I cannot hook up with a guy to save my life. It's not that I can't get a guy to go out with me; I just can't "close the deal," so to speak. This is embarrassing, but if I'm being honest, I have not so much as kissed anyone in six months. Before that, I had long stretches of celibacy peppered with flings with guys who were only vaguely interested in me.

It was suggested to me by a few friends I might have something called "sexual anorexia." According to Psychology Today, "Sex addicts 'act out' or 'binge' through promiscuity or high-risk behavior, sexual starve themselves by 'acting in,' denying themselves the pleasure of relationships, dating, loving touch, and genuine connection with others."

I see myself as covered in metaphorical "do not cross, major crime scene!" tape. I talk about sex and dating all the time, but in practice, I'm emotionally closed-off. I suffer from various chronic illnesses (epilepsy, toxoplasmosis) and don't want to force those burdens on someone else. Oh, and I'm sober, something that seems to constantly cockblock me.

And yet, just like anyone else, I want to love and be loved, fuck and be fucked.

For the past few weeks, I've tried to get over my sexual insecurities by exploring various kinks—sort of like the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but instead of going to Jamaica, it's me in a BDSM den, or something similar. In researching various fetishes, I came across a community of people into latex—a fetish that would provide a literal buffer between me and my partner. Of course, I was immediately intrigued.

Through a latex message board on Reddit, I found a user named Scarlet, who, after years of vanilla sex, adopted a latex fetish while dating a man who dabbled in the kink. She told me that the first time she wore latex during sex—a pair of stockings and panties—it was "a bit uncomfortable." But later, when she got pieces molded for her body, it started to feel like a "second skin."

Latex can intensify touch, so being caressed while wearing a pair of latex panties is apparently mind-blowing, according to Scarlet. Depending on what you're wearing, it can also be physically restricting, which some people say makes foreplay feel better—often because they're also attracted to bondage. You don't even have to be having sex to enjoy the tactile sensations. "Foreplay," Scarlet told me, "is pretty much a cornerstone of the rubber lifestyle," though she added that "sex in latex feels euphoric." The constriction of latex not only heightens physical sensitivity but also apparently makes your body ultra sensitive to temperature. So as things start to heat up, so do you.

Scarlet also said wearing latex helped her shed her anxieties in bed. "It can conceal your identity with hoods and masks and potentially give you certain attributes you don't already possess," she told me. There's a definite costume aspect to it: Everything from latex French maid costumes to cloaks to full-body concealment (like the bondage suit from American Horror Story Murder House.) Full-body rubber suits cling to the female form and exaggerate curves to the utmost extent.

After talking to Scarlet, I felt emboldened to borrow some latex lingerie from my friend. The set I ended up with was reminiscent of the nude one Miley Cyrus wore during the MTV Awards show where she twerked against Robin Thicke while they performed "Blurred Lines."

Watch: VICE Suits Up with Spain's Latex Fetishists

I had the set on under my clothes when I decided to call up an ex, because it felt safer than testing it out with a stranger I met off Bumble. I told him the truth: He needed to come over right then because I was writing an article about the latex fetish and I needed to experiment with it by my deadline, which was the end of the week.

Funny thing about boys: He was over within the hour. Funny thing about exes: There was no need for small talk. We cut to the chase and headed to my bedroom.

I told him I wanted to fool around for a bit while I was wearing the latex and see how it felt, tasted, and sounded. Because I'm a noob, I forgot to lube up the latex to make it slick and shiny, something I remembered reading about on the message boards. There's a whole ritual to the lubing process—Scarlet told me people generally use silicone lube, and the act of greasing up the latex is basically like foreplay.

Since I forgot this step, the fabric caused an uneasy friction at points and squeaked against his skin. It took me out of the moment a bit, but at the same time, this extra element was fun and new. He seemed more into things than usual—grabbing at me in ways he normally wouldn't—and I wondered if it was the latex lingerie or the fact that it's been like a year since we hooked up.

We were mid-makeout when he stopped to say, "To be honest, I was always pretty turned on by Michelle Pfeiffer when she played Catwoman. You know, in that black cat suit."

He had never told me this before. "Was it Michelle Pfeiffer, or was it the cat suit?" I asked.

"I think it was the cat suit," he whispered as we continued to roll around in bed.

We didn't end up having sex, but fooling around felt nice. I'm not generally motivated to be touched (for fear of rejection and because of my own insecurities), but the latex acted almost like a sexual surrogate, providing just enough of a barrier to help me ease into things. Sure, we just groped each other while I kept my bra and panties on—something I've been doing since seventh grade—but the latex made everything seem more special, more provocative.

Am I going to make latex routine? Probably not. It's expensive as hell, and I don't know if my friend will let me borrow her lingerie on the reg. But it was a nice change of pace and sensation, and it did get me into the bedroom again.

Next time, though, I'll definitely remember the lube—because while wearing latex might be sexy and liberating, rubber burn definitely is not.

Follow Alison Segel on Twitter.

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The first murder I saw online was the decapitation of Nick Berg, an American businessman captured and killed by an Iraqi jihadist group in 2004. The video depicted a handful of men working together to cut his head off. I was in high school at the time. I watched him die.

Since then, there have been a number of deaths broadcast online: Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. David Cawthorne Haines. It's become copacetic to watch someone's murder, and not just in dark corners of the internet. These videos exist undisguised, presented under the guise of relevant "news content." You can find them on Facebook and Twitter, sandwiched between family photos and videos of dogs.

The video of Castile dying on Facebook Live generated approximately 3 million views within a few hours, instantly provoking public outrage. I watched, too, and afterward, I was certain the video would be removed for violating Facebook's rules on graphic content. After all, Facebook reserves the right to remove explicitly violent content posted to the site. But it turns out there's a loophole—images and videos "of public interest or concern." Only violent images "shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence" are removed.

But some experts believe the context doesn't really matter, because whether or not the intentions are good, watching someone die can have real and lasting psychological effects.

"I do not believe the intent of the distributor makes a difference in how traumatic the viewer's response is," Dr. Dion Metzger, a psychiatrist with an expertise in PTSD and trauma from mass media told VICE. "The level of trauma is based on the content of the video and also heightened if the viewer identifies with the victim."

Related: How the Islamic State Turned Horrifying Beheadings into Effective Propaganda

Of course, many will argue that's exactly the point: We're supposed to be traumatized by these kinds of videos because the point is to provoke change. If we're not exposed to injustices in the world—in all their gory detail—how can we begin to change them?

Of all the categories of filmed homicide, civilian-police conflict shootings are at the forefront of this discussion. Between March 2014 and September 2016, there were at least 15 viral videos of police encounters that resulted in death. Presumably, users sharing these videos believe that they're contributing to a cause and helping to rectify social injustice.

"It's one thing to talk about the injustices, but when people actually see it with their own eyes, that's a whole different ball game," said Metzger. "They are able to empathize with the victim and can advocate stopping the injustice that they witnessed. For this very reason, the exposure of the filmed violence can bring on positive results."

Even still, that doesn't mean they're not traumatic to the people watching them. One study found that some people who repeatedly viewed footage of deadly events—in this case, the Boston Marathon bombings—sustained more trauma and stress than people who had witnessed the events in real life. In another study, which asked participants to view footage from school shootings, suicide bombings, and the attacks on 9/11, 22 percent of participants showed symptoms of PTSD after watching the videos.

"After watching such content, may have problems sleeping and even a level of anxiety—almost mimicking paranoia—that they can also be the victim of such a violent act," said Metzger.

And yet, as Metzger pointed out, people can't seem to look away. "I believe there's a certain shock value to these videos that make them appealing to the masses," she said.

After 9/11, Americans watched an average of eight hours of news coverage of the attacks, much of which was explicit. Those who watched more television coverage also had heightened stress responses and symptoms of trauma.

Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist and former head of the National Coalition on TV Violence, told VICE there's almost an addictive quality to this kind of graphic violence. "Many people tell themselves that they are watching violent news stories to stay informed, but unconsciously they are becoming addicted to the titillation that this violence creates," she said.

To be sure, as horrified as I was after watching the decapitation of Berg in 2004, it didn't stop me from watching similar videos.

Lieberman sees this as a problem. Beyond the psychological consequences to the viewer, our willingness to consume this kind of content has given groups like ISIS a platform to make their point with footage of beheadings and other violent acts. "Our collective unconscious is being flooded with images of violence, and this is influencing us to become a more violent society," Lieberman said.

Just as with Facebook's censorship guidelines, there's a fine line between what is in the public's interest and what is gratuitous violence—a distinction that the media has grappled with in deciding how best to cover these kinds of videos.

While some videos, like those depicting police violence, are shared to bring justice to the victims, others, like footage of terrorist attacks, can simply create a climate of fear. Either way, the psychological fallout is very real. So if you must share videos of murder online, do so with caution.

Follow Alexis Linkletter on Twitter.

This story appeared in the August issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

There's a moment in Beyoncé's music video for "Formation" when Blue Ivy, cherubic, looks right into the camera as her mother sings definitively that she prefers her "baby heir with baby hair and Afros." It is a deeply political statement. Beyoncé, arguably the greatest professional entertainer of our time, chooses to love her blackness. And she chooses to love Blue Ivy's blackness, as well as her own, by publicly embracing an aesthetic. Throughout "Formation," she pays homage to the multiplicity of black women's hairstyles: The video notably shows black women with epic triple topknots, braided chignons, braided crowns. A wig shop is prominently featured. "Formation" is about looking black and that being beautiful.

At the end of the 18th century in Louisiana, black Creole women were subject to laws criminalizing their apparently ostentatious beauty, unacceptable to the white women around them. The "tignon" laws mandated that these women cover their hair with a head wrap—or be thrown in jail. The women complied, but they proceeded to beautify their wraps; a law criminalizing someone for being too beautiful while also being black is going to be ineffective for obvious reasons. Historian Carolyn Long notes that "instead of being considered a badge of dishonor, the tignon... became a fashion statement. The bright of the scarves, and the imaginative wrapping techniques employed by their wearers, are said to have enhanced the beauty of the women of color." It's no coincidence that "Formation" embraces the singer's Creole heritage and draws on how black women's aesthetics have always been a site for resistance.

How we look continues to be a flashpoint for racism. Beyoncé, having built an empire, has more power than most to speak back to the American tradition of devaluing black women's appearances. But for most, in the workplace and other institutional settings—particularly corporate environments—we must don a metaphoric tignon. We shed the clothes and accessories that make us feel like us in order to better fit in. It's assumed that "professional" in many ways means white. Everywhere—from within the United States military, to retail environments like Abercrombie and Zara, to professional sports (remember those Don Imus comments? The Gabby Douglas fiasco?), to lawyers in the courtroom—black women's hairstyles and other aesthetic choices have repeatedly been marked as unprofessional or problematic.

Photographer Endia Beal grapples with these questions and more in her photo series "Am I What You're Looking For?" Beal records young, educated black women who are about to enter the workforce for the first time. She poses the women in their family homes, in front of a photo backdrop of an office space where she formerly worked. According to Beal, she positioned the women "between the worlds of identity and conformity"—they are anticipating the obstacles they might encounter on their career path because they are black women who look like black women. For the project, Beal's subjects dress themselves in what they consider to be ideal professional attire, and she asks them mock interview questions.

The resulting conversation forces them to confront the emotional prospect that, in fact, they may not fit into the idealized vision of a "professional" woman. The series includes women who bare midriffs in tailored crop tops; women with visible tattoos; women with twinned, voluminous, gravity-defying Afros; women wearing extensions or weaves; women with long Senegalese twists. "Am I What You're Looking For?" honors a constellation of black women's aesthetics, and the conceptual through line is hair, a topic Beal has documented in the past. Her 2013 photo series "Can I Touch It?"—an eye-catching project depicting middle-aged white women in traditionally black hairstyles and pantsuits—went viral.

The range of emotions depicted in Beal's work belies the subjective experience of workplace discrimination. Some of the women look defiantly into the camera; others are less certain of themselves. The women are of some privilege, which is clear from their middle-class family homes, but the relative privilege they enjoy is not enough to shield them from the universality of misogynoir. Beal, who received an MFA from Yale, offers a bittersweet reflection on black women's reality as professionals—perhaps a proxy documentation of her own experience in the very office that serves as the backdrop of the series.

Beal, a professor of art at Winston-Salem State, was inspired in part by the young women in her classroom. "I found that my students were coming to me with the same concerns that I experienced in a corporate setting," she told me. Generations of black women have experienced the same thing in the workplace; Beal wants to interrupt the cycle. "I had the women stand in front of the same office hallway I walked down every day, feeling like I was the other in that space," she said. "I use art as a vehicle to deal with what I'm going through emotionally." Beal hopes that the experience will help the young women to feel emotionally supported as well, adding somewhat maternally, "When you make something together, it brings you closer.

This work was produced with funds provided by Magnum Foundation.

Illustration by Stephanie Santillan

On September 11, at the most recent Creative Arts Emmys, RuPaul received his first Emmy, for Best Reality Show Host for RuPaul's Drag Race. It was a moment of triumph for the world's most successful and famous drag queen, endowing one of his catchphrases—"you better work"—with a double meaning: You better serve it on the runway, but to get paid the way Ru does, you better work really, really hard, too.

On the second season of Drag Race All-Stars, which is currently airing, queens like Alaska Thunderfuck 5000 and Alyssa Edwards compete for a prize of $100,000, an outrageous sum in an industry where most queens perform in bars for dollar bills. We asked four of them—an energetic young queen in Brooklyn, an American making a name for herself in Berlin, a San Francisco legend, and one of Mama Ru's all-stars herself—how they graduated (or are trying to graduate) from amateur tips to professional wages. They spoke to the ways in which drag necessitates hustling to survive and establish one's name—but even with financial success, at the end of the day, the will to perform comes from nowhere but the heart.

THEE SUBURBIA, Brooklyn, NY. Years doing drag: 1–2

I've been doing drag for two years, but in my first Drag Race audition tape, I said since birth. In reality, I've been performing professionally for about a year. The biggest challenge in terms of making money at first is getting people to know who you are. People need to respect you, so you have to show them a strong concept every single time—for me, it's gotta be something high energy and controversial.

When I perform, people give me tips, and I get a booking fee. I work three parties a week, plus my own party called Bananas. A lot of the work I do is just getting my name out there. I also make money selling real estate and writing for a website called Melo. Everybody should have an alternative besides drag.

I recently went to Milwaukee, and that was good coin. The place was packed with people, they had a good budget for the show, and the tips, plus the base pay, were amazing. When you're from New York and you're traveling, just saying you're from here—and actually giving people what they expect from someone saying that—instantly makes the coin rise up. On Twitter, they were like, "Someone's coming from NYC..." and a lot of people came just to see who it was, even though I haven't been on Drag Race.

PANSY, 30, Berlin, Germany. Years doing drag: 10

I started doing drag in San Francisco ten years ago for fun. Then I moved to Berlin to be an artist after graduating from art school, but I found art to be really unfulfilling. One night, years ago, I really wanted to see a drag show, and there just wasn't anywhere to go—there are shows here in Berlin, but the type of performance, the style and level of humor that I was used to, just wasn't there. So I started doing shows in this tiny bar in , and it grew from there. Within a few months, I was doing a dance party, then I started producing larger drag shows with 300 to 700 attendees, and in the span of three years, it's grown from myself and two other performers to 15, sometimes 20. And now I've branched out into a queer music festival called Yo Sissy! and other projects.

I wouldn't say I've achieved monetary success, but I definitely consider myself very successful. Berlin has a huge socialist history, and people have strong opinions about money here. So when I do something that on the surface looks very successful, people assume that I'm making a lot of money. Of course, I have to charge entrance fees, pay performers, rent venues, buy insurance. So there's some friction there—and if I have a bad show, I'm fucked. But personally, I don't do drag for money. I use drag to make money, but I do drag because I love it and believe that it brings people pleasure.

PEACHES CHRIST, San Francisco, California. Years Doing Drag: 20

The first time I was paid to do drag was at Trannyshack in 1996, and I performed there for a couple years, but I spent more money renting chainsaws and props for my numbers than I was taking in. Then I realized I could have this Midnight Mass movie show, because I was running theaters, and so I started doing that in 1998. They're cult-movie screenings where we invite guest actors from the films, and we perform spoof tribute sketches, usually a parody of the movie. After a period of many successful years doing that, some friends said to me, "You're making this theater a lot of money. How much do you make?" But my brain wasn't wired that way. In San Francisco, people didn't expect to get paid. We were all doing it with this art for art's sake attitude.

Today, I make almost all of my money via ticket sales for live events that I produce, write and direct, several of which—including Return to Grey Gardens with Jinkx Monsoon, a part-spoof, part-tribute stage show to the movie—we take on tour. I control the box office, and I'm able to pay myself. The biggest thing for me is that I'm entrenched in the cult-movie universe, and I'm also a filmmaker, so my career stretches far beyond drag. I have one foot in the drag world, but I also get booked frequently to do horror conventions. I think if you're a young queen and you're passionate about something like rock 'n roll, it'd be smart to pursue both and try to integrate the two.

COCO MONTRESE, Las Vegas, Nevada. Years Doing Drag: 24

Until 2012, I was making an amazing salary working on the Vegas Strip. I loved entertaining and thought that being on billboards and cabs all over the city was going to be enough for me. I was at the top of my career. I had money put away. I could have retired.

But then I was in season five of RuPaul's Drag Race, which took it to a different place. It's been amazing. I make more doing this than I would have with my college degree. It doesn't always work out like that for everyone, but if you're ambitious enough and you work hard to perfect the craft, you can make a very lucrative living doing drag. My booking fee is high, and it has to do with my résumé. Not just Drag Race, but I also do a lot of corporate events, weddings, and parties. If you limit yourself, then you limit your pay. If you're not able to adjust—if your potential clients are looking for a certain thing, hiring for a certain kind of event, and you can't deliver—you're probably not going to get the job. That's pretty much how that works. They just want to see a great entertainer, and if you're a great entertainer, you'll make great money.

Follow Adam Baran on Twitter.

The Restitution Room. Photo by Kasper Løftgaard.

This article originally appeared on VICE Denmark

Employees sat in the reception area of H17 are making plans for lunch, when they're suddenly interrupted by the sound of two sets of polka dot-clad doors swinging open. A middle-aged married couple wanders in, the cameras around their necks and guidebooks in their hands signalling that they're tourists exploring the Meat-Packing District – Copenhagen's creative land of milk and honey. They barely have a chance to admire the high ceilings and skylights, the wooden rafters and the bluely-tinted floors, before a sharp statement sends them scurrying back out to the street: "This is a drug consumption room!"

This is a message that employees have gotten used to passing along to stray tourists since H17 opened its doors in the beginning of August, and it's easy to understand why. From the outside, the repurposed slaughterhouse at the address Halmtorvet 17 looks like a newly opened art gallery or maybe a trendy office community. On the inside, you're met with 1,000 square metres of pristinely renovated supervised injection site.

It's a prestigious flagship initiative that Copenhagen's municipality has invested €3.9 million in, and could very well be the world's largest supervised injection site. For their money, the city council got 24 consumption spaces, a health clinic, a restitution area, an activity room – all in all, a place meant to make life easier for the tortured souls that exist on the fringes of society.

Photo by Pernille Søndergaard

In that respect, H17 differs from the overtaxed Skyen ("The Cloud") – another nearby Copenhagen consumption facility connected to the shelter Mændenes Hjem ("The Men's Home"). The two supervised injection sites are only separated by a few hundred yards, but there is a world of difference between Skyen's tense, hectic and often hostile atmosphere and the pleasantly-scented and roomy hospital-like setting of H17. The fundamental idea behind the place – to create a safe space for the marginalised and most vulnerable drug users on the street – seems to have been a success.

"We have had very, very few conflicts. The users tell us that they appreciate the peace and quiet. It's something about the room. And then of course it's a new place, so everyone is on their best behaviour," says 42-year-old Louise Runge Mortensen, who as the director of H17 is responsible for 20 employees and a yearly budget of €2.25 million.

For users coming in to do drugs, the procedure is simple. You check in at the reception and inform the staff what you intend on taking and how – at which point you are allotted either 35 or 45 minutes to smoke or inject the drug, you have brought with you. And if something goes wrong, the staff is on call to administer the necessary first aid – something that has happened seven times in the first month of H17. "Had they happened unsupervised, half of those overdoses would have resulted in deaths," Mortensen evaluates.

We're in the reception looking at the 12 consumption spaces that have been reserved for smokers. Behind a glass wall, we have a view of the 10-15 people on the other side that we don't have access to. Some are sitting alone smoking homemade aluminum foil pipes of cocaine, while others are huddled around the steel tables.

An injection suite. Photo by Kasper Løftgaard.

We stay on the other side of the glass, but outside, I strike up a conversation with Gregor from Poland, who's just been inside to do heroin. He likes the new space, because people fight less, and it's a more peaceful environment to do drugs in. A Danish user agrees, but is too tormented by an infected wound on his calf to elaborate. "I've dragged myself all of the way in here, so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go in and slam some coke," he says with a smile, before disappearing behind the glass doors.

Jessica, who's originally from Sweden, is less enthusiastic. She describes H17 as a "pretty, but impractical place," where aesthetic considerations have been prioritised ahead of the needs of the users. She's particularly dissatisfied with all of the glass and the staff, whom she feels play too big a role. "There are too many hands and too few with the proper qualifications to properly understand the users' needs," she says. "It'll be interesting to see the state of the place in a year, when everything isn't all new and shiny," she adds rhetorically, before rolling down the ramp on a man's mountain bike.

Jessica. Photo by Kasper Løftgaard.

Louise Runge Mortensen is familiar with the complaints of there being too little privacy but, according to her, for most users it's been a question of acclimatisation. "The glass walls are there for our safety and for their safety. In the beginning, people would come in and say: "That right there, that's an aquarium, there's no fucking way I'm sitting in there." But we don't get that as much anymore. Now, people have gotten used to this being the way it is. The women in particular have expressed their satisfaction with the staff being able to see them at all times," she tells me, as we walk across the coloured, reinforced concrete floors that invite "contemplation, peace and concentration," according to the architects.

Anja Bloch was one of the architects' consultants during the renovation, as well as the chairwoman of Brugernes Akademi ("The Users' Academy"). One of her specific suggestions was to equip the tables in the consumption cubicles with a built-in hole for trash, so as to allow the drug paraphernalia to be swept directly into a locked trashcan. "People that have been awake on cocaine for days hallucinate and think that there's more cocaine in the trashcans. Then they start rummaging through them and get struck by used needles," Bloch explains.

Photo by Kasper Løftgaard

Bloch also insisted for the facility to be equipped with its own kitchen: "You cultivate better relationships across a dinner table than a desk. That's why I felt it was important that H17 be given a kitchen with the capacity to host eating events now and again," she says.

But so far, the shiny, new industrial kitchen sits unused, and the sparsely furnished activity room across from it is yet to host any game nights – in fact, the entire section of H17 that is intended for non-drug consumption activities remains closed off to the users. According to Louise Runge Mortensen, t here hasn't been room for any of that in the budget. "The plan is to have a café and activities here, and it's also here that the addiction therapists will be stationed. All of the things that we hope users will take advantage of, when the surroundings hopefully contribute to them coming here to do more than just drugs," she says.

Photo by Pernille Søndergaard

If they in fact want to do more than that, the users are currently forced to make do with the sparsely furnished restitution room, currently populated by a few house plants and two bean bag chairs. These are occupied by two men in outdoor apparel, who barely seem to take notice of us as we pass by, and Louise Runge Mortensen stops to explain the intention behind the room.

"People who have been doing coke, specifically, will oftentimes be awake for three or four days in a row. To be able to lie down here and know that someone is watching over you, so you don't die or get mugged – that's important."

I head outside on the ramp, where users are also allowed to do drugs, and spot a CCTV camera that's pointed directly at the entrance. And across the street, the central police station of Copenhagen towers over the neighbourhood. But the camera is just a security measure, I'm told, and the close proximity to the police station is only an advantage if you're not a drug dealer. "When the first supervised injection site was opened in 2010, an amendment was made to the Danish narcotics law that allows police to not charge people for possession of narcotics when they are only meant for personal consumption. The police almost always leave the users alone," she says.

So far, no new drug market has spawned outside of H17 "but we're still holding our breaths".

Louise Runge Mortensen. Photo by Kasper Løftgaard

Even though it's been hard to get heard above the political back-patting, there has been some criticism and indignation concerning H17. It's mainly centred around the city council's decision to open a huge consumption facility in Inner Vesterbro – a neighbourhood that's already home to Mændenes Hjem, Skyen and the largest open drug scene in Denmark.

Jesper Christensen, Copenhagen's Mayor of Social Affairs, understands the concerns of H17's neighbours. But according to him, the establishment of H17 is an attempt to better living conditions for everyone.

"In regards to the fear that Halmtorvet 17 would lead to the formation of a new Pusher Street, it's my opinion that it's equal to the situation we're experiencing today. But the idea behind the initiative is to make life better for both the users and the neighbours," he explained to Vesterbro-Bladet.

One critic is Michael Lodberg Olsen, the man behind a number of social initiatives for drug users – Denmark's first legal supervised injection site, Fixelancen, being one of them. According to him, the municipality has created a "factory for drug users" by establishing H17, when they could instead be saving lives in other parts of the capital with less consumption facilities.

"Why are the drug users in Nordvest not allowed the same swanky conditions as the drug users in Vesterbro? And why are we spending all of our money on one huge fixing factory? When you think big, you think less about people. Is the idea just to get people off of the street, or is the aim to accomplish something else and something more with the drug consumption facilities? All of the practical evidence points to the intimate locations making more progress in regards to helping people out of addiction," he says.

Photo by Kasper Løftgaard

Louise Runge Mortensen agrees that other parts of the city deserve their own consumption facilities but, to her, it makes sense to aid the users in the places where they're most abundant. "It would be great to have more supervised consumption sites in other parts of Copenhagen because we can see that people no longer die of overdoses in Vesterbro after we've opened the consumption facility here. But they're still dying in Nordvest and on Amager," she says.

"But I don't think it's fair to say that we've centralised the drug scene by opening a consumption facility, where it's most needed. We're just putting a roof over people's heads. We can clearly see that the capacity at Skyen in no way reflects the demand on the streets."

'Duke Nukem Forever' image courtesy of Take-Two Interactive

I could have played any number of different video games last week, but I chose to spend my hours with the decidedly mediocre ReCore, a garbled mess of wasted potential (the details of which are elaborated on here). There's just enough to enjoy and appreciate about it to keep me coming back, but there's a larger reason I'm hoping to see it through to the end: it's instructive to play a bad video game.

Look, I understand there's only so many hours in the day, and it makes sense to spend your free time with things that make you happy. But I also want to learn, study and appreciate what makes them work. And one can only appreciate great things by understanding what actually makes them great. There's nothing more illuminating than a deep dive into a flawed game to help make that crystal clear.

When ReCore came out, I tweeted: "ReCoreis the most PlayStation 2 video game I've played in years. That's both a compliment and a problem." It's a compliment because we live in an age where game companies are dreadfully risk averse, emulating the Hollywood approach: blockbuster or bust. ReCore has the trappings and ambitions of a big-budget game without the flair and polish you'd usually expect. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube era was full of weird games best treated as curiosities to be purchased from a bargain bin. ReCore is one of those: not especially good but definitely interesting.

When I'm playing a game like ReCore, it's an exercise in understanding good design. If I'm frustrated, what was the tipping point where it became upsetting? If I've died in the same area a bunch of times, what's causing that to happen? If something's become tired and repetitive, was there a specific moment where it jumped from pleasurable to insufferable? The difference between a good game and a great game is often a series of fine lines, while the difference between a bad game and a great game can be oceans apart. Identifying those gaps helps you appreciate what goes into making everything click when you're playing something exceptional.

Some (most?) of these games are best played with a six-pack of beer at your side, rather than a notebook with detailed observations. Games likeDuke Nukem Forever, whatever they have to teach us about game design, are suited for group of friends who can help you through the pain. But the next time you're looking for something to play, consider a game with terrible review scores, not the greatest. Because even bad games can have something interesting to say.

Follow Patrick Klepek on Twitter, and if you have a news tip you'd like to share, drop him an email.

Read more articles on gaming on VICE here, follow VICE Gaming on Twitter, and give us a like on Facebook.

Donald Trump at a rally in North Carolina in March. Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada

Less than 36 hours after a bomb ripped through Manhattan on Saturday, Donald Trump called into Fox & Friends to respond to the latest act of terrorism in the US. What the Republican presidential candidate said on the Fox News morning show would have been chilling if it weren't par for the course: Trump called ISIS "very strong" and said they were "winning the war," speculated that the attack had "many foreign connections," denounced Barack Obama for letting in Syrian refugees—a "Trojan horse," he said—and appeared to call for open racial profiling.

"We're allowing these people to come into our country and destroy our country," Trump told the hosts.

Importantly, at the time of Trump's comments, not much was known about the attack. The name of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami (who is now in custody) had not been released publicly, and we still don't know the extent of Rahami's links to overseas terrorists. Though it's possible Trump had some information that the rest of us didn't, his comments about Syrian refugees (Rahami was born in Afghanistan) suggest otherwise.

In other words, a man who could very well be in the White House next year was talking out of his ass about terrorism on live TV. This is a habit for Trump—after nearly every major terrorist attack, he has no qualms about spreading fear and anger, often trafficking in misinformation, dangerous habits for a man so close to the presidency.

The immediate aftermath of terrorism incidents are often a breeding ground for rumors of all kinds, and public officials are generally pretty cautious in what they say at those times. Barack Obama, in his remarks about the bombing, emphasized the "strength" of New Yorkers and their refusal to let fear rule their lives. Though New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that "a bomb exploding in New York is obviously an act of terrorism," he hardly went out on a limb like Trump, who in less than a half hour implied that the attack was linked to Syria and ISIS, and could have possibly been stopped by more aggressive policing and stricter immigration policies.

Trump's Fox & Friends comments were not a one-off, but the continuation of a long habit of loose talk after an attack. Though there are exceptions to the rule—his response to the Dallas attack on police was relatively measured—generally Trump responds to tragic attacks with a mixture of bluster, innuendo, and sometimes outright falsehoods.

In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, for instance, Trump said that the killer had been born in Afghanistan, which was either a lie or a clumsy mistake, and darkly insinuated that "there's something going on" with Obama's refusal to say the words "radical Islamic terrorism." He followed those statements up with some more untruths about whether shooter Omar Mateen had been investigated, and, as he did on Monday, talked about Syrian refugees even though Mateen wasn't of Syrian ancestry.

Trump congratulated himself about "being right" after Orlando, and he echoed that sentiment on Fox & Friends Monday, saying "I knew this was going to happen." He doesn't shy away with making stories about terrorism personal to him—after last year's Paris shooting, he childishly fantasized about personally shooting terrorists.

Another of Trump's go-to moves in response to a terrorist attack is to criticize the "toughness" of the current US leadership. On Fox & Friends, he said, when asked how he'd stop attacks like the one in Manhattan, "We're going to have to do something extremely tough over there," without really specifying where "there" is. When host Steve Doocy, to his credit, pressed Trump for details, the details didn't come: "Like, knock the hell out of them," Trump replied. "And we have to get everyone together, and we have to lead for a change because we're not knocking them, we're hitting them every once in a while, we're hitting them in certain places, we're being very gentle about it, we're going to have to be very tough."

After the San Bernardino shooting, Trump was similarly vague, saying that he'd "get myself in so much trouble" if he said what he'd do to terrorists out loud. And this July, he endorsed the use of "vicious" attacks against ISIS, saying "you have to fight fire with fire." In remarks about the March attack in Brussels, Trump was a little more explicit about what being "tough" meant: "Waterboarding would be fine," Trump said at the time. "If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information from these people."

Hillary Clinton criticized Trump over that sort of talk. In response to his remarks about the New York bombing, she accused him of "giving aid and comfort to our adversaries" by conflating the war on terror with a war on Islam—and, in fact, at least one al Qaeda affiliate has used Trump's call for a ban on Muslim immigration in a propaganda video.

Trump has also repeatedly advocated for the open profiling of Muslims by police. He used the Orlando shooting as an opportunity to call for the surveillance of mosques, and on Monday, he said that police "are afraid" to go after potential terrorists because of political correctness.

"You know in Israel, they profile," Trump said on Fox & Friends. "They've done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do."

It's true that Israel routinely profiles—a practice that has been harshly criticized for humiliating its Arab citizens and contributes to their resentment of the government. But Trump has been pretty explicit about his lack of concern for the feelings of Muslims. In March, he accused American Muslims of "protecting each other" rather than reporting suspicious activity—again, he brought out the phrase, "there's something going on," that Trumpian catch-all for whatever conspiracies are conjured up in the minds of his listeners.

Trump is, for now, just a guy with his name on the November ballot. But if he becomes president his habit of jumping to conclusions and making broad insinuations could have more serious consequences. Today, all Trump can do with his anger is call Fox News and hit "tweet." In the White House, he'd have an awful lot of guns and missiles at the mercy of his impulses.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

The Pancake Rocks and Blowholes of Punkaiki just weren't enough for Rault-Verpe. Photo via Flickr.

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

After failing four days in a row to hitchhike out of South-Island town, a tourist lost his cool, throwing a road sign into a nearby river and verbally abusing locals.

An Iranian police officer stands behind drugs seized from smugglers, in a police base in Taibad, on the border with Afghanistan. (Photo: Vahid Salemi / AP/Press Association Images)

Here's a puzzler. How do you turn violent religious extremists into amoral gangsters, while simultaneously making people who get high look like terrorist funders?

Simply transform all Islamic militants into "narco-terrorists" who are bankrolled by the drug trade. Abracadabra! – a misinformation missile striking simultaneously at gun-toting jihadists and anyone involved in buying or selling drugs. It's propaganda value for money. What's more, because it's a "marmalade dropper" (a story to shock people as they read the news over breakfast) the media will lap it up.

And you can see why – don't tell me you don't want to click on any of these headlines:

"JIHADISTS ARE FLOODING BRITAIN WITH CANNABIS"

"ISIS GENERATES UP TO $1BN ANNUALLY FROM TRAFFICKING AFGHAN HEROIN"

"NEW BORDER RISK: ISIS TIES TO MEXICAN DRUG LORDS"

"OVER HALF OF EUROPE'S HEROIN NOW COMES FROM THE IS"

In 2014, DEA spokesman Rusty Payne described this wicked marriage between terrorists and drug peddlers: "Globally, drug trafficking is not just a criminal issue, not just a health and safety issue, it's a national security issue. Addiction and abuse across the world is funding and fuelling insurgents. Much of the world's terror regimes are funded through drug trafficking proceeds, or the taxing of drug routes throughout the world. The threat is real."

Thing is, the threat is not entirely real. In fact, says Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert in international conflict and organised crime, it's a narrative steeped in half-truths and spin that, in some cases, acts as a cover for the involvement of state officials in the drug trade.

"Many of these links are vastly exaggerated, and based on extraordinarily shabby evidence," says Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Washington DC-based Brookings Institution, one of America's most respected and oldest think-tanks. The "narco-terrorism" narrative, she says, is based on "a lot of drama and myth".

For example, most of the tales portraying the Islamic State as key players in the global supply of heroin are state-sponsored propaganda coming out of Russia. This story is pushed by Russian officials and media outlets because it makes America and Britain look bad. The Coalition's failure to suppress Afghanistan's poppy cultivation after invading in 2001 has led to bumper opium crops that, the story goes, not only fills IS' coffers, but creates millions of heroin-addicted Russians. It's a load of baloney – long-established heroin trafficking routes bypass their territories – but if newspapers carry on printing it, people will soon believe it.

In reality, Islamic State (IS) – currently the biggest global terrorist threat – has very little involvement in the global heroin, cocaine or cannabis trade. Islamic terrorist groups are far from being a band of bearded Pablo Escobars with international reach.

"IS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are not narco-terrorists. They are terrorists who simply tax everything in their area – it is very localised," says Felbab-Brown. She estimates that drugs are one of IS's "smaller income streams". According to a report earlier this year into IS' finances by US-based analysis firm IHS, 50 percent of the group's revenue – estimated at $56 million (€50 million) a month – comes from taxation and confiscation, and 43 percent comes from oil. The remaining 7 percent comes from a mixture of sources, including the sale of electricity, donations and drugs. The money IS does receive from the drugs trade comes indirectly, as part of a system of taxing all goods and services, such as food, transport, fuel and raw materials that are bought and sold within their realm of control.

In fact, the links made between global terrorism and the drug trade have often turned out to be a smokescreen for government involvement. "There are just as many government links to the drug trade as there are terrorist links," says Felbab-Brown. "It's easier to blame terrorists rather than institutional corruption. Remember, the best way of being a drug trafficker is to work for the ministry of counter narcotics."

From entire institutions to rogue individuals, government figures across north west Africa – in Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone – have been linked to cocaine smuggling and methamphetamine production. It is no surprise, then, that the authorities in these countries are particularly keen to spread misinformation exaggerating the role of Islamic terrorists in drug smuggling. It's an old game: state authorities have also been caught knee-deep in the drug trade in countries all over, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, Turkey, China, Italy and Peru.

Velbab-Brown points out that most drug traffickers, unsurprisingly, see IS as a dangerous business partner, not just because of their capacity for extreme violence, but because they attract maximum heat from law enforcement and military intelligence. Nor are IS in cahoots with Mexican drug cartels, as claimed in 2014 by Tom Cotton, Republican senator for Arkansas. The scare story was based on the mumblings of a discredited defence analyst.

Modern day terrorists rarely get involved in the drug trade beyond their home turf. But this does not mean IS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban don't make money from the drug trade. They do, but to vastly differing degrees.

The Taliban – responsible for a long list of atrocities, including the murder of 148 children at a military-run school in northwest Pakistan in 2014 – has the closest relationship with drug money. As with many big players in Afghanistan, such as the government and Coalition forces, the Taliban realised in 1995 that if it wanted to keep the populace onside it had no choice but to let the opium trade continue.

"Since then, the Taliban have sponsored and taxed poppy cultivation and trafficking within Afghanistan," says Felbab-Brown. "Opium is the economic lifeline in Afghanistan. The Taliban's message now is all about being 'protectors of the poppy', preserving the nation's livelihoods against Kabul's 'kaffir government'."

Afghan farmers collecting raw opium in a poppy field east of Kabul. (Photo: Rahmat Gul / AP Photo)

The Taliban's involvement in Afghanistan's domestic opium trade continues despite the country's invasion and occupation by the American-led coalition between 2001 and 2014. But it is mainly restricted to inside Afghani borders, with external trafficking mostly the privilege of corrupt authority figures in Pakistan.

"The Taliban is involved in some opium smuggling to Pakistan. But this business is dominated by affiliates of the main Pakistani political parties and figures in the Pakistani army and intelligence services. And, like the Afghani politicians who also profit from the poppy trade, they launder the proceeds in Dubai and the UAE," says Felbab-Brown. She estimates poppy cultivation makes up around 30 to 40 percent of the Taliban's income of "tens of millions of dollars a year", with the lion's share coming from fundraising in the Gulf and Pakistan.

What about al Qaeda, the architect of 9/11, one of the biggest terrorist attacks in history? Felbab-Brown says a decade ago there were "dramatised links" made in the media linking the group to the drug trade, "based on dodgy, murky evidence", but the stories have since died down because the group has taken such a beating from the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In some parts of Afghanistan, the white flag of the Taliban has been replaced by the black flag of IS. In Nangarhar Province, IS have prohibited poppy cultivation alongside claims of religious purity, to try to damage the Taliban's credentials. But putting ideology ahead of cold hard cash has been expensive for IS, according to Felbab-Brown. Not only have they spurned a huge income through opium, but their ban on growing poppies – while forcing farmers to become IS soldiers instead – has turned the local population against them.

But Islamic State is not a uniform outfit, and for some bands of IS fighters old habits die hard. In the north of Afghanistan, most IS soldiers are former members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a band which used to smuggle opium and, despite fighting under the IS banner, continues to do so.

In the Middle East, IS appears to have forgotten its puritanical credentials. There are whispers that IS has started to tax hashish operations and smuggling in and around Lebanon. However, the key ties between IS and drugs comes in the form of the black market amphetamine Captagon, a drug which fell into their laps when they discovered a series of industrial scale factories producing the pills in Syria. There is strong evidence to show that IS, knowing there is a huge market for the drug in the Middle East – especially in Saudi Arabia and Jordan – has decided to tax its production and sponsor its movement across Syria's borders.

Tuesday Reitano, Head of the Secretariat at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, says IS has a conflicted relationship with drug trafficking in the Middle East: "Traffickers caught within IS territory of control have often been executed. Yet Captagon is produced in Syria and trafficked cross border through Turkey and Lebanon. This is not to say that IS is directly involved in either production or trafficking: their funding model thus far has been to tax the movement of goods, both licit and illicit, through their territory, demanding a payment from the traffickers themselves."

Reitano says Libya has become a hub for prescription drug trafficking, and there is evidence that seizures of large quantities of Tramadol in Greece have been destined for IS for use as battlefield medicine, as well as for recreational markets.

According to both Reitano and Felbab-Brown, there is evidence from refugees coming out of Syria, as well as from captured or killed IS fighters, to back up previous news agency investigations that Captagon is being used to help fuel IS fighters on the battlefield. However, these stories have to be treated with caution. A deluge of stories in the global press suggesting that the November 2015 Paris attackers injected Captagon to carry out the massacre turned out to be false. No drugs were found in their bodies and the syringes and plastic tubes found at one of their flats turned out to be bomb making equipment, not drug injecting paraphernalia, as the media suggested at the time.

In the past decade, the narco-terrorism narrative has shifted to the emergence of a cocaine route into Europe's back door, from Colombia to West Africa and overland through the Sahara desert up to the north African coast. It has been alleged that much of the profits of the trade are being reaped by jihadist militant groups in north west Africa, such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

But how solid is this, the first link to be made between Islamist terrorists and cocaine, a substance consumed so widely in the West, and one that has enabled drug war enthusiasts to equate buying cocaine with the funding of suicide vests?

A review funded by the Kofi Annan Foundation into the links between drug smuggling, extremism and terrorism in the region found that "widespread talk of a drug-terror nexus in the Sahel is misleading". Author Wofram Lacher, an associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said: "Much of the evidence presented as basis for such claims can either be easily debunked, or is impossible to verify."

Crucially, the report concluded that terrorists were far from being the biggest fish in the drug trafficking pond. "Numerous other actors are playing an equally or more important role in drug smuggling, including members of the political and business establishment in northern Mali, Niger and the region's capitals, as well as leaders of supposedly 'secular' armed groups. The emphasis on links between drug trafficking and terrorism in the Sahel serves to obscure the role of state actors and corruption in allowing organised crime to grow."

Reitano too thinks it's all a bit of a snow storm: "I've travelled extensively around the Sahel since the Mali crisis in 2011, and have never once had a law enforcement official – either international or national – say that they have ever seized drugs with a direct connection to Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) or other terrorist groups in the region."

She thinks the links between drugs and terrorists in the region have been exaggerated for political gain, in more than one sense. "I see the threat in the Sahel as having been vastly overplayed because it served a political objective both prior and post the Mali crisis," she says. "In fact, local government officials in Mali's north have probably seen greater benefit from the drug trade than the terrorist groups."

Reitano tells me that while drugs do move across the Sahara, it is predominantly low value hashish. She says there is "a small flow of cocaine that enters from the West African coastal countries such as Guinea Bissau and Guinea and then travels overland across the Sahara, but this has declined significantly since the French counter-terror operations began".

An Afghan man snorting heroin in Kabul. (Photo: Rahmat Gul / AP/Press Association Images)

Rather than dwell on hyped claims of narco-terrorism in the region, Reitano says "the new trend to watch in this space is growing evidence of methamphetamine production. There have been labs and super-labs found in Ghana and Nigeria, and the seizure patterns suggest it may also be produced in Mali, and little is known about the groups controlling this."

It could be terrorists, but it could just as easily be people operating within the State. According to Virginia Comolli, a senior analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the evidence from Nigeria shows that terrorists are no more likely than state authorities to be involved in the drug trade, despite claims from regional observers that Boko Haram is primarily a criminal syndicate rather than one driven by ideology.

"The collusion of state authorities is at the core of the problem in the region and given that it goes way back in time, it is extremely hard to eradicate," says Comolli. "There have been rumours linking Boko Haram to Colombian cocaine traders, but the group is not involved in a big way. They've been involved in low level local drug smuggling, but drugs have never represented a significant source of funds, unlike other criminal activities such as bank robberies and extortion. Nigerian newspapers say Boko Haram fighters have been caught in possession of 'hard drugs', but this is usually cannabis for their own use."

Perhaps the obsession with terrorists and the drug trade is shackled to the past, where this symbiotic relationship – like the Taliban in Afghanistan – has flourished. Until the new peace agreement, the FARC in Colombia have been the most obvious benefactors of the cocaine trade, alongside the Shining Path and Sandinistas in Peru. And despite their denial, both sides of the religious divide in the Northern Ireland conflict received income from the illicit drug trade.

In Africa, Mokhtar "One Eyed" Belmokhtar, also known as Mr Marlboro because of his role in cigarette smuggling across the Sahel region, used illegal drug smuggling as a way of buying weapons. In the Middle East, drug production and trafficking has long funded violent conflict. The PKK, Tamil Tigers and Hezbollah have consistently dabbled in the drug trade. Occasionally, drugs have been the currency used in the commission of specific terrorist attacks: as Spanish prosecutors alleged was the case in the 2004 Madrid bombings.

But there is a downside to hyping the narco-terrorism narrative. Because the more the truth about groups like Islamic State – and how they operate – becomes clouded by baloney and hype, the less likely they are to be defeated. The more emphasis there is placed on the drug trade, the more attention is diverted from tackling more lucrative income streams. There is a much vocalised dream that if only the drug trade can be stopped, so too can the terrorists.

Felbab-Brown warns that it is leading to misguided policies. "These fallacies are actually damaging to counter terrorism: the fallacy that if you disrupt the drug trade you will defeat terrorists. There is not one example of this happening – be it Peru, Colombia, China, Burma, Lebanon or Thailand – because they are not bankrolled by drugs; or the fallacy that we can't negotiate with terrorist groups because they are criminals with no political agenda because they are involved in drugs."

This skewed narrative is also sending us on another dud mission on the war on drugs, where already demonised players in the drug trade, such as drug users and street dealers, are now being tarred with funding Islamic terrorism, turning them from selfish undesirables into virtual enemies of the state.

As if fighting terrorism was not hard enough. As if the drug war needed ramping up a notch: the over-hyped narco-terrorism construct looks set to become yet another foot-shooting move in the fight against those most elusive enemies, drugs and terror.

@Narcomania

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How Drugs Have Been Used in Basically Every War Ever to Make Soldiers Better at Killing

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Virtual reality video gaming has been a dream of the industry for decades. Now, after several false starts, it's finally happening in a big way. According to the makers of the biggest consumer VR devices, these headsets will offer users a new type of escape, be able to connect people in novel ways, and revolutionize the way people play video games.

But now that the dream of consumer-grade VR is a reality, game makers are starting to explore the ethical boundaries and risks associated with this new world of interactive entertainment: Just what is virtual reality going to do to its players? How will our minds and bodies respond to these deeply immersive experiences?

VICE spoke to developers, designers, and researchers about VR's therapeutic potential, as well as the ethical dilemmas and medical risks game designers must take into account when building new virtual worlds.

Get the VICE App on iOS and Android

All photos by Marina Riker

On an recent overcast Saturday morning, I rolled out my purple yoga mat in the middle of a field at No Regrets Farm in Albany, Oregon, about an hour south of Portland. It was a crisp morning, and I gently stretched my muscles to warm them up. Then a goat walked over and peed on my mat.

"When they poop on your mat, just flick it off," Heather Davis, the instructor, told us. "It's like a piece of grass."

Davis was teaching her third-ever class of "goat yoga," which combines a traditional vinyasa flow with the company of free-roaming miniature goats. She came up with the idea earlier this year, after she took her son to a birthday party at the Albany farm. She fell in love with the barnyard animals, the picturesque farmhouse, and the rolling fields, which she thought would be the perfect backdrop to practice yoga.

"She brought the yoga, and I brought the goats," Lainey Morse, the farm's owner, told me. "And that's how it was born."

Heather Davis on her yoga mat with a goat

Morse moved to the farm two years ago and credits the goats with getting her through a divorce and chronic illness, and wants to share them with anyone who's in need of an attitude adjustment from a furry friend. She even started hosting "goat happy hour"—an evening where friends can enjoy a glass of wine with the goats and watch the sunset from inside the old barn.

"It helped me so much that I started bringing other people over," she said. "Even if I was in pain, I would forget about it. It's really hard to be sad and depressed when there are baby goats jumping in your lap."

Related: How To Do Yoga and Not Be a Dick

Davis's first goat yoga class took place earlier this summer, in a field behind the barn overlooking acres of farmland, ranch houses, and grain silos.

The hour-long class is free, with a suggested donation of €9. For now, classes are limited to the summer months because it's outdoors, but Morse is looking to purchase a separate property with a barn where she can host goat yoga classes year round. She and Davis hope to hold classes a few times per week as more than 500 people have already asked about signing up for them, according to Morse.

"I could probably have hundreds in a class, but I only have six goats, and I wanted a good goat-to-people ratio," Morse told me. "I mean, yeah, they're coming for yoga, but I think they're really coming to have the interaction with a goat."

I had my doubts about the class being a Portlandia gimmick, but Morse is entirely genuine in wanting to share the goats to make others happy. She's held all of the goats every day since birth to socialize them and trains them to be polite to guests.

"You have to have friendly goats because some goats would try to headbutt people," Morse said. "They do have that reputation, but if you train them that you're not their toy, then all they want from you is love."

Related: This Man Has Been Trying to Live Life as a Goat

During my class, the goats had an interesting way of showing this love. After that first goat peed on my mat, several others scampered over to nibble on the corners of yoga mats and one rummaged through a pile of shoes, pulling out all the socks and chewing on them.

Davis explained that goat yoga may not be for everyone, but practicing with goats—who may poop, pee, or try to eat your mat—is a logical extension of yoga, which teaches us to deal with obstacles thrown at us in life.

After my mat was rinsed off, Davis asked the class to sit cross-legged and close their eyes. When we moved into child's pose, a little goat walked up to the woman in front of me to sniff her butt.

"It takes some of the seriousness out of yoga and life," Davis said, as she asked us to move into downward dog.

When I looked between my legs, there was a big yellow chicken scratching in the grass directly behind me. Her name was Khaleesi. I would find out later it's because she is "queen of the chickens."

Normally, I get distracted during yoga—I think about how I'm feeling hungry, or how I'm worried about work, or how boring I find the usual hippie-dippie breathing stuff. But in Davis's class, I found myself giggling, trying to keep my balance despite the goat chewing on my mat.

About a half an hour into the class, dark clouds rolled in, and the sky gave way to a light sprinkle. The goats fled into the barn, since apparently goats hate rain.

When the drops started to come down harder, everyone moved into the barn to hang with the goats. They act kind of like dogs, jumping into chairs or walking up to people to be pet. I sat on a bale of straw—something I would come to regret when I had to pick straw out of my yoga pants later—and Davis put one of the baby goats in my lap. The goat nestled into my arms like a baby, and I felt completely at peace.

"These are special goats," said Davis. "You can't just walk into any goat farm and roll out your yoga mat."

Follow Marina Riker on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

Everybody lies, right? It's a fact. We lie about our qualifications; we lie about our jobs; for some reason, we lie about how much we drank last night, as if the fact we managed eight pints is really going to impress anyone over the age of 13. Meanwhile, it's almost scientifically proven that when it comes to sex, and trying to convince people that you are worth having sex with, lying is a given.

With that in mind, we asked some of our friends to tell us the worst lies they've told a potential mate to get them into bed. And how it all worked out for them in the end.

THE PENTHOUSE

I use Tinder to flirt and I always give the address of a friend so my potential dates can't know where I actually live. I've already had some bad experiences with disturbed men arriving to my house drunk late at night and I don't want to have to go through the same thing again.

At some point though, I met this guy that I really liked so we started dating more seriously. Three months into the relationship, I was still pretending to live in my friend's house. At times when he'd suggest spending the night at mine, I'd say I preferred to go his place. On nights where I couldn't avoid it, we'd go together to my friend's house then I would pretend I had to get up really early the next morning and ask him to leave. I would wait for a while after he left, and then leave myself for my real home – which is quite far from my friend's.

I know it may be a little odd but I also feel that letting strangers in my house, is an invasion of privacy. Also, I must admit that my friend's place is a penthouse, while I live in a box of matches.

‒ Lidia, 27

MY HOUSEMATE'S GIRLFRIEND

One night, I was at a party with my housemate, his girlfriend and his lover. Of course, the lover didn't know he had a girlfriend and the girlfriend didn't know he had a lover. After the party, my friend said he wanted to go back to ours with the lover, so he provoked an argument with his girlfriend in order to make her leave the party and stay with the other girl. The guy was a jerk.

On our way home, in the taxi, his girlfriend called him to shout at him for ignoring her all night. He gave me the phone and asked me to pretend I was him, so he could make out with the other woman in the back seat. I spoke to the poor woman for an hour and a half – she was drunk enough to believe that I was him. By the time we hung up, we had arrived home – my roommate had long gone inside with the other girl, while I sat on the steps outside our house. "It's just better that we don't see each other today, because we are too drunk. Let's talk tomorrow. I love you," I remember telling her.

They went on to date for a couple more months, and during that time I was developing real feelings for his girlfriend. Eventually, I told her the truth so she would break up with him and go out with me. She did for a while, but I think she couldn't stop feeling slightly creeped out by what I'd done so she eventually broke it off. I guess I should say deserved it, but I am not sure I did.

- Tomas, 23

THE RUSSIAN MODEL

It happened about two years ago, when I was 18 and lived in Gerona. Some friends from back home, in Russia, were visiting and we went out to party. At one of the nightclubs, we met a group of guys who seemed interesting and, feeling playful, we decided to tell them a bunch of lies and see which one of us would pull faster.

I decided to pretend that I was a model from Moscow, who was in Gerona working for the week. One of the guys, hearing that I was "a model", came up to me and asked for my name and age. We talked for a while, and it quickly became obvious that the guy was only interested in me because I was a model. He asked for my number and I told him: "What do you want it for? I won't be here tomorrow." He replied that since we wouldn't meet again, we should have sex right then and there. I know my aim was to get laid, but I found it all so pathetic that my plan backfired and I lost my metaphorical boner. I made a move to leave, but he grabbed me by the arm and insisted I finish my drink. Obviously, by that point I was scared shitless but thankfully, my friend saw it all from a corner of the bar and interfered. She said she was my manager and we had to leave, because I had a 5AM wake up call the next day.

Nowadays, I don't make up stories to get men interested in me; it seems silly and slightly dangerous. But I don't regret what happened that night; it's a good story to tell.

—Ivanna, 20

THE PILOT

When I was younger, I studied to be a pilot but never practiced it as a profession. Like most people, I went through a phase of sleeping around so whenever I met a guy, I'd say I worked as a pilot for an international airline and that I'd only be in town for a few days. This way, I could be in control of the situation – kicking people out of my place with the excuse of early morning flights, and so forth.

One day, however, I met Alex, whom I liked way more than anyone I'd met before. Things were going pretty well between us – until we decided that it was time for our relationship to get to the next level and moved in together.

I travel a lot for work anyway, so it was easy to keep up the lies about being a pilot for a while – at the beginning, Alex did not suspect a thing. But a few months in, he realised my schedule was too fixed for my lie to be credible, so he started asking questions. Instead of fessing up, I started to go out at night with friends but telling Alex I was working. I'd come home in the mornings and the leave again for my real job, getting almost no sleep. At some point, I even slept at my friends' for a whole week, and told Alex I was in Sydney.

As expected, one day we bumped into each other at a club, even though I was supposed to be in Singapore. It was too late to explain myself. He broke up with me and I was aware I deserved it.

‒ Jorge, 29

THE AGE DIFFERENCE

After being with the same woman for more than 10 years, she left me on a Saturday morning. It was a very complicated situation because we had spent so much time together that my whole existence was built around our relationship. Also I had just changed jobs, so in a matter of a few months, my life changed completely.

As so many people do, in an attempt to numb the feeling that my life was in pieces, I took refuge in one of my great hobbies: partying. Those were a pretty intense few months, full of alcohol and other things – funny and miserable in equal parts. I won't go into detail but anyone can imagine the kind of weirdness that took place.

One night during that time – I remember it was during the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona – I met a girl. We started talking and I really liked her. I think I was the one who asked her how old she was, and she said: "I am 24."

– "I am 34," I replied.

Ten years is quite a big difference, but I was actually 38 at the time. She didn't seem to care about the fake age difference; if anything, she seemed to dig it. That night we slept together and the next morning we embarked on a new relationship. Everything was going very, very well. My life had improved a lot in a very short while.

But of course that lie about my age was always there, hanging around, whispering to me that I was a bastard. Many nights, I'd lay awake next to her, thinking about the day I would be forced to confess – it would have to be before my birthday, which was a few months away.

One day, out of the blue, I decided to tell her. "I have something to tell you," I begun. I guess she thought I was about to admit something even worse – some crime I'd committed or another woman – cause as soon as I said the words she begun to jump up and down, hugging me and saying she was "so relieved!" We laughed for a while and went on with our lives. A few weeks later, we started living together and have been very happy for almost two years now.

‒Óscar, 40

(Illustration by Joel Benjamin)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's late afternoon on the 14th of September 2002, and Ozzy Osbourne's too drunk to make it to an award show. It only matters so much because his wife, Sharon, has been nominated for an Emmy as part of the production team behind the reality show that bears her husband's last name. That means someone from the family ought to be at that evening's Primetime Emmy Creative Arts Award telecast. Jack, a bratty and relatively friendless teenage boy and the youngest of three, doesn't want to go either. "I was like, 'Why? We're not going to win'," he says, more than a decade later. Turns out he was wrong.

Somewhere between offering an intimate look at the so-called Prince of Darkness' pre-retirement domesticity and helping to turn MTV from a music video channel into a reality TV one, The Osbournes ended up as the first show of its kind to win a Primetime Emmy. In 2001, reality TV was still tucked into a broader "non-fiction programme" category that accounted for more dramatic shows – Trauma: Life in the ER – or traditional documentary. The Osbournes, on that day when only Sharon and middle daughter Kelly bothered to turn up to the Emmys, were some of the first to pilot the kind of TV that we're so used to now: cameras following families around, shooting the banality of life in their homes and wider suburbia.

But, as any MTV obsessive from the time would already know, The Osbournes wasn't even the first time Ozzy and his family had invited an MTV camera crew into one of their skull-laden mansions. Back in 2000, when Jack was showing camera operators his revolving CD collection – "I've got System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine, Incubus, Slipknot" – the family were featured on an episode of Cribs. Like the perfect prequel to the four-series show that would air from 2002 to 2005, showing us everything from their Pomeranians shitting in the house to Ozzy's near-death quad bike accident, that episode of the channel's celebrity interiors show distilled so much of what would turn The Osbournes into MTV's most successful show to date, at that time.

"What kept me watching," says Michelle Kay, a PR rep from the Midlands and self-confessed fan, "was probably the same as everyone else on a surface level: the antics, the unconventional nature of their relationships. A crazy matriarch and rock and roll, slurring husband trying to parent rebellious teens. Almost every time Kelly or Jack would say something rude to their parents, I'd always think, 'I could never imagine saying that to my parents – ever'."

And now, half of the on-screen Osbournes are back. Sunday sees the UK debut of a History Channel show centred on Ozzy and Jack taking a road trip together to tick items off their "historical bucket lists". Ozzy's obsession with World War Two documentaries and memorabilia underpins the whole thing. Really, it doesn't matter what the show's about because by now Ozzy's family has become a form of visual currency. The assumption is that people will watch them. You don't have to be an original Sabbath fan or, in this case, a European history buff to care. The Osbournes are essentially the British version of the Kardashians: a famous father, a ruthless "momager" and children who grew up in front of millions before turning into tabloid fodder, then settling down.

§

In most of the show's early episodes, nothing really happens. There's a point in the pilot, for example, when Kelly almost sets the family's brand-new kitchen on fire. That blunder was considered significant enough for the final edit, in an episode largely concerned with watching the family unpack. That template, of making the mundane matter, was actually set years earlier, with PBS' proto-reality show, An American Family, filmed in 1971 and broadcast in 1973. A camera crew followed around one family, the Louds, filming mother Pat buying her groceries, both parents relaxing with friends and their children rehearsing in bands or making classmates giggle during lessons.

But what The Osbournes did was different, slick with the sheen of quick-cut edits, and closer to scripted reality than the documentary tone of An American Family or its 1974 working-class BBC spin-off, The Family. MTV made Ozzy relevant again, to a generation who'd feasibly not realised the theme tune was a crooner-style cover of his single "Crazy Train".

"I knew absolutely nothing about Ozzy before watching the show," says actress and big-time Osbournes fan Leesa Darius, from California. "I was raised by extremely conservative Christian parents, so hearing his music was off the table. I instantly became a fan of the show because their home was the antithesis of mine in the most alluring way: they swore at one another, there was drinking, there was screaming at everyone and everything – and at 13 that was super-cool."

Episode eight of season one: Jack's friend, Jason Dill, comes to stay and is basically a disgusting slob the whole time

You can see the same dynamic at play in Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It's glossier, and more wrapped up in the sexuality of the various Kardashian and Jenner women, but similarly offers insight into an "unconventional" – read: rich and loud – family. Most kids who watched the Kardashian siblings play-fight probably didn't know, or remember, that Kim et al's father was one of the lawyers who fought for OJ Simpson's innocence in the Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman murder trial.

In the Kardashians' case, Kim's sex tape and Kris Jenner's self-promotion savvy elevated their family name from one corner of the "trial of the century" to mass media. In Ozzy's, his reinvention as a hobbling dad – shuffling across the floor and wobbling through his stuttering sentences – cast him in a new light for children born after Black Sabbath's peak (and, especially, those whose parents hadn't introduced them to the bat-biter beforehand).

Both families turn to a matriarch to look after everything, toiling to keep her family relevant. And apparently it's worked, with this new Ozzy and Jack show arriving about a decade later than you'd have thought necessary. In the time since the Osbournes' exit from MTV, their show format has been replicated incessantly. A heavy metal singer helped lead us into the world of The Real Housewives of Orange County, Atlanta and Cheshire; of Laguna Beach: the Real Orange County and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo. Really, it's quite the legacy.

"I just liked that the show was basically about a Brummy family who've somehow ended up in this mansion in LA," says Marna, a charity worker from Manchester. "It was incongruous. There wasn't any artifice like with the Kardashians, which feels a lot more scripted." Ozzy taught us that you can make just about anyone marketable, once you place cameras in their home to humanise them. He said as much himself in a 2002 radio interview, when the host asked if what we saw onscreen was "really them".

"That's the way we are," Ozzy replied. "I was walking around Manhattan and people who wouldn't generally come up to me were going: 'It's them – it's Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne.' We broadened our audience by millions." And that's the sum of it. They shrewdly turned a previously troubled and violent frontman into a loveable old dad – albeit, a dad who missed the Emmys that one time.

@tnm___ / @joelbenjamindraws

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This article originally appeared on VICE US

The invite for the Pyer Moss spring/summer 2017 show read "Bernie vs. Bernie." With the ongoing presidential election, it was clear that one of those names was Bernie Sanders, the former Democratic presidential candidate known for his socialistic views. And it only took a few minutes to figure out the other Bernie was referring to Bernard Madoff, the infamous stockbroker who committed the biggest Ponzi scheme in US history.

While political fashion shows have become a noticeable trend this season, Pyer Moss designer Kerby Jean-Raymond is an OG at this sort of thing. A year ago, Raymond made headlines when he opened his spring/summer 2016 show with a film featuring footage of the deaths of Eric Garner and Walter Scott. He followed that up with a fall/winter 2016 show that examined depression, particularly in the black community. Both of these shows came as fully realized brand positions that spoke to Raymond's willingness to take a stand through his creations.

His spring/summer 2017 show followed in this tradition. It took place on September 11th, the 15th anniversary of the attacks at the World Trade Center, the day when the two 110-story towers that were once seen as icons of American capitalism came tumbling down. The show was both a condemnation of the greed within the American free market—from chattel slavery to modern exploitation—and an expression of Raymond's own personal struggles—his brand is embroiled in a lawsuit with a former business partner involving fraud accusations.

The show opened with a scene of four black female sopranos wearing name tags like "No Name" and "Anonymous" while they rang cash registers. Their humming gave way to spoken word artist and playwright Cyrus Aaron, who appeared on the runway and recited his poem "More Money, More Problems," which was written specifically for the show.

"We sure are a long way from home, but they still make us pay for it," Aaron said, alluding to the struggle of modern blacks and the plight of their ancestors, who were forcibly brought to this continent in chains. "Here we go again; more money, more problems," he said before the models finally took to the runway wearing a mix of suiting, leather jackets, and sportswear. There were sweatshirts featuring photos of Bernie Madoff's arrest as well as jackets emblazoned with the word greed in varsity letters.

This complex runway show may have been a product of Raymond's creative prowess and personal struggles, but it's execution was certainly a team effort. To bring "Bernie vs. Bernie" to life, he tapped a handful of talented creatives.

From the spoken word artist who opened the show, and the DJ in charge of imbuing the event with a texture that reflected the inability for people to "call in black," to the stylist who put the looks together without a moodboard, and the shoe designer who extended Kerby's concepts to footwear—all of these people came together to make "Bernie vs. Bernie" a reality. So we called them up to get deeper insight into Raymond's process and learn a bit more about the genesis of the compelling runway show.

Cyrus Aaron, Spoken Word

Kerby came to my play Someday earlier this year and loved it. He really connected with this one scene in particular and it's entitled "To Kill a Blackbird." It's based on the Black Lives Matter activist Marshawn McCarrel, who committed suicide in February of this year. Coincidentally, Kerby paid his respects to him as well and shed light on mental illness and depression in his last show. So we instantly vibed and we talked about the weight of it all and how heavy it is to be a leader and also hold onto your sanity. It was a really good conversation so we just kept talking and he said he had to have me in the show, but didn't know what he wanted to do at first.

Probably a few months later, maybe in May, we met up again and we had a long conversation about his ideas and what he was going through personally with legal issues. We were just talking about money issues that are particularly prevalent for young black entrepreneurs. He had this rough idea of pairing the two Bernie's against each other in theory and I was like 'OK, I can see it.' That's a heavy topic when you're talking about finance and economics, especially through the black gaze, but I knew what he wanted to do. From there, I went to work and came up with three different poems for him. He ended up choosing "More Money More Problems."

There's just so much to uncover. You know, the legacy of the black dollar, not just America but globally when you factor in the colonization and imperialism. It all presents so much text and narrative to explore that I couldn't put my pen down. The ideas just kept churning and especially because I don't usually have these platforms—particularly in a place like fashion week—I wanted to feel like I was doing it justice while also having a cohesive story.

I also helped direct the segment with the sopranos. Going from the foundation of Kerby's idea—he had done the opera singers last season and I think he liked the thread of including that. We were trying to figure out a way to make that fit without having it be too much since I was already opening with a poem and no models walking. That itself was already extending the show outside of it's normal parameters. As Austin Millz got into the conversation, as he was building the sound for the show, we started hearing this idea about having so much pain about being at work when there's so much going on in the world outside. I think that represents the duality of being an everyday citizen trying to operate within your 9 to 5 knowing that in some cities in the US families aren't getting drinkable water. We were really trying to use that 30, 45 second window for the singers to convey that texture and convey that weight.

Austin Millz, Soundscape

I'm actually a DJ out of New York. So, I do a lot of underground parties and clubs. A homegirl of mine reached out to me and said Kerby was looking for a curator in terms of his new line and his new show. So we set up a meeting.

I actually went into the meeting not knowing what was going on, but I left proud and happy to be a part of the process. I ended up setting the tone musically while Cyrus Aaron was reciting the poem as well as directing the sopranos who were humming and singing behind me. I was basically designing the sound sculpture for the whole show—the models as well.

I went through two or three ideas in my head before I got to the one I really wanted. I wanted to evoke a very emotional, angry, yet overcoming vibe with the music. I felt like that really got across with the key of the drums. I wanted something passionate and with the music I created I think I got all that emotion out.

I love the fact that this show had a cause and a political message. I really did go into this situation not knowing what was going to happen and as it has happened, I've seen the message and felt its power. Being a person of color, being from inner-city Harlem, it all made sense for me. Especially since it was during fashion week.

Salehe Bembury, Shoe Designer

Kerby and I met about three years ago at a dinner at The Box. I started talking to him and his girlfriend and we started talking about shoes. With me being the shoe addict that I am, that sort of turned into a conversation about fashion. At the time, I wasn't very familiar with his brand and what he was involved with and he wasn't very familiar with what I was involved with, so it was just two like-minded individuals sparking up conversation.

This show was somewhat last minute from an execution standpoint. Kerby and I talk every week about everything from fashion to culture. So we kind of started floating this idea and I mentioned we could potentially use silicone to get the effect we wanted.

The extension of the outsole was basically supposed to act as a metaphor for anchors that bog us down in life. Obviously the subject matter of the show was more of a financial aesthetic but there's all sorts of things that can bog us down in life. We clearly couldn't mold the shoes in concrete, but I figured we could do something that had the visual of stagnant hard material but still flexes with the foot and still functions for the show. Silicone was a good way of accomplishing that.

The things that drive Kerby and my creative process are slightly different. From my perspective, for the most part, I'm acting off of nostalgia. The reason I'm a footwear designer comes from basketball and watching NBA with my dad when I was a kid. It's about 90s rap culture and that sort of stuff. I'm selfish with my design to the point that I'm always trying to make the five-year-old kid inside of myself happy. With Kerby's design, it has way more focus. He's tackling bigger issues—issues that I care about, but I'm not necessarily tackling through design. If anything it was important for me to be a part of a design initiative that just had more significance to it because that's not necessarily what I do on a day-to-day basis.

Gro Curtis, Art Direction

We met through my agent maybe two and a half years ago when he booked me because he liked my work. Strangely enough we just clicked together. We are not yes people so our relationship developed together even though we can sort of fight. It's not the typical designer-stylist relationship where there's a moodboard and you get together six days before the show to put together the looks... We are constantly texting each other. We've never had a moodboard. We just talk about what's happening. Sometimes I'm just pestering him with personal questions that I want to know. That's why each collection has an emotional, private, or intimate edge to it.

The idea for this collection was born in June. He was going through some financial problems. I mean, the brand was almost close to bankruptcy and he was not sure if he was going to be able to do a collection. I just told him if you're going out, go with a bang, use this as a theme. This is about you.

In fashion, you have 70 percent of designers who don't make money. You have stylists and editors who don't make money. You have these street style stars who borrow all of their clothes. So it's one huge paradox to work in an industry of luxury, but over half of those people don't have any money. Yes, there's people from Vogue who have trust funds and stuff like that. But a ton of editors and stylists, designers and photographers are constantly struggling with money. It's all bullshit.

As a certain symbol of financial disaster in New York of course there's Bernie Madoff. I didn't want to touch Trump and Kerby agreed because everyone is doing Trump in every possible way from artists to fashion designers. But it was fascinating how many people forgot about Madoff and Wall Street. He was like the biggest thief in history and no one is talking about it anymore.

Follow Mikelle on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

One valley along from Cumbria's Sellafield nuclear power station is the small town of Egremont, where last week – for the 749th year running – locals celebrated their annual Crab Fair. The event is home to World Gurning Championship, which this year looked like it does every year: a bunch of people making their faces look as grotesque as humanly possible.

The reasons why contestants were taking part varied. One man was there to break the world record for most world championships entered – among other events, he'd taken part in a pea shooting competition and come second in the world championships for snail racing. Another woman had come all the way from Stroud after realising how scary she looked without her front teeth.

But the locals and most seasoned gurners – some of whom have been competing for the best part of 40 years – do it for the glory.

@mcbridewilson

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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

Rage rooms, the Zumba of 2016. A "cultural phenomenon" profiled everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Guardian. An insight into the frustration bubbling beneath the surface of the neutered modern psyche. A room where, for between 10 and 45 minutes, you're allowed to break everything you can. Padded protective wear and baseball bat supplied.

"Cathartic" is the word that comes up most often when people are talking about rage rooms. After all, it seems there'd be something deeply satisfying about laying waste to a room. It's so far removed from the advice we're so often given for dealing with anger—do some yoga, try meditation, breathing exercises. Where these are all so passive, rage rooms feel active, you are doing something about how shitty you feel.

I wanted to try out a rage room for myself—to see whether they actually lived up to the hype, and also because, honestly, I'd had a pretty awful week at work. So I roped in perhaps the most chill person I know, our staff writer Kat, for a visit to the Break Room, which is Australia's first.

Our new spiritual home

The Break Room's owner, Ed, told us he started it during a particularly stressful time at work—"I was literally working 13 to 14 hours a day... and I always had this fantasy of throwing my phone against a wall," he explained.

This was surprising, Ed rivals Kat for the appearance of calmness. He said the stresses of his customers have kind of put his own in perspective—the most frequent rager is a top criminal lawyer, who literally has people's lives in his hands.

Ed said that corporate groups are kind of his bread and butter. Apparently people love to smash up the office printer to the soundtrack of Kanye's "White Skinhead"—a Freudian slip that made for one of the more horrifying images I've ever had to imagine.

"One company brought in an old Macbook Air. They claimed it on insurance," Ed said, holding up the laptop's twisted remains. "I'm not sure how legit it was."

Ed, with a MacBook Air I definitely could've used

Ed shows us around the Break Room—shattered plates and glassware piling up on the far wall, shelves full of breakables, and complimentary pink baseball bats to smash it all with. There's actually pink everywhere, a choice Ed explained was deliberate.

The shade is called "Baker Miller" pink, and it's been widely used in prisons to reduce violent behaviour among inmates. Ed told us he wanted to make a distinction between destruction and violence. Throwing a plate against a wall in a rage room, he says, "it's not a violent act."

This was something I'd heard before. Shawn Baker, who started Tantrums LLC in Houston, told me he's often asked if his rage rooms makes people more aggressive. "My answer is no. In fact, I see the opposite," he said. "Once people are through with their session they are tired, relieved, relaxed, and laughing."

Of course, this is all anecdotal. I was curious about what science had to say about rage rooms and whether venting anger in short, controlled bursts could be a better way to deal with our feelings. And according to Dr Christopher Groot, an associate lecturer in the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, this possibly isn't correct.

Dr Groot explained the idea that "emotions are something that need occasional venting or catharsis... and the notion that venting by smashing things is a healthy thing" isn't supported by research. Instead, he says, all the evidence suggests raging could actually make you angrier.

"To make a long story short, maladaptive things can feel good in the moment but are likely to be harmful in the longer term," he said. "Think coping via consumption of chocolate—perhaps pleasant and distracting in the moment but..."

Dr Groot and his head of school, Professor Nick Haslam, pointed me to a widely cited paper about anger, written by Professor Brad Bushman. In it, Bushman and his colleagues investigated "catharsis theory" a treatment popular with 19th century Freudian psychologists that can be basically summed up as, "just let it all out."

"For reducing anger and aggression, the worst possible advice to give people is to tell them to imagine their provocateur's face on a pillow or punching bag as they wallop it," Busman wrote. "If followed, such advice will only make people angrier and more aggressive."

I asked Bushman for his take on rage rooms—whether he thought his seminal work on anger applied in this case, or if they are just a harmless past time. "People might love 'rage rooms,' but there is no scientific evidence that they work to reduce angry feeling and aggressive impulses," he wrote back. "Indeed, research shows that venting has the opposite effect. It is like using gasoline to put out a fire—it feeds the flame."

The carnage of the Break Room

So all the evidence was looking pretty bad for rage rooms but, if you've visited one, it's hard to get past how great it feels to smash things. At the Break Room, Kat and I split a crate between us—hurling donations, factory rejects, and op shop crockery against the brick wall.

As we watched Kat slamming vinegar bottles to smithereens through the reinforced glass, I asked Ed who the Break Room's typical customer is. "Seventy percent of our customers are women," he explained. "They have stressful jobs... they just need something to break the cycle."

Rage rooms around the world reported this same gender split, with way more women than men visiting. "I think it's because women are raised not be aggressive," Shawn Baker from Tantrums in Houston said. "You can be as aggressive as you want. The more aggressive the more fun. And there is no judgement passed on you."

There was something in that, the freedom rage rooms give you to express how you actually feel without being labelled as "crazy" or "emotional." All the science may be against them but, hey, shattering some weird child's sculpture thing Ed had picked up at Savers did make me forgot how shitty I'd been feeling for the past couple of days. At least for a little while, until I realised on the walk home that I'd forgotten to bring my house keys with me.

Follow Maddison on Twitter

Photo by Max Rann

When Nicholas Reville first learned that universities around the world had begun researching the medical benefits of psilocybin—the psychedelic compound found in mushrooms—he saw it as an opportunity to create a movement. He'd seen the success of medical marijuana activists in making cannabis a household name, and he began to wonder what it would take for mushrooms to earn the same cultural clout. He knew instinctively that marijuana had for decades built something that mushrooms still lacked: a good brand.

"It's hard to look at a clock that says 4:20, and no matter how hard you don't want to think about 4/20, you're going to think about 4/20," Reville told VICE. "It's actually a pretty great brand—and it's a brand that reminds you of itself frequently."

If psychedelic fungi were ever going to be taken seriously by the general population—as they have been recently by some scientists—Reville realized they, too, needed their own designated holiday. The result is 9/20, an educational "day of action" that will be celebrated for the second year in a row in cities across the globe on September 20.

Unlike marijuana, which is legal in some form in nearly half the US, psilocybin is still a Schedule I controlled substance, listed in the same category as heroin. But people like Reville say the real challenge with marketing mushrooms is how infrequently people take them.

"Even people for whom it's been transformative for their life, maybe haven't taken mushrooms in years, or maybe take it once a year," said Reville, who declined to talk about his own experience using mushrooms because he said it would detract from his advocacy. "So you don't have the same natural organic pressure and financial interest and social visibility that you have with marijuana, something that's used by some people multiple times a day, for many years."

Through his volunteer-run campaign 920 Coalition (the slogan: "mushrooms are medicine"), more than two-dozen organizations have signed up to host psychedelic-focused 9/20 events. In Dublin, for example, the Psychedelic Society of Ireland is holding a film screening in a park; in Mexico City, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy will present a talk at a cultural center; and in Brooklyn, Psymposia is throwing a psychedelic storytelling event at speakeasy. But because they're all hosted independently, there's not one clear goal.

Unlike 4/20, 9/20 events aren't intended as gatherings for people to get high together. Instead, they're mostly lectures, salons, or meetups that prioritize the goals of research and policy rather than the joys of tripping. The approach represents a reversal from the short-lived psychedelic movement of the 1960s, when LSD pioneer Timothy Leary famously told a gathering of hippies in Golden Gate Park to "turn on, tune in, drop out." The Harvard psychologist was among the first to study psychedelics in an academic setting—including in his project that used psilocybin to evaluate recidivism rates of prisoners—but the controversial research eventually cost him his career.

His son, Zach Leary, who speaks about psychedelics at events around the country, says attitudes about psilocybin have begun to change only within the last few years.

He points to formerly niche psychedelic events like Burning Man, which have since become a rite of passage not just for Burners, but for people like Paris Hilton and Elon Musk. Steve Jobs famously espoused the benefits of LSD, calling it one of the most important experiences of his life, and there have long been stories about Silicon Valley executives using micro-doses of LSD to enhance their creativity.

Zach Leary sees it as a cultural revolution that coincides with the broader push to end the drug war. "Because of the scientific research, it's given a lot of people permission to come out of the closet ," he told VICE.

One of those people is David Tripp, a professor in the liberal studies department at Antioch University in Los Angeles. He says he recently had a "psychedelic coming out experience" in an effort to be more transparent in both his personal and professional life, despite that some colleagues warned him it would be a death sentence for his career. (The psychedelics-focused philosophy course he teaches is still the only one he's ever had to get reviewed by the university lawyer, he said.) "People have a lot of fear around all of this, so there are a lot of ways to handling it, and one of those ways is to marginalize serious work around this stuff."

But the research being done at institutions like New York University, University of California, Los Angeles, and John Hopkins University has become a lightning rod for the psychedelic movement. For the first time in more than three decades, researchers are undertaking clinical trials to evaluate psilocybin as a treatment for anxiety, depression, and alcohol and smoking addiction, according to a feature in the New Yorker last year.

Related: Magic Mushrooms Are the New Pot, According to Psilocybin Enthusiasts

Activists attribute the second wave of the psychedelic renaissance partly to the work of Rick Doblin, another Harvard alum who founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986. The nonprofit advocacy and research group has since funded and organized studies on MDMA and LSD-assisted psychotherapy. But because the organization doesn't receive for-profit investment or government funding, and clinical trials can run tens of millions of dollars, its efforts are limited. Prevailing stereotypes about psilocybin don't help either.

"Sometimes it's frustrating that because of the long stigma on psychedelics, people are often not willing to consider that they may also be valuable therapeutic tools for PTSD and anxiety medication," Brad Burge, a MAPS spokesperson, told VICE.

He says the 9/20 gatherings—even if they're mostly small gestures with no universal goals—are evidence of a shift in public dialogue. "Even in the 1960s when psychedelics were first entering into the Western cultural context, a lot of the events and public gatherings around them were really counter cultural," he said. But now, they're "thoroughly immersed in the mainstream."

Leary agrees, but he notes that dedicating September 20 to increase the awareness of mushrooms seems totally arbitrary. "The roots of 4/20, it's such a great urban legend," he said, referencing the often repeated lore that the misattributed police code for marijuana gained popularity in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert. "There's a part of that feels a little bit like, 'Oh, are we just branding it, creating a gimmick, for the sake of it?'"

If anything, September 20 references a good time of year to pick mushrooms. It also falls in the beginning of the school year, which is helpful for organizing events and generating interest on college campuses, according to Reville.

Tripp, who is speaking at a 9/20 event called "Value Mushrooms for Mushroom Values" in Los Angeles this week, welcomes the new momentum around psychedelics, even if he's not sure exactly what will come of it. "There's no one way to do this. There's no one strategy. We need all the craziness, and some of it no doubt will be harmful," he told VICE, describing the psychedelic movement as one big circus with enough room for doctors, researchers, academics, and the people who just want to get high and trip out for a couple of hours.

"So in that context, sure 9/20, why not?" he said. "It's part of the circus."

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When I attended the VRLA Summer Expo in August, I couldn't stop thinking about Elon Musk's speculation that there's a "one in billions" chance that we aren't living in a simulation. Musk draws a line of technological advancement from Pong to AAA games in 2016. He argues that if we made this much progress in 40 years, we'll someday be able to create simulations indistinguishable from reality. Walking around VRLA, I thought about where VR is now and how long it would take to create a Matrix-like existence: a simulated reality that everyone is a part of. At VRLA, it became clear that the hardware has a long way to go, but virtual reality is making an effort to invite everyone in.

VRLA—the world's largest virtual reality expo—is a biannual event held in Los Angeles. With more than 6,000 attendees and more than 130 exhibitors, this year's expo was the largest one yet. Everything from the traditional VR experiences (games, rides, and films) to the more experimental (like a VR rave) were on display. Before the expo floor opened, a line of hundreds snaked around a large part of the convention center. The floor itself felt like a theme park, with people patiently waiting in line for hours to try VR demos, from the unreleased VR game Star Trek: Bridge Crew, to Mindshow: the VR app that lets you make your own VR productions. You couldn't walk far without seeing someone in a headset, or waiting in line to wear one.

Reggie Watts analyzes the projector menu during his VRLA keynote speech. Photo by Geoffrey Long

"VR and AR are trying to catch up with the OG-R," said Reggie Watts, the conference keynote speaker. (In May, the comedian performed a set in VR.) "I can't wait to put on a headset in my living room and be transported to my living room... in VR. That's where I'd like us to start." During his speech, Watts spent 20 minutes analyzing the projector menu. The hilarious contrast between everyday technology and the inaccessible headset was obvious. It was a reminder that even with the launch of consumer VR products, it's still a niche technology still very foreign to the vast majority of us.

In science-fiction stories, like Keiichi Matsuda's HYPER-REALITY, VR and AR are incredibly powerful, yet mobile enough to touch every aspect of our lives. But in the reality of 2016, consumer VR headsets still allow us to experience robust VR only from our homes. Currently, Facebook's Oculus Rift and the Vive (co-developed by HTC and Valve) are the major players in the consumer VR market, but both require a very powerful PC (and a lot of wires) for use. Devices like Google Cardboard Samsung's Gear VR utilize smartphones to offer mobile VR, but with what they gain in portability, they lose in power and input precision.

Based on the hardware showcased at VRLA, we have only inched closer to the dream of becoming cyborgs. Touch controllers are slowly becoming the standard, as most exhibitors understood that people want to use their hands as much as their eyes in VR experiences. While the Vive allows "room-scale" user tracking, it can only track user movement within the range of its stationary sensors—so don't expect to walk down the street in VR just yet. HP and MSI demoed computer backpacks that connect to VR headsets, so you can walk around without being tethered to wires, but these backpacks are as bulky as they are powerful. Unless a VR-ready PC shrinks to a size and price smaller than a Raspberry Pi's, VR won't become the Matrix in our lifetimes.

A panel titled "The Future of VR Hardware" put this in perspective. The corporate vice president of AMD, Roy Taylor said, " a pair of either gloves or a body suit... We're going to need big powerful processing in the cloud... and unbelievably fast bandwidth." In Taylor's scenario, we turn into Jon Nada from They Live, able to alter what we see by putting Ray-Bans on. But Joy Lyons, chief technology officer of OSSIC, took a step closer to the sci-fi of Gibson and futurism of Musk. The ideal apparatus for VR, he said, is "a chip in the brain."

If making VR devices stronger and more powerful is the long-term goal for the VR industry, then the short-term goal is simple accessibility. VR's next big challenge is getting more people involved as both hardware consumers and software developers. The very first event of the expo was a workshop called "Girls Make VR," where teenagers learned how to create their first virtual reality scene with Unity, a free game creation tool. The expo also featured a bevy of new products: Visionary VR's app Mindshow, which allows amateur VR filmmakers to create cinematic sequences; HTC's Viveport, a platform that offers alternative VR experiences for non-gamers. On the hardware side, AMD announced its line of affordable VR-ready computers, which can be built for around $680, powered by their new graphics card, the Radeon RX 480 (which starts at just $199 if purchased alone).

Evolution of VR (L to R): wired to the computer, mobile VR, backpack with touch controllers, sunglasses with gloves and audio necklace, chip in the brain. Image by the author

For folks who don't own a headset and aren't interested in a Google Cardboard–like experience, more location-based VR is coming—think pop-up arcades for VR content. AMD unveiled its VR pod, Awesome Rocketship, which is set to debut in movie theaters, malls, and other locations across the country. VRCade showcased a wireless, multiplayer VR gaming experience with custom gun controllers and headsets. Fulldome Pro exhibited its gigantic hemispherical setup under which 20 to 30 people can comfortably recline and take in the audiovisual experience. Airflow, a flight experience that suspends you mid-air using a Hollywood-grade harness, is set to become an open platform for developers to contribute their own level designs.

Slowly but surely, VR technology is getting cheaper, more accessible, more versatile, and easier for non-developers to create VR content. Elon Musk might believe that technologies are moving us toward photorealistic virtual realities, but in actuality, broadening the pool of content creators will push a more raw, surreal aesthetic into the mainstream. And we may be better for that fact.

In his talk "How Neurons React to Virtual Reality," neurologist Mayank Mehta claimed that memorable spaces in VR might be good for your mental health. Mehta and his team, whose research concerns the relationship between VR and memory, created a VR rig for rats, an omni-directional treadmill that reacted to the rat's movements in real time by changing the visuals projected on the four walls around it. In other words, the rat believed the simulated space to be its own reality. According to Mehta, creating memorable spaces with rich visual cues is the key to activating the brain: "In the long run, I believe can be used to use VR to make us smarter."

Kuksi's sculptures in VR transcend the inherent scale limitations of the sculptural medium, elevating them to the architectural and epic. A collaboration between Kris Kuksi (artist) and Brian Pope (founder, the Arc/k Project). Image courtesy of Cognition

There were moments at VRLA where I took off my headset and felt like I had woken up from a dream. VR production house Cognition created a space using 12" sculptures by Kris Kuksi, transforming them into 24-foot-high columns ending in a massive temple-like edifice. Cognition uses a technique called photogrammetry, which involves recreating objects and spaces in 3D by assimilating photographs of the subject taken from every possible angle.

I was even able to virtually visit the Temple of Bel in Syria, which was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. The studio had recreated the site using hundreds of archival images sourced from the web. The future of the project is to allow users to decide the spaces they would like to see captured. Maybe someday capturing spaces with photogrammetry will be as easy as taking selfies.

Virtual reality is still in its infancy. Its rate of growth is slow, but the democratization of VR is already happening, resulting not only in more content, but in more diverse points of view. As the tools to create virtual reality trickle down to non-developers, virtual realities that are rough around the edges will accompany the photorealistic simulations that currently flood the industry. The near future isn't VR sunglasses or wearables you forget you're wearing: It's consumer-grade luxury electronics that will transport us to weird and exciting places.

This story appeared in the 2016 Photo issue of VICE magazine.

Photographer Izumi Miyazaki first came to prominence when she was only 15 years old. Now 18, Miyazaki, who cites a number of surrealists as her inspiration, continues her thoughtful, wry, and precise work on identity stereotypes, setting cultural clichés alongside grotesque or awkward elements.

This story appeared in the 2016 Photo issue of VICE magazine.

Sandy Kim is well known for her images documenting the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll life she and her friends lead. Kim herself is a frequent subject, often appearing nude—"There's at least one picture of my boobs in anything I put out," she said in an interview with PAPER—as is Sky Ferreira, who, like Kim, dates a member of DIIV. Her artistic influences range from Diane Arbus to William Eggleston and Dash Snow.