people who might actually want to fuck him.

Talking to Hugo, the appeal of Inner Circle became obvious. Dating apps might try their best to mitigate the shame that comes with earnestly "looking for love" but we all know they're not really a substitute for IRL chemistry on a night out. The problem with singles' nights is everyone suspects they are just festivals for sad acts whose Simpsons duvet covers smell like Cup Noodles. On the other hand, Inner Circle isn't suffering from a cachet problem—everyone there genuinely thought it was great.

Nobody here was scaling the walls with their toes curled inside their shoes. Despite the nauseating smuggery of his press release—"the Inner Circle's distinction comes through its appeal to the elite, from hip creatives to corporate high flyers"—twinkly Dutch founder Michael Krayenhoff had pulled a bit of a slick move. As he put it: "The enormous popularity of our events show that this is the format people like. We called this event a three-night 'pop-up' and it's been packed every night." That said, people seem to like pop-ups so much that if you advertised something like a pop-up rectal exam it would be busy.

Also the founder of the "London Alumni Polo Club," Michael, was a charming guy. He told me he started the night after hearing his friends moaning about how they never had a chance to meet other sexy rich people because they were too busy with their ridiculous high flying jobs. Bringing together a bunch people who all identify as #winners totally inverts the usual, depressing dating night formula.

I asked if he didn't think a singles' night solely for "elites" didn't sound just a tiny bit dickish, though? He said: "Our main focus is the inspiring and ambitious singles in London. This does not mean it's all high income people with a suit—we see a lot of upcoming creatives, actresses, and musicians." Fair enough, but I am guessing the "creatives" might have been the guy wearing a trilby or the one with headphones on his iPhone 6 case.

Watch our film about posh people and politics at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race

If I'm honest, I wasn't feeling massively inspired by Michael or the rest of the night's attendees, but I was feeling a weird sense of empathy creeping through me. While I was still finding it hard to believe that bankers have beating hearts or feelings at all, I was becoming even more distressed at the realization I might have something in common with all these high rollers. Namely, that being a single person in a city of opportunity can actually be a bit overwhelming whoever you are, especially when everyone's trying so hard to play it cool.

At about 1 AM, as the night drew to a close, I realized I was enjoying the company of people who self-describe as "passionate polo players" and only want to date at Nobu. I looked over to Hugo, who had found a lady to rest her head on his soft areola. All he really wanted is someone to adore, ignore, and play FTSE with. Is that so much to ask?

I watched the last unpaired man muddle his way across the room giving a generous bosomed German girl the bite-lip finger guns. I went to leave the building, and almost tripped over the large bovine man's tie lying abandoned on the floor. It reminded me that, in our quest for true love—regardless of our net worth—we're all just as pathetic as each other.

*Names have been changed.

Follow Lucy on Twitter.

Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In a world where you can experience all there is to life via the medium of lo-res pictures lifted from Instagram and arranged into a listicle, it seems important to have real-life experiences—to have your mind blown by things you can touch and feel. It's why immersive theater events take $24 million in ticket sales over their three-month run, it's why gigs are a growing revenue stream for bands—and it's why 80,000 people applied for tickets to You Me Bum Bum Train.

You Me Bum Bum Train is the brain child of Morgan Lloyd and Kate Bond (they refer to it simply as Bum Bum)—it's the hypnagogic brain fuck that happens every couple of years somewhere in London. The set up is this: You enter. Stuff happens. You leave elated, buzzing like you're retroactively coming up on a super-strength Mitzi. The "stuff" in the middle varies from Bum Bum to Bum Bum—highly detailed, absurd real-life scenarios following one another on a nonsense high-paced narrative. The cast of actors often includes up to 300 people and full bands, and the set can include airport equipment, glitter curtains, and bobsleds. Maybe. The pair are slightly cagey when talking about the scenes, because the less you know, the more you get out of it.

Starting out as a club night in a shitty working men's club off a grimy East London street, Bum Bum's purpose on this earth was for people who found themselves being a little misanthropic on a night out.

"It was about being silly and free," Morgan confirms when I meet him. "It wasn't about being cool or stylish. There was an old pram and people had an amazing time with it. It ended up with my friend being starfished on top of it and hurtling down the road at 40 miles per hour." When did the experiential stuff come into it? "It was a secret of different worlds, for the fist one," Kate chimes in. "We wanted to do something creative and spontaneous with other creative people, and to give people a nice experience they might not otherwise experience."

The pair—both former art students, natch—don't see Bum Bum as part of the ever-expanding "immersive theater experience." They look a bit baffled when I say those words. "When we started it, we had just finished our degrees and were looking for something to do," Morgan says. "And it's evolved to where it is now from the realisation that the more real a scene is, the more impact it has. It's all in those tiny details." Kate finishes his sentences off—she often does, there is an air of married couple about them. "Each show gets us to the next platform. But it's all down to the volunteers."

Unlike many things in this life, Bum Bum is not run for vast profit—it's not sponsored by energy drinks, there's not corporation dinging a bell at the sound of every ticket sale. "It's a volunteer program," says Morgan. "They are often ex-passengers—they go on it, love it, and want to be a part of it for the sake of blowing someone else away. It's a community of people who love doing it and making it and working really hard."

Because there is no nine-to-five mentality, people put 100 percent in; they are there because they want to be—figuring out how to make something fantastical work, whether it's counterweighting a trap door or collecting wood or vacuuming the carpet.

READ ON NOISEY: Please Stop Threatening to Make Musicals, Perry Farrell (And Everyone Else from the 90s)

"There's a sense of freedom for volunteers," says Kate. "There's no structure—people can have as much or as little input as they want, it's not a job." People are devoted to them, though. "We had one guy who was a passenger years ago—he's postponed his wedding and moved from Canada for seven weeks to work on production. It makes everything more meaningful."

Of course, the pair have had offers to monetize Bum Bum. But this, of course, does not come without compromise: "We lost all motivation when we realized it would be compromised. Even though we could have made a lot of money from it, it brings so much to so many people that compromising it didn't seem like a good idea."

Bum Bum really is bigger than it's parts—it's provided people with a change of career; volunteers have met, fallen in love, and got hitched; and, more importantly, it's provided people with an insight to an experience they might never have had. "We went to the locals who lived on the estate near where we did our last show—we had to convince them to go on the Bum Bum Train," says Kate. "One of the scenes involved a full orchestra. This lady burst into tears—she was so moved. Afterwards, she said it was better than bingo. And she fucking loved bingo."

Watch our film about celebrity obsessives, 'Rose Boy & Friends'

The pair clearly get a huge amount of satisfaction—creating a world full of silliness where people come together and form a community—and as with any creative thing there are troughs and there are peaks. "Definitely the admin side is a drag," confirms Morgan. "And afterwards, when Bum Bum is finished, you feel depressed. But it's a huge privilege to do them."

I've thought of the feeling that Bum Bum train gave me—it's like trying to explain a dream: impossible, and never quite the same as actually being there. "It's always the demographic who aren't supposed to be there that get the most out of it," Kate smiles. "That old lady who crowd surfed, your friend's mother-in-law who was just so ecstatic after the foam party scene." Kate laughs at the memory. "She ran up to us with tears in her eyes; she was so happy."

Tickets for London's You Me Bum Bum Train go on sale at 6:30 PM on Sunday, June 21. Join the mailing list at bumbumtrain.com for a chance to win tickets to this year's show.

Follow Hanna on Twitter.

Cast members of 'Star Fox Zero', as they appeared, in puppet form, during Nintendo's E3 2015 Digital Event presentation

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you're a Wii U owner, chances are these past few days have been a bit depressing. After the highs of the Nintendo World Championships and new content for Super Smash Bros. (Ryu!), the company's E3 2015 Digital Event (watch it here) merely gave us an Animal Crossing reskin of Mario Party, more amiibo figures and Mario Tennis. Sure, Nintendo have Directs all year long, and express a general disdain for previewing way-off titles at E3, but the total absence of anything due beyond the beginning of 2016 may be telling.

"Experts" keep saying that if Nintendo has sense, everyone at the company right now is working hard to make sure NX—or whatever their next console turns out to be—is a huge hit from Day One, meaning there'll be no new major titles coming for Wii U, or even the 3DS. But Nintendo arguably doesn't have any sense, and so us loyalists read too much into those Retro Studios tweets and the "insider" leaks; we hoped for a new Metroid "proper," F-Zero, or true 3D Mario title. Hell, even a few GameCube remasters, in the manner of Wind Waker, would have been nice. But it turns out that unless Nintendo are stupidly holding all of this back for a future Direct, those experts were right and the fans merely deluded.

But the Wii U is a plucky little bugger and wouldn't want our pity. No, if it's going out then it's doing so in style: destined to be remembered, like the Dreamcast and GameCube before it, as an overlooked gem with a catalogue of amazing games people will one day properly appreciate. And if these are the final days of the Wii U, the good news is there are tons of ways in which we can make them a blast.

Splatoon is about to become the best online shooter out there

The form in which it arrived and the drip-feeding of content bemused many reviewers, but join an online lobby and it's immediately clear that Splatoon already has a devout following. And it's easy to see why when playing it: the shooting is addictive, the subtle gyro aiming allows for precise control dual stick shooters struggle to achieve, games turn in a matter of seconds, and player movement and stealthy tactics are a devious joy to behold. But Splatoon is only giving us 80 percent of what it could offer, and its fans need new challenges soon.

Thankfully, the update planned for August will arrive at just the right time. Tower Control mode, where you move a platform towards your rivals by scaling and defending it while being attacked relentlessly, looks brilliant. When you die, it stops moving. When an enemy gets on, it grinds towards the opponents' territory. Another intriguing proposition is the Rainmaker mode. Nothing is officially known of this yet, but the prospect of the heavens opening on an ink-covered map with a minute to go would create moments of pure adrenaline.

But it's being able to set up games with friends that will change the game tactically forever more. Sure, it should have done this from the outset, and there's still no voice chat (though Skype can easily enough solve this), but even knowing who is consistently on your team and what weapon combos you'll have will alter the dynamic of the game entirely. Its clear now that Splatoon is an incredibly deep, tactical shooter, despite its cartoony appearance, and its upcoming tweaks will cement that. So get making friends.

'Xenoblade Chronicles X,' E3 2015 trailer

Xenoblade Chronicles X will keep you busy for over 100 hours

So the Final Fantasy VII remake is finally coming? Whatever. Have you guys even played the last few entries in said series? Diminishing returns doesn't come close, so Square Enix has some serious work to do. But as the Final Fantasy franchise has declined, so many members of the JRPG community have found ways to enjoy themselves elsewhere.

Such as in the amazing environments that Tetsuya Takahashi has overseen. His work on Xenogears and Xenoblade Chronicles has moved the genre on leaps and bounds (which is why FFXV is copying much of his style), so a brand-new, truly cinematic HD open world to explore is something to get very excited about. And that's what we're getting with Xenoblade Chronicles X, coming to Europe and North America in December having already been released in Japan.

Your spaceship crashes on an alien world and your job is to go and explore it, however you so desire. You fight huge monsters, rebuild colonies, and grow a powerful team on the journey. But the true joy will come via traversing the gorgeously rich world by jumping into huge mechs that fly, float and drive around like Optimus Prime popping his sensors on class-A Energon goodies. Seriously, look at the videos on the other end of those links, and tell me that isn't worth losing a month to? But these games will only keep being made if people support them, so let's make sure we do.

Mario Kart 8's online play won't be around forever

The thing I hate about modern gaming is all this online malarkey. It's all well and good at the time, but the moment a new title comes along the servers for what came before go down, the community dries up, and once-brilliant remote-multiplayer experiences become mere memories. So we must cherish these last few months of Mario Kart 8 online, because it's brilliant. I blitzed the original game and much of that first DLC pack for weeks on end, but I'll be honest, other things have come along which means many of DLC pack two's delights passed me by. I'm going to try and change that now, master Big Blue and come first for a change, rather than way back in seventh. Join an active online community such as Cane & Rinse, who have regular tournaments, and let's toast that Luigi Death Stare one last time.

Watch: The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

"Nindies" are giving us the games that bigger studios aren't

It took a while to get going, but indie developers have done well out of the Wii U. Due to a distinct lack of third-party support for the console, getting your smaller release noticed in the eShop is far easier than it is on Steam or rival consoles' stores, and there are some better games lurking in there than on many physical shelves.

We have a lot to be excited about already. Shovel Knight (pictured above) is a great 2D platformer created to look and play like an NES classic. Affordable Space Adventures is a devious title where you (or ideally you and two friends armed with Wiimotes) pilot a malfunctioning ship around an alien planet, using the GamePad to redirect power to its stuttering innards. It's arguably the Wii U title that best showcases the controller. Then there are the games that use the stylus interestingly, such as Art of Balance and Little Inferno, alongside great ports of The Fall, Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, Master Reboot, OlliOlli, Stealth Inc 2, SteamWorld Dig, and The Swapper, amongst many others.

'90s Arcade Racer,' Wii U gameplay

More are coming. Weirdly, given the subject matter, The Binding of Isaac is inbound and Nintendo approved. The second chapter of The Fall is in the pipeline. The vibrant Daytona homage that is 90s Arcade Racer is nearing completion. Those of us mourning the prolonged absence of F-Zero and Wipeout continue to be excited about FAST Racing Neo. And Mighty No.9 is coming to the U, from the creator of Mega Man, likewise Yooka-Laylee, from the original Banjo-Kazooie team.

But it's the spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, titled Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, that is most exciting. Partly because early art looks promising and perfect for off-TV play on the GamePad's screen, but largely because Armature Studio, who are converting it for the Wii U, are giving away the Unreal Engine 4 code to other developers for free once they're done. This could unlock 1,000s of other titles for anyone keen to take advantage of a user base hungry for games, and see the eShop blossom further.

'Star Fox Zero,' E3 2015 trailer

Many of these remaining games WILL be great

Compared to the exclusives that are actually imminent for PS4, the Wii U's 2015 line-up is actually pretty awesome—and the muted response to Nintendo's E3 Digital Event probably has much to do with us already knowing about said awesomeness. The Treehouse presentation of Star Fox Zero suggested that the Platinum-developed shooter is a bit rough right now, but there's no denying it plays pretty solidly. Nintendo are masters of polish, so expect its final form, like that of Captain Toad and Splatoon before it, to improve greatly before Platinum move on to complete Project Guard.

Yoshi's Woolly World is more or less good to go, releasing in the UK on June 26 (American players will have to wait until October), and offers a decent challenge underneath its adorable veneer, providing you don't switch to its mellow mode. Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash will likely also be a lot better than the preview suggested, given the series' past form, and Super Mario Maker could be a genuine game changer. It improves on every Direct, and the levels displayed at the World Championships show enormous potential.

'Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water,' E3 2015 trailer

Interesting localizations are looming too, which the Digital Event bizarrely neglected. Devil's Third is an ultra-violent third-person slash 'n' shooter from Tomonobu Itagaki (of Ninja Gaiden fame). The single-player mode has a whiff of the PS2 era about it, from the macho lead to the OTT box art, but the multiplayer looks amazing. Want to be a ninja wearing a watermelon helmet and blow up a castle with a bazooka? This is your game. I hope it revels in its insanity and goes full TimeSplitters on us when it emerges in Europe, Australia and Japan in August (American release date: TBC).

Rodea the Sky Soldier intrigues, a weird hybrid of NiGHTS and Kid Icarus. Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water should also impress. The West hasn't seen recent series entries translated into English, but basically you play a young Japanese girl who uses a camera to see the ghostly forms attacking her. Many people regard the atmospheric titles as far scarier than recent Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, and the ability to use the GamePad as the camera means this could be the series' peak.

Then there's the big question: is Zelda still coming? Miyamoto says yes. Maybe it'll span two consoles like Twilight Princess. Whatever happens, the backlash to E3's Digital Event means the title's future is giving Nintendo plenty to think about.

The Wii U should keep its place under your TV for years to come

One positive about Nintendo's slow online uptake is that they continue to excel at local multiplayer experiences, which we can enjoy for years to come. Eight-player Smash is a riot if you can make it happen, and four-player Mario Kart, Rayman Legends, New Super Mario Bros. U, and Super Mario 3D World are all great fun. I hope my kids grow up seeing how much better it is to game in the same room as other people.

The often maligned Wii Party U is a perfect game to share with people who don't usually go in for such digital distractions, Wii Sports Club is a big improvement on its previous-gen predecessor(s), and launch title Nintendo Land is overdue a reappraisal. Its two-player Metroid Blast mini-game is tremendous, but it's the brilliantly simple Mario Chase that will see the disc get dusted off years down the line.

'Nintendo Land' – dig it out again, get some mates over, and have a laugh

Chances are you still have several acclaimed titles yet to tackle—my list includes Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate—so maybe the barren months ahead are an opportunity. And can any of us say, truthfully, that we've mastered a game lately? I'm still to beat Bayonetta on hard, so with nothing amazing on the new-release front, that's something to crack on with. Remember, too, Nintendo games can become collector's items, so snap up the relatively rare Wii and Wii U titles while you can (those old Wii games are compatible with the Wii U). The GamePad also represents a brilliant way to watch YouTube and Netflix or browse the web while a significant other is hogging the TV, so don't be too quick to unplug it.

So then, the Wii U. It's criminal that a console with the best Smash and Mario Kart games ever, the most enjoyable 2D outings of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. since the SNES years, the definitive version of Wind Waker, the spectacular Bayonetta 2 and the most innovative shooter in years in Splatoon is, quite possibly, getting mothballed in the all-too-near future. That would appear to be the unfortunate reality, but at least was can all agree that if it's going out, it's going out fighting.

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Dylann Storm Roof after his arrest Thursday. Photo via Charleston County Sheriff's Office

As Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania pointed out Thursday in the Washington Post, in the aftermath of Wednesday night's horrific shooting rampage in South Carolina, the media generally didn't refer to alleged gunman Dylann Roof as a "possible terrorist." Butler is one of many commentators who have complained about the way shooters are discussed differently depending on their race—if a person of color (especially a Muslim) commits a massacre, it's often assumed to be an act of terrorism, while white killers tend to be discussed in terms of their mental health.

Local authorities charged Roof with nine counts of murder Friday morning, along with possession of a firearm during commission of a violent crime. But Roof allegedly told his black victims that he was killing them in part because they were "taking over our country," which could make this a hate crime if he's also charged under federal law (South Carolina has no hate-crime statute on the books, but the feds are investigating). So is he legally a terrorist? What counts as "terrorism" under the law, anyway?

To find out, I talked to attorney Tarek Ismail, a former counterterrorism and human rights fellow at Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute who co-authored a paper last year about bias in terrorism prosecutions.

VICE: To start with, are the laws for hate-crime charges and terrorism charges similar?
Tarek Ismail: A hate crime is an add-on to a crime. The same is true of terrorism. Often, they're one and the same. The difference is "intent to coerce." Someone writing the law would tell you that a hate crime is a normal, run-of-the-mill crime [that's] perpetrated against a group because of the nature of that group. But it doesn't have that extra element of also intending to scare the shit out of that group. [In the case of terrorism charges], that's the distinction that's made.

Are there examples of hate-crime convictions in cases that were clearly designed to scare the shit out of people?
In the town I grew up in—Toledo, Ohio—there was this guy who walked into our mosque in 2013 with a can of gas, poured it all over the prayer room, and tried to burn that huge mosque down. He was charged with a hate crime. Do I think that's terrorism? Probably. We don't know what his intent was. But when he was sentenced, he said the only things he knew about Muslims were from Fox News. What he knew was that they chop off people's legs, and they want our destruction, and he had to take care of business himself. That's telling, I think. That's where a hate crime and terrorism overlap.

What would the terrorism charge bring that a hate crime wouldn't?
The [sentencing] ranges escalate dramatically once you add the terrorism enhancement, so that plays a role. But I think people who are making the case that this was terrorism are trying to make a broader point that terrorism isn't reserved for a particular group. Others are capable of terrorism, and what the Black Lives Matter movement has been addressing has been that black communities are experiencing terrorism—intimidation and coercion of a civilian population.

Does terrorism have to be political?
The intimidation grounds doesn't have a political tie to it. That's one of the arguments people use when they make this decision: "There's no exclusively political tie here, so this is different from the sort of ISIS-y terrorism that we see." But the law is very clear that anything that's intended to coerce or intimidate a civilian population falls within what we consider terrorism under federal law.

So in this particular shooting, what's the case for the terrorism charge?
When this guy says, "You are raping our women, you are taking over the country," he can't mean exclusively those 20-odd people in the church. He's gotta mean some group that he's generalizing about based on the people in front of him. It's my sense that that probably means black people. That's what he meant by it. That's an extrapolation based on nothing except the population in that church, but it seems logical. As the federal government does more investigation into this—I saw a picture of him wearing Apartheid-era [South African] flags—that stuff goes with intent.

And what about the case against it, hypothetically?
There are stories about Mr. Roof being [evaluated] for his mental stability. This pattern is all too familiar. People who follow these shootings will tell you that this pattern is one that we can predict at this point. Something horrible like this happens, and if the person is white, we'll start to ask questions about their mental stability. If the person is black, they're lucky to get arrested [rather than shot].

But all things considered, compared with other recent shooting rampages, does this suspect seem like a stronger candidate for the terrorism charge?
The terrorism charge here is much clearer. If we're going to take seriously the idea that terrorism is a thing, then something like the Aurora [Colorado] shooting seemed to just be bloodlust—going into a theater and shooting writ large. But here, we're looking at something where the race problem is in your face. The guy says, I'm going into this church, and you can't be around anymore, because you're raping our women, and you're taking over our country. To me it's clear as day.

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Thirty-two years ago, a 32-year-old Sally Ride was launched into space, becoming the first American woman to do so.

There was only one problem: What if she got her period?

There are numerous things that go into preparing for a space launch: checking oxygen levels, testing the communications system, signing off on proper meteorological conditions. But until Ride's first flight, sanitary napkins hadn't been part of the checklist.

"When it came to menstruation, the poor engineers just really didn't have a clue," said Lynn Sherr, Sally Ride's biographer, in the documentary MAKERS: Women in Space. Engineers had been preparing for the inclusion of women in space for years—everything from refitting space suits to fit women, to developing different toilet apparatuses to fit the female anatomy—but menstruation posed a unique problem.

The question of zero-gravity menstruation perplexed NASA's medical specialists. What would happen if you had your period in space? Would the blood stay lodged in the uterus, or would it create blobs of free-floating blood? NASA's medics were specifically concerned about the risk of retrograde menstruation, a condition where menstrual fluid travels backwards in the fallopian tubes. Retrograde menstruation is an earthbound condition (it's believed to be the cause of endometriosis), but scientists figured the lack of gravity would increase the likelihood. If gravity pushes menstrual blood out, then a lack of gravity might push it back in.

Rhea Seddon, who was part of the first group of astronauts to include women, remembers these conversations about menstruation among NASA's medical team. In her oral history, Seddon recalls, "We [female astronauts] were asked, 'What do we do about this?' We said, 'How about we just consider it a non-problem until it becomes a problem? If anybody gets sick in space you can bring us home. Then we'll deal with it as a problem, but let's consider it a non-problem.'"

Curiously, according to Margaret Weitekamp, a space historian at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, there are no known studies on menstruation in zero-gravity environments, meaning that for as much conversation as there was around it, no one tested whether or not it really was a problem. There were, however, a series of tests in the 1960s through the Lovelace Women in Space Program, which was designed to test if women were physically fit for space travel.

Nineteen women were selected for the Lovelace studies, which included a series of rigorous physical exams identical to ones that male astronaut candidates had undergone (plus a gynecological exam). The researchers speculated that women might actually fare better in space, since they are, on average, smaller than men. Indeed, the researchers noted that more women passed the exams with "no medical reservations" than men. But when it came to the gynecological exam, there was a problem: The menstrual cycle might alter a female astronaut's ability to do her job. As the researchers noted in their report, "the intricacies of matching a temperamental psychophysiologic human and the complicated machine are many and, obviously, both need to be ready at the same time." In other words, you can't have a hormonal woman running an aerospace operation. Because of this, the researchers concluded that "it seems doubtful that women will be in demand for space roles in the very near future."

Watch: Motherboard meets with two guys creating the next generation of space suits from scratch.

Eventually, of course, NASA did decide to send women into space. They'd learned that women were anatomically well suited for space travel, plus they took up less space, ate less food, and consumed fewer resources. Regarding periods, medics decided to treat space menstruation like Earth menstruation and see what happened.

There was another question, though: How were they going to deal with all that extra blood? Space waste was a big enough problem in itself. NASA had already developed a special space toilet with a suction feature (cup-like shape for women, cone-like shape for men) to properly store waste and seat belts, so that astronauts didn't float away while doing their business. They had also created something called a Disposable Absorption Containment Trunk (DACT)—a cross between bike shorts and a super-absorbent adult diaper—which could be worn by both men and women during launches or spacewalks, to collect waste when space toilets weren't available. But if women were going to potentially bleed in space, how were they going to absorb that?

Sally Ride in 1983. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As it turns out, there were no specially designed space tampons—women astronauts could use the same supplies they used on Earth. The bigger question, it seems, was how many tampons a woman in space might need. There's a passage in Sally Ride's oral history where she describes preparing for her first flight as the first woman in space:

"There were a couple of other astronauts, who were given the job of determining [...] how many tampons should fly as part of the flight kit. I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight."

That conversation went like this:

"Is 100 the right number?"

"No. That would not be the right number."

In Sally Ride's biography, there's another great scene of her discovering the string of 100 or so tampons that had been tied together, like a strip of sausages, so that they wouldn't float away.

For more on Sally Ride, check out Motherboard's brief history of the first women in space.

It's not clear just how many women have bled in space, in part because many female astronauts choose to suppress their menstrual cycles with oral contraceptives. (No periods, no problems.) But that's a shame, according to William J. Rowe, a professor of medicine. In an article in the Journal of Men's Health and Gender, Rowe argues that menstruating women actually have an advantage in space, since menstruating causes women to lose iron. Astronauts in space often experience increased iron levels, which can be "extremely toxic because it is conducive to high oxidative stress."

Could period blood be a woman astronaut's secret superpower? It's possible. For now, though, we know that zero-gravity menstruation looks a lot like earthbound menstruation.

As Seddon recalled in her oral history, "I'm not totally sure who had the first period in space, but they came back and said, 'Period in space, just like period on the ground. Don't worry about it.'"

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Gold is an essential part of Roma culture, especially for the queen of the witches, Maria Câmpina

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Last year, Slovakian photographer Lucia Sekerková traveled to Romania to meet Maria Câmpina, the self-proclaimed queen of the fortune tellers, who are locally referred to as "witches." Usually of Roma origin, these women are said to be able to read a person's future in his or her palm, in grains of wheat, or in the stars.

Lucia made friends with Maria and spent time documenting the witches, their houses, and their trade—a profession has been passed down from generation to generation since ancient times. I got in touch with her to find out a bit more about her project.

Maria Câmpina sitting on her gold couch

VICE: How did you end up documenting the lives of Romanian witches?
Lucia Sekerková: I've been both fascinated and scared by the occult ever since I was a child. I decided to come to Romania through the Erasmus student exchange program because I thought the country was quite mysterious and rich in folklore. I was searching the internet for information about the villages, the people, and their traditions when I came across a YouTube video of one of these fortune tellers. I knew right away that I needed to meet them in person.

So I asked the CouchSurfing community for help and met a local photographer, Cosmin Iftode. He ended up acting as my guide and translator, which was good, since very few of these witches speak English. I couldn't have done it without his help. Cosmin and I are close friends now.

How did you find the witches?
I just looked up their addresses and telephone numbers on the internet and in the papers, but it was pretty hard to convince them to let me take their picture. Some of them asked for money, others didn't. Anyway, most of them were willing to bargain. The prices ranged somewhere between 20 [$22] and 50 euros [$56] per session.

I told them I was taking their pictures for a newspaper in Slovakia. They probably wouldn't have let me do it if I told them the truth: that I was working on my final project. Moreover, telling them I work for a newspaper assured them that I could pay the price they asked.

After days of searching and bargaining, I finally met Maria Câmpina—the self-proclaimed queen of the witches—and struck a deal with her. In order to take her and her acquaintances' pictures, I had to promise her the newspaper that I was working for would publish a full story about her, as well as give her the front page. This way, I didn't have to pay any money for the photo session. Maria's photo did end up on the front page of SME, a weekly Slovakian newspaper.

These gold chairs belong to a witch named Sultana. Sultana told the author that her studies will only depress her and that whenever she feels unhappy she should turn a rock upside down.

How hard was it to interact with these women?
The hardest part was persuading them to be honest. While I was interviewing them, I got the feeling they tended to exaggerate their stories. It was obvious they were trying to make a good impression. Fortune telling is ultimately a business. I wasn't used to dealing with people like that, so the conversation was quite exhausting.

Watch: "Teenage Exorcists"

Did you test their fortune-telling abilities?
I did. Part of my project was to see just how different the women's predictions were. And they were quite different—some positive, others negative. All were really short and way too general.

For example, one of the witches told me I was going to get married and have three kids within a year. It's been more than a year since and none of the things she said would happen have actually happened. The strangest part was when a witch came up to me, pulled my hair, and told me that someone close to me was going to die. Luckily, they didn't.

The witches' houses are all about flaunting wealth, whether that means golden chairs or flat-screen televisions. This is the house of a witch named Amalia, who at the time was training her niece in the art of witchcraft.

Do you think the local stereotype of Roma people being witch doctors helps these fortune tellers make money?
In Roma communities, it's usually the men who support their families. Whether they make an honest living or not is an entirely different matter. Fortune telling is an ancient trade—the only one that Roma women are allowed to practice. It's also the only way Roma women gain respect and success within their communities.

Roma girls go to school until they are 18, but they're also taught fortune telling by their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. Each girl has to decide for herself if this trade is morally correct or not, because practicing it often entails taking advantage of their clients' naivety.

How do you feel about the fact that this ancient trade is practiced in a modern society?
At first, I was fascinated. I photographed some of the wealthiest and most respected witches in the world. These women have managed to accomplish something incredible: They've built a modern business using ancient rituals originating from their ethnic background. Their customs are exactly the same as a century ago. What's changed is people's perception of them.

Scroll down for more pictures.

Selena is in the process of learning magic and becoming a witch. She goes to high school but learns the magic arts from her aunt Amalia.

This furniture belongs to the witch Maria Câmpina, who told us she speaks to the dead.

Witches sometimes light candles to "open their inner eye" before casting a spell or looking into the future.

Loventa told the author that she could see the sadness behind her smile. She told her that the sorrow would grow deeper after one of her loved ones dies.

Atena was aware that the author did not believe in her powers or God. She said she would never be happy if she didn't embrace God.

This staircase belongs to Atena, who believes her life is guided by dreams of her dead grandmother.

The with Sunita told Lucia that an important turning point is coming in her life, and that she should watch her health.

Potions are a huge part of the witches' culture.

The witch Ivana Sidonia told Lucia that her ex wants her back and that a loved one would soon die.

Crystal balls are often used for seeing into the future.