Illustration von Ole Tillmann

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

Last month, New Zealand's Parliament passed a bill that will make citizens think twice before making a dead-baby joke or posting a nude pic of an ex on the internet. Named the Harmful Digital Communications Act, the law states that anyone who causes "harm by posting digital communication," a.k.a. trolling, is liable to conviction and could face up to two years in prison and be subject to $50,000 NZD ($32,570 USD) in fines.

But what exactly qualifies as "harm" instigated via laptops, 1's, and 0's? According to the bill, anyone who uses online platforms and social media to incite "serious emotional distress"—such as using damaging, threatening, or offensive language, as well as sharing private photos or information without the subject's permission—is committing a crime. Under an amendment to New Zealand's Crimes Act, the country also added the stipulation that an internet user who tells another person to kill himself could face up to three years in jail.

Not everyone thinks the bill is altruistic, though. Gareth Hughes, an MP of New Zealand's Green Party of Aotearoa, said the law was "irresponsibly broad" and could damage both journalism and free-speech rights.

Regardless, the law is in effect, so revenge pornographers and 4chan racists better watch out.

GIF and photos by Guilherme Santana

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil

"I want you all," says Lay Moretti, a rapper from São Paulo, when I ask what kind of girls she wants featured on her blog. Lay is the founder of Bucepower Gang— a Tumblr page where women anonymously post selfies, nudes, and belfies. Lay started the page in an attempt to instigate a conversation surrounding a female's sexual freedom in Brazilian society. Her and her "gang" are pioneering a new kind of feminism, one that doesn't demand any sort of high-brow academic background.

Bucepower exists thanks to Tumblr, a platform that according to many has helped the development and growth of feminism online. "For me, Tumblr is a kick-ass tool," says Lay. "I've been using it for a long time and I like that it gives people like us the power to express ourselves with words and images."

The whole crew showed up to our interview: Barone, Lay, Tutti, Janna, and Cris are all in their 20s and look so cool that I left wanting to dye my own hair blue. In fact, they may very well be the coolest women in São Paulo, always the first to hear about the trendiest bars and parties. They're equal parts crazy, intelligent, and informed—but still, no one ever hits them up to discuss feminism on forums or notable feminist blogs.

Lay tells me that she never gets involved in any online feminist discussions because they are always drowned in unrelatable academic research, and the people who organize them seem to be forgetting that it takes more than a couple of books to attract women to a cause (especially if those women spend their days working, studying, or both). Cris says that she is so disappointed with virtual feminism that she no longer considers herself a "typical" feminist: "I'm a feminist in my own way but if the bullshit that people talk on the internet is feminism, then I'd rather not be called a feminist."

They're right; Feminism these days seems to be either a salad of Facebook ramblings or a never-ending panel discussion about absolutely nothing. What's worse, certain so-called feminists seem to be constantly arguing with each other over what feminism is. "Girls, we are all in the same ship, heading in the same direction. If someone calls me a whore, the woman next to me will probably also be called a whore at some point," argues Lay.

"I'm a feminist in my own way but if the bullshit that people talk on the internet is feminism, then I'd rather not be called a feminist."

"This lack of unity between women can only benefit men. For example, let's say a guy hooks up with two girls: It's almost certain that those girls will end up fighting with each other, when it's actually the guy who should be punished," says Tutti.

Tutti is a rapper, but São Paulo's hip-hop scene isn't the most welcoming place for a girl on the mic, at least partly because in Brazil being overtly confident can often be equated with being slutty. "Sometimes, the toughest insults come from people watching my shows. A lot of people just stare at me and judge me," explains Tutti.

That's part of the reason the gang was started: The girls felt as if they had to take a stand and deal with the oppression they'd been experiencing. "People like the rapper Dina Di showed the way and put girl power into rap—I don't see any other woman in Brazil shaking things up like that. All you see is girls teasing each other," says Lay.

From left to right: Barone, Lay, Tutti, Janna, and Cris

The gang's biggest challenge so far has been finding their own feminist voice; one that differs from popular modern feminism, which according to the girls has been dominated by the white middle class for far too long.

Tutti says that the gang welcomes any woman who wants to learn. "Every woman lives in a different reality. I'm black, so I've experienced different things and my priorities are different than that of a white woman's. But we're not trying to preach or say that one is better than the other; We just want everyone to get along. It's more like: 'I'm black and I've lived through this kind of stuff and you're white and have lived through other kinds of stuff. So, let's help each other, right?'"

With stories of suicide and lives destroyed by revenge porn popping up more and more frequently, the idea of creating a website full of naked women might seem a little weird to some. To Bucepower, their Tumblr is an important part of salvaging a girl's sanity. "This Tumblr was created to tell women that you can show off both your body and your sexuality. But, on a deeper level, it's also a place where girls can get to know each other, exchange experiences, and discuss serious problems," says Cris.

Last year, Janna found out that an ex-boyfriend had shared a naked picture of her on a WhatsApp group with 50 members. One of the participants in the group was her boyfriend at the time. "I was sure that it would never happen to me—I ended up loosing two jobs because of it. I suffered a lot. A lot of girls mocked me. One day, a bunch of girls even began kicking me while I was walking down the street. These days, I can happily say that I love my body and Bucepower changed me and taught me to accept myself. I want to be able to show my fucking body. It's mine after all," she said.

"You're not a badass just because you have a naked picture of me. I post naked pictures of myself on Tumblr because I want to. So, fuck you. You post a pic of your dick first and let's see what happens," Lay chimes in.

Related: Watch Broadly's documentary, 'The Abortion Pill'

Barone tells me that being part of Bucepower was a way for her to combat her own insecurities about her body. "I don't get any support from my family—everyone just tells me I'm fat. That I need to burn my belly fat; that my face is beautiful but I need to lose weight; that men only want fat girls for sex and nothing else. I felt so ashamed of my body, but, with these girls, I've learned that we need to share our self-knowledge with other women, instead of putting them down."

Bucepower is a fairly recent invention, but it has already attracted a huge following. The gang says that a lot of girls write to tell them how happy they are to have finally found a place where everyone can be sexual and show off their bodies without being judged. "Selfies are like therapy. You get to look closely at your body; you actually see it and you accept yourself," Cris points out.

Tutti adds: "We aren't here to create virtual characters. We're a new generation of feminists—we are from the street, from the ghettos. We're from the suburbs. We are black and white girls who grew up in favelas."

"Women in suburban communities help other. They talk with each other, debating and coming up with ways to educate those who aren't informed or don't have money," she continues. Capturing and educating the masses is definitely something that academic feminism seems to have failed at.

Lay

"What about men?" I ask and the whole gang laughs. "One day, a guy told one of us that he'd fucked three of us. Here's what she responded: 'Actually, I think YOU were fucked by all three of them'," Lay tells me. "Guys hate that we are changing the narrative, they really do."

Before I switch off my tape recorder, Lay utters a concluding remark: "A girl doesn't need to victimize herself to get attention, she needs to have and be the power. The Bucepower Gang aren't interested in competing for likes and shares. Girls, all we want to do is kick men's arses."

Tim Grayburn and Bryony Kimmings performing. Photo via

For most of Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn's show Fake It 'Til You Make It, Tim's face stays covered. Bryony says her boyfriend is hiding behind binoculars, jumbled up rope, and clouds of cotton to avoid looking into the eyes of the audience because he's nervous to be performing for the first time. In truth, it's because Tim has been hiding for much longer. Tim suffers from severe clinical depression, and Fake It is the first time he's revealed the depths of it to the world.

While the way Tim tells his story is unique—most sufferers don't deal with their illness through interpretative dance—the fact that he's suffered in silence for so long definitely isn't. In 2014 three-and-a-half times more men committed suicide than women. Despite this, women are still 75 percent more likely to seek professional help in the case of depression. Men are dying because they feel like they can't speak up. Some guys like Tim however, are using comedy to come to terms with their problems, and in doing so encouraging other men to break their silence.

Tim used to work in advertising and Bryony made performance art about things like chlamydia. Unsurprisingly, it was Bryony who talked Tim into making a show about his illness. She first discovered his depression six months after they met, when she found his medication tucked away in a backpack. Tim thought that would be game over: finding out the person you've spent half a year falling in love with is on a medley of prescription drugs can't be easy.

In fact, Tim told me that Bryony was the first person to really understand: "She was amazingly supportive. Because she had another family member who was struggling, I think she was a bit more aware about it—a bit more understanding."

As Tim continued to struggle, Bryony came up with the idea for the show. Throughout Fake It, the couple address their own problems, as well as driving home the point that millions of men and women suffer, but men tend to suffer alone. Tim's now reduced his medication, and is hoping to come off it in the near future. I asked him how getting up on stage has changed the way he deals with depression and anxiety: "I had no idea how helpful this was going to be for me. I honestly just thought it was going to be worse after I got up on stage in front of everyone. I thought, That's not going to do me any good, not with my anxiety. I had no idea the whole process would be so therapeutic."

Tim and Bryony

Tim thinks that researching the show has been a massive help, too. Now that he understands his illness, he feels more prepared for when it strikes. Before his diagnosis in his early twenties, he just thought the headaches, sickness, fatigue, and even his suicidal thoughts were normal.

"I thought I was being a pussy, basically. I didn't actually believe in depression myself, I thought it was just people who couldn't hack life." In reality things were beyond his control. "It's why I got so bad, because I ignored it. I didn't take any medication, I drank to hide the way I was feeling. It all got too much and I got really ill. We're trying to encourage [people to open up], blokes especially, because we're idiots and we don't talk about it."

I spoke to Dr. Joyce Benenson, a psychology professor based in the US, who carries out research into why men are less willing to appeal for help when something's wrong. She's observed behavior in boys as young as three that shows they're more stubborn than girls, and believes this could be biological, rather than simply stemming from society's image of the strong, resolute male.

According to Benenson, "It's not that much of a leap to posit that females are just wired biologically to take better care." No matter what causes men to go it alone with their problems, Benenson sums it up alarmingly frankly when she quotes another suicide study: "Women seek help. Men die."

Related: Watch our film about mental health services in the UK, 'Maisie'

Phil Wang is a stand up comedian who's used to revealing his deepest anxieties to rooms full of strangers. He suggests comedians and performers are naturally more honest: "I think because our job is to think about ourselves all the time, we do get to some harder truths about ourselves." Despite this he admits men often hide their feelings, telling me "They want to keep it under wraps, don't want to talk about it at all. Men are probably in touch with their emotions, but they're not expressive with them. And it's traditionally seen as emasculating to be so."

For Phil, as for Tim, performing helps him to come to terms with what goes on inside his head: "It's a release, a form of therapy. That's a bit of a cliché but talking it out—establishing a recognition from the audience of what you're talking about—it makes you feel less crazy and alone." Even as a professional comedian, though, the nerves still get to him, and he'll push his glasses down his nose until the audience's faces are blurred. "People think it's condescending but it's just because I'm too nervous to look them in the eye."

Carl Donnelly is another stand up, and he's spent the last few years making people laugh while living on antidepressants. He's off medication now, but still finds it easier to speak about his illness on stage rather than with friends. Humor is a way to explore his issues, but he sees too many men hiding behind humor. "I think too many guys use it as an end point, if something's upsetting them and someone asks if they're all right they'll just make a joke about it."

Carl reckons that a male reluctance to talk about mental health issues could be a hangover from a previous generation: "A lot of men at the minute feel quite lost. I think since the roles of each sex have changed, most guys have made the transition quite well, but the older generation are still like, Don't talk about your feelings. I think there's still a part of the new generation that's very similar." According to him, attitudes might have changed, but the way a lot of men behave hasn't. "Although now you're allowed to accept that you're broken and to talk about it, I'm a bit worried that there's a new wave of old school blokes coming through."

Phil Wang

Tim doesn't know exactly what makes men go it alone, but he does think society's gender roles are stopping guys from speaking up. "I can't help but think that it comes from centuries of conditioning. At the end of the day, [men and women are] made the same, we've got a cock and balls and that's the only difference [...] I don't think there needs to be any emotional differences."

One of the best outcomes for him has been the reaction of his friends and family. Tim used to be a roofer, and he tells me how loads of his mates are builders and carpenters: "I was terrified they'd treat me differently, be more sensitive around me because they didn't understand what depression was, they'd just think, He's a bit sad, we better not take the piss out of him."

In reality little has changed, and Tim's given his friends the courage to confront their issues. "I've started getting messages from loads of friends telling me they're going through this or that, or they have done like five years ago but they didn't want to tell anyone. And it's not just mental health problems either; it's any kind of problem. A mate had a gambling problem and he feels now that he can completely open up and talk about it."

Male stubbornness surely goes some way to explaining the shocking suicide rate, which keeps increasing despite a steady erosion of the stigma surrounding mental health. Whether this is down to Dr. Benenson's biological theory or, as Carl suspects, the legacy of his Dad's generation, humor has long been used to hide anxieties and fears. For Tim, confronting his problems through humor hasn't smothered them, but it has made them manageable: "It doesn't make you feel so alienated." If comedy makes more men realize they don't need to alienate themselves, they might finally seek help, too.

'Fake It 'Til You Make It' is playing in the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from August 6 – 30.

Both Phil Wang and Carl Donnelly are playing in the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, from August 5 – 30.

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Doña Norma rests and watches TV after a tedious workday as a janitor in a Mexico City hospital. Photo by Ernesto Álvarez

"Are you looking for my grandma? She's not home. But if you want stuff, I can sell it to you," said the boy who opened the apartment's door. He was gone for a while and then brought along a wooden box which he carried with so much pride—as if it were new toy. His faint movements showed that he kind of knew what he was doing was wrong. The box contained little plastic bags marked with the words "Cristal" [crystal].

We had reached the fourth floor of an apartment block in downtown Mexico City, where 60-year-old Doña Norma (not her real name) lives with three of her grandsons (aged six, four, and one). Doña Norma is a drug dealer, but when she's not at home, the children take over the business.

To get there we crossed the building's entrance and walked along a narrow corridor leading to a flight of decayed cement stairs. Some of the apartments have metal railings in their doorways, while others have curtains instead doors. The whole block smells of piss.

You can barely hear the sounds of the street on the fourth floor—as if they were a whisper blended with music coming from different flats. I knocked on the metal door and was greeted by a bald headed six-year-old child in an Angry Birds T-shirt.

One of the children offered us crystal meth. Photo by Emilio Espejel

"My grandma went to the store. But if you want stuff, I can sell it to you," he insisted. Another kid stuck his head out of the door. Inside the apartment, a small TV showed a cartoon and a pile of laundry on the floor next to an old sofa filled the room with a humid smell.

The kids did not seem to know what exactly they were selling, but they sure knew the price well: 220 pesos [$13] for half a gram of meth. They also said they sold cocaine, weed, and MDMA.

We told them we would wait for their grandma. We sat on the stairs outside their apartment and 20 minutes later, the children's stepfather arrived. He is 22 and the third husband of Doña Norma's daughter. The young couple lives in a little room in the same flat. He takes care of the children, although he's rarely around. He invited us in.

The apartment is quite small and its walls are painted blue. The ceiling has been eaten away by moisture, showing several leaks. On a squeaky bed, in the first room on the left, lay an one-year-old toddler looking attentively at everything that surrounded him.

Doña Norma's one-year-old grandson. Photo by Emilio Espejel

We took a couple of pictures and our cameras became the center of attention. The children insisted on borrowing them to take some pictures themselves. Then, they pulled us one floor up, to the deserted rooftop.

They ran, climbed, and played as if they were in a park. When you're a kid, everything's a game. When we went back downstairs, Doña Norma received us lying indifferently on her bed. She told us a bit about her business without going into detail.

Related: Watch our documentary 'Mexico's Land of Sorcerers'

Doña Norma works as a janitor in a hospital in Mexico City, but she's also been dealing for the last 15 years. "It's always money troubles that push people into crap jobs like this one. If you live in this city, drugs are the easiest thing to get your hands on."

She said she knows that by dealing she messes with "sick people," as she calls them, and that she feels very sorry for drug addicts. "They're people that don't love themselves, and that makes them evil. You can't love anybody if you don't love yourself and God," she continued.

The kids kept playing while Doña Norma told us that the business is getting harder and harder because the supply chain has increased. "These young kids, all they know how to do is show off. It is because of those dumbasses that business is so bad. One asshole's business takes off and I have to risk my life by carrying all that shit or by having to work with the same assholes. This gig is very dangerous. If I get caught, no one's going to have my back or take care of the children," she said without taking her eyes off the TV.

One of Doña Norma's grandchildren walking along a corridor inside the building. Photo by Ernesto Álvarez

The kids playing with toy cars in the living room. Photo by Emilio Espejel

Photo by Ernesto Álvarez

On the building's rooftop, one of the kids pretends to be a superhero.

On the rooftop, another kid pretends the metal container is his house. Photo by Emilio Espejel

The two brothers look towards the street. Photo by Emilio Espejel

On the building's rooftop, one of the kids pretends to be a superhero and jumps over the water tanks. Photo by Emilio Espejel

One of the author's weekly games. All photos courtesy the author.

"If you would read a man's Disposition, see him Game; you will then learn more of him in one hour, than in seven Years Conversation, and little Wagers will try him as soon as great Stakes, for then he is off his Guard."

-Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning His Behaviour and Conversation in the World, Richard Lindgard

"Dungeons & Dragons is some of the most crazy, deep, deep, deep nerd shit ever invented."

-Ice T

Playing Dungeons & Dragons after going through the polished and shoulder-padded world of the more normcore gateway drugs—Warcraft, Skyrim, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, whatever blockbuster thing with hit points and constitution scores that's keeping you from going outside—is like cracking open Revelation after a year of Sunday School. Unlike today's digitized RPGs, D&D was not designed to be accessible or even (to the chagrin of child psychologists) meaningful because, basically, it wasn't designed. Like all real art, the target audience for the first D&D rulebooks were the people who made them.

When D&D was thought up by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax in 1974, the idea was there'd be a loose set of rules for how to pretend to kill people in the fake middle ages, and anything not in the official rules you could just make up. In theory, anything could happen. That kind of sandbox-style freedom made D&D its own unique thing to everyone who played it, niche-adapted enough to survive without being subsumed into any of the other visions of pop fantasy it would inspire over the coming decades. It's Game of Thrones but it's also Adventure Time—and everything in between. Aside from attempts to scrub away the unconscious racism and sexism of its 70s campus-nerd roots, the current game has survived with most of its genuine eccentricities intact—not in spite of how out of step they are with what people expect from a wizardgame in 2015, but because of it.

The Christians were right. D&D is still—even in a world with Grand Theft Auto, spice, ISIS, global warming, and Donald Trump—completely fucked up. It is a game with talking floating eyes that want to disintegrate you, stats for the devil and the Buddha, a three-headed god that carries a panther-skin bag and throws a magic brick for 5-50 points of damage, magic teeth, the chance to play as a teleporting dog or a badger if you die, planets that aren't round, and psionic priest vampire manta rays.

But beyond all that, the reasons that D&D is still worth playing are the people you play it with. As opposed to online RPGs where players interact through screens or headphones, when you sit down for a game of Dungeons & Dragons you do it with your people. In the same room. With snacks. Without the rest of the bar watching. There's a story about three witches and a pack mule, which you all not only watched but invented, and then the witch threw a Dorito at you and drank your scotch.

Like nerd stuff? Watch our documentary on Magic: The Gathering

You learn things about your friends during these times, too. Who are these people when the stakes are low and wagers are little and no one is cool? Poker night gives you permission to get into your friends' wallet; D&D night gives you permission to get into their heads. Sometimes it's no surprise: Patton Oswalt played a drunken dwarf, Marilyn Manson says he was a dark elf, VICE international atrocity expert Molly Crabapple played a thief—but would you have pegged our porn correspondent, Stoya, for a druid with a dog named George? It's important to know when there are hippies in your house.

The game is meant to reflect the people playing. D&D came out of the mimeographed, amateur-press wargame scene and reached the height of its popularity in the mid-80s, when zines had staples in them, Metallica didn't suck, and computers had not yet quite eaten the world—and it still carries a heavy debt to the handmade and the DIY. Every rule in the game has been crossed out and rewritten thousands of times by thousands of pencils in thousands of ways by thousands of Brads, Steves, and Marcys for tens of thousands of tables who wanted to do it this way instead of that way, and none of them needed to learn code to do it.

D&D gives you not only a reason to make real actual stuff, but a reason other people should care. At conventions you can see LED-lit mazes that make the Jackson Hobbit SFX team look like hacks, but the heart of the game is palace towers made from coffee cans and pig men painted with nail polish and crossing "winter wolf" off the wandering monster chart and writing in "warsnail." The nearest equivalent is the culture around the post-50s decadent-psychotic era of homemaking magazines when Woman's Day would show you how to make, like, shirred herring salad in the shape of an igloo on the rim of a lake of blue Jell-O. And for good reason: these distant scenes are both, at heart, about the ephemeral art of throwing parties. The eight-layer raisin-pineapple compote carousel and the foamcore Skull Fortress of the Hate Toad will both be gutted in 40 minutes, but right now it's fun and right now it's weird and that's a party. And when it's dead you spend a week planning the next one.

"Weird" was always key to D&D's continuing survival. On paper, the game should look and feel no different than any of the mechanized orc-killing toys you can get for your PC, Playstation, or XBox, or like the special effects blockbusters we're getting more and more now that Hollywood's figured out how to make armor and tentacles look right on a screen—but it doesn't. Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax and other architects of the early RPG scene had read Tolkien and Howard's Conan books, but their fandom was crazy deep and genuinely literary, embracing the wisecracking and oddly adult sensibility of Fritz Leiber's medieval noir, the anti-mythic experimentalism of Clark Ashton Smith, and the amoral freakshow wordplay of Jack Vance—pulp fantasy's Nabokov, who inspired spell names like "Oitluke's Freezing Sphere" and "Leomund's Lamentable Belabourment."

D&D's weirdness is always the weirdness of people, put on the spot and making things up all by themselves. It's the kind of 3:00 AM weirdness that video game designers have to dial back in order to have a plot or snare a big enough audience to justify their budget. It's the kind of weirdness that can be exactly as interesting as the people playing it, and the later it gets the weirder the storyline becomes. It's a manifestation of the players' collective imagination, and it's a formula that—despite mind-blowing advances in graphics and gameplay innovation—can't be replicated on a screen.

Zak Smith is an artist and occasional adult film performer whose paintings have appeared in many major collections public and private, including the MoMA and the Whitney. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for a group of friends consisting mostly of porn actresses and strippers. He is also the author of two multi-award-winning tabletop RPG supplements: Vornheim and A Red & Pleasant Land and was hired as a consultant on the latest edition of D&D.

For this episode of VICE Talks Film, we sit down with the indelible Kevin Bacon. We discuss his acting process and how its evolved through his career, revisit the immortal Tremors 25 years later, and chat about his latest turn as a crooked, mustachioed lawman in upcoming indie thriller Cop Car.

Cop Car hits theaters Friday, August 7 and is available On Demand August 14.

Unless otherwise stated, all photos by Tumblr darling Bob Foster

And so you wake, another day closer to death, your head stuffed like a pillow, your eyes pink and matte, your lips dry and stuck. Smell the air; smell your sour breath. These are those perfect, quiet seconds before the pain hits: before the bright light blares through the curtains, before the quiet ringing pain jolts through your skull, before you wake up and turn over and find yourself next to a half-eaten slice of pepperoni. This is peace time. This won't last long. You are hungover.

This is you, tomorrow, or the next day, or Sunday, after that thing—you know, Rob's thing, that thing he's doing at the bar? You're not really up for it but he says it's going to be a big one—and this will be every Sunday like it until you hit middle-age and decide drinking isn't worth it any more, and stuff like "intricately prepared cups of herbal tea" and "watching Grand Designs" are better instead, a slow form of self-death, a quiet sigh of giving up.

But until then: tequila? Yes, please. Brandy? Don't even like it pal but I'll gulp it down. What's that you say: eight more lagers, drunk in rapid succession before having a sort of blurry-eyed fight with a bouncer, swinging both weak fists but failing entirely to connect, the bouncer taking such pity on me that instead of fracturing my skull he calls me a taxi? Don't mind if I do! And then you wake up the next day, rigid and agonized, a physical embodiment of regret.

Fun, right? Here's a guide to surviving it:

GETTING UP

Hup, hup, buddy, come the fuck on. Ho now. Easy now. Come on: close up your eyes and brace your stiff legs, and press your tender palms against the bed. This is it, you are rising. You are up. You are basically Jesus after Easter. And then it hits you: the blood rush to your head, the headache that always threatened but never took hold, and your spirit wanes, and you flop back onto the duvet. Give it 15 and try again. Check Twitter for a bit, sideways with one eye open, the way that Twitter was always meant to be consumed, and hope the big roving whatever Greek god of pain there is will pass his ire over you as you lurk quietly in the shadows. Maybe just lie on the bed for an hour-and-a-half and order Domino's using the app.

DEALING WITH THOSE QUICKFIRE lIGHTNING SHOCKS OF EMBARRASSED MEMORY THAT SNIPE THROUGH YOUR HEAD, PTSD FROM THE NIGHT BEFORE

At some crucial point in your hangover your evening splays itself in front of you like a Prodigy video as you fit, lavishly, into stasis, rendered unworkable by the reality of The Shit You Do When You Are Drunk. This is how you die: a 2001: A Space Odyssey journey through a space inhabited by your worst drunken behaviors and most terrible spat sentences, flashing before you as a single tear winds its way out of your face, as you replay yourself trying to air kiss someone hello and headbutting them instead, as you suddenly judderingly remember vomiting into your hands inside a taxi and then just sitting there, like, holding it?

This is when the fear hits you, and it is fear—a cold clench in the middle of your chest, a dread so heavy you can feel it—because it's not just a fear of embarrassment: it's a fear that the drunk you is the real you.

We are all monsters scrapping against our own skin. We are all terrible people imprisoned by societal norms. We are all secretly Hydes, disguised by Jekylls. Memories of the night before are truly the most uncomfortable reality that there is: that these drunk people are ourselves, untethered from our normal person prison, left to run wild, to fight and vomit with abandon, to call three consecutive taxi drivers an asshole. The truth of drunk flashbacks is just that: they are us, and we are them, and no matter how hard you deny it, we are all, secretly, just base and filthy little animals who like shouting and fucking. Anyway: that's all very real for a hangover, so just close your eyes, don't check your sent texts folder, and try to forget it.

Trending on MOTHERBOARD: Music Begs BitTorrent To Help Fight Piracy

YOUR SENT TEXTS FOLDER

The sent texts folder after a night out is actual Room 101. It is horrors and it is promises of horrors. It is the worst nightmare you can imagine, only instead of a rat in a cage strapped to your face it's "empirical proof that you text your ex again, you idiot." I would rather have to murder an innocent man with a shovel than check my sent texts folder. Do not check your sent texts folder until you are sure—until you are absolutely sure—that you are emotionally ready for it.

HANGOVER ENVY

There's always one person you went out with the night before who posts a photo on Facebook at 11:00 AM the next day like, "Beautiful day in the Catskills!"—as though popping up to the mountains is a viable activity after what you did to your body last night, as though standing upright while wearing a bathing suit by a swimming hole is somehow anything less than a miracle. Who are these people, and how do they clear their heads? They are aliens and monsters, disguised as ruddy-faced and wholesome human people. They are not real. They cannot be real. Their existence is a smug mirage. Do not be envious of them: pity them, for they do not know, through regular visits to the bathroom over the course of a lazy Sunday, the simple joy of watching your piss slowly turning an acceptable color.

BEING SICK AS AN ART FORM

With enough practice it is possible to be an elegant vomitter, arcs of puke gracefully crossing the room and dinging with pinpoint accuracy into a pint glass, spewing in a toilet so carefully there isn't any splashback, no cleanup necessary. It's possible. But more likely it will be you, pulling your own hair back, dampening the knees of your jogging bottoms, weeping and crying at the same time, doing that thing when you're gasping for air because you're crying—"Ah–huagh! Ah–huagh! Ah!"—but also gasping because you're vomiting—"A–roo! Ah–ah–ah–roo!"—and making both sounds at once, a sort of compound gurgling, that of a tortuously dying animal.

(Photo via Amelia Abraham)

BLANKETS

I don't know quite when it was in my life that I got such a thing for soft furnishings—pre-25, I truly would have slept under a shit-on tarpaulin on a big piece of corrugated metal if I had to – but now I am So Into Blankets And Cushions That It Is Unreal. And that goes double, triple, one hundred fold when I am in the throes of a hangover. Get some blankets in. Build a little fort. Keep your bedding fresh and tight. Have some pillows and cushions about. Swaddle yourself in decadence. Spend $100 on a blanket and hold it over your body when you're feeling shitty and thank me for it later. SOFT FURNISHING CRUNK CREW 4 LYFE.

THE CURE

Fundamentally, you need a cheap painkiller, a sugary drink, and something that has the smell of food and comes in the shape of food. So that's two Ibuprofen, one big Gatorade, and a McMuffin. Or the dregs of a bottle of Tropicana filled with water and shaken, taken with some Tylenol and a takeaway pizza. Sweet tea and someone else going to the shops for doughnuts also helps. That's the hangover cure you deserve, but not the one you need. What you need is a massive punch of protein and to get over it. I once cured a hangover in six minutes flat by eating grilled bacon and some scrambled eggs, no toast. Have I done it since? No, I like toast and I like wallowing. But the option is there. If you resist the urge to gorge on carbohydrates, you can hurdle over the meat of a hangover before you've even charged your phone.

BLOODY MARYS

Bloody Marys are very bad and, sidebar, for assholes. Do not drink Bloody Marys.

HAIR OF THE DOG

Hair of the dog works, technically, in that way that a cold can suddenly wake the top of your brain up, and the liquid seems so refreshing, and your blood is pumping again, and the pain is dulled a little, but then you find yourself at 2:00 PM on it again, your skin feeling tight on your body, your limbs aching and so tired, and someone puts their arm around you and says "Heyyyy!" and you just go "FUCK OFF, PAL" you push them and go "NO JUST FUCK OFF I'M NOT IN THE MOOD," and you're upright and functioning—yes—but you're also a grouchy little fucker now, you're the guy in the pub questioning if people really want a pint when it's your round, you've got two-thirds of a pint anyway, I'm not buying them to stack them up, I'm not made of money. When you get like that, you need to make your excuses and split, grabbing a pizza on the way home, getting in bed, and watching cheery Netflix cartoons until you fall asleep in a pit of your own filth.

CANCELING PLANS

If you have ever made plans with someone the day after you made plans to have a big one, you need to know that you are an idiot, and legal authorities should be able to make the decision that you are unsafe to live your own life. That said: we've all done it, haven't we, and then had to turn up for some activity—"Climbing?" you said, nine days ago, you idiot. "On a Sunday morning at 8:00 AM? Sounds fun!"—and now you are both sweating and shivering while an Australian dude with arms bigger than your apartment is telling you that "chalk dust is pretty fucking important," and "make sure the harness doesn't get all tangled in your gooch." You've fucked this. You've fucked this right up.

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The sooner you get over the squeamishness you have about canceling plans, the better. I always go by this rule: 90 percent of the time, the other person wants you to cancel the plans anyway. Does anyone, truly, ever want to do anything? Does anyone want to spend their Sunday catching two buses and one train to see you be sick off the top of a climbing wall? Does everyone not really just want to be in bed watching TV? Send the text. Apologize profusely. Cancel the plans. Never leave the house again.

WORK

Phoning in sick to work with a hangover is the worst waste of a sick day ever, because if you can mount the commute and get to your desk then you can have your hangover there and get paid for it. Think about that: you are being paid to be the husk-like shell of a human person. Nobody minds if you don't really do much that day: you're hungover. Whatever small amount of work you do will be treated as though a wounded soldier has somehow battled through the Somme. You can go for at least two 40-minute shits during the day and nobody will even blink. Sleep on the toilet. Drink full fat Coke at your desk. Hour-and-a-half lunch break to go get a burrito. The last hour of the day you can outwardly play Solitaire and nobody will bother you about it. Then slink off home at 5:00 PM on the dot, wishing everyone well on the way out, and maybe go home to mill around in sweatpants. Done.

Photo via Amelia Abraham

WAKING UP ON A SOFA WITH A DICK DRAWN ON YOUR FACE

Listen, I know gender is fluid now and the binary has been flipped on its head and none of us are men or women but rather inhabitants in various junk-having bodies that may or may not correspond to our own complex and internal feelings and identities, human beings containing gender multitudes, human beings containing genders infinite, and so the following is actually very politically incorrect to say now, but I have a theory: given a surface and something to etch with, men will draw penises and girls will draw either hearts or very basic smilies. Do the science on this, it's real. Give me the PhD funding and I will do it for you.

This is why you woke up at a house party with a dick drawn on your face: men, with access to Sharpies and a face, will always draw a dick with the Sharpie on the face. The bell of the dick is etched toward your mouth, the balls towards your ears. A man did this. Unerring pubic detailing. A man did this. This is the albatross you have to endure, now, because vigorously washing your face with whatever liquid soap you can find is only going to make it worse. Go home, dickface, slink home, and hide your shame upon a pillow.

DESPAIR

At some point, sooner or later, while your heart palpitates as you lie on the couch in the depths of despair, you will renounce alcohol in all its forms. You will tell everyone you are doing one of those dry months, you know the ones. "Just a Coke for me," you say at the bar. They ask you if Pepsi is OK. "No." Don't you feel good? Don't you feel... brighter, somehow less exhausted? All of your friends are slamming beers and you are drinking an orange juice and jogging. Have you finally kicked it? You notice how you're better at work, that getting up in the mornings isn't a chore now, you feel like all the blood in your body has been cycled out and renewed, that all your cells have been updated and rebooted. God, you're so ALIVE, aren't you? You're just so—well, I guess it's Friday. A Corona won't hurt. Haha, you're buying? All right: one, but then I really have to go to the gym. Di–did you put vodka in this lime and soda? You fucker. And then scene deleted you wake up, and roll over, and put the TV on, and you realize you have once again tumbled off the wagon and been trampled by its self-righteous wheels. Your body is again a trash can. Six days, you lasted. Six.

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WEARING SUNGLASSES

During a hangover is the only time you are allowed to wear sunglasses indoors unless you wake up one day and are actually Lenny Kravitz.

TIDYING UP

The loudest noise in the world is the sound of knocking eight empty cans of Bud into a metal sink while enduring a hangover. Don't do it. Don't clean up. You always do it in that weird, tight-backed pose anyway, tiptoeing around the house, occasionally pausing to pick up a single yogurt carton and ferrying it to the garbage and turning around and finding the mess has multiplied behind you. It can wait until tomorrow. Stop this nonsense now.

FORGETTING IT ALL AND DOING THE SAME THING AGAIN

And so as surely as the moon follows the sun and the sea returns lovingly to the shore, so you will follow the worst hangover of your life by thinking yeah, actually, maybe a G&T would be all right now, wouldn't it? Because forgetting the agony of a hangover is like the flood of hormones into the brain that make new moms forget about the pain of childbirth, only instead of holding a baby and cooing you are cradling a bottle of wine and making two-fifths of an orgasm noise. Go on, brave little soldier. Go forth and spread good cheer. See you again tomorrow morning for a Domino's and a quiet little scream into a pillow.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Photo taken by Nicor, image via

READ: An Interview with a North Korean Defector Living in London

In a move presumably designed to quell a rare twinge of boredom, Kim Jong-un has decided to create his own timezone, called "Pyongyang time." Next Friday, clocks in North Korea will be put back by half an hour, meaning that North and South Korea are no longer on the same local time, as they have been since 1910.

In a dispatch, the world-famous Korean Central News Agency announced the change, which will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula. Japanese forces left Korea after the Second World War, but both North and South remained on Japanese time.

Relations between the two countries improved slightly last year, when Japan eased sanctions on North Korea in exchange for information about citizens abducted in the 1970s and 80s. Recently though, Japan strongly condemned Pyonyang's missile tests, and—clearly—Japan's occupation still weighs heavily on North Korea's national conscience.

The real world implications of the new timezone likely won't be very significant, although it could create problems for the workers of a factory jointly run by North and South Korea, situated near the border. A South Korean spokesman was quoted in the Guardian as saying that North Korea's new timezone could threaten efforts to reduce the widening gap between the two countries.

Related: Watch 'The VICE Guide to North Korea'

Gordon Filemu Cady in front of Crystal Clear Supplements, his Portland store that sells nootropic substances. Photo by the author.

I'm sitting with a man named Gordon Cady and getting ready to swallow 700 milligrams of polyrhachis ants.

"They can lift 60 times their body weight, drag 100 times their body weight, and it used to be only available to Chinese emperors and whatnot," he says. "It was the cream of the crop." He tells me they'll provide us ginseng, protein, vitamin B, and a shitload of zinc. They taste like warm, spicy dirt.

Cady is in the business of selling nootropics, an amorphous classification of pills and powders that users say improve memory, focus, coordination, and spatial awareness. Still unregulated by the FDA, these products supposedly stimulate the production of the neurotransmitters choline and acetylcholine. Some products Cady sells, like phenibut, promise to reduce anxiety in users. Others, such as piracetem, noopept, and synephrine, are supposed to boost your mental capacity. Others still, such as adrafinil, are analogs of prescription drugs (in adrafinil's case, the wakefulness-promoting agent modafinil, sold in the US as Alertec), meaning that they have the same or nearly the same effects as their prescription equivalent.

Legally, these "smart drugs" are sold as "nutritional supplements" and can't claim to provide the same benefits as FDA-approved medicine. But, from personal experience, nootropics can definitely max you out. The ants, technically a "natural vitamin complex," give me the macho feeling of a fresh pump at the gym.

Many nootropic users are meticulous about the contents and qualities of the things they put into their bodies—they treat these substances like power-ups that can push their existence to some higher plane. Nootropic blends are called "stacks" and users on the nootropics Reddit forum are obsessive about cataloging stacks, down to the milligram.

The FDA's official stance on unregulated "supplements" is this: "Manufacturers and distributors of dietary supplements and dietary ingredients are prohibited from marketing products that are adulterated or misbranded. That means that these firms are responsible for evaluating the safety and labeling of their products before marketing to ensure that they meet all the requirements of DSHEA and FDA regulations." In other words, when it comes to supplements, buyer beware. (On Crystal Clear Supplements' online shop, many products carry the disclaimer that they're "for research purposes only.")

Cady sells nootropics online and out of his alternative-medicine storefront in Portland, Oregon. He calls his business Crystal Clear Supplements. He works from a small lab behind the kitchen, scooping and weighing and measuring and packaging. On a recent Tuesday, an old­-school LG flip phone pings on his desk constantly with inquiries. Two impeccably clean fishtanks—­­one saltwater, one fresh—add a bubble of comfort. There's a red-footed tortoise named Obi walking around the house. Cady lives in an adjoining room, as does his roommate/employee, a 31-year-old named Austin Cook who goes by "Skwerel."

"I don't care about the hippie woo-woo shit," says Cook, referring to the immense network of mythology, pseudoscience, anecdotes, and the rare peer-reviewed trial, all of which make up the bulk of readily accessible nootropics information. "I'm not going to say something that can't be factually proven." He tells me this as he's barefoot, parting the tie-dye curtains that separate the house from the shop.

Over my three days with Cady, I take monster quantities of nootropics and botanical supplements off him: hundreds of milligrams of adrafinil and phenylpiracetam and noopept (for increased spatial awareness, mental acuity, focus, and anxiety); powdered deer antler (to improve eyesight and relieve stress); kratom (an organic opiate substitute).

Cady's journey to peddling alternative medicine began with an addiction to Adderall. At 13, the now-29-year-old was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed 40 milligrams of the stimulant a day. Ten years later, he found himself about to "successfully drop out of college" for the first of four times, unable to get out of bed if he didn't get a dose. "I found myself having to medicate to go to sleep: I would just drink excessively. From that fostered an alcohol addiction, alcoholism surfaces, and it's not funny, man," he says. "I was pretty well resigned to do that for the rest of my life, because I couldn't find any alternative or way to switch off it."

To quit Adderall while keeping his mental health under control, he decided to seek alternative treatment. But, lacking guidance on how to wean off the ADHD medicine, and now wary of the pharmaceutical world, he turned to the internet. After a tip from a friend and some research, he decided to replace his Adderall intake with adrafinil. Once ingested, the drug metabolizes into its chemical analog, the similarly named modafinil. Unlike Adderall, which messes with your dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin neurotransmitters to allow you to achieve a sense of focus (not to mention very possibly putting you in a euphoric state), adrafinil/modafinil stimulates several areas of the brain, leading, Cady says, to a more balanced sense of focus and wakefulness.

"It was only when I could slow down the rate of my lifestyle to a more healthy pace I realized that I'd been jumped up on speed all the time," he says.

I should note here that outside of the nootropic community itself, there are a lot of doubters. A psychiatrist who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subjects told me he was skeptical of the entire endeavor, and doesn't see Cady's story as particularly revolutionary. "In the case of addiction replacement, it's certainly not a departure from technology. It's just substituting one compound for another."

Though hard data and reputable trials are hard to come by, if you look around the web you'll find nootropic users documenting their courses. Despite Cady's reassurances that nootropics aren't addictive, some users on Reddit say they've developed dependencies to piracetam, a nootropic said to improve memory and help with depression. Others claim that while piracetam helped them feel happier, those feelings of well-being came with "brain fog" and exhaustion. Furthermore, no one knows exactly how these substances interact with FDA-approved prescription drugs.

The products that Crystal Clear Supplements and other nootropic merchants discussed in this piece sell are generally proprietary blends of different compounds. If you put enough stuff in your blends, you can get away with selling substances that might be illegal under other circumstances.

When I try the nootropics Cady gives me, however, I feel great. It's late afternoon and the world seems brighter, the air sharper, colors and sounds more distinct. I find that my thoughts are coming quicker, my social neuroses have oozed off, and I feel as confident as I can recall being as of late. Is this how Cady feels all the time? To what end can I push my potential?

"Substances, whether it be food that we eat or medications that we take, are tools for self-enlightenment," is how Monday Tammi puts it. Tammi is 38, lives in Cady's basement, and occasionally helps in the shop. She's a former electrical engineer for Intel's R&D department and her preferred nootropic is phenibut, which, she says, helps alleviate her fibromyalgia, as well as PTSD she incurred from an abusive relationship.

Photo by the author

Throughout the week, I connect with at least a half-­dozen additional nootropics users who say their use of the stuff has only led to positive results. One uses phenibut and adrafinil to keep focused. Another uses adrafinil to stay away from alcohol. One uses phenibut to stave anxiety and the desire for other illicit substances.

Later, while researching this article, I talk to dozens more nootropic users, from civil engineers in Denver to project managers in Seattle to writers in New York. Every time I met a nootropic fan, I'd ask how they heard about these things, and nearly every one of their answers (including Cady's) led back to the same place: a Feburary, 2012 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Rogan, of course, is the standup comedian, martial artist, and former Fear Factor host who has become famous as one of the most successful podcasters in the country. He's also a "big fan" of nootropics. "I went down the rabbit hole a bit and became really fascinated by the subject," Rogan tells me. "Basically," he says, nootropics are "nutrients that supply the building blocks for human neurotransmitters."

Along with friend Aubrey Marcus, Rogan is an investor in the supplement company Onnit, which manufacturers the nootropic-heavy dietary supplement Alpha Brain. It contains nootropics such as vinpocetine, choline, and the herb bacopa.

When I asked Marcus about Alpha Brain, and how it might help people with certain medical conditions, he says: "You can't talk about any substance like that until it's approved for use by the FDA. A pharmaceutical drug is not a nutritional supplement."

Onnit went to the lengths of funding a clinical trial meant to show their product was not snake oil. The lead author of the study, Todd Solomon, is a neural investigator at the Boston School of Medicine, as well as a clinical neuropsychologist at the Boston Center for Memory. He says his team conducted the same sort of trial the FDA requires to approve a drug, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Alpha Brain was found to give a "mild" benefit to verbal memory, executive function, decision making, and impulsivity.

"This is really on the cutting edge," Solomon says of the field. "I've not been aware of any drug that's been developed for cognitive enhancement and approved by the FDA. The supplement world, because it's much less regulated, they can make claims and they aren't required to back it up."

But how did Rogan catch the body-hacking bug? When I ask, he points me to DJ No Name, a.k.a. Mike Nelson, a Bay Area radio personality currently at KFOG and previously of LIVE 105 and AC KLLC. And Nelson, in turn, told me about his nootropic evangelist: Bill Romanowski, the four-time Super Bowl champion and former NFL linebacker who was tied to the illegal steroid ring run by BALCO CEO Victor Conte.

"About the time Bill was promoting his book [ Romo: My Life on the Edge: Living Dreams and Slaying Dragons]," Nelson tells me, "he came into the studio with a signed copy and a Raiders jersey for my 30th birthday, about 12 years ago. We hit it off and he offered to start training me, which is when he started giving me the supplements. I talked to Joe about it, and, being Joe, [and being] into all things brain enhancement, he started getting into it."

But the former NFLer wasn't just a fan of nootropics, he was also apparently an amateur chemist himself: "Romanowski created his formula to help himself with the effects of concussions," Rogan says.

"I had 20 concussions documented, and another, you can probably say, 200 that were undocumented," Romanowski tells me. Nootropics, he said, "have literally been a lifesaver for me."

Romanowski couldn't find a supplement that helped his deteriorating mental condition resulting from those concussions, so he decided to concoct his own. He went to pharmaceutical scientists in Arizona to guide him. And that's where he heard about nootropics.

In 2003, right after his last year in the NFL, Romanowski moved to commercialize a combination of supplements that resulted in Neuro1, his commercially available product that claims to "support better memory, longer concentration, improved mood and sharper focus for physical energy and long-term brain health."

Sure enough, the ingredients of Neuro1 include a handful of nootropics, including piracetam and choline, significant substances in Cady's own stacks.

Romanowski also saw the burgeoning market for anything that could give people a mental edge. "I knew executives were taking ADD medication," he says, referring to the cabal of tech bros who take Adderall to get ahead of the competition. "I marketed Neuro1 for executives. I built it for myself."

Bill Romanowski (center) with fans. Photo via Flickr user Allen Lew.

"I wish I had this my last year (in the NFL)," Romanowski says. "Because I could have probably squeezed out another two seasons. I really do believe it does that much for the brain." Though he claims to know a handful of NFL players who currently use nootropics (he declined to name them) he says it is not a common practice. "It should be, but it's not."

"I'm just sharper, more on, more with it when I take them," Romanowski, who regularly appears on Bay Area radio programs, tells me. "When I don't, I feel lethargic, I feel punch-drunk." He says it would be disastrous for his broadcast career if he didn't take them: "If I don't take my stuff, it's literally like going into a football game taking downers—you're not going to play very well. For me, I'm not going to sound very good, I'm not going to come across with energy. I need to project the message that I want to get out there."

He also claims his supplement helped Tiger Woods on the golf course. "When he was winning in golf, he was taking Neuro1," he tells me. "That was after his dad passed. He was going through a real bad slump. I then started sending him Neuro1, a big supply every month, and literally he started taking off and winning every tournament for about two years."

(VICE attempted to verify this claim. In an email, Tiger's agent, Mark Sternberg, said: "Regarding your inquiry on Tiger, we are unaware of what you are asking." When I followed up with more specific details, Sternberg did not respond.)

Cady's wares. Photo by the author

Romanowski is into modafinil, too, though he can't remember who introduced him to the stuff. "Believe it or not, I'm not sure if it was Victor [Conte]," Romanowski says. "I may have been the one that turned Victor onto it. Because they used to give it fighter pilots, to keep them up. I was like, This is not on the NFL ban list, I think I'm gonna try it. I used it for at least two years." (Though the prescription drug wasn't on the NFL's banned substances list at the time, it is now.)

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On my way out of Portland, I'm eating a capsule of phenibut every hour. Phenibut is commonly used in Russia, and was once used to help Soviet cosmonauts stay calm in space. Since nootropics aren't FDA-approved, there's no real guidance on how much—or even what—to take and when. So I'm experimenting.

What I feel is nothing like a high. I don't grind my teeth. I don't crave food, nor am I repulsed by it. It is a feeling that could only be described as close to precognition.

Hours later, I felt nauseous but couldn't keep my eyes open. I texted Cady: "Can you overdose on phenibut?" No, he reassured me, it won't harm you, you'll just fall asleep. And then I did fall asleep, but awoke in the middle of the night—14 hours later—to horrible stomach pain. All at the same moment, I dictated a nonsense email of absence to Siri, vomited full-force into the toilet, and told my girlfriend the cause of this was raw salmon I ate, not the mounds of nootropics I'd swallowed.

Then there was the clarity I'd been promised: To me, getting fucked up no longer seems responsible, sexy, fun, productive, or revolutionary. But neither does pushing yourself towards acuity to the point you end up covered in puke. But still, who wouldn't be entranced by the prospect of a permanently lucid existence? Why not try to move through life at our most effective, even if that involves taking chemicals of uncertain provenance? It is, in the most literal sense, the American Dream realized: a great experiment, a technocratic walking reverie. There is no great secret, no technological hurdle to overcome. It starts with a handful of ants.

Follow Dale Eisinger on Twitter.

In the immediate aftermath of the February 2011 earthquake, which killed 185 people and virtually destroyed Christchurch's central business district (CBD), the New Zealand government sealed off the inner city. Guarded by the New Zealand army and police, and later by international disaster relief workers, even business and property owners couldn't get in.

In spite of this, somehow a well-known Christchurch photographer named Sabin Holloway was granted a pass. This week he opened an exhibition of large-scale prints of photos he took from inside the red-zone. It's the first time any of them have been seen in public.

VICE: Hi Sabin, how come you've sat on these images so long?
Sabin Holloway: It's still really raw for me and a lot of other people who lived through the quake.The CBD was my playground. I lived and worked there, partied there, and knew it like the back of my hand. When I was allowed in after the red-zone went up, it was deathly quiet—spooky even. Going into a place where you were used to noise and activity, and finding it silent and deserted, it felt like you were underwater. It was surreal—that's why I've called the exhibition Deep Water.

Was there a process involved in photographing the aftermath?
Not really, I'm a professional photographer and director of photography, so I use some kind of order or process every day of my working life. Something like this though, it's so overwhelming that you've just got to run on instinct. It was destruction on a massive scale, so I did make sure I covered the whole central city. That was all on foot, by walking around.

Having access to a wrecked city when there's army and police keeping everyone else out must have been a pretty unique experience. Tell us about that.
Yeah, it was pretty horrific for so many people who couldn't get in. I tried my best to help out friends. People who owned businesses or apartments couldn't get in to grab anything. There were hard drives with everything on them—tax records, property deeds, business records. I salvaged what I could and helped out where I could.

How many prints are there?
I've printed up nine on a large scale. They need to be large-scale to convey the scope of the event. Those will be on display at The Tannery, a great art-deco inspired space that was the first major retail rebuild after the quake. The exhibition will be hanging until September 4, which will be the five-year anniversary of the first earthquake.

So what happens to the rest of the photos after the exhibition?
I don't know. I guess it's kind of a unique documentation, because there were very few photographers granted access.

I've archived all the digital files. I was never in a hurry to get them out there and seen, and I guess I'm still in no hurry. It's nice to know that there is a large body of work safely stored though. Maybe they'll gain more significance with time.

Deep Water will be hanging at The Tannery, 3 Garlands Road, Woolston, in Christchurch New Zealand until September 4.

Interview by Grant Bryant

Christie Blatchford and Barbara Kay, proud anti-feminists. Headshots Via the Globe and Mail and CAFE

The mainstream media landscape in Canada is wrought with a major disease, and its women columnists aren't doing anything to help cure it.

Some of the country's most high-profile columnists—Christie Blatchford, Margaret Wente, Barbara Kay—are women, and they are reinforcing misogynist narratives each week. Any hint that a man has committed a sexualized crime against a woman and these women columnists are victimizing him, apologizing for him, and uncovering any and all reasons why it may not have been his fault. Rather than supporting the choices of other women and challenging the structures that oppress them, they use their platforms in Canada's national newspapers to reinforce harmful narratives.

Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente and Post columnists Christie Blatchford and Barbara Kay have long claimed that rape culture is not a thing. Wente says young women should avoid getting drunk if they don't want to be raped. Blatchford uses her court reporting to discredit women: a short skirt becomes a veritable acquittal. Regrettably, attitudes like these seem to be a rule rather than an exception amongst the country's women columnists.

Given the chance, they will say anything to convince their audiences that rape and violence against women are rare occurrences. There's Blatchford's column in which she speaks to the "brave," "courageous" boy who appeared in a photograph, penetrating Rehteah Parsons from behind and giving the thumbs up while she vomited out a window. There's Wente's classist and sexist assertion that "talented, highly educated women from privileged backgrounds (Lena Dunham also comes to mind) are celebrated as feminists and behave like trailer trash." Or Kay's musings on just about anything, but as a choice example, the "slow, tentative, fragile return of women's lost sense of sexual honour." These women are among the most prominent voices in Canadian media, and they are also obedient mascots of the patriarchy, ever-nodding bobbleheads dashing to the rescue of men who harm women.

Two weeks ago, as closing submissions were made in what's believed to be Canada's first-ever Twitter harassment trial, the Post allowed its anti-woman rants to go too far yet again.

A brief recap of the case to make sure you're with me:

Gregory Alan Elliott was charged with criminal harassment in November 2012 after his tweets at Toronto feminists Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly allegedly became stalkerish in nature. He was taken to court after the Crown decided his behavior did resemble harassment, and both Guthrie and Reilly testified that they were afraid of Elliott based on his tweets, and that it was clear he knew what they were doing and who they were talking to online.

Full disclosure: Guthrie and I have been friendly acquaintances for years. We attend some of the same rallies and events, and I admire Guthrie and her advocacy work.

But that's not to say I can't point out the rabid mistakes journalists are making in their coverage of this case. Friendship doesn't change facts, and the fact is that the internet goes out of its way to silence women who dare to speak up for themselves. Guthrie has received countless rape threats and death threats, and that's partially because some mainstream media are not even trying to report on this case in an accurate or balanced way.

As a columnist for Postmedia, Canada's largest newspaper chain, Blatchford is published in papers across the country, and she is likely among the most-read journalists in Canada. Instead of using her journalistic skills to help women, though, she is choosing to stoke this unsafe environment. In a "poor men"-themed sob story, she claims Elliott's only real "sin" is disagreeing with Reilly and Guthrie. She also blames the fact that he lost his job on Guthrie, rather than his own miserable actions.

"The graphic artist and father of four lost his job shortly after his arrest, which was well-publicized online, and if convicted, could go to jail for six months," she writes. She calls those repercussions "astonishing" "given that it's not alleged he ever threatened either woman."

So it's not threatening for a man who appears to be following you on the internet even though you've blocked him to also make a show of knowing what you're doing and who you're talking to? Cool. And now, Blatchford's words are being used to fuel a Kickstarter Elliott's son created to raise money for his legal fees.

As Anne Thériault writes in a Canadaland piece you should read:

"The fact that Blatchford used her platform to go after two women who are unable to defend themselves is what makes her piece especially unethical. She is basically offering internet trolls a free shot." (The verdict is due October 6, and Guthrie and Reilly have been advised not to speak publicly about it until then.)

After Blatchford's column was posted, Alheli Picazo published another piece for the Post which, while not wholly unsympathetic to Guthrie's side of the story, contained further errors.

"Under attack from the MRAs," it reads, "Guthrie fought back, suggesting a 'doxing' campaign against Spurr—Internet slang for publishing his personal information and contacting his employers to make them aware of his online behaviour. It was this step that would form the crux of the fight between Guthrie and Gregory Allen [sic] Elliott."

But dox Guthrie did not. She didn't share any information about him that wasn't already publicly available. She simply tweeted:

Guthrie tweeted about Spurr's game rather than doxing him. Screenshot via Twitter.

She didn't actively try to get Spurr or Elliott fired. Guthrie just warned employers about hiring someone who seemed to condone violence against women. Based on the game, how could a person help but wonder about the extent of the creator's misogyny? Everything Guthrie did in this case happened as a matter of public record and is searchable on Twitter. (Since the most recent Blatchford column, she's locked her account. But those who follow her can still search and see exactly what was said, or check out her Storify. These journalists decided to ignore that.)

They also didn't bother to access Crown prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg's arguments, which she submitted in writing. She gave Metro permission to read them after the fact. Jessica Smith Cross reports some of those arguments:

"'Mr. Elliott sent copious amounts of obsessive, harassing tweets where he tweeted 'at' the complainants, mentioned their handles, mentioned the hashtags created by Ms. Guthrie, sent subtweets at the complainants, monitored their feeds, etc. He did this knowing that they blocked him and that they did not want contact with him,' Goldenberg wrote."

Goldenberg, Cross reports, "took issue with the defence position that Guthrie and Reilly must not have been truly afraid of Elliott because they called him out—even taunted him—on Twitter."

Why hasn't the Post's coverage mentioned this? Why are these writers trying to protect men instead of supporting the rights of women to feel safe in public spaces? The Guthrie case was not a one-time thing. These columnists regularly evade facts that make women seem like reasonable, intelligent beings who tell the truth, and fabricate situations that make us seem like "shrill," silly wretches hell-bent on vilifying men. Are they simply sticking to the misogynist status quo to be accepted by the old boys' club that hired them in the first place? Can it possibly be just for clickbait? Or do these women actually believe themselves?

I am troubled that here in Canada our national news outlets are making errors like these. Don't get me wrong, I have made mistakes as a journalist, some of them serious. We are all only human. But the Post articles seem to be deliberately avoiding the facts.

It worries me that so few people with prominent voices have bothered to stand up for Guthrie, Rehteah, and all of the women across Canada who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. The dearth of voices bothering to cover these issues illustrates how few feminist writers and editors are out there. And, if we can agree that "feminism" means "political, economic, and social equality of the sexes," this is a sad state of affairs.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Screencap via Fox News.

When the Republican presidential candidates took the stage at Thursday primary debate, the night seemed poised to devolve into a political three-ring circus. Ten sweating and suited men lining up to spar in the middle of the basketball arena, egged on by a trio of gleeful Fox News anchors with giant teeth. And in the center of it all, Donald Trump, the celebrity ringmaster whose campaign success continued to defy all normal political logic.

In the end, the debate was a circus, of sorts—and Trump was the main attraction—just not in the way we anticipated. Because rather than derail the debate, as many had expected, Trump himself was derailed—blindsided by Fox News moderators apparently fed up with the real-estate mogul and his gonzo presidential campaign. All of which is to say, it was two very entertaining hours of political theater. We've compiled the best moments below.

A SHOW OF HANDS
The first indication that Thursday might not go smoothly for Trump came within seconds of the start of the debate, when Fox moderator Brett Baier asked the candidates to raise their hands if they would not support the eventual Republican nominee.

On cue, Trump's lonely hand went up in the middle of the stage. "Mr. Trump, to be clear, you're standing on the Republican debate stage," Baier noted, "and that experts say an independent run would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton." Trump was clear.

What Baier was trying to show was that Trump isn't really in the 2016 race for the Republican Party, or even to beat Hillary Clinton, but for Donald Trump (which, of course, has always been very clear).

More interesting, though, was what this little litmus test said about Fox News. Like most media organizations, Fox has stirred up the Trump frenzy, and even implicitly propped up his presidential campaign. But faced with the possibility that Trump could make a mockery of the debate—and potentially fuck up the GOP's chances of winning the White House—the network did an abrupt about-face. And with none of the other Republican candidates likely to take on Trump, it was up to the moderators to do it themselves.

DONALD TRUMP VS. MEGYN KELLY
The extent to which Fox had turned on Trump was made brutally clear with a question from host Megyn Kelly, about the reality-TV mogul's history of referring to women as "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals." ("Only Rosie O'Donnell," Trump interjected unhelpfully.)

"For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O'Donnell," Kelly said. "You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?"

Screencap via Fox News

'WE NEED TO BUILD A WALL, JEB'
Fox's attempts to break Trump fever aside, he is still the Republican frontrunner—and while that may defy all conventional campaign logic, his improbable lead has had an influence on the rest of the GOP's 2016 field. This was particularly clear last night when the debate turned to the issue of immigration.

"If it weren't for me, you wouldn't even be talking about illegal immigration," Trump told moderator Chris Wallace, during a segment on immigration. "This was not a subject that was on anybody's mind until I brought it up at my announcement."

Obviously, this is an exaggeration. But rather than look down awkwardly when Trump started talking tough about a giant border fence, and suggesting that the "cunning" Mexican government is "sending the bad ones over," the rest of the Republicans on stage Thursday rushed to talk about their own hardline immigration policies.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who previously supported a pathway to citizenship, said that he'd learned "there are international criminal organizations penetrating our southern-based borders, and we need to do something about it." Florida Senator Marco Rubio, part of a group of Senators who authored a 2013 immigration reform bill, said he agreed that the US needs a border wall, but that it also needs to stop "El Chapo from digging a tunnel under that wall." Even Jeb Bush, a relative moderate on immigration issues, called for a crackdown on so-called "sanctuary cities."

"Donald Trump is hitting a nerve in this country," Ohio Governor John Kasich told the debate audience. "He's hitting a nerve. People are frustrated. They're fed up. They don't think the government is working for them. And for people who want to just tune him out, they're making a mistake."

CHRIS CHRISTIE VS. RAND PAUL
One of the biggest non-Trump moments of Thursday's debate was a clash between Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie over the NSA surveillance program. It was a substantive, important debate over a policy issue that continues to divide the Republican Party.

Christie, a former federal prosecutor who, as he reminded the audience Thursday, was appointed in the weeks following 9/11, argued that Paul was wrong to bring up civil liberties concerns over the dragnet surveillance program. Paul in turn accused Christie of trampling on the Bill of Rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment. And it devolved into a nice little shouting match.

"I don't trust President Obama with our records," Paul shouted. "I know you gave him a big hug, and if you want to give him a big hug again, go right ahead."

"The hugs that I remember are the hugs I gave to the families who lost their people on September 11," Christie responded. "Those are the hugs I remember."

Paul just rolled his eyes.

'WITH HILLARY CLINTON, I SAID BE AT MY WEDDING AND SHE CAME TO MY WEDDING'
By far the most fascinating comment of the night was Trump's startling distillation of the power of money in politics. Asked by Wallace to explain his donations to Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, Trump explained:

"I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me."

So what did Trump get from Clinton? "Well, I'll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding," he said. "You know why? She didn't have a choice because I gave."

On the surface, Trump's remarks—combined with his later admission that he has taken advantage of the US bankruptcy system—seem like a vigorous endorsement of crony capitalism. But there is also an underlying honesty—an admission that, yes, average American voter, you are right, the political system is fucked; it is essentially based on bribery.

And for maybe the first time, I got why Trump's billionaire populism might be resonating with disenchanted voters, looking at the prospect of another Bush vs. Clinton election. (It doesn't help that while Republicans were debating Thursday, Clinton was taking selfies with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, or that Jeb responded to a question about the Bush dynasty Thursday by referring to himself as "Veto Corleone.")

What Trump is basically asking is if Republicans would rather vote for the candidate who's getting bribed, or the one doing the bribing. Whether they heard anything other than "[Hillary Clinton] came to my wedding," though, is anyone's guess.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Judy Lorraine Syrek

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: Some people were, allegedly, allowing their dog to shit on their neighbor's lawn.

The appropriate response: Yelling at them.

The actual response: The neighbor allegedly committed a hate crime against the dog owners.

According to a statement she later gave to police police, 56-year-old Judy Lorraine Syrek of Grand Rapids, Michigan (pictured above), has been having a problem with her neighbors allowing their dogs to poop in her front yard.

Last Monday, this apparently became too much for Judy, and she confronted the neighbors. Obviously, confronting her neighbors was the right thing to do, as allowing your dog to shit in someone else's yard is super unacceptable.

However, according to police, Judy reacted a little strongly. She reportedly pointed a pellet gun at her neighbors and threatened to shoot them with it, before "letting loose with a stream of racial epithets." It is unclear whether or not the neighbors were aware the gun was only a pellet gun.

"She was upset over the neighbor's dog and feces in their yard," said Terry Dixon of Grand Rapids Police to the local ABC affiliate. "Apparently those neighbors were not addressing that particular problem. She got upset and felt the need to bring out a long gun and then point it at several subjects."

Police arrested Judy and charged her with felonious assault and ethnic intimidation, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Cry-Baby #2: An officer from the Rohnert Park Police Department

The incident: A man filmed a cop.

The appropriate response: Nothing. Comes with the job.

The actual response: The cop pulled a gun on the guy filming.

Earlier this week, Don McComas, a resident of Rohnert Park, California, uploaded a video to his Facebook page showing a run-in he'd had with an officer from the Rohnert Park Police Department.

The video starts with the officer driving towards Don as Don films from his driveway. After sitting in his car and filming Don through the window, the officer exits the vehicle and asks Don to take his hand out of his pocket. Don refuses, saying he has done nothing wrong.

The officer then takes out his gun and begins to approach Don, who backs away, telling the officer repeatedly to go away.

When Don asks why the officer got out of his vehicle, he responds, "You're taking a picture of me, I'm taking a picture of you."

The exchange lasts several minutes. During the conversation, the officer confirms that he does not suspect Don of a crime. At one point, the officer asks, "Are you some kind of a constitutionalist crazy guy or something like that?"

The video ends with Don telling the officer he is going to put the video on YouTube. "Go ahead and have a nice day, put it on YouTube, I don't really care," the officer says. He then gets back in his vehicle and drives away.

According to the Los Angeles Times,Los Angeles Times, the police department has launched an internal investigation into the incident.

"We've been made aware of this matter, and we are taking it seriously," Rohnert Park mayor Amy Ahanotu and city manager Darrin Jenkins said in a statement to the paper. "We understand the concerns that have been raised by our community and others and we want the public to know that your trust in law enforcement in our city is a top priority."

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know just here, please:

Previously: A guy who called the cops because his girlfriend fed his bacon to a cat vs. a Starbucks manager who banned a guy for sticking up for drivers with disabilities.

Winner: The Starbucks manager!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

F. Gary Gray was only 23 when he directed the fantastically literal video for Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" in 1993. Its sun-kissed, deadpan style transferred beautifully to his debut feature Friday (1995), which Cube cowrote and starred in as the straight(er) foil to Chris Tucker's more animated pot dealer. Friday quickly achieved cult-classic status, and Gray spent the next two decades racking up an impressive body of action cinema, from bank-heist thriller Set It Off (1996) to the surprisingly fun remake of The Italian Job (2003), and the brutal vigilante flick Law Abiding Citizen (2009).

Gray's latest project is Straight Outta Compton, a biopic of N.W.A, the controversial LA rap outfit comprising Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella. It traces the group's origins in the late 80s, their early successes—which became turbulent and fraught with drama thanks to the financial duplicity of manager Jerry Heller—and concludes with the premature death of Eazy-E in 1995.

The movie is mostly a delight. It's a sweeping, incident-packed drama that traffics in humor, emotional force, and sociopolitical insight, even if its charms sadly don't extend to portraying women—save for Dre's mother and Eazy-E's wife—as anything other than barely-clothed eye candy.

The film's bona fides are clear. It was produced in part by Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E's widow Tomica Woods-Wright; and features Cube's son O'Shea Jackson Jr. as his father. Gray's affinity with his subjects is evident, as well—he also shot the videos for Cube and Dre's "Natural Born Killas" (1994) and Dre's "Keep Their Heads Ringin".

I recently spoke to the LA-based Gray over the phone to get the inside track on the film.

VICE: This must be a genuine passion project for you. Could you talk about how excited you must be to seeing it come out now?
F. Gary Gray: I've known Cube since the beginning of my career as a director, and it's all come full circle. For me, to be able to tell the story of N.W.A. and their lives—their rise, their fall, and then their rise again—it's the film of a lifetime for me. I grew up in Los Angeles in that era, so a lot of things that they rapped about I witnessed and experienced firsthand. A lot of the elements of the story intersect in ways that have never intersected for me in other films I've directed.

I was struck by the film's scale. When I saw the running time (150 minutes) I was like, "Wow, OK." We've seen running times like this for films like Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, but this is the first rap biopic in that vein. That's significant.
You know, I never thought about it like that. But since you put it that way, I guess it is the first. [That scale] is so important. You could make three movies out of the N.W.A. story. The runtime is something I don't really think too much about because everything in the movie, I believe, is intriguing and compelling. You learn a lot, you laugh, you cry. We've gotten a lot of great feedback from people from all walks of life. They say, "I want more, I wanted more."

You can't just google "N.W.A." and get these details. You can't experience the brotherhood that you experience in the movie by going on to Wikipedia. –F. Gary Gray

The length is totally justified. It was great to see something that had sufficient space for the story to unfold in.
There may be a director's cut that's even longer [laughs]. We'll see, but I'm very happy with epic nature of the film. It's an epic story. It goes far beyond the group and the music created. It's relevant creatively and artistically. It's just a... [pauses] major story. I'm sorry I'm just choked up because it's just so many things for me on a lot of levels. But it's a major story.

What you're doing is quite radical. The film reverses the stock media narrative of the guys being thugs and agitators. It's complicated because they were serious men, whose work was informed by serious events, but they also had an aggressive persona that they deliberately projected. Your film takes us beyond that persona and into their lives.
Absolutely. There's a humanity to the story that you wouldn't normally associate with this genre of music. That was important to me. I want you to get to know the guys behind the tracks, behind the lyrics and beats, and get a sense of them as human beings. That's what makes this special, because you can't just google "N.W.A." and get these details. You can't experience the brotherhood that you experience in the movie by going on to Wikipedia. It's very easy to dismiss these guys as edgy street rappers who talk about controversial things. But when you experience the brotherhood and the family ties that bind them and the motivation behind the music, you can't help but have a different relationship with N.W.A.

Image courtesy of Universal

It's also very light in places—I think that element might surprise people. There was a lot of laughter in the screening I attended. How important was it for you to include humor?
Well, I grew up in an environment where there were dangerous times, but there were a lot of funny moments too, you know? My first movie was Friday, and it was a very funny movie about weed-dealing. So you will always get that, I believe, in my movies—some sort of humor, it helps the drama. This is a bunch of kids who came together, who spoke their mind about things that they were passionate about, about things that affected their lives. Even from their perspective, when you listen to their albums, a lot of their shit is funny. The movie takes the same track and you get a sense of the rawness, the authenticity, the humor, [and] pain. These are all the things you experience when you listen to Straight Outta Compton.

I wanted to make it feel raw, real, and authentic as opposed to comedic. –F. Gary Gray

The film pulls no punches in depicting police aggression and violence. In particular you use the backdrop of the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, the acquittal of the officers, and the subsequent uprisings in LA. It's sadly very topical today. I watched the film on the same day I heard about the Sam DuBose case in Cincinnati, and it was just a few days after the madness with Sandra Bland and that cop in Texas. In this way your film doesn't feel like a period piece at all...
We didn't know that this would coincide with all the headlines regarding police brutality. I've been involved with this movie for four years, and those weren't the headlines back then. When we finally finished the movie and these headlines started to creep up... You feel sad about it. You wish you could say, "Hey listen, remember back in time where these things used to happen and they no longer happen?"

It's unfortunate that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I've been saying this lately, and I'm optimistic that these headlines will put pressure on the people who make changes—our lawmakers, our leaders. Law enforcement that has a tendency to go that way, or workers within a culture that forgives these types of things, I think they will feel the pressure. Because now every time that kind of thing happens, it's not going to be slipped under the rug in the way that it was in the past.

Image courtesy of Universal

Tone-wise, you play it pretty straight—it's very respectful of the guys, and despite the humor, it's dramatic and even quite stately. Straight Outta Compton could be the first of a potential second cycle of films about this era, because there were spoofs like CB4 (1993) and Fear of a Black Hat (1994), which parodied gangsta rap and made it all look pretty silly. How do you feel about those films?
I don't remember them, but I remember when they came out. I remember that they were parodies, which puts you on alert to a certain extent. If you make a movie like this, there are so many ways to get it wrong. It's very easy for people not to take this story seriously and view it as a parody of the 80s, and of the group. I wanted to make it feel raw, real, and authentic as opposed to comedic.

I'm glad I had Dre, Cube, and Yella, and Ren around to help with the details. Eazy's widow, Tomica, also helped with the details. The group involved—the technicians, my team—we pulled this movie together and you feel the weight and the importance of the story and the group.

The costumes are amazing, too. Can you talk a little about them?
Our costume designer, Kelli Jones, worked on Sons of Anarchy, so she's used to working in these subcultures with rough guys. She had to individualize each character and convey their progression as they started to make money. When you have five guys that live in Los Angeles who weren't any slaves to fashion... to find ways to individualize them and help tell the story with their costumes was really a challenge. She stepped up in a major way—I think she deserves an Oscar nomination for this.

On Noisey: Watch an Exclusive First Look at Straight Outta ComptonStraight Outta Compton

It seems there's something happening in the culture now with West Coast rap. I noticed it in Dope, which is set in Inglewood, and the main character writes his thesis on the lyrics to Cube's "It Was a Good Day," the video that you directed. Do you see your film as part of a West Coast revival?
You know, I really don't think in those terms. I heard Dope was dope... [But] I've been so immersed in the N.W.A. world that I haven't had a chance to see that movie. I just focus on what's going to make this story great. I know that sounds really cliché, but for me it's the universal story. I think that whether you live in LA, you live in New York, or if you live in Sweden, you can identify with some of the universal things that we touch on.

Straight Outta Compton opens in theaters nationwide Saturday, August 18.

Follow Ashley on Twitter.

IS fighters. Photo courtesy of VICE News

For much of the 90s and especially after the 1998 US embassy bombings, whenever the world talked about Islamic terrorism, the conversation inevitably turned toward al Qaeda. They loomed as the big daddy of jihadi violence, the brand rogue militants wanted their little insurgencies affiliated with if only to tap into the group's global network of funding and training. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 only burnished their influence. But in 2014, the world got to know the Islamic State, and Americans started to panic about the new threat.

Once an al Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State has been at odds with their old buds for a while now, and US counter-terrorism officials are split over which represents the greater threat, as the New York Times reported earlier this week.

Al Qaeda could never get behind the Islamic State's obsession with purging those Muslims they deemed apostates, often focusing more energy on this endeavor than on fighting Western powers. Nor were al Qaeda leadership all that hyped about what they saw as the Islamic State's alienating style of violence. Al Qaeda formally severed ties with the Islamic State last year, and ever since, the two organizations have been in hot competition for ideological and physical control of numerous splintering militant groups across the Islamic world.

The jihadisphere, in short, is in turmoil.

To get a better idea of who will win out in the long-run, VICE reached out to Patrick M. Skinner, an ex-CIA officer and counterterrorism expert currently serving as director of special projects for the security intelligence firm the Soufan Group. We asked Skinner to tell us about the current contours of the conflict between the Islamic State and al Qaeda, to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the groups when squaring off against each other, and to give us his best predictions as to which organization will come out on top.

VICE: We know there's active conflict between al Qaeda [in the form of local affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra] and the Islamic State in Syria right now. How's that playing out?
It's not the strength of the groups; it's their philosophy [that matters]. Al-Nusra tends to co-opt a lot of other groups. And ISIS fights everybody, so they lose [a lot of battles] because they fight everybody all the time and nobody wants to work with them. So that's their downfall in Syria. They do well in certain areas, but al-Nusra is more powerful because they have more partners.

The Islamic State is a political entity as well—it's concerned with infrastructure and holding territory. Does that make them more of an easy target, more vulnerable, than al-Nusra and other mobile, cell-based [al Qaeda-affiliated] organizations?
Yeah, they have something to lose. And they have lost. They've lost a couple provinces in Syria. To be a state, you have to have physical control. You can't melt away. And they're fighting rebel groups that can do hit-and-run. And the Islamic State can't do hit-and-run.

In Syria, they can't leave Raqqa. They have supply lines. That's a big deal. That's probably going to be one of their downfalls in Syria because they really are grounded. They have two avenues into Turkey and when those get shut, which they will, they're in trouble.

That's a strategic weakness for the Islamic State, but which group has the tactical advantage? As I understand it, the Islamic State is more about traditional massed force attacks—shows of force—while al-Nusra [and al Qaeda at large] are more focused on insurgencies. How does that dynamic play out between the two of them?
The one interesting thing about the Islamic State is that they do both when they have the ability. When people do terrorism, it's because they don't have the strength of a traditional army. So where they have that strength, they do pretty effective infantry attacks. Militarily speaking, the [Islamic State] attack on Mosul was pretty good. Where they don't have it, they still do terrorism. They'll do a lot of suicide bombings.

But they've kind of merged it, like [in] Ramadi, they had 27 huge truck bombs. They softened up the defenses—there is no defense against that many massive car bombs. And then they went in with small arms.

Al-Nusra kind of does the same thing. They're a serious fighting force. They tend to do one thing more than ISIS: They infiltrate other groups and then they do sleeper cells, which ISIS doesn't. So al-Nusra basically collapsed two moderate rebel forces last year, Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, because basically it put in a bunch of sleepers and then they attacked.

Tactically, they're not that far apart. It's just that in some places, ISIS doesn't have to be a terrorist group, like in Mosul or Ramadi or Raqqa, because they control all the levers of power. So they're not a terrorist group, they're a state army there.

Check out the National Magazine Award-winning Islamic State documentary from VICE News:

It's a matter of strategy rather than tactics that will settle things between the Islamic State and al-Nusra in Syria, then? And the Islamic State's strategy is weaker?
Yeah, they can't leave Raqqa. It's their capital. Everyone focuses on, Oh my God, they established a caliphate (or said they did), and they have this capital . The thing about having something is that it can be taken away from them. But the other groups can just leave Raqqa. They can come and go. They can move in and out. But if you want to be a state, you can't do that.

They're going to lose Raqqa sometime. It's not imminent. But when they do, it's going to be very notable.

But if they're making a state, couldn't they just build up a strong enough army with enough numbers to repel any threat from al-Nusra's terrorist strikes? Or couldn't they become hyper-aggressive and just cleanse al-Nusra out of the region?
They've actually done pretty well. Their foreign fighter numbers are going to go down. All of the Western countries have cracked down on travel so they're not getting those massive numbers. But they've done a pretty good job of local conscription or recruitment or volunteers (it's hard to tell). They've been able to replace their numbers. Right when you think that they're at their weakest, they strike somewhere else. That's what happened in Ramadi.

They're going to come at rebel groups in Syria as hard as they can. They're already hyper-violent. I think that as pressure comes, yeah, they're going to rage and strike out as much as they can. They're not in any danger of collapse. When we talk about how they're getting hurt, these are long-term concerns.

They're going to try to prevent being encircled, especially in Syria. Which makes them vulnerable, because you know that they have to do that, and the other rebel groups are going to be taking advantage of that.

Beyond the Syrian front, where the most direct conflict is taking place between the Islamic State proper and al Qaeda's local affiliate, both sides have their branches all over. How does the conflict between the two groups look, or could it look, in these other theaters?
What [the Islamic State] is trying to do in places like in Libya, they established their own little line. Then they got kicked out of Derna. They're not there anymore, because the other groups... these are some real, strong groups and ISIS fights everybody all the time. It's just what they do.

Now, Mullah [Muhammad] Omar's death [the Taliban supreme commander to whom al Qaeda and its affiliates had sworn their allegiance] is going to have a big impact. People need to wait a couple of months to see how it plays out. But the big divide between ISIS and al Qaeda has been over allegiance. And now that Mullah Omar's dead (and may have been dead for years), other groups have yet to explain what they're going to do. Some Mullah Omar affiliates might say: You know what? We're going [with ISIS]. ISIS is going to try to poach as many of those affiliates as they can. They're already saying: Hey, come join the winning team.

But the fighting is really in Syria. [Elsewhere] I think ISIS is going to wait and see over the next couple of months and include as many affiliates as they can over the Mullah Omar debacle. It's a big deal that that happened. They're not going to get into open conflict in many places, because when they do, they tend to lose—because al Qaeda has been in these places for a long time.

Well, there were those reports about confrontations elsewhere, like against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but [the Islamic State] didn't make much headway there I guess, did they?
They'll increase [there]. The original Taliban, they were fighting to get something back. They wanted to return to what they used to have. But the younger fighters are just fighting. And ISIS appeals to that. But it's like Libya: each province is so different that it's going to be hard for them to establish that homogenous group that they always want to do. Afghanistan resists that. Even at their height, the Taliban didn't control the whole country. They'll make advances, but Afghanistan is very different from Iraq.

So Syria's the big theater for a conflict with the Islamic State then. You've said that strategically they're weak because they're locked into their territory. But how long does it take al-Nusra or a similar group to hammer away and defeat them?
Well, last year we would have thought they would have burned themselves out [quickly]. The governance was so bad that someone would rise up. That has not happened. They've managed to balance insane violence against some level of social services. It's a low bar in Iraq and Syria. Basically all they had to do was be better than chaos, which they are in some ways. So I don't think they're going to burn out. They're going to have to be pushed out. If left alone or contained, they'll stay there forever. They're going to have to be strangled.

There's going to be a lot of fighting. It's going to be very difficult. Unless the US just goes all-in, which they're not going to do, right now nobody is strong enough to take them out themselves. If all of the rebel groups can work together, they can end ISIS control. But they're not a group.

If we have to boil it down, between al-Nusra/al Qaeda and the Islamic State, you're saying that al-Nusra doesn't have the strength to take down the Islamic State, but that because of how al-Nusra is structured, the Islamic State can't beat them either?
Yeah, right now neither of those guys can beat the other. Al-Nusra's in a better position because they tend to make alliances. So of the two, in Syria, al-Nusra has the better long-term forecast. ISIS, they shoot themselves in the foot every day, because they shoot everybody all the time. Al-Nusra can't kick them out of Raqqa, but they can do a lot of damage in a lot of other places, because Syria's a very, very large country. And they can just keep working with other groups.

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