Hey, good buddy, what you got there? What you got there in your foreskin, my boy?

A MAN who hid a packet of cocaine under his foreskin while naked in the car park of Homebase has appeared in court.

Well! Thank you the Swindon Advertiser for that! I have crossed my legs over one another and I am never uncrossing them again, because all I can now feel up there is the phantom papercut-like feeling of a flattened baggy being squeezed indelicately up my foreskin! I am never going to un-feel this feeling! The corners! The corners are invisibly pranging my tenderness!

declined to comment.

HOW CAN YOU HAVE. SEVEN POINT TWO GRAMS. OF COCAINE. UP YOUR DICK.

UP IT.

UP YOUR DICK.

I have spent a shocked hour – maybe an hour-and-a-half – on the logistics of stuffing seven grams of coke up your dick, and I have come to a few conclusions here re: stuffing seven grams of coke up your dick, and—

i. I mean, I suppose point one is seven grams is a lot of cocaine to shove up your dick! I consulted with a nameless VICE employee who knows a lot more about cocaine than me (and, by extension, storage thereof) and asked him how much seven grams was, in terms of volume, and he (or she; girls love gak, too – it could be a girl) he came over with a little bobble of tissue to illustrate "one gram of coke, by volume" and then he said "this, only times seven" – i.e. bigger than a marble, smaller than a gobstopper – and we both just imagined that amount of cocaine and looked off into middle distance and imagined shoving it up our respective bellends—

ii. Point ii. the first question you are probably asking is "did all seven grams of cocaine necessarily have to be up the dick? The details are sketchy" – but, from the Salisbury Journal: "Prosecutor Keith Ballinger described how the wrap had 'emerged' from private parts," suggesting it was a singular package of cocaine concealed about his person rather than a number of grams dotted about the place, for example up the arse, in an armpit, &c. So, essentially, when questioned by the police about what he was up to at 08.30 in a Homebase car park, this dude answered by silently emitting a singular wrap of cocaine from the tip of his dick. As answers to questions go, that is imperious, and—

iii. Only way I can imagine storing that much cocaine at once is all folded up in a Lottery ticket, and basically: Did my boy shove a Lotto ticket full of gak up his slit?

Listen, we've all taken things places we shouldn't have done – a hip flask to work, fireworks to school, ket to a wedding – but, clearly, us mortals are thinking on too low a level to truly ever smuggle contraband on a major scale. A Swindon man turned his foreskin into a kangaroo pocket just to keep seven grams of cocaine out of the hooved hands of the police, and for that he must be applauded. Instead, "The Man" has decided this week that he must spend 13 weeks in prison. There's no justice.

@joelgolby

Various old cocaine headlines from VICE, slightly altered to make it sound like they are about shoving cocaine up your dick:

How Your Low-Key Cocaine Habit Actually Affects You

London, This Is What's Actually in Your Cocaine

How Unethical Is

War. All things considered, it's probably one of the things people like least about the world. Unless you're Genghis Khan or Tony Blair, when asked if you'd want to wage war you'd probably go "nah" and make a face like you've just discovered you've been sitting on an unwrapped Twix.

Conversely, the past. People fucking love the past. Old people, yes, because they are hurtling towards the ground at the speed of light and so can't get enough of the past, when they were decades further from death. But younger people, too – the types who grow twirly moustaches and go to Blitz parties, presumably forgetting that The Blitz was the name given to the relentless and not-fun-at-all bombing campaign waged by the Germans during WWII.

So what happens when you wedge these two things – both war and the past – together in a massive field in Kent? You get The War and Peace Revival show, a five-day military and vintage festival at Folkestone Racecourse.

It has all the things you get at a normal festival, like music, beer, mud and people dressing up in embarrassing yet painstakingly-created costumes. It's just that instead of the music being about "getting blunted" or promiscuity, it's about doing "The Lindy Hop" and maintaining stable relationships. And instead of costumes like "sparkly sequined glitter hippy" or "nu-rave native American" it's more "deeply problematic SS uniform".

I've often wondered why people are so obsessed with World War I and II. I mean, sure, it was the last time the world truly came together to defeat a terrifying and genuine evil, and the lessons we learnt from the tragedies that took place have dramatically shaped the course of modern history, but fucking hell, we do love to bang on about it; it feels like there's been a new movie, book or video game released about the Wars at least once a day, every day, for the past 60-odd years.

To find out why people enjoy re-imagining a period that saw some of the greatest losses of human life history has ever seen, I went down to the festival and had a walk around.

The first thing I noticed was the sheer scale of the thing. I had a little wander around to get my bearings and it was probably about two-thirds of the size of Glastonbury, but just absolutely rammed to the gills with tanks, army uniforms and people camping in makeshift barracks rather than bright orange Halfords €35 jobs.

The campsite genuinely looked like a bit like a scene in Full Metal Jacket, complete with signs saying things like "God Is My Shotgun" and "You Yell, We Shell, Like Hell". They even still did that annoying "wacky flag above our area so we know where we're camped" thing, but instead of being Spongebob Squarepants or an acid house smiley it was giant American, British and, in some cases, Nazi flags.

I started talking to a guy called Marcus, who was sitting in the Vietnam section dressed as an undercover CIA agent and drinking what looked like JD and Coke, despite the fact it was 10 in the morning. I asked what drew him to playing dress up in a giant field of other people playing dress up.

"I used to be in the army," he said. "To be honest, doing this is the closest thing you can get to the camaraderie of being in the army – I think that's why a lot of people do it."

In between sips of his drink he told me he was a history teacher in his spare time, and that this is only one of many re-enactments he attends, his favourite being the Tudor-themed War of the Roses re-enactment where he likes to play an Italian merchant.

"The thing is," he continued. "The thing is, my rank is actually pretty high as a CIA agent. Basically, I'm on the same level as a colonel, so I can tell anybody here if I wanted to to let me use their helicopter or tank and they'd have to let me."

I'm not sure if he was in character at this point, or if he actually believed what he was saying, but either way he let me try on this fancy gas mask so I couldn't complain.

There were various sections of the site dedicated to different facets of war. Some contained just tanks and vehicles. Some contained tanks, vehicles and fake battle scenes, complete with guys (and it was 99 percent guys) just kind of sitting around in their uniforms looking nonplussed.

I struck up a conversation with an owner of a tank-type people carrier thing, who was more than happy to explain where he got every single tiny part of the vehicle, down to the side lights and the authentic German hip flask on the inside.

One common trait among everyone there was that they were extremely keen to talk. This guy had come all the way from Latvia to show off his rustic Batmobile and wasn't prepared to let me go without chewing my ear off about every little nut and bolt. It was actually quite sweet to see a grown man essentially reduced to the level of a teenager discussing his latest Pokemon Go catch, until you remind yourself that his Pokemon Go catches are relatively ideologically unsound.

As I pottered around the dusty fields I started to see more and more incredibly detailed uniforms, most filled out by slightly overweight guys who – although I couldn't ask every single one – I safely assumed have never been in the army.

I got talking to this lovely-looking fella who, even in midday heat burning the top of my bald head, was so dedicated to his outfit – one worn by henchman from the shady Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil universe – that he wouldn't even take off his face mask to talk to me.

"I just love how everything looks, and how it feels to be in full uniform," he said. "For me, it's more about collecting all the individual parts and then designing the costume myself. I take a lot of pride in how good it looks."

Next, I wandered into what looked like a massive branch of Rokit – a vintage clothing arena full of rockabilly, polka dot type stuff, which didn't chime with the trenches I'd seen a minute earlier, but hey-ho. There, I got speaking to Natalie, who was selling vintage gear out of a 1950s style camper van called Twiggy.

"I just think the whole look exudes class – that's why I'm into it," she explained when I asked why she dresses the way she does. "It's something that I think is missing from modern society. People in those days had a lot more time to do themselves up; they took care over their appearance. These days, girls just put their hair in a scrunchie and go outside like it doesn't even matter."

Needless to say, a lot of people at the festival were pretty enamoured with the "good old days", a simpler, sepia-toned time when children respected their elders and nobody got angry about halal butchers because they didn't really exist. You get the impression that, for the people who attend War and Peace, nationalism is a thing to be proud about, rather than shied away from. There will have undoubtedly been some Remainers among their number, but I got the sense that these were the kind of people an emotionally-led, nationalistic campaign like Vote Leave would have worked a treat on, because they're already so heavily invested in a rose-tinted version of the past that they would be willing to ignore stuff like "facts" and "expert advice" in favour of returning to an age where jingoism wasn't a bad word.

To guns now, and: there were a lot of guns. Extremely realistic BB guns, paintball guns, shooting ranges, deactivated guns, old guns, new guns, even this €2,950 golden AK-47 gun, which I'm fairly certain Gaddafi owned at some point. The owner told me its story:

"It was actually found in the Middle East," he said. "When it was found it was covered in blood and guts. You see the bullet hole at the back of it?"

Sure enough, there was a big old bullet hole on the other side of the gun.

"That's where someone had obviously taken a shot to the stomach and died."

It's good to know there are still people out there who are committed enough to looking like evil dictators gone mad with power that they're willing to spend thousands of pounds on gold automatic weapons.

I also noticed there was a black SS flag hanging up behind his counter. The SS being the Schutzstaffel, AKA the guys in charge of enforcing Nazi racial policy, AKA some of the worst bad guys in history. I saw a lot of Nazi memorabilia around the place – people in uniforms, swastika flags, skull and crossbones patches; y'know, evil stuff – and so had to ask the attendant at yet another stall bearing a large Nazi flag what makes it OK to so brazenly display the kind of iconography that would offend hundreds of thousands of people.

"I just specialise in bomb fuses. I really like bomb fuses, and the German ones were really well made," said Tony, adding: "I think, for a lot of people here, they just like the beauty of it. Everything the Nazis made was incredibly well-made; the knives are all hand-crafted, the machines are all still great examples of their kind."

But what about the inherent awfulness associated with it all?

"I think you don't come to a place like this if you are sensitive about things like that. I think some people might share that ideology, but most people are just here to collect and trade."

In fairness, Tony didn't actually own the flag – it belonged to his stall manager – and did seem like he was genuinely just really into fuses, there to collect rare items, as many others were too. And because of the rarity of German war items (most sell for double, if not triple, the amount of Allied gear), the market for Nazi stuff will always be stronger and therefore more revered in these circles, purely on a financial basis.

But that's not to say the festival didn't feel quite problematic in parts. Throughout the whole day I didn't see anyone who wasn't white, bar a Japanese guy in full Japanese WWII uniform who shouted "Banzai!" a lot. It wasn't a problem for me, as "white bald guy" seemed extremely on trend at War and Peace this year, but I can't imagine what it would be like for a Jewish person if they had to walk around, seeing what – at surface level, at least – sometimes looked like a very lackadaisical Nazi rally in a field in south-east England.

As the day was winding down, I decided to take a quick breather in this tank. I spoke to its owner, John, about how he came to own such a tank. "I built it from scratch over three-and-a-half years," he said, proudly. "It took me a lot of effort to make this vehicle, and I'm pretty much retired now just so I can focus on my vehicles."

John seemed like a very nice guy, and his enthusiasm for "vehicles" helped me understand the festival a little more. Away from its dodgier facets, the event – and the entire culture around it – is essentially an extension of those little Aircraft kits, only absolutely massive and about 40 times as expensive. And instead of toy soldiers in toy vehicles and tanks, you dress yourself up in full regulation uniform and sit around all day getting pissed, talking to whoever will listen.

@williamwasteman / alexandermcbridewilson.com

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

It's hot as fuck in Romania at the moment – last weekend, temperatures hit 35°C before noon on both days. There's no way to escape the heat, to avoid sweating like a pig. I find that Bucharest has a unique sort of beauty when it's dealing with these kinds of temperatures, so last weekend I went out on the street armed with a camera and a bottle of water. I live in Mexico, and I've never had to deal with such oppressive heat.

More on VICE:

Photos of Greek People Dealing with Their Heatwave

Photos of British People Trying to Deal with the Heatwave

What Is It About Summer That Makes Us Want to Drink and Fuck So Much?

Could I justify smoking my joint, if I actually knew where my weed came from? Image via

Submit a question to our panel talk about the ethics of getting high in Sydney on August 3. In partnership with The Ethics Centre.

It was a thing of beauty. Long and conical, with graceful lines and smooth curves. Looking upon it evoked a strong tempest of emotions: It was a monument to the human ability to craft order and meaning from the simplest of raw materials.

I am of course, referring to the joint I rolled the other night. Consisting of roughly 1.5 grams of bud, a sprinkling of magic mol mix, and a small hint of tobacco at the tip to help it light. All well chopped, all well rolled. Even the roach was perfect, made from an old cardboard NSW train ticket, which is widely acknowledged as the superior roaching ticket.

Unfortunately, my plans for this bona fide piece of 21st century art were interrupted by my editor at VICE. They contacted me, asking if I could try working out exactly where my weed came from. Would I still feel comfortable smoking the thing if I knew what was involved in making it?

It wasn't something I'd ever considered before. I think I'd been happy being ignorant, to be honest. It wasn't really about there being some bad dude, somewhere along the supply chain, making some money. The thing I was worried about was that I'd discover someone had been hurt getting this beautiful joint to me. I guess I'd find out.

The first point of call was obvious enough: the people who I'd bought from. While they were happy enough to talk, they ultimately knew about as much as I did. Their particular contact had come from the dark web, and meetings were arranged through encrypted messaging apps. This arrangement is obviously beneficial in that it helps avoiding detection and arrest, but it leaves the buyer in the dark.

Somewhat disappointed that my dealer hadn't been able to produce documents certifying that their weed was completely organic and fair trade, I set about contacting other sellers. A pattern quickly emerged: They'd buy in pounds—either from dark web or real life sources—and then break it down to ounces, halves, quarts, and fifties. Most were unsure as to where exactly the pounds themselves came from, apart from vague descriptions like "bush" or "hydro."

Only two people had a more informed idea of where the product was coming from. One dealer spoke enthusiastically of a mate who had a constant crop of small plants on the go, enough to keep a steady income stream, without straying into the territory of a major dealer.

Another, an ex-dealer, spoke glowingly of their suppliers. They were a group of men who could be readily described as "bikies." The dealer was keen to make clear they were "non-threatening, non-violent."

WATCH: VICE Asks: What Are the Ethics of Getting High?

"I'd even call them paternalistic in a good sort of way," they told me. "Even though I haven't dealt with them for years, they're always stayed in touch with friendly messages. They even introduced me to the people who gave me an apprenticeship and the eventual pathway to a straight job".

It's not exactly surprising that the information I was getting was vague and varied. Apart from journalistic curiosity, there's very little reason for anyone involved on the smaller end of the supply chain to have any real information about the back-end of the operation. After all, if it was easy to track where your weed came from, there wouldn't be very many weed dealers left.

This led me to my next port of call, the police. With a strong sense that I was about to be added to another 20 government watch lists, I contacted Victoria Police's media unit, asking if they could explain to me the likely source of my weed.

I was bounced around a lot. It seemed like there were many police taskforces related to marijuana, and the drug trade more generally, but no watchdog dedicated to determining what's ethically sourced and what's not. Finally, I got an official statement.

"We need to change the attitude where some people believe taking drugs 'recreationally' is okay," it read. "The only people who benefit from illicit drug use are drug traffickers and organised crime syndicates for financial gain."

It was strange reading that. Obviously, neither of us want criminal gangs raking it massive profits. Yet I'd never think for a second targeting recreational users was the way to fix that. How had we started wanting the same things and ended up at such very different conclusions?

ImageviaYouTube

I decided a less stern authority figure might be more able to speak a little more honestly about the subject. So I emailed a drugs and addiction specialist who works in one of Australia's cannabis growing hotspots, Port Macquarie. Tony*, as he asked to be called out of fear of getting fired from his job, was a lot more forthcoming with information.

Tony said a lot of the weed grown in the area came from, "harmless hippies, who are just happy to see the stuff hitting the market." According to him, the worst thing you could really say about them is that, "they're not really paying any tax on their profits."

Fantastic, I decided, reaching for my lighter in celebration. I couldn't really justify not smoking this joint over tax avoidance, given I have an iPhone, wear Nike shoes, and pour my money into lots of other companies that pay as little tax as they can.

Unfortunately, Tony just kept on talking. "The rest generally comes from larger criminal consortiums, who'll gladly employ kidnap and torture in the course of their business," he said. "I've also dealt with groups in my area who'll commit sexual violence against woman and children in order to intimidate or coerce when required." And suddenly the aesthetic qualities of my joint seemed less enticing.

Where is our weed coming from? Mates helping mates, shady but civically-inclined biker groups, dark web sources, and the odd terrifying, deeply immoral criminal organisation. If you're in the habit of meeting mysterious men carrying fragrant ziplock baggies, the chances are you've financed some or all of the groups above. But like the coffee you drink, the chocolate you eat, or the clothes you wear, there's a chance that the choices you make as a consumer could be hurting others. How you feel about that is up to you.

As for my joint? Well, obviously it was just a fictionalised rhetorical device created to help guide this conversation. And by that I mean I smoked it right after I got off the phone with my editor. Now if you excuse me, I'm off to see what happens if you make homemade pizza dough, but use vanilla cake-mix instead of plain flour.

As soon as I step off the plane here, I can feel the heat of the city. It's hot—real hot. Houston hot. And within a few hours of arriving, I've already seen way more protesting than I did over four days in Cleveland. At a McDonalds on Diamond Street, near Temple University—my first stop in a full day of demonstrations—a couple of hundred people have gathered on street corners waiting for a DNC Black Resistance March organized by a local group called the Philly Coalition for R.E.A.L. Justice.

The first people I see are observers from the National Lawyers Guild and Amnesty International, who are on site to monitor police activity surrounding the DNC. Dozens of demonstrators have already been arrested, so they're busy.

After milling around for a couple of minutes, I hear someone start calling for the crowd to "bring it out in the street," and slowly, the protestors line up behind a banner, signs raised. Black Lives Matter slogans rise above the crowd, along with a couple of black anarchy flags. And just like that, the intersection is blocked and traffic comes to a halt. Motorists from all directions blare their horns as they realize the march is about to fuck up their afternoons. An angry dude is forced to turn his truck around because of the traffic, and screams "Fuck black pride!" as he speeds off.

The march thus assembled, a black organizer calls for a mic check, and then asks all the white people in the group to get to the back of the march, explaining that this is a black resistance protest—that goes for "white media" as well, she adds, and says that organizers are not afraid to kick people out of the march.

A lot of people are confused by this, especially the white anarchists. But the mic-check lady won't budge. This splits the march in half. Black protestors seem concerned that the anarchists will co-opt their march and movement. The demonstration, they say, is a protest against the Democratic Party for taking advantage of black votes, and also against the gentrification of black communities as a result of the Temple University expansion—a local issue not likely to resonate with the carpetbaggers in town for the DNC.

As I walk through the crowd, I'm greeted warmly by organizers of the protest. A couple of artists hold up paintings of President Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan. When a black man strolls by and says, "Fuck Obama!" the artists confront him about it—not physically, but in a debate, over the president's role in engaging the military overseas. It gets heated at times, but as soon as the march starts, everyone takes their respective places.

The usual protest chants begin, versions of which you've probably heard at a high-school pep rally: "Everywhere we go! People wanna know! Who we are! So we tell them!" Then, all of sudden, I see a rubber boot bobbing on someone's head in the crowd. Once again, it isVermin Fucking Supreme, right there on Broad Street.

A ghetto bird flies overhead, and I realize the march is running late. It was supposed to end at city hall, but it hasn't even left yet. But there's another demonstration starting across town, so I call an Uber and head over.

I get dropped off right in front of city hall, right next to a PT Cruiser with a "Black Men for Bernie" wrap around it. I see a guy with a "Free Hugs" sign, which seems par for the course at convention protests. Another guy has a sign that says, "The Police Killed Jesus"—now that's a new one. It seems the biggest contingency here is Animal Liberation Now, a sort of Anonymous of the animal right movement. A group of Guardian Angels walk past me in their custom red jackets—I had no idea they still existed. Good for them.

I walk across the courtyard, where an anti-DNC march is about to start on South Penn Square. The crew here is motley. Black activists mixed with pacifists mixed with anarchists, plus a few #BernieOrBust people. I spot not one but two ukuleles. The march is delayed because they're waiting for the previous march to get leave the square. So they start the chant "Hell no DNC! We won't vote for Hillary!" to pass the time. The sounds of traffic are drowning out the megaphone, so they set up a PA system, and announce their march will commence at 17:15, when the Black Resistance March arrives. It's only 16:00.

After hanging around for about an hour, the black resistance crowd still hasn't shown up yet. Meanwhile, the crowd here has tripled in size, to about 200 protestors. In response, the cops have started blocking off streets with police cars and human barricades. The confusion is multiplied by the everyday citizens of Philadelphia, who are just starting to get off work and navigating their way through the protesters. Communist flags aren't something you typically see on the commute home.

Finally, I see the protesters I'd been with earlier coming my way, only now there are dozens more of them. Something like 1,000 black resistance protestors come barreling down Broad Street, headed straight toward city hall, chanting "No good cops in a racist system!" The cops escorting them don't seem to notice, and go about their jobs. As their crowd melds with the protestors waiting at South Penn Square, the chants get louder. The police presence increases as well, but everything remains calm. I see several people holding up cardboard coffins painted with dead donkeys, and "DNC" written on the top. These guys are not fucking around.

The march is going from city hall to Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park, but my knees won't make that. And anyway the convention is starting, so I make my way to a watch party hosted by Jesse Jackson and Vivica A. Fox, and paid for by the Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation. I'm not credentialed but I walk in with no trouble at all, and order a vodka and pineapple from the cash bar.

I enter the viewing area and make my way to the back. The attire business casual, but some people are dressed in their Sunday best. I see a seersucker suit that's actually pretty fly—I might need that guy to hook me up with his tailor, because in my camo shorts, I am severely underdressed, even for the press. At least VICE's photographer, Pete Voelker, had the decency to wear a long sleeve shirt. My shirt had long sleeves before I butchered them with my granddaughter's scissors.

I look up at the screen and see a group mothers of victims of police brutality and gang violence on the convention stage, billed as the "Mothers of the Movement." The crowd at Wells Fargo Center starts to chant "Black Lives Matter," before the mother of Sandra Bland calms the crowd and starts speaking on behalf of Clinton. Lucia McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, follows, along with Sabrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin. Fulton closes out the moment, saying that she doesn't want to take the spotlight from Clinton, leaving the crowd with what she says God has given the women on stage: strength, love, and peace. The moment is visibly difficult for these women, but they are focused and determined. I pray for them.

After catching a glimpse of Vivica Fox, I walk outside, hit a blunt, and head back downtown. An Uber drops me off on the far side of FDR park, and walk to the gates in front of the convention. As I pass through the park, I see dozens of tents—a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters are camped here for the week. They don't have permits, but the cops are in a pickle because they can't legally arrest them. It's tricky.

When I get to the perimeter area around the Wells Fargo Center, I start to see people, and their numbers increase as I move closer to the entrance. They are protestors, waiting for the delegates to leave—but the delegates won't leave until the protesters clear the exit. On the other side of the gate are about 100 state police in riot gear. A gentlemen with a bullhorn is asking people to move back before there is a confrontation.

But the demonstrators aren't moving. I see red flags and bandanas over faces—the anarchists are in the building. Shit is going down. The ghetto bird hovers overhead as protesters talk shit to the police. Guys argue about different 9/11 theories. I hear a saxophone in the distance. I'm not sure what the fuck is going on. Even some of the protesters are confused by what is happening. A couple of activists are even trying to send demonstrators back to the park. But it's not working.

Eventually, a few delegates make their way out with no problems. It's anticlimactic, but I'm not mad at it. No one here actually wants to end their night staring down the riot police, and no cop wants to face off against a horde of anarchists. Given the violent alternative, I'll take anticlimax any day of the week. Hopefully everyone can live to take their aggression out on their ballots in November.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

Even if Pokémon Go seems to have surpassed it in download numbers, Tinder is still one of the most efficient methods to look for fresh meat. And since the app is all about making a good first impression on someone who's listlessly swiping through profiles while taking a shit or lying in bed with a hangover, it's safe to say a lot can go wrong with those first impressions.

With that in mind, we asked girls from all over Europe what they use Tinder for, and what will get them to swipe right or left.

PAZ, 22, LONDON

VICE: What's your biggest turn-off?
Paz: A photo of them posing with something stupid like a bottle of champagne. Something that makes them look like a douchebag. I don't like it when their first photo is of them showing off already. Also, if they're sitting on a car or something trying to be cool – it's so cringe. It's like, "nah!"

What would you swipe right for?
Like maybe a photo of them smiling, having fun. I really like dogs so if they have a puppy. Just a really laid back picture, not trying too hard. And a picture of them – not a group photo because then you don't know who's who.

What would make you want to talk to a guy?
A genuine good opening line. Not just like "Hi". More like, "What do you do?" I have a really descriptive profile so it helps if they mention something I put in my bio. I play a lot of sports so if they go "What kind of sports are you into?" then I'm like, this person took the time to actually read my bio. They genuinely want to find out about me, not like "hi, DTF?"

What would make a really uninteresting profile? What would make you swipe left?
A lot of guys put their heights on their profile. How tall are you is probably not the first thing I'd ask. Or when people put stuff like "Going on holiday to Malaga, Malaga 2k16," – no one fucking cares, mate!

What would make you accept a first date?
If they initiate meeting up and if they make a genuine plan. I really like it when people are like "Do you want to go to this place, I've heard it's really nice." I don't like it when people ask you out and then try to make you decide. If they don't know where to go, do they even want to meet up?

DENISSA, 24, PARIS

VICE: How long have you been on Tinder for?
Dennisa: I'm not on it anymore but I used it a lot last summer.

What made you download the app?
I was single and I had just moved to Paris and I didn't know anyone. I thought it could be cool to meet new people.

So, it was not just to flirt?
No, just to meet new people. I matched with tourists, people from abroad like me with whom I could go around Paris and visit stuff.

Did you end up meeting many people?
Yes. I come from Indonesia and I am a Muslim. I met this guy during Ramadan who wanted to convert to Islam. We stayed together for a month or so. But, apart from him, it never went farther than a first date.

What makes you want to right swipe?
I don't like blond boys. Then, even if the person is not pretty, if they've got good, artsy pictures, I'm more likely to swipe right. I work in fashion and media so photos are important for me.

Anything that pisses you off?
I am Asian, so I hate it when the guys I matched with tell me things like "I've never been with an Asian before" or "I like the shape of your mouth." I don't like the fact that they insist on it and they just want to tick Asian girl off their bucket list. I don't give a shit that you've never been with an Asian girl, mate.

MARGHERITA, 23, MILAN

VICE: When did you start using Tinder?
Margherita: I used it last year, for a few months. I wanted to meet new people and I was curious to see how it worked. Then I got into a relationship and I deleted it.

And how did it work for you?
Actually, it didn't work that well. I had tens of matches but I went out with a girl only once. She was pretty weird but mostly boring. I ran away in the middle of the date.

How often did you use it?
When I was bored: on the bus, or while watching TV at home – like all social media.

You identify as bisexual. Do you go for guys or girls on Tinder?
Basically, Tinder works like real life to me: I check out boys and girls, but at the end of the day I go for girls.

What does a profile picture need to work for you?
Well, essentially I have to like her face and her attitude. I don't like selfies that are too sexy or provocative. I like girls who are not shy and are okay with their bodies. It's great if they feel like showing them off, but then it doesn't have to become too much. The line is often very, very thin.

Do you care about the bio?
I'd read it only if I wasn't sure about the picture.

Did you have a pick-up line?
Nope, no pick-up line. If I really liked someone I'd write to them, otherwise I'd just wait to be approached. I'd try to become friends with the other person first. If they were fun to chat with then we could go out for a beer.

LOIS, 24, AMSTERDAM

VICE: Why did you download Tinder?
Lois: I was single and it seemed like fun. It was mostly out of boredom, but also out of genuine curiosity after hearing all the success stories. But mostly just to have something to do while taking a dump.

What did you find the most annoying thing on Tinder?
Pictures of guys with cats. That is so clearly meant to show that they also have a soft, sweet side. Surely everyone sees right through that? And boring dudes in boring button-down shirts – that's also a big turn-off.

Is there anything you do like about it?
I had a photo of myself as the McDonald's clown on there, and that got some funny reactions. One guy said, for example: "Nice McMuffins." I thought that was a good one.

Have you gotten any dates out of it yet?
Once, almost. That guy was pretty fit but before the date he said: "I have to admit something; I did gain a bit of weight recently." And of course I'd heard the stories about guys who were a lot slimmer in their pictures than in real life, so I ended up turning him down.

IRIS, 20, BUCHAREST

VICE: How did you end up installing Tinder?
Iris: I had just broken up with my former boyfriend. A friend saw that I was sad and told me to try out this app.

Did you have any luck?
I met my current boyfriend on Tinder. We spoke for the first time in January, and met in person after a week. We've been together ever since.

What don't you like about Tinder?
Anyone with a smartphone can use it. I hated the fact that all these assholes think they can pick up chicks with lame pictures and status messages. You have to work at it, honey.

(LEFT) EMILY, 19, (RIGHT) PALOMA, 19, BERLIN

VICE: Emily, what have you used Tinder for so far?
Emily: I've been looking for girls but not for a relationship. I just wanted to meet new people and try to have a good time with them.

How long have you been using Tinder for?
First I used it to look for boys for about a month but then I deinstalled it. Later, I went back on Tinder to date women. I was only on there for three days – then I met her. [Looks at Paloma]

So, what does a profile have to have for you to swipe right?
If the first picture is really ugly, I won't even look at the others. But with good-looking people I always check out the rest of the pics too. With Paloma, it was the pics. They were just beautiful. No posed photos or selfies, but photos that show the whole person – the things she does and the things she likes. I also appreciate it when people write about themselves instead of putting up a collection of corny quotes.

What puts you off?
People who are just out to get laid. I'm not a fan of manipulated photos and duck faces either.

What are some of the worst things people have said to you on Tinder?
If you're a woman seeking women, there is a bunch of girls looking for a third party for a threesome. That's weird but it has been the only negative thing.

Paloma, how long have you been using Tinder for?
Paloma: About half a year but sporadically. Sometimes I'll spend all day on Tinder, other times I'll forget about it for a week. I'm mainly looking for sex and fun – but I have to have fun first to get in the mood for sex.

Who do you swipe right for?
I guess the criteria are pretty obvious. Beauty is key, but so is style. If a girl is really hot but a bad dresser, I'll pass. But if I see a reasonably pretty girl in great clothes, that already tells me a lot about her. I don't really care about the interests people list.

What kind of poses make for the best photos?
If the girl is hot, it doesn't matter. If she's pulling a stupid face but she's really cute, then I don't care. But I don't like body photos that don't show the face. Those people can just jog on, as far as I'm concerned. I hate that stuff. If they can't face the camera, it shows that they're insecure.

What was the worst first message anyone ever sent you?
I was living in Barcelona at the time. One woman asked me if I wanted to come round to hers, share a bottle of wine and fuck on her last night in town. I tried to ask her some questions but Tinder was so slow that everything only got through to her the next day. And I probably would have said yes, actually, if only I'd been able to find out a few more things about her. So I guess it was Tinder's fault, or the network's, not hers.

KARNA, 24, COPENHAGEN

VICE: When did you first start using Tinder?
Karna: Oh God! I've been using it for like two years or something. It was definitely when it was still a new thing in Denmark. Maybe it's been three years.

Why do you use Tinder?
I started using it as a joke. Then, all of a sudden you're sitting there, shopping people. And the likes! They give you a real confidence boost.

What do you look for on Tinder?
I like them to fit a certain mould with their looks. It's kinda hard to describe – I don't want them to be too handsome, but not too ugly either. If they're too handsome I almost know what type they are. I am like Goldilocks – I don't like them too soft, but I don't like them to be too hard either.

Do you go on a date with everyone you match with?
No, not at all. I also only date the guys who ask me out.

Do you have a type?
I like guys that are chill. I like it when they have a funny bio. And if they're doing something fun on their photos. I don't like people who take themselves too seriously.

How important is the photo and bio?
It's very, very important. Both need to really pop.

Is there a type, you would never go for?
Guys with nude photos. And too many selfies. I'm not into sports either, so I don't like the guys who post a lot of photos of that sort of stuff. It's also because I know, that we're not going to be a match.

More on VICE:

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Sean Penn as Spicoli in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High.' Universal Pictures

This article is originally from VICE US

"I no longer doubt that marijuana can be an intellectual stimulant," wrote the Harvard professor Lester Grinspoon in 1994. "It can help the user to penetrate conceptual boundaries, promote fluidity of associations, and enhance insight and creativity."
Those sentences are from his introduction to an edition of Marihuana Reconsidered, his groundbreaking 1971 book that aimed to challenge the public outcry over marijuana use.

The original edition of Marihuana Reconsidered also included an essay by someone who referred to himself as "Mr. X," and he noted how being high in the shower helped him figure out how racism worked—a revelation that inspired him to write 11 essays in an hour. The claim sounded crazy, until it was revealed that Mr. X was Carl Motherfucking Sagan.

Sagan is a great example of a pothead who's accomplished amazing stuff while high—and he's not alone. Steve Jobs used marijuana to aid his creativity in the 70s, while weed was one of many chemicals it took to get Hunter S. Thompson's mental engines revving. Francis Crick was one of the scientists who discovered DNA, as well as an unlikely pot advocate who was a founding member of the proto-legalization group called Society of Mental Awareness (SOMA). The famed neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that pot allowed him to reconcile with his own atheism; author Lee Childs—whose Jack Reacher novels are a favorite among the Fox News set—recently admitted he's smoked every night for 44 years and writes while stoned. So why the hell do people generally think of potheads as lazy do-nothings?

There was once a time when marijuana was accepted among intellectuals and creative types as lubrication for the brain. Under the influence of hashish, "people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft," wrote the French poet, essayist, and general chill-ass dude Charles Baudelaire in 1860. He added, "Every difficult question... becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods."

Of course, Baudelaire was geographically and temporally separated from the American moral majority's reign of marijuana scare-mongering in the 60s and 70s. As Grinspoon wrote, "There is something peculiar about illicit drugs: If they don't always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many nonusers to behave that way."

And right when marijuana cultivated a reputation as the counterculture's substance of choice, the government stepped in to impose what Allen St. Pierre refers to as "the idea that marijuana use creates a lack of productivity, a slobbishness, a lack of attention." St. Pierre is executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (or NORML), and says that those stereotypes have been around since the Nixon administration, who used them to wrest legitimacy from anti-Vietnam War activists.

Nixon and his cohorts worked to ensure that, as St. Pierre puts it, "Regardless of your political affiliation, if you were a Vietnam War protestor, ergo, you were a pot smoking, non-working hippie." A talkative, bubbly guy, St. Pierre essentially functions as a one-man force against public misconceptions regarding weed: He speaks with gleeful erudition about marijuana, and he estimates he's done "thousands" of interviews about the drug since joining NORML in 1991.

As the years have passed, the myth of the pot-smoking slacker has grown thanks to the Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA), the organization behind the notorious "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" ads. Founded in 1985, the Partnership for a Drug Free America brought together the best and brightest in the advertising industry to create ads meant to, according to one LA Times article from 1996, "un-sell" the idea of taking drugs. The PDFA didn't just brand drugs as lame, but actively dangerous, too; and just like Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, the PDFA initially did little to distinguish between weed and harder substances such as cocaine or heroin.

One of its ads depicted a kid who smoked pot once as dangling from puppet strings, while another found a stoned kid named Tommy smoking a joint in the park being mocked by his schoolmates for being a delirious loser. Another featured a documentary-style interview with an imaginary burnout whose pot use led him to heroin at the age of 14. Scary stuff—that is, until it was revealed in 1997 that the PDFA was being bankrolled in part by Big Alcohol, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma, a plot that St. Pierre rightly says is "about as Orwellian as you can get."

Though the PDFA swore off accepting funds from alcohol and tobacco companies in 1997, it still accepts donations from Big Pharma; two years ago, the Nation wrote about how Purdue Pharma—the makers of OxyContin—was a major funder of anti-marijuana legalization efforts. But St. Pierre tells me that he expects stoner stereotypes to decrease as the decriminalization of marijuana increases: "When one walks into a marijuana dispensary today, they see some are designed equal to or better than any Starbucks." As more people become familiar with weed, and realize it doesn't turn them or the users they know into puppets on a string, the perception lifts.

Meanwhile, anecdotes of artists using marijuana to enhance both their creativity and productivity are myriad. DJ Quik frantically mixed half of Tupac's classic post-jail album All Eyez on Me in 48 hours by alternating between a steady smoking regimen of cigarettes and joints (Quik's reps confirmed to VICE that the story is true). And as St. Pierre points out, "Listen to the Beatles in their first years of existence, then listen to Sgt. Pepper. It wasn't the fact that they went from being 22 to 26—it's that they took marijuana."

And anyway, science—to a certain degree—backs up the idea that weed can motivate rather than deflate. A 2011 study showed that alcoholics who switched from booze to weed might experience increased creativity as a result, and a 2014 academic paper posited that marijuana could help increase creativity in uncreative people.

"I don't think marijuana is a key that unlocks something," St. Pierre is keen to clarify. "But marijuana can help people get through their day and have a series of clear thoughts. People are ripping away the overwrought static in their head and live a more functional life. If that isn't creativity, then what is?"

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A mural of devoted to Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, painted by Langston Allston. Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images

In the wake of Alton Sterling's death this month, many mourned what seemed like just the latest in a series of unjustified police shootings of black men. Some people took to the streets in protest. Others reflected and grieved in private. Langston Allston started painting.

Allston, a New Orleans–based artist, has been using his artwork to address social change and stoke conversations since he studied painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010. When he heard about Alton Sterling, Allston hitched a ride to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he picked up a paintbrush to contribute to the city's anguish and healing. There, Allston painted murals, including a portrait of a local protester called Lil' Smurf, who Allston said made an impression outside the Sterling memorial. A photograph of his artwork was later featured in the New York Times.

We spoke to Allston about his murals and why he sees painting as a viable form of protest.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Part of the mural painted by Langston Allston in Baton Rouge. Photo courtesy of Langston Allston

VICE: How did the mural at Alton Sterling's memorial come about earlier this month?
Langston Allston: I've been super active in terms of including in my art how fucked up the world is. I've kind of always had a particular thing about police brutality in my work because it's something that's always been close to me. I went to Ferguson . But we ran into a lot of protestors who were really inspiring—people from the community who came out and were just mad—so I just pinpointed a guy we were talking to earlier in the day named Lil' Smurf. Lil' Smurf was out going hard and protesting and I was like, Man, I've got to immortalize this somehow. Because it's sad how quickly this activism reacting to a sad event fades away. If there's any way to keep people visually energized and plugged in, I think that's a useful thing to do.

Image courtesy of Langston Allston

Do you see your paintings or murals as helping people in some way?
I personally don't think a mural by itself is an incredibly helpful thing. But I find as I'm talking to people that sometimes the things I paint take on a life after I've left that they didn't have when I was there. They mean things to people over time. Creating emblems and icons for people to gather around and talk about is definitely a useful thing to do, but I think there's more that has to get done. The visual element of any movement is always critical because it helps people remember it, helps people identify it, and helps people plug into it who weren't previously plugged in. But everything else has to happen in addition to that. There's definitely room for art in activism, but it's not end-all-be-all by any means.

What are you trying to accomplish with your artwork?
I really want to do work that lets people understand that the issues we're grappling with are complicated, but also understand that they're reversible and changeable. Activist art is something I've wanted to avoid, even though my art features activism, if that makes sense. I want stuff that will talk to people for a long time because these issues haven't gone away. We've been fighting this fight since slavery, basically, to get respect and to get people to stop murdering black people in cold blood. It's obviously going to be ongoing and obviously individual incidents really polarize people or pull them together. It's really important to remain active and aware of what's happening, but it's also important to understand things as being broad issues that affect everybody all the time.

Image courtesy of Langston Allston

If you don't categorize your work as activist art, what would you categorize it as?
I guess I would just call them paintings. I aspire to be active and affect change, but at the same time, I think that my paintings are just paintings.

Do you see this current movement—specifically, the Black Lives Matter movement—as something as significant as the civil rights movement?
I think I do see it as being equally significant. Really, it's a young movement; it just started. But those things we're looking back on and talking about like the civil rights movement or black power, those were things that started as young movements in times where it was necessary for them to exist. There was a gap where people really weren't polarized by it and the conversation wasn't happening on a national scale, and I think we're overdue to readdress this kind of shit because I don't think it's gotten better. In many ways, it's gotten worse.

Where I live in New Orleans, all these problems are extremely real every single day. There's no getting away from the reality of it. The law, in many ways, has lost its legitimacy—especially here in Louisiana. It's the incarceration capital of the world, so everybody down here is on papers in some way. Cops representing justice isn't really a thing. You don't see police come through New Orleans or Baton Rouge and think, Oh that person represents justice and fairness and equality. You already know they have the power to fuck up your life and probably will at some point. It's extremely necessary to start addressing that huge problem we have—especially here, because it is so fucked up. Little changes would do a lot. We just need to get a little bit of movement.

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Photo by Jason Bergman

Even the homophobes in Cleveland are hospitable. On Wednesday night of the Republican National Convention, I was sitting next to a middle-aged local at a no-frills watering hole called Nick's Sports Corner. I asked him his thoughts on Indiana governor Mike Pence, who was about to take the mic right down the block. I tell him I'm impossible to offend, and he really takes my word for it, going on a truly stunning and very laudatory rant that I would rather not reprint. His mug of America (formerly known as Budweiser) was sloshing over the rim as he pounded his fist against the bar.

"Damn right I'm a homophobe," he said before slamming down his glass and offering to buy me a drink.

The gesture seems incongruous, but then again so did the entire convention this year, given that televangelist Jerry Falwell spoke on its closing night, later followed by openly gay businessman Peter Thiel. I'd like to ask this Clevelander his thoughts on the sort-of unholy alliance that Trump is attempting to forge between gays and conservatives in the wake of the Orlando shooting, but I have to decline the drink, as I'm there prepping to meet Milo Yiannopoulos, who I first saw speak at the surreal "America First" Rally on the opening day, orbited again at his relatively boring LGBTrump party the following night, and now had finally nailed down for an interview. In fact, the self-described homophobe I met would probably like the 32-year-old platinum-blond provocateur, given that his whole schtick is railing against the idea that words and identity politics are meaningful. Although he's been a voice of the alt-right movement for years, he very recently received a ton of mainstream attention after allegedly orchestrating a campaign of Twitter abuse against actor Leslie Jones, one of the stars of the recent Ghostbusters reboot, and getting banned from the social-media platform as a result.

While I enjoy at least the idea of Yiannopoulos rankling hand-wringing liberals, I also think that his arguments give permission to people who want to say vile, racist, bigoted things. Meanwhile, I find at least some of his arguments compelling, like, for instance, the idea that we're at a unique moment where after the legalization of gay marriage, liberals now have to work for gay votes rather than just expect them. I spent about an hour discussing this with the infamous troll and challenging him to push me over the fence into full-blown conservatism. Here's what we talked about.

VICE: I'm gay, and I hate both the right and the left. I have been following you around and want to take this as an opportunity for you to convince me. Tell me why I should be more vocal about this at the risk of being socially ostracized.
Milo Yiannopoulos: This is a very strange interview.

I think you can make two choices in life when you have difficult things ahead of you: the easy one with the feelings, or the hard one with the facts. Science tells us that people tend to make decisions based on their emotions rather than reason and use reason to justify them later. It requires a significant degree of conscious effort to avoid that pitfall. Now it seems, to me, fairly obvious that if you are a homosexual, you can choose the mollycoddling and pandering and feel good maxims of the left, so that after a tragedy like Orlando you can buy into the rainbow Twitter avatars and the hashtags and feel good about yourself for saying, "Love wins." It doesn't really accomplish very much. And sometimes the conservative way is a little more counterintuitive—but more affective. Sometimes, actually, the compassion can be difficult to identify in it because it involves hard choices. It's not just about telling everyone that they're beautiful and wonderful and perfect.

I agree that Twitter avatars are not very effectual. What's the counterintuitive approach?
From my point of view, it's the conservative response to Orlando, for instance, a conservative response to the Islamization of Europe, which represents the best hope for gay people to be happy and safe and comfortable. Now that involves saying some unpleasant things about people you know—about Muslims, for instance. Now, not every Muslim you meet is going to want to firebomb a nightclub or take a gun to your head. But significant numbers of them do, and not really in minority. It's a significant portion of Muslims who simply find our way of life completely unacceptable. It's become dangerous to be gay in America for one simple reason, and that reason is Islam.

So what do you make of the ways that both Trump and Hillary responded to the shooting? I've interviewed gay Trump supporters who say that the speech he gave after made them love him.
I looked at responses from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and something struck me, which is that the two responses from the left—one, denial, and two, feeling—led to almost nihilism, really. A denial that there was a link to Islam or a connection to an Islamic antagonism toward gay people. And the sort of Nihilism of "Love Wins." Well love doesn't win. AK-47s win.

Meanwhile, I didn't realize Trump had this speech in him, really. It was pretty much the most terrific speech he has ever given. It was remarkable, and I encourage everyone to read it. Trump's response proved to me, as a British person hoping for the best for America, that he actually had some answers. There was an opportunity there to elect a president who would do something. I don't see that from the political left.

What's a long-term solution if you believe gays and Muslims can't coexist? Segregation? I don't see the end game to this argument.
I'm not sure that I could get behind a full deportation, but I don't have a problem halting immigration in countries where it threatens, not just minorities or another Orlando, but Western culture—which is the best culture. Western democratic capitalism. Free capitalism of the likes that we used to have in Europe, that you still have in America—which gave women the vote, which means that gay people can have a nice life. The places in the world that don't have it—it ain't very nice to be anything but the prestige class. In this country, you can pretty much do what you want to do, and say what you want and go where you want. That's not the case in most of the world. What surprises me about the left is that it doesn't seem to realize where the good stuff came from.

Gay marriage being legal is a moment that is pretty liberating for a lot of people. They don't have to be single-issue voters.
Don't you find it depressing?

Do you?
Of course!

Do you think that gay marriage being over and done with has caused that community to pivot to hand-wringing over other things that aren't necessarily issues?
I think the gay rights struggle is over, and it's time to shut up, stop, and go home, rather than continue to bleat and whine and police language and pivot to transgender pronouns and effectively start doing shakedowns. I don't want to see the Gay Establishment and gay charities turn into these sort of organized Al Sharptons, that go around policing the perceived homophobia, inventing grievances and victimhood where none exists, pretending to see insult and offense where none was intended. I don't want to see gay people be like that. That seems to me to be profoundly antithetical to the best spirit to gay dissonance of someone like William S. Boroughs. That seems to me to be so contrary to all of the best things about being gay. It's horrifying.

You advocate dropping the "T" from LGBT. It strikes me as maniacally self-serving to dismiss a group of people who basically started the gay rights movement as soon as it becomes politically expedient to do so. It's like hitting the lottery and then never talking to your old friends again, no?
Even the L and G shouldn't be together. Gays and lesbians don't really get on very much. We don't mix very much; we're not allowed in your bars. Lesbians and gays are horrendous about each other. Why are the L and G together, let alone anything else. There was a time, sure, in the 50s and 60s, when it payed to stick together. But that time's over. And all of these groups have different priorities. The very lesbianic third-wave feminism has very different priorities from gay men, it seems to me. Both of those groups have very different priorities to the trans lobby.

I kind of think that Jerry Falwell has less in common with Peter Thiel than a gay man has with a lesbian. Looking at the people speaking tomorrow before Trump, I can't tell if he's trying to move gay people into the party, or if it's just a sign that Trump has absolutely no ideology whatsoever.
I would say—I didn't finish my degree—but I went to a very good university in Cambridge, and I was taught that their were dozens of different ways to approach text. You could do a feminist reading, you could to an Lacanian reading, you could do all sorts of things. It seems to me that journalists are so poorly educated now, they literally have one prism through which to view the world, and it's the prism of oppression, bigotry, sexist, racist, homophobic—that's all they see when they look out in the world. I pity them because I would hate to see the world so monochromatically as they do.

But if you snap out of that and realize that the public actually is sick of the one-note preoccupations of journalists and that the allegations of sexism and racism don't have the power they had anymore, and that's good, and people are actually looking for a chaos candidate—I think the dysfunctional coalition that Donald Trump is assembling makes a lot more sense.

Why does this moment feel different than the political correctness movement in the 90s?
In the 90s, political correctness started to pop up, but it was beaten. It was beaten away. So now it's come back, and it's come back with a full force of every civil institution in the country. Politicians, the media, the entertainment industry, academia, the lot of it. But that's good, because that means if we beat it now, we beat it in its final form, in its strongest possible incarnation, and it will never return. That I think is happening by itself, but I'm happy to chivvy it along and also of course document that history as well. It's nice being someone who can give it a kick up the ass and then scurry around the corner and write about it as it comes around.

How does it feel, as a conservative, to know that a lot of the voter base fucking hates you?
Well, a lot of liberals hate you. I'm better educated on politics in Britain, but what I can tell you is––

Liberals don't stand on a street corner holding signs that say "God Hates Fags."
Oh come on, how strong is the religious right in this country, really?

Strong enough that Jerry Falwell is speaking on the final night of the Republican National Convention.
But what purchase do they have on the media? What has Trump said that's been influenced by radical evangelicals or anything like that? Realistically, the era of the religious right was the 90s. This was when people were saying that music and video games inspired school shootings on the basis of no evidence. Now it's feminists saying they can make you sexist with no evidence. It's the same ugly instinct, just from a different political direction. I don't like it anymore from the religious right than I do from the social-justice left. But to suggest that the religious right or that social conservatives have anything approaching the power that social justice has on the left in America is simply ridiculous.

And Mike Pence hates you for reasons that aren't even religiously motivated or easily dismissed as based on an old book. That's actually worse.
Mike Pence doesn't hate gay people. He's a family values and states's rights guy, and I am fine with that.

I wanted to ask you, if you could change whether or not you were gay, would you do that?
Yes. No. Well maybe before my career started taking off. Very honestly, if you did put the pills in front of me, if you really did it, if you said, "If you take this pill, you will be heterosexual," I think I would do it.

Why?
Well, it's not any of the things that people normally expect. People are always surprised by this answer, and it's amazing to me that this has never occurred to other gay people, but, when I'm fucking a person I love, I can't make a baby with them, and that's weird, and saddening, and confusing, and not a nice experience. When you're making love to someone who's most important to you in the world, you can't do what heterosexual couples do, which is create a child. Maybe I'm completely alone in that. But that bothers me.

I definitely expected the answer was yes, but not for that reason.
I don't know why this doesn't occur to more gay people, or if they just lie to themselves about it, or if they never get to that stage in their life or whatever.

There's a combination of things. I very much like the access to that wild abandon and freedom, particularly the cultural freedom that being gay gives me. I've obviously taken full advantage of that in my career. But when I think about where I want to be in 40 years, it's like, "Do I want to be happily married with my own children with the person I made those children with?" It's very tempting.

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(Image: Flickr user brar_j, via)

Don't Trust the Internet is a weekly column where we investigate all the bullshit tabloid stories, political memes and conspiracy hearsay that your mum is sharing on Facebook.

Okay, so disclaimer: I don't use Pokemon Go. I have no problem with anybody who does, but sadly I have neither the data nor the inclination to chase Jigglypuffs around Hornsey. However, there are some elements of its omnipresence that are starting to grate. None more than the totally, definitely, absolutely fake "Crazy Pokemon Go" stories.

There's a logic to this, of course. If a considerable percentage of the world's smartphone users suddenly start meandering around strange and hidden locations they're bound to, on occasion, stumble across strange and hidden things. A couple of big stories have been true – this girl finding a dead body sounds pretty legit, as does this Plymouth sex shop becoming a Pokestop – but in their wake they have inspired a dearth of fabricated Pokefables. Inspirational or cautionary tales of looking for Charmanders and finding love, or murder scenes, or adorable elderly people. It's a foolproof setup; there's no way of proving you're lying, and all you need is a weird location and kooky incident, and you've got a ready-made crazy Pokemon Go story.

Much in the vein of people pretending to be children for retweets, these stories must come from a thirst for viral recognition. A strange regressive urge found in grown-adults to be popular and lauded for capturing one of life's quirky moments. And for as long as Pokemon Go continues to be more popular than food, we can expect these outright lies to continue. Reddit upvotes, dude! Gotta catch em all!

WITNESSING A MURDER

Let's begin with the fakest of all the fake "crazy Pokemon Go" stories. If you can't be bothered to watch the entire video, it's basically a clip taken from a live stream of a YouTuber called Alex Ramirez playing Pokemon Go. Out of nowhere, in the middle of his game, he suddenly notices a truck pulling up outside the church where he was playing. At this point, Ramirez suddenly freaks because, "ohmygodohmygodohmygod" he's just seen the dude in the truck kill some chick. What follows is a thrilling audio sequence as he finds himself pursued by the murderer, before eventually calling the police to explain everything that had happened. Only, he didn't, because, of course, none of this happened.

This story was picked up initially by loads of places, mostly gaming blogs and tech sites including Gizmodo, as well as blowing up on Reddit. Since then, Ramirez's story has become weirder and weirder. The police got involved to say they believe the video is a fake; Ramirez has supposedly lost his job as an Uber driver (something Uber have denied); and at one point Ramirez even had a GoFundMe set up in his honour – since he got sacked and all – but now it's becoming more and more obvious he made the whole thing up, the campaign has disappeared.

The biggest giveaway that Ramirez is chatting absolute Pokeballs is his acting. If you're going to go one stage further with your fake story and actually record audio of "the incident" rather than just write it down and post it on Reddit, you've got to be able to convincingly capture exactly how a human being would likely respond to witnessing a murder. Ramirez literally says: "Why is there a random truck here at the church? Is this motherfucker playing Pokemon too? Oh my god! Huh! Oh my god! Holy shit! This guy just killed some chick! Oh my god! I just witnessed a fucking murder!" Not exactly kitchen sink realism is it.

THREATENED WITH MURDER

This small epic is currently one of the most popular on Reddit's very own "Crazy Pokemon Stories" subreddit. It follows an "average evening of Pokemon hunting" for three brothers who, following a disagreement over how many original Pokemon there were, find themselves the victims of homophobic slurs and death threats at the hands of some older lads and their over-zealous mum. The best part of the whole thing is the GCSE drama of how the initial confrontation plays out. Behold:

"You know, I had all the original 120 Pokemon when they came out."

Obviously he was exaggerating, but we cared more about him getting his numbers wrong.

Ralph corrected: "151."

"Huh?"

"There were 151 original Pokemon."

You could cut the air with a knife, couldn't you? Proper old school stand-off, this. The sheer venom packed into that "huh". I'm shuddering reading it. I can see them now, the two packs of Pokemon hunters, like a version of West Side Story featuring an all-male cast of vloggers with baseball caps. The flick of a switch-blade when Ralph says, "There were 151 original Pokemon." The silence – the unending silence in which you could have heard a pin drop – preceding the absolute chaos that follows. And oh boy, what chaos. Thrown soda, cries of "faggot" and a mother so batshit crazy she threatens to run everybody over. All because some punk didn't know how many original Pokemon there were.

This is definitely fake, but that said, the actions of the mother remind me of the only Pokemon story I have. When I was nine years old I collected Pokemon cards. One afternoon a boy of a similar age who lived a few doors up from us came round to play. We were comparing cards and eventually agreed to swap three of his cards for one of mine – I think it was a Golem – based on their relative worth. He went home and I thought nothing more of it, until an hour later his mum came storming down the street and called me out quite publicly for conning her son out of three cards. I was forced to return them, without getting my Golem back. It was deeply humiliating and I have never forgiven the shitty mother or her shitty son.

SHOTS FIRED

Another one popular on tech blogs and Reddit, a YouTuber's run-in with a gun-wielding landowner is one of the more dramatic Pokemon Go incidents to hit the internet. As played out in the video above, the gag-inducingly named Lanceypooh got into a spot of bother when driving out into the middle of some backwoods somewhere in the dead of night. Everything goes awry when the plucky heroes leave their car and find themselves being yelled at by whoever owns the land it turns out they're trespassing on. The video of the incident currently has over 400,000 plays.

There's a line in Superbad that goes, "I'm sorry, Evan, that the Coen Brothers don't direct the porn that I watch." I'd like to imagine that if the Coen brothers ever do direct some porn, it will look a bit like this. A couple of hapless middle-American blokes, stranded out in the middle of nowhere, shaky handheld camera, gunshots.

The thing that makes these setups so obviously fake is just how performative everybody is during the build up. Not only is it an unholy coincidence that the whole thing was being filmed, but the two stooges involved behave like the worst kind of post-Will Ferrell YouTube comedian‚ squawking irate zingers at each other about "rural Pokemon" in a tone that screams, "God, I desperately hope my comedy vlog about tech takes off after people see how funny I am on this, because at this point I really have nothing left to give."

CAUGHT CHEATING

This story got picked up by both the New York Post and the Daily Mail, despite literally just being a vague anecdote about a breakup. This crazy Pokemon Go story goes as follows. "Gamer" Evan Scribner was canoodling with his ex-girlfriend behind his current girlfriend's back – something he would have got away with if it wasn't for Pokemon Go's pesky geolocation services. Scribner claims that due to the app recording his location – and when exactly he was at said location – his girlfriend was able to work out where he'd been due to him catching Pokemon in the neighbouring area. Poor old Evan says his girlfriend worked out he'd been spending time with his ex and hasn't spoken to him since.

There's definitely something fishy here. Besides the whole "your girlfriend isn't speaking to you but you're doing an interview with the New York Post" thing, surely this story would only be worth reporting if there was a shred of evidence it actually happened, as opposed to a "gamer" – not a job title, by the way – retelling an anecdote. I'm also surprised there weren't more obvious ways of catching him out, like, I don't know, text messages or phone calls. To have to go deep into somebody's Pokehistory seems like really taking the long way round.

No, most likely, this "story" was just a way for Evan Scribner to show off to the world about how often he gets laid. Man just wants you to know how big his Pokeballs are, basically.

SURVEILLANCE

One of the most popular rumours about Pokemon Go is that it is, in fact, a massive surveillance operation run by the CIA, or Google, or the NSA, or the Illuminati, or something. This theory has spread like wildfire across Facebook, and even movie director Oliver Stone has declared the game a "new level of invasion" that could lead to "totalitarianism". There are a few different versions of this story. One suggests that Pokemon Go is using your camera to deliver images of your home to Google Maps, but other reports go further, suggesting that the app could be feeding information to the CIA or the NSA.

In very, very basic terms it sort of makes sense. Pokemon Go is essentially a massive map of the world featuring real-time locations of whichever members of the population are playing at the time. But you've got to ask yourself: what exactly would the CIA want with that information? Surely a massive list of the whereabouts of everyone currently playing Pokemon Go is the most counter-productive data imaginable. That's basically a hard-drive full of all the least dangerous people on the planet. The people who run blogs about game consoles, the people who Instagram their pets, the people who go to comic book conventions. It's literally the antithesis of a most-wanted list.

Even then, it's not real. Snopes recently got in touch with Google to ask if this data was being collected – if Pokemon Go really was handing all of our personal information over to the government – and the answer was a resounding no.

@a_n_g_u_s

More on VICE:

Nintendo's Shares Have Slumped After Idiots Realised They Don't Own 'Pokémon GO'

We Visited the World's First Real-Life Pokémon Gym in Osaka, Japan

Why I'm a Full-Grown Adult Who Still Loves 'Pokemon'

(Photo: Flickr user Angrylambie1, via)

Older people love having sex. That's because, like younger people, they too are also humans, and humans generally enjoy having sex with other humans. It's a lot of fun, and it feels great, and it's good for your bones and your heart and your soul. So it's no surprise that a recent report found that 26 percent of people over 60 in the UK are unhappy with life because they're not having sex enough. In fact, a lack of sex later on in life, it turns out, is a greater cause of distress than being stuck at home all day, living in relative squalor or being widowed.

A 2015 University of Manchester study found that 54 percent of men and 31 percent of woman over 70 are sexually active, but for the remaining percentages, it must be frustrating racking up all those decades of experience and then not being able to anything with it. So because you can never know too much about ~coitus~, we asked a bunch of people over (or near) the age of 60 to share some of that experience with us, giving us their best sex tips and asking them about they've seen sex change throughout their lives.

Sue, 67

(Photo: Agnieszka Chabros for Catalogue Mag)

In the late 1960s, in Britain, men still had all the power, so they asked women out on dates, and people would go to things like balls. But then there was also the radical hippy group who came in and held orgies with marijuana and acid and sexy dancers.

Even though men weren't very experienced with sex, because they didn't get to have experiences with any women that were more advanced sexually, women just thought whatever they did was OK because it was all they knew. And since all young people lived at home with their parents, there was no opportunity to go out and have flagrant sex and experiment on the kitchen floor. The change started in the mid-60s, because the music became a huge signifier of what was different. It was an odd time, though, because there was this huge sense of conservatism throughout it all – women were still writing cookery books and knitting back then, for god's sake. But then a whole bunch of acid came along and it gave people the freedom to say, "I will not get married, I will not have children, I will not be locked into housework; I will get a job and fly around the world instead." In the 70s my sister and I were living in a beach town, so we had to have sex with a different boy every night for a year to get experience. People went from sitting at home and eating TV dinners to not ever going home and dancing and fucking as much as they could.

The best thing to do to learn about sex is to go and have a lot of sex. I would tell everyone to go out and pick up random people. People should also talk about things, because there's no replacement for that. Definitely, definitely practice masturbation, because that's a skill. You have to know exactly what you want, and you've got to know what's happening to your body. So, if you're with a partner that can't give you those tingles in your feet, you're with the wrong person and you've got to leave them, because sex dictates how your relationship will be. You must also love your body and explore it in every single way. Even the top of your head; everything. You should also be very informed on sex toys – everyone should go to Amsterdam, because really that's where the best sex shops are, and it's brilliant! Having sex with people of the same gender is important, too – everyone should try that at least once in their life, but be sure to just have lots of one night stands in general. Lastly, everyone should try bondage games at some point in his or her life. With the right partner, it can be amazing. Oh, and everyone should make a movie of themselves having sex. If you're not turned on, don't do it. That's the only rule with sex.

Leo*, 59

People have always had sex – I doubt there's anything that people do today which wasn't done by the generation before us, or the generation before that, or the one before that, etc. I don't think dating has changed, either – people still go to the same kinds of places and get up to the same kinds of shenanigans.

Finding a date has certainly changed, though. Apps like Tinder have made it possible to find a date while sat on the sofa, which I guess is fine for most, but it sort of takes the sport out of it. I think the best part of dating is the thrill of the chase, the subtleties of flirting and the risk that she might already be in a relationship. With Tinder, this is all removed. How dull!

I've been very lucky in my life. Without sounding like a complete arse, I have never had a problem in getting a date, and I've done pretty much everything that can be done, sexually. If I were to offer any pearls of wisdom to younger men, it would be this: porn isn't real. The women that you will meet in your life are not porn stars and sex isn't like it is portrayed in porn films. Take time with your partner and don't be an arsehole.

Jo*, 60

When the six-week block of school holidays came around in the late-60s, my friends and I would meet up and go out to parks to meet up with boys and kiss them in the bushes. We'd meet the boys at the youth club and then get together afterwards, and if we could we'd get into clubs because sometimes they didn't check how old we were. We'd go there early and stay until way past midnight by putting mops in our beds with wigs on top so our parents wouldn't find out because they were Christians and would have gone crazy. All the boys used to walk us home, though. There was never the question or thought they'd do something bad to us, because it just wasn't like that. No matter how far it was, they'd walk us home.

Everything was different then; I got pregnant with my first child when I was 16, so we started young, even though our parents didn't want us to. It was all about breaking the rules and doing what we wanted to do at the time. I'd put on my best dress, make-up and go! Those were the days – everything was easier then and no one was scared of what might happen because it wasn't very likely anything would. We had good times back then, man. Things are so much different now, though – we could be free and do what we wanted, but people have to be much more careful now. I hear so many horror stories these days that I just want to tell all my grandchildren not to go out with strangers and do what I did, because you just can't any more.

If you do find someone you like and you get along and that spark is there, make sure you use protection! Or the pill if you've been together for a long time and you know where the other person's been. And tell each other what you like and what you don't – that is so important. When I got pregnant I'd only had sex a few times and I didn't even like it that much back then. So don't continue with something you aren't enjoying or you don't think is all that, and don't ditch your friends for anyone. Those are the most important things! That wasn't even on my mind when I was fooling about, because no one talked about it, but there you have it.

READ ON BROADLY: Teen Girls Are Roasting Boys Online in New Cyberbullying Trend

Ron*, 59

It's definitely become easier now for people to find sex. Dating was there earlier, but it was difficult to engage in sex unless there was some hope of a relationship. Today, I've found it really doesn't matter if people engage in sex even without a relationship. It's more out of carnal desire probably, or just to convince yourself there is physical compatibility.

Easy availability of sexual services via the internet has also made things so different for many people, such as paying for sex or sex outside marriage, for example. It's kind of denigrated the beauty of sex, so more isn't always better in my opinion.

As for sex tips? Don't rush in just for physical attraction or desire. Think about possible consequences, too. But, most importantly, you can enjoy a good sex life without making it the only headline in any relationship. Love, live, laugh and enjoy a relationship.

*Names have been changed to suit the person's low-key lifestyle.

@YasminAJeffery / @its_me_salma

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Mount Roskill is a listless suburb of Auckland, a collection of cul-de-sacs lying under heavy skies on the slopes of a dormant volcano. When New Orleans photographer Aubrey Edwards visited on one of her frequent visits to New Zealand she spotted a group of teenagers riding the streets with huge sirens strapped to their handlebars. Within 24 hours she had found the group on social media and was back to photograph them at their unofficial headquarters, the small street of Howell Crescent.

Calling themselves "Straight Outta Roskill," the group of locals have worked out sophisticated car battery systems to rig up their pushbikes with house alarms to blast music. The craze has caught on around the city, and police have accused young people of stealing sirens from local schools to attach to their bikes. But Straight Outta Roskill, the originators, insist they never steal. They're church boys.

VICE spoke to Aubrey about photographing the group and their code.

VICE: Hi Aubrey, So who are these guys riding around with ludicrously big sirens on their bikes?
Aubrey: They're mostly Mormon, and mostly Tongan. There are other Pacific Islanders and Catholics and Christians. It's kind of an extension of their church. They're not a gang, they're very clear about that. Their rules are when they pass by someone who is elderly they turn down their music, and they don't play their music on Sabbath. They're very wholesome kids

How did it all start and how does it work?
When I do these projects I'll do lots of subcultural work and I'll trace back to who were the pioneers. The pioneer of this group is about 24. He started it when he was 16. The youngest members are about five. It came out of seeing cars that were decked out with these speakers but they couldn't drive so they decided to take that form of expression and strap it on to these really shitty bikes. Through different trial and error they figured out the best way to create these platforms, figure out the best way to rig the speakers to batteries. They've got this system down. They call it strapping. They'll strap their bikes up and ride through the streets but mostly they'll meet for these battles with other kids on bikes to see who has the loudest music.

Is the street where you shot really where it all began?
Yes, it's right on Howell Crescent. They say they're the first ones who started doing it. There's another group called the Farm Boys who started doing it and another group down south.

What do they get for winning a battle?
Street cred. They get to call themselves king, but it's always disputed who actually wins so they'll have another battle.

What's the best music to play for a win?
They play some music from Tonga so they're representing their homeland. Apparently the worst music has the highest treble and that's the loudest music so the battles are really horrible music going back and forth. Maroon 5. Lady Bee. Celine Dion.

Where do they get those giant speakers?
They're from house alarms. They'll get them from second hand stores, from alarm stores. They said they don't steal any of them so if an alarm goes missing from school which happens sometimes, they say they don't steal them. Each bike has about five or so.

What's the secret to getting the winning sound levels?
Different bikes have different ways of doing it. They all have a car battery. So everything is connected to a basket that holds a car battery. From that it feeds on to a receiver and that plugs into an auxiliary cord that plugs into their phone. It's tested. It's tried and true.

They've had some negative blowback in the media. How open were they to you photographing them?
My background is in visual anthropology. There's always gaining trust and being transparent about what your intentions are. It was a tattooed American girl that found them on Instagram, so I think they were really curious. I went the first day and showed up on Howell Crescent and waited until they started coming. I talked to them and then asked if I could come back and take photos the next day. So they had time to get their bikes ready.

Why are they called Straight Outta Roskill?
Yeah, it's from "Straight Outta Compton". It was interesting because given their Christian ideology it's very different from what they're pulling from in American culture. I grew up in LA listening to Ice T and all that. They said it comes from that. I asked why and they said, "Well, we like it." I think it just sounds hard.

Words by Frances Morton. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

When the doors of the Palacio de Deportes arena in Madrid opened for the Iron Maiden show two weeks ago, a small group of fans had been camping out in front of the gates for 24 hours. They were young girls all decked out in Iron Maiden shirts and flags. "We slept here with 10 people," they told us about an hour before the doors opened. They were nervous – it was the first time they were going to see the band live.

Meanwhile behind them, Iron Maiden's more senior fans were taking things a bit easier. These Spanish veteran fans met through their Iron Maiden fandom and have been friends for decades – seeing each other only at shows. Before every gig, they come together in front of the arena for a sort of pre-game. They stand around, have a beer and a chat about the band, the concerts they've missed, the leaked set list, what Resurrection Fest festival in Viveiro was like last weekend and how the band members seem to be doing physically during this last tour.

This year's street party – or botellón in Spanish – started small, but as the opening approached it gradually took over the whole of Plaza de Felipe II. Grocery shops that line the square in front of the Arena started to run out of cold beers, but well-prepared fans had brought along ice boxes filled with alcohol.

One couple told us the first Iron Maiden concert they went to was at this very stadium in Madrid, more than 25 years ago. They couldn't count how many times they've seen the band since then. The same can probably be said of the rest of these pre-gamers – they all seemed to be fiercely faithful to their idols, and to take no note of how much Bruce Dickinson looks like your dad these days. Likely, because these guys are your dad.

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I Spent a Sunday in America's First Heavy Metal Church of Christ

The mythos and underworld infamy of the Mafia has long been romanticized on the silver screen. These pop-culture depictions glorify the gangster lifestyle and its man-of-honor ethos. But oftentimes, reality is nothing likeGoodfellas or The Godfather. In the mean streets of Brooklyn, life is rough and sometimes becoming an associate of the Mafia is the only option.

Frank DiMatteo was born on Cross Street in Red Hook and raised in a family of mob hitmen. When you grow up with Crazy Joey Gallo pinching your cheeks until you cry like DiMatteo did, childhood can be nothing if not adventuresome. In his new book, The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia, out July 26, DiMatteo tells what it was like to grow up with mob royalty.

His father and godfather were both enforcers for the infamous Gallo brothers. DiMatteo's uncle was a bodyguard for Frank Costello and a capo in the Genovese crime family. DiMatteo dropped out of school at an early age and started hanging around with the President Street Boys, also known as the Gallo crime family, a faction of the Colombo family. Growing up, he had a front row seat as the Gallo's waged a war for control of the Colombo family.

DiMatteo calls himself a Mafia "survivor." When many of his peers ended up in the trunk of a car or thrown into Sheepshead Bay to "swim with the fishes," DiMatteo, at 58, is still kicking. And unlike many Mafia guys who've told their story, DiMatteo isn't a rat. He walked away from the mob in the early 2000s with his integrity intact and still lives in his hometown of Brooklyn. We spoke with him to find out what it was like working for the mob in its heyday, how 60s culture changed the game, what he thinks about the modern Mafia, and why he started Mob Candy, a Mafia-culture magazine.

VICE: What was it like growing up in a Mafia household in Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s?
Frank DiMatteo: Eight, nine I didn't give a fuck. I was busy being a little kid. I didn't comprehend the real Mafia stuff, because it wasn't really spoken about, and there were no books and newspapers in our face every second like now. By ten you notice your uncles are a lot different from other people. They're whispering and then there are people coming around and they dress differently than other families. By 12 or 13, I knew who everybody was. By 13, I was driving, and I started learning about the life. By then, I knew exactly what was going on, so I was privy to a few things, but not much. I didn't go kill nobody at 13, but I was going to the clubs with them. Driving them here and there because I was tall. I looked like I do now, just a lot younger. I was six foot at 13. These guys went to a lot of restaurants, a lot of clubs, topless joints. Driving is basically how I learned what was going on.

My godfather is Bobby B. Bobby was one of the shooters for the G crew. He wanted to be my godfather, and I was very close to him. I drove him around for a couple of years in the early 70s. Bobby was a character, a stone killer, but you would think he was a jokester, like real schizoid. I mean, the guy was for real, but he was a funny-type guy as far as you could make him out. If you didn't know him, you really couldn't make him out at all. These characters are a very strange breed of men.

Was it like a regular job? You just clocked in? Did you know your job detail?
No one turned around and said, "Hey, Frankie, let me tell you what we're doing today in detail." You're not supposed to tell every little thing you're doing to everybody. People that look for too much information scare me, because that's not what we're there for. I wasn't supposed to know shit. If I wasn't involved in it, I really wasn't suppose to know about it. But I'd hear other people tell me all sorts of stories and stuff, and I'd go, "How do you know that shit, man? You're not supposed to know that."

What was life like in a Mafia crew back then?
Everybody was busy doing their thing. Who's robbing? Who's stealing? And who's trying to eat? You know what I mean. It was the early 70s. Money wasn't flowing. We weren't big time hoods. Every fucking day they were trying to do something—shake somebody down. So you didn't know what was going on. We were doing cigarette runs to make some money. We were hoods, man. And they all had different personalities. Who was a grumpy fuck? Who was funny? Who was a drunk? Who was a pot head? We had Puerto Ricans with us. We had Syrian guys with us. We had a Jew guy with us. It was like a fucking circus. Who had five dollars in their pocket?

What was Crazy Joey Gallo like?
Joey left when I was like five or six. He went to jail. He got out when I was like 16, 17, so I saw Joey for one year. I think 71 to 72. Joey was Joey. Joey was a scary guy. His eyes gleamed. He smiled. He wasn't the guy to joke with. But on the other side, if you're with him, there's nothing to fear. But Joey sowed his oats when he came home. Don't forget he was gone for ten years, so he was going out drinking. He was conducting business, but he stayed in the city a lot. The rest of us guys those days stayed in Brooklyn. We didn't leave far from the neighborhood.

Joey was staying in the city with my godfather and Pete the Greek. We'd see him once a week if were lucky. He would come down to the club. He was a nutty guy. Functional, but legitimately nuts. He had no fear. He was like the throwback of the 1920s gangsters. He thought he could move around and do what he wanted, say what he wanted. He didn't think nobody was going to shoot him, nobody had the balls to do it, so that's how he functioned. But we know he was wrong. He was only out a year when they killed him.

How did the 1960s impact the younger generation of mobsters coming up who filled in the ranks?
The 60s impacted the mob guys coming up. The new hoods were a little different than the old street guys from the 20s. The street guys from the 20s came up out of poverty. These guys, late 60s early 70s, they weren't starving as much. They were just bad guys. What the 60s did was just open the doors to different crimes, stocks and bonds, and these guys just had a different mindset. Then there was the pot. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, I don't think they were walking around fucking zoning out all of the time. These guys would smoke a joint in the street and laugh like it was a joke. They were half crazy. It all changed. It changed them. The respect or the mindset. They didn't listen to all the rules and regulations like the old-timers did. They laughed at that shit.

DiMatteo and his wife, Emily, around 1970

How did you leave the mob and avoid prison?
I was lucky. Had some foresight on a few things. Beat a lot of cases. I was very, very lucky to walk away, especially with all this rat shit. But we just walked away like it was the end of the day. The boss flipped, so no one came back and said, "No, you can't do this, you can't leave the Mafia." Everybody was ratting. Everybody was gone. We walked out the door like nobody was watching the door, like the door wasn't locked anymore. Nobody even called us. We were just lucky all the way around.

What do you think of the Mafia today?
They have no idea what they're doing. They're young. They've got guys who don't know shit because a lot of guys are dead, a lot of guys are in jail. A lot of guys are rats. A lot guys with a lot of time in have flipped. These guys coming up, no one is teaching them. They're just reading books and saying the word Omerta, you know?

Half the guys in charge, you can't even call them by their nickname anymore. They can't kiss in public because they're afraid. They're afraid of everything. It's like a fucking joke now. You've got no respect. Every other crew is laughing at you. You've got the Albanians laughing, the Russians laughing, you know? There's no respect. They're not scamming nobody no more. The other thing is you've got 200 rats, and no one is dead. Not one rat is dead, and they're walking around in the open.

The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia will be released on July 26.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

As has already been well established here, summer sucks and the stifling heat dome bathing most of the continent in damp sweat has us desperately searching for cold, dark places to hide until it's all over. Relief is close though, as this morning's annual lineup announcement from the Toronto International Film Festival promises sanctuary in air-conditioned movie theatres for summer's final few weeks.

The program for TIFF's 41st festival features a slate of heavy, dramatic releases under the thematic umbrella of "infinite views"—further proving this city's ability to always, no matter how grasping, find a way to capitalize on prodigal son Drake.

From Antoine Fuqua's much anticipated opening night blockbuster, The Magnificent Seven, to Park Chan Wook's psycho-sexual romantic thriller, The Handmaiden, here's a look at some of the movies set to premiere at this year's TIFF.

Denzel Washington reteams with director Antoine Fuqua to continue playing some version of his morally ambiguous cop from Training Day. In Magnificent Seven he's a bounty hunter tasked with gathering a group of ragtag stereotypes to fulfil a contract for revenge. But is there more to his motive than just a paycheque? Probably, guys. Chris Pratt plays the comic relief (shocking) with Ethan Hawke, Matt Bomer, and Vincent D'Onofrio rounding out the cast. Based on Kurosawa's epic screenplay for Seven Samurai, Magnificent Seven will open this year's TIFF and at the very least will have a ton of blood and explosives.

Holy shit this looks amazing. If you're already a fan of Korean filmmaker Park Chan Wook then you know to expect more lush, deranged, sensual imagery and a bonkers storyline with themes of greed, torture, and sexual servitude. The Oldboy and Stoker director looks to have created another suffocatingly beautiful world that promises to expose a lot of ugly shit before leaving you wrenching from the plot's twists and turns.

Written and directed by British filmmaker Andrea Arnold, American Honey won the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes festival. Sasha Lane stars as a runaway who gets caught up with a crew of hard partying, white dreadlocked magazine sales weirdos, with a dreaded Shia LeBeouf as their de facto leader. It's like a sunbleached Spring Breakers on the road.

We get it people who make movie trailers, it's a mad world and you find it kind of funny and you find it kind of sad. Please stop using this song to express so literally the vibe of your film. We've all seen Donnie Darko. OK, now that that's out of the way, Ewan McGregor's directorial debut actually looks pretty good. Based on the 1997 Philip Roth novel of the same name, the moody drama shows the quiet devastation of a small-town family after a couple's teen daughter becomes a political terrorist. Ewan McGregor plays the lead opposite Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.

Leave it to overrated jock Oliver Stone to turn a story about an unassuming nerd into some sort of cyber-Rambo spy thriller. A jacked up Joseph Gordon Levitt (his neck is at least twice its normal girth) is definitely angling for an Oscar nom with his gravelly voice acting that honestly just sounds like he really needs to clear his throat, maybe drink a glass of water. The real life story of Edward Snowden is fascinating and thrilling enough, the Stone treatment here looks like an over-the-top campy injustice to the quiet bravery of the real man.

'Catfight' poster

There's no trailer for Turkish director Onur Tukel's Catfight, but the action comedy starring Anne Heche, Sandra Oh, and Alicia Silverstone got a lot of attention at this morning's announcement. Early reviews suggest a hilarious, vicious, and violent film about estranged friends who reconnect and take their jealousy and hostility to a bloody extreme.

Other notable films headed to Toronto this September include: Canadian Denis Villeneuve's alien sci-fi drama Arrival; Nick Cannon's directorial debut, King of the Dancehall starring Cannon, Busta Rhymes, and Beenie Man; JT + The Tennessee Kids, Jonathan Demme's Justin Timberlake concert documentary; and first-time director Kelly Fremon Craig's coming-of-age comedy The Edge of Seventeen, which will close out TIFF.

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Illustrations by Sophie Wolfson

If people found out you didn't shave off your pubic hair, you were both disgusting and a lesbian. If you got a boyfriend, you were a slut; if you had a boyfriend but didn't sleep with him, you were frigid, and if you didn't ever have a boyfriend you were a freak. When you went on holiday, you had to take a whole Facebook album's worth of photos of you looking as thin as possible. Your group of friends start only eating soup or an apple for lunch. You start eating an apple for lunch. The thought of ever having to be a teenage girl again is enough to make me feel like I've got a hand physically around my throat.

Nothing surprises me about the new study from Girlguiding. Their poll of 1,627 girls and young women showed that confidence rapidly drops away from girls at the age of 10. Ninety percent of nine- and 10-year-old girls felt they would have the same chance as boys at succeeding in their chosen jobs, but this dropped to 54 percent among 11- to 16-year-olds and to 35 percent among 17- to 21-year-olds. Only a quarter of the older group said they felt "powerful", compared with a third of 11- to 16-year-old girls.

Anxiety is a multi-causal illness, but the fact that women feel worse by the time they're an adult than they do when they're a teenager is a troubling tell-tale sign of time spent lacking in confidence and feeling powerless. Women are nearly twice as likely to have anxiety than men. To find out more about these sad stats, I asked girls and young women about the first moment they felt like they'd lost their power and what to do to ensure this stops happening to the next generation of women.

Jennifer, 19, London

It was at the beginning of secondary school when people started making fun of me for being smart. I started worrying about why they weren't saying it to guys, so I began hiding being clever. I felt I wasn't being what a girl was supposed to be like. I was even told by a family friend that girls being clever intimidated guys. Not being honest with myself or standing up for myself made me feel so powerless.

It got worse when I was 13 or 14, as you worry more about what people are saying about your looks. One time after a chemistry test where I got full marks, this boy from my class came up to me and said, "Were you the one who got 100 percent?" I nodded and he said, "Why do you always do that? It's so unfair." A guy in my class also got 100 percent but he said nothing to him about it, only me. I felt like I'd done something I should be ashamed of as I'd made a boy feel bad. It's only now I see it doesn't matter how I make men feel.

If we want to help girls there needs to be a real focus on PSHE and SRE – which should definitely be mandatory and good quality – to teach girls about their own value and how to treat themselves.

Carissa, 18, South London

It was when I first went to high school. Suddenly, you're expected to not look like a kid any more and you have to be an attractive woman. It's make-up, shaving, waxing and everything. It all comes at once. If you can't keep up with that it can be a big problem for you. The people that were considered popular did it first and then there's the pressure to follow them and do whatever they're doing to get by. That's when your insecurities come in, you notice the differences between you and other people – how you present yourself, how you look and your relationships. As you get older, it gets worse. Your self awareness grows and you have the added pressure of being an adult on top but you're still carrying those pressures that started when you were 12 or 13.

It's difficult to fix because the media has a lot to do with it and no one can control that. But inside school environments, it's about educating people on those topics rather than ignoring them. I don't remember ever being told about confidence or gender imbalance at school. If there was a talk as a year group, it was always about drugs or alcohol or maybe safe sex, but never about more mental issues. Now when kids are that age they don't just have Facebook either, they have Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and we see celebrities and people older than us and we want to live that life and hold ourselves to those standards even though we're kids. Social media definitely makes this worse but how can you regulate how much time people go on it for? It's hard.

Alice, 13, Norwich

One day I was watching a movie and realised it was always the woman being the victim or unable to protect themselves. The woman was never going to beat the bad guy. They just go off with the guy and the guy gets rewarded. People and adverts say, "You're a girl, you can do what you want!" but it doesn't feel like that in reality. It feels like you get punished. In our sex education talk someone asked, "Why are men superior to women?" and the teachers just ignored the question and wouldn't discuss the idea further.

For me to feel more powerful, we'd have to get rid of a lot of the sexist people in the world.

Amena, 21, Birmingham

As soon as I lost confidence in one thing, I snowballed and lost confidence in any area. Before you hit puberty you either have baby fat or you're thin. If you have that baby fat, you're looking at the opposition before you hit puberty and it plays on your mind. At 11 or 12, you start looking at who's popular, and it's the girls wearing make-up and older clothes. It's harsh for girls, you're completely judged on your appearance. We felt powerless in the changing rooms. During PE, some of my friends would go into the toilets to change rather than be in the open. It's that age when you transition from knickers to boxer shorts to proper underwear. Everyone's looking around the gym to see if they're behind or if anyone's not wearing the right thing.

This got worse later on for me. Now I can't even leave the house without wearing make-up. I feel like as I get older I'm losing power. I'm increasingly critical and I think that's true of most girls I know. We're so hard on ourselves.

I'd say if young girls deleted celebrities and people who don't make them feel good about themselves on social media, that'd help. Now I only follow people who inspire me. People who do really cool art or make-up, for example. Workshops on how to deal with your body differing for other women's, and how you should fight to be equal to men in the workplace should be mandatory. Teachers are too scared to waver from the curriculum. School is the biggest part of socialisation so they should be allowed and encouraged to talk with kids about what goes on outside the classroom.

Esme, 15, London

If a boy wanted to be a musician, he is judged on how well he can play the saxophone. But I feel like if me or one of my friends wanted to be a saxophonist, first people would look at me and if they liked what they saw, they would then listen to my music. Knowing that makes me feel powerless.

I have no idea what could be done to make girls have more confidence. When you find out let me know. There should probably be more realistic portrayals of adolescence in mainstream media. It doesn't help my self-confidence to look at Olivia Newton-John in Grease and think that's what 17-year-olds are supposed to look like, when in reality she was like 28 when it was filmed. I want to see teens actually in their formative years, spots and all. There should also be more advice from school too. We have wellbeing lessons on gender identity and fluidity which have been surprisingly progressive but as for power and confidence, we've never heard anything about that. Even if we did, it would almost definitely be all together as opposed to separate by gender and too broad to be helpful.

India, 21, Cardiff

I started secondary school as a long-haired, long-limbed girl who could pull on and off my size four skinny jeans without unbuttoning the front. I lost power the minute my body started to grow, as I'd internalised the notion that to be thin was to be happy. I remember crying in my bedroom at 14 when I could no longer fit in my size six clothes. Around a similar time I was travelling home on the school bus and the boy behind me was telling me in detail how I was considered an "ugly" one of the girls. I walked home in tears and went to the bathroom to realise that I'd started my period. That was the time I realised I was no longer a neat or perfect girl.

I don't think there's an external solution though. We're always going to look on Instagram or at other people in magazines or the street. It's about naturally cultivating friendships and relationships which make you feel better about yourself and developing constructive habits and hobbies. I started competitive dance training to inhabit my body properly instead of living in my head. For me at least, it's been a good decade of struggle. Traditional parent or teacher interventions never worked for me or anyone I know. Perhaps trying to cultivate a culture at school and home where girls feel valued or worthwhile somehow would help.

Ruby, 19, Bristol

Having moved to a new city and having been going out to various different events and clubs, I have witnessed or been subjected to various accounts of groping and grabbing. Boys that seem to either be slightly younger than myself or the same age think it's fine to treat the girls around them in the clubs like a piece of meat that's on display. I immediately feel powerless as a young girl when, in response to having my bum grabbed, I tell them to stop and not to touch me, I get various slurs and hand signals shoved in my face. One of the only ways to get them to listen is to say "I have a boyfriend". Sadly it seems they are more likely to have respect for another guy than a girl. When in fact the only thing that needs to be said when you don't want someone touching you is "no".

I think in schools, from a younger age, maybe around 10, girls and boys should have open discussions in classes with supervision and direction from an elder about relationships, treating people with respect and that nothing is expected of you from someone. It's okay to say no and that's the only reason you need to give, should you feel that way.

@hannahrosewens

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A bottle of 665 Leather's house brand of poppers and a bottle of Jungle Juice aerosol poppers, surrounded by poppers pins made by the author. Photo by the author

I was first introduced to poppers (the inhalant that makes anal sex a breeze and dancing a joy) by a lesbian roommate who worked at a nightclub bar, who would return home each night with an armful of confiscated drugs. (It was, suffice it to say, an incredible living arrangement.) One drunken night, when I was 20, she forced me to take my first hit. Seconds later, I found myself rolling around on the carpet, giggling uncontrollably while my face turned red with heat.

I had no idea poppers were primarily a hookup drug until I was offered them during, you know, a hookup. I became massively confused, wondering why my guy wanted to turn the tide of our passionate night toward a tickle party. But it was then that I came to understand the glory that is sex on poppers.

In their heyday, poppers were typically made from a form of alkyl nitrite called amyl nitrite or isobutyl nitrite. Nowadays, retail variations can include harsh formulas—everything from cyclohexyl nitrite to isopropyl nitrate—that often seem strong enough to strip paint; when inhaled, they can produce headaches, possibly cause permanent vision damage, and, according to some experts, even sudden death; older, legit formulas merely produce a pleasant ten-second high.

How reliably they produce that high, of course, depends on the brand you're inhaling. And there's a lot more to poppers these days than whatever Al Pacino was snorting in Cruising.

My body is now a prison and my brain is floating, waiting for my sensory system to restart, and I feel as if a friend were to shock or surprise me while I'm on them, my heart would explode.

At sex shops, you'll take your pick from seemingly dozens of brands of tiny amber bottles, with names like Amsterdam, Locker Room, Jungle Juice and Rush. I refer to the latter as the Nike of inhalants, and while Rush may be the most recognizable brand in the game, its vials aren't produced with the same care as, say, a fine Scotch. Bottles of "Rush" are sold for €5 at New York bodegas and €20 at upscale LA sex shops; there's legitimate formulations, obviously counterfeit offerings, and everything in between. And it's as important as ever to know what you're popping into. Maculopathy, after all, is never a hot look.

Enter small batch, local, artisanal poppers. Given how (relatively) easy it is to homebrew it, some gear and fetish shops now offer signature blends on the DL. A friend of a friend tipped me off to 665 Leather, a leather store in West Hollywood, which offers an unlabeled 10 ml bottle of its own unique formula for €20, one it simply calls "Leather Cleaner." (Other shops I called were cagey about divulging many details over the phone—one obliquely told me to "stop by," and left it at that—but I've heard that more than a few sex shops now carry house brands.)

While picking up a bottle, I was told it was made by "a guy," and the concoction is "similar" to amyl nitrite. I'd like to envision said man in a white lab coat with an MIT diploma nearby, but I later settle for picturing a leather pig who may or may not own a rubber fist.

I give them a rip once I get home, and the effects are intense compared to your everyday bottle of Locker Room or Nitro. My head is on fire and pulsating; my lungs feel like helium balloons inflated to their limit. The first hit is no joke, but once my eyes stop watering and I bow my head for round two, I find I'm unable to repeat the euphoria I experienced just moments before. Which is sad, because some formulas maintain their potency for hit after hit after of cheek-flushing hits. (Though as I clear my nostrils after my dive into Leather Cleaner, I catch a pleasant sweetness in my nose, and the slightest hint of vanilla bean. It's a wonderful vintage nonetheless.)

At the other end of the poppers spectrum lay varieties that offer the same high in more intense ways, and while at 665, I picked up a bottle of aerosol poppers named Jungle Juice. These contain ethyl chloride, and there's no recommended dose, because the label indicates they're "for cleaning glass and metal surfaces." They are, to say the least, decidedly sketchier than your average bottle of Rush—and I can't recommend you try them out, because the risk of harm to your body is that much greater, as I later learned.

I reach out to an experienced friend for further instructions, and he advises me that a five-second spray on a clean sock will do the trick; hold to mouth, breathe in a few times, and enjoy. I give it a whirl, and within ten seconds, my body is tingling from head to toe. (Especially my fingers, but I also think I sprayed that hand trying to angle the nozzle—this stuff is no joke.) The effect is far removed from the typical jolt I get from a normal huff of poppers; my body is now a prison and my brain is floating, waiting for my sensory system to restart, and I feel as if a friend were to shock or surprise me while I'm on them, my heart would explode. They're definitely doing... something to my body.

After giving them another try, I decide to play doctor and determine that it is in my best medical interest to discontinue use of this product. The next morning, my throat felt noticeably sore. It's possible I overdid it with these, but then again, the label reads "Cleaning Solution," and instructions suggest the formula is great for stainless steel kitchen appliances, so who knows what went wrong or why my reaction felt so harsh. The bottle could say "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and I would have the same idea of what it is and how to use it.

With all the names, formulas, manufacturers, and counterfeiters of poppers in the world today, it's impossible to know exactly what you're ingesting and how much is too much when it comes to the drug. According to some studies, poppers are fairly innocuous—in 2007, they were ranked 19th out of 20 popular drugs in terms of addictiveness and potential for harm. Some people have gluten allergies and feel fatigued when they cave and eat that office donut; others take their first whiff of poppers and end up blowing out the center of their retinas. If you do choose to indulge in some unvetted formulation of the stuff, it's in your best interest to do some research to determine the authenticity of the product and what it's actually made of. In this day and age, there are forums and communities of users with decades of aggregated experience on the topic. It's a terrifying world out there in poppers-land—one day, hopefully, we'll see GMO-free nitrites on the shelves of Whole Foods, but until then, play safe.

The author's cat also enjoys a huff of euphoria. Gif by the author

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Florin Barbu and Claudia Racolțea before their separation. Photo via

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Two years ago, the children of a Romanian couple living in North London were taken into custody by social services. Their parents, Florin Barbu and Claudia Racolțea, were fighting constantly, which gave their neighbours enough alarm to call in for help to protect the children. They were taken away and last June, the boy and the girl were adopted by a British same-sex couple.

The news hasn't gone down well in Romania; so far it's sparked fierce protests, while it also prompted the children's father, Florin, to go on a hunger strike for a bit. The Romanian Orthodox Church (which represents 80 percent of the Romanian population) spoke publicly about how the children's religious rights are being violated because they were adopted by a gay couple.

With Romanian immigrants settling in Western countries, it can happen that their new Western neighbours take issue with Romanian parents' sometimes harsh or violent Eastern European parenting style. In November last year, the children of a Norwegian-Romanian couple living in Norway were taken away by Norwegian social services. That case also led to nation-wide protests in Romania – mostly organised by Christian nationalists afraid that the children were being kidnapped and brainwashed by heathens.

A homophobic video that emerged in Romania in the wake of Florin and Claudia's children being taken away. It was shared by Florin. Via

Florin and Claudia are now divorced and while Claudia still lives in the UK, Florin has moved back to Romania. I spoke to both of them about how they got to the point where their children were taken away, and why they can't stomach a loving couple taking in their children.

Florin Barbu. Photo via

In January 2007, 30-year-old Florin Barbu moved from Romania to the UK to find work. He worked as a construction worker and trained to become a licensed bodyguard and cab driver. He met the then 25-year-old Claudia Racolța online. She had also recently arrived in the UK and initially worked as a nanny before becoming a club bouncer.

Several months after they met, Claudia got pregnant. Their first child, a girl, was born in February 2008 and they had a boy two years later. After a while their family life became strained. "We made mistakes. We argued in front of the children," Florin told me. "She would argue with me over anything. She'd take medication because of a knee injury, and you couldn't reason with her sometimes. When we fought, she'd call the police and they'd arrest me – handcuff me. One time it happened in front of our daughter. They would take me to the station and ask if I had ever been violent to my kids and my wife, and when I'd come home the next day everything would be fine – great even. That would last a month until my wife would throw another tantrum because of her medication. I don't want to badmouth her at all – she's the mother of my children and I want us to work together to get our children back."

Florin and Claudia came to the social workers' attention around 2010 and after frequent visits from them and the police, the children were removed from their home in 2014. One of the reasons cited for this removal was that Florin violated a restraining order Claudia had against him. "I shouldn't have let my husband come back home," Claudia told me over the phone. "They wouldn't have taken the children away if I hadn't. We did it to ourselves: we kept fighting with each other instead of focusing on our children. I spent a year in therapy because of domestic violence."

Claudia is now set to marry a Polish coworker and she says she wants a normal life. She doesn't think her kids are currently living a normal life, with the couple that took them in. "I'm not as concerned for my little girl, as I am for my little boy," Claudia explained. "I think it's an illness to have a different sexual orientation. I don't think it's normal. God didn't create this on Earth. That's my opinion, but I can't judge – God will judge. But my children are with them and we're not aloud to live with them, while I'm not dead and Florin's not dead."

The British couple's identity is kept private, but they did send a warm letter to Claudia to keep her up-to-date. They write that the kids both have their own picture albums with photos of Claudia and Florin and that they remember their parents fondly. The couple encourages the kids to practice Romanian and be proud of their Romanian heritage – they have a Romanian family member who answers all questions the children have. But in Claudia's mind, it's just talk. She plans to take the fight to the European Court of Human Rights.

Claudia Racolța. Photo via

The question is how far that will bring her. A British court ruled that the children could be adopted after social workers monitored the Barbu-Racolțea family for six years. The court found that it was clear that the biological parents loved their children, but had been unable to care for them in safe conditions. The children were present at their parents arguments, and Claudia was absent from one of the set meetings with her children after they had been taken away. When I asked her about that, she told me: "Yes, that happened once when I went to Poland, to visit my new partner's family."

There are some other incidents in the reports – about how her son had access to a knife, for example – but Claudia denies them all to me. She claims one of the social workers was just out to get her, because Claudia once turned her away at the club where she worked as a bouncer. "I refused to let her in because she had been drinking and her friend was carrying a small bag with white powder. A month and a half later she was assigned to me as my social worker." When reached for comment, social services in London declined to comment on the case.

Romanian authorities have recommended that the kids be placed in the care of the parents' extended families, but British officials rejected that idea – both children were born on British soil and have never actually visited Romania. The parents lost an appeal to the court's decision last month and now mostly try to stir up as much media attention, comments from authorities and protests as they can.

At the moment, Florin risks jail time for making the identity of the couple that adopted his kids public on his Facebook account and posting pictures of them. "You know, I have nothing against gay people – but I don't want them to do anything out in public. How will our kids feel when they see them kissing on the street or holding hands?"

At the end of my conversation with him, Florin Barbu asked me whether I thought he would get his children back. I avoided to give him a straight answer.

More on VICE:

Here's Why You're Going to End Up Just Like Your Parents

We Asked Some Romanians to Persuade Brits to Move to Romania

Photos of Romania's Neglected Orphans Then and Now

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Police outside the residential facility in Kanagawa. Photo via Getty

At around 02:00 on Tuesday, Satoshi Uematsu put a hammer through the window of his old workplace. Prowling around the first floor, he opened a bag filled with knives. The 26-year-old––apparently motivated by a desire to eradicate the disabled––then started slashing people's throats. In the end, he killed at least 19 and seriously injured about 20 more at a residential facility for the handicapped located an hour outside of Tokyo.

After attacking nearly a third of the center's residents at his leisure, Uetmatsu drove to the Sagamihara police station and confessed to one of the deadliest crimes to take place in Japan since World War II. The country has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, according to the United Nations, and some reports are calling the slashings the biggest mass murder to ever happen there. Regardless of its scale, the fact that it happened at all is the result of disturbing negligence by Japanese officials who failed to act despite repeated warnings.

Back in February, Uetmatsu delivered a letter to a Japanese politician asking for permission to mercy kill the handicapped. "I dream of a world where the disabled can die in peace," it read. "I will carry out the plan without hurting the staffers, and I will turn myself in after I kill the disabled."

The letter proposed an elaborate plan involving the killing of 470 disabled people as part of a "revolution." What he wanted from the politician was a guarantee that he could get off on insanity grounds and be given $5 million and plastic surgery to start a new life afterward.

Days later, he was questioned by police for handing out fliers near the facility that contained similar comments, and he was eventually committed to a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as paranoid and dependent on weed. Despite working at a facility that cared for disabled people, and harboring a stated desire to murder them, Uematsu reportedly first got in trouble with his boss over tattoos on his chest and back.

Yuji Kuroiwa, the governor of the Kanagawa Prefecture, has apologized for not acting in advance, according to the Associated Press. The nine men and ten women who died ranged in age from 18 to 70.

Uematsu's attack lasted about 40 minutes, and it's likely he would have claimed many more victims if Japan's gun-control laws had been more lax. It's completely illegal to own a handgun in the country, and to get a shotgun or rifle is a longwinded process (even members of the notorious Yakuza gang rarely carry firearms.) In 2014, there were only six gun-related deaths in the entire country, and in 2015, there were only eight crimes in which guns were fired. As such, knives are the weapons of choice for the country's most infamous crimes. In 2001, a former janitor stabbed eight children to death at their school. In 2008, a man murdered eight people at a shopping center with a dagger.

Meanwhile, in Japan, confessions are extremely common. Police aren't allowed to conduct wiretaps or undercover operations, and the legal system doesn't allow for plea bargains, so authorities are forced to rely on a cultural pressure to unburden oneself after wrongdoing. Perhaps because of this, the country has a 99 percent conviction rate. Uematsu reportedly told police in no uncertain terms, "I did it."

If Uematsu made troubling but consistent remarks to politicians and co-workers, his Twitter account reveals that he was fixated on a number of things he believed were afflicting his homeland, like AIDS and radiation poisoning. On July 23, he commented on a teen gunman killing nine people in Munich, Germany, saying, "it would have been fun if it was a toy."

His final missive came just after an employee of the facility called the police Monday morning. "May there be peace in our world," it read. "Beautiful Japan!!!!!!"

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On Fire Island, the largest of the barrier islands outside Long Island, you'll find the Fire Island Pines. The hamlet serves as a community, cruising ground and capital of high gay society. Lush with its namesake scrub pine trees and bordered by sand dunes, it's overrun each summer with queer men of all stripes, who flock there to find brotherhood and embrace.

Among America's gay communities, from Palm Springs, California to Provincetown, Rhode Island, the Pines (and its neighbor, Cherry Grove) have fixed themselves as a hedonist's mecca nonpareil in our national queer imagination. "The Pines is to gay people what Israel is to Jews," a resident once told the New York Times.

Since long before Stonewall, it's where gay men have sought sex and shelter from the outside world. The singular landscape has stained the works of Edmund White and Andrew Holleran. Its reputation as an essential destination for high gay society is said to have begun when W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood arrived costumed as Dionysus and Ganymede, "carried aloft on a gilded litter by a group of singing followers."

This weekend marked the 18th iteration of the Pines Party, an all-day, all-night dance and fundraiser where the magic of the island blooms into a bacchanal carouse. Photographer Nathan Bajar hopped a ferry to capture portraits of the attendees, aglow in the sun and drunk with passion.

I was about eight when someone showed me how to draw this. It started with two sets of three parallel lines that were joined diagonally left to right, then capped off at the top and bottom with pointy bits. It was a fierce, beautiful S, and drawing it was addictive.

Soon all my schoolbooks were covered in The S. I never questioned what it meant or where it came from, I just knew I loved it. But it turns out I wasn't the only one.

I recently googled The S and discovered that although everyone loves it, no one knows its origins. Various Reddits and notice boards are full of really nostalgic people without a clue.

It seems The S has appeared throughout all of North America, South America, Europe, Russia, Asia, and Australia. Some people think it's a 90s thing, others report seeing it as early as the 1960s. There were theories that it was the symbol of some 80s hair metal band. Other people thought it was the original emblem for the clothing brand Stussy. Others thought it was an incarnation of the Superman logo. No one was sure.

I thought I'd ask the office.

"That's the Superman S," mused Ben, our in-house graphics guy. I asked him if that meant it was actually from Superman but he said it wasn't. "No, I think it's just what kids think when they're drawing it. They really just draw it because it's cool."

I got on the phone to DC Comics to find out if they knew anything. According to Benjamin LeClear, who manages the comics library at their studio in Burbank, California, the S has nothing to do with Superman.

"It doesn't look like any of the emblems from the old Superman Shield logos," he said after rummaging through their collection. "His 'S' has a lot of open space and almost never connects to itself."

Benjamin told me he'd become intrigued and, like me, launched his own mini investigation on the web only to turn up nothing. "I didn't realise what a crazy urban myth/mystery this Pointed S thing is," he said. "I would love for this to be Superman-related, but I don't think it is. Though Superman has the most famous 'S' symbol of all time."

"It's the Stussy S!" exclaimed Ramona, one of our producers. Like Ben's guess, she didn't think it was actually an emblem associated with Stussy, but refused to believe it had any other name. "It's definitely called the Stussy S," she said, then drew her own version that wasn't as good as mine.

Pretty much every forum on the web mentions Stussy—the Californian surf/street wear company founded in the 80s. A lot of people seem convinced the symbol was originally a Stussy logo, so I called Stussy.

"No, this is not an original Stussy Logo," stated Emmy Coates, who has worked alongside Shawn Stussy since 1985. "I personally get asked this a lot, but people have been drawing this S long before Stussy was established. People have just assumed it was Stussy and it's sort of spread from there. It's actually quite amusing."

I finally asked Emmy what she thought the symbol looked like. "It looks like Suzuki logo," she replied.

I was tempted to call Suzuki but didn't. I needed to zoom out and take in the bigger picture, so I got in touch with an expert in symbols and semiotics: Paul Cobley.

Paul is a Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University in London. According to him the theory that it was a hair metal symbol was also ridiculous—"It's certainly not the Saxon logo," he said. "Theirs was far more sharp and had a staff." Then he offered the most likely yet bland explanation of all. That is, it's fun to draw.

"The reason kids go through this is probably because it's a Moebius strip," he said, referring to the sort of looped one-surface shapes Escher was fond of drawing. "It can't be drawn continuously, but it does have a perpetual flow."

I think he was on to something. Most nine-year-olds can't draw, so when someone hands them a magical recipe to create something fairly cool, on demand—that'll go viral. Especially when the shape has the sophisticated, mathematical lineage of a Moebius strip. Yes I'd learned the term ten minutes earlier, but whatever. Moebius strip.

The S isn't a Stussy logo or a Superman emblem or a gift from aliens, I think it's just the most fun ever.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

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Rockstar Games has created many a protagonist in its 18 years in business, but few feel quite so relatable, as likeable, and as empathetic as Red Dead Redemption's John Marston. I've been reacquainting myself with the GTA makers' open-world Western for a couple of nights now, around five hours of play adding up to ten in-game days, and I'm surprised by just how excited I am to be doing it over. What was supposed to be filler fare, a cursory reinvestigation brought about by the game's recent backward compatibility with the Xbox One, bridging the gap between finishing The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine DLC and starting early August's No Man's Sky, is now every bit as compelling as it was the first time around.

And I think that's for two main reasons. OK, three, factoring in my adoration of Blood and Wine and the stories told by The Witcher 3 before it—Red Dead plays in much the same way as CD Projekt RED's multi-award-winning RPG, albeit without such a heavy emphasis on stats and, naturally, significantly less importance placed on the use of magic (though a little faith and fame can come in handy in the fictional frontier territory of New Austin). You're a man with a folklore-quality past, upright on a horse a lot of the time, traveling the land to perform deeds both honorable and rather less so. Catch the two games in your peripheral vision, and your brain could well muddle them up, save for a wyvern swooping down on Geralt.

Aside from the fact that I'm evidently in a mood for men on horseback right now—I suppose that's a sign to get on and finish The Phantom Pain—Red Dead's immediate appeal, second time around, is based in two distinct characters: the landscape that Rockstar has carved out of so much digital dirt, endlessly fascinating as it both lures the player into its beauty and then looses a bunch of cougars and bears at them, and John Marston himself.

The environment immediately embraces the senses, a high-def depiction of a world so far away from our own but equally in the throes of technological change—this is the West alright, but it's not so Wild now, with the railway established, a phone network reaching out from the Eastern cities, and new-fangled carriages without horses coming onto the roads. The game's 1911 setting places its events 30 years after the demise of Billy the Kid, three after the establishment of what would become the FBI, and just another three from the outbreak of WWI. William Cody, a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was still alive, but his famous touring Wild West Show had long ago fallen out of public favor as cinema, with moving-picture Westerns like The Great Train Robbery, grew in popularity. Progress was marching in earnest, and any old dogs were likely to be trampled beneath it.

John Marston is an old dog indeed, and one that quite probably can't learn any new tricks. He wears his scars, reminders of a life lived in opposition to the law, and his demeanor is one of a man who knows his ultimate destiny, and it's not going to be pretty. When we meet him, though, he's in the company of federal agents, charged with the apprehension, or obliteration, of an old buddy of his, Bill Williamson. Bill's been tearing up New Austin and the surrounding area, leaving too many corpses in his wake for the local lawmen to watch idly and hope that a rattlesnake does the right thing as he sleeps. While he's now doing government work, John's way of life is ingrained so deeply that he can't change direction, even when the opportunity seems to be there to do so.

Original artwork for Bill Williamson, courtesy of Rockstar

During the game's tutorial-style first couple of hours, John spends a lot of time in the company of ranch manager Bonnie MacFarlane, carrying out helpful duties and odd jobs. He walks the ranch in the company of a trouble-smelling dog, Charlie. He herds cattle alongside Bonnie. He breaks horses to add to the ranch's harras. He learns the ropes—or, rather, the lasso—alongside the kind of strongly independent female character that remains uncommon in video games. A sweet bond develops between the two, and I'm sure it's Rockstar's intention to have the player believing that Bonnie has affection for John that goes deeper than the pleasantries they exchange, and John certainly has a great deal of respect for her, too. "You're worth two of any man I know," he tells her, as Bonnie correspondingly compliments his skills, claiming he could be a fine ranch hand if only he could break out of the outlaw way. But John Marston is an honest man, and he's committed to a wife we don't meet until several hours later. And that's what he's in this mess for, pure and simple: the safety of his family.

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Related: Expecting your own Undead Nightmare? Watch VICE's film on surviving a zombie apocalypse

Given that Red Dead Redemption came out in 2010, enough time's passed that any article on it should pass without fear of spoilers. But its backward compatibility saw sales spike by almost 6,000 percent in a day earlier this month (July 2016), which suggests that there are plenty of people out there playing the game for the first time. I won't delve into the finer details of how John's tale works itself out, then, but I will celebrate the fact that he's a Rockstar leading man acting (almost) entirely altruistically. He states, more than once, that he doesn't want to kill Bill—but his hand is being forced by authorities, men in positions of power preventing him from seeing his wife and son until the job's done.

Plenty of video gaming protagonists are motivated by personal gains— Grand Theft Auto V might line up three very different playable characters, but each one of them is in it for themselves, chasing their own vision of the American dream by any means possible (yes, Michael has a family, but his love for it is hard fought). Elsewhere in the Rockstar catalogue, we see Max Payne driven by understandable vengeance, and Bully's Jimmy Hopkins smash the bad eggs of Bullworth Academy, but all the while craving popularity for himself. Contrary to such self-satisfying forces, whatever their reasonable catalysts, John Marston just wants his family back, his sole selfishness to be left alone. His outward persona is several shades left from the definition of a good man, that much is as obvious as the deafening thunder that rolls over Hennigan's Stead. But his heart is as pure as any virtual one has been in (not exactly) recent memory.

Original artwork for Bonnie MacFarlane, via Rockstar

Which is why it's so hard to do what you should be able to in a game cruelly dubbed "GTA with horses" by just about everyone who never played it: Go on a post-save rampage and wipe out as many civilians as you can before the law steps in with no-questions-asked directness and the safety off. Don't pretend like you've never done it, we all have, ever since those late nights in dorm rooms staring at Grand Theft Auto III on a small, second-hand CRT. I've already found myself unable to even do what the game is explicitly telling me to, when it comes to leaving strangers with no fate other than death, or worse.

On encountering the Christian missionary Jenny, alone and extremely unwell, in the wilderness, the game will instruct you to bring her medicine and simply walk away. But do so and she collapses, apparently content to be vulture food. She claims that God will save her, but John Marston's not about to rely on any man upstairs: "Nobody made my path but me" are his words to Bonnie when she asks if he's religious. So instead, I raise my Winchester to her, which immediately has her bolt upright and sprinting between the cacti. A short chase and a Y-to-hogtie command later, and she's on the back of my horse on the way to Armadillo, the nearest town. Unfortunately, this counts as "abduction," and there's a $20 bounty on my head. I race into the telegraph office and clear my name (thanks, randomly received pardon letter), and then cut her free. She staggers down the central street—to where, who knows, but she's moving a lot better than she was back there in the badlands.

I feel that's a good deed done on top of those where individual player agency takes a back seat to linear progression, and one that properly reflects the man that Rockstar paints with Red Dead's first fistful of missions. On saving the bleeding-out traveling salesman Nigel West Dickens, and getting him to the nearest doctor, John tells him to get better before they conduct any kind of compensatory business. "Let's get you fixed up first, then we'll decide what you're my man for," he says, helping the old-timer into the care of Armadillo's resident physician. He, under my command, tries to help a bride-to-be in total denial that her betrothed passed away some years earlier (or, is she a ghost, eh?). He goes out looking for missing children and willingly rides with the finely hirsute Marshal Leigh Johnson, owner of the neatest mutton chops this side of Blackwater, against the various gangs plaguing the region. He is a rare good guy, sincere and resourceful, amid an ocean of narcissistic gaming world peers.

Original artwork for Marshal Leigh Johnson, via Rockstar

And he's as much a product of the game's landscape, and of Rockstar's obvious determination to move Red Dead further away from lazy GTA comparisons, as he is a vessel for the player's own free-roaming actions. "I think it's this land that makes the men, rather than the other way around," he says to the Marshal and his deputies. "Men are born, and then they're formed. At least, that's how I see it." He knows he is expendable, in the biggest picture. He knows, deep down, that the West's advancement will be his undoing, and that this earth will someday claim him.

But right now, on day ten of who knows how many more, his mission is simple: do right by those he promised to protect, and who never deserved to be caught up in a mess of his making. And that's wonderfully compelling from the player's perspective, because you know that the intensity will escalate, and the risks taken become all the more fraught. But as they do, he'll never think to quit, because what's at stake means too much. I know so, because I've done this all before. But, as I now realize, and with apologies to newer games that no doubt need attention, that's no reason to stop.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

NSW Blue Tongue Wizards defeat the Vic Leadbeaters in the State of Origin. Image via Facebook.

On Monday, Australia's national Quidditch team, which is something we have, apparently, became world champions. The aptly named Dropbears defeated the United States in a close match at the Quidditch World Cup in Frankfurt, Germany. Which is also apparently a thing. Turns out, 21 countries fielded teams, up from just seven last time around.

News stories about the victory lauded Quidditch as a sport that encourages positivity and sportspersonship, while requiring incredible sporting prowess. I thought it sounded kind of bullshit. Real-life Quidditch looked like a sad take on the Harry Potter sport, a bunch of 20-somethings running around with sticks between their legs.

But, trying this new thing where I try to be less of a cynical asshole, I decided to interrupt the celebrations of the Dropbears' chaser, Tara Rawson, to ask whether Quidditch is the real deal.

VICE: Hey Tara, congratulations on your win. I have to be honest, I didn't know Quidditch was a sport people actually played until a few hours ago. Was it hard to win a spot on Australia's national team?
Tara Rawson: People from all over the country tried out for the team. It's definitely getting more and more competitive. The first time around, it was just sort of an elect yourself, send some videos—because all of our games get filmed—so we could show what we could do for the selection panel.

This time around... watched us at the national tournament, which is called QUAFL. And then they picked a giant pool of 50 people for two weekend-long selection camps. Everyone who was invited to those hand to try out: we did beep tests, they tested us physically, they tested our endurance, our footwork. They picked the team from that, plus reserves.

I feel like Quidditch players must occupy this strange intersection of people that are both massive Harry Potter fans, and also really into sport. Is that the case?
You do kind of get the spread, people are usually either very much a Harry Potter fan or very much a physical, sporty person. I don't think I realised until this trip how much our very, very sporty—I mean they are the best in the country—how many of those people are actually massive Harry Potter fans. People are actually doing side trips to London while we're over here to see the Harry Potter park. One of our players brought a trivia quiz of Harry Potter, and everyone knew all of the answers.

Teams competing at the QUAFL Australian national finals. Image via Facebook.

Is that how you first got into Quidditch, being a massive Potter-head?
I heard about it and I think I probably had the same reaction most people do, this is not a thing. I had to check it out, it sounded hilarious. And I fell absolutely head over heels in love with the sport, which I think everyone who actually gives it a decent go does. It's completely unique, I've never played anything like it... Once you get going, the Harry Potter side falls away. It's just the most amazing sport on its own.

Right so break it down for me, a mere muggle. How do you play real-life Quidditch?
Okay, so you have to kind of let go of the fact that it's Harry Potter and we don't actually fly and all of that. But we do all run around with a stick.

Like a broomstick, between your legs?
Yeah, it actually just adds an extra level of difficulty. You're performing tackles with one hand, a lot of our catches and throws are done with one hand. You have to be able to run as fast as you can, and move as fast as you can with in your hand.

Sometimes teams play with actual brooms. Image via Facebook.

So you're a chaser. Are the other positions all the same as in Harry Potter?
Yeah it's kind of split between your chasers, who wear white headbands, and they score the goals. You've got a keeper, who wears a green headband, and they are sort of a glorified chaser. And then you've got your beaters, who wear black headbands... they have to hit people with dodge balls and knock them out. And the final part is the snitch and the seeker.

In the books, the seeker has to catch the snitch, right? Tell me how that works in the real world.
Yeah the seeker has to catch the snitch, who is sort of an impartial person. It's like tag footy for them. They have a tag on their shorts, and the game doesn't end until you catch them.

Oh, I get it. The snitch is a person, rather than like a magical flying ball.
Of course, so when we're playing back a home, the snitch is a person from another team who isn't playing the game. At the World Cup, we had impartial snitches who were chosen, they were the best in the world. They are either really physical, they can throw you around. Or they are incredibly fit and they just run and run and run. It's actually incredibly difficult to catch them.

Seeker Dameon Osborn after catching the snitch. Image via Facebook.

So that's how Australia beat the US, we caught the snitch?
We did, yeah. But the snitch is only worth 30 points, so you have to score goals, you can't just focus on catching the snitch. In the books it's worth 150. So we were down, but we were within "snitch range." I think we were 20 or 10 points down and we caught the snitch.

America actually caught it first but the catch was called "no good," because it has to be clean. So America caught it, we were still absolutely elated because we were like, "Oh my god, we're still within snitch range. We've given our best, no one has ever done this well." And then the catch was called "no good," so everyone picked up again. When our seeker Dameon Osborn actually caught it, that was the longest two-three minutes of my life, waiting for them to deliberate over whether to call it good or not.

... So they called it good?
Yeah and as soon as they called it good, I mean the entire team flooded the field, all of the supporters too. I've never been in a mosh pit like that before. It was so intense.

Were the US the team to beat? The Slytherin of the Quidditch World Cup, if you will.
Absolutely, they started the sport I think it was 10 years ago now. And, you know, it's America: they take everything so amazingly seriously, and they absolutely dominate everything that they do. So they had a head start on the world and because it's America it's been—up until this point—literally impossible for anyone to get even close to them.

Have the Dropbears versed the US before?
At the last World Cup, America and Australia were in the grand final again and I think the final score was like 250, or even more, against nothing. Australia didn't even get on the scoreboard. So to come in and have a really close game, and then win, it is just the most amazing feeling in the world... No one thought we could do it, we didn't go in as favourites. People thought Australia would get top eight, maybe push into the top four.

Okay, so you're world champions. What's next for Quidditch in Australia?
I think we just want to take what we've learnt from this experience back to our local teams. I just really want to improve people's opinion of the sport, as well. There's still such a stigma about it because it's from Harry Potter.

Follow Maddison on Twitter, she's a Hufflepuff.

A second teaser trailer for Danny Boyle's Trainspotting sequel was shared by the Guardian on Monday, and it's just about as vague as the first one we got. Despite actually having new footage in it, this trailer is about as boring as watching trains go by, because it is literally just that.

The original film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's book Trainspotting was largely responsible for launching the careers of both director Danny Boyle and actor Ewan McGregor. This sequel, which was given the incredibly familiar title, T2, is said to be loosely based on Welsh's second Trainspotting book, Porno.

The new trailer has very little to offer beyond a single shot referencing the 1996 film. The four aged actor's faces are almost completely out of focus, making Spud, Renton, Sick Boy, and Begbie hard to make out, although they look pretty good for four recovering heroin addicts.

It's still unclear how faithful T2 will be to Porno, or quite frankly what the film will be about at all. Looks like we'll have to wait until January 2017 to find out.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

The apartment of 21-year-old Antonia Kourtides in Ansbach is located just a few metres from the spot where a suicide bomber injured 15 people on Sunday night, when he detonated explosives in his backpack just outside a music festival. Antonia was sat reading in her study on Sunday night, when she was startled by a loud bang. "There were no screams coming from that direction though, so I assumed it was just local teenagers playing with fireworks. But when I saw the bustle of firemen and policemen outside my window, I realised that it had to be something more serious," she says. "Of course one of the first things that pop in your head these days in such cases, is terrorism."

The glass of this display cabinet was broken during the attack on Sunday night.

The explosion took place at about 22:00, very close to the entrance of Ansbach Open 2016, which this past weekend attracted more than 2,000 visitors from across Germany. Today, a video was discovered on the suicide bomber's phone which shows the 27-year-old Syrian pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and promising to take revenge on Germany "for standing in the way of Islam."

German interior minister Thomas de Maizière said at a press conference in Berlin that the attacker was supposed to return to Bulgaria – where he had first gotten refugee status – but that this deportation was stalled when he showed papers proving he had mental health issues.

Apart from the area surrounding the crime scene, the mood in the town of 40,000 people feels relatively normal. The cobblestone streets of the old part of the town are just a bit busier than usual. Broadcast vehicles are parked everywhere, police officers are securing pieces of evidence and calmly asking journalists to keep away from restricted areas and onlookers have gathered near the barricades. From the cafes on the nearby Martin Luther Square, locals sit and watch the bustle.

The streets surrounding the crime scene are open to the public again. Remains from the night of the attack are still on some tables.

"This morning, I went shopping. On my return, as I tried to enter my building I was stopped by police," says Antonia. Yet, traffic seemed to resume soon after that – even the cafe where Antonia and I met this past afternoon is full.

People around us are drinking coffee and laughing, just a few metres from the scene of last night's crime. The terrorist attack is the subject of most conversations I can overhear but it's dealt with an attitude so relaxed, it's almost creepy.

"If I didn't know what happened yesterday, I wouldn't be able to guess just from the behaviour of the people around me," says Antonia, as she sips her coffee. "Personally, I'm fine. I'm not panicking. I just hope the events of the last few days don't further the hatred some Germans have for refugees."

By the fourth day of the Republican National Convention, I'm sore as shit. I forgot my knee brace, so the OG is having a rough go out here. But I'm not complaining. On one of my last night's in Cleveland, I stopped at a local bar called the Tick Tock Tavern, and ended up in a 45-minute discussion with some real people from the hood about how to better ourselves as a community—a spontaneous conversation I'll remember for all of my days. The people are behind me, so let me get up, get out, and get something, like Goodie Mobb said.

I started the last day in Cleveland on Fourth Street, just outside of the convention center, at the restaurant where MSNBC posted up all week. I was there to do an interview with Tamron Hall, but just before going on, I had a chance to talk with Darrell Scott, a Cleveland pastor and Donald Trump supporter who spoke at the convention. He told me he's known Trump for almost six years and considers him a friend, so when the RNC asked, at the request of the Republican nominee, if Scott would speak at the convention, he jumped at the chance.

I was curious how, as a black man and a pastor, Scott's support for Trump has been received, and he told me that he thinks that many people in his community agree with his positions, even if they won't come out and say so publicly. If you say so, Rev. More power to you. I wished him well and turned around to hurry my ass onto the set.

Photo by Pete Voelker

Outside, I noticed a crazy-looking truck that I'd seen driving around downtown Cleveland all week. It's impossible to miss, plastered over with homemade posters and signs about God's wrath and Hillary Clinton's lies. Seeing as it was my last chance to find out who was responsible for this insane vehicle, I walked up to find the driver, but I couldn't see him anywhere. Where the hell did he go? I looped around the truck, and then boom, there he is, getting back into the driver's seat. I told him I was with the press and asked if he had a second to talk. He paused for a second and leaned in, cupping his ear. "Sorry, I don't hear so well," he said. "Could you repeat that?"

Eventually, he agreed to talk, and I started simply, asking where he was from. He replied, "I am... from..." Clearly, I had struck gold. He began to quote Martin Luther—not King Jr., but the German theologian, and as he's speaking, I realize why I couldn't find him earlier—he lives and works in the back of the flatbed truck. Inside, he's crafted an entire bed and home office setup—from where I stood, I could see a swivel chair and a desk, with a small filing cabinet and a bulletin board tacked up on wall. There's some kind of light coming from the back too, over what I imagined was his bed situation.

When I finally tuned back in to what the man was saying, I realized that he was mostly incoherent—and the shit I can make out doesn't make any sense. Plus, the smell coming out of the truck would have made a landfill vomit. So I thanked him for his time and exited stage fucking left, making my way to a protest that was scheduled to go down at Carnegie Bridge. As you may have heard, things were pretty tame in Cleveland last week—nothing came close to the shit people had been expecting to pop off around Trump's nomination. This was a last chance for protesters to make some noise, and I was going to be there in case anything happened.

Photo by Pete Voelker

I arrived just as the marchers were starting to make their way across the bridge. As usual, the Bible Thumpers were out in full force, shouting about faggots and dykes and heathens and sinning liberals. Nearby, I saw Nathan Stehouwer, a Cleveland doctor who helped organize the march.

The demonstration, Stehouwer said, was a "collective of people that cross the entire political spectrum—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents coming together against the racially divisive and anti-immigrant message that Donald Trump has been promoting." They'd chosen the color yellow to represent their group, and someone handed me a yellow shirt and requested I join them that night in Cleveland's Public Square, where they planned on holding a protest at the moment Trump took the stage.

Photo by Pete Voelker

At the other side of the long-ass bridge, I noticed an older woman pouring a cold bottle over her head and a younger man helping her find a place to sit. I assumed they were related, or at least friends, and walked over to chat. As it turned out, they were complete strangers: The young man introduced himself as Tim Schwartz, a first-time protester from Los Angeles, and told me that he came all the way to Ohio "because it's the first time he's seen something so hateful to so many people, and it's not right.

"As a privileged person with inherent privileges from living in America, we shouldn't be letting a person like this run our county," Schwartz added.

The woman was from East Lansing, Michigan, and though I couldn't make out her name over the noise of the march, I did hear her say that her first protest was at Kent State University, just outside of Cleveland, where national guardsmen fired on unarmed college students on May 4, 1970. She told me she was there that day, carrying her young daughter on her shoulders. Her daughter, now grown, had caught the protesting bug as well, and the pair had come out to the Republican National Convention to march together again this week, this time against the GOP's coronation of Donald Trump.

Photo by Pete Voelker

As the march wound down, no one seemed quite certain where the route was supposed to end, and eventually, everyone just decided to walk back across the bridge. But I broke off, hungry, and pushed my way back toward the Quicken Loans Arena, and a soul-food joint that a couple of locals suggested.

By 19:00, I was in Freedom Plaza again, waiting for the final night of the Republican Party's show to start. There were all manner of talking heads and costumed delegates milling around, and I spotted Bakari T. Sellera, a former Democratic state legislator from South Carolina who'd gotten in a fight with Pastor Scott on CNN the night before over Trump's position on police brutality. I passed along my respects, and we both moved on: The convention festivities were about to start, and I had just enough to time to grab a Tito's-and-pineapple before I headed to the floor.

Photo by Jason Bergman

I'd just finished when someone came over the loudspeaker to announce that the speeches had begun. The Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, my old friend from Arizona, grumpily took the stage and gave an angry endorsement of Trump. He's followed by Mark Burns, another black pastor who is a member of Trump's National Diversity Coalition. Sweating, Burns bloviated for about ten minutes, leading a call and response among the elated delegates.

Then former Minnesota Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton got onstage, and for whatever reason, told a story about Vince Lombardi. I'm not sure anyone else got it either. By this point, my feet and my ears were hurting bad, so I decided to find a good seat and get ready for the speaker we are all waiting for: Donald J Trump.

Photo by Jason Bergman

But what really did me in is the dancing. After four days, it was killing me. Not just because it was bad—and it was, really bad—but because of why they were dancing: For a presidential candidate that represents hate and racism and sexism and classism and fascism and every other shitty-ass ism you can think of. They were dancing in celebration of hateful language, and decisive rhetoric, and flat-out lies, yelling for unity while giving their full-throated support to policies of exclusion. They were celebrating Trump in all his arrogance, and smug conceit, and ugliness.

It was insulting, maddening, infuriating. As they danced, I thought of Dallas. I thought of Baton Rouge while they boogie-oogie-oogied, and of Minnesota while they shuffled. I thought about Orlando. The people in that room had the power to alter the course of history, and they were fucking dancing for a tyrant.

In the end, I couldn't take it. I was supposed to renew my floor pass for the Trump speech, but I decided against it, making up an excuse about my leg hurting. I made a couple of wisecracks to hide how disgusted I really feel, and waled out of the fucking place.

Photo by Jason Bergman

I was angry, but not just at the people inside the arena—I was angry at myself too, for not having the strength to stay or the fortitude to withstand the End Times anger filling up the room. I'd fought so hard to be in the room, to hear what Trump had to say, and witness in person his bold ascent to the GOP nomination. And I'd left. The Republican National Convention had taken its final toll on me. It's not like I'd planned on making some kind of political gesture or anything—but I was supposed to be able to take it, and I couldn't. And I wasn't entirely sure what that said about me.

I made my way back to Public Square just in time to catch the beginning of the "Love Trump Hates" rally. A white guy with dreadlocks down to his waist had been on drum duty all week, but that night was the first time I'd paid attention to him. For some reason, it calmed me. I stopped being quite so angry. And I knew that I wouldn't walk out of any other rooms again: Let them dance, let them sing, let them eat fucking cake. I'm going to be right there. See you in Philadelphia.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

The theme for this year's Christopher Street Day gay pride parade in Berlin was "Danke für Nix" – which means "Thanks for nothing". That motto reflects the current state of LGBT rights in Germany: gay couples aren't allowed to marry or adopt, and people who have been sentenced for homosexual acts over the past decades under the Paragraph 175 law are still waiting for the rehabilitation that was promised by the German Ministry of Justice.

But of course it wouldn't have been a gay pride parade if people allowed all that injustice to shit on their mood. Almost 500,000 visitors came out to celebrate LGBT culture and watched the parade go from Joachimsthaler Straße to the Brandenburg Gate. Christophe Gateaux documented the day – the sun shining bright on all those happy faces in latex masks.

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First dates are unnerving. They're stressful and straight-up scary. Generally, we worry about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and fucking everything up. And we're so caught up in our own first-date anxiety that when the other person says something weird or outright terrible, it takes a little extra effort to process. At one point in my life, I was dating aggressively, scoping out various online dating services for eligible bachelors that fit my list of requirements. Most of my dates fell somewhere in the "meh" range—not exactly bad but nowhere near the kind of memorable experience that would justify a second outing or even a post-date text. Typically, I'd be bored, creeped out, or otherwise disinterested in the man sitting across from me, especially after some particular exchange that left me pretty speechless.

Once, after my date told me he usually writes off his romantic outings as business expenses, I didn't think it could get much worse. I was quite wrong.

"Hey, do you think you could ever give up sweets?" he asked, watching me basically inhale my brownie sundae. "What?" I asked, with a half-giggle. "Why the hell would I do that?"

He sighed. "It's just that you'd be so much sexier if you lost weight. You're just pretty right now." I lowered my spoon and stared directly at him for a few moments. "Did I say something wrong?" he asked. I smiled and reached for the closest server. "Hi. Can we get the bills please? Separately." What the fuck else was I supposed to say? For an interaction where people are so concerned about making a good first impression, it always surprises me what some think passes as acceptable conversation or commentary.

I knew I couldn't be the only one with shitty stories to share.

The worst thing you've heard on a first date?
After she came 30 minutes late and asked hostile questions for the first 30 minutes of the date, she turned to me and said, "So I paid for this drink and that's not OK. You're lucky I'm still here, but I'm definitely going to leave once I'm done this unless you get me another one. And you have to drink something other than Heineken. That's not a real drink people drink, that's just something people drink if they don't know what to drink."

And after?
I got another drink and proceeded to get verbally abused for the rest of the night.

- Mike, Toronto

The worst thing you've heard on a first date?
So, drunk me went to a club, made out with a random, and apparently gave him my number. I agree to go out with him, and we get on the topic of different diets, and he starts telling me how he was a raw vegan for a while. "Yeah, when I went raw, I became so horny. I was horny all the time because the sexual energy was just constantly flowing through my body. I had to release myself all the time." He later told me he was 44, and when I told him I was 21 , he yells, "Oh my God, you're 21? ARE YOU A VIRGIN?"

And after?
We shared an awkward car ride after he refused to "make" me take the subway. It ended with me half-hugging him, thanking him for the meal and jumping out.

- Vanessa, Toronto

Related: Watch our documentary on dating in the age of the internet, 'Mobile Love Industries'

And after?
I went "to the washroom," ordered mozzaerlla sticks to go and a round of beers for the nearest table to the bar, and put it on his bill. Then I left.

- Alexandra Morinello, Toronto

The worst thing you've heard on a first date?
"Why's your wallet so thin?"

And after?
I paid for my portion of the meal and dipped, leaving her to pay the rest.

- Wize, Brooklyn

The worst thing you've heard on a first date?
The date itself was fantastic. He did everything right, and I was really impressed. But then he mentioned his Soundcloud link and how when he went to follow me on Instagram he noticed who ELSE followed me. I already knew where this was going, but I wanted to see if he really had the balls to get so outta pocket. He did. Few moments later, he was asking me for the "6ix God's contact"

And after?
I cut him off and asked what time it was, fake yawned, and abruptly left. I blocked his number and haven't spoke to him since.

- Jamz, Toronto

The worst thing you've heard on a first date?
After telling a man my family is from Guyana, he told me he heard all the women of Guyana have... and he began to make a vagina shape with his hands. I asked "what are you trying to say?" And he said, "You know fat," and he made the hand motion again as in "fat vagina." Then he smiled and said he would love to see it.

The thing you did right after?
I finished my drink and told him he was going to marry a woman who will probably poison him after one year and one child, and I thought that it was highly unfortunate that his future looked so grim. He attempted to awkwardly explain himself and his comment, and then serendipitously enough, his wallet happened to drop on the floor while he was frantically trying to "apologize." So I did what anyone would do. I stole $100 from his wallet when he wasn't looking, then pretended I had a family emergency, bought a slushy, and caught the bus home.

- Alicia Bunyan-Sampson, Pickering

Follow Sajae Elder on Twitter.

Shanna Katz Kattari. Photo courtesy of Shanna Katz Kattari

When people think about BDSM today, they often think about Fifty Shades of Grey. That franchise and other pop-culture touchstones paint kink as a sultry extravagance of the rich, svelte, and white—a rarified space for those with pristine bodies. Even as kink becomes more popular and widely discussed in mainstream culture, the common depictions of BDSM don't leave much room for those with non-normative bodies to be able to participate.

However, the actual world of BDSM has long been populated by people of all levels of ability—from those with visible conditions like paralysis to invisible conditions like chronic pain or fatigue, as well as mental conditions like PTSD. For many people with disabilities, BDSM is just one facet of life in which they have learned to accommodate their differences. For others, kink is a powerful tool for managing their disability: controlling pain, inverting social dynamics, and achieving new levels of comfort with and communication about their disabilities and needs.

Many major kink sites and organizations now offer public workshops on how to navigate disability in BDSM play and relationships. But relative to the incredible diversity of disabilities and the nearly infinite variations of kink, the intersection of BDSM and disability has received shockingly little attention, even within the kink world.

VICE spoke with several people living and working at the intersection of these identities—those who came to BDSM with a disability and others who were already members of the community and developed impairments later in life. We also spoke to private practitioners and public sex educators. They told us what kink can bring to the disabled experience (and visa versa), about the differences between being disabled in private and public BDSM spaces like play parties or dungeons, and some of the complications disabilities can create in the kink world.

Photo courtesy of Shanna Katz Kattari

Shanna Katz Kattari

Shanna is a disabled woman and sex educator (who did not wish to disclose the details of her disability and its affect on her life). She researches and offers classes on BDSM and disability.

I had always heard from clients and workshop attendees how inclusive and supportive the kink community was around disability, and then experienced this for myself when I offered classes and workshops in kink spaces.

Some attendees take advantage of pain processing workshops to learn how to breathe through their daily pain, while others have brought up using flogging to increase endorphins thereby reducing pain from scoliosis, and having their partners use domination to help them work through anxiety and panic attacks.

I have had clients concerned that they could not be truly dominant if they were disabled, who then realized what a great way to have submissive partners provide service—like bringing pills on time, making sure they stay hydrated, prepping and cleaning up play spaces, or massaging painful body parts. Conversely, I have met submissive folks who have resolved their concerns about their impairments through the care provided by a dom.

I think every single individual, couple, and group could benefit from the conversations and negotiations built into kink culture prior to playing or being in a relationship, and I've seen how much that benefits disabled folks. Someone with mobility issues might include what positions feel good and which ones don't. Someone with PTSD, a trauma history, or anxiety might share what words, actions, scents, or other things might accidentally trigger them and what their partner should do if they're triggered.

Kinky people are incredibly creative, and disabled individuals are also creative, which results in an intersection that can revolutionize the sexuality of kinky disabled folks and their partners.

Photo of Lyric Seal by Nikki Silver

Lyric Seal, a. k. a. Never Be(ast)

Lyric is a transgender individual and artist, activist, and adult performer born with scoliosis and a joint disorder known as amyoplasia who uses a wheelchair.

I have been trying to take my time in how I represent myself as a kinky person in my art because I have natural performance anxiety. In certain contexts, as an adult performer, there is an expectation of how your body is going to be able to perform, props and all, and I think my anxiety is related to having a kind of unpredictable body that is not always going to perform in a way that is normatively expected.

In my personal life, I'm more intuitive and direct. I feel like I'm better at explaining what I need, as well as listening to what someone else wants and needs. It really feeds my imagination to be able to imagine a visual and physical representation of what I want and be fearless in sexualizing it. I feel the intersection of having a challenging, exciting body and challenging, exciting sex has made me a braver person.

I think that I have been given the social message that it is too much for me to be everything that I am: black, queer, disabled, tattooed, as well as a sex worker, an artist, and a kinkster. When I imagine sexual situations, I sometimes wonder, Does this contradict this other part of who I am? If I want to bottom in a certain way, does that degrade or betray the other aspects of my identity in which I am oppressed? Then I remind myself that, no, these identities are all inside the same person. So that helps me grow as a person and helps me understand how three dimensional other people are.

Photo courtesy of Grace Duncan

Grace Duncan

Grace is a longtime kinkster who developed a thyroid condition ten years ago, and her husband and BDSM partner has developed back issues.

Back before I had Hashimoto's disease, my husband and I could spend an entire day playing in various ways. Now, we have to carefully figure out how much I can do or it ends up ruining the play for us because, instead of a satisfying session, I just end up tired.

My hub and I would plan a scene, get everything set up, and the whole time I would be struggling. I kept telling myself that I'd be fine, that my being tired won't get in the way, but the full-on fatigue didn't allow me the mind space I needed to submit.

Instead of letting go, I ended up more stressed because I couldn't do what I wanted so badly to do. For a long time, I fought this, insisting to myself and my hub that I was all right. I didn't want to accept that my health, especially the fatigue I was feeling, would impact this aspect of my life like it had everything else. It got to the point where he would recognize the signs when I was too tired to play and would call it off.

It wasn't until I totally freaked out during a session and called my safe word—which is extremely rare with us—that I began to accept that I needed to start being more honest with my husband and myself because it wasn't doing either of us any good if I tried to fake it.

At the time, the idea of being disabled in any way and still involved in BDSM wasn't common. I didn't have many close to me in the community who I could go to—all of them were quite able and didn't have to make allowances—and I had a difficult time finding resources on how to limit.

So some of what we came up with was, really, just me and my husband's own creativity. We stepped back and reevaluated our play—looked at what we could do that wasn't necessarily such a big scene. I am a masochist and absolutely adore impact play, so we found ways to work in smaller spankings or floggings. I was also able to find other subtle ways to feed my submissive side, like sitting at his feet while we watched a movie.

We still plan scenes, though I doubt I'll ever be able to do the types of scenes we were able to do before I got sick. If we do plan it properly, submitting to my husband and handing over control helps relieves my daily stress, as well as the stress that my problems cause. It's not an easy thing to accept, but it sure beats not playing at all, which, frankly, I refuse to do.

Related: Check out 'Cash Slaves,' our documentary about financial domination

Lady Solaris

Lady Solaris is an LA-based dominatrix and sex educator with a connective tissue disorder, among other impairments.

For a lot of people, BDSM can be difficult in private play because there's not a set time or space. Adaptations are also huge in private play because most people don't have a dungeon or dungeon furniture in their home, but they can get incredibly creative with the items that they have at their disposal.

When you're going into a dungeon, the feeling is different. It allows for socialization. But because of prying eyes, a lot of disabled people coming to public kink spaces have this sense of pressure—which factually doesn't often exist in the community—to fit the mold of what society has shown us BDSM should be. For someone coming in with a disability, you have to be very secure in yourself as a person to relay that to somebody you're playing with, and then to be OK with adaptation.

Disabled people sometimes can't even get in to some spaces because of the way they've been designed. Some club owners don't necessarily think about the fact that they could design the space for people with disabilities from the start. Additionally, some of the furniture designers forget to think about the community as a whole and neglect to create furniture that could adapt to multiple people.

The gap became very apparent to me when I would ask at seminars for an adaptation in something like throwing a flogger or tying someone in a particular way, because I don't have the strength or dexterity to do those things as easily as someone who doesn't have any restrictions or disabilities, and the presenters would tell me, "There are none, this is the only way to do it."

So I started adapting my own stuff for myself and the people I'd play with—coming up with different ways to tie people up or throw a flogger and so on—and be safe while doing it. Maybe it didn't look the same as what other people in BDSM were doing at clubs and dungeons, but it was safe for the bottom and safe for me, and I could still enjoy BDSM.

Seminars with disabled people who previously felt like they had to keep their disabilities hidden have started to open the discussion up in LA's kink space, especially over the past eight years, but we still have a long way to go. It really helps to share the knowledge of adaptation for people with disabilities or injuries, as well as being comfortable playing in public spaces. Other people may see an adaptation and use it as well, realizing, "I can still do this type of play because I just saw somebody do an adaptation that would actually work for me, even with my back injury."

Photo of Azura Rose byDoomCookiePhoto

Azura Rose

Azura is a goth sex worker, model, and submissive based in Toronto with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which causes frequent joint dislocation and chronic pain.

People were always kind of onboard with me being a submissive or masochist—although they were worried about hitting me too hard and knocking a joint out of place. But I've had the most issues with the rope bondage community. When you tell people in that scene, "I have joint issues," they're hesitant about putting their rope on you especially with suspension. They're worried something's going to dislocate, and they're going to drop me and are unsure of how to accommodate for the way that my body is because they often only learn one way of tying people up. Sometimes people decide that they'd just rather not play with me.

I can understand from a safety perspective why people feel uncomfortable consenting to the risk of playing with someone when they don't know how. But it can be really frustrating when I miss out because other people are not as adaptable as I've had to be my whole life.

In my private life, I'm polyamorous. One primary partner is also disabled, so we balance our needs together. I'm really stubborn and will play through an injury, but she has fibro myalgia, so she can't just work through it because it will just get worse. Being with her has also taught me to be more comfortable about taking my time and judging what's reasonable for me, not just injuring myself over and over because I want to do something.

My other partner is able-bodied, but he's really good at listening to me. If I say that something hurts, he has to decide if it's something significant. He can overreact sometimes, whereas most disabled people realize that being hurt is just a daily occurrence.

Building a BDSM relationship with a disability can still be difficult. I need to make sure that people see me as an independent, rational adult and respect me when I say that I don't need help. It's also important that people address their own language issues and not use slurs around me. Building those ties can be as simple as taking the time to think about accessibility when planning a night out with friends or just not looking at me with revulsion every time one of my joints dislocates.

I think that the hardest part for people can be when they witness other people treating me badly. Maintaining a positive BDSM relationship is not just about people addressing their own issues, but really taking a stand if a friend starts using slurs or talking about how they don't care about accessibility.

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Frank Bourassa drinks Goldschlager because he doesn't like the taste of alcohol. Aversion aside, the shimmery, gold-flecked liqueur seems like an obvious choice for a man whose quest for riches drove him to print €230 million in fake US currency. For Bourassa, the shooter's saccharine taste is made even sweeter by the fact that despite his extraordinary caper, he is a free man.

We meet up with the self-proclaimed world's best counterfeiter in his hometown of Trois-Rivières, QC, at a bar that seems named after him. But the staff at "Les Contrebandiers" (French for "The Smugglers") don't recognize the man they're serving.

Bourassa attributes this to the fact that the (rather prominent) coverage of his exploits was mostly published in the US, in English. "Strangely, in my town, it's not really known because life here is all in French, and English doesn't really infiltrate the kind of insular world we have in Quebec."

This is Bourassa's life now, a quiet, modest existence in a small city that stretches along the Saint Lawrence river.

But a few years ago, the former career criminal hatched a plan that would forever alter his life. "I was just stopped at a red light," he recalls, "and I thought to myself, we get up in the morning to sell a product, provide a service, but the goal is always to make money."

"I thought well, why not cut all the steps and make the money directly, it's going to solve the problem. All the irritations, the complications and issues we have in life, at work, I won't have those anymore."

Frank Bourassa: 'I don't do much in moderation.'

For years, Bourassa researched his plan, fastidiously studying the US bill's security features and contacting hundreds of paper suppliers to find the perfect canvas for his crime.

"I'm really something when it comes to research," he brags. "The samba? Not so much, but research? It took me thousands of hours," he says. "I had to find a recipe, ingredients, components, and a place to do it. I had to source a supplier that would produce my recipe without it seeming like this was a recipe for money paper."

After months of emails, Bourassa finally found a European shop willing to print his order, though he maintains they had no clue as to his final intentions. He describes the moment this shipment arrived to its final destination as "the happiest day of his life, by far."

It was also the most stressful. "Up to there, I hadn't spoken out loud to anyone, because a voice recording is strong evidence against you in court," Bourassa says. "Everything was done by email, and from the moment they took the paper and sent it, I had no clue whether or not they'd called the FBI."

Picking up the paper shipment at the Port of Montreal was an ordeal that required three days of surveillance, numerous accomplices, and a change of vehicles to further cover their tracks.

Sitting in a shadowy booth away from the rest of the bar's patrons, Bourassa—who refers to regular, non-criminal people as "legal folks"—runs through the myriad precautions he says most wouldn't think of taking.

"You have to transfer are some of the best people on the planet, but they get beat down by their government, they have it tough," he says, citing the lack of access to free healthcare as an example of this hardship. "So I didn't want to find a network of clients who'd spend this in the U.S. because the way fake money works is that anyone who gets caught with it loses it."

"I may have a lot of faults but I'm not willing to beat people down, to steal and cause someone harm. But doing something against the government, that's not something I have that much of an issue with."

There's hardly any way to track the money he sold, so Bourassa can't say whether it was used for other crimes, though "I doubt it ended up in church."

Tasting freedom—in Canada, at least.

The world's best counterfeiter now runs his own enterprise, offering consulting services to help businesses thwart counterfeiters.

His freedom isn't total: Bourassa's only protected from extradition if he stays in Canada, and he still can't say whether he's still being watched (Secret Service representatives told VICE they couldn't comment on the case because their investigation is still open).

Bourassa says further surveillance would be a waste of time. "I wouldn't touch another fake €20 with a 100 foot pole," he says. "Never in my life." If he could go back, would he do it all over again? "Yeah, I'm happy, I did a good job."

Follow Brigitte on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

The following is an excerpt from Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. The new book by Elizabeth Greenwood examines what it's like to fake your own death, the cottage industry that's sprung up around making someone disappear and the paper trails individuals construct in order to be "reborn". In the passage below, the author explores how and why people fake their own demise and the differing ways that they go about it. Playing Dead is out on the 9th of August from Simon and Schuster.

Todd put me on Bluetooth when he called from the road on a Friday afternoon. He was on his way to a campground in northern California. He had left work early to beat traffic and get a few hours to himself before his wife and his two daughters, ages ten and eight, arrived. A 49-year-old software manager from Lafayette, California, an affluent suburb in the East Bay, Todd's soft, nasally voice skewed more surfer bro. He called me from the car with the windows rolled down because he couldn't talk to me at home or at the office. He couldn't talk in front of anyone else because we were talking about how he thinks of faking his own death.

"The only way to do it is at sea or to get blown up," he told me. "You do it on a boat and find someone to witness it. First, I'd take out an insurance policy so I'd be gone but would know my kids could get a college education. I would arrange a sailing trip somewhere in southeast Asia and make it seem like there had been a drowning. I'd head to Thailand because you can live in Thailand for nothing. I've traveled there, and I know how easy it would be. You don't need anything, not even papers. I wouldn't want to take any money with me, but I'd have some on the side, a few thousand. Now I'd have to make money, and I would do it online. I know I could make enough money to support myself under the radar—untraceable internet ad sales or something. It'd only make about ten thousand dollars, but I could live off that, just me, in Thailand, easy."

Todd described himself as "a cog in the wheel." On the periphery of Silicon Valley, where billionaires are made overnight, Todd is uncomfortably in the middle. "The area isn't great for my career, and technical jobs are hard to get," he said plaintively. Depending on how hellacious the traffic, he spends fifteen to twenty hours a week commuting from the eucalyptus-lined suburb to his office in Marin County. As he sees it, "I will never be able to retire. Every penny goes into mortgage, family, bills. We will never be as comfortable as my wife wants." Todd would be happy to spend his golden years living on a houseboat, but it's not an option. "I mentioned that once to my wife, and she went ballistic," he said. Todd has the life he thought he wanted: two healthy children, a wife, a house in the suburbs, and a good job. But he feels trapped. The idea of faking his own death provides fodder for his imagination during his commute and in front of his computer as he fantasizes about lazing on a Thai island, away from his responsibilities. Once, he Googled "faking your death" and was directed to the site wikiHow, on which someone had posted crude steps a person might take. Step one of the article instructs: "Decide whether you really want to do this."

The thing that surprised me most about Todd was not that he wanted to fake his own death. I'd done the same Google search.

* * * * * * *

Faking your death—both as a concept and as an act people attempt with surprising frequency—first occurred to me several years earlier, when I was having dinner with my friend Matt. We had met teaching public school in the Bronx. That evening, as we sat in a cheap Vietnamese restaurant, I was feeling sorry for myself. I'd recently abandoned teaching to go back to school full-time, which meant foolishly taking out several dozen thousand dollars in student loans to heap upon the $60,000 debt from my undergraduate education, bringing the sum total to a bloated figure in the six digits. At the beginning of the semester, I felt alive and nourished and like I was on vacation after a career of corralling second graders. Then, a few weeks in, I realized what I had done. I'd screwed myself financially, big time (for the second time!), and had nobody to blame but the creep in the mirror.

In the dim crepuscular light of early winter, I was bemoaning my self-imposed financial plight to Matt, who was exhausted and smelled slightly like the syrup from the school cafeteria. He looked less than amused.

I revealed my latest vision of the future over greasy spring rolls:

"So the plan is to become, like, a towering luminary and highly sought-after public intellectual, and, I mean, my TED Talk alone will obviously pay back my private loans, but in the very off chance that the film offers don't come knocking straightaway, I've come up with plan B: Belize."

"What does that even mean?" Matt asked, his eyelids sagging after a day of coaxing eight-year-olds into mastering fractions.

"You know, just slip through the cracks. Find a sun- bleached country with a rickety government and no extradition policy and kick back on the beach, avoiding the feds for the rest of my life."

Would Sallie Mae and the US Department of Education really deploy a repo team to a tiny Central American country in search of a certain debt-laden Rubenesque bottle blonde? What's a little $100,000 deficit to them? (Well, actually closer to a half million after the lifetime of accrued interest.) This conversation took place in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, when it had become evident that the middle-class ideal of playing by the rules in search of the American dream was for chumps. Flouting it like the goons on Wall Street was the only way to profit and evade consequences. Defaulting on debts was very much in the zeitgeist—plus I could score a vacation in the meantime. I was pretty pleased with my plan, though the fantasy was more of a pressure valve than a blueprint. The puritan in me, while realizing how the system is rigged, still paid her taxes and got regular teeth cleanings. But the idea of throwing on a wig and some shades and starting over was appealing, even though I was still relatively young at the time. I joked about it, but my student loan debt, though not unique in any way, made me feel definitively and inextricably fucked. Two options presented themselves: a Dickensian debtors' prison or a life on the lam.

"Or you could fake your own death," Matt said casually, shoving another spring roll into his mouth.

"Or I could fake my own death," I parroted back, the thought undulating through my skull like squid ink.

Why hadn't that occurred to me? Faking my own death. An untimely end would make a far superior story for the bill collectors than simply vanishing one day. Sloughing off the past, shucking the carcass of my impoverished self, to be reborn, unblemished as a sunrise. My "death" would not be a conclusion but a renaissance—a shot at an alternative ending. The dross of life would not inflict itself upon me: I could arrange and edit to suit my specifications. Faking death could be a refusal, a way to reject the dreary facts, a way to bridge the chasm between who you are and who you want to be. From bit player in your life, you become the auteur. From being pressed up against a wall, you carve a tunnel.

* * * * * * *

Our instinct for reinvention is as old as time. The founding myth of the Talmud features Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai faking his death so that he can escape Jerusalem during the Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the first century AD: "Pretend you are sick, and let everyone come to visit you. Bring something rotten and place it with you, and they will say you died." It's a theme that resurfaces frequently in literature.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 story "Wakefield," for example, a man leaves his London home "under the pretense of going on a journey" but instead takes an apartment around the corner where he can watch his own life progress without him, from a ghost's perspective. Huck Finn smears pig's blood around a cabin and plants clumps of hair on an ax, orchestrating a hoax to "fix it now so nobody won't think of following me," and sets off on the adventure of a lifetime, unencumbered by the adults who would want to "sivilize" him. Juliet downs a tincture to make her "stiff and stark and cold, appear like death," to leave her family's warring tribal politics and live happily ever after with her lover. Men in crime novels by John Grisham and Tom Clancy disappear or fake their own deaths regularly, like their cultural predecessors in pulpy noir paperbacks. Gillian Flynn's 2012 bestseller Gone Girl is plotted around a staged murder. Gossip Girl's steely robber baron Bart Bass returns from the dead in the penultimate season, a classic soap opera trope. Don Draper on Mad Men ditched Dick Whitman in the Korean War and assumed a dead man's identity. And everyone's favorite antihero, Walter White on the TV show Breaking Bad, hired a consultant to deliver him to a new life off the grid. To become invisible is to cast yourself as both the villain and the hero of your story.

Today disappearing seems virtually impossible. This, I think, is what accounts for our renewed fascination with it. We are burdened with our search histories and purchase histories and data stats that constitute our profile, to then be lumped and farmed out and sold to the highest bidder. Disappearing means disconnecting—unimaginable yet totally captivating. Precisely because it has become less feasible, that deep urge to be anonymous, or even to be someone else, exists ever more powerfully within us. The desire to disappear doesn't go away just because times change and technology strangles us. That we cannot fulfill the urge as easily is perhaps the greatest tragedy.

And yet the fantasy persists. Dr. Ze'ev Levin, a New York University psychiatrist and professor who specializes in personality disorders, tells me just how widespread this impulse is: "There's this fantasy that many of us have that if we moved to a different place, our lives would be different. It's not unusual for people to say that things are terrible in New York, so if I moved to Australia, things would be better. I think there are universal fantasies we have about wishing we were somewhere else, and someone else. Taken to an absolute extreme, erasing your life assumes you will then be reborn as something different. If I died while I was alive, I could come back as something other." Dr. Levin sees this tendency of avoidance cloaked in a daydream as an evolutionary trick that prevents us from confronting and examining the uglier parts of ourselves. "We are structurally designed to not want to look at what's upsetting," he observes. Actually going through with such a deceit and making the fantasy concrete would indicate antisocial and manipulative behavior, but as Dr. Levin says, "Fantasizing has nothing to do with being a sociopath."

Perhaps Todd's plan for faking his death will remain in the realm of pure fantasy. But were he to put his plan into motion, Todd fits the prime demographic for a death fraudster. As a middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual white man with a family, Todd represents the person most likely to fake his death. I'd noticed this disproportion in the demographics, and I wondered if there was anything to it. Privacy consultant Frank Ahearn and author of How to Disappear told me that the majority of his clients who sought to leave their lives behind were men, and J. J. Luna, author of How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life, told me that "far more men than women!" seek his "invisibility" services. In the 1996 guidebook How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, disappearance enthusiast Doug Richmond writes, "To a man of a certain age, there's a bit of magic in the very thought of cutting all ties, of getting away from it all, of changing names and jobs and women and living happily ever after in a more salubrious clime!"

But why do these seemingly privileged men, who enjoy every perk that DNA has to offer, feel so hemmed in that they must go off the radar entirely? Perhaps it's because although men still out-earn women, they then entangle themselves in financial trouble trying to enhance their fortunes. Maybe they shrug off because they feel less responsibility to see their children grow and flourish. Women shoulder the burdens of family and community—they take care of dying parents, snotty kids, shut-in neighbors—anyone before themselves. Though that might be relying too heavily on conventional wisdom about gender roles, the numbers speak for themselves: faking death seems to be a heavily male phenomenon. After combing through the stories and examining the traits that men like Todd share, I noticed that they all seemed to feel emasculated, made impotent, by their mundane lives. So, not earning enough money, they invest in a harebrained scheme. Underwhelmed with their monogamous sex lives, they take up with other women. Faking death seems to be not only a way out but also, counterintuitively, a way to be brave.

* * * * * * *

I thought about my conversation with Todd. His plan didn't surprise me. He sounded pleased with himself, like he had thought of everything—the drowning that would eliminate questions about a body, the insurance policy, the "untraceable" business model—but my research had taught me that his plan was really a pretty standard pseudocide. Water accidents without a body washing up onshore always raise red flags for law enforcement. Or as Steve Rambam, a private investigator who consults for dozens of life insurance companies says, "Ninety-nine percent of faked deaths are water accidents. In most drownings, the body is recovered. So why was this body not recovered?" Any insurance company requires a seven-year wait period to pay out claims where no corpse has been produced. And being "untraceable" on the internet is simply a pipe dream. Todd would likely get busted before he could even order a Singha beer.

But what did surprise me about Todd was his lack of sentimentality. I kept expecting him to qualify his plan somehow, to say something like, "Of course, I would never actually go through with it because I love my daughters too much." Sure, he'd accounted for them, mentioning the insurance policy that was to pay their college tuition. During our conversation, as the wind muffled his voice over the phone, as he drove by himself on a highway three thousand miles away, I kept waiting for the hesitation. But I didn't hear any.

While over 700 Hells Angels are meeting up in Ottawa this weekend, one of their clubhouses in British Columbia has apparently become the site of an escalating Pokémon Go battle.

The gang's clubhouse in Coquitlam is a designated Pokémon gym, which I guess makes it like a flame to the millions of nostalgia-addicted moths who can't stop playing the Nintendo game on their phones. Longtime West Coast gang reporter Kim Bolan was tipped off about the gym on Friday, and players have since started fighting over the spot.

If smack talk on Reddit can be considered any indication, the competition is heating up. "I beat this gym with a Hypno named MattDamon," one commenter bragged. "What a low level Pokemon. I'm going there right now to reclaim the gym for team blue," replied another. "You don't want to start a turf war with us."

Read More: Hells Angels, Boozy Old Men, and Thongs: Everything I Saw at Canada's Biggest Biker Rally

While it might not necessarily be a bad thing to have extra eyeballs on a gang hangout, police definitely aren't happy about it.

"We think it's highly inappropriate that this game would include a location that attracts all ages—including children—to the location of a gang," BC anti-gang police force spokesperson Sgt. Lindsey Houghton told the Province.

But considering one kid in Vancouver jumped onto Skytrain tracks while playing Pokémon Go earlier this week, it's tough to say whether the game or the gang poses more of a threat.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

I wanted to look at aspects of sexuality that I'd never heard of before for my new BBC Three series The Paris Lees Sex Show. That's right. The BBC has given me my own show. About sex. I wanted it to be much smuttier and more superficial, but the Beeb insisted we give it an educational spin, you know, for the yoof and that. Public broadcasting innit. But it's still quite slutty, by BBC standards – see how my lady lumps jiggle about in this clip like two big wobbly jelly-filled balloons?

Anyway, VICE wanted to know if I'd actually learned anything from my special investigations and it turns out I did, actually, which, combined with a good decade of being – well, let's face it, a bit of a slag – means I've gathered a fair bit of wisdom when it comes to sex. So, without further ado...

1 CHILL

Relax. Take a deep breath, hun. Honestly, if life has taught me anything it's that you can sit on a traffic cone, if you would only chill the fuck out for a minute. #ThisGirlCan

2 GET A SEX DRAWER

I don't care who you are, get a sex drawer. Even if you're hooked on traditional penis-in-vagina sex, cum is gonna fly loose every once in a while, right? Not to mention all those lovely pussy juices. So you're gonna need somewhere to store tissues, condoms, and a hand towel. Handcuffs. Dildo. Machete. All your sex stuff. I'm also a big fan of those Andrex washlets you can get in Boots. They were on offer in Sainsbury's in Hackney the other week so I stocked up on them like a thrifty 1950s housewife. I'm telling ya, these Andrex make you feel super frickin' fresh down below. I swear the aloe vera ones done turned me into a virgin again.

3 VALUE INTIMACY

I've had several truly intimate and special relationships in my life – my manicurist, my hair stylist, the lady who does my eyebrows. But it's only really in the past few years that I've grown the fuck up and realised how great true intimacy can be. Sure, promiscuity can be incredibly fun – and anyone who used to drink in Yates in Nottingham back in 2009 knows I mean that with all my heart – but I doubt it's nourishing in the long run. I kind of think of casual sex as junk food now. And love-making as home cooking. Don't get me wrong – sometimes you just really, really fancy a big fat greasy saveloy from the Turkish chip shop down the road, but it's never going to compete with a meal that's been slowly prepared with herbs and love and shit. Who'd have thought it eh? Me, a romantic...

4 NOTHING REALLY MATTERS

So here's the other thing that my awakening to intimacy has taught me – when you love someone, pretty much anything goes. I'll always have my own preferences and, believe it or not, boundaries, but when you're loved up, you'd kind of do anything for them. And I don't mean that in a weird, degrading, co-dependent way, but in a loving, open and beautiful way. Like when you find yourself doing something you've never really been turned on by before purely because you know that the person you adore finds it hot, but – and here's the crucial bit – now you enjoy it too.

5 NEVER SAY NEVER

I'm "sex positive" but there are things I can't help but have a visceral dislike of – say, for example, people hurting themselves. And I suspect that scat – playing with shit – will always be a step too far for me. But many things that I once thought beyond the pale, or ridiculous, don't seem so bad to me any more. And from personal experience, I know I'm not alone in that. I've met many guys in their 30s and late 20s who are turned on by trans women – whether post- or pre-op – who, at 20, would never have believed that they would 'go there'. But like so many areas in life, your sexual perspective changes all the time, often quite dramatically. And that's OK. I guess that what I'm trying to say is that I've recently discovered I'm in to Furries.

6 FUCK ME WHILE I CRY

Can we all just agree that it's super hot to be fucked while you're emotional?

7 PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES NEED TO CUM TOO

I'm fairly self-absorbed, so it's not something I've thought about a lot before, but since I started filming my show, I've learned that there isn't a lot of porn out there for people who are blind or visually impaired and, well, that sucks. There is a book of braille porn, but you need two hands to read it... so yeah. Blind people need better erotica that appeals to all their senses.

8 FANTASIES ARE FINE

Everyone has a naughty fantasy that they would never in a million years want to enact in real life and that's fine. And I reckon everyone needs to access that fantasy once in a while. Even if you're really turned on by the person you're with, even if you love them desperately and couldn't be more attracted to them, sometimes you will still have to think about Your Thing to get off. I don't want to know what yours is and you sure as hell don't need to know what mine is, although if you really want to know it involves a see through mac and a girl I used to go to school with on a wet and windy night with six rugged, woman-starved firemen and a dog biscuit but that's all I'm saying, OK.

9 THREE'S A CROWD

You always say you're going to have a threesome when you first hook up with someone. You probably won't. I'm not saying threesomes can't be good or that happy couples can't pull them – and a third party – off with huge success, but it's fraught with danger. I reckon you should get the threesome stuff out your system during your slut years, but it's 2016, so do whatever the fuck you like, I suppose.

10 GET TESTED

Lord knows how, but I've never actually had the clap. IKR? Despite doing it unprotected down an alleyway behind Marks & Spencers, twice, with a drug dealer who looked like the one with contact lenses from So Solid Crew. But I'm an idiot. Just use a condom. We don't want you getting some awful sexually transmitted disease, like gonorrhoea, or a baby. Speaking of which...

11 BRITISH SEX EDUCATION NEEDS TO GROW UP

Most sex education does next to nothing to prepare you for the realities and responsibilities of Game of Bones. Oh, what's that you say? You put a penis in a vagina and a woman can become pregnant? Who fucking knew?! There was me thinking the only way to find yourself with child was to fall asleep under a hawthorn tree on the solstice. Yes, kids need to learn about reproduction, but they also need to know about consent if we are ever going to end sexual violence, promote respect for people's personal boundaries and save a lot of trauma and suffering. When I was at school, we watched a film telling us that one day we'd have to wash our armpits more often, grow hair down below and that masturbation could be quite nice – all of which I'd have worked out by myself by the time I was 14, thank you very much. No one ever told us it was OK to be gay, or bi or even not to want sex at all. And they fucking should have done.

12 EMBRACE THE AROMA

Armpits are hot. Don't spoil them with cheap deodorant. Just keep them clean. It's important. I watched a video about that once. Maybe it's just a personal preference of mine, but I suspect the Joy Of Sex was right – we are supposed to like the way other human beings smell. Apart from Boris Johnson. I reckon he smells like spam and failure.

13 STOP BEING SELF-CONSCIOUS

Stop worrying. Your sex partner is with you because they're attracted to you. Or really horny and can't do any better. Either way, just fucking own it – and enjoy yourself!

14 LATEX WORKS

Latex is hot. This was my dress at the beginning of March:

This was my dress at the end of March:

Sorry, Kim West Latex.

15 HEAD IS A SKILL

Blowies. I'm gonna leave the last word with Samantha from Sex and the City: "Teeth placement and jaw stress and suction and gag reflex. And all the while bobbing up and down, moaning and trying to breath through our noses. Easy? Honey, they don't call it a 'job' for nothing."

§

And that's it, really. I will probably just keep making the same mistakes over and over again for the next 50 miserable years or so, but I hope that at least some of the knowledge I've picked up can help you. Happy fucking!

@parislees

Watch The Paris Lees Sex Show here.

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This isn't a picture of the Romanian hospital mentioned in this article, but praying is probably what you'd want to be doing if you were a patient there. Photo by David Amsler via

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Last week a particularly gruesome video was leaked to Romanian media, showing several maggots in an open wound close to a patient's ear. The man had suffered severe burns and was hospitalised in a burn unit in Bucharest.

The video was leaked by Camelia Roiu – an anaesthesiologist at Spitalul de Arși, where the patient was admitted – who told newspaper Gazeta Sporturlor: "What's the point in hiding what's really going on? What's worse – to let the public know about the horrible conditions we work in or to live with not having done anything to change them?" She also claims that there were flies flying around the intensive care unit, where she shot the video. The patient died one day after the video was released.

"The maggots were not the cause of the patient's death and, of course, we removed them from the wound," the hospital's spokesperson Dr. Adrian Stănculea told Romanian television station Antena 3. "The footage is real – I can't deny that. The patient had four or five larvae in the burn wounds on the side of his face. The wound was covered with dead tissue, which can't be washed easily – if you aren't careful, you could end up with an ear in your hand. Those areas were washed very delicately."

But Camelia Roiu claims there have been other cases of larvae infecting patients' wounds in the same unit. She has encouraged her colleagues to speak out but the response has been mixed. "Some of my colleagues think I should shut up but others are professionals. I appreciate that," said Roiu according to hotnews.ro. "Those who don't want to admit what's going on should remember that, as doctors, it is our duty to care for people."

In an interview with TV station Digi 24, the recently appointed Romanian Health Minister Vlad Voiculescu did not hesitate to accuse the hospital's management of negligence: "This is unacceptable. (...) surely someone could have taken some time out of their lunch break to put up a mosquito net," he said. He also said he hopes the doctor who filmed the incident cleaned the wound after putting her camera down.

The Romanian medical world has suffered a bunch of scandals recently. Less than a month ago, the same burn unit came under scrutiny when a patient died after she accidentally received a transfusion of the wrong blood type. In May 2016, an investigation showed that disinfectants used in most major hospitals' across Romania were being diluted to the point where they lost their effect. And in November 2015, 64 young people lost their lives in a fire in Bucharest's Colectiv club. An investigation by newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor revealed that the cause of some of those deaths were not the actual burns, but hospital infections.

The Spitalul de Arși intensive care unit was closed down after the larvae video was leaked. The Ministry of Health sent out a press release describing the measures the hospital will take to prevent this from happening again – like installing hand-sanitising stations at the entrance and exit of every ward, and hiring an outside firm to clean and disinfect the air conditioning. Phew.

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Illustration by Ella Strickland de Souza

Getting into your own bed after a four-day festival is one of life's great pleasures. After a long weekend of mud, shitting into open cesspits and dealing with that warm mystery liquid that trickles through your hair when someone lobs a bottle into the crowd, the promise of sleep and a shower at home is what gets me though that final morning, lugging a broken tent back to the car and hoping my driver friend doesn't start coming down too hard on the journey home.

This was me after Glastonbury this year. But jumping into bed and shutting my eyes on the first night back indoors, something wasn't right. As I closed my eyes, ready for a solid 15-hour sleep, a sharp shock ran through my spine, making its way down into my chest and through my arms. And it kept on happening.

Imagine a combination of an electric shock and that moment of pure unadulterated pleasure as you're coming up, but without the desire to have a three-hour conversation with a stranger in the smoking area. It was pretty alarming. My heart was pounding, and for a moment I thought I was going to die. In retrospect, this was slightly irrational, but little sleep and an assault on my serotonin levels meant I wasn't quite thinking straight.

Sweating with panic, I did the only sensible thing you can do under the circumstances: self-diagnose via Google. Scrolling through the endless pages on my phone in the dark, it seemed pretty obvious to me I was having a heart attack, but thankfully just before I dialled 999 I stumbled on a website for "people who enjoy partaking in drug-taking" and saw my symptoms laid bare: I was experiencing brain zaps.

No, me neither.

"BRAIN ZAPS ARE KILLING ME!! NOT KIDDING!" wrote one forum user. "My whole brain inside feels like I'm being electrocuted, especially when the zaps shoot around to my brain stem and a little way down my neck."

Each time I tried to nod off they'd come back, pulsating through my body, making me tremor and jolt. Now afraid that sleep would equal certain death, I started looking into the topic and found out that these brain zaps are actually pretty common. While research is basically non-existent, it's often suggested that the zaps are a side-effect of ecstasy use; that the feeling has something to do with the brain trying to re-regulate its serotonin levels, as ecstasy causes your brain to release large amounts of serotonin. People coming off serotonergic antidepressants have reported feeling the zaps, too, adding weight to the argument.

Some MD and pills (Photo by the author)

After a quick Facebook call-out, I had a whole load of people wanting to chat to me about the time their brain got all zappy after a binge.

"I'd been at Bugged Out and I think I took about four of five pills over the weekend," said 25-year-old Anna over Facebook chat, explaining that she had a great time, until she got home to London: "Every time I moved or stood up or walked it felt like a little electric shock in my head. And it sort of felt like my eyes were taking longer to catch up with my body."

Like me, Anna panicked – but instead of looking to the internet for answers, she sensibly headed to a doctor for a diagnosis. Problem was, she didn't tell the doctor she'd been doing pills – "so it was a bit pointless; she just said I had a cold".

Ellie, 22, had a similar experience after getting back from Sonar festival. "I was just lying there in bed and I got this sharp pain and spasmed a bit," she explained over Facebook chat. "Something weird is happening to your head and you can't stop it – it's quite scary and you can't ignore it. They lasted for like four days."

The more I spoke to people, the more similar stories I'd hear. Most people, however, had never really mentioned their experiences to anyone before because, as a guy called Johnny put it, "I thought I'd just lost my shit, you know?"

Dr Cathy Montgomery is a Reader in Psychopharmacology at Liverpool John Moores University, meaning she knows a lot about drugs. "We don't know exactly what they are or exactly what causes them," Cathy explained over the phone, "but they are experienced as an electric shock sensation in the head, commonly at the base of the skull or neck, which lasts milliseconds to seconds."

Cathy's explanation sounded exactly like what I – and the others I'd spoken to – had been experiencing. But what I couldn't understand is why, after plenty of comedowns where the worst of it was chapped lips and an all-encompassing sense of sadness, I was suddenly experiencing these zaps.

"They're more likely over a period of heavy/continuous use," Cathy reassured me, "because your brain doesn't get a chance to increase the serotonin levels in between usages, so there is a cumulative depletion, which takes more time to regulate." She also pointed out that "polydrug use means increased neurotransmitter release and the increased likelihood of depletion", which basically means mixing drugs makes brain zaps worse.

My zaps went on for nearly a week, meaning I'd occasionally have to grab on to shelves in Tesco or shuffle myself into the foetal position as I lay awake at night dripping in sweat, but for Anna the whole experience actually started to become quite pleasant.

"The less intense they became it actually felt kind of nice," she said, "like a very mild version of being on pills, safe in the knowledge that my brain wasn't melting."

Anna might have been having a wild time, but I hated it, so I asked Cathy what we should all be doing to try and reduce these unwanted shudders hitting us on a Monday morning – bar, of course, just not taking loads of pills in a row. In an ideal world, we agreed, we'd each be tested to see what might make us susceptible to these side-effects, as well as testing the quality of the drugs themselves. But until wholesale reforms are made to our outdated drug laws, this doesn't seem a likely option.

"Limiting polydrug use can help," Cathy said. "For example, taking ecstasy and cocaine at the same time can be more harmful than taking either drug alone." Limiting periods of use is also a good strategy; taking regular breaks during your bender should help reduce the incidence of brain zaps.

If neither of these sounds appealing – but, I mean, come on; you really don't need to do a bunch of coke when you're already two pills deep – Cathy has one final solution: tryptophan.

"If you do find yourself in a serotonin-depleted state, you need to eat essential amino acids, which will facilitate serotonin production," she explained. So food like turkey, salmon and eggs are exactly what you need to get your brain back to normal – but don't eat anything else, like carbs or fruit, with your turkey, as it may well mess with the good bits getting into your brain.

So there you have it: next time you're heading off to a festival with plans to double-drop every sundown, make sure you pack the salmon.

@MikeSegalov

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If you ever needed any more evidence that the global financial industry – and, by extension, the thing that controls our pathetic lives – is as frivolous and ludicrous as a diamond-encrusted SpongeGar iPhone case, then the fluctuating shares in Nintendo have you covered.

The Japanese video game company experienced an extreme boost in shares after Pokémon GO – the augmented reality game that you already know everything about – was released earlier this month. However, investors clearly didn't google it properly, or perhaps just couldn't be bothered, because Nintendo don't own the app; it was a company called Niantic, Inc. that created and published the game. Shares in Nintendo subsequently dropped by a fairly large 17 percent.

In fact, Nintendo only have a 33 percent stake in Pokémon as a franchise. The Pokémon Company, which owns the copyright to Pokémon, is a joint venture between Nintendo, Game Freak and development company Creatures. The maximum profit share Nintendo stand to gain from Pokémon GO is 30 percent.

That said, Nintendo's shares are still up 60 percent, even after the sharp decline. Pretty mad that a company has to basically tell these people to stop investing because they'd made a huge mistake or just hadn't bothered to check. Man, glad these guys are the ones with all the money!

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Check out Ida's Tumblr, blog, and Instagram.

Illustration by Joel Benjamin

Prison seems to provide an almost infinite source of bizarre stories for the press. Throughout the last few months, we've had inmates reportedly fight each other half-naked armed with toilet brushes, attempt to blow their up rivals using liquid explosives, and squeeze naked through the food hatch on a cell door. Suffice to say, a lot of stuff goes on behind bars that you'd be unlikely to encounter in everyday life.

The notion of prison being like another world might be a cliché, but it stands to reason that the rules of mainstream society aren't likely to apply in a place reserved for people who are deemed to live with the general population. With this in mind, I got in touch with four former prison inmates to find out the most bizarre things they witnessed during their time inside. Here's what they had to say.

John Williams
67 years old
Served a number of sentences for armed robbery

I saw two incidents during my various prison sentences that have stuck in my mind as being quite bizarre. The first was when the prison guards in HMP Albany dug up the body of my dead pet budgie, thinking I'd buried contraband. People serving long sentences were allowed to have budgies, and I'd come to see mine as almost like my child. There was a little grassy area with a tree on it outside the wing, which I'd decided was a suitable spot for a burial. About 20 minutes later, I was looking out my cell window when I noticed a group of screws walking towards the grass.

To my horror, they then started digging, obviously thinking that I had hidden contraband. They must have seen me burying something and got the wrong end of the stick. It was very surreal. They eventually uncovered the budgie, and had a good laugh about it. I didn't see the funny side, though. I'd actually developed a closer relationship with that bird than I had with most people up until that point, which is probably one of the reasons I ended up in prison in the first place.

The second incident involved a prisoner getting caught wearing the prison governor's wife's underwear. He was strip searched, and revealed to be wearing a pair of Anne Summers-style knickers. The screws searched his cell, and found four other similar pairs. They wanted to know what was going on, and fired off questions at him: "What's going on here?", "Is there a black market in knickers?", "Where did you get them?" He refused to answer, so he was hauled in front of the governor for having unauthorised items in his cell.

I later heard that the governor had read out the charges, and then asked him if he had anything else to say. "Yes," said the undie thief. "I'm very sorry sir, but they're your wife's knickers." He had been allowed outside the prison to paint the governor's house, as he was a trusted inmate, and had snuck inside and stolen the underwear.

Justin Rollins
32 years old
Served sentences for street robbery

The strangest incident I saw inside happened at HMP Highdown in Surrey. I was on the healthcare unit at the time, after cutting my arms with a razor so that I would get transferred there. It was safer and quieter than the young offenders section of the prison, which I had previously been in.

Highdown mainly held category A and B adult prisoners, but also housed some youngsters, of which I was one. Everyone else in the healthcare unit but me was an adult, and a lot of the residents had serious mental health issues. One day, I witnessed a guy being dragged out of his cell by guards in white anti-contamination suits. He was taken past my cell, and placed in a special cell designed to reduce the possibility of self-harm.

It wasn't unusual for prisoners to be removed by the men in white suits; it usually happened when someone had covered themselves in shit, which happened on a regular basis. This time, the reason was something far weirder though; a pillowcase full of severed pigeon heads had been discovered in the inmate's cell. He had been using bread to lure them to his window, and then ripping their heads off and collecting them.

We never saw the pigeon killer again after that. I assume he was either shipped out to another prison or fast-tracked to a mental health facility. The other inmates found the incident funny. At the end of the day, you've got to find humour in dark situations in jail. The staff were more hardened than the cons. They'd seen all types of things in there, and took it in their stride. Saying that, one of them did vomit up her breakfast upon the pigeon discovery, for which I don't blame her.

Ceri "Cesto" Stokes
33 years old
Served numerous sentences for violent offences

The most bizarre thing I saw whilst locked up was a guy taking a screw hostage with a fake bomb made out of a flask and some wires from a radio. He was Irish, and was playing on the national stereotype. In reality, he had no idea how to make bombs. The hostage was a female screw called Emma, who was a pain in the arse. The whole wing had been complaining about her, and the Irish kid had obviously decided to take action. He'd blocked her in the office, and was threatening to blow her up. She was pissing herself, which we all thought was funny, because she had been making our lives a misery.

It became obvious that the screws had lost control of the wing, and the inmates were soon rioting. The guards managed to lock us outside in the exercise yard, where we were kept until midnight. The prisoners on the wings surrounding the yard threw their mattresses out of their windows, and we set fire to them and had a bonfire. The riot made the Welsh news.

The Irish kid got an extra four years added to his sentence for hostage-taking. The prison governor eventually assured everyone who had been kept on the yard that we wouldn't get any additional charges if we all agreed to go back to our cells. Although he kept his word, some of us got shipped out to other jails shortly afterwards. It was a strange and funny incident that sums up how mad prison can be at times.

Stephen Jackley
30 years old
Served a 12-year sentence for armed robbery

One of the oddest things I saw behind bars was the guards in HMP Parkhurst cancelling the prisoners' time on the yard because there was a cloud in the sky above it. I guess according to the prison authorities' logic, rain means wet ground, which constitutes a breach of health and safety. A cloud suggested that rain could have been on its way, and they wanted to be proactive and deal with the threat before it arrived. Considering the nature of prison, I wouldn't have thought a cloud featured at the top of the list of things that could have potentially caused us harm.

John, Justin, Cesto, and Stephen now say they are reformed characters. Justin has a book out about his criminal days, Stephen runs his own publishing company, John keeps a blog about all things crime- and prison-related, and Cesto now raps.

@Nickchesterv / @JoelBenjaminDraws

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It was when I read an opinion piece by a British writer Dylan Jones that I learned I was a slut—an actual, world-class slut.

In his piece, Dylan describes being called a slut when, after the topic of one's sexual headcount came up as party banter, he estimated that he'd slept with 400 guys. Which, to me, is low. What was worse were the comments on an article which aggregated Dylan's essay, attributing his number to low standards and self-esteem, even supposed "mental health issues," as if one's worth lowers with each dick or ass you take. Sex-positive commenters emerged as well, praising his honesty while dismissing the puritans. But I can only imagine what those closed-minded moralists would say to me.

Sleeping with 400 men means sleeping with 40 each year for ten years. My husband Alex and I probably fucked 40 guys over the course of our five week honeymoon in Europe.

I had my first three-way when I was 14, with two neighborhood boys. I've been having sex regularly since I was 16. I have been having sex for 32 years—32 times 40 makes 1280. And that's a low estimate. The real number of men I've slept with, as far as I can figure, is somewhere between that and 3500.

I've had a lot of sex, and for that, I feel lucky.

What matters is the quality of the time we share together, whatever the duration of that time may be. I remind myself daily to remember that each man I make love to is a human being, and that I can love them for precious few minutes.

Sex isn't just about getting off. It's about connection and intimacy. Even in the most anonymous of hookups, there's something magical to be found; blowing a stranger in a bathroom can be as intimate and mind-blowing as any sex. Sex is transcendental and beautiful, even if that stranger pushes you away, zips up, and leaves. Even if you never see your partner again. Sometimes, especially if you never see them again.

I spent teenage weekends at my best friend's apartment on Central Park West. We would spend our Saturdays watching the Robin Byrd Show while I sucked him off. Eventually, I'd head out alone to Central Park. I was probably 16. I didn't have a community. I didn't know what it meant to be gay. And while I was a horny teenager, I wasn't just going to the park to fuck. I was looking for a place to belong, and people who were like me.

In the late 90s, I left New York for Los Angeles, and found myself alone in a new city. I had just read John Rechy's Numbers, a veritable cruising bible, and soon found myself stalking the shadows of Griffith Park, devouring whatever and whomever I found. I know now that what I searched for, beyond sex, was friendship, and a way to be intimate with another, even if just for a precious few seconds. I spent hours kissing, fucking, holding others' hands while they masturbated, whispering things into strange ears, sharing moments lost but for my memories.

There is real beauty to be found in holding someone while deep inside them, feeling their heartbeat and hearing their shallow breaths. Sometimes it's enough to share that feeling and nothing else. Occasionally, within moments of loneliness, self-hatred, and desperation, we find each other, and for a few minutes can anchor one another in a dark and isolating world.

I feel no shame for any of it. I have fucked amazing people, people I now care for and love. These are people who would do anything for me and I would do anything for them in return.

"That guy," I once overheard one man say about another, "has fucked so many people, his sex can't have meaning anymore. He's an addict." But sex has retained meaning to me. With some guys, it still feels magical, like something truly important is happening.

I have fucked amazing people, people I now care for and love. These are people who would do anything for me and I would do anything for them in return.

I refuse to shame anyone for their choices, even if they aren't choices I would make. For 12 years of my life, I was a daily heroin user. I have been an escort. I have slept with men for a line of coke. I've held men I loved while they died in my arms. I've stolen from people who meant the world to me. I have been selfish, unkind and petty. I have lied, I have cheated, and I've found redemption—a way to really like who I am, to forgive myself, and to seek out those I hurt and make amends.

We are broken beings living in a harsh world. Why shouldn't we be good to one another? Why shouldn't we fuck, support, cherish, and love one another? I want as many people to love and be loved in turn as possible in this world. I sincerely want my husband to fall in love and fuck as much as he can in this lifetime, and I want the same for our boyfriend, too. I want it for every guy I make love to, now and in the future...

What matters is the quality of the time we share together, whatever the duration of that time may be. I remind myself daily to remember that each man I make love to is a human being, and that I can love them for precious few minutes. I can hold them and protect them. That is the worth of who we are, and the value we can offer.

Follow Jeff Leavell on Twitter.

This is the VICE Interview. Each week we ask a different famous and/or interesting person the same set of questions in a bid to peek deep into their psyche.

When she was growing up in Denmark, Karen Marie Ørsted was obsessed with Spice Girls. Now, in her twenties, she's essentially a punk Sporty Spice with the best cover of Say You'll Be There you've ever heard.

At 18, she formed Mor, a trashy band and toured Europe and New York, playing at squats. She loved 80s hardcore and got heavily into left politics, spending her free time campaigning and attending rallies. Realising she had to go solo and switch to electropop, she began project MØ (pronounced halfway between "muhh" and a cow noise). Her debut No Mythologies To Follow came out in 2014 and captured the confusion of being a young adult along with massive bass and pulsing synths, via pop choruses of Spice Girls-level catchiness. Now she's co-writing Major Lazer songs and has just released a song with them and Justin Bieber.

Just before her Diplo-produced second album drops, we met her in Rough Trade and shared a weird avocado toast thing and talked about being scared by everything.

How many people have been in love with you?
Maybe six or eight. Some of those were when I was young and when you're 16 you know it's not forever. It's a little easier for me to attract people now – I think back to when you're younger and fall for people in bands, even though you barely know them. I've been with my boyfriend for two and a half years and he's a musician himself and super down to earth. Ever since I was 19 I've been in a relationship, to be honest. I always go from one to another, for some weird reason, and I always find someone where I connect on a personal level.

Why did you break up with your first boyfriend or girlfriend?
He broke up with me. I was so heartbroken for so long because it was the first. As a teen it's the first time you feel everything so when when that happened I thought I was gonna die. I was so fucking ruined. I heard the reason was that I didn't want to do anything sexual. I was only 14 and wasn't ready. I was scared. Afterwards I was so scared of falling in love for real.

What would your parents prefer you to have chosen as a career?
They've always been supportive and just wanted me to do something that makes me feel uplifted in life. The only thing was my dad – he wanted me to go to college and get a basic education after high school. My parents are both teachers and my dad is a psychologist now. And actually, I wanted to go in the end because all my friends were doing it. I was scared that I'd miss out on getting drunk with my friends. I'm happy that I did it.

How many books have you actually read and finished in the past year? Don't lie.
I'm a pretty slow reader so maybe only two books. But I really want to read more, because it also inspires me a lot. When I wrote my first album I was reading Joseph Campbell, he's this philosopher who writes about mythology. That inspired the title, No Mythologies to Follow. I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries. We live in a very stressful time, with like screens all over the place, and I think reading a book can make you really relaxed. It's almost like a yoga class, because it makes you get into something that's organic and natural, it's not about scrolling or clicking, it's different. So I want to do it more, and I find it really pleasant. Right now I'm reading Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band. I loved her and Sonic Youth as a teen so it's like candy.

When in your life have you been truly overcome with fear?
All my life, like I'm a child. I was super scared of the dark. I have a crazy imagination and it's a visual one that can be scary from time to time. I still have a nightlight now. If I've had really long working days for many days in a row, I'll get more anxious, and that's when sometimes, when I'm about to fall asleep, my mind goes, "Oh, what the fuck?" and ghosts start to come up the side of the bed. When it gets really bad, I turn on the light. I hope I'll get over it some day. It's not bad, but this is definitely the thing that scares me the most, because in real life, if I'm in situations that are a little bit scary, then I don't get scared. I toughen up. Definitely the most scary times are in my head.

(Photo via Wiki)

What would be your last meal?
I don't know if I'd be able to eat if I knew it was my last. I don't even have a favourite food but I'll say sushi. I like the classic little maki rolls with salmon and avocado.

If you were a wrestler, what song would you come into the ring to?
It would be like a sensitive, but very dark, rough song. Maybe Wildfire with SBTRKT and Little Dragon, because that has the emotion and fragileness but it's still crazy. Inside my tornado brain, that's how I see myself; a vulnerable person, but at the same time...

What film or TV show makes you cry?
The older I get the more I cry when I watch stuff. It's always on the plane, because you're like fragile and the air con is drying you out. I cry a lot during documentaries, especially when it's about nature and real people. Show me an animal program about predators on the savannah with all this poetry, like, "Oh, a predator is always out there. Those poor leopard kids are never going to get anything to eat!"

If you had to give up sex or kissing, which would it be?
Oh, sex for sure. The love and intimacy that a kiss represents, I could not live without that. I would rather walk through my life and have the tension and not get sex but have the love, than walk through life and get the sex but not have that tender moment, because the sex stuff, that's the explosion, but I would rather have the flames.

Where did you go on your first friend holiday and what did you do?
I miss that so much! The first one was just with my best friend who I still talk to every day and another friend. That was just before we really started to drink, but we started drinking there, with some guys. The two other girls hooked up with the guys, and I got so angry because one of the girls hooked up with the guy that I was kind of in love with, so I got so angry that I started crying and went in the tent to sleep angry and drunk.

What memory from school stands out to you stronger than any other?
Being in a group of girls and just having very special times that would only be within these walls of childhood. You don't know you would split up and everything would be different, and the whole world would change. That thing you have in school was really special and magic. Being so close and being like the family that you chose yourself. The thing with my job is that where I used to be with my girlfriends all the fucking time, now I see them only a couple of times a month. It's one thing to have a great family, and even though you love that safeness and you have a good time with them, when you're with friends that are your own age, you're in a whole different mindset. You reflect upon yourself in a much deeper way. You mirror yourself in all these people and it's so important.

What is the nicest thing you own?
I have my lucky cats, I have my bum bags. I don't have crazy eccentric thing, really. No matter how much I make on certain things right now, this is my life saving, like I'm gonna live off this my whole life. It's important to be rational about it. I have that from my mum and I'm happy I do.

Do you think that drugs can make you happy?
I don't believe in drugs because I have such a fantasy mind that I think if I took anything psychedelic, I'd be shit fucking scared. But, I get drunk like everybody else. I don't think they can make you happy, but I think they can make you let go and make you realise the other side of things. And even though people say, "Yeah, we did drugs, it's not real," well it is kind of real if you remember it the next day, and for the thoughts you have and the conversations you have, and even the feeling of letting go, because it does make you feel differently. Of course, I have smoked weed but not for a while, because it didn't really do much for me. I think when I get drunk, that's when I get high.

@hannahrosewens

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These days, divorce is the norm. Certain agony aunts even encourage it – because, you know, it's all about your happiness, you see. Your happiness is paramount. If you're not happy, you should do everything in your power to be happy, no matter the collateral damage. As long as you can have a nice lie-in or go to the pub for an extra hour, who cares if your children are staring at the wall every night trying not to wake the house up with their choking tears?

Sure – it doesn't always pan out that way. But it's undoubtedly a formative moment in many young people's lives. Perhaps the first real moment you see fallibility. Maybe it was a shock. Maybe you saw it coming. Either way, we got a load of our friends to describe the time their folks called the clock on their shitty marriages, how it felt and what happened next.

ZOE, 26

My parents have never tried to be my friends. This isn't Gilmore Girls; it's a standard middle-class, four-person nuclear family. Mum and dad are such shining examples of the kinds of traditional adults who keep children out of their personal affairs that I genuinely didn't see their divorce coming. I mean, my mum may have had her own room for a bit, but that didn't seem weird. Neither did the fact that mum, my sister and I left the country when mum got a new job, kissing dad goodbye at the airport on the way to our all-girl adventure.

Over the summer holidays when I was eight, we went back to our house where dad now lived on his own, and our parents sat my sister and I down in the front room. They told us they weren't in love any more but that they loved us both the same, and that nothing would change that. I cried for about a minute, we all had a cuddle and spoke about it and then it was done. There was no custody battle, we kept living with mum and now my dad can make divorce jokes at Christmas when both sides of the family get together and it's cool. Plus, having divorced parents is really helpful when you need to have a teary chat with someone after a break-up. Perspective.

BOOKER, 31

These failures, which were my failures, burned brightest behind my 11-year- old countenance that day. I should have known it was coming – the lesion of growing up among long-term parental conflict scratches deep – and yet, when it did, the guilt of shock confirmed that it must have been me who had made a mess of it all.

Months of pre-emptive peace work, which culminated in me blasting Tina Turner's "Let's Stay Together" from my bedroom, had all proved hollow. You may not be able to kid a kidder, but, as I had discovered in that moment, you can a kid. Faced with my dad cradling his shame beneath soft eyes, and mum, hard-faced in her desperate survival, I was exposed as a fool, self-made by childish faith.

"Me and your mum are breaking up, Books. It's my fault. Don't blame your mum and please don't tell your sister."

I didn't cry. It wasn't that way. I just looked out of the window, watching my sister play in the garden, waiting for them to leave. And then they did, through different doors.

I remember mum carrying me up the path towards him, and wildly screaming: "WHAT IS THIS? WHAT IS... YOU PILLOCK! YOU FUCKING PILLOCK!"

JOE, 28

The very moment my parents told me they were getting divorced was pretty unimpressive in itself. I was seven and it was a bit like being told there had been an earthquake somewhere deep in the Atlantic; not realising it had direct implications on you until a 60-metre tsunami arrives six hours later and destroys everything you know.

The proper laughs were in witnessing their breakdown. My dad only ever found himself in my birthplace of the North East because his one way ticket from Tehran to Texas had an overnight stop in Newcastle, so there was always an element of accident to their entire marriage.

Though he would grow up to be a pretty practical fella, he was thoroughly useless in his thirties, much to mum's disgust. I vividly remember the day a leg broke on their bed. Dad had been laid off recently from the factory, and mum worked full time as a nurse, so she told him to get it fixed before she got home, so the bed would stop rocking. When she returned that night, he'd sawn the other three off.

A few months later, he disappeared with our family car, a five-door Ford Escort, for the day. He appeared again that evening: he had traded it in for a two-seater, 1979 mustard yellow Mercedes SL 350. His dream ride. He pulled up outside honking the horn, pure joy aflame in his eyes. I remember mum carrying me up the path towards him and wildly screaming: "WHAT IS THIS? WHAT IS... YOU PILLOCK! YOU FUCKING PILLOCK!" My face was nestled in her jumper and I remember it stank of the chicken Kievs we'd had for dinner.

When the divorce announcement came a few months later, it was via dad, delivered solemnly in the yellow Mercedes, my sister and I both strapped uncomfortably in the one remaining passenger seat, parked in the alley outside the nursing home where mum worked. "Your mother and I are getting separated," he said with a moisture in his eyes. I remember asking, "Does this mean I'm not half Iranian any more?" And he said "No, obviously not."

JULIAN, 29

Like most things in my life, my parents divorce happened after a great delay, but which time I was too old to care. I was 20 when they told me. I got a phone call from my mum one afternoon, saying she was "done", or something along those lines. I wasn't really that fussed about it, and it didn't really seem like a big deal. I had other, seemingly bigger things on my mind at the time, like all freshly post-adolescents do. It was only later on that I became aware of the impact of it, as the jealousy brewed into chaos around petty things like which child spends the most time with who and shit like that. Parents always say, "It's not your fault!" when they split up, but maybe it was my fault – maybe I was just too cool and they wanted me to themselves. Damn.

JAMES, 28

Growing up, my parents didn't spend a lot of time together, but they were never at each other's throats – just the odd shouty argument sparked by stuff like my dad not cleaning his face hair out of the sink. Everything seemed fine to me, a 17-year-old with no real understanding of long-term relationships beyond "you don't have sex very often". I figured they were fine, her absolutely loving being by herself all the time, him having a great time working himself into an early grave.

Anyway, we used to have a shed that my brother and I would go and smoke weed in, before coating ourselves in Lynx and actually fully believing our mum had no idea what we were up to. We'd been out there one evening and stumbled in, expecting to sit in front of Road Wars with a chocolate milkshake. But when we got inside our mum was sat at the kitchen table and asked us to come to her room, which she told us – pretty much immediately, as far as I can remember – that her and my dad were getting divorced.

Maybe it's because I was stoned and slightly numbed to what was happening, but I wasn't that cut up about it at first. Also, I instantly rationalised it out loud to try and make my mum feel better, because I could see she was feeling awful about it; "It's sad, but at least we're older – at least we spent most of our childhood together as a family," I said, hoping that might help. In retrospect, it probably only made her feel worse.

@joe_bish

More from VICE:

Love, Lies, and the Long Aftermath of My Parents' Divorce

The Easiest Way to Divorce Someone in the UK Without Any Actual Paperwork

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Photo by Wong Maye-E via AP Images

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of everything under the sun. We hope it'll help you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

On July 19, North Korea went and did a naughty thing: It fired three ballistic missiles, which traveled across its landmass, and dropped into the Sea of Japan. As is often the case, North Korea's abrupt display of force appears to have been an expression of disapproval at new military measures being put in place by the US and South Korea—in this case, it was the US's implementation of the THAAD missile defense system in Seongju, South Korea.

North Korea can't physically harm me by blowing up Seongju, at least not anymore. (As it happens, I used to live about 95 miles from Seongju in the neighboring city of Gwangju.) But as callous as this may sound, the fate of Seongju isn't what worries me. What worries me is when North Korea claims, like it did earlier this year, that it can reduce its enemies, including the US to "flames and ashes." That was just one of North Korea's many colorful ways of expressing its long held, and well known, desire to wipe out the US, South Korea, and Japan.

But do I really have any reason to fear the Hermit Kingdom?

"If the regime feels directly threatened, it could lash out, inviting a counterattack that would destroy the country, but causing a lot of damage along the way." —Charles K. Armstrong

What worries most analysts is that North Korea's nuclear option is pretty much its only option if it gets into a major fight. "The escalation ladder is only artillery, and then nuclear weapons," Victor Cha, North Korea analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told my colleague Keegan Hamilton back in March. That conversation (which you can watch below) took place shortly after a cascade of events in which North Korea successfully tested its fourth nuke in January, and then launched a satellite into orbit in February.

The UN then cut off a huge amount of aid, and—in a commonplace strategy for dealing with North Korea—exporters agreed to embargo resources, and braced for something crazy to happen, because embargoes and sanctions tend to piss off Dear Leader Kim Jong-un.

North Korea seems to view itself (somewhat reasonably) as under constant external threat. Each time North Korea's defense system achieves something, like its first successful nuclear detonation in 2006, it's told by the US, the UN, or even its closest ally, China, to absolutely not take another step. Then it inevitably takes another step, and another, and another.

"Pyongyang has reaped tens of billions in concessions, including cash, food, energy, fertilizer, while advancing its nuclear and missile capabilities, all in return for repeatedly lying about denuclearization," Lee Sung-Yoon, Korean studies professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, told VICE in an email.

Earlier this year, Kim claimed he'd finally gotten his hands on a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on a rocket. Then in April of this year, when North Korea claimed that it has the ICBM technology necessary to attack well inside the US mainland, North Korea's claim that it could turn American cities to ash finally developed some real validity.

But North Korea's history is fully of empty threats. "North Korea itself is not going to attack anyone—least of all the US—without provocation. Their number one priority is survival," Charles K. Armstrong, professor of Korean studies at Columbia University, told VICE. According to the CIA's World Factbook, North Korea is mostly a struggling, agrarian backwater that just happens to have a bellicose cult leader running it from its biggest city.

The World Factbook claims that in order to have some semblance of an economy, North Korea futzes with its currency supply in order to stave off hyperinflation. What little industry North Korea has, according to the CIA, struggles with broken-down machinery, and has no access to spare parts. There's not enough usable farmland, and even if there were, there's not enough fertilizer, tractors, and fuel to generate food. North Koreans, The World Factbook says, pretty much rely on food aid to live.

In March, when Kim told his people they were in for a historic famine, he blamed the new UN sanctions, rather than a total agricultural breakdown at last year's harvest, leading to "lean times" that are most likely peaking right now as silos sit empty in anticipation of a fresh harvest in the coming fall.

"Its very own survival depends on overturning one day the gloomy reality of perpetual inferiority against that other Korean state." —Lee Sung-Yoon

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA agent told the Japan Times in 2013, "It is virtually impossible to run a human spy in the North and penetrate the Korean state." Riedel said most foreign intelligence about North Korea comes from satellite photography.

In other words, fallow fields are visible to satellite cameras, so the CIA can say with certainty that North Korean farmers are struggling. But tucked away inside of buildings (and in tunnels) North Korea could—and probably does—have capabilities we don't know about, according to commentator and former congressional advisor on North Korea, Joshua Stanton. " in South Korean courts, and found responsible in US federal courts," Stanton told me.

For instance, in May, North Korean agents in China killed a pastor who had been helping North Korean defectors escape to the South. "They have a history of bombings and other terrorist attacks, and also control North Korea's hackers," Stanton said, adding, "I'm not aware of any attempts on anyone in the US, except for cyberattacks."

North Korean hackers mean business. The 2014 Sony hack was attributed to North Koreans who were supposedly retaliating against the creation and release of an objectively bad movie called The Interview. That hack was sophisticated, intentional, and enormously damaging, causing $35 million in digital damage, smearing showbiz muckety mucks, and briefly holding a movie release hostage and leading to a lingering debate that threatens to soften Hollywood's ability to satirize—a tangible blow to free speech.

"The bottom line is that the North Koreans are capable of anything." —Joshua Stanton

Even if the odds of my own injury or death at the hands of North Korea may be infinitesimal, as are those of my South Korean and Japanese friends, there are other things to fear. North Korea wants to, and thinks it has to, hurt the US and South Korea somehow. "Its very own survival depends on overturning one day the gloomy reality of perpetual inferiority against that other Korean state, the one that is far more prosperous and pleasant," Lee told me.

Or as Stanton put it: "The bottom line is that the North Koreans are capable of anything."

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of North Korea?

3/5: SWEATING IT.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

When you're a kid, getting kicked out of school sounds a lot like freedom. Your whole life could be watching TV, eating ice cream and making prank phone calls, and all you have to do is poison your teacher's coffee or punch someone really hard in the face.

Turns out it's actually not that fun at all. It's a miserable process that can fuck with your whole childhood. And sometimes you don't even have to do something terrible, you can just be mentally ill or gay and that's enough for you to get the boot.

Three recent expellees share their stories.

ELLEN, 23, ENGLAND

I had been sent outside of my maths class for being disruptive, throwing books across the room and pencils. Outside the classroom at each end of the corridor were fire hose pipe reels and fire extinguishers. I thought it'd be funny to let the hose off. It was much more powerful than I'd thought it would be though.

When I let it go on the floor, water sprayed along the corridor, the hose was out of control and I couldn't stop it. It was carpeted, so the whole thing was soaking. I panicked and ran off because it was quite a lot of water.

I went and sat downstairs in the canteen making sure members of staff saw me as I thought that way I wouldn't get the blame, because I'd have an alibi for the time of the flooding. Unfortunately, it was all captured on CCTV. The flooding was so bad that it came through to the ceiling tiles on the floor below. It blew the electricity and some of the ceiling rotted. I ended up causing hundreds of pounds of damage.

They rang my mum and told her she would have to come in. She received a fine for the damages and had to fork out €600. I refused to attend the meeting and that day, I ended up getting permanently excluded. I didn't kick up as fuss at the time. I thought it was great. I couldn't wait to brag to my friends about it.

But it didn't quite live up to my expectations: I just spent my days mostly in bed or on MSN. It quickly became boring because all my friends were in school while I was at home. Although I was allowed back for English, maths and science at the same school, that was it. After those lessons, I had to leave the premises straight away. It's not my proudest moment in life but you live and learn I guess: I have never let off another fire hose.

IZZY, 18, SCOTLAND

I went to boarding school for over six years. I got kicked out in my last year of school. I had struggled with mental health problems throughout and really hadn't received much support at all. In late 2014, when I was 16, my mental health took a turn for the worst. In January, I overdosed and ended up in hospital. I was told I could return any time I wanted. I chose to come back a few days later.

I went for a meeting with the headteacher and became clear she was adamant on getting me to leave. She basically said that she didn't care if I killed myself but if I was a pupil in the school, it will reflect badly on them. She made it clear that she cared more about the reputation of the school than my health and life. I was allowed to stay for two weeks on the condition I took medication. This was to be a trial period to see if I could handle school. If not, I'd have to leave.

Unfortunately, I had a mock exam that week and I ended up getting 0 percent, mostly because I was having no sleep because of panic attacks. Although one teacher said that I may be able to resit it, I was called into the head's office where she immediately expelled me, asking me to pack my things.

That day, I sat in my room crying. A teacher came every ten minutes to make sure I hadn't tried to hurt or kill myself. A friend came and packed for me. I left after six years of living there without saying goodbye to anyone. Only a few people knew I was expelled until I stopped turning up to class. I had a breakdown in my uncle's car and then stayed with him and his girlfriend for a couple of days while I looked for a place to live.

My parents took it surprisingly better than I expected. They were angry at how I'd been treated but were very supportive. Other teachers wanted me to sue and everyone in the school - staff and students alike - stood behind me and defended me. The head was suspended in the end but I don't think that had anything to do with me.

ROB, 16, CALIFORNIA

I've been homeschooled my whole life. With homeschooling in the States, there's this thing called Co-Op and you go once a week. They teach you what you're learning the next week, they give you homework, you come back and they check your work. These co-ops tend to be religious, where you're mocked if you don't follow Biblical practices.

Growing up, I felt like I was never good enough. I was different from most boys: most of my friends were girls, I listened to female pop music and in my teen years, I started to question the strict culture I had grown up in. It was around this time I discovered I was gay. I was deeply depressed and contemplated ending things at 14.

The school reverend told me to 'man up' and 'pray the gay away'.

The church that my family attended was also extremely conservative and was much like Co-Op. They're also well-known for their anti-LGBT measures and have been actively collecting signatures to stop anti LGBT discrimination laws. Knowing this, I was careful who I told.

Around this time, my school reverend would constantly lecture me why as to why I shouldn't listen to a certain type of music or wear certain clothes. He told me to "man up" and be the person God had made me to be. He even made me have 'therapy sessions'. He told me to "pray the gay away" and I complied not because I believed it, but because I thought it would make things stop. Near the end of these sessions, I ran away and was so close to ending it right there. My parents were against me, all my friends from church were against me. I felt the lowest I had ever been. After a month of attending the sessions though, everyone thought I'd been cured.

So I created a Twitter account to talk about what I was dealing with. It helped a lot to have an outlet I could express my feelings about being gay, but also somewhere where I could be out.

One day I got a text message from my mum saying that she was going to a meeting with the school. They told my mum that they dug through my social media and found hints of me being gay. On my Facebook it said that I liked men. I was getting kicked out of school. They said it wasn't about hate, but about their policy: that you can't be gay and attend school there. Their only excuse was that they were doing it for love and that it was for my own good. My parents were totally fine with me getting kicked out for being gay as they're anti-LGBT.

There's really no happy ending to this story. I'm at another school and hoping to graduate so I can go to university. It's a struggle, but it shows that there's still discrimination towards LGBT people, no one should get kicked out of school for being gay. I'm sick and tired of being put down by society for being myself. I want to let kids know that there are people out there like you and it does get better.

Vice has changed some names to protect identities.

The Samaritans help people who are feeling suicidal or struggling to cope. More information here.

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It's a beautiful day in Ohio—sunny but not hot, or not Texas hot, at least. Which works, considering that you have to walk about 12 miles a day out to get anywhere at this convention—the way the streets are blocked off downtown, it's impossible to park within decent proximity to anything. To get it done at the Republican National Convention, it takes will, determination, and the most comfortable pair of shoes you can afford to be seen in. My shoe of choice: Yeezy Boost 350. Fashionable yet practical, if you get them box price.

All photos by Jessica Lehrman

I start my second day at the convention with an interview with Roger Stone, a political consultant and old friend of Donald Trump, who left the campaign last year after a feud with then-campaign manager Cory Lewandowski. The feud has apparently continued, even though Lewandowski himself has been fired from the campaign and is now a CNN contributor. Both of them are here in Cleveland, and last night, Stone claimed on Twitter that Lewandowski drunkenly tried to crash the Trump family box at the RNC on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday morning, Stone walks into the interview with his suspenders and seersucker suit, looking the part of the consummate Southern gentleman. I hate that I don't have a glass of iced tea to offer him. And I have to say that as much as I expected to not like him, it's really hard not to. His presence immediately commands attention, and he easily takes over the room. There's simply no denying his charm. He is a master storyteller and eloquent conversationalist. I have a million questions, but I've only got 40 minutes, so we both make the best of it.

I have a little downtime after the interview, so I stop by the media center set up for the tens of thousands of journalists at the RNC. It's in a huge exhibit-hall space, and every major print, television, and online organization has a base here, including VICE. On all of the screens, I can see Trump landing in Cleveland, with his new vice president, Mike Pence.

As Trump takes a chopper into downtown, my Yeezys and I are back on the block again, heading to Public Square. The same "Allah is Satan" asshole is back again, but no one entertains him today, and before long he leaves. Random sign holders walk the square. A lady dressed as a butterfly carries one that says, "Let Democracy Fly Donald Trump!" Another guy dressed like a beachfront Jesus carries a sign that calls Trump the Antichrist. Rosie Palfy, representing the Forgotten Veterans, speaks from her podium about real issues facing not only veterans but lots of people, but her speech isn't abrasive or inflammatory, so most people pay her no mind. It's a shame.

We get word that a flag burning is taking place in front of the entrance to the Quicken Loans Arena. We arrive to see the police start to set up a bicycle perimeter outside of the gated area. Rumors start to fly that Trump is gonna be walking through here, but I find that highly unlikely. I find a spot in front of the Fort Worth Police Department's bicycle division and chat it up with the Texas boys.

Soon, an even larger contingency of officers starts coming through. I spot the Cleveland police chief and members of the fire department as well. I then see a guy with a flag in the midst of it all, but I'm too far away to tell if he's the potential flag burner or not. We hear the Bikers for Trump are waiting with fire extinguishers in Public Square. By the time we get there, we hear that the flag burner is back where we just came from. As 100-plus cameramen break north for the action, I decide against backtracking through the chaos and break south.

For lunch, I'm heading to a BBQ rib spot called Hot Sauce Williams, where I'm supposed to meet Henry Childs, a black Republican delegate from Texas. I had no idea what a black Republican would be like, but if I'd had any assumptions, this guy would have shattered them. There's a look in his eyes that lets you know he is here to live life in a real way. I can tell that if he puts his mind to something, there's no changing it.

Once I take away the political titles and terms, I realize we couldn't be more alike. We agree that we need to change the direction of the country, and the political discourse, and we agree on almost every issue we discuss. We just don't agree on what the best way is to bring these things to fruition. It's one of the best conversations I've had out here.

When lunch is done, I head back to Public Square and who do I see but Geraldo Rivera. He's a familiar face at scenes like this, and is flanked by a dozen or so police officers who look a bit like they'd rather be anywhere else. I would too.

I make my way to the Rock the Vote event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. The party is laid the fuck out—this is what I'm talking about. The music and the vibe is on point. I head downstairs to check out the hip-hop exhibit.

While walking around, I see my friend Luis Calderin. He was a part of the Bernie Sanders campaign before becoming vice president of marketing for Rock the Vote. We head to the political exhibits, and we talk about what Rock the Vote looks like in 2016 as opposed to the 1990s, and about how the organization plans to register half a million people online.

Outside the museum, the California delegation—at least the ones who aren't sick with norovirus—are hosting their party. It's an amazing buildout with a top notch band playing "Billie Jean"—but there's nobody in that bitch. Just then, though, a bus full of delegates pulls up, so the buffet and Mondavi wine will not go to waste. When I see the two guys walk in with suits made out of American flags, that's my cue. If this was my last opportunity to turn up in life, then I would happily die unturnt.

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Sure, Pokémon Go may be kind of boring and riddled with bugs, but who cares? How else are you going to venture into the world, catch 500 Weedle, and then go home to drop a lucky egg and just evolve like crazy to gain XP to become a master trainer?

Unfortunately, it's hard to find the time to commit to a serious Pokémon regimen, what with the jobs and responsibilities and laundry or whatever. That's why one brave soul in New Zealand has done what so many around the world don't have the guts to do: He quit his job to travel around, playing Pokémon Go full-time.

"I have been working for six years, and I was desperate for a break," 24-year-old Tom Currie told the Guardian. "Pokémon gave me the chance to live that dream."

The Guardian reports that Currie has already hit six towns in New Zealand, and has bus tickets to keep going for the foreseeable future.

"Tom is a very spur-of-the-moment, independent kid, he always has been," Currie's mother told the Guardian. "His nana and I don't understand the game, but I remember him loving it in his childhood. I am just glad he is out enjoying his life and seeing so much of New Zealand."

Currie has been on the road for a week now and already bagged 90 of the original 151 Pokémon. That means that if you are holding a gym somewhere in New Zealand right now with just a lame-ass 500 CP Pinsir, Currie is probably on his way to give you a very rude awakening.

Read: A Whole Week in the World of 'Pokémon Go' Has Left Me a Wreck

Photo by Lubunya via

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps

On Thursday of last week, I flew from my home in Zürich to my family in Izmir. I would stay for three weeks and the plan was to go on some day trips, take my nieces and nephews swimming and just relax and spend some time together. That all changed when the first push notifications about the attempted coup reached us.

Military interventions into politics are a Turkish tradition. Since the Republic was founded in 1923, there have been four coups where the military succeeded in taking power from democratically elected governments. Particularly the coup in 1980 left deep scars in Turkish society, because of General Kenan Evren's brutal crackdown on dissidents.

The military sees itself as a protector of the secular Turkish republic and traditionally follows Kemalism – the ideals of modern Turkey's founder Atatürk. In earlier coups, parts of the military believed that those in power were violating the key values of Kemalism, and felt called to protect the republic.

Since last Friday, a lot has been said and written about the coup – how it came to this and what effect the failed coup will have beyond the hundreds dead, thousands injured and the countless arrests and impeachments. My family and I, Alevi Kurds originally from southeast Anatolia, thankfully aren't among those numbers, but we did experience the attempt like many others in Turkey did. This is how I, a Swiss citizen with a Kurdish background, experienced the day of the attempted coup and its aftermath in Turkey.

Friday July 15th at around 22:30 (MEST): The military closes the bridges over the Bosporus in Istanbul

My brother and I are sitting in a restaurant in an Izmir suburb and have just ordered a bottle of raki to toast the start of our holiday. Within a few minutes the other guests at the restaurant get restless and exchange wild rumours – they've heard Erdogan has been shot. My brother and I start getting very uncomfortable – one second we're sitting together laughing and the next we're not sure about anything anymore.

The people at the table next to ours whisper about an attack, an assassination and protests. My brother and I try to calm each other down, tell each other that we don't know anything yet. We call our parents and my sister-in-law who are with us in Turkey, to be sure that they're safe. They haven't heard anything about what we tell them.

I catch myself wondering whether I can fly to Istanbul next weekend for a friend's wedding.

While still discussing the rumours with the other patrons, we start getting the first push notifications from Turkish media mentioning closed bridges and blocked streets in Istanbul. The restaurant owner turns on the TV, where we see the occupied bridges. I have so many questions: What's going on? What does this mean for my family and me? But it's not just the big questions that hit me: I catch myself wondering whether I can fly to Istanbul next weekend for a friend's wedding.

After we leave the restaurant we first hear it's an attempted coup on the car radio. I immediately think of my father – the memory of the bloody military coup of 1980 is never far away for my family. It was the start of a time of repression, violence and the persecution of people who opposed it. Will it come to that again? Who could be behind the coup? If they take over, would we soon want Erdogan and the AKP back? How will the AKP and Erdogan respond? And: how will the masses respond? I'm afraid and feel powerless.

Screenshot from YouTube

Friday July 15th at 23:00 – the military announces it has toppled the government

We're sitting at home and watch the message from coup leaders on the state channel TRT. They've hijacked the broadcast to announce they've toppled the government and are now in power. They say they took over to fight the AKP's rampant corruption and its general incapacity to rule. Marshall law has been imposed, as well as a strict curfew. They announce a new constitution which they say will recognise the country's ethnic and religious minorities.

As Alevi Kurds we're a double minority, so we should be delighted with that last promise. But it feels absurd to hear such an announcement from a brand new military regime. Could a military coup be a positive impulse for Turkish democracy? Should I be happy about a coup? Could I ever be?

My father has terrible memories of the coup of 1980 and doesn't think much of military involvement in politics. "The military gets involved to promote democracy and protect the country from a totalitarian system?" he asks with his typical slightly detached scepticism. "Just goes to show how broken this country is. We should be pleased to see a coup? That's never a good thing. No matter who's pulling the strings." I tend to agree with him – my father has had a lot of experience with these kinds of matters and his analysis of political events is usually spot on. State media report the AKP is still in power.

Friday July 15th at 23:30PM – Erdogan mobilises his supporters via FaceTime

Screenshot of tweet by Deniz Yücel

By now, users with Turkish IP addresses can't access YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and most TV stations have stopped broadcasting. The first image to appear on TV is a FaceTime video of an interview with Erdogan. He speaks of a devious conspiracy by a clique within the army, and he encourages people to take to the streets, take over key places and airports in the country and stop the military.

It's absurd to hear a man who struck down protests and grossly reduced the right to assemble and demonstrate. But we can see on TV that many Turks are heeding his call. It's understandable that these people refuse to accept a military coup, but we do wonder who they are and what they want, exactly. They chant nationalist slogans ("Martyrs don't die, the homeland cannot be divided") and an Islamist slogan chanted at conservative religious marches. Those chants are accompanied by Mehter marches – traditional military music dating back to Ottoman times.

A friend who is in the city centre of Izmir tells me that there are violent clashes between people on the coup's side and civilians. Thousands of AKP-supporters are protesting in the streets – it looks like the Turkish football team has just won the Euros.

The nationalist Islamist slogans make my family very unconfortable. We all agree that a coup is deeply undemocratic and won't move Turkey forward. But it's also scary to think it could just play straight into the hands of the regime. An attempted coup could legitimise an even more authoritarian rule in Turkey.

Saturday July 16th at 03:00 – the coup apparently failed

Every media outlet is now reporting that the coup has failed, and the government claims that everything will soon go back to normal. We're all deeply confused – without realising it, we apparently all had some very small hope that a regime change could possibly lead to more democracy and that hope is now gone. I'm a bit embarrassed about having allowed myself to feel that way. My family have been gathered around the television set for hours, trying to get information about what's going on. We're all deeply confused and it's impossible to sleep. The government threatens revenge and retribution, which is as expected as it is worrying. Our biggest fear is that after this unreal situation, the country will move further and further away from actual democracy.

Saturday July 16th at 13:00 – Erdogan sends a text message to Turkey

Everyone in Turkey receives this text message from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Everyone.

Screenshot by the author

"Dear children of the Turkish nation. This action is a coup against the nation, commandeering armoured vehicles and weapons in Ankara and Istanbul, behaving as if it were the 1970s. Honourable Turkish nation, claim democracy and peace: I am calling you to the streets against this action of a narrow cadre that has fallen against the Turkish nation. Claim the state, claim the nation."

The text message is a personal call to continue supporting the current AKP government on the streets. I find it totalitarian and frightening, but my family in Turkey is used to these kinds of messages. The text has a visible effect: on Saturday night, the streets and squares are full of people celebrating the failure of the coup. But there seem to be coup leaders who haven't been found and arrested yet. The text is probably intended to make sure the people will defend the regime against a potential second attempt.

Sunday July 17TH – Turkey has changed

According to the state news agency Anadolu, more than 200 people were killed during or after the attempted coup, 2000 were injured and 7500 were arrested. My family's fears seem justified: according to media reports, Erdoğan has removed almost 3000 judges and banned 21,000 private school teachers from teaching. Almost 1600 university deans have been dismissed and the education ministry fired 15,000 employees.

Videos of soldiers being humiliated, beaten and almost lynched are circulating on social media. A coup is undemocratic and I couldn't support it under any circumstances, but the images of the riled masses are no less terrifying. These people say they're flooding the streets to defend democracy, but I wonder where they were exactly two months ago, when left-wing HDP MPs were stripped of their immunity. Why didn't they protest the unspeakably undemocratic Turkish electoral system, which excludes all parties that have less than 10% of the votes? Where are they when it comes to minority rights, why don't they stand up against the systematic exclusion of the opposition, the oppression of critical media, the persecution of journalists?

Screenshot of tweet by Deniz Yücel

Wednesday July 20th at 22:00 – Erdoğan declares a state of emergency

After an hour-long meeting of the national security council President Erdoğan announces that he is declaring a state of emergency across the country. He says it's to protect the people – the freedom of assembly and movement remain intact, as do the freedom of speech and the free press, he claims. But that's not the political reality: we hear and read that people are arrested based on their social media posts. At least Erdoğan is honest about that when announces further arrests. My father's icy commentary is quick to follow: "This country has been in a state of emergency for years. Phases of stability are the exception. We'll see what this means for the country. I have a bad feeling about it."

More on VICE:

How Facetime Saved Erdogan from Turkey's Failed Coup

Hazy, Dreamlike Photos from a Trip Across Turkey

Istanbul Rising