Your favorite video game probably isn’t on this list. Waluigi will not be mentioned beyond this paragraph, and getting a Hollywood adaptation doesn't cut it here. As with sci-fi, anime, and really any kind of entertainment, the difference between a good video game and a good video game to play high is huge. A terrible game to play sober can be excellent on drugs, and a game that’s amazing when you’re sharp and clear-headed can be irritatingly difficult after a couple of bong rips.

That said, there are countless compelling, visually stunning, surreal, immersive, thought-provoking, highdea-friendly video games out there, and it would be impossible to include them all. But every title here is a good wave to ride.

Everything

You are anything and everything, from a molecule to a post office to a galaxy in the dry, witty Irish animator David O’Reilly’s first video game. All you do is explore, passing your consciousness from object to organism and back across seemingly infinite biomes, planets, and celestial bodies. Along the way, you unearth wisdom from the philosopher Alan Watts, who helped popularize the philosophy that *hits blunt* all life is connected and is actually a single organism. There’s not really a way to win or lose—again, everything is you, so there’s no one to beat—which makes it the perfect, low-pressure game to puff n’ play. - Beckett Mufson, Staff Writer, VICE

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

If you're going to pick a Bethesda game to play high, don't go for the higher brow Skyrim or any of the Fallout titles. Nah, pick up Morrowind—a de facto turning point in Elder Scrolls titles that still has crap graphics and a really willy-nilly combat system where it's unclear if your weapons ever connect with your enemy, but sometimes they get hurt (and usually you do, too). The game is incredible, you don’t even need a fence to sell stolen goods.

Being high is also the only way to make Dwemer Ruins at all palatable. - Nicole Clark, Staff Writer, VICE

Grand Theft Auto V

Most of the Grand Theft Auto series is way too harsh for me to enjoy stoned. But one of my best friends showed me that Grand Theft Auto V includes a wealth of surreal post-game “cinematic performance art pieces” that he calls “dreams.” Dreaming is living up the potential of open world games by constructing experiences that their creators could never have imagined. Discovering one is way better blazed than fighting cops and robbing banks. PC mods and Ghost Dog aside, there’s nothing trippier than flying a jet upside-down through Raton Canyon (Canyon Dreams), or taking potshots from an indestructible freight train that the cops can never catch (Train Dreams).

The best one is Chicken Dreams, in which you choose Franklin for his ability to slow down time. You locate and hijack a semi at the Cluckin’ Bell Farms. Make sure to have some C-4 in your inventory, turn on the country radio station, and drive toward the city as fast as you can. Toss explosives out the window to get police on your tail until you have three stars. Just before you hit the bridge crossing the river, go into slow mo mode and turn to lead the cops up the mountain. If you’re lucky, “Convoy” by CW McCall will be playing on the radio. Follow the road until you hit a tunnel. On the other side, head straight to careen off the mountain. Set the camera to slow mo and watch the torrent of police cars and the Cluckin’ Bell truck rain down from the sky. Every time you achieve a Chicken Dream, you’ll notice different details. Imagine the feelings of the chickens inside the trailer. Imagine what the officers will tell their families when they get home tonight. If you land the truck, drive away unscathed, and lose the cops near the Salton Sea, you have achieved the perfect Chicken Dream. - BM

Stardew Valley

Best damn farming simulator. CHANGE MY MIND. - NC

Slither.io

I would recommend slither.io. It's a free in-browser multiplayer game where you are a snake eating colorful, glowing orbs to grow larger. You start out very small and can potentially get very big. When you inevitably run into another snake, you explode into a bunch of smoldering spheres yourself. It's pretty chill. - Peter Slattery, Social Media Editor, VICE

No Man’s Sky

This game about flying to the center of the universe and discovering a bunch of alien life forms along the way famously didn’t live up to the hype. But it just got an update and HOT DAMN LOOK AT THIS GAME IT’S STILL SO BEAUTIFUL. Just play when you’re too blitzed to need a plot. - BM

Nier: Automata

You will not want THC for this one, but you might need CBD. This is easily the best game I’ve played in the last ten years, and one of my top five favorites of all time. You play as an android, tasked with saving the Earth from robots so humans may eventually repopulate it. But the robots start to demonstrate sentience in a way that feels eerily...human. I will cut off there for the sake of spoilers, but the game has multiple play-throughs, and each of them upends your expectations of the previous ones. If you go so far as to play through even the credits, you’ll find a game that slices into the very essence of what makes us, well, us.

More than that, the gameplay is an absolute joy. It combines the best of JRPG style movement, with absolutely massive swords or hammers, and a hovering companion bot that can shoot bullets or missiles. It’s a bullet hell that never feels like drudgery.

The game is, basically: existential anxiety but make it fun. Any further summary will not do it justice. Play it, but with the necessary moral support and emotional fortifications. - NC

Katamari Damacy

Your dad, the King of the Cosmos, destroyed all the stars and constellations, and now you’ve got to clean up his mess by rolling thousands of objects into bigger and bigger balls. Reach critical mass, and you can replace the stars. That’s the out-there-as-fuck premise of Katamari Damacy, one of the trippiest and most satisfying games of all time. It requires critical thinking and adaptation, but isn’t competitive or dark, and is easy on the reflexes.

There are other Katamari games, but I haven’t played them. The most recent one is a mobile game called Amazing Katamari Damacy, which got significantly worse reviews than its namesake. - BM

Dream Daddy

This dad dating simulator is one of the best point and click storybook games I’ve ever played. You and your daughter move to the town of Maple Bay, where you find that all of the people in your neighborhood are also single, dateable dads. There are seven, they are all hot in their own way. There is no way to lose. - NC

StarCraft

StarCraft is easily the greatest game ever made. If you didn’t spend a significant portion of your formative years doing bong hits and killing zerglings, I feel very sorry for you. You missed out. The good news is, more than 20 years after the original’s release, the game is still immensely popular and there are plenty of people to play with. So pick up the newly remastered original and put those tanks in siege mode. The sound of zerglings exploding will be just as satisfying as it was back in 1996.
- Writer requtested anonymity

Super Smash Bros.

This fighting game is all about rhythm, and when I’m playing with friends it pays to think outside the box. I often lose after I’ve smoked thanks to slightly delayed reflexes, but when I win it’s incredible. Unexpected tactics pay off, like bouncing a laser sword across the map for no reason, only to have a surprised opponent jump right into it. The game’s premise itself also becomes wonderfully absurd while high. Why are Pikachu and Link fighting? I feel like they would be bros if they ever actually met.
- BM

The Witness

A puzzle game so challenging that having highdeas will probably actually help you think outside the box. I kept finding environmental puzzles everywhere, in the real world, for months after I finished this one. - NC

Pokémon

Playing old Pokemon Game Boy games is lit when you’re lit mostly because you can name your squad all sorts of dumb things, like a gangster Oddish named Tyler who is obviously the leader of Oddish Future. Round it out with Frank Octillery, Doduo Genesis, and Clamperl Sweatshirt, and you’ve got yourself a WOLF Gengar. Plus, Pokémon is turn-based, so it’s perfectly fine to get lost in thought or take a snack break, as long as you’re not fishing. - BM

Kirby Air Ride

Kirby Air Ride is like Mario Kart, but it’s from the early 2000s and the steering is objectively garbage. If you’re not feeling racing, I’d highly recommend the “City Trial” option, where you and up to three of your friends can ride around a “city” collecting power-ups like speed, steering—yes, the steering is so bad on some of these little airships that you need power-ups to make them use-able—and weight (great for melee, horrible for flight). If your opponents collect a power-up that you wanted, you can literally smack it out of them. It’s great. At the end of the City Trial you and your friends duel in some mini competition, sometimes a race, sometimes a flight challenge, and occasionally a brawl. The real joy is in accomplishing City Trial tasks that unlock new Kirby colors and airships—like knocking down all the trees in the forest, finding the “garden in the sky,” and, of course, finding all three pieces of the legendary ship. Yes, you can smack these legendary ship pieces out of your opponents as well. - NC

Civilization Revolution

What if the Roman Empire had never collapsed and the first astronauts on the moon spoke Latin? What if Shaka Zulu, and not Genghis Khan, conquered the largest landmass of all time? What if rock n roll was invented under the rule of Egyptian Pharaohs? All of these possibilities and more are tangled up in Sid Meier’s turn-based strategy series, Civilization. I particularly like the game Civilization Revolution for its goofy graphics and sound effects, and the fact that you can beat it in like 15 turns if you’re cutthroat and lucky. - BM

The Original DOS Master of Orion

The original DOS Master of Orion is a classic, well worth downloading an emulator so you can play it baked out of your tree today. The turn-based sci-fi strategy game tasks you with conquering the galaxy, either through diplomacy or war (though mostly the latter). MOO is a throwback to a time when video games were still relaxing, before players started quoting their “actions per minute” stats and donning adult diapers to extend sessions. So, if you’re extremely stoned and can’t face the fast-paced tempo of modern gaming, then the pleasing monotony of MOO is definitely for you. There is literally no rush with this game. Take two minutes for a turn or spend hours leisurely tweaking your empire’s economy. Negotiate at length with such nerdily-named rivals like the Psilons, Darloks, and Silicoids. Take your time, roll another joint, and just relax. - Anonymous

Tetris

Tetris was the first entertainment software export of the Soviet Union according to Wikipedia, so that’s fun to think about. Nothing is more satisfying than crushing four rows of blocks with a single straight Tetrimino—the official name of Tetris blocks—while listening to music originally composed the Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov. When you’re high, it sends tingles down your spine. - BM

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Beckett Mufson on Twitter and Instagram.

A woman’s "blood-curdling scream" wailed across the lagoon at Pinhook Park in South Bend, Indiana, startling a seven-year-old girl named Paula, alone with her two-year-old brother at a campsite. In the dead of night on June 24, 1988, Paula said, she heard the woman pleading for her life, followed by more screams.

A couple of hours earlier, Paula’s mother, her mom’s boyfriend and her other sibling, six-year-old Bobby, had left the campsite to buy some food, according to a recently filed criminal complaint in Indiana’s St. Joseph County. When the trio returned, Paula "vividly remembered that all three were covered in blood." After burning the blood-soaked clothes and cleaning up thick crimson stains from the boyfriend’s van, Paula and her family departed Pinhook Park, she recalled.

About six days later, in an embankment near the lagoon, searchers discovered the body of Miriam Rice, a 28-year-old suburban mom of a three-year-old child who was four months pregnant. The same night Paula heard screams, Rice had gone missing during one of her evening walks with her dog. A coroner determined someone had killed Rice with multiple and blunt force trauma to the head.

Rice’s brutal slaying remained a mystery for nearly three decades—until last month, when St. Joseph County Prosecutor Kenneth Cotter charged 77-year-old ex-con George Kearney and 56-year-old Barbara Brewster, his former girlfriend and Paula’s and Bobby’s mother, with murder. Kearney had been in custody for weeks, and on Monday, a judge ruled Brewster be held without bond following her extradition over the weekend from Weaver, Alabama, where she was living. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Her children, now adults whose names are Paula Brooks and Robert South, are the key eyewitnesses whose statements helped cold-case detectives find probable cause against Kearney and Brewster. It’s an unlikely breakthrough for a homicide case that has been dormant for so long, according to crime experts—one made all the more complicated and unlikely given the familial ties at play.

"Most of these cases are solved through connections of DNA techniques and recanvassing the cases,” Jason Dickinson, a Montclair State University psychology professor specializing in child and adult eyewitness testimony, told me. “Insofar as cold cases being solved by eyewitnesses who were children at the time the crime took place, something like that is a rare occurrence."

Michael Benza, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and expert on criminal procedure, agreed. "Normally, we don’t see eye witnesses coming forward this long after a crime," he said. "You have other kinds of issues as well. Like, how reliable is the testimony, especially when the witnesses were children when the murder took place. People have trouble remembering key details."

Dickinson added that investigators will obviously do what they can to bolster eyewitness testimony by corroborating as much of it as possible. "Those details will increase the credibility of the witnesses’ memories," he said. "As an investigator, I would also look to see if there is anything influencing their testimony and what is the reason they are now coming forward as adults."

Still, this one looks pretty cut-and-dried.

Speaking via phone from her home in Middleboro, Kentucky, Brewster's sister Helen Patrin said her family has been living with the deep dark secret of Rice's murder for almost 30 years. "Both Paula and Bobby were traumatized," Patrin told me. "Bobby was in really bad shape. I ended up raising both of them because my sister just does whatever she wants to do. She disappeared in 1995 and I didn’t see her again until 2009, when my husband died."

According to the criminal complaint, Patrin was interviewed by investigators this year, and told them Brewster and Kearney dropped off Paula at her house after leaving the campsite. "Paula told her of the screaming and the blood," the complaint states. "[Patrin] stated that she did not know what to believe at first. However, she stated that later that day, she saw on the news that Miriam Rice was missing."

Patrin also told detectives that she contacted Crime Stoppers—a program utilized by police departments across the country that allows people to provide anonymous information about unsolved crimes—the day Rice disappeared, and again when the body was found, to report what her niece had witnessed. A spokesman for umbrella organization Crime Stoppers USA did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

"Helen Patrin opined that perhaps she wasn’t believed because of Paula’s age," the complaint states. Records confirmed that Helen Patrin contacted Crime Stoppers with the information.

Patrin added that her sister and Kearney were both on probation when Rice was murdered and were questioned by their probation officer about the homicide. "It didn’t do any good," she said. "He let them go and that was the end of it." (An online search of St. Joseph County’s clerk of courts records under Brewster’s maiden name Flowers and two other last names she has used did not turn up any criminal convictions against her prior to 1988).

Tim Corbett, the headline-generating commander of the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit, conceded that police "looked at" Kearney and Brewster in 1988, but told me they were not considered prime suspects at the time. "The thing is with these unsolved cases, we get calls all the time," Corbett said. "We get pulled in a lot of different directions."

The Rice case was bumped around from one agency to another, further complicating the investigation. It was originally assigned to the South Bend Police Department. In 1993, the case was reassigned to the special crimes unit in St. Joseph County, where it languished for 22 years, per the complaint. In 2015, St. Joseph’s newly-formed cold case unit took over the investigation and went to work revisiting leads, according to Corbett.

"We developed this squad with some guys who were retired and probably bored of sitting on their asses," Corbett said. "It has been very successful and we have solved several cold cases."

According to the complaint, the first break occurred on March 9, 2016 when Kearney gave a voluntary statement to cold-case investigators claiming he wanted "to clear the air' after receiving letters in prison from Brewster’s daughter Paula Brooks questioning his involvement in Rice’s death. In 1989, Kearney was hit with a 40-year sentence following his conviction for felony child molestation, according to Indiana’s online offender database.

During the police interview, Kearney recounted how he, Brewster, and her son Bobby were in his van when they saw Rice running along Pinhook Park's pavilion. Kearney said Brewster "got something out of a black bag and ran after the woman."

He lost sight of his female companion and the woman, but heard her scream, Kearney told investigators. "When Brewster returned, she had blood on her hands," the complaint reads. "He further stated that Brewster washed her hands off in the lagoon."

Investigators subsequently interviewed Brooks, her brother Robert South, and their aunt Helen. Brooks, now 37, gave her account, including the screams she heard, the trio returning to the campsite covered in blood, and how her mother made her clean blood off the van’s interior. Her brother, however, provided detectives with key details about Rice’s final moments on earth.

The 35-year-old South said Kearney pulled the van over and grabbed Rice, who fought back. "Kearney smashed her head into the side of the van and then forced Miriam Rice into the van," the complaint states. "Kearney began yelling at Brewster to kill Miriam Rice."

South then saw his mother "continually beat Miriam Rice about the head with some tools" while "a substantial amount of blood was splashing about the van, including upon him," according to the complaint. Traumatized by the murder his entire life, he never spoke to anyone about the murder because Kearney had threatened to kill him if he did, South told investigators.

On February 15, cold case detectives tracked down Brewster, who admitted that she was present when Rice was killed. However, she denied any direct involvement in the murder, insisting Kearney overpowered Rice and rendered her unconscious in the van. "Kearney then drove her and her children back to Pinhook Park and dropped them off," the complaint says. "Miriam Rice was still unconscious in the van when Kearney left with her. Roughly 15 minutes later, Kearney returned without Miriam Rice," according to Brewster.

But Patrin, Brewster’s sister, believes both of them had a hand in Rice's demise. "If you ask me, I think my sister is guilty," she told me. "So is George. She is really something. And that man is pure evil."

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Quick question: How many homeless people are there in Torquay, England?

Just as a ballpark. It's a town of about 65,000. It's a seaside resort town on the English Channel down in south west England. Maybe there are ten? 20? 120?

The point is that this seems like a question with a proper answer, doesn't it? Like the starting point of an investigation, rather than the entire investigation itself.

I'd thought so, too. Until about 25 minutes ago.

"They're pretending because they get funding to combat homelessness. It's the biggest modern-day sham! Homelessness is a huge business! Fake homelessness is even bigger! So why on earth do homeless charities have any interest in reducing the number? Honestly, Gavin, you play this one right, and you can have yourself a really big story here."

Ashley Sims with a bird

Ashley Sims is my new vigilante friend. He has ruffled a lot of feathers lately. He says the local paper is against him, that the council hates him, and that homeless charities denounce him. He is loved and despised throughout the town—though the exact quantities of each emotion remain unclear.

His story cuts across local politics, perverse incentives, and the limits of the welfare state, to arrive at that uniquely unloveable point where the caring classes tacitly collude with the managerial classes to create a mirage of both caring and competence.

The problem with Sim's story, though, is that I don't entirely believe it. When I get off the phone with him, finally, some suppressed spinal nerve pings in me, journalistically. Because things that sound too good to be true are the things that are most gagging for printing. A dilemma.

Is Torquay actually a hotbed of corruption? Or is Sims actually just a troubled, makeshift hero gradually coming undone?

Some known facts:

Late last year, Ashley Sims was running one of his restaurants. There was a homeless man begging outside the coffee shop beneath him.

"Anyway, I did a bit more research, and I found out that all of them had a place to live. Nearly everyone was a professional beggar," he says, convinced, over the phone. "They'd go and get their sleeping-bag, go into town for a couple of hours and then come back once they'd made enough for their next fix."

Like most in the town, he'd noticed an uptick lately. People were saying the town was rundown, that the city center was dying. The evidence? Homelessness had exploded. So Sims came up with a plan. The sort of plan someone who has no background in a topic comes up with at a pub, before someone tells them it's preposterous, dangerous, or just won't work.

"There's only one thing these people don't like—having their picture taken. So I put up signs around town, warning people that they could have their picture taken."

Over the course of a couple of days, Sims took pictures of all the homeless in town—around 20. Then, through a network of locals, he identified as many as he could. Then he went down the local job center. "I said, 'Do me a favor: run a check on these—see if they’re in receipt of any benefits."

He published the frauds on his Facebook page, Fake Homeless. Magically, overnight, the number of homeless in town went down, says Sims, "from 20 to six."

Then stuff started exploding. He was widely denounced, the press began calling, he got invited on talk shows, where he'd be put head-to-head with local homeless charities, who had no time for his methods. Before long, Ashley Sims found himself in local council meetings.

"I had seven photos and names I was going to expose as fake homeless on Thursday. So, the council called me on Monday at 9:30 AM for an emergency meeting. They said: 'We can't let you proceed because we've learned that one of the people you are planning to expose is really homeless.' So I said: 'Apologies—please give me the name of that person so I can correct it.'"

"They said: 'Oh, we can't do that—data protection.' So I said: 'Please God, don't let this be a setup and you're about to leak this to the press…'"

The next day, it was leaked to the press.

"But all the ones with more than two brain cells were saying: 'Hang on—does that mean the other six weren't homeless?'"

Who is and who isn't homeless matters, if you follow Ashley Sims's logic because funding follows the need. Central government, charity, taxes, business rates—all pay into systems to help rid places like Torquay of their homelessness. All this, of course, is above and beyond basic dole and housing benefit, which—hypothetically, at least—should ensure there aren't any homeless.

"But they don't want that, do they? It's a modern-day scam, what they're doing [...] TESH, the council initiative, was given £400,000 [$525,234] by the government. And guess what they did with that money—fuck me—they spent it on salaries. They employed 3.5 outreach workers that nobody has ever met. I went to TESH, I said: 'What's the names of these outreach workers?' and they told me, 'Oh, we can't tell you that…'"

Ashley Sims scoffs when I tell him I'll have to put his many allegations to his antagonists.

More of Ashley's photos accusing people of faking homelessness.

I contact Kath Frieldich, chair of People Against Torbay Homeless—which is a part of Sims's despised TESH umbrella, though they are funded independently through private donations—and ask what they actually do.

"Basically, we have an outreach team that goes out 365 days a year. Posting signs are really important. We have strengthened that because we're part of the TESH collective. The majority of the things we use day-to-day, they are things that are recyclable. We have our own food-bank. We also have what we call our moving-on bank…"

It's hard to latch onto Frieldich's sentences; her words move in vast flocks of newspeak that never breaks down into simple yes or no answers.

"Now, not to speak out of turn, but you need to think about where you're getting your information about the £400,000 [$525,234]. I think you're probably better off speaking to John Hamblin at [charity] Shekinah. If you go onto the TESH page, you'll see the numbers are there. That's pretty much public information—It's nothing mysterious."

I download Shekinah's annual statements. They spent a million dollars in 2017, but that covers projects in other towns. In Torquay, they run something called Factory Row, a homelessness center with "13 full-time staff." According to Companies House, the wages bill for Factory Row was £279,000 [$366,350] last year. I called Shekinah twice. They never returned my calls.

I try Frieldich again. "You don't have any kind of estimate on the number of homeless? Would you say four is incredibly low? Is 28 a decent average?

"I'll give you the same answer I give everybody: The figures—high levels, low levels—it doesn't matter, it's always too many." She sighs. "I don't know where this myth has come from that only people who sleep in doorways are homeless. There are homeless people all over. We're very experienced with finding them. A lot of them won't stay in store doorways. Who would, the level of attacks we get… Very nasty attacks, too."

Where are the others?

"All over. Different places. I can't divulge that. That's a safeguarding issue."

Who is safeguarding Ashley Sims these days? It's just that he keeps walking into strange situations.

"Karma's a beach" was The Sun's headline when they reported that Mr. Fake Homeless himself was now living in a trailer. His detractors savored the irony; it seemed that maybe he would finally learn his lesson. Sims tells it differently: His landlord gave notice that he wanted to sell the apartment he was living in.

But what of Karma's a Beach, Part 2? Sims has shut down the entire brace of pubs, bars, and restaurants he owned in Torbay, the Devon borough that contains Torquay, and claims the council harassed him into it.

"When I had the pubs and the clubs, there was one where [...] they said I wasn't licensed for people to stand up. They had to sit down. They actually said, 'If anyone's playing pool, between shots, a member of staff has to tell them to sit down.'"

"When we applied to have the license changed, the woman from the council said: 'We think Mr. Sims has got too much on [...] because Mr. Sims and his partner have recently had a new child.' I mean, can you imagine if they'd said that to a woman!"

"So, I got rid of all of them now; I've cashed all my chips in."

Sounds bleak.

"Not really. I'm happier than I've ever been, to be honest. I've still got one business."

Right. What's that?

"It helps people with dementia to remember to eat and drink by playing music with subtle messages in it. We're trying to get funding now."

I'm not sure if that sounds like a business as much as a noble hobby. Regardless, why has Ashley Sims cashed in all of his chips? The pool table story is particularly weird—I've never heard of a "sitting license."

I call Torbay Council. They ask me to email instead. I email, to tell them I'd like to talk to someone on the phone. They tell me to email anyway. I send over some questions. A response never comes.

Was it the final question that spooked them: "How many homeless people are there in Torquay?"

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter.

Hollywood loves nothing more than digging up the great movies and TV of yesteryear and—for better or, usually, way worse—trying to raise them from the dead. We're already getting prequels to The Sopranos and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, along with reboots of The Matrix, Charlie's Angels, Daria, and a whole lot more. Now, because apparently nothing is sacred, the monumental cinematic achievement that is The Sandlot is about to get a prequel of its own.

According to Deadline, the movie is in early development at Fox, and David Mickey Evans—the same guy who wrote and directed the original—is slated to co-write this time around. The only news we know about the plot so far is that apparently it's going to have something to do with the Beast: the terrifying, bloodthirsty junkyard dog who allegedly ate 120 to 173 guys, and made life a living hell for Benny, Ham, Squints, Smalls, and the rest of the gang.

If there's any truth to Squints's retelling of the legend, the Beast's origin story goes back 20 years before 1962 when his grandfather, police chief Squidman Palledorous, cracked down on the demon dog's murder spree and had him chained up for-ev-er. Maybe the forerunner to The Sandlot will follow Palledorous as a police procedural, or maybe it'll just focus on a new group of neighborhood kids playing fetch with the English mastiff puppy before he snaps. Who knows! And more importantly, who cares? No scene involving that dog could possibly top this cinematic milestone:

So why a prequel, you might wonder, instead of a sequel? Turns out there are already two of those, both of which went straight to DVD back in the 2000s: The Sandlot 2, which has something to do with gender equality and toy rockets, and The Sandlot: Heading Home, in which Luke Perry gets hit in the head with a baseball and time-travels back to when he was 12. They look about as bad as they sound—but maybe this prequel can shake off those Ls and turn out all right.

Or maybe it'll just, you know, eat dog crap for breakfast.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Fortnite, for the few still blissfully unaware, is a wildly popular third-person shooter where everyone from preteens to Drake come together to slaughter goofily-dressed avatars in a virtual realm. Basically, each game starts out with 100 players who whittle each other down, Battle Royale-style, until the last player or team standing is crowned champion. There is also dancing.

The game is so mercilessly addictive that people have started penning panicked screeds about their children's Fortnite addictions. But apparently not all parents are so bugged out about screen time—some just want to make sure their kids are winning. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, parents have started shelling out as much as $20 an hour to pay Fortnite tutors to coach their kids how to better lay waste at Tilted Towers or whatever.

"There’s pressure not to just play it but to be really good at it," Ally Hicks told the Journal after paying around $50 for four hours of online Fortnite lessons for her ten-year-old son. "You can imagine what that was like for him at school."

"I want them to excel at what they enjoy," Euan Robertson, another parent who recently hired a Fortnite coach for his two tween boys, said. Plus, Robertson added, there's an added safety benefit to his kids' Fortnite habit. "They’re not going to break a leg playing video games," he said, apparently unaware that the game can come with its own unique set of hazards.

Coaches charge anywhere from $50 for a four-hour lesson to $20 an hour and hire out their services on freelancing sites like Gamer Sensei, the Journal reports. Sometimes, the parents wind up taking lessons themselves. "The other dads I play with congratulated me," JD Giles said after he and his kids upped their Fortnite skills with a professional trainer. "I earned a little credibility with my son and his friends—and my wife and daughter made fun of me."

This is the world we live in, everybody. The planet may be dissolving into a hellscape, but we can all rest assured knowing that the next generation of our nation's leaders will have what it takes to pwn noobs online.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow VICE on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

“It’s always a gross dude.”

As someone who has spent too much time writing about cults (sorry everyone!) this is a sentiment I’ve heard a lot lately. Almost nobody can think of a woman-led cult off the top of their head (Ma Anand Sheela doesn’t count), but most could easily list off a bunch of narcissistic men who amassed notorious cult followings. One wonders if it requires an especially malignant strain of toxic masculinity for someone to declare themselves a prophet/guru/healer and exploit vulnerable followers for whatever strange purpose.

Turns out, though, it’s not exclusively dudes who do this. Cult researcher and California State University professor Janja Lalich assures me there are many women cult leaders, and destructive ones too. A new-age spiritual guru named Teal Swan has sparked a particularly heated debate after at least one former student died by suicide. Swan claims to have super-sensory powers, to be able to see what’s happening inside people’s bodies, and to help people recover repressed memories of childhood trauma. She was recently the subject of a six-part Gizmodo podcast called The Gateway.

Though Swan has denied cult allegations, her massive social media influence and controversial practices around depression and suicide—sometimes encouraging students to imagine their own deaths in detail—have placed her on the dangerous side of Lalich’s cult radar. And with nearly a half million YouTube subscribers and hundreds of videos on everything from skincare to relationships to cryptocurrency, Swan doesn’t immediately fit the (gross, dated) profile of a cult leader. In the past, female gurus like Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Judy Zebra Knight made headlines building doomsday shelters and claiming to channel ancient spirits, but Teal Swan brings in a new level of 21st-century internet literacy as she uses YouTube and SEO to find desperate people.

To better understand what a present-day woman-led cult looks like, I called up Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown, who visited Teal Swan’s retreat center in Costa Rica. Brown mostly avoids the cult label in his reporting, and acknowledges that Swan is serving a need for a shame-free conversation about taboo subjects like child sexual abuse and suicidal ideation. But he also shares concern for the people who devote their lives to her “dark brand of spirituality” without professional oversight or accountability.

“When she finally arrives, it’s very theatrical,” Brown recalled of their first in-person meeting in Costa Rica, where students had paid upward of $2,000 to work with Swan. “She descends this stone staircase, and she has two close followers on either side, and she’s perched higher than everyone else. And one of the first things they do is a death meditation, where she said ‘we’re all going to get suicidal for a moment.’”

Brown told VICE he was caught off guard when Swan instructed people to envision exactly how they would end their own life. But the participants seemed unfazed by the exercise, already familiar with Swan’s intense video style. In clips still available on YouTube, she has suggested suicide is a reset button, feels like a relief, and that suicidal thoughts are a valid reaction to bad situations. In comments below viewers express their fear and shame about wanting to go through with it.

Brown found Teal’s unconventional approach doesn’t line up with suicide research. A new study on suicide contagion released this week found mention of suicide methods in media increased the chances of subsequent suicides. “That’s one big thing with Teal, she tells people they have to decide whether they’re going to commit to life or not,” he told VICE. “That doesn’t match with how humans behave… The data says nobody is 100 percent committed to living or death—even in the middle of a suicide attempt, there’s still part of you that wants to live.”

Lalich sees this kind of dramatic therapy as a way to manipulate vulnerable people. “They can get very unstable, and that’s what she’s counting on,” she said. “Cult leaders will always get their people to what I call ‘reframe their lives.’ They reinterpret their lives so they see everything from before the cult as messed up, and only by staying with the cult leader will they get straightened out.” (To this day, many members of the “Teal Tribe” say they are only alive today because of her teachings.)

Brown was curious about how these followers found Swan, and many of them described “some sort of cosmic delivery.” ”They were putting this intention out to the universe, and Teal’s videos were sort of coming to them,” said Brown. But Swan had a more straightforward answer to this question. “She said she basically targets them, using basic SEO, and basic Google tags, so when people are searching things like ‘I want to kill myself,’ they find her videos.”

Teal Swan didn’t respond to VICE’s requests for comment, but I was able to get some answers from a Google representative on how they deal with suicide-related searches. The tech giant doesn’t allow autocomplete on searches that indicate self-harm, and serves a “results box” at the top with the phone numbers of trusted country-specific organizations. But with straight-up titles like “I Want to Kill Myself (What to Do If You’re Suicidal)” and “What to Do If You Feel Hopeless,” Swan’s videos aren’t hard to stumble across on YouTube’s search platform.

Lalich says she’s been hearing complaints about Swan for quite some time. “Mostly they’re from people who feel they’ve been exploited,” she said. “They want some kind of validation that they were right in feeling that way about their experiences.”

But for everyone who felt exploited, there are many more who stand by their guru. Like other personalities operating in the new-age self-help space, Swan has a wealth of benign-seeming content about setting goals, finding joy, and breaking out of destructive patterns. Videos on “how to see auras,” “how to activate and open your third eye,” or “how to use your intuition,” and others have amassed tens of millions of views combined.

Whether or not her followers accept the cult label, Lalich says there’s more work to be done to expose exploitive gurus and fight cult stigma. “You certainly don’t want to run up to someone and say ‘hey, you’re in a cult.’ You have to talk to them tactfully about it,” Lalich said. “I think if we can get more information out there about what cults really are, how they deceive, and take advantage, it may stop people from having such a negative reaction to the word. Because it’s useful for identifying what’s wrong with that group.”

Brown said Swan’s online community is as active as ever—still growing at about the same rate. He says his biggest takeaway was that young, controversial figures who make big promises like Swanwill continue to find an audience as long as there are gaps in mental health resources. “If you google something about suicide, you’re probably going to find that suicide lifeline up top, but it’s not very human. It’s just a number,” he said. “My takeaway is we need more options for people who are struggling, from other sources that are being held more accountable.”

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Check out Scott Lenhardt's comics on his website and Instagram.

I like to consider myself a pro on beating drug tests because I’ve passed numerous—even some close calls—while on probation, in prison, and on parole. I would have only tested positive for weed, but a dirty for marijuana could’ve sent me to “the hole” for 60 days or back to prison when I hit the street. I passed my first drug test when I was out on bond in 1991. I was getting ready to embark on a journey as a fugitive and had to pass the urine tests as a condition of my bond. But there was no way I was going to stop smoking marijuana. That was my lifeline back then. I went to the local head shop in Northern Virginia and bought a bottle of Golden Seal. I took the capsules, drank tons of water, and passed the test. One of many.

I’m not an expert and I’ve never heard of a magic bullet, but from being involved with drugs, being around addicts and ex-addicts, and from my own experiences I know cocaine, heroin, and speed are all out of your system in a couple of days. The same for LSD, which I’m not even sure can be tested for. Weed is the tough one, though, especially for a hardcore smoker. THC stays in your body for up to three weeks or more if the person is hefty. It gets in your fat cells. The important thing to remember is to drink a ton of water and try to pee it out beforehand. You don't want to give them concentrated morning piss. You want it as diluted as possible when you take the test. That’s what I’ve learned taking literally hundreds of urine tests. I’ve also written about the many ways that prisoners beat them.

I took my last drug test in January 2016, when I got off federal probation, and I’ve been toking up ever since. But with so many people getting drug tested these days and the outdated War on Drugs mentality still prevalent, it's still not a terrible idea to know how to beat these things when they come up. As such, I contacted two experts on the subject for VICE.

Barry Cooper is a former drug agent and current drug expert/humanitarian who’s been featured on VICE before. He’s been teaching how to pass a drug test for over 12 years and has a website, Never Get Busted. Paul Armentano is NORML’s Deputy Director. NORML has been a player in the marijuana legalization effort since the jump. I talked to both by phone to find out the best way to beat a drug test, if the stuff they sell at the local head shop works, and what home remedies can help beat a drug test. Here’s what they had to say.

Can the stuff they sell at the local head shop help you beat a dirty urine?
Barry Cooper: Yeah, 100-percent. What I tell people, if they don't have time to buy from a good online source, go to the local head shop and ask the clerk what their best detoxifier is. And it's important not to say "Drug detoxifier" or "I'm on probation" or “employment drug test" because they won't sell it to you. They're not allowed to sell these [items] to pass a drug test. That's why they're sold as detoxifiers. The local head shops have the right product to beat the tests that are being used locally in that court [district]. That's why I tell people to go to the head shop in whatever court jurisdiction they're in, that's the store they need to go to, to buy their stuff.

Paul Armentano: This is a game of cat and mouse. There are products that work for a period of time. And then the drug testing industry becomes aware of such products, and they impose countermeasures that tend to make the use of those products obsolete. Then the industry that has sprung up to try and help people thwart drug tests comes up with new potential strategies. That sort of cat-and-mouse game has literally been going on for decades. I'd also add that most of the products available in those sort of facilities that involve consuming any sort of fluid, by and large, are simply diuretics and they may work to some degree, but they're largely overpriced and they certainly over promise.

You always hear people talk about putting bleach or detergent in the urine and the like, any truths to these home remedies?
Armentano: Well, there's different strategies people employ prior to taking a test. With a product that is going to lower the sensitivity of the test. Another option is the use of an adulterant, which is something that is added to the sample itself in hopes that that's going to create a false negative result. When it comes to the latter adulterants, again that's your sort of perfect example of a cat-and-mouse game. There are certainly products that, when added to urine, can throw off the sensitivity of the test. In most cases, over time, the drug testing industry becomes aware of what those adulterants are, and they either begin to screen for the adulterant itself, or they check some sort of composition of the urine that they anticipate will be altered when an adulterant is used.

Cooper: There are home remedies that work, but they don't work 100-percent. There are so many different factors in terms of being able to fool these drug tests. I tell people all the time I wouldn't take my chance with lemon juice and cinnamon and several other things you can mix together, that's one home drink that works sometimes. I just wouldn't take a chance with my freedom on those. I would go to a local head shop or go online and buy from a good source because that's the only way to really pass excepting abstinence.

What about dilution? How much water should your drink?
Cooper: There's a rhyme that says, "The solution to pollution is dilution." There's a lot of truth to that. The problem is when we dilute and drink a lot of water—the idea is to drink it an hour before your test—you pee really nothing but water. The amounts of THC are not high enough to be detectable. The problem is that the color of the urine is the same color as pure water. When they see that, it's usually flagged as a test that's been tampered with. That's why a lot of these products, these detox drinks, they tell you to drink a lot of water with it. But it has niacin and other colorings added to it on purpose so your urine is a normal color after diluting.

Armentano: The test itself is screening for metabolites, which are breakdown products of certain active drugs. The test is going to be more sensitive or more likely to detect those metabolites when the urine is concentrated. The less concentrated or the more diluted the sample is, the less sensitive or accurate the test is going to be. Consuming any sort of fluid, but particularly diuretic fluids, in the hours prior to a test is going to lead to a less concentrated sample, and thus is going to lead to a less sensitive test result. But of course, drug testing labs are well aware of people trying to dilute their urine through the use of fluids, and there's a number of different ways they try to test to see if a sample is overly diluted or not. Again, it's all cat-and-mouse kind of game.

What about the THC sticks to fat cells argument?
Armentano:

Different metabolites have different half-lives. Cannabis is different [than] cocaine. That has to do with the makeup of the metabolite itself. Carboxy-THC is lipid-soluble. Cocaine's metabolite is water-soluble. A water-soluble metabolite is going to be broken down and excreted as waste by the body much more quickly than will a fat-soluble metabolite. It's literally simply the chemistry of THC that makes it present for a far longer time than it would otherwise be. Someone's metabolic rate may influence some variation of how long that process is going to take. But at a fundamental level, drug tests are going to be much more likely to identify someone who uses cannabis as opposed to someone who uses other drugs, simply because cannabis' metabolite is fat-soluble and most other drug metabolites are water-soluble.

Cooper: THC does hide in the fat cells. It hides in the fat cells of every body—no matter their weight. These detoxifier drinks, exercising, and drinking a lot of water prior to a test can flush those things out of the system. It's a two layer protection system. The detoxifiers will help get the THC out of the fat cells and they also supply something in case it didn't get all of it. It covers THC leaks and hides that from the testers.

What do you think is the best way to beat a dirty urine?
Cooper: The detox business is a multi-million dollar industry. It's such a competitive money-maker because there are so many people being drug tested. It’s gangster out there, man, it's such a big business because the drinks and these products do work. They keep people out of jail. I have one page that's called "How To Pass Your Drug Test." I've worked on it for over eight years now, and it's received millions and millions of views. On that page, there's a link to the products that I have used that worked and the products I endorse. On Never Get Busted and the "How to Pass Your Drug Test" page I teach how to pass the drug test, how to use the product properly, and people can click on the links that order the product.

Armentano: Abstinence is the only sure-fire way to beat a drug test. And of course, drug tests and labs are human. It's even possible that somebody may have never been exposed to illicit drugs and could have an unfortunate incidence where their test comes back positive anyway. That's why our samples are generally split into an A sample and a B sample. In case something like that happens.

Are their any over the counter or internet products you recommend?
Armentano: I wouldn't feel comfortable endorsing any product. Particularly products that are sold over the internet.

Cooper: Test Clear and Pass Your Test. I know that shit works. For the last 12 years I've been working to keep people out of jail. These detox drinks do that. And the detox products for the hair follicles [work also]. I've been doing this a long time. They work.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

A pregnant woman was served cleaning solution instead of the latte she ordered in a McDonalds in Alberta, Canada.

According to the Canadian Press, Sarah Douglas swung into the Lethbridge, Alberta, McDonalds Sunday morning on her way to her kid's ball tournement. Like most of us, she needed some of the good stuff to wake up and ordered a coffee, which she took a swig of once she was on the highway.

Turns out, it wasn’t coffee.

"I immediately had to put my hazard lights on and pull over and spit it out and rinse my mouth out with water," Douglas told the CBC. "I opened up the lid of the coffee and out poured this pungent smell of chemical. It wasn't a latte at all."

The mother of two then went back to the McDonalds and spoke to the manager of the store. While there, she asked some workers to show her what she was served instead of coffee and when they did, Douglas snapped a photo. The image shows that what she swigged included citric acid, phosphoric acid, methyl-trimethyl-3, and 2-butoxyethanol. Now, I’m no chemist but, you know, that doesn’t sound great. The warnings on the bottle saying a user should wear gloves and goggles when handling, and it don’t really suggest it’s safe to drink, either.

Fortunately, Douglass was fine. According to a note issued by Dan Brown, the owner of this particular franchise, what happened was the machines that make the coffee are cleaned every morning and “the milk supply line was connected to the cleaning solution while this guest's drink was made.”

Brown told the CBC that the franchise took “immediate action” and that a health inspector has already visited the franchise. Douglas told the CBC that she was contacted by Brown and offered an apology but decided to come forward with the story because she’s worried what happened to her might happen to other McDonald’s customers.

At the end of the day though, while, yes, you shouldn’t drink cleaning solution used by fast food restaurants to clean out their lines, it still probably tasted better than a double-double.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Imagine, for a second, that the debate on climate change is over. Donald Trump is no longer president, of course. The political and economic influence of the fossil fuel industry is in freefall, climate change denial is an absurdity from the past that only your grandparents still talk about, and every political and business leader on the planet has made slowing global temperature rise their single most important goal. What would it be like to live in that world?

Probably your mental landscape includes more solar panels and wind turbines, highways full of electric cars, energy-efficient buildings, the replacing of dirty fuels with less damaging alternatives. If that’s the case, you could be ignoring a huge part of the solution. Cleaner technology is essential if we are to have any kind of long-term future. But it’s only one piece of a transition with potential to restructure our planet-ravaging economic system and the toxic politics the system has created. Unbeknownst to most people, even those who follow climate change closely, this transition is already underway.

Over the past few weeks I have had long and unguarded conservations with experts who don’t see themselves as traditional environmental thinkers, yet are on the leading edge of efforts to address the most serious crisis civilization has ever faced. I asked them to describe a world where their solutions are being implemented at the highest levels of our political and economic order. And though their answers were as diverse as their backgrounds, they agreed that the future we must build to stave off environmental collapse may well be more prosperous, equitable, and democratic than the world we currently live in. That’s the good news.

But they warned me that if we mismanage this transition, if we don’t adhere to certain fundamental truths, we risk creating a society every bit as unequal and exploitative as the one we currently live in.

Examples of our shift away from nature-destroying activities are everywhere. There is the California town of Richmond suing Chevron, its biggest employer, for helping to cause climate change. There’s the Lubicon Lake Band installing solar panels in the heart of Canada’s tar sands. and the Los Angeles battery-storage company that’s investing $400 million in Appalachian coal country. Zoom out and view these stories in aggregate and their impact is staggering. Researchers with the London School of Economics calculated one in ten US workers are helping build the green economy. London-based analysts FTSE Russell have estimated the global green economy to be worth $4 trillion, which is comparable to the oil and gas sector.

“We can build something better than we had before by moving off of fossil fuels,” May Boeve, the head of the climate advocacy group 350.org, told me.

Stories about climate change rarely dominate the news cycle. And in the Donald Trump era they’ve been pushed further to the margins. Much news coverage of this year’s G7 summit meeting in Quebec, for example, focussed on the personal feud between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Yet a communiqué released by the summit, which Trump refused to endorse, suggested that future economic progress is inseparable from climate action. “This is something greens have been demanding for years: climate change at the core of global geopolitics,” meteorologist and Grist climate columnist Eric Holthaus wrote in the wake of that summit. “Now it’s here.”

We’re still very far from where we need to be. A paper this June in Nature Energy estimated the world must invest an additional $460 billion per year in climate solutions over 12 years to have any hopes of hitting 1.5 degrees. Any warming beyond that target, which is looking less and less achievable, drastically increases humankind’s exposure to deadly heat waves, flooding, diseases, drought, and famine. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re charging headfirst to civilizational collapse.

“The kind of chaos that most apocalyptic visions describe… like, ‘We’re going to have gunboats in the harbors shooting refugees,’ that kind of stuff rarely recognizes how bad that would be for capitalism,” Geoff Mann, co-author of Climate Leviathan, a new book explaining how geopolitics could evolve in response to climate change, told me. “All the most powerful states are tied very tightly to the health of the global capitalist system and they’re not just going to throw that up and forget about it.”

A view of an oil sands site in Fort McMurray, Canada. Photo by Ian Willms/Getty

Instead, as the impacts of climate change grow more destabilizing, business leaders are likely to push politicians to mount an aggressive response. The pressure Mann describes is already building. Last year, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and 21 other companies placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post urging Trump to keep the US in the Paris climate agreement, arguing “climate change presents both business risks and business opportunities.” (Trump ignored this plea.) Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum, which hosts an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, bringing together thousands of CEOs, world leaders, celebrities and economists, warned that “the world needs to move faster on climate change to avoid disaster.”

Mann predicts we could someday see the emergence of a global authority representing the interests of powerful countries and corporations that would help coordinate and enforce drastic climate actions around the world. This world would be much more sustainable than today’s but also has the potential to be massively unequal. Which is why Mann argues that “we have to ensure this transition doesn’t lock in existing injustices or inequalities even more than it already does.”

The time to do so is dwindling. People with the least responsibility for climate change, like the Filipino typhoon survivors I met last year for VICE, are already suffering more than the wealthy people who caused it. Yet everyone I spoke to for this story thinks a planetary transition guided by the desires and experience of communities on the frontlines of climate change is still possible. Here’s what it could look like:

Mass Affordable Housing

Humans need a place to live and a means of transporting themselves. Yet the way our society provides these necessities is terrible for climate change. Many people live in inefficiently designed buildings and get around in gas-powered cars. These two things—buildings and transportation—represent more than one-third of US carbon emissions. For years we’ve treated this as mainly a technological problem to be solved by designers, architects and businesspeople. In Vancouver, Canada, where I live, a developer named Westbank is building a 43-story housing tower that is certified as LEED Gold, one of the highest standards for sustainability. It has dozens of electric vehicle charging stations. Studio apartments start at $1 million.

What if we treated the climate impact of buildings and transportation as a social challenge instead of an engineering challenge? California offers an interesting case study. Over the past decade or so the state has passed some of the world’s most ambitious climate legislation. Yet more and more people are getting around in private cars. Several years ago Vien Truong, an organizer from West Oakland, met with people living in lower-income communities to learn what they need to become more sustainable. Near the top of their list was affordable housing. California’s rapidly increasing housing costs have pushed lower-income people to the edges of cities, far from public transportation. “This is why you always want to talk to community members first,” she told me.

In 2012, Truong helped pass a law that redirects one-quarter of the revenue raised by cap and trade in California (a program that makes polluters pay for emitting carbon) to communities left out of the state’s economic boom. To date, that adds up to more than $800 million. Affordable housing near transit is a funding priority. “It wasn’t just an environmental policy,” said Truong, who is now head of Dream Corps, a social justice organization started by former Barack Obama advisor Van Jones. “It was a way of designing policy that supports healthy, whole, and safe communities.” She has since spoken to policymakers around the world about the experience. “Absolutely I do think it’s a model we can replicate,” Truong argued.

An apartment building covered in solar cells in Berlin. Photo by Andreas Rentz

More Education for Girls

Many people’s image of progress on climate change involves a room full of world leaders in expensive suits signing a densely-worded treaty. But progress can also look like a classroom of children. When environmental researcher and author Paul Hawken set out to rank the 100 most effective solutions to climate change, he put expanding access to education for girls living in lower-income countries at number six. Women with more education have fewer children, which reduces stress on the planet’s resources. They also tend to earn more money and contribute to stronger communities. Hawken estimated this could help cause a 60-gigaton drop in global emissions. That’s roughly equivalent to removing 340 million cars from the road.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation in Northern Alberta, as well as a Climate Change Fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation, has seen firsthand the transformative impact of education. Her hometown of Little Buffalo is at the center of Canada’s tar sands. In 2013, a pipeline broke and spilled 28,000 barrels of oil near the community. Horrified, she decided to lead an effort to install 80 solar panels in Little Buffalo. “It was the first time ever that solar panels were seen in our community,” she told me. When she spoke about the project with local indigenous elementary school students, “You could just see within their questioning that they were really excited,” Laboucon-Massimo recalled. “They had really started thinking about, ‘Oh these solar panels help us not burn fossil fuels.’” The children will now grow up knowing a future without oil, gas, and coal is possible.

No More Climate Denial

Much of the technology for a low-carbon shift already exists. States and cities that have embraced it are thriving economically. Yet making that shift a core priority of the US federal government is right now politically impossible. Last year, some conservative thinkers argued in the New York Times that the GOP should support a policy of taxing carbon emissions and then returning the revenues to people as tax refunds. This was not embraced by the Republican Party as a whole, however—Breitbart advised them to “shove their carbon tax.” Most Republican leaders still deny humans are at fault for climate change. In the past year, the number of GOP supporters who acknowledge humans are causing it shrunk from 40 to 35 percent, according to a Gallup poll that found up to 90 percent of Democrats accept the science.

Years of academic research into polarization on climate have yielded a relatively straightforward insight: Ordinary people reject climate science and the solutions associated with it because right-wing thought leaders such as Rush Limbaugh urge them to do so. “It’s not like Joe Schmo in suburban St. Louis has a ton of intrinsic, deeply felt, idiosyncratic opinions about the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere,” David Roberts, the lead climate columnist at Vox, who has written extensively on political polarization, told me. “He opposes the climate change hoax bullshit because that’s what the people he respects on talk radio tell him is what conservatives believe.”

A 2016 panel discussion of the denialist film 'Climate Hustle.' Sarah Palin is second from left. Photo by Kris Connor/Getty

If Republicans such as Trump and Mitch McConnell suddenly started believing in climate change, many conservative Americans might also shift their opinion. But how could you flip right-wing elites? One pathway there could be for a Democratic administration to deliberately shrink the market share of fossil fuel companies. “I would ban gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035,” Roberts said. “People would freak out, but the minute it became law there would be this outburst of innovation.” New industries would align behind the low-carbon transition and begin to lobby Washington. And fossil fuel companies who have helped to push Republicans to deny the scientific consensus on climate change would lose influence. Once that happened, climate denial could conceivably start to fade from national politics.

This might accelerate state-level action. In places like Texas, much of the work to make farming more drought-resistant, shift to clean energy, and otherwise adapt to a warmer planet is being done by people skeptical of the science, Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told me. Yet it’s not occurring near fast enough to keep climate change from throttling the region. If deniers now governing states like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida accepted scientific reality, “it would completely change the tone of the conversation,” Hayhoe argued. “You’re adding a recognition of urgency… If you don’t acknowledge humans are changing the climate, then you don’t acknowledge that it’s going to get worse.”

Stronger Democracy

There is no scenario for addressing climate change that does not involve a rapid global build-out of clean energy. This piece of our world’s low-carbon shift is worth big money. Over $330 billion was invested in technologies such as wind and solar last year. Renewables directly employ nearly 10 million people. Tech corporations like Amazon are making clean energy commitments. The market for electric cars shows signs of exploding. The scenario Mann described earlier in this piece, where clean energy elites lead an aggressive capitalist response to climate change, seems more likely every year. Yet alongside it is the potential for a mass revitalization of local democracy.

When several dozen academics, diplomats, and energy experts gathered last year in Berlin to imagine what the world would be like if most of its energy came from renewables instead of fossil fuels, they came to the conclusion that this future may “become increasingly regionalized and localized.”

“Citizens who provide for their own energy and have increased access to education, health and wealth independently of government programs may feel emboldened to ask for more political participation or in some extreme cases, even promote secessionist tendencies,” they wrote. Decentralized renewable energy could someday provide electricity to millions of people who are currently lacking it. “You’re talking about a whole generation who know their experience of turning on the lights as not being connected to a coal grid very far away that’s making somebody rich,” Boeve from 350.org said. “But that’s actually in their own community, that they help control.”

The experience of being able to generate your own power is already influencing politics within the US. When fossil fuel utilities in Florida backed a measure that would increase fees on users of rooftop solar, Debbie Dooley, a Trump-supporting Tea Party activist and renewable energy advocate, helped bring together Christians, libertarians, business groups, and environmentalists in opposition to the fee increase—and they won. Dooley told me rooftop solar appeals to people across the political spectrum because it increases freedom. “I just see a day where everybody powers their own home,” she said. “Individual liberty is what it comes down to.”

Solar panels on a house in Maryland. Photo by Benjamin C. Tankersley/for the Washington Post via Getty

The Path Forward

Trump is so bad for climate change that just about anyone who takes the crisis seriously looks great by comparison. These days that person is likely to be a tech billionaire. “Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” Elon Musk told Rolling Stone. We need people like Musk to throw their financial and technological weight into solutions. Yet there have been reports of poor safety conditions, low wages, and anti-union intimidation at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. “Everything feels like the future but us,” one worker explained to the Guardian.

“It’s tempting to imagine that men like Elon Musk can save the planet for us, that we just need to unleash the power of their innovation and wait for the magic,” Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis wrote last year in The Nation. “But as the workers in Fremont well know, the quest for profit very often comes at the expense of people—even when the product is green.”

When the future isn’t perceived as fair, when it means large sections of society struggling to get by in a warmer world while a techno-elite calls all the shots, that provides authoritarian leaders with the chance to exploit people’s anger. We saw it with Trump in coal country. And we will keep seeing it, the experts I spoke with for this story said, so long as the desires of vulnerable communities are ignored.

“We need to have a climate justice league that’s made up of both policymakers and scientists but also everyday folks who are dealing with some of these challenges,” Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former senior advisor at the US Environmental Protection Agency who now helps lead a social justice group known as the Hip Hop Caucus, told me. “We’ve got to be smarter moving forward,” he said. “We have lots of work to do.”

Geoff Dembicki is the author of Are We Screwed? How a New Generation Is Fighting to Survive Climate Change . Follow him on Twitter .

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Greetings, fellow millennials. Do you ever feel powerless in the midst of the overwhelming clusterfuck that is the current American political climate? Do you feel ignored by a Democratic party that is too busy coming up with slogans and tripping over itself to make any kind of cohesive effort to fix this mess? Does it ever feel like the aging politicians running your country are too busy getting their jowls jiggled by some lobbyist to keep your puny life in mind?

Think again! Congress loves you, and its members are here to let you know they care by speaking to you in a language you can understand: memes.

On Wednesday, GOP senator Richard Burr managed to work a reference to the classic "This Is Fine" meme into his statement during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference during the election. Senators—they're just like us!

"Some feel that we as a society are sitting in a burning room calmly drinking a cup of coffee, telling ourselves, 'This is fine,'" Burr said, looking pleased to be able to bring up that infamous fedora-ed dog at work. "That’s not fine and that’s not the case."

"We should no longer be talking about 'if' the Russians attempted to interfere with American society," Burr went on. "They’ve been doing it since the days of the Soviet Union and they’re still doing it today."

The "This Is Fine" meme, originally pulled from a 2013 webcomic by KC Green, has—for better or worse—become one of the lasting memes of our time, perfectly encapsulating our collective fatigue at the overwhelming deluge of bullshit we're forced to drag ourselves out of bed and face every day. The meme was already awkwardly co-opted by the GOP's official Twitter during the 2016 Democratic Primary, and now, somehow, it has made its way into an honest-to-God congressional hearing.

Did we need another example of the way the internet has seeped into every crevice of American politics? Not really. But, whatever! Who cares? This is fine!

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow VICE on Twitter.

In 2016, the state of Massachusetts voted to legalize recreational marijuana, opening up the flood gates for entrepreneurs to start looking for spaces to open up shop. But the historically working class neighborhoods of Dorchester in Boston, some residents say that dispensaries are just another threat to their community, which has struggled with drug abuse and other socioeconomic woes.

In states where marijuana has been legalized, weed-related businesses can hike up property values, and the taxes reaped from the revenue can be funneled into public programs. But there are also questionable health issues involved, like higher rates of hospitalization. And much like coffee shops and restaurants, a high-end dispensary could attract gentrifying clientele that could change the face of a neighborhood, especially since the legal weed business is dominated by white men.

Editor Ankita Rao spoke with residents and policymakers in Massachusetts as the rollout was underway.

You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

On VICE’s weed travel show BLUNT REVIEWS, we trek to places where weed is legal to review things a cannabis-consuming tourist can do stoned. On this episode, VICE’s Darlene Demorizi spent a day getting blazed in Los Angeles, where she cured her munchies at Pink’s Hot Dogs, a historic restaurant that tops franks with guacamole and nacho cheese. Then she unwound at Lit Yoga, a THC-friendly studio, and stopped by Puff Pass & Paint to make a little art over a glass of CBD-infused wine.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

At every lottery in the world, there’s a person who calls winners to inform them their lives have changed. In Australia, one of those guys is Matt Hart. He works at Australia’s largest lottery operator, The Lott, and every day, Matt makes very weird and often emotional phone calls.

Over the course of his career, Matt estimates he has called over 400 people, each one with their own unique story and reaction. We spoke with Matt to hear about what that's like, and what he's learned about luck.

VICE: Hey Matt, how does it feel giving away money?
Matt Hart: You feel like a cross between the Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny when delivering the prize money. When you think about it, it’s quite surreal that we just interrupt someone’s life, every morning, to deliver the news that they’ve won a top prize and they’re now a millionaire or multi-millionaire. We have this little insight into their lives—it’s a real emotional thing for many people, we hear about their hopes and dreams of what they’d always thought they’d do with a million-dollar win.

What’s the best winner’s story you’ve ever heard?
Last year, I had a call that really made me realize what a difference money can make. I once told a woman she’d just won a million dollars and she started crying—but it was a deep cry. It wasn’t the usual happy tears. And in the course of the conversation, she explained that she was dying of terminal cancer. So her tears were this sort of huge relief and happiness because it meant that her husband could stop work for a bit and they could spend time together, tick everything off their bucket list that they could, while they had time together. It was one of the most emotional phone calls I’ve had because you could tell from her reaction that it meant so much to her. Even thinking about her now, it really makes me emotional.

Not really related, but watch the latest video from VICE Australia (article continued below):

What's the most excited reaction you’ve had?
Often there are private syndicates, a group of friends, or workmates who have gone in together. It’s always nice that they’re sharing that win and experience together. There was a bunch of friends in South Australia, young guys, and they were just absolutely going off. Basically, yelling and screaming at the top of their lungs and jumping up and down. I think anyone nearby would have heard them.

Have you ever had to convince winners that you actually work for the lottery?
Yeah, it happens often. It probably has to do with two things: People believe that it'll never happen to them, or they say I’ve never won anything in their lives, so they can’t believe they've won the lottery. My very first call was a guy in Sydney, he thought it was a prank call and said, "If you call me again I’ll call the police!" and he hung up on me. We eventually united him with his money and he was really apologetic. A lot of people won’t believe it until they see the money in their account.

Do people just blow it all?
One of the common misconceptions is that people just blow it all in a short space of time. When we’ve followed up with people, years down the road, they’ve usually used it wisely. It’s almost this fear of not spending it wisely spurs them to make good decisions and make sure it will benefit them for a long time. We had one lady who won and she was going to get a new car door, but not a new car. She said, “My car's fine, I just need a new door.”

What are some of the more interesting ways you've people spend winnings?
We’ve had a lot of quirky winners. We had one guy who wanted to go become a Buddhist monk. Another winner bought a rhinestone dog collar for her dog because she purchased her winning entry while buying dog food so believed her dog helped her win. I asked another winner what they were going to do with their win, and he said, “Oh, I’m going to the dentist.” Or my favorite was a Darwin man who said, “I’m going to go get a haircut.” It seemed so trivial and it was clearly on their mind but they didn’t quite have the resources to do it beforehand.

Do you ever get numb to the emotion of the job?
No, never. There’s something really special about it. On Monday morning, you can never think, oh its back to work. It’s hard to have Mondayitis when you’re giving away a couple of million dollars. And because you’re dealing with people, it does keep things fresh because you never know who’s going to answer.

How many winners do you think you’ve called and how much lotto money have you given away?
I’d estimate eight to ten a week. That’s mostly people who have won $10,000—through to the biggest prize I’ve given away which was $50 million.

Do you tell people at dinner parties what you do for work?
Yes. I usually go straight to the top and say I call lotto winners. People are always keen to make sure I have their phone number just in case I need to call them. People are really interested in the lottery in lots of ways that aren't about winning. They’re fascinated by the balls, the draw machine, and how it works. People are ultimately interested in the lottery because we all like to dream of what we would do if money was no object.

Has this job effected how you see luck or the way you value money?
I don’t believe in luck. It’s a game of chance so it could happen or could not happen. If you want to take part in the game you just need an entry. At times, it makes me feel a bit blasé about numbers. Like oh, right I’m giving away $600,000. But then I think that’s actually a lot of money. Because we’re dealing with such a spectrum of prizes you forget the true value of it.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Stephen Smit on Twitter

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, is a Republican. This simple biographical fact often gets lost amid rambling Twitter rants from Donald Trump, like one the president delivered Wednesday about the "Witch Hunt" led by Mueller and "17 Angry Democrats." Yes, just about all of the people caught up in the sprawling probe that has already made convicted felons out of several Trump cohorts have been Republicans or conservatives. But Mueller, who was appointed an assistant US attorney by George H.W. Bush in 1990 and FBI director by George W. Bush in 2001, has no beef with the GOP. That was probably one of the reasons Rod Rosenstein, the (Republican) deputy attorney general who appointed him last spring, chose Mueller. His credentials seemed unimpeachable.

Mueller's stature obviously hasn't stopped Trump from trying to destroy him—that's how Trump works, smearing and besmirching every halfway decent human being he comes into contact with, dragging them down to his sorry level. But the special counsel recently broke new ground by referring a batch of cases exploring whether Americans of both parties failed to register as agents of foreign governments to federal prosecutors in New York. As CNN reported this week:

Since the spring, Mueller has referred matters to SDNY involving longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta and his work for his former firm, the Podesta Group, and former Minnesota Republican Rep. Vin Weber and his work for Mercury Public Affairs, the sources said.

One source said that former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, a former partner at law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, is also part of the inquiry.

None of these people have been formally accused of wrongdoing or charged with any crimes, but this still seems like a signature moment in Mueller's probe. No one can accuse him of being an anti-Trump partisan here—after all, Podesta's brother, John, was chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign, not to mention the guy who fell for a Russian phishing attempt that may have helped Trump win the White House. And Craig sits at the nexus of the Democratic establishment, having worked for the Clinton White House and for Barack Obama after that.

But this is also the latest sign that the best-case scenario for Mueller's probe, from a good-government perspective, is not about impeaching Trump or flushing out his weirdly-tight-with-Moscow friends. Instead, it's shining a light on the filth of influence in Washington, the way both parties have become enthralled by big money and high-powered consultants and "strategic affairs" lawyers. This is what Trump called the "swamp" before he began his presidency by refusing to clean it up. In a twist, Mueller isn't just narrowly focused on the Russians and any wrongdoing from Trump's team—he's exposing the bipartisan favor-trading that makes a demagogue like Trump possible, and maybe even laying the groundwork for actual changes.

"The Trump presidency combined with the Mueller probe is setting the stage for a major reform effort that will begin in 2019," said Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, a campaign-finance reform advocacy group. While the attorney and longtime activist might have a personal interest in that outcome, one thing he told me was indisputable: "Major reforms come from scandals. History tells us that. We have a systematically corrupt system and the public knows."

Obviously, Trump hasn't drained any swamps—he's created new ones. But Mueller is putting a handful of usually invisible power players under the federal law enforcement microscope, and that could pay long-term dividends.

"It's interesting that we have a Democrat in Podesta, a Republican in Weber, a lawyer and Democrat in Craig—and all of them are uber-insiders, they've been in DC for decades, and have filled many different roles, and have such deep contacts and relationships to draw upon should they need them," Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a DC good-government group, told me.

Krumholz wasn't quite as bullish as Wertheimer about the Mueller investigation spawning a wave of major government reform in Washington. But she did feel that if nothing else, all this scrutiny of people unused to it was having a deterrent effect, however short-lived.

"It is important if they have broken the rules—if not the laws—for them to be held accountable and be held up as examples," she told me.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Danny Duncan wants to know how much he’ll be fined for throwing a cake off the stage. It’s 8:30 PM on Friday, July 27, 2018, at Manhattan’s Gramercy Theatre, and the YouTube star is celebrating his 26th birthday. In the past few hours, he’s had a flurry of bad news: Not only did he forget his slip-on white Vans on his tour bus in New Jersey, but the venue has strictly prohibited the use of water and fire—which means, much to his constant annoyance, no water guns or sparklers. He’ll have to pay upward of $2,500 for any spilled liquids (he’s repeatedly inquired what the fee would be), and the New York City Fire Department, citing the fire code, has barred any and all pyrotechnics, no matter how minor. But what about cake? No one has said anything about cake.

“Four-fifty,” someone shouts to Duncan from backstage, over the roars of mainly 15- to-18-year-old boys in the crowd. “They’ll fine you $450.”

That’s apparently a reasonable amount of money for Duncan, because as soon as he hears the number, the celebratory dessert is in his hand—and then there it is, seconds later, flying toward an overhead light.

“I’m the YouTube Steve Aoki,” he later tells me, cracking up.

The security guards, as they will be for most of the night, are not amused. But Duncan’s adoring fans are—and have been for a while. He loves them, and they love him.

After all, this is the 15th stop on the YouTuber’s self-funded, countrywide, 20-city Virginity Rocks Tour, an unrehearsed hour-long mishmash of a performance that includes two little people—Cameron Famularo and Kewon Vines—dancing to Soulja Boy, the latter attempting to seduce a “MILF” from the audience by lip-synching Drake, multiple jousting battles, more than ten boys getting only the tops of their heads shaved, a luchador wrestling match, failed skateboard tricks, crowd surfing, free merch, a shitload of confetti, fake $69 bills with Duncan’s face printed on them, chants of “Fuck Pussy!,” a headbanging DJ nicknamed “Ratchet,” and a singalong to James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful.”

When a newly somewhat bald boy named Danny climbs down the stairs back toward the pit, I stop him to ask why he let Duncan do that to his hair.

“Why not?” he says, capturing, in a single shoulder-shrugging phrase, the entire tenor of the evening. “My mom,” he whispers to nearby friend, “is going to kill me.”

Why not.

Why not, if you’re a member of Duncan’s crew, get a “VIRGINITY ROCKS” tattoo in the greenroom? Why not, if you’re Duncan, stand in the doorway of your bathroom, five feet from the toilet, and aim your piss toward the bowl? Why not name your act, which has nothing to do with “Virginity” or “Rocking,” “Virginity Rocks”?

Because though Duncan is sober (his parents, he tells me, were alcoholics), he does have sex—and this show, if it’s still unclear, has nothing much to do with abstinence. Instead, it is what Duncan claims to be the first of its kind—a YouTube channel taken off the internet and translated, however unpracticed and sloppily, into a live rendition.

“I wanted to do something better than, like, a meet-up for my fans,” he tells me, noting that he couldn’t “sing or anything” like that. “No one had any real idea what this was going to be. They just bought tickets.”

While Duncan says he has nothing against those who’ve yet to pop their cherries, he acknowledges that the branding is a little tongue-in-cheek. (When an Oregon student was told she couldn’t wear a “Virginity Rocks” shirt to school this year, Duncan later went to the small town and gave away a bunch of Ts.) He clarifies, though, that he’s not totally kidding.

“If you’re a virgin, I really do think that’s amazing,” he says, sharing that kids will come up to him and reveal he’s inspired them to wait. “I wish I had that self-control.”

It’s hard, on the surface, to take Duncan’s sincerity completely seriously. Over the past few years, he has amassed more than 1.5 million subscribers, and many of his vids have been viewed millions of times. He’s that guy you knew in high school who punched other kids in the nuts for a good laugh—but he never grew up and became a self-proclaimed millionaire because of his refusal to. His hero, he says, is Daniel Tosh, and he is personal friends with Carrot Top. He is a Jackass-esque prankster who’s unbiased with his victims. Duncan’s gags target everyone, from his good friends to people he’s never met. He can be quite generous, like when he fed the homeless with the Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster or purchased his mom a new house. He frequently has minor, inconsequential run-ins with the police. When he bought his sister a new car, he drove her rundown pickup into a lake. After his mother needed a new mailbox, he installed one shaped like a large wooden dick, and when the local news interviewed him about it, he wore a suit and tie and told them his name was “Gary Winthorpe.” He enjoys wheelies on his dirt bike (sometimes indoors), crashing his car, and hoverboarding. (“I love sports,” he tells me.) He often carries large stacks of money around, on film, because he says it’s “funny.”

“I 100 percent make the best videos on YouTube,” Duncan tells me, crediting his cameraman and DP, Alex Martinez, who’s shooting a documentary of the tour. He doesn’t follow many others in his field either. “I watch Justin Bieber paparazzi videos,” he says. “And Bryce Harper getting mad at shit.”

Watch anything Duncan has ever put out on the platform—you don’t have to be too selective—and you’ll immediately get what he’s all about. Take one of the more recent additions, “Being an Asshole!” In the 11-minute clip, he insists that though some commenters call him an “asshole,” he’s actually a “great guy”—so now, because they said that, he’s actually going to be an asshole. Here are some of the ways he accomplishes that: He screams at children when they run into the shot; he stops his car at a red light and beeps at people walking on the crosswalk; he points a camera, with a stalker-length lens, in strangers’ faces until they notice him; he arrives at an event and starts fiddling with the audio equipment; he imitates accents; he puts on a fluorescent vest, and with the aid of an orange cone, directs traffic; he jumps onto the back of a motorcycle that’s not his; he tries to grab someone’s cellphone in the middle of a call; he hurdles over toddlers; he asks a guy, not very politely, if he can fuck his dog.

“A lot of people tell me not to do certain things,” he says, referencing words like “pussy” and his not infrequent use of them. “But I never really cared. I just do what I want.”

Duncan was born and raised in Englewood, Florida, and says he moved to Los Angeles when he was 22 with $20 in his pocket—the amount, he often jokes, that’s now his per diem from the venues where he performs. When he got to the city, he was helping train professional athletes, one of whom was Jason Lee, the skater and My Name Is Earl star. He encouraged Duncan to pursue Instagram and YouTube and, ultimately, acting. Prior, he had no intention of chasing an entertainment career.

“He thought I was funny,” Duncan tells me. “And that I should try it.”

A few years on, he’s never looked back. He wants to put out this doc with Martinez, and then he hopes the future is—you guessed it—film and television.

He hasn’t, though, forgotten his origins, and like Adam Sandler, Duncan says he wants to work only for himself and just involve his friends in his endeavors. Like, say, Kevin Amarillo, who Duncan met when he first moved to LA and who has become something of his sidekick. (He has “Danny Duncan” tattooed on his ass.) Amarillo tells me he was skating in Southern California and sleeping in the back of cars and, with no other real plans, was going to join the Navy. Before he fully committed to enlisting, however, he says Duncan made a wager with him. The two were playing basketball, and Duncan insisted that if he could sink a full-court shot within five tries, Amarillo would stay in LA. He took the bet. Duncan made the basket in his last attempt.

“It’s the one thing,” Amarillo says, “that changed my life.”

He’s thankful, clearly, and hearing him narrate the tale, it almost sounds as if Duncan intervened in his life like some sort of omniscient god. Amarillo had, minutes before he shared that story with me, let Duncan attempt to shove a condom over his head. It didn’t work, so he tried a second time. It didn’t work, so he tried a third time. It didn’t work.

Duncan’s humor is built on this distinct antagonism—not unlike, say, Johnny Knoxville fucking up a rental car and trying to return it. It might not land for everyone. The condom might not always fit. But what he shares with the king of MTV’s hit series is how he can, seemingly without effort, bring a dedicated group of deranged pals together and inspire them to do what he says. And never have to endure (indeed the often humorous) abuse he subjects.

“Danny just DMed me on Instagram,” Vines tells me, when I ask how they got together. “And here I am. I love this Jackass-type shit.”

Whether it’s Kewon Vines or Kevin Amarillo, Cameron Famularo or DJ Ratchet, they recognize the madness inherent in Duncan’s videos and live shows is all in good jest. (Catch Duncan whipping apples at his DJ’s stomach.) And, maybe more importantly, what else are they supposed to be doing? Well… why not?

At the end of the show, Duncan announces that he’s heading downstairs, to the merch table. He’ll take a photograph with whoever, as long as they can all clear out by 10 PM. It’s 9.

I’m standing behind the partition, between the stage and the floor, watching everybody clear out, when a woman from New Jersey, Kristen Monteleone, approaches me. She wonders if I’d hand her a few $69 bills for her son, Colin, who’s already bolted to wait for his photo op.

“There,” I say, giving her three. “That’s $207.”

I wonder if she approves of Duncan and what he does. She smiles.

“Whatever gets these Fornite-playing little shits off their asses,” she says, “I don’t care.”

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

Follow Mike Breen on Instagram.

The corpse flower—a.k.a. Amorphophallus titanum—is named for its stench, a rotting, noxious mix that calls to mind roadkill or mildewed gym laundry. (The Latin name translates literally as "giant, misshapen phallus.") Chemical isolation of the flower's compounds reveals overlap with cheese, sweat, garlic, feces, rotting fish, and decomposing meat.

If that description sounds delicious, you're in luck! Though the corpse flower blooms unpredictably (every five to ten years) and stays open for just 24 to 36 hours, one is about to bloom any minute now at the Huntington Library, LA's storied arboretum and research behemoth. The Huntington has affably named the plant "Li'l Stinker" and has been tracking its growth as if it's a child, tweeting daily updates since July 25.

The Huntington Library holds more than 50 corpse flowers, but they've collectively bloomed only five times since 1999, according to the LA Times, most recently in 2014. Corpse flowers attract more than 10,000 visitors on years any of them bloom, and Huntington extends its normally 10 AM–5 PM visitation hours into the evening to accommodate the boom in foot traffic.

There is a reason for the stank: The horrendous smell apparently tricks bugs—like pollen-carrying carrion beetles—into mistaking them for literal rotting meat, ensuring a pollination cycle. The corpse flower hails from Sumatra and holds the record for largest unbranched inflorescence—basically that giant cluster of flowers arranged on the stem in the middle of the plant. They can grow up to ten feet in the wild, making Li'l Stinker relatively small, since it's only 42 inches tall as of July 29. But all the stench fans gathered in LA right now are hoping that its odor will be huge and putrid. Good luck to them.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Nicole Clark on Twitter.

Drive about 30 miles outside of Las Vegas, just off Highway 15, and you will discover a desert landscape occupied by mysterious objects. There are severed mannequin parts, perforated movie star pin-ups, sun-scarred wedding albums, and strange assemblages of discarded consumer goods and debris. Decimated by firepower and bullet holes, these artifacts seem to lose their shape, volume, and surface. They dissolve into the environment like an organic property of the desert.

Over the past few years, Hoyer has been visiting unofficial shooting ranges in Nevada to research, document, and photograph homemade gun targets. Diverse in material, form, and construction, these readymade sculptures punctuate the landscape with a story that is menacing and amusing.

By positioning the targets center-frame, Hoyer bisects the violence and decay with a steady, fixed horizon of desert sky. Viewers stare down the barrel of the lens, from the perspective of the shooter, to observe a hidden constellation of gun culture and the American imagination.

When Minnesota Senator Al Franken was accused late last year by eight women of groping or forcibly kissing them, the controversy seemed to wrap up relatively quickly. Less than a month after the initial allegation, his Democratic colleagues called on him to resign, and he did, though without admitting to any misconduct. But even in his absence, intra-Democrat squabbling over how his scandal was handled has festered, and has now blossomed into a public feud between one of the leading potential 2020 candidates and the party's most famous big donor.

Before his fall, Franken was a progressive hero who had earned a reputation as a sharp questioner during Senate hearings; his name was even being thrown around as a potential 2020 candidate. The allegations against him seemed like a litmus test for Democrats at the time. While Republicans were rallying around accused sexual predator Roy Moore in Alabama, the opposition had a chance to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on bad behavior from one of its idols, and that's what it decided to do. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said it was time for him to step down, at least 32 other Democratic senators joined her, and Franken was left with little choice. (It might have helped that everyone figured Democrats are unlikely to lose Franken's seat in a special election.)

But where some saw Democrats' swift decision to believe Franken's accusers and oust him as a template for how sexual misconduct scandals should be handled, many of Franken's supporters believe he was wronged when he was chased out of the Senate without even an Ethics Committee investigation into charges that were a lot less serious than those facing Moore or Donald Trump. Democratic Senators like West Virginia's Joe Manchin decried Franken's treatment, and even some true-blue progressives like New York anti-corruption activist Zephyr Teachout thought the decision was made too quickly.

Some of those displeased at Franken's banishment blame Gillibrand in particular, and that's where things get complicated. Gillibrand, who once held relatively conservative positions when she represented an upstate New York House district, has become a progressive leader on issues ranging from abolishing ICE to investigating sexual assault in the military. She's young, she's charismatic, she's unafraid to call Trump's policies straight-up evil—all of this should endear her to Democratic voters looking for a champion in 2020. But among the Democrats who now disdain her are many donors, chief among them George Soros.

The Hungarian-born mega-donor told the Washington Post in June that Gillibrand took down Franken “in order to improve her chances” in the upcoming presidential race, and for that reason he wasn't going to support her. And though Soros is maybe the most famous Democratic donor in the country (and the one most often made into a bogeyman by conservatives) there are plenty of other donors, including women, who agree with him, according to recent reporting from HuffPost. “I viewed it as self-serving, as opportunistic―unforgivable in my view,” a New York donor named Rosalind Fink told the outlet.

“If standing up for women who have been wronged makes George Soros mad, that’s on him,” Gillibrand told HuffPost in response. “It is clear that we must put our morals and the valuing of women ahead of party loyalty. When someone does something wrong, you have to speak up and be counted, whether it’s President Trump, or a Democratic colleague.”

Even though the 2020 primaries are a year and a half away, there's already a behind-the-scenes scramble for New York donors—a reliable source of Democratic cash—among potential candidates. None of the big names have declared that they're running, but we know the 2020 race will be chock full of contenders, most of whom can't exactly afford to alienate a huge chunk of Democrats with deep pockets.

It's not clear that Franken's resignation will be an out-in-the-open debate when those primaries approach. It's a complex topic that doesn't lend itself to soundbites favored by campaigns—on one hand, shouldn't politicians be held to high standards? Shouldn't women be believed? On the other, isn't there a right to due process? A lot of people loved Franken, and Gillibrand's move to oust him looked to some people like careerism, a play to boost her profile while getting rid of a potential rival. But Gillibrand is also obviously genuinely interested in issues of sexism and harassment, and it's not difficult to imagine her telling Franken to resign even if she wasn't planning to run for president. And don't those charges of "opportunism" reek a little bit of misogyny? Would she face the same criticism if she were a man? By 2020, the Democrats may have many other things to debate that have nothing to do with Franken or men like him, and all of these questions may never end up being asked.

But the Franken scandal doesn't need to be in the news to have an effect on the Democrats. It's already taken root among the donor class and poisoned some of them against Gillibrand, and if she's behind on fundraising, that could impact the entire campaign. (That we're even talking about this now, in 2018, is a byproduct of an incredibly fucked election process that gives enormous power to a handful of wealthy people.) It may also become part of a more nebulous narrative that had already been swirling around Gillibrand: that she acts out of political instinct rather than genuine progressive feeling—a hard allegation to rebut when you're trying to become the most powerful person in the world.

Franken's resignation will always be a blot on his political career, as well as its likely end. But in a perhaps unfair way, it's become a blot on Gillibrand, as well. Maybe she was in the right when she called for him to leave the Senate, but it's undeniable that it's now made her path to the White House more complicated. If she is an opportunist, she doesn't seem like a very skilled one.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Recreational weed may be legal in nine states, but people are still routinely trying—and failing—to illegally sneak the stuff across the border into the US. Would-be smugglers have already built marijuana-shooting bazookas and cannabis catapults and brand-new cars stuffed with pot like weed Trojan horses, but now, it looks like some smugglers have started turning to Rodney Dangerfield for inspiration.

Texas Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents announced this week that they have seized around $40,000-worth of marijuana stashed inside some golf bags—complete with fake clubs to make it look realistic, the Houston Chronicle reports.

According to the Chronicle, Border Patrol agents in Brownsville, Texas, spotted some people in the Rio Grande river swimming from Texas into Mexico and decided to search the area. When they did, they uncovered some abandoned golf bags stashed on the river banks near a golf course, presumably waiting for some stateside member of the smuggling team dressed in terrible plaid clothing to pick them up.

The bags were filled with around 50 pounds of marijuana in total, packaged in bricks and ready to be sold. CBP believes that the plan was to have someone retrieve the stashed weed and slip into the golf course, where the smugglers could sneak the green onto the green and make a clean getaway. Apparently, the plan got lost in the rough or whatever.

There haven't been any arrests yet, but whoever masterminded this whole operation is probably pretty unhappy they're out $40,000, wherever they are. Sorry, would-be smugglers. Maybe next time you should think up a tactic that doesn't seem cribbed from a terrible Caddyshack reboot.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow VICE on Twitter.