After he lost the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump was uncharacteristically gracious, spinning and staying positive like an ordinary political candidate. "I'm just honored, I'm really honored. And I want to congratulate Ted and I want to congratulate all the incredible candidates," the second-place finisher said.

About 36 hours later, he apparently wasn't feeling so honored anymore:

A teacher at a public high school in an impoverished neighborhood sits down in our chair and confesses things about her job while wearing a creepy mask.

Shirley Curry fan art. Image supplied

It is dusk. In front of you lies a steep path winding up towards a fortress in the clouds. The city is Solitude, capital of Skyrim, the setting for the popular fantasy roleplaying game The Elder Scrolls. It's a sort of parallel universe, but the strangest part is that your Skyrim guide also happens to be a 79-year-old grandmother.

If you're familiar with the labyrinthine subculture of online gaming then you might know who I'm talking about. For a woman who has lived through a world war, the invention of Pong, and the advent of the internet, Shirley Curry has managed to come out on top in a world unimaginably different to the one she grew up in. Known online as Gamer Grandma, she has won the hearts of 115,000 YouTube subscribers—double the population of the quaint Virginian town she calls home.

Shirley's love for gaming was sparked in the mid-90s when her son installed her first computer, along with a copy of seminal strategy game Civilization II. She obsessively worked her way through the entire franchise until Skyrim brought her addiction to a whole new level and introduced her to the world of YouTube gaming. Thanks to the charmingly named "Jacobthebro" who shared it on Reddit, Shirley's first gameplay video went viral in less than 24 hours. She woke up the next morning to an inbox flooded with 11,000 emails. "I just sat there and cried," she tells me over a crackly Skype connection. "I didn't know what to do with all of it."

As more and more YouTubers become household names, Shirley's story of stumbling into overnight fame by pursuing a niche hobby is rare. But fame has not come tax-free. Most of her waking hours are now spent recording gameplay, fielding emails, responding to comments, and keeping up to date with other YouTubers' content. It is an endless cycle, one that allows little time to indulge in her love of quilting or sci-fi novels, leaving her feeling "trapped" and "consumed."

Ironically enough, Shirley's YouTube fame has actually restricted the gaming she can enjoy to less than 30 minutes a day. "I wish I had time to play for hours like I used to, just for myself. Having to keep it to so many minutes ... is hard," she says wistfully. But being an eternal optimist who sees the silver lining in every iCloud, she seems largely unperturbed by just how much YouTube has altered her daily life.

Where most YouTube comment sections are characterized by their ability to reach new lows in petty slander, Shirley's videos are flooded with warm comments such as "Please adopt me... I'll bake you cookies." But even she is not without her haters. She alludes to trolls she's had to ban, many of whom accuse her of being a pre-pubescent prankster masquerading as a grandma.

As it stands, Shirley is the only older gamer on YouTube public about her identity, although she insists many more are lurking behind an avatar. "Older YouTubers should use their own pictures and put their age in their profile," she argues. "Then everybody would know there are lots of older people and it wouldn't be such a big deal." In her opinion, a refusal to hide and pretend older gamers don't exist is essential to fixing the online culture.

Shirley's DogHouse Systems gaming set up. Image supplied

Discourse around the lack of older voices online doesn't have to stop when we log off either. Change can and should begin IRL. Shirley makes the case that kids these days could take the initiative to bridge the generational gap by inviting older family members to game with them, even if it requires Estragon-esque patience. And does she follow her own advice? "No," she cackles. "But my grandkids think I'm cool."

Behind the celebrity facade, she is just another "noob" slaying pixelated dragons in her pajamas, and for Shirley this is enough. She is yet to cash a single check from her YouTube career, having only monetized her channel in early January. Instead, she seems content to simply keep on playing.

Shirley's diehard love for gaming left me ready to challenge my own grandmother to a round of Tekken, but beyond this what struck me most about our conversation was the idea that within the span of a few decades, older gamers won't be an invisible minority. They will be the norm.

Follow Xiaoran on Twitter.

On today's episode of Daily VICE, we speak with Donald Trump's most fervent women supporters. Then director Todd Haynes talks about his new film Carol, and we explore the power of indifference on social media.

Watch Daily VICE in the VICE channel on go90. Head to go90.com to learn more and download the app.

Marc (right) outside L'Atmosphere. All photos courtesy of Marc Victor

Running a club is stressful enough, but try doing it in a war zone where alcohol is banned. Between 2004 and 2008, Marc Victor ran L'Atmosphere, Kabul's most infamous party spot—a notorious rooftop poolside bar and restaurant, crammed wall-to-wall with journalists, aid workers, diplomats, humanitarians, spies, contractors, and mercenaries. Or, as one VICE journalist described it, "the real-world equivalent of the bar from Star Wars."

In 2008, as Western hangouts increasingly became targets of terrorist attacks, Marc sold up, returned to Paris, and decided to write about it. The result is Kabul Kitchen, a comedy based on his life running L'Atmosphere.

I meet Marc in a cobbled courtyard outside his apartment in Paris. It is serene—pale green shutters, plants, and window boxes—like a postcard. He shows me inside and it's completely barren. The bedroom consists of a bed, the living room, and a sofa. No pictures, no trinkets, no stuff. He hands me some water in a mug. "It's hard to find somewhere quiet in Paris," he says. As we discuss his extraordinary life, it becomes clear why Marc wants some peace these days.

The bar at L'Atmosphere

VICE: So firstly, how did you come to set up a club in Kabul?
Marc Victor: I never set out to run a bar. I was a journalist. I started out as a theater critic, then I went to work in Cambodia for six years for the French radio station RFI. When I came back to Paris, I was bored. So in 2002, when the Taliban fell, I decided to go to Afghanistan to work for an NGO that was training journalists to rebuild the media there. When the project came to an end after a couple of years, I wanted to stay. My friends kept saying to me that there weren't any good places to go out in Kabul. So I obliged.

Was there much of a party scene there at the time?
The expat community was young—most people were in their 20s and 30s and single. It was like a university campus. These kids worked hard, they had stressful jobs, and they wanted to play hard. Before I opened, there used to be parties at the NGO headquarters like UNICEF, and sometimes the American Embassy would host some wild nights, especially when it had contractors in town. But when L'Atmosphere opened, they started coming to my bar. Thursday was the big party night, because everyone had Friday off.

I guess living somewhere so dangerous, you'd want somewhere to let off some steam.
Exactly. That's why we built a swimming pool. Well actually, that took a while—none of the builders in Kabul had ever seen a swimming pool before, so when I tried to get it put in they literally just dug a hole and put some water in it. But I wanted to create an oasis.

In the TV series, everyone is drinking, shagging, and taking drugs all the time—like they had to make the most of every night because it could be their last. Was it actually like that?
Whenever a new young couple would arrive in Kabul, we'd place bets on how long it would be before they broke up—99 percent of them would. There's a constant, underlying tension when you live in a war zone. You never know what's going to happen from one day to the next. That really bears down on relationships. All the NGO workers were sleeping with each other, which was made even more complicated by the fact that they all lived in these dorm rooms. Finding somewhere to actually have sex was difficult. They worked together, lived together, partied together, slept together. It was intense—they needed the release.

How do you run a bar in a country where alcohol is banned?
My life became a constant struggle to get alcohol. It's easier to find drugs than alcohol in Afghanistan. When I first arrived, there were shops that sold alcohol to expats. But then they closed, so I had to go to the military bases to buy off the army. When they ran out I'd have to buy it on the black market, which would cost a fortune and you didn't really know what you were buying. Then I'd have to get it to the restaurant without being stopped by Afghan police. If officers caught me, they'd take me to the station and I'd have to bribe them with money or booze. It was always a battle—people couldn't leave my club drunk or they'd get arrested. And if an Afghan drank in my club and was caught, we'd be shut down.

How do you stop people leaving a club drunk?
With difficulty. The guy I sold the restaurant to after I left in 2008 actually ended up in prison. Sometimes, there would be periods when the Afghan forces would tighten up, just to prove that they were strong enough. They broke into the restaurant, confiscated the alcohol, and put him in jail for a few days. Karzai wanted to show muscle—that he was dictating the laws, not the foreigners.

Is that why you quit the restaurant?
Six years in Kabul wore me out. Up until 2006, the situation in Kabul wasn't bad for civilians and foreigners—all the fighting was between the military and the Taliban. But then the kidnappings and suicide bombings started. In 2008, there was an attack on the Serena Hotel: A terrorist walked into the lobby with a suicide vest strapped to him and killed six people. It was a clear attack on foreigners in the city. I closed the restaurant for a month and decided that I'd leave.

It must have been hard for you to protect your customers inside.
In the beginning it was OK. But as the years went by, and the situation between Afghans and foreigners got more tense, I needed more and more security. In the end we had six armed security guards, sandbags, numerous security doors, metal detectors. It became impossible to be safe. One incident in 2006 was a real turning point for me. A group of young US soldiers, who were apparently drunk, drove an army car through a traffic jam, causing a massive accident. A group of Afghans surrounded them, throwing stones. And the soldiers' reaction was to start shooting. There was a huge riot—and its aim was to kill all the foreigners in the city. I was out at the time in my van, buying booze for the restaurant. I was stopped by the police, with a van load of illegal alcohol. I called the restaurant. All the foreigners in the city had fled. It was chaos. All of our lives were in danger. Our neighbors saved the customers' lives—they put a ladder over the wall and hid them in their houses.

How was the restaurant seen in the local community? You had a bar and swimming pool with women in bikinis in a strictly Muslim country.
Like anyone who runs a club or restaurant, I had to have a good relationship with my neighbors. I hired a lot of them and their families. I put a fence around the swimming pool so people couldn't look in. Although the neighbors' kids would make holes in it so they could peek in and check out the women.

Did you ever have any moral problems with profiting from a war?
When I arrived in 2002, I did not arrive to a country at war. The Taliban had fallen, bin Laden had escaped. Countries have to start living again after conflict. Ninety percent of everything I made there stayed within the country. Some of the NGO types would tell me it was wrong to open a restaurant, you know, "We're here to help these people, not to drink and eat and party." I'd watch them arrive, say they would never come to L'Atmosphere, but 90 percent of them would end up there in the end once they got bored and needed a drink.

Is the club still open?
No. It stayed open for a while but it became impossible to keep the business going. In the end it got cemented over and turned into a parking lot.

Do you like being back in Paris?
Well with the terrorist attacks, I feel right at home... No, in seriousness, it's nice. It's OK. For now.

You sound like you're bored.
A bit. But you know, life is OK.

Kabul Kitchen season one box set is available now.

Follow Jenny on Twitter.

Jerusalem, Israel, April 1990. In the Christian part of the Old Town, ultra-orthodox Jewish and security guards are waiting for Ariel Sharon's arrival. All photos courtesy of Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos

This article originally appeared on VICE France

When Patrick Zachmann told his mother he wanted to be a photographer, her response was to open the phonebook and look for guidance from a professional. With all the embarrassing tenderness that is typical of anxious mothers who want to make sure their children are given a bright future, she ended up calling Henri Cartier-Bresson on his private number. His ex-wife picked up the phone. She didn't have any advice to give, so she focused the conversation on how hard it is to live with a photographer. Forty years later, a single glimpse at Zachmann's portfolio is enough to realize that his mother didn't have anything to worry about.

Since starting out in the late 1970s, Zachmann has walked the streets of Naples with anti-mafia brigades, documented marginalized Chinese communities in Hong Kong, and worked on the integration of immigrants in Marseille. His work frequently shifts between black and white and color, depending on his subjects. I talked to Zachmann about his projects and how he built his own identity through the examination of others.

- Julie Le Baron

Naples, Italia, June 1982. A 'mafioso' is arrested at dawn by an anti-mafia brigade

VICE: When you started working as a photographer, you had very strong left-orientated opinions as well as a desire to change the world. What were your first projects?
Patrick Zachmann: My first "real" reportage was in Portugal in 1975, just after the Carnation Revolution. I really wanted to explore the country and its social, political, and economic situation. I traveled across Portugal with a backpack and skills I had learned by myself. My career really took off after that experience.

Over there, I met the director of Rush, a newly-born agency with which I stayed for seven years. With them, I covered a few topics that had to do with current affairs in France as well as abroad, but I always preferred working on society-based issues. In 1979, I started working on what was going to become my book, Enquête d'identité.

What made you brush away news topics?
That same year, I went to Iran at the very beginning of the revolution. I was in the plane that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini back to Teheran. It was my first experience working as a news reporter, with the guarantee of being published. Eventually, it was a very negative experience because it made me realize I was not cut to work in the news. I just could not get used to the pace: You always need to run without having time to stop and think about what you are doing.

One day, I found myself in the cemetery where the Ayatollah was supposed to give his first speech. It was mayhem—journalists everywhere. At sunset, the light became beautiful and soft. I felt frustrated because I had to go back right away and hand in my film rolls. This experience taught me a lesson, and being confronted with religious zealotry marked me a lot.

Naples, Italia, June 1982. Women crying after their sons and husbands are arrested for drug trafficking

Speaking of violence, you then went to Naples, which was rotting because of violence.
After this reportage, I wanted to test my own limits and those of the people I photographed. It's important to know whether you can press the button of your camera or not in any given situation. Naples has become a learning field for me. At the time, everybody would go to Lebanon to cover the war and I didn't want to take part in this. I always preferred going where the media did not go, in forgotten or unknown places, to cover issues that were not or no longer news. I read a short article in Le Matin de Paris, which was about the mafia war that was taking place in Naples and killed 400 people each year. It was a conflict between two families of the Neapolitan mafia. Nobody talked about the Camorra then.

Once I was there, I faced three forms of violence—first, the one coming from Camorrists. Then, there was violence from the police and the people I was taking pictures of, who sometimes reacted vehemently—women that had just seen their husbands getting shot or arrested. Their reaction brought me back to an inherent violence, related to the mere act of photographing. Talking about this, Diane Airbus once said that even though she was trying to be sweet and nice with her models, the act of photographing still remained an aggression. I got obsessed with that idea. Now I don't think I could do the same reportages, nor could I take the photos I took back in 1982. Perhaps I am too conscious of the pain of the people I was taking pictures of.

Hong Kong, 1987

What did you learn about your own limits over your stay there?
I learned that you need to know how to wait, that there are frustrating moments where it is better not to take pictures. I built some kind of ethical code empirically. After that, I tried not to take pictures when someone suffered or when I thought that pressing the button would add an unnecessary pain; especially if this picture was not essential or there was a chance it would not be published.

It's hard to find a balance when you want to take pictures "on the go" like Henri Cartier-Bresson would say, to capture magical moments and you fundamentally want to respect the people you are photographing. It is sort of contradictory, isn't it? At times, I wish I could seize what's visually appealing in the streets, but I know that without asking, in certain countries or situations, I am exposing myself to a violent backlash. On the other hand, asking them for their approval destroys everything that appeals to me. I don't like taking pictures of people without giving them anything in return for it. I realized that going to marginalized people, listening to them, and taking their pictures is the first step of a dialogue. If you give attention to those who feel weak, it feels like a gift to them. It took me a lot of time to integrate this fact. I also give a lot of little prints that I often find years later, pinned to a wall or in a photo album. I remain passionate and often moved by that strong relationship between a photographer and his models.

Furthermore, I became aware of how powerful photography was in its documentary and momentary aspect, but also the sentimental value of it. When a person passes away or a place is destroyed, photos can be precious and historical.

Paris, France, 1981. Patrick Zachmann's mother (left) and her sisters

How do you separate yourself from your subjects in cases like Mare Mater, where you work on your own mother?
Every time I worked with one of my parents, I succeeded in breaking silences thanks to photography and cinema. Without that, I do not think I could have learned as much about my family. This approach has always been difficult—painful at times—to undertake. Precisely because you need to keep a "professional" distance, remaining neither too close nor too far from your subject. It happened that I wanted to drop my camera and take my old and frail mother in my arms instead of taking her photo.

What gives me the strength to work on this is how necessary it is for me to do it. It is important to understand, clarify, go beyond taboos and secrets, and make our own opinions. Whether it is about your parents, yourself, or the world, you need to forge your own opinion. This is what I like in photography; leaving and returning to exterior and interior worlds, conscious and unconscious.

Before Mare Mater, between 2009 and 2011, I had already photographed migrants in Calais, Paris, Malta, and Greece, but the pictures never went beyond the journalistic aspect. I needed to uncover the link between my subjects and myself. Of course, both sides of my family are immigrants, but those links were not enough. I was drawn to the question of separation between young migrants and their mothers—all young boys. I followed them in Marseille for more than a year and went to their home countries to visit their mothers. Then, I investigated my own mother's history at the same time I was working on this project—she was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and I wanted to hear her story of Algeria before it was too late. I finally understood what was similar in my situation and the one of those migrants separated from their mothers—as I was going to be separated from mine forever. I mixed those stories in the book, the exhibition, and the film Mare Mater. Perhaps we are better at telling stories we truly understand or that echo our past.

How do you decide between color and black and white?
I find it important to ask myself the question before I start working on something. I don't want to repeat myself, which is often what happens to photographers with a particular style. It really haunts me. Truth is, we repeat and display the same obsessions over a lifetime—it's something inherent to being an artist, I believe—but we can find new ways to express them. Consequently, I often ask myself what would be the best format to express such or such subject. For my series on workers' gardens, I bought a 6 x 6—it may well be a tribute to Robert Doisneau and his photographs of the suburbs.

My use of color is another issue. For example, for my book on Malians I wanted to give a fair account of the cultural shock and geographical gap they face when they try to integrate themselves in France. Also, I was weary of pitiful and miserabilist images of immigrants we are generally shown. I thought this portrayal was not synced with today's reality of immigration. I make books where the text and photos are entwined; I make films in which my pictures are embedded. Essentially, I want to question the connection between fixed and animated images. As long as I am not repeating myself in terms of aesthetics, I am sure I will be passionate about what I'm doing.

More of Patrick Zachmann on Magnum's website.

Follow Julie on Twitter.

More photos below:

Naples, Italia, March 1982. Prostitutes and trans people warming themselves up around a campfire

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, 1989. French actress Béatrice Dalle

Naples, Italia, June 8, 1982. Ciro Astuto, known as "The Outlaw," one of the leaders of the clan Nuova Famiglia, has been killed by one of his own

Hong Kong, 1988. A young prostitute and her boyfriend, member of a triad

Marseille, France, September 1984. Malika, a young woman who comes from the second generation of North-African immigrants

Marseille, France, September 1984. Algerian wedding in the estate of Bassens

Villiers-le-bel, France, 1989. This family lives in a ZAC in "Derrière-les-Murs-de-Monseigneur," which consists of 1,000 apartments.

Marseille, France. 1984

Naples, Italia, June 1982. At the Police station, a group of kids (the youngest is eight) just got caught red-handed during a robbery.

New York, 1987. The Wus and their three sons, all valedictorians at Harvard.

On February 29, VICE will launch our new TV channel, VICELAND—a 24-hour cable channel featuring hundreds of hours of new programming. It's been a lot of work, but we're very proud to share what we have been making.

We've already released the trailer for our new show, GAYCATION, and for our latest seasons of the classic VICE series BALLS DEEP and Action Bronson's F*CK, THAT'S DELICIOUS. Today, we're bringing you the first look at the new season of another old favorite that's making the leap to TV—WEEDIQUETTE, the 420 show that is like no other.

In the series, VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu chronicles the science, culture, and economics of the emerging "green" economy. Each episode of WEEDIQUETTE explores the impact of marijuana legalization across the United States and internationally, examining how people on all sides of this issue are reacting to the growing popularity and acceptance of this remarkable plant.

There are many players in the weed revolution, each one with a story, and we'll be giving them all a chance to tell their tale when VICELAND goes live at the end of February.

Give the WEEDIQUETTE trailer a watch above. The first episode airs March 1 at 11 PM.

Jian Ghomeshi leaves a Toronto courthouse with his lawyer Marie Henein (left) after the second day of his sexual assault trial. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Even people who weren't legal experts could tell that Tuesday went poorly for the first witness in Jian Ghomeshi's sex assault trial.

By the end of her cross-examination, Ghomeshi's lawyer Marie Henein revealed that the witness, who has accused Ghomeshi of pulling her hair and later punching her in the head, contacted the former CBC host via email a year after the second alleged assault took place. This despite her repeatedly telling police, the court, and journalists that she'd made every effort to cut him out of her life.

"I didn't have any more dealings with him after that," she told police in sworn testimony heard in court, referring to the time period after Ghomeshi allegedly beat her in the head at his home in January 2003. She said she would turn off the radio or TV when he made appearances as they forced her to "relive the violence." That wasn't true according to the emails.

The emails Henein presented in court showed the witness contacted Ghomeshi in January 2004, asking him to get in touch with her, and again in June of that year, this time including a photo of herself in a bikini.

Henein accused the witness, whose name is under a publication ban, of lying under oath. The witness said she "didn't remember" sending the emails and later claimed she was using them to "bait" Ghomeshi.

"I wanted Jian to call me so I could ask him why he violently punched me in the head," she testified, noting that she was in a committed relationship at the time and no longer had any romantic interest in Ghomeshi.

It seemed like a bombshell revelation, one that came after Henein had highlighted discrepancies in the witness's testimony regarding the details surrounding the two assaults—the make and model of his car, whether she was wearing hair extensions, if they were kissing before or during the alleged hair pulling incident.

But was the defense's revelation really as damning as it seemed? And was the witness's statement that her memory came back in bits and pieces, plausible? VICE reached out to experts to put the trial so far into context.

Are the Inconsistencies Heard So Far Enough to Raise Reasonable Doubt?

Michael Spratt, an Ottawa-based criminal attorney, told VICE the witness's credibility and reliability have been seriously compromised by her testimony.

"With inconsistencies of that magnitude it demonstrated the witness is either not credible or is not telling the truth or that the witness's memory is flawed about major details," he said.

Allowances can be made for misremembering smaller details—like the exact sequence of events on the night the alleged assault took place, Spratt said, but the emails showed more than that.

"Either she has lied to the court about having contacted Mr. Ghomeshi," he said, "or it demonstrates her memory is not reliable when it comes to sending an email and intimate messages to the person whom she says months before or a year before had assaulted her in a very serious manner."

The defense will be able to argue that her memory on other points, such as the assault itself, are suspect.

The lead-up to this case has prompted much criticism of the justice system and its tendency to rip apart alleged victims on the witness stand, but Spratt argued the cross-examination in this case has been "completely fair."

"The witness has been cross-examined on inconsistent statements... To remove the ability to do that would be to cast aside our common-law traditions which go to fairness."

Those inconsistent statements will be looked at cumulatively, said Spratt. "If you put enough holes in the hull of the boat, eventually it will sink."

Trauma Victims Often Have Fragmented Memory

Throughout her testimony, the witness explained the variances in her statements to police, media, and the court by saying her memory didn't come back to her all at once.

"These are memories," she told Henein. "You remember certain pieces of them and as you sit with them you remember more of the peripheral parts."

Henein, at various points in her cross examination, suggested the witness had false memories or was flat-out lying.

But Barb MacQuarrie, community director at Western University's Center for Research & Education on Violence against Women & Children, told VICE it's entirely possible that the alleged victim did recall things in bits and pieces.

"The details around it, the time of day, the color of the car, what she was wearing, what he was wearing, they wouldn't be the kind of details that someone who has experienced trauma would hold on to," she said.

"The experience of trauma would be the memory that is most accurate."

It Wouldn't Be Abnormal for an Abuse Victim to Contact Her Abuser

Why would someone contact a man who had allegedly punched her in the head a year after the assault occurred?

That was more or less the question raised in court Tuesday by Ghomeshi's lawyer.

The witness said she wanted an explanation from Ghomeshi, to "bait" him into calling her.

We don't know if that's true, but, regardless of the motivation behind the emails, Macquarie told VICE a victim getting in touch with her attacker doesn't mean she wasn't attacked.

"Some women will immediately leave the situation and never go near it again. Many, many, many other women have a much harder time drawing that line between herself and the abusive person."

And abusers can be very charismatic and charming, as the witness stated Ghomeshi was in his initial interactions with her.

Bottom line, according to Macquarie, is the question itself is problematic.

"It should never be implied that the woman is inviting abuse because she's reaching out and showing interest in a relationship," Macquarie said.

The trial continues Thursday.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter for live tweets from the Ghomeshi trial.

'Black-ish' creator Kenya Burris. Photo courtesy of ABC

When ABC's Black-ish first premiered in September 2014, it was the beginning of a much larger, pivotal turn for the current television landscape. The show about a black family living in a predominantly white neighborhood uses a familiar trope ("fish out of water") to address an otherwise unique experience (race relations in the United States). Along with the premiere of Fresh Off the Boat (based on VICE host Eddie Huang's memoir), Black-ish ushered in a somewhat new idea that a central non-white family could be marketable enough to justify a prime time slot on one of the nation's largest television networks.

Centering around the upper-middle-class couple Dre (played by Anthony Anderson) and Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross), Black-ish looks at three generations of blackness from the top-down. There's Pops, Dre's dad (Laurence Fishburne), who serves as an anchor to the black culture of yore, while Dre and Bow's kids often function as a more modern counterpoint to Pops's and Dre's old ways. That the show manages to pull off cutting social commentary while remaining one of the most consistently funny shows on prime-time TV is a testament to the strong vision behind it.

That vision would belong to Kenya Barris, the creator and showrunner for Black-ish, who recognizes how unique his show is in comparison to other family sitcoms. Barris hopped on the phone with VICE to explain how the show—in an earlier incarnation—could have been about a white family. He also discusses his cognitive dissonance with The Cosby Show and preaches about the importance of showing successful black people while showing the alternate realities of black life.

VICE: So, how did Black-ish get started?
Kenya Barris: I think this was my 19th pilot? A couple of them had gotten made in some form another, but this one was the first one that had a network's commitment. I had sold a version of this show probably four or five times. And I think what made the other versions different were a few things: One, the other versions did not have Laurence Fishburne and Anthony Anderson attached; and two, I don't think I was as honest in the other versions. Like when you're writing for a magazine, there's a certain swag that this magazine seems to have, and you may not even do it on purpose, but you know that this is a TIME piece or this is a Vanity Fair piece. So, inadvertently or not, you end up slanting your writing to the choir. So, when I would say, "Oh, this is a FOX pilot," or, "This is an NBC pilot," I did what I had to do. Whether it was taking a family and making them white or taking a version of my story and telling it from a different point of view. I tried to do what I thought was going to get the show picked up. And my biggest advice to anyone is: Never do that. Always tell the most honest version of your story, and from that, it's either going to happen or not.

What finally led to Black-ish as we know it on ABC?
Well, my wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life, financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around and I was like, "Who are these people?" It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up. And even going further, it was the opposite of what a little black kid would be like growing up. were a different version of a little black kid. I started feeling like, "Was I a bit of a relic?" I still had these kind of antiquated views of what black was, and I was fighting that with my children, and my wife—who's biracial, and her mom's a hypnotherapist, and her name's Rainbow, and her dad's this white guy. It's just this totally different thing, so I felt kind of like the outsider in my family.

Kenya Barris on set

So the show was based around this "outsider" black father—was it always going to be Anthony Anderson?
Short answer: yes. I wrote this with Anthony in mind. We had spoken. We knew we wanted to work together, we knew wanted to do something together. Anthony, in a lot of ways, is my brother from another mother. He's from Compton; I'm from Inglewood. We've both had similar experiences. You understand if you come from that situation and are sort of now in a predominantly white world, you're constantly going to feel like you're taking a hit. And that was Anthony and my story. Now, we both have kids who are in private school and are doing things totally differently. It was a lot of those stories that we shared, and we were like, "We have to do this together!"

Let's talk about the politics of the show. How important do you think it is to show black people in high-powered careers?
Well, my parents were great parents, but they weren't doctors or lawyers. So when I watched The Cosby Show, I was like, "I wish my parents were doctors or lawyers! I want to be a doctor or a lawyer!" I love that aspirational viewpoint for kids—especially for little black kids in this day and age. We're having this time where the black middle class is expanding in a different kind of way. But the black middle class also still has a lot of holes in the "hood" because that's where they came from, or that's where their parents came from, and that's what they understand. So I really wanted to be honest and show a different viewpoint.

Speaking of careers, I remember reading a New Yorker piece claiming that Dre's career was changed from a TV writer to an advertising executive so that ABC could cut deals with advertisers.
Well, that is not true. The switch was made because the network and I didn't think that America would as easily identify with a television writer as it would with an ad executive—which we've seen since God knows how long. You know, . You're still often that fly in the buttermilk and you're often sort of asked to be the voice of your people. How many times has someone asked you, "Why do black people do...?" And you just want to be like, "You know what? I don't know!"

That's kind of touched upon in the first season when Dre is asked to be in charge of his company's "urban" division.
Yeah, and that was based around me. I've been on predominantly "white" shows before, and I had also been on predominantly "black" shows. I would complain that when I was on a white show they would only hire me because there was a black character or they needed a black voice. But then I would be mad if they went and hired a white dude in my position. It was that duality and I kind of felt like that's what Dre felt.

"As a creative, you have to be your truest form. You can't worry about fitting into whatever boxes people want to put you in."

Tell me about a day in the writers' room.
I think our room is mixed half and half. We have Jewish writers, and white writers, and Indian writers. We have a lot of women on our staff—I think we might have more women than men—which is important to me as well. For me, it was important to have a really mixed group of people because a lot of stories aren't just about being told from a black point of view; they're about the perception about how black things in life sort of resonate with everyone. At the same time, I also want to know how things that we sort of feel are unique to one culture really aren't—we're just people, and we all sort of share.

Do you ever believe that ABC has stepped in and encroached on your vision?
ABC as a network? Almost never. The thing that I did not know, however, is that S&P company—it's almost like a third party. They run their shop in a way that they don't answer to anyone. That's the battle, S&P.

We're doing an episode right now about what it's like the first time that you have to sit and talk to your kids about civil unrest. The kids are sitting at home, they see a crowd of people, and they're waiting for the verdict of an indictment—and Jack turns around and says, "Why are all these people so mad?" Then you have to sort of decide because the house gets divided. Does Bo let Dre and Pops's sort of ideology about who the cops are—what they were used to growing up—affect how she's going to explain to her children about what's going on? It's a very heavy episode. Of course we try to use a lot of comedy, but it's a hard topic.

Is it difficult to balance that humor with reality—particularly since the show is so indebted to race-based politics?
Yeah, it's the hardest part of the show. I'm a huge fan of Norman Lear's work, and I'll talk to him in a sort of a mentoring kind of way. I still think of this thing that he said: "It's hard enough to do 'my boss is coming over and my wife burnt the pot roast' anyway." That's hard comedy to do in itself. But then when you take out the mundane ideas and put in something like, "Oh yeah, somebody got shot by a cop!" in that mix it starts to become... whew, something else. But I kind of feel that if you start letting things like drive you, you might as well just do a poll of what episodes you air every week.

What does that have to do with the race-ness about it?
Well, we don't get these opportunities a lot. Anyone who has any sort of profile or reaches out to the masses in any kind of significant way, that's his or her responsibility. I hear people say, "I'm not a role model" all the time and it's like, "Well, of course you're not!" It doesn't mean that people aren't going to look at you as one though.

Honestly, that's why it hurt me so much to hear all of the stuff about The Cosby Show. Because, you know, that show had such an effect on me. It's hard when I hear people who want to take away the impact of that show because of the man. You know, my wife and I have arguments and go through hard times just like everyone else. But , if we're not together, does my show not matter anymore? If I get divorced, does my show not count?

Do you feel like that has happened to you—now that you're kind of a "name" because of the show?
Like, I'm going to a luncheon right now, and dude, I want to wear some fucking jeans and a T-shirt! Because honestly, I'm like, I don't give a fuck about what these white people think about the way I dress. But then again, I do. I think Du Bois said it best: We do live a duality. As I'm talking to you right now, I've gone from a Tom Ford suit to leather jeans. At the end of the day I tend to err on the side of representing the show. But at the same time, I'll go to pitch meetings and I'm always myself. And that's what I would give as a piece of advice. You know, as a creative, you have to be your truest form. You can't worry about fitting into whatever boxes people want to put you in. In this country, we've let perception become our reality. But it's not.

Follow Michael Cuby on Twitter.

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Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh. Photo by Bartek Kucharczyk via Wikimedia Commons

Men's rights activism bears all the hallmarks of a typical conspiracy theory. The projection of subliminally-perceived personal failings onto an othered social group, the conviction that this group has infiltrated the upper echelons of society to promote its own agenda, the belief that members of the movement have "taken the red pill" and perceived a reality that normal members of society cannot see.

And as with many cultish conspiracy theories, the people who promulgate the MRA gospel can profit massively from the devotion of their followers. Virulent misogynist he may be, pickup artist Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh—who once said rape should be legal "if done on private property"—is primarily in it for the money.

On Monday, news broke that Roosh was organizing a global series of meetups for his "fellow tribesmen." Newspapers, politicians, and activists in over 40 countries discovered that hordes of MRAs would be congregating at 165 locations worldwide for an "International Meetup Day." Press coverage was wall-to-wall and apoplectic, as Roosh intended all along—because his aim is not to unite young men against the oppressive forces of female empowerment, but to profit from the desire of young white men to feel oppressed.

In 2015, Roosh hit the headlines in Canada, following a campaign he swiftly dubbed the "Battle of Montreal." It was a grandiose name for an unremarkable event. Canadian feminists angered by Roosh's neo-masculinist ideology protested against a couple of speaking appearances in Vancouver and Montreal. Roosh urged his supporters to "counterattack" and threaten his feminist nemeses online. In a shocking denouement, a protester threw a beer over Roosh. That was more or less it.

But Google analytics show how searches for Roosh and his website spiked in the weeks of the "Battle," before slumping back to their usual level. Learning from the events of last summer, Roosh has now engineered a headline-grabbing controversy on a much larger scale.

When contacted for comment, Roosh said: "You're an idiot. I'm not making any money off this." But if this weekend's meetups were truly intended to be clandestine, Roosh would not have posted their locations and passwords on a public webpage. Rather, he constructed a honey trap for the media, with his fervent supporters as bait. Then he sat back and watched the coverage pour in, sweeping visitors towards his online store. As this week's story exploded, he shared metrics flaunting the explosion in views to his website, comparing his search-engine ranking to arch-controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos while bragging about his own "infamy."

In its rejection of patriarchal notions of masculinity, feminist theory offers solutions to issues genuinely affecting men, such as high rates of suicide and the stigmatization of mental health issues. But it is "infamy," not the suffering of men, which is Roosh's primary concern.

As such, Roosh repeatedly presents feminism as a "war" against men. " is mere purgatory until a newly devised outrage sends them to hell," he writes. "Those who don't pick up arms... will suffer most." His pseudo-militaristic rhetoric is calculated to appeal to angry young men, desperate to feel a sense of inclusion and importance.

Pickup artists generate profit along broadly similar lines to the Western military-industrial complex. First, take a disenfranchised, embittered man, frustrated by the lack of opportunities for financial and sexual advancement in civilian/beta society. Second, convince him that he can give his life meaning by uniting with other men to assert his dominance over inferior bodies. (Degenerate brown bodies in one instance; biologically inferior female bodies in the other). Tell him that this war is just, and his part in it significant.

Finally, sell him an AK-47 or a self-published e-book called Day Bang: How to Casually Pick Up Girls During the Day, and reap the spoils of war.

Roosh's profits directly flow from the PayPal accounts of his male acolytes. But the phantom oppression he engenders in the minds of his supporters manifests as actual oppression enacted on the bodies of women worldwide.

Women die at the hands of foot soldiers in the MRA war against women. Frustrated to the point of rage by a nine-year dry spell, George Sodini sought the advice of pickup artists like Roosh. He went to their conferences, bought their books, and posted on their forums.

But his investment failed to generate any sexual return. Journal entries detail his rage at the "30 million... desirable single women" who he calculates "rejected" him. So he shot three "desirable" women to death, and then killed himself.

PUAs seized upon his suicide as proof that "celibacy is walking death," weaponizing his "failure" to hawk their products. "Don't Be George Sodini—Seriously—Get some game and get real," wrote one MRA huckster, linking to his own online store.

Sodini is an extreme case, but he embodies the lies peddled by Roosh and his ilk. In reality, there are a couple of reasons why men aren't getting laid: Either they fall outside of patriarchally-imposed norms of attractiveness, or they're sexist pricks.

But MRAs offer an enticing third option, far easier than working to deconstruct external patriarchal values and internalized patriarchal behaviors. The "red pill" offers up a tangible, external enemy, and the subsequent opportunity to wallow in self-pity about the unfairness of a supposedly matriarchal society that won't let you get your end away.

Roosh preys on this deluded craving for suffering to engender attitudes that leave women beaten, belittled, and marginalized, and sexually frustrated men more furious than ever at women—and thus more likely to buy Roosh's books. Those who buy into neo-masculinist ideology are not lions led by donkeys, but "betas" led by "alphas."

Related: Watch Broadly's documentary on the fight to end revenge porn

Both the "Battle of Montreal" and the forthcoming meetups are framed as acts of pseudo-military resistance. Articles on Roosh's website about the "Battle" refer to "airstrikes," "ground campaigns," and the "information war."

Eager to feel part of a bona-fide resistance movement, many fans buy into this rhetoric wholesale. Comment threads about this weekend's meetup salivate over a "watershed moment in world history" and stress the importance of "maintaining basic operational security." (OpSec 101: Publish your security measures on a public forum.)

"It's time to go underground in the cities that threaten the safety of my supporters," Roosh tweeted as the media descended on Monday, amplifying his fans' paranoia to the point of absurdity. Roosh knows that his fans are not in any real danger, but he also knows they want to believe that their lives are imperiled by the feminist threat. Those safe from oppression feel a voyeuristic pleasure in imagining its weight upon them, as though they are watching a horror movie that can be switched off at any point.

The meetups will inevitably be swamped by throngs of journalists, standing around in the cold and trying to look plausibly misogynistic in the hope that a gullible anti-feminist will feed them provocative quotes. It's a vicious cycle, with negative media attention reinforcing MRAs' satisfaction in the imagined knowledge that the whole world is united against them.

To borrow conspiracy-theory terminology, the media shitstorm around this weekend's meetups is a false-flag operation. Roosh has intentionally brought the wrath of the global left upon himself. The meetups were planned to generate purchases of his books, not to establish an international guerrilla network of MRAs. His fans, taking to the trenches in their trench-coats and trilbies, are nothing but collateral.

Follow Matt Broomfield on Twitter.

Photo of Kim Kardashian by Juergen Teller. Photo of woman looking at Juergen Teller's photo of Kim Kardashian at the Paris Photo Fair by Miguel Medina

January 24, 2016. E! Channel. Season 11, episode 10, Keeping Up with the Kardashian's, America's Thunderdome for tinted moisturizers, scenes of mild domestic peril, and the maniacal pursuit of salad and delicate lighting.

Kris and Kim are standing near a doorway having a conversation about some Italian marble that has gone missing. Kris is dressed sort of like Charlie Chaplin. Kim is wearing a shiny gold choker that looks like it is made of fish bones. She is very pregnant. Her hair is perfect.

Kim: Can I tell you what's so annoying?

Kris: What???

Kim: You took my ten marble slabs. So I have to either buy seven slabs of marble or I have to change two of my bathrooms. I can't have my whole house be one marble, and then two rooms another marble.

Kris says she will replace it. Kim tells her that she won't be able to because the marble is not available in America. Kim offers her one million dollars if she can. "It's not Calacatta, it's Calacatta Gold; it's only from Italy." They stare at each other. There is lots of dismayed head shaking. Kim licks her lips so hard that she literally dies, like, for real. They leave the room.

I have seen every episode of this television show, most of them multiple times. I have seen its spin-offs, its double-episode wedding extravaganzas. Hours and hours of people in the back seat of a Rolls Royce, staring at their phones, contemplating Jean Royére armchairs or apologizing to someone. People having pretend-arguments about being disrespected, sipping iced coffees. People who pronounce consonant sounds with the deliberate care of someone filling in ScanTron bubbles. People who are possibly delusional and unreasonably particular about landscaping. People who have never done a good deed or known of a noble cause that they wouldn't first synchronize with the release of a fragrance.

Here are some Wikipedia episode descriptions for the first two seasons: "Kourtney deals with relationship drama"; "Bruce experiences a midlife crisis"; "Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé go to Mexico"; "Kim shoots a sexy calendar"; "Kim battles against Kourtney and Khloé after she purchases a Bentley." Replace the names of the boyfriends and this is still the thematic basis of the show, nine seasons later. It is television as fake home-movie. It is the fevered angst of the banal. Not your banal, sure, but the rhythms are the same. It is life as a reenactment of being alive. Your WiFi stops working. Tyga crashes their trip to St. Barths. What's the difference, when you think about it?

The family is inescapable. Sometimes it feels like their lives are on a loop, for all eternity, in supermarkets, at the Super Bowl. This bothers lots of people. It probably bothers your dad. They're pregnant again. They're married again. There are Kourtney's denials about Bieber, shiny-faced post-club entering-all-black-SUV-with-camo-jacketed-Bieber about Bieber, coy half-smile just-friends about Bieber. Kylie scribbles "KYLIE WAS HERE" on Kanye's album announcement. Khloé marries a basketball player. She dates a different one. The first one almost dies. They try to work it out. Kim makes the selfie famous. Kim's NFL running back ex-boyfriend starts dating a Kim doppelganger. Hillary Clinton and the spool of polyester she's wearing pose for a picture with Kim and Kris. Kendall is 19 feet tall. Caitlyn Jenner hijacked your newsfeed.

They're preposterous. But they are driving preposterous into the fucking red.

And yet, I want more. I want it all. In the realm of humans who exist as big, powerful, collagen-filled targets of your scorn, your famous-for-being-famous hot takes, they are without peer. They are invincible. They are hate-proof. They cannot be stopped. I love them, unabashedly, sincerely.

Are we tempted to ascribe weighty philosophical meanings to the most plastic shit in our time? Do we want to validate the days we've spent with pop culture ephemera? Yeah, OK, I think a little. They're preposterous. But they are driving preposterous into the fucking red. They are pulled over on the shoulder with smoke billowing out from under preposterous's hood. If you commit to something that shamelessly, if you slow-roll your Maybach through a mob of paparazzi and wrinkly white people and Facebook statuses who think you're What's Wrong with America and come out undented, I'll ride shotgun.

I love that they have stolen "vanity" and "arrogant" back from the type of people who like to wield those words to make covertly racist judgments about black quarterbacks, and have reformed them into something empowering. These are girls who are not only eager to be sexy for millions of people, but who are willing to be ugly in front of them too. Watch 15 minutes of their show; let the ruthlessly vivid high-def cross-examine their every imperfection.

We have seen them sick, pregnant, blotchy, with unevenly applied bronzer, with hangovers, pimples festering under their cheeks, lumpy pink mosquito bites on their shins. Kris talking about getting the varicose veins on her kneecap lazered. We've seen them in grim tabloid photos, who wore it better memes, plastic surgery debates, dissecting before-and-afters, do these lips look bigger than those lips, are her tits real could her ass be real. We've seen Kim terrified, pensive, nervous, begging for Ray J's cum, begging for Ray J to make her come, big pores, her swollen feet when she's pregnant.

Just because we get old doesn't mean we have to stop trying to fuck. Be hot forever. Make another million.

Kris lists off her plastic surgeries like someone flipping through stamped passport pages. Kylie is 18 and admitted to having artificial lip fillers. In Kim's book of selfies, Selfish, the middle 39 pages are all nudes. As a caption beneath one, she writes, "I wasn't intending to put these in the book but saw them online during the iCloud hack. I'm not mad at them. lol". There is no scandal when there's nothing to hide, nothing to hack when you've made your entire life accessible since before we even knew you existed.

For all its pregnancies, KUWTK never really tries to sell you on the idea of Motherhood: The Splendor of Human Life. It's in this business for loud, ridiculous aftermaths. "How I Got My Body Back's", weight-loss updates, #squadgoals, #revengebod, "New Year New You." If we are not transforming, we're stagnating, they're telling us. Just because we get old doesn't mean we have to stop trying to fuck. Be hot forever. Make another million. Earlier this season, when Kourtney told Kim and Khloe that she hadn't been focusing on the development of her mobile app because she was busy with her kids, Kim said, "So what. Everyone in life has a baby and they work like ten jobs."

To paraphrase Alex Pappademas, this is either a terrible show and wonderful piece of art, or the reverse. I'm never quite sure.

Kim is a woman who rarely gives interviews, whose responses seem hardwired to either sell a product or a mood, who disseminates information only through pained looks on Sunday nights and renegade glances over the shoulder at her titanic ass. But, in a way, by acknowledging that she is beholden to society , their interpretation of her, likes as currency, followers as currency, she is being more honest than anyone else in the public sphere. To make a 448-page meditation on eyebrows, a show about closets and ignoring people, an Instagram populated with pictures of people taking a picture of you taking a picture of yourself, is to admit that you are fragile, desperate, real, ready to be consumed this way. Beloved and shredded in equal measure. A selfie is like playing a game of truth or dare and picking both. It is a confession and a provocation. An acknowledgement of both our frailty and our own colossal beauty. A sale and a retraction at once. Our need to be immense, flawless, important

Does this make them frauds? Fools? Conmen? I don't think so. Isn't that all of our lives? Gorgeous forever on the internet, exhausted and pale at the gas station. The diets we broadcast to the world, the miles we ran, our ambitions, trying to look heroic, rebellious, our petty grievances with society. What are any of us doing in front of mirrors? We are all telling these same lies, some of us just get to do it on television

I don't think it is the Kardashians' burning imperative to inspire. I don't think they have even the slightest desire to cohabit with terrestrial life forms, actually. But by accident they made it all right to feel like getting dressed could be a Rocky montage. They took "feeling yourself" from a shameful impulse rotting in the MySpace caverns and dignified it. If watching a Kylie Jenner lip liner tutorial makes some lonely and damaged person feel when she enters a room like she is Helen of Troy on molly, I hope Kylie runs for president. I hope Kylie names a selfie she took in a hotel bathroom as her running mate, and a screenshot of a 3 AM hey-you-up text from the dude who left her in high school as her chief of staff.

What is modesty, really, but society telling you to sit in time-out for feeling awesome?

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

If you missed the first, PC-exclusive release of Not a Hero in May 2015, I forgive you. I guess. The game, London indie crew Roll7's funny bone-tickling ultra-violent follow-up to its BAFTA-winning OlliOlli skateboard sim (and its equally excellent sequel), came out at the same time as a shit-load of bigger, shinier titles with significantly larger marketing budgets and photo-real-enough viscera instead of chunky red pixels spilling over the screen. It was up against The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Project CARS, the Final Fantasy X remaster, and plenty more. There was competition, basically, and relative minnows rarely last long when they go swimming with sharks, however hilarious their own bite.

"We were a little underwhelmed by the 'noise' on the day of the game's release," says Roll7's founder and director Simon Bennett, "but it turned out that it was released in the busiest month for game marketing spend. There were like 500 games coming out on Steam, and The Witcher 3! But the game has actually outperformed the OlliOlli series on Steam, so commercially it's by far our biggest PC title."

Which makes its move to console a very valid enterprise—and with the release calendar a little kinder right now, Not a Hero has a greater chance of being found amongst the freshest batch of PSN offerings. And to anyone out there with a PlayStation 4, in desperate need of a game that can fill a spare 15 minutes with belly laughs and lashings of claret, I say: Look no further than what's staring you in the face, right now. Not a Hero's two-dimensional levels are laid out to be played at speed, each of them a puzzle of sorts, a maze, a race. It's a short-session godsend. Your chosen character smashes through windows, knocks down and executes goons at point-blank range, lets off pipe bombs and sets up gun turrets to tear through gang members, plasters up posters, steals cheese, burns ganja, retrieves bonsai trees, and unleashes purring-but-deadly kitten bombs about the place, all in the name of... politics, actually.

Things do tend to go bang in this game, and it's usually for the best that you're not standing next to whatever's the cause of said bang

There's a story behind Not a Hero's frenetic gameplay—gameplay that's closer to OlliOlli's muscle-memory twitch moves than first impressions might imply, albeit with a (I think unique, certainly uncommon) single-tap cover mechanic that sees your diminutive avatar duck into the shadows to avoid gunfire. Nutshell: Your bullets-spraying actually-a-bit-of-a-hero is in the employ of a purple anthropomorphic rabbit by the name of BunnyLord, who wants to be mayor of the game's city setting—and to boost his public ratings, he's taking lethal force to the criminal elements around the place. Drug dealers, weapons traders, wannabe fromagers—nobody's safe from BunnyLord's crew of effing and blinding hitmen and women.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's latest episode of The Real, 'The Real 'Better Call Saul'

Sure, why not, can't be worse than that other guy

You begin in control of Cockney gobshite Steve—fast, and always with a running commentary of his murderous exploits, but he can't reload on the move, and his little pistol doesn't pack that much of a punch. Next comes Cletus, a Scot with a shotgun who isn't quite so nimble but whose firearm of choice will see off any close-quarters enemy, and knock others off their feet. I might be imagining a difference in their speed—but the third character you unlock (based on BunnyLord's popularity), the very Welsh Samantha, definitely is a fast mover. There's also Jesus—not that Jesus—and Clive and Kimmy and more. They're all unique, and playing around with the game's roster will soon result in you finding mainstay favorites. While you begin with Steve, you might find yourself using him until you unlock the Latin lothario that is the fleet-footed Jesus—at least if you play anything like me.

And what's key is not to be reckless. The first few stages of Not a Hero can be taken hell for leather, but while there are often sub-quest-like rewards for hitting certain achievements in every scenario, which include speed-based challenges, you'll want to feel your way into each kill zone. I really wasn't fibbing when I told you it plays surprisingly like OlliOlli—and also the likes of Trials HD and Pumped BMX—where the kickflips and fakies can flow like liquid gold only after you've taken on a run at a more leisurely pace.

"Although it might not look like it, Not a Hero shares a similar rhythm to OlliOlli, in that once you have the 'flow' dialed, it really clicks," confirms Bennett. "Except that this time you're exploding baddies with insane weapons rather than landing a perfect 360 kickflip." In other words: Don't be surprised when you die, and die, and die, in pursuit of an all-objectives-passed run of gory glory. "The game plays awesome on PS4," Bennett continues, "and it feels really at home on the console, especially with the DualShock 4 ."

I can vouch for Not a Hero's PS4 suitability—Sony's contemporary system does feel as natural a home for the game as it was the comparably unsafe-for-minors Hotline Miami (which it definitely shares a little DNA with, not to mention a publisher in the shape of Devolver Digital). But there's a significant bump in the road it followed on its otherwise smooth translation from PC, namely the lack of a Vita version.

A bunch of fictional video game people, sitting about, right before some murdering

"On the Vita version, it was an unfortunate 'technical issues' scenario that was kinda out of our hands," Bennett says. "That's just how things go sometimes, we just hope that Vita owners can understand. It's never through lack of trying, or anything evil or malicious. If it were up to us the game would be on every platform under the sun, but that is just not possible with a team of five."

And what that team of five does next is inevitably going to attract industry attention before it's got so far as anything playable—you don't win a BAFTA in a category against the likes of the latest FIFA and Forza games, as announced by Linford Christie, and then vanish into the night with nothing to follow it. Right now, exactly what that is hasn't been announced. But it might not be more Not a Hero—at least, not immediately.

"We do love BunnyLord, and the gang," Bennett concludes. "They are now family. There is nothing currently planned , but never say never."

Not a Hero is out now for PlayStation 4 and, obviously, PC. Find Roll7 online here.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Facebook's dystopian "On This Day" function has been going for about a year now, but it feels like none of us have acknowledged the wretchedness of beginning each day by looking back at how previous days may have been better than the present: spending time with people we prefer to those currently in our lives, employed in more fulfilling jobs, walking on a beach in a country you'll never return to, and not scrolling through Facebook in an office wondering if it would be a bad thing if you got fired.

These daily nostalgia injections also serve to remind us how much of our lives are still on Facebook—not just the profile pictures we carefully curate to make us look fit, but the five-year-old tagged photos of that awful trip to some festival where you wore neon pink face paint. Don't think that people aren't bothering to look at those bits to see if you're a suitable person to have sex with; they definitely are.

Even if you're not a professional Facebook lurker, we've all done the entry-level "tagged photo left arrow" stalk, where pressing that one button takes you right back to the start of your friend's tagged photos. You in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt in an album called "NEWQUAY 2006, NEVER FORGET :)". You during that phase where you put concealer on your lips and tilted your head 90 degrees to the left every time a camera was in the same room as you.

That first photo says everything about you that you don't want to be said: Your misplaced assurance in your own sense of style, your weird face that hadn't properly found what shape it's supposed to be—it's like having your bar mitzvah video played on repeat for anyone to watch at any time.

With that in mind, we got a bunch of VICE staffers to write about their first tagged photos and what it says about them. Frankly, they're all idiots for doing this, because now these pictures are not only available to all their Facebook friends, but are going to come up on Google Images for the rest of eternity. Suckers.

Hanson O'Haver (Social Editor, VICE US)

This is a photo from 2007, of me on a beach in Santa Barbara, during my freshman year of college. I'm wearing a Weirdo Rippers-era No Age shirt under an American Apparel sweatshirt, thanks to a friend who worked at the store and let me buy things with a heavy discount. I'm also smoking two clove cigarettes at the same time because I was that type of guy.

I spent most of that year annoyed that I didn't get into any of the colleges I wanted to go to, mentally hating on fraternity guys and the girls who went to their parties, and trying to get good grades so I could transfer schools. I don't really remember much else. I took intro to philosophy that year so I know I must have felt alienated. I remember that one time a group of us got stoned and rode our bikes to see Pineapple Express. We ran into a drunk driver checkpoint and I was the only one who freaked out. I turned around, biked back to campus, locked my bike, walked to the theater, paid for a ticket, and watched the second half of the movie.

The next year I moved to New York, realized that everyone had been perfectly nice to me, and felt like an idiot for being a gloomster while people who wanted to be my friend played frisbee on a beach in December. I don't keep in touch with anyone from back then, but I've held on to lots of pictures of people in racist halloween costumes, just in case any of them ever run for office.

Paris Lees (Writer, VICE UK)

I've always been hot. This photo shows me soon after I transitioned from male to female, in the late 2000s, before it was trendy. I think I look pretty feminine for someone born physically male who hadn't, at that point, taken hormones or had any surgeries. That's my natural hair color at the roots, by the way. Long time no see! My bum's fatter now, which I prefer. Oh god, why the fuck is my ass on Facebook? I don't think I had much validation in other areas of my life back then, so a lot of my self-worth came from feeling sexy. I thought that men's lust for me proved I was a real girl. I thought I was a fucking Pussycat Doll.

I was an escort as a teen and advertised this pic in the back of Exchange and Mart magazine. I was a "fully functional Pre-Op TS" offering "the full girlfriend experience" for "discreet gents." Laser hair removal and food aren't free. The photo was taken by some sleazeball called Callum, who made bukkake films and the odd bit of "tranny" porn. I thought his place was posh at the time—now I see the bed frame is tatty IKEA shit. I never did any of his videos because I always knew I'd be a big deal one day and didn't want it coming back to bite me in that gorgeous bum of mine. I'm on X-Tube, though. No face. Tenner if you can find me.

River Donaghey (Associate Editor, VICE US)

Sorry for the lo-res pic everyone

An older friend of mine had a bunch of acres of farmland outside of Eugene, Oregon, so he decided to build a stage and put on a thing called VirgoFest. He invited my band to play, and this is from that time. We all camped out on his property and took drugs and got chigger bites. I was 15 and had hair that could only be described as "Peter Frampton-esque." My nails were painted black, but the camera mercifully missed that.

I'm wearing a Wowee Zowee-era Pavement shirt that was very short for some reason. My belly button was always exposed. Those two girls were older than me—they'd driven down from Washington State to see our show. At a point during the acid trip later that night one of them said she didn't believe in evolution and everyone thought she was kidding. The one on the right took my shirt when she left. I never saw them again.

Joel Golby (Staff Writer, VICE UK)

Ah yes, here's me rocking a Sandi Toksvig–esque haircut and the kind of sunglasses they give you after you have laser eye surgery. I am wearing one of those sort of zip-thru granddad cardigans that were the only thing Burtons sold for a good 18-month period ten years ago, and I would not describe this as a "strong look." Not even at all.

I remember this party: It was the end of second year of university at the house of a guy I hated. In the first year this guy came into our halls and tried to invent a new slang term for cool, which was "chili pepper." As in: "Yo, bro! Chilli pepper!" Later it was shortened to just "chili." He found true meaning in his life when he joined the university ultimate frisbee team. He called ultimate frisbee "disc." "That disc sesh was really chili" was an actual sentence he actually said. He wore two wrist sweatbands at all times. I hated him so much. I still do. I wonder what he's up to now, actually? What was his name... Simon something? "Si." Oh shit, I've just found him on—he's a business development manager. That is so Si. He has written his job title like this: "BDM." His Facebook page is every cliché going: He has checked himself in to his local commuting train station. He has done a "flight booked Milan 2016" update with a cry-laugh emoji. He's shared one of those recipe videos doing the rounds. This one seems to be shepherd's pie jacket potatoes. They look revolting.

I wonder if he's happy, you know? I bet, deep down, he's happy. I bet he goes home and eats a jacket potato stuffed with shepherd's pie filling and thinks about Milan and cuddles up tight to his girlfriend and thinks: nothing. I bet he thinks nothing. This has long been my theory: That the truly basic cannot be deeply unhappy because they have so little synaptic firing that they are genuinely satisfied with Family Guy reruns and mince-based meals and early nights and holidays pencilled in for eight months' time.

But what am I doing that is so good, huh? I mean: Who the fuck am I? Why did I hate him in the first place? Is it because he was everything I was not? He was popular: that was why we were at the party. Girls liked him, which was an additional reason why I was at the party. In fact, one girl entirely mistook me for him and started... I don't know, talking to me. Why did I hate him? Maybe... maybe I'm the dickhead of this story, you know? Me in my fucking sunglasses indoors and my "Dad's taken the divorce quite badly so he's moving in with a man called Hilary" haircut and my fucking zip-thru cardigan. Sitting silently in the kitchen of a house party drinking beer and talking to the same friend I always talked to. Taking this blurry-ass picture. I'm awful. I absolutely loathe myself.

Daisy-May Hudson (Producer, VICE UK)

This is me, breaking free from the chains of Epping, at the tender age of 15 for my first ever house party. I'd never been to London on the train before and my mum called me at least four times before I'd even got there. Up until this point my drink of choice had always been Malibu and pineapple, and my look basically involved straightening my baby hair so hard that it stuck up on its end. But here I was navigating my way through a sea of nu-rave boys wearing pink skinny jeans with kirby grips in their hair listening to Cajun Dance Party. I had discovered a whole new world. I hadn't forgotten my roots, though: If you look closely, you can see my necklace says "Epping Gash."

Aws Al-Jezairy (VICE News)

This was in my early days of getting smashed. I was an obnoxious drunk with little self-control and wouldn't consider it a successful night out unless I had turned paralytic or picked a fight with someone. This was at a nu-rave themed party that actually took place during the height of nu-rave. Don't know if that makes us meta or just dickheads. It was when I first discovered American Apparel too, so I was head-to-toe in it—apart from my jacket, which was probably bought from Krisp or Mark One. I was wearing a stolen pair of the staple AA striped thigh-high socks, and jewelry that I had stolen during my biggest and only ever shoplifting binge. I think you'll agree that I look great.

Matt Taylor (Crime Editor, VICE US)

This photo doesn't actually include my face, which is probably for the best. It's the spring of 2006, and I was going through a phase where I was trying to make up for my previous phase of really caring about homework. So here I am in an album titled "Beer Pong," getting into some kind of Natty Light-and-weed-inspired backyard boxing match, and, in fairness, loving every bit of it.

I also may have been engaged in some subconscious effort to make up for the fact that a year earlier, I got in a fight with a guy I worked with—we were cabana boys—and didn't exactly prevail in the parking-lot melee.

Jamie Clifton (Deputy Editor, VICE UK)

This is me in 2006, which was the year "Gravity's Rainbow" (Note: This is a song by Klaxons, which were a big deal in the UK.) came out, which you probably could have guessed from the pink headband and green metallic eye shadow I have smeared over quite a lot of my face. I was at a nu-rave fancy dress party, but I did also go outside dressed like this a few times.

The Klaxons look wasn't a super popular one in the town I went to college in—the cool guys in the canteen were more into Bench T-shirts and those funny wet-gel faux-hawk mullet things you now only see on European footballers or jobbing magicians—but don't worry, no one ever shouted insults at me. I was never made to feel persecuted for being really into primary colors. Still, it's a pretty good illustration of the confidence of youth. Soon after this was taken, a load of stuff happened that made me grow up really quickly and develop a crippling self-awareness that would make it impossible to do anything without second-guessing it ever again. Shouts to adulthood!

The lip ring is a hangover from my pop-punk phase. I did get a lot of shit for that. A kid outside a cinema called me a mosher, so I called him a townie, so he punched me in the throat, so I hit him on the arm, and an usher broke up the only fistfight I've ever been in.

Tshepo Mokoena (Weekend Editor, VICE UK)

Rectangular frames, like street harassment or every Clapham bar, are a reminder of everything that's wrong with humanity. I used to wear them in my part-hippie, mostly clueless about clothes phase, when I'd cut off my chemically treated hair and grown dreads as a political statement on rejecting Westernized beauty standards. Or something. I was 16, both naive and idealistic. My BFF of six years at the time took this photo in the bedroom of one of our closest friends. She lived a few doors down from me, in our electric-fenced, guard-patrolled suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe, and was legally old enough to have that just-seen bottle of South African cream liqueur in her room.

OK, so, the candy penis pouch. It was a gift from one male friend to another, given the day this was taken, and we may or may not have later eaten it off his body.

Sam Wolfson (Executive Editor, VICE UK)

The photo comes from an album called "Uncle Nick and Aunty Claire's Silver Wedding Anniversary." They're not relatives of mine. The truth is even more depressing: When I was about 16 I would make some extra cash taking genuinely the worst PA system in Britain to bar mitzvahs and 50ths and "DJing." I remember this one went very badly and I was essentially booed off my by friend's parents and all their mates. I think we just put on The Best of Motown in the end. Still got £150 though.

Bruno Bayley (VICE UK Magazine Editor)

I have never had Facebook. I was heavily dug into a phase of pretension at the time all my friends started getting into it, and made such a fuss about how crap and self-congratulatory it was that I couldn't ever sign up, even years later when, at times, I imagine I could have enjoyed it. I did, however, get a MySpace, which was, unsurprisingly, crap and totally self-congratulatory. It was probably worse than having Facebook because it was consciously not Facebook.

MySpace thankfully coincided with my end of university/start of going out in east London phase. Accordingly, all the photos on it are of me at my friends' club nights wearing bad hats and T-shirts with lots of writing on them. This is representative of the genre: me in a "fun" hat, wearing a T-shirt with my friend's record label's logo on it, at Push, an indie-electro piss-up attended almost exclusively by acquaintances of the promoters, at Astoria 2, pretending to be more drunk than I was because I thought it made me look cool.

Chicago is one of the most diverse cities in the country—but it is also one of the most segregated. The city's backbone, Halsted Street, cuts through all of Chicago's diverse neighborhoods, so we took a tour down Halsted to see how all these different worlds connect.

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This one little plant has sparked an entire industry full of lucrative careers. Photo via Flickr user Rainer Vandalismus

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

A few weeks ago, when I was interviewing reporter-turned-pot activist Charlo Greene at a weed-themed ball, she hinted that I should ditch my job and follow her lead.

"If you were to transition what you're doing right now in journalism to the cannabis industry, there are a number of jobs you could apply for. And what's even greater, there's even more opportunity for you to create exactly what you want to do because there's so much need," she told me, at which point I interjected, "Are you trying to recruit me?" "Maybe," she replied.

I'd been asking Greene what Canadians could expect to come out of legalization. In short, her answer was: money and opportunity.

"Every time you look up there's another headline about some new innovation or product or service that's out there and it creates real value... We're just at the tip of the iceberg now."

The event drew people who worked in TV, education, finance, real estate—all looking to cash in on cannabis. The move makes a lot of sense. Weed may not be 100 percent legal yet, but once it is, it's expected to generate $5 billion in annual revenue in Canada. In anticipation, plenty of above-board (and semi-above board) jobs are already cropping up, some of which pay serious cash.

On the corporate side of things, people working as consultants or in quality assurance for licensed producers are cracking six figures. Meanwhile budtending and retail positions are in line with what you'd expect from comparable service sector jobs. VICE asked people in the industry about the opportunities that are available now.

Health Canada Inspector

Salary: $71,591–$96,000

Being a Health Canada inspector is as legit as it gets. You are a narc—and as such you're paid very well. According to postings obtained by VICE, these jobs require you to suss out "regulated parties who perform activities such as importation, production, and distribution of narcotics, targeted substances, restricted drugs, marijuana for medical purposes, industrial hemp, controlled drugs, and precursors." Basically, this means you visit legal grow-ops and make sure everything follows the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

You need a science degree and one to two years of experience in the areas of "regulation and/or production and/or quality control of drugs, medical devices, natural health products, consumer products, pesticides, tobacco, food, plants."

As a perk, as if getting paid to tour weed factories wasn't sweet enough, you get to travel lots.

Who wouldn't want to hang out in a forest of weed all day? Photo via Facebook

Master Grower

Salary: $100,000 and up

The master grower, or "pot whisperer" as one newspaper put it, oversees every aspect of growing for a licensed producer including selecting strains and seeds, cloning, potting, transplanting, feeding, trimming, harvesting, packaging, and inventory. The space can be massive—Tweed Inc., one of Canada's largest suppliers, has a 30,000-square-foot production area—so they're split up into rooms managed by section growers.

Tony Lacombe, Tweed's brand new master grower, told VICE he has no academic expertise in agriculture. He's just been growing weed for a hella long time.

"All of my experience comes from practice: hands-on experience/experimentation during the a year.

Photo via Flickr user Fotoblog Rare

Director of Quality Assurance

Salary: $100,000 and up

Buying weed on the black market means when you end up with a shitty batch, you're left with no real recourse. It's frustrating as hell, but calling out your dealer when there aren't many other options is kind of like biting the hand that feeds you. That's what makes legal weed and its promises of quality control so appealing. Tweed claims its quality control measures go beyond Health Canada requirements. Everything from growing instruments, to the facility, to the plants themselves, is tracked and tested. As an example of how thorough the process is, production rooms at Tweed are monitored "to help ensure only the cleanest air enters" and products are tested "for pathogens that could be contracted through oral consumption or inhalation—so you know there is no risk regardless of your method of delivery."

Tom Shipley, who performs this role at Tweed, was previously a Health Canada researcher who worked in toxicology and later evaluated vaccines. Shipley told VICE weed's dubious legal status "can act as a research barrier or deterrent, limiting the number of peer-reviewed publications on the topic."

In addition to overseeing everything that goes down at the facility, it's his job to investigate consumer complaints.

Freshly trimmed cannabis. Photo via Flickr user Mark

Trimmer

Salary: $11.25/hour and up

This job sounds dull as fuck, but it's a pretty straightforward way to make a buck. Suited up in coveralls, a mask, and goggles, you trim buds for legal growers, removing the sticky stuff from stems and leaves. "It's an easy job," said Sandra Colasanti, vice president of sales and business relations for Remo Cannabrands, a BC company that sells weed-friendly nutrients to legal growers.

"But it's mundane and because you sit there for that many hours, you're also ending up with carpal tunnel syndrome." (She said black market trimming jobs pay around $20–$25 an hour.)

Trimmers are checked before they leave a facility, so unfortunately there's no way to pocket any green for personal use.

A Weeds Glass & Gifts location. Photo via Facebook

Dispensary Employee

Salary: $12/hour and up

From dabtending to scaling to straight-up customer service, dispensaries are probably the best bet for a young person looking to get into the weed biz.

Don Briere owns Weeds Glass & Gifts, a dispensary chain that has 28 locations in BC and Toronto. (There are an estimated 40 dispensaries in Toronto, with more opening up by the day. Vancouver has more than 100, though the city will likely crack down on many of those in the next couple months.)

"I'm like Starbucks," Briere told VICE. "I basically sell half of a store to a working partner, so I'm spreading it out in the community."

Likewise, he said his staffers almost act as restaurant employees—a dabtender serves up a "shot of cannabis"; scalers measure out different amounts of chronic.

They start out making $12 an hour and graduate to $15 an hour after a 90-day probation period.

Briere, who takes home $84,000 a year, also pays his workers medical, dental, and pensions.

"All these jobs were created because cannabis is now going to be legal," he said. "We support police, schools, and hospitals, and (organized crime) doesn't."

A dabtender at Hotbox Cafe in Toronto. Photo via Facebook

Vapour Lounge

Salary: $50,000–$60,000 (customer service)

Hotbox, one of the oldest vapor lounges in the GTA, features a large patio where people can sess as well as a private member's lounge with a dab room and video games.

Owner Abi Roach opened it in Kensington Market in 2003, inspired after a trip to Jamaica where she saw people openly smoking pot everywhere.

"I had an opportunity to take out a small business loan and I thought, What do I love to do the most? I love smoking weed."

For now, the location, which is undergoing major renovations, is BYOP, though Roach hopes that will change when the laws do. The venue offers snacks, but no alcohol, and closes at 11 PM on weekends to avoid late-night drunks.

"I'd rather just close and not have to clean puke and deal with people fighting and screaming," said Roach. "I just want a place where people can come and smoke a joint."

It's not just your average weed brownies out there these days. Photo by Allison Elkin

Baker

Salary: $25/hour

Baking is a risky business right now. A Supreme Court ruling from last June made it legal for people to consume cannabis any which way they pleased, including eating cookies, brownies, etc., but it's still not legal to make those products for sale. Vancouver has implemented an outright ban on edible sales, using the "think of the children" (who might mistake weed candy for regular candy) logic. So bakers are pretty much operating in a gray zone.

"Before the for a baker found making cannabis butter, it was akin to running a meth lab," said Tracy Curley, a patient's advocate who owns The Wake N'Bakery in Toronto.

"A pedophile would do less time than someone making cannabis butter."

She learned to bake from a dispensary owner and two-and-a-half years ago started the business, tailoring her recipes for cookies, s'mores, and pixie sticks to suit patients with diabetes, cancer, and celiac disease.

Between processing the plant and turning it into coconut oil and butter, "it's a full-time job."

The market has grown incredibly in the last couple years, she said, and those looking to bake can start by turning to YouTube.

"I'm kind of looking forward in the next year or two to being completely out of business."

Beauty/Health

Salary: $24,000–$36,000

Yes, weed beauty products are a thing now. So if you're one of those crafty people who likes to make your own soap, you might be in luck.

Sarah G. is one of those people. She started Mary Jane's Touch in 2012 with a medicated balm used to treat chronic pain; the line has since grown to include soaps, bath salts, body butters, and scrubs. She also makes healthy THC-infused snacks, like granola, root vegetable chips, dried fruit, and pressed juices.

"We saw in dispensaries or compassion clubs were sugar laden sodas and juices, and felt like there should be a healthier, more natural option."

She and her partner work out of an office space, where they do everything from production to packaging. But they're expanding to a team of eight and will soon offer medicated massages, facial masks, and a delicious sounding "canna-cocoa hydrating wrap."

(Employees would make around $15 an hour plus incentives, she said.)

As for training, Sarah said, "We're still a ways away from there being a formal education system for cannabis jobs in Canada." So basically, people with backgrounds in health and beauty have an upper hand.

Consultant

Salary: A few hundred to a few thousand dollars per project

Yep, weed is now so corporate that it warrants its own specialized consultants. The term consultant has always seemed very vague to me, doubly so in a weed context. But basically it's someone who helps people break into the industry.

"There is a spectrum of passionate people who want to enter the cannabis industry, ranging from working trades people to pharmaceutical chemists, but not everyone knows how to enter," Alexzander Samuelsson, a Toronto-based tutor who recently launched Devat Consultant, told VICE. He says his background in chemistry and history as a medical patient make him right for the job. On a day-to-day basis, he said he connects investors and entrepreneurs.

In addition to his rate, Samuelsson said he negotiates for equity of around 20 percent or a mix of equity and wages.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Jason Paris

New Orleans is the Vegas of the South, a town where debauchery is not only allowed but compulsory. A combination of Confederate and freak flags fly above it—they make strange bedfellows, of course, but find common ground in the intoxication levels of the people flying them. Bourbon Street alone is a veritable jambalaya of bars, all catering to wildly different demographics, from people who unironically collect Hard Rock Cafe merchandise to absinthe aficionados. There are also things like bookstores, yes, and very good ones at that. But if you happen to enter one, a dusty refuge from the ceaselessly blowing hurricane that is Dauphine Street, your solitude will be inevitably ruined by the existence of someone in an "I Got Bourbon Faced on Shit Street" shirt stumbling inside looking for a place to piss.

I no longer drink. I used to, quite heavily. So heavily, in fact, you might think I was trying to kill myself, and you might be right. Scratch that. You are right. My sobriety is a recent development—so far, so good, but, as with anything in life, able to shatter apart at any moment. This machine doesn't run on dreams, and I was in New Orleans for a stand-up comedy gig that would pay a substantial chunk of my rent this month.

I have been to New Orleans. I have lived in New Orleans. Though rarely, if ever, did I let the bon temps roulet during my tenure there. My partner at the time, a man who did not drink or drug and made a point of letting you know the reasons why, barred me from doing so. The days I spent there were not the darkest, but they were also not especially bright. My partner and I would cut the tedium of our directionless existences with meaningless arguments, usually predicated on a slight I had committed in his eyes. Hurricane Katrina provided a forced break from our regularly scheduled programming—an opportunity to argue in a series of new environments, which we took to with aplomb. In spite of it all, I didn't drink—a feat I now consider miraculous.

To say New Orleans triggers emotions that would normally lead this garden variety lush to the bottle is an understatement. But there I found myself, alone, no longer forced to answer to my ex, or to anyone else for that matter. I was merely there, powerless, wondering... now what?

Once you get off the plane, demon alcohol is there. Hell, you get on the plane, and it's there. It's everywhere. Tempting you, taunting you. Escape from the psychic terrors that plague your existence, it promises, is but sips away. Bereft of these sips, in a situation where you would normally take to them like a duck to water, coping appears impossible. You intellectually know it is possible, of course, but fuck if you know the cheat codes to pull it off.

The check-in person at my hotel handed me two vouchers for free "welcome punch," served in the lobby's filament bulb-laden bar. Fantastic. When I entered my room, a complimentary bottle of wine sat on the desk with a note from the concierge, instructing me to enjoy it with her compliments. Fantastic-er. It felt as though the entire goddamned world, or at least the state of Louisiana, was conspiring to convince me to hit the sauce. I sighed and sat on the bed, staring at the enormous statue of General Robert E. Lee outside my window. (The South is not known for its subtlety.)

I used the bottle of wine as a doorstop, as I felt I needed to give it a sense of purpose, a reason to justify its existence in light of the fact that I was incapable of enjoying it in the manner in which it was actually created.

Now lying on the bed, I could see the wine out of the corner of my eye. Tired of staring at a defiant General Lee, I shifted my attention to it; soon it consumed my entire thought process. It was a red, one I'd drank before, from a country I'll never be able to afford to visit. My chest tightened with anxiety.

I gave in. Who the fuck was I to turn down free anything, even if that anything was poison? Cunning, baffling, powerful poison, ready, willing and able to destroy my life?

The only problem, other than the obvious problem that I was about to willingly hop off the wagon, was my lack of a wine opener. I consulted YouTube for a solution, eventually deciding to heed the advice of an excitable Russian who had successfully opened a bottle with a mere door key. I had one of those! Heck, I had THREE of those!

Approximately 15 seconds later, the key to my best friend's apartment snapped in half, its teeth wedged permanently in an impenetrable cork. All at once, my ability to accept logic kicked back in and I realized this was a fortuitous development. Why I was willing to waste my sobriety on a perfectly good doorstop without a second thought? I suppose it was because I wasn't thinking, just devolving back into my former self.

Image via Flickr uservxla

I took to watching the hotel channel—you know the one, the one that exists in every tourist trap and informs you, the visitor of its fair city, about all the things you simply must do while briefly in its confines, for the sole purpose of distracting me from myself. I watched nothing else, even after the channel's programming looped and began again. In my favorite segment, a woman interviewed two inebriated men outside the birthplace of the Hurricane, a rum-based beverage that looks and tastes like hummingbird nectar. The man on the right, sweating into his polo shirt, pronounced the drink "Whore-icane." This was not intentional, merely a byproduct of his supremely altered state. The host, slightly tipsy herself, chortled. I found her level of intoxication charming; his, the antithesis thereof. I knew, if I drank, I could never be her level of intoxicated. I would always be his.

And so, in the interest of, at the very least, not looking like a fucking putz, I once again resigned myself to a lifetime of abstaining. The overwhelming majority of my fellow visitors, of course, had not taken such a pledge, but they also weren't drunks. They were drunk, sure, but they weren't drunks. Big difference. I didn't hate them. I didn't resent them. I just wasn't them. I turned the television off and went to bed, ignoring as best I could the sound of their revelry outside.

Follow Megan on Twitter.

Rick Santorum praying in 2012. Photo via WikiCommons

As is usually the case in presidential primaries, the days immediately following the Iowa caucuses on Monday have been full of reality checks for the more hopeless candidates. Earlier on Wednesday Rand Paul dropped out after finishing fifth in Iowa and disappointing in the New Hampshire polls—joining Democrat Martin O'Malley and fellow Republican Mike Huckabee as a caucus casualty—and now CNN is reporting that Rick Santorum is following suit.

The Republican former senator has been campaigning for president for what seems like forever—his moment in the sun came when he edged out eventual nominee Mitt Romney in a close Iowa contest in 2012. But since then, he has faded into obscurity: This time around, he never got the poll numbers to appear on the main GOP debate stage, and was increasingly marginalized. In a pre-caucus story headlined "Contemplating Oblivion With Santorum, 2016's Saddest Candidate," NBC News reported that at one event Santorum hosted, "Much of the crowd consisted of Chinese teenagers in matching blue T-shirts visiting Iowa as part of a program to learn about American democracy."

Before the caucuses, Santorum may have been holding out hope that evangelical voters in Iowa would suddenly decide to reward him for his years of social conservatism. But it turns out that pretty much the only person who wants Rick Santorum to be president is Rick Santorum, so he's expected to announce on Wednesday night that he's going home.

Still in the race are Carly Fiorina, who barely outperformed Santorum, and John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush, who are hoping that they can prove their viability as candidates in New Hampshire. Jim Gilmore is also still in the race, though no one really knows why.

All photos by author

Somewhere along the line, photography went from a means of recording reality to a force that informs it. Instead of living our lives and periodically capturing the "Kodak moments" as they occur, we began to manufacture them. I don't know if this is an inherently bad thing—maybe it's just the logical next step in the world Susan Sontag described in 1977, where photography offered "indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had." But we no longer simply go places and photograph what happens. What happens is largely a function of what we photograph. Now more than ever, we author our lives.

It's with this in mind that I decided to go on a road trip across the United States without leaving the comfort of my home. #InstaRoadTrip2016 is a two week journey from New York to California—a classic American voyage of youthful soul-searching and self-discovery—made entirely on Instagram. I mapped out my route and have been exploring all this great nation has to offer using photographs that have been geotagged in the locations I want to visit. I've been on the road for several days now and hope to reach the Pacific sometime in early February.

Why go on #InstaRoadTrip2016? Because it's confusing. I don't mean that I'm hoping to make something that, like a lot of art, is intentionally elusive and hard to make meaning of. What I'm interested in is disorientation—the way our culture of image making and sharing can make fact feel like fiction, and fiction like fact. That is, as personal storytelling/broadcasting becomes our primary motivation for being, acting and doing, the line between story and reality is sure to blur.

My mom currently thinks I'm driving across the American Rust Belt. Either she hasn't been carefully reading the captions under my pictures, or she has and somehow still thinks I'm on a "real" old fashioned road trip. The point is that she's confused. The point is that she's reading my story, but is unsure where her son is, what he's up to, or how he's doing.

Gideon Jacobs is a writer based in Brooklyn. You can follow his work here.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson explaining the gang indictment at his office in Downtown Brooklyn. Photo by the author

On Wednesday, Kings County District Attorney Ken Thompson was explaining how local gangs communicate over Facebook to a coterie of reporters at his office in Downtown Brooklyn.

"'That's opp zone,'" he explained, "as in, 'opposition zone.'"

Continuing down the list on a white placard at his left, Thompson chose a line from another suspect: "And 'I wanna boom it up,'" he said, means, "I wanna shoot them."

According to Thompson and the New York Police Department, the online chat in question took place just before a barbecue in Canarsie, Brooklyn, in May 2014. The young men learned rivals would be there, and hatched a plan to hit the party with gunfire, Thompson said. From the windows of their cars later that night, they allegedly sprayed the party with bullets, injuring two women and one man. Shortly after, one of the suspects—Jerome Myrie, better known just as "Myrie" and still at large—apparently took to Facebook to boast of the bloodshed.

The plan, in the alleged gang members' minds at least, had worked.

But on Wednesday, the allegedly sinister planning—and subsequent social media celebration—was used as evidence in a 76-count indictment against 18 alleged gang members, including Myrie himself. The men are all between the ages of 18 and 27, and are said to hang on Flatbush Avenue, Newkirk Avenue and Ditmas Avenue in Brooklyn. 15 of them have been booked on charges including second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and weapons possession (nine guns were recovered) for attacks across the borough, the barbecue drive-by among them.

The suspects, the DA claims, are part of a larger group called Folk Nation—a sort of gang alliance, or set, with origins in 1970s Chicago that Thompson compared to the American and National Leagues in professional baseball. The idea is that the Folk Nation's allied member gangs are in a constant state of war with a rival coalition, People Nation. The 18 suspects' chapter in Brooklyn is allegedly called No Love City, and according to the DA, the local Crips chapter is its chief enemy.

"To enforce their dominance, they often directed their violence at rival gang members," Thompson, who announced the indictment alongside New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, said Wednesday. "Essentially they would get in cars and go on 'hunting expeditions,' looking for rivals to kill."

In one such example, Thompson delivered a minute-by-minute narration as a surveillance tape from a Canarsie courtyard in July 2014 played for reporters. A 23-year-old suspect named Corey Roberts was seen arguing with someone on a sunny, summer afternoon, as young children passed by on scooters. The video then shows him opening fire from the entrance, as people scream and scatter. His bullets hit two innocent bystanders, one in the heart. (Somehow, both survived.)

According to prosecutors and police officers, violence in Brooklyn surged after a No Love City member was killed by a rival on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood last October. Some of the Brooklyn suspects apparently saw on Instagram that several of their rivals were at a filming of rapper Meek Mills' music video in DUMBO. As the indictment reads, several of them allegedly rushed over in cars and "engaged in a gun battle with rival gang members."

The suspects are said to have escaped through the neighboring communities of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, where this sort of violence is virtually unheard of, and ditched a bullet-riddled car on the street. However, the DA says, they didn't realize that blood and fingerprints were left at the scene, offering crucial evidence to investigators.

The resulting bust, conducted by the NYPD's new Gun Violence Suppression Division, is the latest indication that gang warfare is still rattling major sections of New York. That's especially true in Brooklyn—which is often called the "bloodiest borough" by local tabloids. According to law enforcement officials, a select group of young men are largely responsible for the 18 percent rise in gang-related shootings in 2015.

In high-crime communities, recently-funded "violence interruption" groups have taken to mediation and intensive workshops, in hopes of discouraging shootings before it's too late. And just last month, both Thompson and Bratton announced Project Fast Track, which sets up specific courts for gun-possession charges. (When I asked Thompson if this bust would be tried there, he said no. "We'd like to fast-track them to prison," he told me.)

" have no concern for human life," Commissioner Bratton told reporters, reiterating the tough tone. "And so we should have no concern in putting them away for 25 years."

As of Wednesday morning, all but three of the suspects had been arrested and arraigned. One is awaiting extradition from New Jersey, while two others remain on the lam—both of whom Thompson promised would be arrested in coming days. As Bratton suggested, 17 of the men face up to 25 years in prison, and the lone suspect facing a straight murder charge could do life.

"We're here to say, 'No more,'" Thompson said. "This indictment means to us that our streets don't belong to violent gangs, or armed thugs. They belong to the people of Brooklyn."

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