The outside of the Madison Hotel. Photo by the author

Last November, the tenants of the Madison Hotel, a 220-room residential hotel in downtown Los Angeles, sued the property owners for conditions they described as "untenantable." Among the complaints listed: Trash wasn't being collected within the building, leading to a cockroach infestation; the elevator frequently broke and wasn't fixed; the communal TV room and lobby were stripped of furniture; mold grew up the walls; there was a bedbug infestation; and the landlord allegedly threatened to forcibly remove certain tenants, some of whom said they were harassed about their sexual orientation or their disabilities.

The tenants who sued—there were 15, most of them elderly, disabled, or military veterans—hoped that a lawsuit would make the Madison Hotel, which has some of the last affordable housing units in downtown LA, habitable again. But so far, it hasn't.

"Essentially, for the last month and a half, the owners have ignored that there's a lawsuit," said Jeanne Nishimoto, attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. "They weren't even turning on the heat in the building when it was very cold. And it's an all-concrete building—you can guess how cold it gets in there." (William Holdings, LLC, one of the defendants in the law suit, declined to comment for this story.)

Eventually, the tenants filed a court order to ensure the building was kept at a temperature of 70 degrees during the day and 65 degrees at night. But not much else has changed, and it's unlikely to, as long as the low-income residents of the Madison Hotel occupy potentially profitable real estate. According to the people familiar with the situation, landlords using underhanded tactics to evict tenants in Los Angeles goes much further than just the Madison Hotel.

"We definitely an increase in harassment and intimidation throughout the city of Los Angeles," said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, and one of the loudest voices for tenants' rights in the city. Those most vulnerable to harassment are the poor, the elderly, and immigrants who don't speak English, he said. "They get papers telling them to get out, and in most cases they do. They don't know they have an opportunity to fight it."

Figures from the Housing Rights Center (HRC) show that official harassment complaints have more than doubled within two years: There were 251 complaints in fiscal year 2012–2013; by 2014–2015, there were 524. Chancela Al-Mansour, executive director of the HRC, said that the numbers don't differentiate between tenants complaining of harassment from landlords or other tenants. "Although, in Los Angeles, the large majority of harassment complaints are made by a tenant against the landlord," she wrote in an email.

The city of Los Angeles doesn't have a specific anti-tenant harassment ordinance, but the city of Santa Monica—a neighborhood on LA's west side, and technically a separate city—does keep track of tenant harassment. Complaints there by renters have similarly spiked in recent years: 38 complaints in 2012–2013 versus 81 complaints in 2014–2015. To date, there have already been 55 in this fiscal year.

"We are aware that tenant harassment continues to be a problem," said Adam Radinsky, chief of Santa Monica's Consumer Protection Division. "But I'm cautious about drawing conclusions." He explained that this might be the result of tenants in Santa Monica getting smarter about their rights. "It could also be that buildings are being bought by new owners, or even by banks after foreclosure who are trying to evict tenants without being fully aware of the law."

Others agree that the numbers don't tell the whole story. One reason for the increase could be due to cash-strapped tenants filing harassment complaints to give them extra time to muster-up the rent, said Melissa Marsh, an LA-based attorney who represents both tenants and landlords. "We've had a lot of job losses in the last couple of months, despite what you're hearing in the media."

Los Angeles is the least affordable rental market in the US, according to a study by UCLA. Of those at the bottom 20 percent of the income ladder, nearly 78 percent pay half or more of their income on housing (the gold-standard is considered 30 percent of income spent on rent). Seven out of the ten most overcrowded zip-codes in the country are in LA, and the city has the largest number of chronically homeless people in the nation.

LA's poorest are being squeezed to the fringes of the city or out onto the streets by the lack of affordable housing. Since 2001, nearly 19,000 rental units in LA have disappeared through the Ellis Act (a law that allows property owners to evict a tenant in order to remove the unit from the rental market, as long as they don't re-rent within a certain period). As of 2014, there was a deficit of 376,735 affordable homes needed for extremely low-income renters—at the same time, residential development in LA is booming and rental costs are steadily increasing.

The latest housing bubble inflating property prices in the city almost certainly drives tenant harassment complaints, said Dianne Prado, a senior staff attorney at the Inner City Law Center. "Share holders who own these LLC's, they come in, they don't do their due diligence or actually care what condition these buildings are in. All they're doing is coming in to purchase these buildings to flip it to see how much more money they can make."

Marsh is keen to distinguish between official types of harassment (landlords making threats or illegally entering apartments, for example) and building and safety code violations (like allowing a building to deteriorate). But Steve Diaz, community organizer at the Community Action Network, said it's not always that simple. "Landlords use a wide range of ways to get what they want."

A few years ago, the owner of another residential hotel in downtown LA began construction on a building, with the intent to push the tenants out, according to Diaz. "And then the next thing, these tenants got a knock on the door, 'Hey, I'm the new manager, would you like to move for $500?' That's some of the worst kind of harassment, right there."

The city is paying attention to the problem—on the surface at least. Three city council motions to address things like the affordable housing crisis and the Rent Stabilization Act are pending. But Gross isn't convinced this is a sign that things are about to change. "I think this is a test to see how serious the city is in wanting to address the crisis we're facing. When you try to address unbridled development in the city, you're talking about a very powerful force that has tremendous resources, and which provides a lot of campaign contributions."

In the meantime, Marsh says renters should "smarten-up" about their rights, like taking the time to read through a lease before signing it. "Everyone has a duty and obligation to educate themselves about their responsibilities and rights."

Follow Daniel Ross on Twitter.

Mug shot via New Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office

Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir and subject of HBO's true crime miniseries The Jinx, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to unlawful possession of a .38-caliber revolver. The deal was reached after Durst got arrested by the FBI in New Orleans last March, with the feds apparently concerned he might flee the country as a result of the renewed interest in his case, The New York Times reports.

Durst is expected to get sentenced to 85 months in federal prison. But he still hasn't been arraigned on a Los Angeles County district attorney's charge that he murdered his close friend and girl Friday, Susan Berman, in 2000. The plea bargain over the gun charge requires LA prosecutors to arraign him by August 18, meaning they have a little over six months to put the case together and transfer Durst from New Orleans to California, where his crack defense team will contend with Berman's execution-style murder by a gunshot to the head.

Durst's adult life has been marred by allegations and mystery. He was born rich—inheriting a slice of his father Seymour Durst's real estate fortune. In 1982, Durst's first wife, Kathleen McCormick, disappeared, and has never been found; her family has believed for many years that Durst is responsible for her disappearance. Meanwhile, Durst was acquitted of murder in an unrelated incident in 2003, even though he described the process of chopping up the body of his 71-year-old Galveston, Texas neighbor, Morris Black, and dumping it in the ocean. (His defense was that the lethal gunshot got discharged accidentally, during a struggle.)

The event did, however, result in a felony conviction for evidence tampering and bail-jumping.

After Berman's body was discovered, a letter was found apparently attempting to tip off the LAPD to the location of a "cadaver" at her address. The handwriting was analyzed at the time, albeit inconclusively. However, analysis performed in the HBO series, as well as Durst's audiotaped confession, were cited in the arrest warrant last year.

If and when the murder case does go to trial, the scene in the courtroom will surely be a colorful one. Durst's lawyer is spunky Texas litigator Dick DeGuerin, who won the acquittal in Texas, and the relevant district attorney is LA's legendary cold-case prosecutor John Lewin.

In 2012, after putting a convict away for 26 years for a murder that occurred in 1985, Lewin told the press, "The passage of time played to this case's advantage," adding, "Lies are hard to remember. The truth never changes."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Every weeknight, at the oddly specific hour of 12:37 AM EST, Reggie Watts can be found on The Late Late Show with James Corden. And on most evenings, Watts, who serves as the program's bandleader, is given the brief opportunity to pose one question to Corden's guests, most of whom are unassuming celebrities eager to promote their latest project. To break through the banality of late-night chatter, Watts routinely constructs spiritual and existential inquiries. In one of his segments—now lovingly labeled "Reggie's Question"—Watts asks Jeff Goldblum about the ineffability of sensuality. On another night, he asks Susan Sarandon about the existence of vampires. No matter the response offered up, Reggie cordially responds, "That's correct."

The multi-talented Watts was at Sundance recently to present Waves, a virtual-reality narrative about a man who does VR in VR. The project is part of the festival's New Frontier program, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last month. In the meta excursion, directed by Benjamin Dickinson, Watts brings along his familiar comedic touches (philosophical musings, probing insights into humanity, generally uproarious non-sequiturs). The plot, if we're even to call it that, presents a man plunging into the digital ether, dazed and confused while also joining a cult.

During a wide-ranging conversation with Watts over dinner, we spoke about the future of VR entertainment, his sincere desire to join a think tank, and what it's like to go on a road trip in a Tesla.

VICE: You've managed to build a career by doing pretty much everything.
Reggie Watts: I like to follow my creative instincts and just create a good dialogue with my intuition, and do what it takes to get out of the way of that as much as possible. I'm pretty flexible with how something gets made. I don't really fixate on it not being exactly the way I need to because, for me, it's more important to just get something out rather than be disappointed by a technological glitch or someone not being available for a project. I have a certain amount of a window where I'll try to make it happen as I see it, but if it doesn't, I'll keep moving. It's about fine tuning and honing a production technique, essentially. I want to make things, but I want to make them quickly and well.

That's hard to do, no?
It's really hard to do, because you're trying to close the gap between the idea and the actualization of that idea, and it gets more complicated with different mediums. If it's film, it just requires a lot of people. Even if it's a small-scale film, you're dealing with five, six people, so it's a lot to orchestrate. It's really about creating a production process that erases the middle ground of, "Oh, I have an idea," and "Oh, we made it."

It seems like you're just this ball of creativity where ideas are constantly coming from.
Yeah, it feels that way. I try to be inspired by the smallest and the largest stuff.

Does that ever get overwhelming?
I think it's only overwhelming if I have a lot of ideas and they're not getting made. If I'm not getting to make stuff semi-regularly, I start to get bummed because it starts to back up.

When was the last time that happened to you?
I mean, kind of now a little bit, because I do The Late Late Show, but it's just real-time performance and it's not really making anything, necessarily. I mean there are bits we do that you can view online later, but that's me in the show, and it's not my project.

Are you happy with the show?
I think that they write stuff that's in my voice, and they let me improvise within the structure, which is great, and I definitely have fun doing it. But it's not the deeply enriching, philosophical, "Oh, this is the idea I want to make and I'm not sure if people will like it, and it's experimental, but I want to make it" type of work.

What's the next project that's going to fulfill that?
I'm on the verge. I'm doing a comedy special with possibly Netflix, so that'll be a weird thing, and it'll be something I'm gonna make and stand behind. And I'm working on an album, a solo album this year.

What's your approach in the studio? Is it all improvisational?
I write in real-time. I'll just show up at the studio and we'll write there. I don't like wasting my time contemplating and thinking about things over and over. Not to belittle people's process—because obviously their process is their process—but my process is I like to show up and do stuff and I like it to be as quick as possible.

Is that because you need constant (and different) stimulation, or you just don't have a lot of patience?
I think it's just about staleness. I want the maximum freshness of a creative idea. I don't want to think of something, and then all of a sudden have it dragged through all these bureaucratic creative decisions.

And where does comedy fit into all of this?
Well, I love comedy—I always have—and I can't not be a joker. I was always fucking around. I was the class clown.

What age did that start?
Hmm, I don't know. It's kind of all additive. You keep doing it and suddenly someone's like, "Do you wanna do that at this thing?" And someone else sees you. I can't really point to anything that started it. It just grew out of being a kid and loving what I loved. I didn't think too much about my career, I just went with what I could do.

That seems to be a trend in success: people just doing what they loved, then recognition—if they have talent—inevitably follows.
You just live your life and do what you do, and you run into all these different people throughout your life, and you find community, and you make friends and you play shows, and you talk about shit, and it all just feeds off of one another. Before you know it, your friend is like, "I'm booking this festival," and you're like, "Oh, that's crazy," and he or she is like, "Can you play it?" If you have talent, community, and some modesty, everything works out.

Whatever happened with you and Comedy Bang Bang?
Well I was doing it, and I guess it was the fourth season, and basically I just didn't like getting up early to film. Even though it was only like two or three months of filming a year, getting up at 6:30 AM, I just couldn't do it. And it was like 12-hour days, and I didn't think the production was that efficient, and that bothered me. I loved everybody working on it, and I love Scott, but it really started to make me bummed out, and then I started being grumpy.

Did you end up viewing the job as a hindrance?
After a while it is, because it's not my project. I'm capable of generating my own stuff, and if I'm not doing that for a while, it really starts to bum me out.

Do you ever worry that you're falling into that same cycle again?
Well, a little with The Late Late Show, but it's not a huge demand on my time. It's only like four hours every day, or Monday through Thursday at least. It's manageable. I just have to push myself a little bit and put my nose to the grindstone.

To me, it's a transition. I can take advantage of the access I have of the Hollywood talent that comes through there. I know like almost 30 percent of the guests who go through there, we'd run into each other through some capacity or another. I think it's an interesting place to be because you're very visible, and it's on network television, which has a certain thing to it, it adds a little value.

Seems like a good deal.
It is. Ben, the showrunner, is a great guy. Rob Crabb's a great guy. I mean, everybody involved in it—my band, they're really awesome. There's nothing I can really complain about. The only thing I can say is that I've got plans to do bigger things. I want to be part of think tanks, work on user-interface design, work on surround sound.

I'm familiar with those terms, but what exactly are you talking about?
User interface meaning how you interact with technology. It should be something that's intuitive, not esoteric and has a steep learning curve. I also have a lot of thoughts about where I'd like technology to head in ten, 20 years, what we should focus on and green technology and all that stuff. And I want to be involved with some of those thought leaders, helping steer ourselves to a better future.

You're certainly in prime position to potentially make a difference.
Well, it's cool that you can choose how you wanna do things in life, you know? For me, I want to be as conscious as possible, and I want to have a good time, and I want to treat myself well, I wanna try stuff that's just stupid and fun for myself.

Like what?
I got a Tesla, and I love driving it—it's so much fun to drive. I love going on a crazy trip with a cool girlfriend of mine where we say, "OK, let's just go hang out in Morocco," or something. Just do random things, acquire experience in life, and surround myself with good people.

I think that's all this is.
Yeah. That is all life is, isn't it?

"I try to be inclusive to the general human in my art, especially for some weirdo high school kid who doesn't have any friends who runs across this weird experimental video I did on YouTube. I'm writing for that kid."

How do you stay level-headed about all this? Most people can't just travel cross country.
Well, I mean, a lot of that is allowing myself to indulge a little bit. If I have the resources, I should use them to a point. The rest of it is I like being generous. I like taking care of my mom, I like being responsible with what I have. I like to speak my mind when I have the opportunity to speak my mind, I like to keep everyone's best interests at heart, and taking care of myself, and making sure that I'm healthy, all of that. So it's an ongoing balancing act, but it's easy to keep in balance as long as you have good people around you and a good sense about yourself.

It's an ongoing process. A lot of it is never losing sight of the goal, and to quote the Beastie Boys, the goal is, "You gotta fight for your right to party." If you want to live a certain way, or if you want life to be a certain way, independent of what that means materialistically, then you need to stay on track in the process. I try to be inclusive to the general human in my art, especially for some weirdo high school kid who doesn't have any friends who runs across this weird experimental video I did on YouTube. I'm writing for that kid.

Would you say that your best work has come out of darkness?
I include a lot of darkness in what I do because I find it's really important and it grounds people, but humor is the only thing that will save you. People talk about Jesus saving you. It's not really very accurate.

Are you religious?
Not really. I grew up a Catholic. I like the ritual. My mom's French, and in France we'd visit cathedrals. And I love that ancient kind of ritualistic traditionalism, but the spiritual teachings of things... certainly there are useful humanistic teachings. Anything more than that I couldn't get with. It didn't make sense.

I do appreciate the communal aspect of it, which is really beautiful. I just don't like religion when people use it to differentiate themselves from others. That's the danger. It's fine to believe whatever the fuck you want to believe, if that makes your world make sense to you. Great. But if you're open to other people, and hearing how they like to interpret the world, that's really the only way you're going to make the world a better place. We have no shortage of divisions. It is possible to move into another age of enlightenment.

Does VR fit into that age of enlightenment?
On this panel today , there were questions like that. VR is a very isolationist experience. However, I was talking about synchronization, when several people are on headsets, but they're collectively synchronized. Then that changes the whole stakes, because now it's immediately as social as being in reality. Really, what's going to change everything are two things: One thing is communication chatrooms, being on Skype. Imagine having depth-of-field-sensing cameras and when you put on the goggles and your friend calls you, you can actually see them in the room. And then you're just sitting in chairs talking, and they're thousands of miles away.

And you're OK with that?
Oh, I love that. I think it's beautiful. But I'm not saying it as a replacement, I'm saying it as a supplement.

I can't help but think it's going to replace human interaction, like in Her.
It puts a premium on organic interaction. The benefits are it connects people over vast distances to be able to experience each other, in a way that's more empathic. And we're just talking electronics. It's not trying to replace reality. That supplement is your grandma is in fucking Turkey, and you're traveling in Germany, and you decide you want to talk to your grandma. She's sick. She's ailing. I'm going to fly back in a couple days, but I want to check in on her, and you have her put on goggles—which are a really easy thing to understand—and suddenly your grandson is there, and she feels closer to you. Closer than a telephone call. Closer than a Skype call. What that does is put a premium on "I really miss you. I want to see you. I want to be able to touch you." The ability of VR, to allow you to experience something from a different person's perspective, is really powerful. Many people will never travel that far, and they might not know what it's like to see the devastation of a flood. To be able to be in the middle of the experience and have someone guide you—it's an opportunity.

Sam Fragoso is a writer and editor based in San Francisco, where he serves as the creative director at the Roxie Theater and the founder of Movie Mezzanine. In 2017, the Critical Press will publish his debut book titled Talk Easy, a collection of interviews with filmmakers who represent the future of cinema. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo by Fairfax Media, via Getty

In 1999, a couple of days after Shawn Williams met the woman he'd eventually marry, she went in the hospital for knee surgery. Two months later, after the cast was taken off her leg, doctors informed her that she had multiple sclerosis. By 2005, his wife was forced to leave work—something as mild as turning her head would lead to uncontrollable vomiting. For a while she could still get around with a cane or crutches, but by 2009, she was bedridden.

Williams installed a downstairs bathroom to their two-story home and converted the living room into his wife's hospital quarters. Williams made the transition into a full-time caregiver. Last summer his wife fell out of her hoyer lift (a device used to move immobile people in and out of bed), and he was forced to check into a full-time nursing facility.

A couple of years ago Williams started the r/caregivers subreddit. It's a place where he and fellow caregivers can talk about the stresses, questions, and sadnesses that come with supporting an incapacitated loved one. The community is small but dedicated, and it provides an empathy that the rest of the world can't muster.

"It was slow going at first, and it's still slow going," Williams told me. "I follow the MS subreddit and told them about it, which brought in a circle of people. It's nice to just throw stuff out there, even if people didn't have any advice for me and were just lending a shoulder."

R/caregivers is one of many communities on the internet focused on fostering empathy between people who look after loved ones. While a lot of the conversation on these sites is focused on granular, mechanical advice—like, for instance, "do medical alert bracelets work?"—these are also spaces to be sad.

"I can't stress enough how important it is to have support whether online or in real-life," said a caregiver who prefers to remain anonymous, who regularly posts on the Facebook group Dementia Caregivers Support and reads r/caregivers. "People in real life don't really want to know what's going on. They don't want to hear anything other than, 'Life is great! My loved one is so sweet and I love being able to care for them! What a blessing!' The minute you voice the truth, people get uncomfortable."

"In the group I'm in on Facebook," the caregiver added, "I can talk about how my loved one just hit and screamed at me, and people will talk me off the ledge. I can ask about how to remove the smell of pee from a carpet. I can ask a question about Medicare or etiquette when hiring a live-in. Other people who actually understand what I'm going through are a godsend."

Williams told me that his wife doesn't know about the caregiving subreddit, which allows him to be as honest as he needs to be. "Venting is important," he said. "There's so much frustration, you want to be mad at the disease, but you can't help but take it out on the person. If you can it's good to bide your time until you're in front of a keyboard so you can do your screaming there."

"Caregiver here. I've cared for my mother for about seven years. No family. No friends. No job. (Not for lack of trying) I've run out of ways to stay positive I believe," user pookie74 wrote in an r/caregiving post titled "Depression." "The stress is overwhelming and my health is deteriorating. I realize how hopeless this sounds (and actually may be) but, as a sole care provider, having stopped my own life years ago, what can I do?"

Around 43 million Americans care for an aging loved one, said Andy Cohen, head of the caregiving support site caring.com, adding that the grief that comes with that task tends to stay private.

"One of the things that came up in our research is that while people are looking for objective information, they're also looking for emotional support," Cohen said. "If you're planning a wedding or having a baby you obviously want to talk to your friends about it, but if your parents are dying you're not inclined to do the same thing because it's very sad. We set up our forums to use aliases so people can be open with their feelings in a supportive group. One of our customers called it her 'sacred garden.'"

Some of that honesty can be brutal. Cohen says that some people come to his forums and talk about hating their parents—something they would likely only say anonymously.

In a few years, Williams hopes to buy a house with the necessary equipment that would allow him to bring his wife home and return to caring for her full-time. It won't be the final hurdle, but they've learned to roll with the punches and stay optimistic.

"Not to be cliche, but she's my soulmate," Williams told me. " gets me on a level that nobody else does. She's someone I can trust. She understands all my crazy ideas, my dreams, my sense of humor."

Follow Luke on Twitter.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Dear So Sad Today,

Have you ever experienced having toxic friends? And if so, what is your advice on that? I just stopped being friends with two of my friends who seemed very toxic to me and even though I loved them, I believed it was best for me to move on. What is your advice on moving on and finding new friends? I've been trying to find newer, closer friends to replace them but it's very hard to find such friends. Should I join more clubs on my college campus? If you could send me some advice that'd be great.

Sincerely,

Smothered

Dear Smothered,

When I was a freshman in college I was friends with a group of girls. One day they decided they didn't like me. This was because I was hooking up with what they thought were too many dudes. Also, sometimes I would just leave them alone at a party to go hook up with a dude (sorry, but that's part of my charm!).

For a few weeks I kissed their asses, feeling insecure, trying to win back their love. But then I realized, wait, I don't even like them. In time, I became friends with some new girls who were sluts just like me. I had only met these girls in passing, but they seemed like cool people to be friends with—way less judgmental and concerned with what I was doing with my vagina—so I reached out to them.

Once I became friends with them, what ended up happening is that the two groups kind of merged. I introduced a few of the girls I liked from my old group of friends to the girls in my new group of friends and we all moved in together, becoming something of a squad.

This being said, I've never felt totally comfortable in a squad. There is something about group dynamics that makes me feel the need to shut a door—any door—and be alone. After college, I never lived with people again. And over time, I've felt like some of the members of the older friend group are still too conservative for me or don't fully understand me. So I have taken a lot of breaks from my friendship with them. I feel that I can be friends with them sporadically and I love them out of shared history, but when I find myself starting to really doubt myself around them, I take a break. That self-doubt is a symbol of too much influence on their part. It's a form of toxicity.

I'm not the type of person to say that everything gets better. But one thing that has really gotten better for me with age is that I don't care so much what friend groups think of me anymore. This might be because I now spend my time worrying what anonymous strangers on the internet think of me, but that's a different story.

When I think back to being excommunicated by that group of girls during my freshman year of college, or by another group in middle school, I feel a great relief in being my own person now. This has only come with time and was not something I could force, but it does happen.

xo

So Sad Today

***

Dear So Sad Today, queen of goth life,

I need your help. I need some advice. What do you do when you're sad like just try to cry an endless river? It's triggering idk what to do.

Thanks,

Goth Princess

Dear Goth Princess,

Despite how it may seem, I am not a good cryer. Like, I'm always afraid that if I just let go then my feelings are going to kill me. I'm scared that if I start crying I'm never going to stop: even though history has shown me that I always stop at some point. So I am definitely more of a bottle-upper. Actually, I guess what I am is a tweeter. Consider every tweet a tear not shed.

But it's weird that I'm scared to cry, because every time I do cry I feel so much fucking better after. It's like, oh shit, why don't I do this every day? I've also noticed that sometimes, if I'm having heavy cycles of panic attacks, they finally subside a bit when I cry. It's like the anxiety is not anxiety at all, but other trapped feelings pushing up against the inside of me.

The thing is, I'm still not great at knowing what my underlying feelings are. Half the time I'm sad for an obvious reason, but I'm like "No, it can't be that." It's usually only after I do something primal and physical, like sex or yoga, that I start crying and realize I've been carrying around a bunch of shit and have needed to cry for days.

Since my yoga practice sucks and I never do it, I tend to end up crying after sex quite frequently. When I feel the cry coming on, I excuse myself from the person I'm with to go pee (always pee after sex so you don't get a urinary tract infection). Then I get a few minutes of good tears on the toilet.

I don't know of anything that makes me feel more alive. Crying alone on the toilet is probably the thing that makes me feel most whole. I guess I could watch a sad movie or listen to some sad music to try and get the same effect. But sometimes I'm just too scared of my feelings to intentionally bring it on. It's like I have to run and run until there is nowhere else to go, and then, finally, the tears come.

xo

So Sad Today

***

Dear So Sad Today,

I want to tell the friend I am in love with my feelings, which is causing me great anxiety. Am I setting myself up for disaster?

Best,

Not Telling

Dear Not Telling,

I think it's usually better for the truth to be out there. Any time I've waited to tell someone how I felt about him, the fear was usually based on some underlying knowing that either the person didn't like me in that way or didn't like me as much as I liked him. It's almost like I was keeping it to myself to preserve an illusion that something would happen. Living in illusion is a high sometimes, but eventually, the person either likes you or doesn't. So if you don't want to delude yourself, it's probably best to say something now.

That being said, you may risk ruining the friendship (or putting it on hold for a while) because one or both of you might feel uncomfortable after you say something. But I think it's hard to just have a real friendship with someone you secretly like romantically anyway—at least if the air has not been cleared.

xo

So Sad Today

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released in March from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

Follow So Sad Today on Twitter.

Julian Assange. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by
VICE.

US News

Sanders and Clinton Battle for Progressive Cred
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have clashed over their progressive credentials ahead of the New Hampshire primary. While Sanders criticized Clinton for only being progressive "some days," Clinton insisted she was "a progressive who gets results." —The Washington Post

Black Lives Matter Activist Runs for Mayor
DeRay Mckesson, a leading figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, has announced he is running for mayor of Baltimore. "We cannot rely on traditional pathways to politics and the traditional politicians who walk that path," he said. —The New York Times

Obama Condemns Islamophobic Rhetoric
President Obama made his first visit to a US mosque, speaking to Muslim Americans at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. Obama attacked those who use "inexcusable political rhetoric" and said "an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths." —VICE News

Cosby Case Cleared to Proceed
A judge has refused to throw out a sexual assault case against comedian Bill Cosby, despite Cosby's lawyers arguing he had an immunity agreement. Cosby is accused of drugging and molesting a former athletics official in 2004. —CBS News

International News

Leaders Seek Billions for Syria
World leaders and diplomats from 70 countries are meeting in London today to attempt to raise billions for victims of the war in Syria. The UN and regional countries like Jordan and Lebanon say they will need $9 billion in aid for refugees in 2016. —AP

Assange May Soon Surrender
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said he will turn himself over to UK police on Friday if the UN rules against him. In 2014 Assange complained to the UN that he was "detained" inside the UK's Ecuadorian embassy as he could not leave without being arrested. —CNN

IS Leaders Move to Libya
Several senior commanders from the Islamic State (IS) group have moved to Libya from Iraq and Syria, a top Libyan intelligence official has revealed. "They view Libya as a safe haven," he said. IS control the area around the Libyan city of Sirte. —BBC News

TTP Deal Signed in New Zealand
Ministers from the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas have signed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal in Auckland, New Zealand. Activists protested outside the city's convention centre, believing it hands too much power to corporations. —Al Jazeera

A still from Pussy Riot's new video.

Everything Else

Facebook Wants 5 Billion Users
Facebook aims to have 5 billion of the world's 7 billion humans connected to its social network by 2030. "We want to finish connecting everyone," said Mark Zuckerberg at his company's 12th birthday party. —USA Today

Pussy Riot Rail Against Russian Corruption in New Video
Pussy Riot's new song and video Chaika focuses on recent corruption allegations against Russia's prosecutor general Yuri Chaika. The video sees singer Nadya acting out the torture of opponents. —VICE

Steven Avery's Brother Does First Interview
Earl Avery, brother of Netflix's Making a Murderer subject Steven Avery, has given his first TV interview. Earl said he won't hold any grudges after Steven accused him murdering Teresa Halbach. "His lawyers told him to say that." —Rolling Stone

Attractive Female DJs Only, Please
Derrick Carter, the Black Madonna and others have spoken out against Justin James, the booking agent who posted a Facebook casting call saying he would "only work with attractive female DJs." —Thump



Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'Confessions of a Schoolteacher'

On today's episode of Daily VICE, we meet a fire chief who became so obsessed with the Serial podcast that he quit his job to investigate Adnan Syed's case—and other alleged wrongful convictions—full-time.

Artwork by Nick Scott

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When I was 17, I developed an anxiety disorder that intensified when I moved to London at 21. It caused agoraphobia, claustrophobia, depression, and a debilitating phobia of fainting. Someone told me at the time that I was existing, rather than living.

Before this starts to resemble a woe-is-me memoir excerpt, know that I managed, from about 2014, to start recovering. But life after mental illness is a neglected part of the wider conversation we're having on mental health. Future in Mind, the UK's strategy report on mental health treatment for young people, only mentions the word "recovery" twice in more than 80 pages.

One in 25 people in the UK are affected by a generalized anxiety disorder and one in ten young people overall will experience a mental health problem, a spokesperson from charity Rethink Mental Illness says, "with half of these going on to experience a lifetime of mental health issues." A fair number of these people will recover and there's support and advice available for them. But a big part of recovery is being able to live independently, and is something we hardly seem to talk about.

Andy Bell, deputy chief executive at charity the Centre for Mental Health, says that from a care perspective, recovery isn't just about trying to "fix" someone. "The important thing to understand about recovery is that it should be treated from the perspective of the person," he says—and not seen as a one-size-fits-all model. "Many people say the most important thing for them is whether the help they got was focused on the things they wanted, such as sorting out housing and a career." This makes sense to me. After something has such a devastating effect on you, regaining control and independence is the most important step in the recovery process.

Everyone's route to recovery is different, but experts agree on five general points. First, Rethink's spokesperson says it's important to accept your illness: "Acceptance may help you make changes and take steps towards achieving new goals. It might help you to read about your illness and talk to other people with the same diagnosis."

"You might find it more helpful to focus on developing ways to cope, rather than trying to get rid of every symptom of your mental health problem."
—Rachel Boyd of Mind

Rachel Boyd, information manager at the charity Mind, tells me that this means being patient with yourself. "It's important to remember that managing your mental health problem is a journey, and won't always be straightforward. You might find it more helpful to focus on learning more about yourself and developing ways to cope, rather than trying to get rid of every symptom of your mental health problem.

"If at any point you do have a setback where you feel worse or symptoms return, try not to be disheartened or angry—things can and will improve if you find out what works for and helps you."

Bell says that local NHS and social services can support people through recovery by helping them push past fear or deep depression and do the things they want to do—a second key part of recovery. He says it's important to join in with your peers' activities, making adjustments wherever they're needed, and seeking support to help you do this. Rethink suggests making small, gradual lifestyle changes, such as volunteering, learning a new hobby, or exercising.

Jessica Brown

They sound simple, but fit into feeling like you're in control of your life and your recovery, even if you need to make some adjustments. "If you've lost a job, relationship, or anything else because of your illness," a Rethink spokesperson says, "then there are different ways to deal with this as part of your recovery. Some people try to get back some of the things they have lost, and others try to look for new opportunities." If you work in a good, accepting, and non-stigmatizing environment, Bell says going back to or starting work is a big step on the way to recovery. "Work can be part of the answer, not the problem."

Having hope comes next, he says, and with it knowing "that it's possible to have a good life with or without symptoms." Rethink advises reading about other people's recovery stories online, or joining a support group where people share their stories: "For some people, low self-esteem and a negative outlook can be barriers to having hope for the future. Recognizing these issues and understanding that they may be related to your illness can be the first step towards building hope."

The last part of recovery relates to accessing services and being able to talk to someone, "whether it's your , a friend, a member of your family, or an organization such as Mind or the Samaritans," says Boyd, from Mind. "There are different ways to treat mental health problems, and it will depend on what feels right to you, and how your diagnosis affects you. 'Talking treatments' like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have been effective for some. Your doctor might also look at whether medication will help you manage the symptoms of your mental health problems," and she says there are alternative techniques to consider, from hypnotherapy and support groups to relaxation techniques.

While evidence of what works in recovery may still be thin on the ground, this year will see the end of a pilot two-year program offering local courses on recovery to up to 80,000 adults. It aims to investigate how people manage their post-illness mental health, and will use those findings to help local areas shape their services. We're getting somewhere.

My illness left gaps in my life where friends, experiences, and career progression should be, but I've learned to transition from a fear of leaving the house to being able to hold down a job and find a relative sense of stability. No one may have prepared me for illness, but we may as well do whatever we can to talk about what happens afterwards.

Follow Jessica on Twitter.

BellBoi is a tiny cafe just off Brick Lane in Shoreditch, London—though to call it a cafe would perhaps be misleading. It does serve coffee, and there's the obligatory peg board with prices for cappuccinos, espressos, and flat whites marked out in white letters. But there's barely seating room for more than two people inside, and no toilets. There is, on the other hand, a large computer terminal that the barista uses to update calendars and spreadsheets, and a wall of luggage lockers at the far end of the shop floor.

BellBoi is the client-facing hub of a small Airbnb-letting empire in Shoreditch made up of more than 30 properties in the surrounding area, plus a few in New York. Guests arrive to pick up their keys and receive a laminated map directing them from the cafe to their accommodation—a model imported from the US, where sharing economy support services have already taken hold. It's a business founded entirely on professionalized use of the Airbnb platform, and like many similar operations in London, it's operating in the gray area between what's legal and what's actually enforced.

All of these rooms and apartments are listed by "Vincent & Alice," a prominent hosting couple I first discovered through the Inside Airbnb website, an online tool that aims to "add data to the debate" around Airbnb's effect on housing and communities across 31 cities worldwide.

Click to enlarge. Via Inside Airbnb

By scraping data from publicly available listings and plotting them on a map, it gives the kind of insight that Airbnb's own statistics lack—like the fact that, as of September 2015, there were 4,680 listings in the capital for entire homes or apartments, frequently booked and with high availability all year round. In other words, properties which are used virtually full-time to host Airbnb guests.

Ignoring questions around the morality of keeping these properties out of the long-term rental market during the sort of housing crisis that London is going through, the majority of these lets are also likely to be in contravention to local housing law. Section 44 of the Deregulation Act, an amendment to existing housing legislation introduced in February of last year, states that if a property is let out to short-stay guests for more than 90 days in a calendar year, the homeowner must receive planning permission from his or her local authority for a change of use to short-stay letting—something London authorities are reluctant to allow. (Camden council lists disturbance to neighbors, decreased sense of community, and reduction of the permanent housing stock as reasons for resisting all development of short-stay accommodation in the borough.)

In fact, up until the amendment in 2015, planning permission was technically required to undertake any short-term letting at all in London. When Conservative housing minister Brandon Lewis introduced the deregulation bill to Parliament, he outlined the need to remove "unnecessary red tape" in order to provide extra income to householders and boost the sharing economy in London.

But while the new bill specified a new (and relatively generous) quota for unregulated short-term letting, it also greatly complicated the work of the enforcement teams that were tasked with identifying illegal lets. Paul Simmons, a manager within the planning enforcement team at Westminster Council, who objected to the bill, explained:

"When this went through Parliament, Westminster lobbied very hard firstly for the laws not to change, but secondly for there to be some requirement for the flat owner to notify the council—maybe just through clicking a button on a website—to say that a person was staying, for how many nights, etc. But the government said no, that it was too bureaucratic, and so as a result it's very difficult for us to know without reasonable doubt when the limit has been reached."

He estimates that his team investigates between 2,000 to 3,000 cases each year—the same as before the change in legislation—except that the amount of work needed to successfully serve an enforcement notice has increased significantly. And it's the difficulty in enforcing the new laws that has opened the door for London's new breed of professional Airbnb landlords.

Click to enlarge. Via Airbnb

In a phone call, Vincent and Alice of BellBoi were somewhat evasive when I put it to them that their business was based on illegal use of rental housing. But both were adamant that a large percentage of Shoreditch is now Airbnb'd full-time, and that there were thousands of other landlords in London who were doing exactly the same thing. The first claim is hard to verify (although utterly believable for anyone who's been to Shoreditch recently), but the second is completely in keeping with the data.

Like Brandon Lewis MP, Airbnb promotes the idea that the typical host is just an individual renting a spare room now and again, but the data suggest this is only partly true. If, as InsideAirbnb's figures show, 10,000 of the Airbnb listings in London are from hosts with more than one property on the site, that's a huge number as a proportion of the 24,100 active hosts that Airbnb claims operate in the city.

Even Airbnb's own official statistics on London are revealing: The highlighted claim that 35 percent of hosts' income is at or below the median for the UK is slightly comical, since if the hosts represented a normal income distribution you'd expect 50 percent to be at or below the median. Put another way: Two-thirds of hosts make more than the UK median income, and not far off half of them make more than £43,000 a year—which would put them in the top 15 percent of earners in the UK.

Clearly, not only is there a lot of money to be made through Airbnb, but there are a lot of wealthy people listing properties on it. And things are being made easier than ever for these wealthy property owners thanks to a new type of startup with a uniquely tailored product: the Airbnb management service.

Click to enlarge. Via hostmaker.co

"Airbnb management"—a very 2016 industry—involves anything from providing a key exchange for guests, or employing cleaning staff to remake beds between stays, professionally photographing a property, meeting visitors with a welcome pack, operating an account in the host's name, and scheduling bookings to maximize occupancy. In fact, in exchange for a cut of the profit, a landlord can just hand over his or her keys, then sit back and collect a paycheck at the end of the month with no further interaction.

Posing as a homeowner with a flat to let, I called Hostmaker and Airsorted—two prominent companies operating in London—and asked about what returns they could offer me. Both boasted occupancy rates of 75 percent or above, with average stays of between three and five nights. That would work out at somewhere around 280 days per year—again, well in excess of the quota for short-term letting.

When I questioned the legality of the arrangement, representatives of both teams were well aware that there was a 90-day legal limit. Though they stopped short of advising me to break it, both were happy to admit that almost all of their customers chose to ignore it (with one reassuring me that the laws were "unenforceable"). Provided I was happy to aim for full occupancy, I was told that I could expect an income well above the market average for residential tenants, even in off-peak months for tourism.

These companies are not in themselves breaking the law, but they're potentially facilitating an activity that often does. And even if the legal framework were to change and become even more forgiving of short-term lets, we need to ask ourselves: As the capital struggles to provide enough housing, is this really the kind of "sharing economy" we thought would help?

Read on Motherboard: Kill Your Airbnb's Hidden WiFi Cameras with This Script

When researching this article, I reached out to Murray Cox, creator of the InsideAirbnb website, to ask what he thought were the key points to pursue.

"Superhosts are low hanging fruit in terms of discovering illegal use of housing," he told me by email, "but in aggregate, all of the hosts with a single investment property listed permanently on Airbnb can be just as disruptive, and are frequently under the radar of policy makers and enforcement."

Though they may be under the radar for outsiders, they're certainly not for Airbnb. With the enormous amount of data they collect, it would be simple for Airbnb to spot infractions of the 90-day law and restrict hosts' accounts. So I contacted the UK office to ask if it'd consider sharing this data with local councils, and whether the company thought short-term letting was driving up prices. A representative from the Public Affairs department sent this statement:

"Airbnb hosts are regular people who share their homes and use the money they earn by sharing space in his or her home for 50 nights a year. Airbnb helps grow and diversify tourism in London, helps countless Londoners stay in their homes and the city they love, and provides an economic boost to communities and local businesses across the capital."

The thing about economic boosts is that some always get more of the boost than others. For all the talk of its disruptive nature, Airbnb still looks a lot like capitalism 1.0: People with property, or those who have access to credit, find it easy to generate more and more of it; people with money to consume the product benefit from greater choice; and people with none of the above are squeezed out of the equation and collectively absorb the negative impact of higher rents and increasingly transient communities. Above it all stands Airbnb itself, a £17 billion giant of a company, taking a cut of every pound, euro, or yen spent through the site.

Newspapers still seem more interested in reporting the one-off, headline grabbing stories of sex, drugs, and wild parties in rented flats. But if there's an out-of-control gang using Airbnb to wreak havoc in local communities, it's not the teenagers. It's the landlords.

Thumbnail photo by Raysonho via

Follow Corin on Twitter.

A little cow. Photo via Flickr user Suzette

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

I think, deep down, we all know the meat industry isn't that great. Whether you've watched Cowspiracy, read those George Monbiot-type articles about how meat production is catastrophically bad for the environment, or just listened to someone at a party go on about how Food, Inc. was, like, so dark it almost made him or her give up eating burgers, you're likely aware of the ramifications of industrial animal farming.

So it's no wonder that around 20 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK now follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, and around 12 percent of all adults in the UK are vegetarian. The amount of red meat being eaten in Britain has declined almost year-by-year since 1950, and this trend looks set to continue.

Which makes you wonder: What would actually happen if the whole of Britain just stopped eating meat? Would farmers all lose their jobs? Would we be healthier and happier? Would the streets look like something out of a Mike Leigh film, grayscale, with loads of people sitting around starved of protein, their hair falling out, their translucent skin bruising at the lightest touch?

To find out, I spoke to experts in food policy, environmental science, and meat-related health.

All photos below from the Anchor village cows advert, 2011

IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY AND FARMING
Timothy Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London

VICE: Would it be possible to maintain a farming industry without animals here in Britain?
Timothy Lang: Well, that's a big debate going on in my world: Can we imagine British farming without animals? Or can we imagine carrying on doing what we're doing and making it even more brutal? Animals, cows, and sheep are major sources of greenhouse gasses, and we're using a lot of "hidden" land for them. The Amazonian rainforest is being chopped down for the purpose of growing soya, which is then fed to the animals in Europe which you eat. We're growing a huge amount of cereals here in Britain and across Europe, which are then fed to animals. Animals used to be part of a fertility cycle, a rotation in farming, but have become an end in themselves. We've made animals not just competitors to us in terms of land use, but also major users of land, resources, and indeed food. We have to dramatically reduce animal use in Britain.

What would actually happen to our farming landscape if meat was taken out of the equation?
Well, for a start, we would dramatically increase our horticulture. The good things for your diet and mine are actually plants. Fruits, vegetables, cereals—staple foods. And there has been a catastrophic drop in the production of these things in Britain. If we stopped eating meat we would have to resuscitate and reinvest and re-skill ourselves in horticulture. And we have to do that anyway, certainly with climate change. When I was a farmer in the uplands on the Pennines, 50 years or so ago, even then, we experimented with growing crops in parts where people would say, "Oh, that's sheep country." You could grow swedes, turnips, brassicas, and potatoes very easily and very well, and historically they did.

We would have to re-skill a lot. It would mean the transformation of British agriculture. The politicians are frightened, but they have to address this issue. Climate change is going to make them do it. The food system is being forced to change by climate, by water stress, by population changes, by geopolitics. We've got a food system based on a population being well fed by very, very intense agricultural methods. We now know that has to change.

How long would it take for farmers to re-learn and shift their methods?
That can't be done tomorrow. It's taken 50 to 70 years to get into the mess we're now in. We have to make a very dramatic change in approach very quickly. We should have a 30-year plan. The Labour government started a 20-year plan and then the coalition abolished it and nothing happened. They went back to a Thatcherite notion that markets will resolve themselves. The current government is working on a 25-year food strategy, but it's all about supporting industry and industry taking a lead. Industry cannot resolve this. It's going to have to be consumer culture changes. I'm a critic of the thinking that's going on at the moment in government. As a public, we're going to have to take the movement toward discussion.

IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Nick Hewitt, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Department of Environmental Science, Lancaster University

VICE: What would happen to the environment if we all stopped eating meat?
Nick Hewitt: Eating meat makes a large contribution to the greenhouse gasses that people in the UK produce. If everyone stopped eating it, the food-related greenhouse gas emissions would reduce by about 35 percent. It's one very effective way to make a big dent in emissions.

Why?
It's particularly cattle—beef is by far the worst. Cows chew grass and digest it in conditions in the stomach with no oxygen, and that releases methane. That's the principle reason. Also, the way the grassland is fertilized causes greenhouse gas emissions. Transporting the food around does contribute, but it's relatively small, unless you use air freight. Lorries aren't too bad. The biggest lifestyle choice you could make to reduce greenhouse gasses is to stop eating meat. It's hard to think of another single lifestyle change we could make that would have the same effect.

So using the same farmland for plants would be the quickest way to reduce emissions?
Yeah. You'd still have to be careful with your fertilization, but using land for meat is the least efficient way of producing protein. It's just an inefficient way of producing food. By growing plants on the land and eating those, it's much more efficient, so we would be greatly reducing those greenhouse gas emissions.

Would it make more of a difference if everyone was vegan?
Yeah, it would make more of a difference, because obviously if you're vegetarian but eat cheese that's related to the dairy industry and cows. If you eliminate cheese and meat, you'd reduce emissions even further.

Hypothetically, then, meat-free Britain is a lot cleaner.
Our government has put targets on the national greenhouse gas emissions and said that, by 2050, UK emissions have to be reduced by 80 percent of what they were in 2010. It's very hard to see how we'd ever meet that target without reducing emissions from every sector—transport, heating, fuel, food. Food currently makes up about 20 percent of total emissions. If the government wants to reduce by that overall figure, we have to reduce emissions from food.

Why isn't the government telling us that via campaigns or something?
What the government is trying to do at the moment is reduce food waste. So, obviously, the more food wasted—and there is a hell of a lot of food wasted—the more unnecessary emissions there are. So if you cut waste, you'll cut emissions. That's the government's focus right now. If the government is serious about this it would try to introduce interventions to get people to eat less meat or go vegetarian. The numbers show that. So, hypothetically, if we were all vegetarian in this country, we'd change things drastically. Sadly, in some very large countries, meat is seen as a status symbol and its consumption is increasing drastically. Anything we can do to help that is a help.

IMPACT ON THE HEALTH OF THE POPULATION
Ian Givens, Professor of Food Chain Nutrition at University of Reading's School of Agriculture

VICE: What would happen to the health of British people if we all gave up meat?
Ian Givens: There isn't any real association between white meat and cancer or cardiovascular problems. It tends to be relatively neutral.

Red meat, though, is a different story. There is an issue in Britain of malnutrition of young females. There is good evidence from several surveys that women, especially between the ages of 11 and 18, have a suboptimal level of a number of key nutrients, and one is iron. In fact, half the population is below the lowest level of iron intake. If you look back over the last ten years or more, there's been a consistent decrease in iron intake, and that—without too much of a doubt—is down to the reduction of red meat intake, because it's the best form of iron. The question is: Does that matter? Probably not in the short term, but one wonders what happens in the long term.

So we'd have to make sure we were supplementing young women, especially with more nutrients?
That's what the evidence suggests. There are other issues about zinc and vitamin B12, which would have to be supplemented. But then you have to balance that with the fact that red meat increases the risk of getting colon cancer. Most evidence now says that processed meat has a high increase of relative risk for colon cancer, higher than red meat. If you look at the increase of cancer per amount of red meat per day, it's still quite striking.

Overall, then, do you think this new Britain would be healthier?
There would be some health benefits. Colon cancer has the highest prevalence of any cancer that's available to both men and women. The evidence suggests that the risks of colon cancer associated with processed meat especially would be reduced. Processed meat is bacon, sausages, salami, deli meat, hotdogs, luncheon meat, and so on. I'm less sure about red and white meats. The BMIs of vegetarians and vegans are also significantly lower, and they have lower risks associated with obesity.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

A screenshot from the 'Ghostbusters' level pack for 'Lego Dimensions'

I finished the Ghostbusters level pack for Lego Dimensions last week, actually on the very same day that news emerged that the next film in the franchise—the Kristen Wiig- and Melissa McCarthy-starring reboot, directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig, in cinemas this summer—will have a video game tie-in. Or at least, it might have one—a Retail Merchandiser report on forthcoming Sony consumer products (Sony owns Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the previous two 'Busters movies of the 1980s) states that "a new full-fledged Ghostbusters video game from Activision will release alongside the movie on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4."

Color me several slimy green shades of actually quite excited, mainly because the Lego expansion pack has scratched at an itch that I'd forgotten I had: the desire to play through a decent video game based on one of my favorite series from my pre-teen years of pressure-free existence. If you, like me, are a child of the 1980s (and yes, I know, millennials exist and will ultimately inherit the Earth; but give it a rest for now, Generation Y), then you know the original Ramis-and-Aykroyd-and-Murray-and-Hudson Ghostbusters of 1984 is amongst the greatest movies of all time. I needn't go into the hows and whys—that's just how it is.

The sequel of 1989? Yeah, not so much—but the animated The Real Ghostbusters, which began in 1986 and featured highly stylized versions of the first film's specter-fighting four, was a lot of fun and very quickly convinced me to nag my parents for the accompanying toys. An Egon whose tie would flip up if you squeezed his arm. Ecto-1 with a seat on the top because, obviously, that's where you can bust the best from. The team's fire station headquarters with slime-slots in the roof and floors, so you could ruin your Christmas present within 30 seconds of opening it by pouring brightly colored gunk all over the thing.

Bringing this back to video games, while I loved the fan service the Lego Dimensions pack provides—it's basically the first movie, in virtual block form, with more physical humor, and a whole bunch of lines from the film shifted about in the narrative to fit said scenes of silliness—it's unlikely to last all that long in the memory.

Playing as any one of the four Ghostbusters—once the story itself is done, and you set about exploring the section of New York that makes up its free-roam hub—is a neat touch, but they constantly repeat select few lines from the game's parent picture: "I collect spores, moulds, and fungus"; "You're always so concerned about your reputation." They each play the same way too. And while it's a genuine treat to face-off against a blocky Gozer, take down a mammoth Marshmallow Man, and hear Winston cry, "I love this town," when Stay Puft's been scorched into so much burning gloop, the story's only ever on wheels—it knows its destination, and you're merely a passenger, unable to really affect the direction of how this tale plays out.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film in our The Real series, 'The Real 'X-Files'?'

Of course, this isn't an uncommon aspect of licensed video games—if they're based on a movie, chances are they'll stick to the script. And yet, the first Ghostbusters game I ever played—the first video game to be based on the franchise—wasn't quite such a stickler for partner-media accuracy.

Designed by Pitfall-maker David Crane at Activision, and first released in 1984 (though I played it much later than that, owning the '86-released ZX Spectrum version), Ghostbusters the game was just as much a business management simulation as it was an all-action, phantom-trapping adventure. It was tactical, methodical, and mature in a way that Lego Dimensions' take on busting—it takes the term literally, with most environmental assets breakable into rebuildable pieces or collectable studs—most certainly isn't. You have to stock up on gear, get your modifiable vehicles out on the streets of New York, and make money. That's the primary goal here: not to immediately rid the city of malevolent spirits, although that helps, but to collect enough cash to stay in business until a climatic encounter with a disturbingly diminutive sweet-tooth-tempting sailor. (He was a little bigger on the Commodore 64 version, but still less threatening than Casper wrapped in candyfloss.)

The first 'Ghostbusters' game really captured the look of the movie, I'm sure you agree. Via mecha-neko's Photobucket

I appreciate that the "real" Ghostbusters embarked on their paranormal business venture to turn a profit, but it felt unusual to me, as a kid playing this game in a bedroom-above-a-garage, to have to count dollars and cents instead of ploughing through zap-and-trap sequences without considering the cost of using these unlicensed nuclear accelerators. I don't recall the lure of lucre being a necessary evil of progression come the game adaptation of Ghostbusters II, which we had on the Amiga—cracked, of course, because even with so many hours of overtime, my dad was in no position to bring us home new games on the regular. But then, I barely recall the game at all.

I remember descending into the sewer system of Manhattan, controlling Ray Stantz to check out the river of slime. I remember that section being bastard hard. I can't picture what came afterwards. But thankfully we have YouTube these days, so I can shake up my memories with the help of a "longplay" video that only lasts for 15 minutes. A lot of it is slideshow exposition—the video's three minutes deep before we even see the stage I know I played, monstrous hands reaching out from plasma-coated walls, nightmares of the awful controls flooding back. Stage two, it turns out, puts the player in control of a mood slime-animated Statue of Liberty, the section presented as a perfunctory side-scrolling shooter; and the third and final level is an isometric, squad-based battle against the movie's painted antagonist, Vigo the Carpathian. It looks like complete garbage. I'm glad my dad didn't pay money for it.

Ghostbusters II actually had a few games made in its honor, with the NES take on its events framed as a tough-as-nails run-and-gunner. It was followed by the HAL-made New Ghostbusters II in 1990 (it came out a year later in the UK), which upped the cutesiness, flipped the perspective to top-down, turned Winston blue, and let you play as Rick Moranis. Think Hotline Miami, but with fewer gangsters and gore and more ghastly ghouls. It's actually still fun to play today, if you have the means and/or time to do so.

On Motherboard: Is the VICE Office Haunted?

A screenshot from 2009's 'Ghostbusters: The Video Game'

Right, hands up, now: After Ghostbusters II, games based on the franchise rather passed me by. Without a movie to serve as the hook to hang each new release on, the quality and profile of these titles began to dip—he says, having not actually played any of the likes of 2003's Extreme Ghostbusters: The Ultimate Invasion, the 1993 Real Ghostbusters game for the Game Boy, or the 2006 mobile title simply called Ghostbusters. But I don't feel I need to—the internet (oh, the internet) tells me that these games were at times awful, at best irrelevant, and should be burned in a skip. (OK, I'll concede that the Mega Drive game does look pretty great. Mean Machines scored it 80 percent, which should have been enough for me to seek it out back when.) However, perceptions of all things interactively Ghostbusting changed in 2009, when the first film's cast got together to effectively make Ghostbusters 3, albeit in video game form.

And here's where I welcome back any younger readers who can't remember what it was like to lust after a Hypercolor T-shirt only to see it ruined after one hot wash. Ghostbusters: The Video Game, for various PlayStation systems, Xbox 360, Wii, and Windows and more, had the writers (and stars) of the first movie, Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, consulting on its story, and also featured the voices and likenesses of the four Ghostbusters of old alongside a host of other familiar faces.

C'mon, Activision, let me play as these rad gals in your next game

Much like the Lego Dimensions add-on, it's a product soaked in amazing fan service. But rather than retreat plot points, it takes the tale of four guys loaded with proton packs to a new place entirely. The setting is Thanksgiving, 1991, and its big bad is a demonic Ivo Shandor, a.k.a. the architect behind 55 Central Park West, the towering building that's home to Dana Barrett and Louis Tully in the 1984 film. Everything connects back to the lore that Ramis and Aykroyd laid down 25 years prior—there's even a significant role for renowned Environmental Protection Agency officer with no dick, Walter Peck. "You" are a rookie 'buster who rides with the old pros, ultimately saving New York (and, ergo, the planet) from becoming merged with "the Ghost World." Which isn't to be confused with the Thora Birch-featuring indie flick of 2001, as a world entirely like that would just be the worst.

Anyway, the Ghostbusters save the day, and Ghostbusters: The Video Game got itself some follow-up fun in the form of a lower-budget but respectable sequel, the digital-only Sanctum of Slime. Which pretty much brings us up to Lego Dimensions and the new game in the making—assuming it definitely is in the making. I'd love to see the all-female squad cross over into the gaming medium—I mean, who wouldn't want to play as a virtual Kristen Wiig, wisecracking around New York City, occasionally slapping a spook into a containment unit for "safe" keeping? C'mon, Activision—assuming you are making another Ghostbusters, please don't make it an all-dudes affair. I love Bill, and Dan, and Ernie, and the late Harold, but have you seen the photos from the upcoming movie? That, in game form, this summer, thank you very much.

The Ghostbusters level pack for Lego Dimensions is out now, more information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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 the latest seasons of classic VICE series like BALLS DEEP, Action Bronson's F*CK, THAT'S DELICIOUS, NOISEY, and WEEDIQUETTE. Today, we're bringing you a first look at another new show we're excited about—the stand-up comedy series FLOPHOUSE, created by Lance Bangs.

FLOPHOUSE is a comedy show with all the comforts of home, featuring comedians like Clare O'Kane and Brandon Wardell. Each episode takes us inside the communal homes of America's up-and-coming comedians and culminates in an intimate stand-up performance in living rooms, backyards, and garages.

We'll give you a chance to get inside the lives of comedy's funniest rising stars once VICELAND goes live at the end of February, but for now, watch the FLOPHOUSE trailer above. The premiere episode airs March 3 at 10:30 PM.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Stretching her endless limbs on a yacht, Taylor Swift noticed a paparazzo on a boat in the blue slipstream. Not wanting him to sell this private bikinied moment, she uploaded a selfie to Instagram, gazumping the pap out of his trade.

That is the feeble victory celebrities have managed to eek out in the war over their private lives. Having accepted that the world owns every inch of their bodies and each minuscule detail of their sex lives, the best they can now hope for is to leak the information themselves rather than let a long-lensed photographer do it.

The latest celebrity to beat the press to an exposition is George Shelley, a pipsqueak pop star referred to by British television and radio presenter Nick Grimshaw as "Harry Styles's little sister." Shelley is a singer in X Factor's Union J, a boyband assembled of angelic voices and perfectly plucked eyebrows. He released a YouTube video to explain that he's loved women and he's loved men.

Very clearly, Shelley says it's not something he feels he can label, that labels themselves are old-fashioned, but he's had girlfriends and boyfriends. But lo the online headlines: 'WATCH: George Shelley comes out in emotional YouTube Video,' 'George Shelley reveals he is bisexual,' 'George Shelley makes emotional revelation about his sexuality.'

The pieces themselves are at least well-meaning. These days it seems there's a tabloid obligation to present a positive narrative around people "coming out." So, for example, British television personality Vicky Pattinson's supportive tweets are screen-grabbed and pasted into stories alongside collated fan celebrations and aggregated hashtags. George is "brave" for announcing he has fallen in love with people, not genitals.

But it wasn't always this way. A 1990 front page of the Sun read "£1M SOCCER STAR: 'I AM Gay'" with the tagline: "Justin Fashanu confesses." Famously, he never played professional football again. In 1999, Irish pop singer Stephen Gately gave a hasty coming out interview to the same paper after hearing that a supposed friend was about to sell the story on him. He later suffered from depression and when he died of pulmonary edema, Mail columnist Jan Moir put it down to his "dangerous lifestyle."

And even though it seems as though things might have changed in the past few years—Olympic diver-turned-vlogger Tom Daley came out in 2013, and Sam Smith came out in a chat with Ellen DeGeneres in 2015—it seems as though, for the tabloids, all that has changed is a move from front-page outrage to back-slapping positivity online while poking-fun in the celeb pages.

Dan Wotton, the very same journalist who yesterday tweeted "It's so sad that boyband members still feel the need to hide their sexuality. It's 2016 people!" commits to an ongoing franchise in the Sun called "The Bi Bus." With his head photoshopped into the driver's seat, this "proud gay man" drives a bus-load of queer celebrities' cut-out heads. The underlying assumption being that being bisexual or queer is a temporary jolly instead of an innate feeling or an approach to love not predicated on the presence of a certain set of genitals.

The Sun's bi bus by the 'Sun.'

Some poor picture editor has surely been tasked with slicing around an image of George's tousled hair so as to neatly superimpose him alongside Bi Bus regulars Miley Cyrus, Tom Hardy, Megan Fox, and Harry Styles. More's the pity for George, who came out specifically to halt the "online speculation." But the way a personal announcement can be immaturely co-opted by tabloid writers as a "ha ha" moment is why queerness is stigmatized in the first place and why so few celebrities feel they can come out.

The oddest bedfellows to emerge from any public coming out are the two factions of the "why do we even care?" school of thought. On one side, there are socially-righteous youths who don't think sexuality needs to be solemnly declared like a cancer diagnosis. On the other, we have older harumphy sorts who would rather all this wasn't in their face all the time.

The former group are idealists, but it's unrealistic to expect no one to discuss their sexuality at a time when one in six LGBT people are victims of hate crimes, and 40 percent of young LGBT people have considered suicide. Queers need positive support wherever they can get it. Indeed, the more intolerant the latter group, the more important it is for LGBT people to come out, to make queerness acknowledged as a normal and everyday occurrence. But as long as editors of national papers react like jilted lovers, butthurt they didn't get the exclusive nosey on someone's private life first, we're going to get more vlogs like George's, whether the subject wants in or not.

As much as I love short films, I never thought I'd be 100 articles deep in writing about them. There are great films out there, for sure. But for every mind-blowing one, there are hundreds of inane, heavy-handed, stupid ones. It's an uphill battle to bring you top-notch content every week, but I've tried to remain vigilant in my quest for goodness and I'm proud to say that this 100th one is a doozy. Plus, icing on the cake, it's the filmmaker's first film, which was animated as part of her thesis for MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest), which went on to win over 45 awards internationally and was shortlisted for the 87th Academy Awards. I'm proud to present animator Réka Bucsi's acclaimed absurdist short film, "Symphony No. 42," which begins like many landmark things—with a bang.

From the opening scene of "Symphony No. 42," where a fox draws a moving, mystical image before pulling out a gun and shooting itself, you know this short will take you places. The film is a compendium of vignettes that blend nature and pop culture with a surrealist, deadpan sensibility. Whether Busci is poking fun of famous artists like Damien Hirst, who's found painting his dumb dots on his iconic shark, or juxtaposing helpless elephants against brain-dead humans, her absurdist situations illuminate something about our condition. However, in each situation, next to the dry, dark humor is a futility or sadness that is never quite addressed. What does it all mean? Who knows? In the end, her whimsical creatures, affectless humans, and moments of surreal irrationality offer no answers, but they do swirl together into, well, pretty much everything.

I reached out to director Réka Bucsi to see if she could help shed some light on her ideas and her future films. Check it out below.

VICE: Why "Symphony No. 42"? What was wrong with the ones before it?
Réka Bucsi: Forty-two is a magical number that looks good, is a suspiciously central number in the world of science, and still I think means nothing at all. I like to just take things as they are, and not symbolize them, but it's really not easy to do that with movies. Also, I'm sure Mozart had some great symphonies before his 42nd one, but this has nothing to do with the man.

Then have you always been a fan of symphonies? What is it about the classical form that gets you going?
I like classical music—it makes me feel smarter than I actually am. I have huge respect for some composers, and listening to their music is a great inspiration. I also think classical music can build a really great contrast with some of my work. It helps me balance between dramatic and sarcastic.

What came first, your character design or the visual gags associated with them? I especially love the reoccurring gag of the elephant painting for help.
"Symphony No. 42" wasn't meant to be a gag film. But I was really glad when the audience reacted with laughter, as this showed me that I could hit that spot in other people that I thought as a "laugh-cry" moment in the film. The characters came simultaneously with the situations I put them in. It was never first a character and than a story. The situation brought the character along, and the character defined what it could do best. I think that poor elephant doesn't deserve laughter, but I'm really glad you enjoyed watching him suffer!

Well, your short is still absurd, in the best way. I don't think there's any getting around that. But having traveled around the world with it now, what has been the most absurd response to "Symphony No. 42"?
There was a guy once, who asked me in a letter if I am part of some kind of secret society, because of the sign that the fox draws in the very beginning of the film. He was quite suspicious and sent me some screenshots of other films that have the sign as well and asked me what is going on in the film industry, and to reveal the truth. It was really hard to resist not sending him a well-built-up conspiracy theory that would scare him to death.

Even though you're a relatively new animator, both this and your newest short "Love" seem to tell their stories through vignettes. Is that style of storytelling more exciting to you than something more linear?
Actually, "Love" is very different from "Symphony No. 42." The trailer may make you feel it's a similar structure, but it's a way more concrete story. I wouldn't call the situations vignettes anymore, but I wouldn't call it classical storytelling either. I'm just excited about the short form of film. I think it is a perfect platform for experimenting with storytelling, composing pictures and sound. It's only recently that I started to feel a growing interest in feature length, and how I could maybe include the things I like in the short format.

What are you working on now?
I just finished my new film "Love," which is a 14-minute-long, French-Hungarian co-production. That film took a lot of time to finance and make, but will be shown in competition at the Berlin Film Festival for the first time . I recently worked with some great people on a short promotional film for a city in Denmark, but mainly I try to just draw without deadlines for a bit now, and see what happens. In the near future, I would like to do something based on music. I will be part of an artist-in-residence program in Vienna in May, where I want to start developing a new short little something.

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

For information on Réka Busci, visit her website.

Photo via Flickr user Kakei.R

Assholes are like opinions: Everyone has them—but no one has more opinions on assholes than Jonathan Allen.

For the Canadian academic, anuses are a gateway into understanding culture, language, social anxieties, humor, politics, and possibly the meaning of life. Given that butts are gender neutral and represent a host of positive and negative connotations, they make for a fascinating topic of study. Allan spent two and a half years researching and philosophizing about the anus, and he eventually wrote Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. Set for release in early March this year, the book inspects the ass in literary theory and cultural criticism.

Starting with Sigmund Freud's 1908 work "Character and Anal Eroticism," Allan shows how describing someone as having an "anal personality" may signal our need to take the anus, with all "its pleasures and its discomforts," and "repress" it. From there, the author surveys everything from films like Brokeback Mountain, the virginity complex, anal pleasure and violence, and even how butts relate to colonialism in Canada.

We reached the professor and Canada research chair in queer theory at Brandon University by phone for an interview. We probed him about butt stuff like twerking and how the anus relates to socio-economic disparity and gender.

Dr. Jonathan Allan says Kent Monkman's "Cree Master 1" painting flips the traditional colonial narrative. Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

VICE: What do you mean by the "democratization of the anus"?
Dr. Jonathan Allan: One of the things that most interests me is how we define gender based on difference. And of course, gender is this weird thing that gets conflated with sex all the time. When you fill out a government form, it asks for your gender—male or female. Well, male or female is about your biological sex, not your gender, which is how you live your day-to-day life. Everything is about difference. The one thing that unites us is the butt. We all have one, have access to it, and we sit on it for most of the day. That's what's so interesting to me.

You also relate the anus to what you call "the frontier myth and colonialism."
When I started presenting this work at conferences, someone asked me about colonialism. They referred me to novel Song of the Loon, which is about a settler's erotic adventures with indigenous bodies. So much of the language of colonialism—we say "the land was raped" and so on—what would it mean to invert that narrative?

This might sound simple, but butts are dirty. They are considered uncouth to talk about in certain company.
That's true. I can't imagine most of us sit around during holiday dinner talking about our butts. But, at the same time, pay attention to it on TV. You will hear constant references in the media. I was watching one of those medical emergency shows on TLC, and sure enough some guy shows up at the hospital with something stuck up his butt, and he can't get it out. On Big Bang Theory, there's a great moment about the "anal autograph" and the "colon calling card." In the movie Sisters, there's a scene where a dancing ballerina toy gets stuck in some guy's ass. For ten minutes, there's an ongoing joke about this toy playing music in this guy's ass. We do this thing where we talk about our rectums, but we talk around them. We hint at it because it's dirty. It's purpose is defecation, but there's a remarkable universality to it.

Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

Can we talk about twerking?
It's a shameful and yet desirable thing. It defies rules of gravity and it's right in our face. It's not the first time we've seen the ass in popular culture. We had Ricky Martin's "Shake Your Bon Bon," "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," "Fat-Bottomed Girls," Sisqo's "Thong Song," and others. But twerking took it to a whole new level.

In your book, you say women are the biggest readers of gay romance novels.
There's very little serious writing about romance novels, unfortunately. To actually sit down and read these things not as a joke or judge them as something bad housewives read, I wanted to find out what's going on there. They're everywhere though. I think are the fastest growing sub-genre in romance reading. They are mostly written by women for women. They speak to anxieties around the male body and the kinds of pleasure men have and have access to.

For your research, do you have a room covered in photos of anuses with interconnecting strings linking them together? I'm thinking A Beautiful Mind–type scenario.
There are all these connections that are constantly made. One thing that is interesting to me is how the ass is invoked in political discourse. The metaphors we use—"backroom deals," for instance. Or Donald Trump's "getting schlonged" thing. It's about about the refusal of the phallus, right? And then he uses that to describe Hillary Clinton. Or Doug Ford: After the provincial election in Ontario, he said how the Progressive Conservative party needs an "enema."

Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

Let's talk about eroticism.
For a part of the body that's so taboo, we put a lot of energy into it. Whether it's getting a perfect ass, downsizing if we have a fat ass, or gaining an ass. I saw in a men's magazine—maybe GQ or Men's Health, one of those magazines—2015 was the year of the man's ass. In the first pages of my book, I point out how declared 2014 to be the year of the ass in general. We're obsessed. We want to sculpt it; we wear yoga pants.

Dr. Jonathan Allan. Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

Could you unpack the issue of violence and the anus?
In the book, I talk about Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge. That scene is quite graphic. There is a certain violence and a lot of power at play. I think that power is always transferable and always in flux. The anus is always there. We've all experienced pain in our asses. We've all experienced anal pleasure. We've all had particular bowel movements that were pleasurable. When we frame it in those terms, it becomes something different. I don't think we'll ever get rid of the shame of assholes, but we're clearly interested in them.

Is there something to be said about social class and the butt?
The butt is the proletariat of the body. If it is about wealth, the Kardashians seem to be doing fine. There are class arguments to be made around it though. I quote the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who says, "The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Devin Pacholik on Twitter.

Jaimeo Brown Transcendence's Work Songs is one of the most exciting, experimental, and important albums set to drop this year. The project is centered on the samples of songs laborers have sung through the ages as they toiled away with their work. Producer and drummer Jaimeo Brown teamed up with Grammy Award-winning guitarist and composer Chris Sholar and a host of other musicians to usher these historic tunes into the new millennium. What makes Transcendence's music so literally transcendent is how it builds new sonic textures on top of these historic audio samples, effectively linking our present with our past. When the two things come together, the audio collages arrive at a sound that's incredibly forward-thinking and fresh.

One of the standout tracks from Work Songs is "For Mama Lucy," which features a sample of the voice of Leroy Grant, a man who was incarcerated in Mississippi's Parchman Farm prison in the 50s. We hear Grant sing in a throaty croon about being distraught over a ill loved one. But what's cool is that the backing music behind his voice takes us on a journey that begins with a distorted blues rock sound that recalls the vibe of Electric Mud, and then evolves drastically, culminating with some blissed-out free jazz that sounds as chaotic and propulsive as modern life feels.

VICE is proud to exclusively premiere the music video for "For Mama Lucy," which you can watch below. The video follows the song's lead, visually bridging that gap between our past and our future through sampling. But in the video's case, it's the sampling of historical images spliced with the trappings of modern-day life. We see plantations and slain Civil Rights leaders in black and white as well as LCD monitors and current technology in vibrant color. Watch the video below and then keep scrolling down to read a short email interview I had with Jaimeo, who breaks down his vision for "For Mama Lucy" and the whole Work Songs project in general.

VICE: How did you develop the concept for this video?
Jaimeo Brown: The concept of the video is woven from the fabric of the larger Transcendence story. Transcendence seeks to transcend the barriers of history, art, and technology. We wanted everything, visually and sonically, to line up with this message so that "For Mama Lucy" would be accentuated emotionally. It was very much a collaborative effort amongst the creative team that has been involved—Steph Thom and Freda Knowles from saltjam., Haley Brawner from my record label, and the talented filmmaker Brad Wong, who did an amazing job finding the raw footage and assembling it to create a coherent, powerful piece.

The music video is a collage of images spanning a wide swath of American history. But it seems to begin and end with images of what looks like the Oak Alley plantation—there are also references to the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and World War II. How did you select the images for this film, what do they say to you, and how do they reinforce the overall concept of the song and the album?
The images that were chosen reflect the historical nature of Transcendence. In order to transcend the darker realities of our history, we have to face them. Transcendence finds its roots in the African-American experience, but demonstrates the common denominators that are found in every culture. The album illuminates music that has been tied to great struggle, perseverance, ingenuity, and courage. From Mississippi to Yamagata, Japan, work songs have been a way that humans have been able to transcend the overwhelming hardships of life.

As the video progresses, it turns from black and white into vibrant color. What is the significance of this shift?
The color also speaks to the future, as the black-and-white images refer to our history. The goal was to connect the two. It's always important to me that hope is the preeminent message of Transcendence, and I believe the color helps bring that out and conveys our optimism.

At certain points, we see not only the collaged images, but also the mediums through which they are disseminated—like televisions, iPads, and computer screens... What's important about not only the message, but the medium in which we get content?
Technology has produced a virtual reality in our culture. The idea of transcending technology focuses on making the best use of this medium. The Gees Bend quilters taught me that necessity and creativity are the parents of invention. If we have the right intentions, technology can be used in incredible ways to transcend.

What can we expect to see from the other music videos coming from this project?
I'm really hyped about the next video. It will feature some incredible work by the prodigious animator and filmmaker Fons Schiedon and dancer DC Focus. The visual elements of Transcendence are as important as the music itself, and we're really excited about creating stunning videos that encourage others to transcend!

Pre-order Work Songs on iTunes and go see Transcendence live at the Brooklyn Bowl on February 21.

Follow Wilbert on Twitter.

Check out Jim's blog, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook.

With the Beta for Ubisoft's hyped-to-the-nines RPG-shooter-slash-MMO The Division now behind us, it's time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of this new Tom Clancy-branded game. Did our preview fill us with hope, or did we witness teething problems enough to park our hopes for it being an essential multiplayer experience? Read on, obviously.

The Dark Zone

Let's kick things off on a positive note. The success of the game is hardly assured by the Dark Zone, but it's easily its single brightest idea and best chance of standing out in the online shooter crowd. The Dark Zone is essentially The Division's take on a classic player-versus-player area. You pass through a brief safe zone, replete with vendor and ammo chest for any last-minute load out switches, and you're straight into a scarier version of the game's world, where other human players can kill you before stealing your hard-earned kneepads.

There are PvE missions and AI enemies you can tackle in your squad of up to three other Division agents—you're part of the good guys, trying to restore order to New York City after a particularly virulent virus has cut down a healthy percentage of the population and basically turned the place to shit. You spread out or stick together, taking out rivals and rifling through their gear for whatever's useful—but you don't get to keep that loot unless you reach an extraction zone and attach your stash to a helicopter hoist. Sounds simple, but activating an extraction commences a countdown that anyone in the vicinity can hear. And if you attack another player character, you become a glowing rogue agent with a timed bounty on your head, too. It's an enticing risk-reward scenario that puts a tense and hardcore spin on PvP/E. —Danny Wadeson

New York's Not Exactly a Player-Friendly Setting

Look, I've been to Milton Keynes. A lot. You don't need to tell me that a grid-style road layout will induce even the most committed of insomniacs into blissful R.E.M. sleep. But as I walked around the small areas of New York available in the beta, the environment became incredibly tiresome. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but in a post-apocalyptic world, having to go down a long street to make two left turns to go down another long street seemed a bit silly. Why couldn't there have been some nice short cuts? Like a fire escape of a smashed-out ground floor of a shop, or an open apartment block that connects parallel avenues? Perhaps there will be greater game-world variety in the finished product—I expect there will be. But in the beta, it all felt a bit linear. —Sean Cleaver

The Seamless Transitions Between Areas Are a Joy

It's true that the American grid system leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to traversal variety, but the one thing The Division's beta map managed with aplomb was that it just kept on going. More specifically, the game was pretty much completely seamless—I only encountered a loading screen when fast traveling or dying, and you've got to say "fair enough" in both cases. While that might not sound like much to the modern gamer, consider that this is—and will become even more of—a complex, massively multiplayer online shooter and it's pretty impressive. If the full game can add a little more ever-present danger, this seamlessness will help make it a gripping, "always-on" experience. —DW

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film, LARPing Saved My Life

Tunnel-Vision Combat Makes for Tired Encounters

Linear is a term that cropped up in my mind a lot while playing the beta, both solo and in a team. Go to point A, shoot things in the way, and pick up loot. This could be because of the layout issues, but there don't really seem to be many ways to approach a combat encounter other than to stroll up to a few hoodlums, duck behind cover, and proceed to light them up. The gunplay is great and challenging for a third-person cover shooter, but if you're used to Destiny's open areas, AI that actively flanks and dodges, and those all important X-factor abilities that add up to some truly grandstand moments, then The Division might fall short. I enjoyed the shooting and the grenade tossing, including the sticky bomb, but it did all feel rather rote. —SC

It Puts the "Rocket-Propelled Grenade" in "RPG"

I'm a Destiny fan, and certainly agree that the gunplay on offer in The Division is more functional than thrilling, but its class/squad system actually makes perfect sense in a way I've been missing from console games. The RPG-lite system—comprised of flexible perks, passive talents, and active skills—really lends itself to experimentation. In so many games, the RPG systems are self-fulfilling prophecies, but it really feels like success in The Division will necessitate a well-rounded team. A bit like Rainbow 6 Siege but without the twitchy tweens making a mockery of your (lack of) tactical nous. Hopefully. —DW

We Didn't Start the Fire

You don't really get a sense of the whole story from the beta, and I'm obviously not going to judge the game on that. What I am confused about, though, are hostages. Why are any hostages being taken? In a city being rapidly decimated by a viral outbreak, what purpose does it serve to take prisoners? Rob people? Sure. Kill, enslave, build a gang of followers, all of this is plausible. But these poor defenseless humans, waddling around this part of New York, are being captured for... what? I honestly can't tell you, because it makes no sense to me. Leverage? Leverage for what? Supplies? Medicine? There's a big ol' free space provided by whatever government is at work about half a kilometer down the way. I'm being flippant, of course, but while freeing hostages helps you get to grips with firefights in confined areas, it brings nothing to the overall experience, so far. —SC

'The Division,' Agent Journey Trailer

It Doesn't Actually Matter If the Story Sucks

Tom Clancy games have always been known for their totally accessible, gripping narratives, duh. I jest, of course. But The Division, even if its core plot line is a little hackneyed and its game world grayer than a wet weekend in Gears of War, could be saved by a wealth of emergent narratives, each personal to the player (or small sets of them). Even in our brief time together in the Dark Zone, we cooked up some minor-epic flash in the pans. From stalking a lone player and trolling him with near-miss sniper shots, to kicking off spiraling cycles of rogue-agent bloodbaths by the extraction zone, the water-cooler moments are going to be way more numerous, and important, to this game than any bullshit that's built into the "story proper." —DW

If I'm Playing a Role, I Want to Feel Connected to It, and I'm Not so Far

OK, I accept that. But just to jump back to the hostages—one of the reasons that it really grated on me is because I simply don't know what I'm doing in this universe. We mock Destiny for its shoddy opening moments—you're a reanimated guardian and, quelle surprise, also the only person who can save the universe (so long as you discount the other million or so reanimated guardians, controlled by players around the world)—at least it had a beginning. I know The Division's beta didn't include much in the way of story on purpose, but taking it as an RPG, which Ubisoft wants us to do, I didn't feel like I connected in any way to my on-screen character. It was an empty avatar, walking through New York, shooting guys who obviously looted every sporting goods store going in order to uniformly clothe themselves. I didn't feel any real agency. Just saying—it's a Tom Clancy game, full of clichéd action-movie motifs and dialogue, and getting on with it is too great of a pass to give this game. As an RPG, I didn't feel like I belonged in its world, in any way shape or form. But I hope that's just a side effect of the beta's limited access.

Then there's the UI. I don't mean the always-on-screen box displaying your remaining ammo, cool-down periods, perks, and so forth, which could easily be shrunk down—I'm talking about the main inventory. Initially it seems very well laid-out. But once you start modding guns, some clearer visuals regarding what gun it is you're fixing these new sights to would be useful. And isn't the text small? The text is small, isn't it? Just how close to our TVs do you expect us to sit, Ubisoft? —SC

The Division is released for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on March 8. More information at the game's official website.

Follow Sean Cleaver and Danny Wadeson on Twitter.

Taken from inside a North Slave Correctional Centre in Yellowknife. Photo by Pat Kane

"Send me back. I'm going to hell right now."

The disheveled Inuk man with a mop of jet-black hair continued to yell as he slammed his head against the plexiglass in the prisoner's box. Moments earlier, Justin—who is originally from the remote fly-in community of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, but has spent several years living on the streets of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories—had tried to strangle himself with his shackled hands. If it hadn't been for a social worker frantically shooting up from her seat to bring the suicide attempt to the attention of the sheriff, he might have succeeded.

Justin was being brought before the courts last week because he had allegedly kicked an RCMP officer in the head after he was found sleeping on the floor of a bank's ATM lobby on a typically brisk -4 °F night in Yellowknife. He currently faces several other charges, including several for assault, which date as far back as 2014, but has no convictions in the NT.

Having covered the court system on and off for local media outlets over the past several years, the scene was all too familiar: a person clearly suffering from mental health issues being dragged through the court system, when it is obvious that some form of medical response is needed.

Fortunately, Peter Harte, a defense lawyer who has been working in the North for the past 12 years, recognized Justin from his time in Cambridge Bay and submitted a request for him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation under the mental health act—an application that was reviewed and approved the following day by a judge. Had he not been there, Harte believes Justin could have been left to fend for himself.

"I was concerned that he was going to be treated not as someone with psychiatric problems but rather treated as a criminal," Harte told VICE, after his intervention on Justin's behalf. "There's a systemic problem, which is why I stepped in."

On any given day, the courtrooms of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut offer a glimpse into the complex web of inter-generational violence, mental health issues, and substance abuse in Canada's remote north, through the lens of the criminal justice system.

Outside Yellowknife Court House. Photo by the author

Last Tuesday was docket day in Yellowknife's Courtroom 2, where a lengthy list of accused, consisting mostly of young aboriginal men, were brought before a diminutive female judge with greying hair. The few exceptions were a 40-year-old Caucasian man who plead guilty to stealing $281.90 worth of chicken, beef, and shrimp from the local grocery store, and the parade of a half-dozen white men of varying ages who were being charged with trafficking crack cocaine. The latter is a phenomenon which is increasingly on the rise in the NT, as gangs and drug traffickers from southern provinces move north to prey on a population that is vulnerable to addiction.

The demographic of the crowd in the courtroom was unsurprising given that 87 percent of the criminals held in the NT's correctional facilities are Aboriginal, while 86 percent are male, according to figures provided by the justice department. (Although the rate of Aboriginal incarceration is high compared to the national average of 24 percent, half of NT's population of 44,000 are Inuit, Metis, or First Nations, and only three of its 33 communities have populations where non-aboriginals are in the majority.) The crimes being tried ranged in severity from a 34-year-old man accused of stabbing a man to death and attempting to murder a woman, to the theft of a bottle of vodka from a liquor store in Inuvik.

"It's a microcosm of all the aboriginal issues you see on the TV every day," Harte said of docket day, where the court mostly deals with procedural matters such as setting trial dates, entering pleas, and in some cases sentencing.

Of the 74 people who were scheduled to appear—some in person, others in custody via teleconference—many were up on violent charges, with sexual assault (13) and assault (14) accounting for 27 counts. Another handful of men were appearing on charges of aggravated assault or assault with a weapon, in addition to one child luring case and the aforementioned man accused of murder.

Photo via Bonnie Rotton's Instagram

Bonnie Rotten was watching football in her living room one Sunday when a comment popped up on one of her Instagram photos:

"So is she gonna stop porn or be one of those disgusting, horrible mothers?"

The comment was in response to a photo Rotten posted of herself with her two-week old daughter. She didn't reply—Rotten says that she tries not to feed the trolls—but comments like this have become routine since the 22-year-old former porn actress announced that she was pregnant last May.

"Every single day, I get the most ridiculous comments," she told me. "'What kind of mother are you?' 'How do you think your daughter is going to feel when her friends bring up to her that her mom was getting railed by a bunch of dudes?' Or, 'How do you think you're gonna raise a child when all you do is suck dick for a living?' Just stupid shit, all day long, from all angles."

Rotten stopped performing in February of 2015, in anticipation of her pregnancy. She was at the height of her career; in 2014, she was the second-youngest woman ever to win Performer of the Year at the AVN Awards. But her pregnancy, she says, has changed her life and her career.

According to Mark Spiegler—one of the top porn agents in Los Angeles, who's represented the likes of Rotten, Sasha Grey, and Asa Akira—it's "pretty rare" for one of his clients to get pregnant. When they do, though, most drop out of the game.

"I don't really have too much to say about this," Spiegler told me, "because when girls get pregnant, they usually quit porn."

When porn actress Dana Vespoli was 33 (married to fellow porn actor Manuel Ferrara), she decided she wanted to have a baby. But when she and Ferrara started trying to conceive, it affected the way she approached work: She had to take fewer risks with her body.

For one thing, she started only doing girl-on-girl scenes and working with fewer people, since "you're more prone to infection when there's that much exposure to different people, different flora."

Vespoli, who has been in the adult industry for 11 years, stopped performing for the majority of her pregnancy. After giving birth, she realized getting back to work would be a challenge for her postpartum body. Porn actresses use their bodies as instruments for their work; new moms use their bodies as instruments to nourish or nurture their children. Vespoli found the divide too taxing.

"I breastfed all my children," said Vespoli, who is now a mother of three, "and my body didn't really feel like it was entirely mine during that time. I felt like it belonged to my children. I didn't want anything else touching my breasts, or to catch an STD and have to go on antibiotics. It's really hard on the infant."

Rotten echoed the sentiment: "I'm a very all-in person," she said. "I'm either going to be all-in as a performer, or all-in as a mother. I can't do both."

While that may be the standard trajectory, there are also ways to capitalize on pregnancy within the porn industry. Sierra Simmons was a freshman at Florida State College at Jacksonville when she and her boyfriend found out they were expecting a child. Simmons had been toying with the idea of working in the adult industry to put herself through college, and when her pregnancy test came back positive, her decision was made.

"I was in school and trying to pay for all of that," says the now 20-year-old biology major. "I needed to have the funds to do everything, and I was so concerned with not trying to stress myself out with working from nine to five."

Her boyfriend, agreeing that they needed the money, gave her the green light. "I was like, 'OK, alrighty,'" she said. "I went ahead and committed."