At 28, I've finally started to feel like a grown-up. When I was in my early 20s, I dated sleazy photographers or DJs who never introduced me to their friends. At 28, though, I'm partnered with another 28-year-old, and we're even buying a dining room table so we no longer have to sleep in spaghetti sauce.

Based on statistics, it's getting harder and harder for people to find their soul mates. The percentage of married households in the US is lower than it's ever been and people are waiting longer to tie the knot. It's becoming more and more common to meet divorcees below the age of 30, too. I wanted to know what it's really like to attempt to find true love or spend Valentine's Day with the same bag of bones for decades, so I called up some veterans dating experts: three grandmas.

These women have literally created lives, yes, but they've also lived vibrant ones. Joanne, a 66-year-old from Brooklyn, warns of the importance of encouraging people to come out of the closet, and says online dating is just as shitty at 66 as it is at 26.

Bella, who asked to use a pseudonym, is 77 today, but she left her husband after 25 years of marriage at age 45 to travel. Since her divorce, she's found difficulty finding a man who can keep up with her passion for seeing the world, though she recommended that others don't give up on their dreams for a relationship.

Honey is a happily married cancer survivor. Before we got off the phone, the 71-year-old warned me: "Be very nice to your girlfriends, because they're going to outlive your boyfriends." Point taken.

Anyway, I'm spending Valentine's Day on a beach in the Caribbean with my boyfriend. If you're solo masturbating and eating some nachos to fill the romantic void this weekend, or simply need some encouragement about finding your perfect mate, take a break and read what these grannies have to say.

For a different take on relationships, watch our doc on America's lucrative divorce industry:

Joanne
66 Years Old
Brooklyn, New York

VICE: Are you currently dating?
Joanne: Right now I don't have a love life. I've had two husbands. My daughter says I'm a man hater, which I'm not! When I separated from my husband eight years ago, my daughters put me online to meet someone new. I was reluctant, but did use the dating site to meet a man who seemed nice. He came to my house, but had I known what he looked like in reality, I would have not opened the door. He had this turquoise car and was like, "I'm going to take you out to coffee. Is there a Dunkin Donuts anywhere?"

I will never date a man who has less than me. I have a new car, I have two homes, I'm not rich by any means, but I don't want someone who wants me to support them. I find these women who are older than myself, with younger guys, or men their own age, and they're supporting men. They all say the same thing: they don't want to be alone. I'd rather be alone.

What was your first love like?
My first husband, my daughters' father, was this macho, Italian man. I'm Italian, but that's not my type.I married him on the rebound after breaking off my first engagement, which was with my first love.

Why did the engagement end?
We had a wonderful relationship. My girlfriends liked him, he used to say to them, "I want a platonic relationship ." We had to look up the word "platonic." At the time, I didn't understand, you know? I was madly in love, he was madly in love, and we got engaged anyway.

A month before the wedding, we were looking for an apartment, and my parents said, "Why don't you buy a house? There are houses for sale, we'll give you money and he can get a GI mortgage," because he was in the Navy. I found out that he couldn't get one because he had a dishonorable discharge.

Why was that?
I didn't know why at the time, but I should have known. He said, "You have to come some place with me, Joanna. I need to introduce you to this woman I speak to." So he takes me to the city to meet a psychiatrist I didn't even know he had. And she told me he's gay! Now this was in 1970, and everybody was in the closet. And of course, I didn't marry him.

What did he say?
He was devastated. He begged, he pleaded, he said he loved me. He said yes, he did have a relationship with someone in the Navy; he did have a boyfriend before me. I should have known—he worked on Wall Street but was a hairdresser on the weekends.

What happened to him? He was your first love, after all.
I don't know. It feels like he disappeared from the Earth. One of my girlfriends saw him with a boyfriend at a beauty parlor once. He was very paranoid about dying, and I'm sure the spread of AIDS intensified those fears. I remember he had a white shirt and a pair of jeans and he said, "If anything happens to me, Joanne, I want to be buried in this." Maybe he committed suicide, maybe he had AIDS, but no one ever heard from him after we split up.

If you could have given yourself any love advice when you were in your early 20s, what would it have been?
I didn't look for the right things. I never thought about what my husband made as far as a living. It was just getting married and getting out of the house because my folks were kind of strict. All my girlfriends were married or engaged, I was supposed to be married with them. So I married my husband quick, or else I was going to be an old maid.

I would never feel like that again. My father was always putting me down, telling me I was stupid. I think if I didn't have that negativity toward myself, thinking I wasn't good enough, I don't think I would have married my first husband. I love my children. I feel what is meant to be is meant to be. But I would have lived my life totally differently if I thought more of myself and thought more about myself. I would have picked the man; he wouldn't have picked me.

Bella
77 Years Old
Charlottesville, Virginia

VICE: Tell me about yourself.
Bella: I'm divorced. I married when I was 20 in 1961 and stayed married for 25 years. We had three children. We got married because I was pregnant.

Do you think you would have gotten married if you weren't pregnant?
Maybe not. Well, I was not happy in my home life [at my parents'] so it was a door for me to escape.

Have friendships been an important part of your life?
They're very important, especially since I recently dislocated my shoulder! If it hadn't been for friends, I wouldn't have had enough food in the refrigerator. I do like living on my own and being dependent on myself. That's very satisfying to me. I have two cats.

Do you stay in touch with your ex-husband?
Yes, I do. We're in touch because of our children. He's on his third marriage right now. When I see him, I often wonder what interested me, but I think escape was the motivation. He's a good man; he's a good honest man.

Why did you leave your marriage?
I had goals that I wanted to pursue. The industry I was working in allowed me to travel, which became my biggest goal. At the time, my children were of the age where they certainly didn't want me interfering in their life other than simply being there. And since I had gotten married very young, I wanted to do the exploring that I wasn't able to do when I was young. I needed to have a sense of freedom, which I really never had. Between ages 45 and 69, I had a lot of that! It was great. Plus, I met a guy that I started dating that I really liked. A lot of good things fell into place.

What happened with the guy?
I lived with him for eight and a half years, [first in Cleveland]. Then we were both transferred to Florida for our jobs, so I moved with him to Florida. I was at the point where I wanted to get married again, but he couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to do that, so I had to leave. This was 1998.

Have you dated since?
Oh yes, but nothing serious.

Did you have any foreign flings while traveling abroad?
Yes, I did! Again, nothing serious.

How is it dating different when you're older?
There's no naivety. When I was living in Chicago, I decided to join one of these dating programs where it's " just for lunch." I was really surprised how a lot of the men really weren't into travel. They were content in a simple lifestyle, so it didn't turn out to be that interesting to me.

How does dating in 2016 seem different to you?
It seems like all of those programs like Match.com asked, "Are you interested in more than one date?" That was interesting to me, because if you went on one date and it wasn't what you wanted, then you could go on to another date. You didn't have to want more than one!

Honey
71 Years Old
US Virgin Islands

VICE: Hey, will you introduce yourself?
Honey: Everybody calls me Honey instead of Grandma. My first grandchild heard my husband calling me "honey" all the time. He said, "Honey, can you get me a glass of wine?" and my little Jack, who was two at the time, said, "Honey, can you get me a glass of milk?" and it stuck. I've been married eight years, and together we have five children and six grandchildren. Three of the kids are mine, and two of the kids are his. We're all mixed up.

How did you meet?
We met at a party in 1980. We're both cancer survivors. I'm a 25-year breast cancer survivor, and he's a 12-year prostate cancer survivor. That's probably what brought us together.

What advice do you have for searching for the right partner?
You better like them. Never mind being madly in love with the person; you better like them. I have a sign in my kitchen that says, "Kissing don't last, cooking do." But old or young, you meet someone, you're attracted to them, and you hope they are as nice as they appear to be when you first meet. You ought to spend some time really making sure that that's true. If you jump into something, there's no going back. Just because it's the time to get married doesn't mean that the person you are dating is the right one to marry.

So how do you know?
Well, that's the mystery. Maybe when you care more about them than you care about yourself, or when you can comfortably imagine yourself taking care of them when they're not as as they are now. You have to know that the person is going to have your back—and you're going to have their back—no matter what.

It's scary.
Love is the scariest thing on the face of the Earth. But it's also the most wonderful. It's why we get sucked into it over and over. But eventually hopefully you meet the right one and it all works out. It really helps if that person is your best friend. If you'd rather spend time with this person more than any other person, then that's a good sign.

Do you believe in finding "the love of your life"?
Yes, I do. I absolutely do. That's what I call my second husband, "the love of my life." Love is just as scary when you're old as it is when you're young.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

You probably haven't heard of Julius Fromm, but have him to thank if you've ever desperately slotted money into a vending machine, jammed a freshly bought condom in your pocket, and staggered off for a night of mediocre, inebriated—but protected—sex. Fromm basically invented the condom vending machine. He was a Jewish-Polish immigrant who moved to Germany as a child, before setting up hugely successful condom brand Fromms Act in 1922, opening up a few factories and capitalizing on the roaring trade in contraceptives to fend off postwar STDs.

Then Hitler came into power. Within a few years Fromm had a swastika hanging in one of his factory canteens—courtesy of two senior staffers who'd been early members of the National Socialist Party—and by 1937, Fromm's family and seemingly lascivious condom brand had been the subject of a smear campaign in an anti-Semitic newspaper.

At 55, Fromm moved to London in 1938 when it became clear that Jewish people were being systematically expelled and murdered in the Holocaust. Though he always hoped he'd be able to return and reopen his factories, he died in London three days after the end of WWII—at which point the German government had made him sell his business to a woman close to the Nazi party. We spoke to historian and journalist Michael Sontheimer, co-author of Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis,about Fromm's life, legacy, and how to make serious money off condoms in the 1920s.

VICE: None of us seem to know much about Julius Fromm, even though he was a big player in the condom game. How did you first come across him?
Michael Sontheimer: I grew up in West Berlin, and we used to call all condoms Fromms without really knowing why. Much later I learnt that there was a Fromm family, and within it an entrepreneur and chemist called Julius Fromm. When I heard he had a son, Eddie Fromm, who lived in London I found out where Eddie lived and rang him up to get to know about the family history.

What was the story, then?
They were this very poor Jewish family who moved from modern-day Poland—which was Russia then—to Berlin, and started a life there. Obviously Julius Fromm was one of these young Jewish men who worked hard and wanted to make something out of his life by not staying in low-paid work. I happen to live two houses down in Berlin from where Fromm started to make condoms, in a traditionally shabby room in the courtyard of his house. The demand was so high and his success so enormous that within 10 years he had three factories. He had an ability to find a product that would become very important and sought after.

What was one of the most interesting things you learnt about Fromm during your research?
He was a pretty genius businessman. When he started he was making nothing, rolling up cigarettes as a job. Then he started evening lessons in chemistry, and had this brilliant idea that contraception would become more and more important. He set a good example for all these really clever Jewish businesspeople who lived in Berlin and contributed towards the German economy, before a psychotic government decided to get rid of the Jews.

How did he go from rolling cigarettes to taking classes in chemistry?
Ah, in the beginning Fromm didn't only produce condoms—he also made gloves or dummies for toddlers. Even his son Eddie didn't know why Julius chose chemistry, though.

Were the Germans interested in his success from the beginning?
In the 1920s there were numerous Jewish business people with fantastic careers, and it didn't matter so much that he was Jewish. It wasn't a matter of anti-Semitism before the Nazis came into power. When they took over the country, Fromm even had some Aryan Germans who had been working with him, to whom he sold some of the company. Then later he was forced to sell Fromms Act to a woman very close to leading Nazi party member Hermann Goering. It's a weird story because Hermann Goering then traded a castle in Austria for the Fromms company, with this Austrian woman.

What did Julius gain from that?
The original Fromm family had to escape to London, so Julius got a bit of money from the company and was compensated—many other Jews were not compensated. He managed to get to London, and thus he and his three sons survived the Holocaust.

He knew something was going on so he got himself out?
Everyone knew that something was going to happen. He luckily survived the Holocaust but after the war the communists—the Russian and East German communists—expropriated the Fromm family again because they said, "Oh Fromm was a bad capitalist, so the family shouldn't get back the company." First, the Nazis and then the communists prevented them from getting it back. In the end the three sons started to make Fromm condoms again but the original factories in East Germany were all gone.

This is ridiculous. The whole story sounds like a film treatment.
Actually there were some film producers interested in it, but that didn't work out because there wasn't a central love story. And, really, because condoms are somehow a difficult product to turn into a film. People are shy about them.

Is it true that Julius invented the condom dispenser machine?
Yes, he was very much into public relations and advertisements and understood from early on that it wasn't enough to have a good product. You also had to make it interesting.

Where were the machines?
Like they are today, he placed them in communal bathrooms, somewhere slightly out of the way and out of sight.

I've read that the formula for making condoms hasn't changed much since Fromm pioneered "cement dipping," where glass moulds were dipped into a solution to make seamless sheaths. How much have the methods changed since?
In the 1920s when Julius Fromm was making condoms, there was a huge workforce in his factories whereas today it's all automatic. But the basic principle, of a glass penis shape which is dipped into a latex emulsion, is the same. They did lots of tests in Fromm's factories so that the condoms were 100 percent protective, and hole-free. So they blew them up. The workers took them and blew them up like balloons; if they didn't pop then they were safe. And today that is done automatically with a machine they blow them up and go really big, it's quite amazing how big they get before they pop.

Is that a testing method that Fromm made up?
Yes. He was known for having a great guarantee and a quality product.

Your book tells of relationships the Fromm family had with celebrities, too. Can you tell me more about that?
Julius' oldest son Max was an actor, who fled Germany in 1933 after training in theatre in Berlin. He ended up in France, where he featured in Hollywood movies with Bert Lancaster in the 1960s. As a blonde, he often had to play Nazis—he was a Gestapo officer in The Train, a famous film about art robbery during the Nazi occupation in France. That is somehow tragic, and happened to quite a few German refugees who ended up in Hollywood: they had to play Nazis.

How did Fromm advertise his products?
Openly. There was a big debate in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, on whether condom advertising ought to have been allowed in commercials and magazines. Condom ads were banned. Fromm worked around it with some tricks, for example with shops putting up signs saying: 'you can get the famous Fromm rubber sponges here.' But of course everyone knew that they weren't only selling sponges. If you saw one of those signs in a shop you could go in and ask for condoms.

Do you think he ever struggled to cope with the loss of his company?
Yes it was quite terrible. He was living in London and had nothing to do, after he'd been in Germany running this big factory. He was always waiting for the war to be over and he wanted to go back to Germany and build up the whole company and the factories again and then just a few days after the war ended in May 1945 he tragically died. He got up in the morning and wanted to open the curtains, and fell over and that was it. He was hoping so much to get back to his company.

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Image courtesy of James Hyman of the Hyman Archive

Late last year, Playboy caused a fuss when the venerable nudie mag announced that it wouldn't have naked ladies in it anymore. Well, there are still naked ladies, as the New York Times has pointed out, but they're the sort of naked ladies who might live in GQ or Esquire, their most provocative bits hidden behind some equivalent of a fig leaf. The strategy is pretty obvious: People who want to look at naked women have more than enough ways to do that on the internet; as Gloria Steinem told Time: "It's as if the NRA said we're no longer selling handguns because now assault weapons are so available."

Still, the first full-nudity-free issue of Playboy, which is coming out in March, marks a big shift in the brand. Founder Hugh Hefner's 24-year-old son even publicly broke with the company because he's so appalled by its decision not to publish photos of vaginas anymore. But the people in charge of the magazine are betting that millennials in general will approve of the move. The Playboy website went SFW last August and as a result, executives told the Times, quadrupled its traffic. The hope seems to be that by removing the whiff of baby boomer seediness from its pages, young people will read and subscribe to it.

But what about the people who are already obsessed with Playboy, the collectors who have watched the magazine go from sultry pinups to bleached-blonde implants to the nebulous combination of celebrities and feigned taboo-breaking? How do they feel about this change? To find out, we spoke with three Playboy collectors of varying fanaticism to get their perspectives on the magazine's past, present, and future, and whether eliminating the explicit will help Playboy build back what once made it so appealing.

Image courtesy of the Hyman Archive

James Hyman
45 Years Old, from London
Guinness World Record Holder for Largest Collection of Magazines
866 Playboys Collected

VICE: Why do you collect magazines?
James Hyman: One of the initial reasons for collecting is that I was a scriptwriter for MTV in the late 80s, early 90s. I had to write things for the VJs, or video jockeys, to talk about, and the best thing you had before the internet was magazines. Let's say a was in heavy rotation and you needed to keep writing about Prince or Madonna or whatever—where better to get more information than a Rolling Stone interview? Magazines were full of rich information that was not easily available.

So when did you start collecting Playboy, formally?
I saw it in a newsagent and thought it was another interesting magazine that had pop culture, and my thing was always collecting pop culture. So you look at a Playboy and it had a naked woman on the cover, but that woman would always be a pop culture staple, like Bo Derek, Kim Basinger, Janet Jackson, whoever. I was collecting the news ones, but then after going to crazy shops in London I discovered the dangerous pursuit of back issues. They would have Playboys going from the 50s through the 80s. I thought, Right, I've got to fill my collection of magazines, and that's what I did.

What do you like about vintage Playboys?
I think they really capture a time. The writing was always fantastic; you had amazing interviews in them. John Lennon's last interview was in Playboy. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King were in Playboy... James Bond was serialized in it! People say it as a cliché, but I would read Playboy for the articles.

Do you think going away from full nudity is a good move for Playboy?
Whether it's desperation or not, I don't think it's a great move because you expect nudity in Playboy. Now, maybe parameters need to be clear because I understand Playboy Brazil and Germany are keeping the nudity. Without the nudity you could argue it's like French fries without ketchup. There's a magazine here, Horse and Hound , you're not just going to call it Hound magazine. People expect it.

Is your collection up to date? Are you a subscriber?
Yeah, I'm still collecting it, so I get it every month. I'll keep [my subscription] going after the re-launch, sure.

Will you still read it, or is it just being archived for your collection?
I don't read every magazine I get. I don't read tons and tons of magazines like I used to, but I still read the articles in Playboy. I read Playboy hoping there's going to be something of interest in there. Maybe there'll be, I don't know, an in-depth interview with Quentin Tarantino or something interesting. But yeah, weirdly, I do still read it.

Learn more about the Hyman archive by going to its website or following it on Twitter.

Danny Bowes
37 Years Old, from New York City
Hundreds of Playboys Collected

VICE: When did you start collecting?
Danny Bowes: I started in the spring of 1992 when I was 13.My dad gave me a copy that had an interview with Michael Jordan. [The interview] was sort of a turning point in his relationship with the media. My dad had sensed the significance of it at the time and he gave me the magazine because he figured I was old enough where I wouldn't be like, "Oh my god, there are boobies in the magazine!" But of course, I read the interview, and then was like, "Well, I do believe there are boobies in this magazine." So my interest was piqued.

How did you collection grow from there?
Later that year I turned 14. As a birthday present, I think it was my mom who had seen the magazine lying around and thought, Eh, I'll get him a subscription . So basically for my entire teenage years and the whole time I was in college, I was a subscriber to Playboy, and I think only one month in all that time is missing from my collection.

So why did you keep back issues?
I'm not big on throwing stuff out in general, but in each of them there was always something worth keeping. Like an interview from one issue was interesting, or one of the short stories from another issue was good. There was something of interest every month—most of the time not for the pictures, but, admittedly, I flipped through a few times.

Did your dad collect too?
He bought it a lot and had it around the house, but he didn't have a formal, organized collection. And it was just better in the 70s. The 90s were a really weird time to collect Playboy because it was on this weird trajectory into plasticity that I felt kind of uncomfortable with as an aesthetic. It was promoting this very weird and I didn't feel very philosophically healthy about it at that point.

How would you describe that aesthetic in the 90s?
It was all very exaggerated and artificial. All of a sudden, all the models had very unnatural enhancements and looked like they were shot this way by somebody with a slightly unhealthy view of femininity. And I never really got that sense in the early years, when it was just good-looking naked women.

How do you feel about Playboy eliminating full nudity?
I feel that it's time at this cultural moment. The value of the magazine was never entirely about the nudity; it was always a major part of it, you know, founded to be that. But the way that things have evolved, with print giving way to digital, it's the time to make that transition if you're going to make it at all. And there's enough merit in the magazine over the years to make it possible. The new editorial direction they've taken in the last couple of years has been a lot more progressive. I stopped my subscription in the 90s, but now I sort of wish I was still a subscriber. During Hefner's Viagra years, it was sort of like, Jesus Christ. But now it's a home for a lot of good, progressive writing.

A 1960s Playboy image via Lysette's Etsy account

Lysette Simmons
30 Years Old, from Los Angeles

VICE: Will you tell me about your Playboy collection?
Lysette Simmons: Well, it's dope. I really love it and I don't even know how many I have—at least a hundred, maybe 200. I only collect the first 30 years. I've only recently realized why I like this era—Art Paul was the art director for those specific years. There are some covers that are just... art. I don't actually have the holy grail of them, which is the first issue in October, 1953—you can't find that one for less than two grand.

So why did you start collecting?
It's kind of odd, I guess. I had a few that my grandma gave me when she was cleaning out all of the magazines that my grandparents had subscriptions to. And then my dad died in 2012 and I just needed to destroy things. And I don't know why I picked on Playboy, but I started making paper snowflakes out of the pages of the issues I had. They were very beautiful. I liked that if I folded this woman up and couldn't see any part of her body and did all the cutouts and unfolded it, such a beautiful thing would be the result.

Do you cut up every magazine you get today, or do you preserve some?
I have started to not cut them up as much, and actually purposely out legendary issues that I know of. I just got one I'm really excited about the other day in the mail—August, 1955. [The cover] is just a drawing of a mermaid and a rabbit scuba diving, nothing unsavory going on.

Do you have thoughts on Playboy's new direction without nudity?
Good for them. Not having to take your clothes off to get somewhere in LA? That's great. One more reason not to take your clothes off to get somewhere.

It looks like the models might still be getting naked, but not everything is going to be shown.
I'm fine with that. I haven't read any articles about the decision to do that, but if I were running Playboy, my thinking would be to try and legitimize the magazine again.

Have you found that collecting Playboy is rare among women?
I haven't met any other women who collect Playboy. And when I first told people I was collecting them so I could cut them up, they were horrified because at the time I had no idea what they were worth. I was just grieving for my dead father by desperately cutting up snowflakes. I thought if I could make one every night, if I could make something beautiful every day, I could keep going. I thought, Well, I need more Playboys if I want to live, so...

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Police found 190 mL of liquid ice in hidden in bras. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Four drug importers could face life in prison after the largest seizure of liquid methamphetamine in Australia's history.

The joint operation began in December last year, when Border Force police found liquid meth in gel bra inserts, stowed away in a shipping container from Hong Kong. "Hidden inside those gel bra inserts was 190 litres of liquid methamphetamine," AFP spokesman Chris Sheehan told a press conference today.

Further investigations by the Joint Organised Crime Group—made up of the AFP, NSW Police, Australian and NSW Crime Commissions, and Border Force—uncovered an additional 530 litres in five storage units across the Sydney suburbs of Miranda, Padstow, Kinsgrove, and Hurstville. The drugs were hidden in craft glue and painting sets.

All up police estimate they seized around 3.6 million hits of ice, with a collective street value of $1.26 billion.

Federal justice minister Michael Keenan heralded the seizures as a big win for policing of drug imports. "This joint operation shows how successful our law enforcement agencies are in tackling the organised criminal gangs that pedal in the misery of ice," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

However, the illicit trade remains a big earner for organised drug crime in Australia. In the past few years gangs have become so efficient at importing drugs that bulk prices have fallen significantly. According to an investigation by Fairfax, Cocaine has fallen from $280,000 per kilogram to as low as $180,000; ecstasy from $65,000 to $37,000.

Buoyed by high demand though, street prices haven't experienced the same drop, suggesting these groups are only increasing their profit margins.

More as this story develops.

Illustration by Jacky Sheridan.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Depending on who you ask, Valentine's Day is either an absolute crock of shit, a slight inconvenience, or a chance to show your beloved what they really mean to you. For me, it's a combination of all three. Undoubtedly the worst part of V-Day for basic dating types, however, is the acquisition of a table at a restaurant. This is even worse for non-dating types, because not only are you dealing with the cold shiver of abject loneliness, you also can't get anything to fucking eat. It's like the whole world is rejecting you all at once.

Spare a goddamn thought for the waiters and waitresses getting by proxy nausea from a thousand puppy eyes and footsie games scuffing up their restaurants. Sure, they might make a few more tips off some particularly amorous customers, but for the most part they're either cringing the grease out of their hair at dates gone wrong or boaking at the pheromones hissing off a date gone well. We spoke to some of Britain's top servers to hear some of the disgusting, depressing things we do to each other in public on this special, loving day. D'aww!

THE AWKWARD DOUBLE DATE

A couple had come to the restaurant pretty much every week for dinner together but they broke up. Both booked Valentine's Day dinners with the new people they were shagging but obviously hadn't thought about the fact that it was both their favorite restaurant and they clearly would have similar ideas. They turned up like one hour after each other and had booked tables opposite. Both hadn't told their new partners they were only recently single and then they basically had a massive row about 'how dare the other one bring their new partner to 'their' restaurant.' It was very awkward for their dates and the restaurant, as it's very small. The ex-girlfriend started going on about how he met him on Plenty of Fish and how she moved in with him after two months, but then he started staying out late. The Plenty of Fish thing was funny because I think another customer said something along the lines of, "Everyone knows Plenty of Fish is just for sex for ugly people." Which was kind of true for that couple, to be honest.
- Kara

THE VERY HUNGRY CUSTOMER

One of the waiters, who was 16 at the time, got a blow job from a 42-year-old woman. She took him to the basement stock room, didn't kiss him, just sucked him off, went back upstairs and sat down and finished her meal with a group of girlfriends. It's very Samantha from Sex and the City, isn't it?
- Philip

THE POO IN THE WOOWOO

I worked at a grim Wetherspoons on Valentine's Day while I was a student. For some reason, a fair few couples took up the Valentine's Day deal (three-course meal with a drink) and decided to spend their evening there. A student couple sat at a table in the corner. I didn't know him, but I knew of her from different friendship circles. She was one of those sporty ones that goes to university to do sport and tells everyone about how great the sport is. I knew she had a bit of form for doing some pretty rare stuff because she organized all the initiations for her club, or whatever it was.

Anyway, her fella comes to the bar and orders a pitcher of WooWoo, a kind of schnapps, vodka, and cranberry drink. They finished up and left in a hurry. After a few minutes I notice a foul stench coming from their corner. I was surprised to find, among other random things including a drinks menu, that one of them had dropped giant shit in the jug.
- Nick

Illustration by Jacky Sheridan

THE MASHED SPUD-FUCKERS

There was a couple who were having sex and doing coke in the toilet (we only have one) so there was a big queue. I had to ask them to leave, which they shamefully did. The next person went in to use toilet and then another customer came and got me and asked me to clean the toilet, so I was thinking there was loads of coke and, I dunno, cum or whatever around the loo. But the couple had thrown loads of potatoes down the toilet and blocked it. I ran to the manager and said, "There's loads of potatoes in the toilet, can someone make sure no one is downstairs in the stock room taking stuff?" And the manager just said, "Oh, not the fucking potatoes again—who keeps doing that? That's twice this week." I don't know if the shaggers did it or someone before them, but the idea of shagging bent over a toilet full of potatoes is so funny.
- Lisa

THE 6PM SUCKLE

For a good six-month-stint a couple of years ago, I worked at a wannabe 'trendy' craft beer bar in the provincial Scottish city where I went to uni. 

As a small mercy, I'd taken the Valentine's Day shift, because most of the other people I worked with had partners. 

I was cutting limes and stuff, preparing for the night, but at this point it's only 6 PM and it's dead, dead quiet. There's an innocuous-looking couple at the bar. He's a typical sporty-looking bloke with a lads' holiday Facebook cover photo and she's his equally dull, nice-looking girlfriend. So they've had some pulled pork and a couple of overpriced cocktails, and you can imagine they're going home to some dull sex.

 I'm standing there cutting fruit but suddenly I hear a deep, meaty-sounding sucking to the left of me. It's the unmistakable sound of lips on tit and his lips are very tightly, very sloppily clasped around her tit. It was 6PM on fucking Valentine's Day in an empty pub. To this day, I won't forget their mutual look of slightly outraged incomprehension as I chucked them out.
- Francisco

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Shane Warne: cricketer, single dad, truther. Image via

If producers think that audiences watch celebrities in reality TV to "see how the other half lives," they're wrong. For the viewer it's a waiting game. The payoff? Hearing a celebrity say some crazy shit.

Take Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kylie was the most boring one until she started tweeting about chemtrails. "Why did I see 75 planes spraying white stuff into the sky on my 15-minute drive to work... Does this have anything to do with why Honey Bee's (sic) are dying off really fast?"

I don't know Kylie, but thanks for taking on the big questions.

Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Five years and the best part of 58 million units sold since its February 2011 launch, Nintendo's 3DS is the only handheld games console you need in your chunky backpack, subversive print-tote or remarkably roomy coat pocket in 2016. Its only "console-proper" rival, the PlayStation Vita, is as good as dead, with Sony refusing to commit first-party resources to developing new titles for their commercially flat-lining portable. Following the 154 million sales of the DS range before Nintendo's twin-screen system took on the (autostereoscopic) third dimension, the 3DS's market dominance is absolute. And the console's completely changed my relationship with video games since I got one to call my own. Not that its early reception was entirely positive.

Writing on IGN just a couple of months on from its stateside release in March 2011, Audrey Drake remarked that her 3DS had been "collecting dust for weeks", highlighting a lack of launch window third-party titles, adding: "I'm now an extremely dissatisfied customer." Sales were slow, and Nintendo laid the blame for the console's sluggish commercial performance on a lack of high-profile software. With the company losing money to the tune of billions of yen, a price cut had to come – and when it did, it was dramatic. In the UK, the 3DS's initial price of £229.99 was slashed to under £150 just months after its launch. It was a gamble for Nintendo, but one that paid off – it knew that some big-hitters were on the horizon, games that could push the 3DS into profitability.

In November 2011, Super Mario 3D Land began to change the fortunes of the 3DS, ultimately selling over 10 million copies. A month later came Mario Kart 7, which has (to date) beaten that figure by over 2.5 million. Pokémon series titles in 2013 and 2014, a handful of Monster Hunters, "life simulators" Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Tomodachi Life, and more Mario Bros. entries have all racked up sales figures in the multi-millions. The rest is history, save a few headaches. The 3DS is more than just a success; it's another Nintendo phenomenon to rank up there with the handheld that started them all, the Game Boy. Not that Nintendo's debut portable of 1989 was the first on-the-go system – that was Milton Bradley's Microvision, released in 1979. But ask anyone aged between, say, 25 and 40 where their mobile gaming experiences began, and they'll almost certainly answer the Game Boy. (With DS being the most likely response of anyone younger.)

A range of Game Boy models – I eventually owned (and still do) the clear version of what you see here in green, front left (photo via Wikipedia)

I wasn't allowed to have a Game Boy, as a kid. I'd pore over pictures of the whitish-grey machine, with its monochromatic LCD screen, recognisably NES-like face controls, and glowing red power indicator. I'd go to bed with the Argos catalogue, dreaming of what it'd be like to own one, with a copy of the always-bundled Tetris and whatever else I could grab from the store in question – some Bugs Bunny platformer, Alleyway and the first Super Mario Land. But my parents never relented, despite my repeated requests in the run up to several Christmases and birthdays.

Maybe today I can see their point of it "just being a toy", something I'd quickly grow out of – it was a plaything, a time-killer/filler, whereas the family Amiga did so much more (not that we ever used it for homework). Years later, in the late-1990s, my then-girlfriend got a summer job at Nintendo, and one day brought me home a Game Boy Pocket – the clear model – with a couple of games: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (amazing), and Disney's Mulan (I'm not sure I ever played more than five minutes of it). I quickly picked up Tetris, Tennis, Pokémon Blue and a couple more cartridges – including the impossibly difficult Star Wars – but Zelda aside, few held my attention. I had grown out of these simple games – that, and as an 18 year old, many more ways to fill my evenings had just opened up to me.

Handheld gaming didn't pique my interest again for 15 years and change. I'd been through a degree and a publishing job in London, worked for well over a decade in music journalism and begun writing about games as a paid gig (I know, right?) before an email from Nintendo caught my attention. Super Smash Bros. was being relaunched for the company's contemporary consoles, the Wii U and 3DS. I'd played 2001's Melee on the GameCube, liked it, and was keen to check this new version out. Small problem: it was coming out first for the 3DS, and I didn't have one. No problem, as it turned out – Nintendo would loan me a 3DS XL (the bigger-screened model), and a copy of the game. A few days later, sure enough, the postie delivered me a little bundle of joy. I got more than stuck in – every commute was a chance to face a new challenger, and I worked hard on unlocking every character, from EarthBound's Ness to Falco from the Star Fox franchise and Mr Game & Watch. Link and Kirby became my main guys, and while I'm certainly not proficient enough at the new Smash to take on the pros, I reached a personally satisfying level. Eventually, Nintendo needed the 3DS, and game, back. I was close to inconsolable (no pun intended), but another games writer came to my aid.

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I bought a second-hand 3DS XL from a gentleman called Dom. It had a few knocks, nicks and scratches on it, no big deal. So if you see a slightly battered 3DS covered in VICE and Ninja Tune stickers on a train anytime soon, take a peek around it and you'll probably find me – hiya. It's perhaps the greatest gaming investment I've made in recent years, and I absolutely include the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in that snap assessment. I adore my 3DS, and to repeat a point you might have missed earlier: it completely has changed the way I relate to video games, how they impact my life, and the amount of time I even get to spend with them.

You might think that covering games full time means that I play a lot of them. Wrong. Covering games full time means spending hour upon hour chasing stories and commissioning articles; subbing, publishing and promoting content; liaising with other in-house departments about potential new projects; handling everyday admin (people have to get paid); responding to events and announcements that demand instant coverage; and generally keeping on top of an inbox that's got more pitches in it right now than an entire Major League Baseball season. So when it comes to getting hands-on with the "big" console releases of any given year, most of the time I'm in for five, six hours, top. Fallout 4? Barely four. Metal Gear Solid V? Nine. I finished The Witcher 3 and its Hearts of Stone DLC, but that is the exception to the rule. Bloodborne? I'm still the wrong side of Father Gascoigne.

Related: Check out the top 20 games of 2015, according to VICE

But I've sunk a solid 12 hours, at least, into The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and I'm still some way short of finishing 2013's fantastic 3DS RPG. It's a beautiful game, portable but so far from being a compressed take on home-console cousins. And I think that's why, for me, the 3DS has become such an essential amongst my gaming hardware – its games are only rarely "pocket-sized editions" of others you'll have played on more-powerful systems. A Link Between Worlds is a bespoke production that is both lovingly crafted with nostalgia for the SNES's A Link to the Past and the Game Boy's Link's Awakening, and built to perfectly fit the specifications of the 3DS. It makes great use of the 3D, for one thing, with dungeons playing out across a number of simultaneously visible levels, and Link's wall-merging ability always looking exquisite. The same is true of Super Mario 3D Land, which uses the system's stereoscopic top screen to better telegraph routes through stages, and its gyroscope for aiming first-person tools, like binoculars. Neither of these games would work so sweetly on any other platform.

Promotional art for 'The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds'

Which is why it's slightly saddening to see Square Enix's brand-new Final Fantasy Explorers – an engaging take on Capcom's Monster Hunter series, albeit simplified and featuring famous Final Fantasy characters – completely ignore the graphical potential of the 3DS. While every game on the handheld can conceivably be played in 2D, Explorers is only ever that way, no matter how far you push the side-mounted 3D slider. That doesn't particularly detract from what is an enjoyable romp through FF-series sights and sounds (so far, at least – my blue-haired Gary is only six or so hours into her adventuring), but Explorers isn't a game that feels unique to the 3DS. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, a ghost-busting blast through a series of haunted houses, absolutely does; likewise the sublime Mario Golf: World Tour, a sunshine-kissed sports sim that never fails to brighten my day. The 3D is a vital gameplay ingredient of the terrific puzzler Pushmo (aka Pullblox), and makes N64-era Zelda titles Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask look better than they ever have.

On Motherboard: Nintendo Direct Is Still the Best Event in Gaming

And it's accessibility to older games that really makes the 3DS such an indispensible companion for me, on my travels. I've armed mine with a 16GB memory card, onto which I can load any number of old-school NES and Game Boy titles, via Nintendo's digital eShop. So whereas the Game Boy was a toy, the 3DS is a window on the very history of gaming culture. I can use it to play NESsentials like Super Mario Bros. 3, the original Castlevania and Metroid, and Punch-Out!!, as well as GB winners like Kirby's Dream Land and Super Mario Land 2 (both in black and white, of course). And it's not just Nintendo's past that's preserved here – a number of releases for SEGA's Game Gear are on the eShop, while Japanese developer M2's series of SEGA titles "remastered" for the 3DS is regularly delivering the definitive versions of childhood favourites.

"I think all of these classic SEGA titles have much to offer, in terms of evergreen gameplay appeal," is what M2 president Naoki Horii told me in 2015. And having played through the 3DS updates of Streets of Rage 2, Out Run, Fantasy Zone and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, each of which add new gameplay modes to familiar experiences, I can honestly say that these are the best these games have ever been.

'Chrono Trigger' is playable on the DS, which means you can play it on the 3DS, and you really should

The 3DS's backwards compatibility with DS game cards (all 2,000-plus of them) is another massive part of the handheld's appeal. In recent months I've laughed myself sideways while simultaneously saving a high-school girl's relationship in the awesome rhythm-action game Elite Beat Agents; built a drug empire capable of impressing real-life dealers in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars; and shat my pants exploring the USS Sulaco in Aliens Infestation, aka the one Gearbox-made Aliens-series game you should play, and not the stinking Colonial Marines. And then there's Chrono Trigger. Perhaps my favourite SNES RPG, narrowly edging out Secret of Mana and A Link to the Past (I was never much into Final Fantasy back then, sorry), the time-travelling, world-saving Chrono Trigger was ported to the DS in 2008, and to have access to it again, anytime I like, is just glorious. Not that I've been able to get past the sodding Golem Twins on this run. Forgot my element-absorbing armour, didn't I.

The author's somewhat battered 3DS beside his Pocket-edition Game Boy

And even when it's faced with a genre of game that it maybe shouldn't be suited for, like a frame-precise fighter, the 3DS impresses. I actually prefer the portable Super Smash Bros. to its crisper-of-visuals Wii U relative, and Super Street Fighter IV on the handheld, a 3DS launch title in Japan, holds up well against the tournament-play console versions. VICE contributor Andi Hamilton is something of a Street Fighter authority, and says of the 3DS port of IV: "It's a surprisingly fully featured version of Super, and if you're a pad player you can actually use it as a decent practise tool for combos and execution." Not that French Street Fighter pro-player Luffy swears by it – the last time I saw him with his 3DS out, during downtime at a London tournament, he was taking on his girlfriend at Smash.

In conclusion, the 3DS is, for my money – and I've spent plenty of it on it – the best handheld console ever made. I appreciate that there's a lot of love for the Vita, and that the Game Boy will always be in the hearts of gamers of a certain vintage. I respect, too, those who fought so valiantly in the battery wars of the 1990s, but ultimately succumbed to plugging into the wall: the Game Gear and Atari Lynx had their fans. And, yes, Sony sold a certifiable shitload of PSPs, despite those awful UMDs. But the 3DS isn't just a portable for the present – it's a platform for gaming across the ages, and better yet, a means to play (and replay) so many beloved titles from more than three decades of gaming history while on the move. Which is why it's so perfect for me. On the train, at a station, in an airport: I'm rarely bothered by spread sheets, meeting schedules or inbox woes. I can just get my head down and press on with playing. It's a feeling of freedom, really, that I get whenever I switch on my 3DS – and wherever the game in question takes me, I'm almost always happy to be there.

@MikeDiver

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No fighting in Newtown, just loitering. All photos by the author.

Anger at Sydney's lockout laws seems to have hit a new high mark this week. Maybe bar closures have hit critical mass, or maybe it was Premier Mike Baird's hotly disputed Facebook post. Whatever the case #CasinoMike is trending hard for all the wrong reasons and the anger is palpable.

To capture some of this sentiment we hit the streets of Newtown on Friday night. There we met some of those who didn't make the bouncer's cut, or found themselves on the wrong side of lockout. No one would defend violence of course, but then no one felt lockouts were the answer.

Beth (right) and Emmah

I found Beth and Emmah walking past the silent Newtown Hotel just after midnight. They were the only pedestrians in either direction. "We're part of the lockout new-wavers," Emmah said glumly. "We were 17 when the laws came in so it's all we've ever known. I get the gist of it, I agree with the idea of making everything safer but I don't agree with the execution—it's fucking horrible."

Beth said that she approved of Premier Mike Baird's aspirations, but lockout laws didn't produce enough results to validate their cultural cost. "They won't change mass behaviour," she said. "I recently saw a knife fight at a 14-year-old's house party."

I asked Beth what an alternate solution looked like and she mentioned the Red Frogs, which are a Christian organisation helping teens get home on Schoolies. It's a "proactive approach," she said. "They give you red frogs, water, and phone chargers."

Hugo (left) and his friend James

By 1 AM the committed Oxford Street crowd prepared to batten down the hatches for the 1:30 AM lockout, while the more adventurous made their way to the casino. Just joking. They went to Newtown where bouncers only close the door on the truly fuck­eyed, and the drunk can roll around on the pavement with relative impunity. Among the crowds who had fled was Hugo. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes from what he said was a malfunctioning contact lens.

Hugo had just been refused entry to Kelly's and was keen to vent. "I tell you man, we went out to Cargo Bar, got to the door just at 1:30 AM. Not allowed in. Sure we could have done better, got there earlier, but it was a matter of a few minutes."

Hugo said he doesn't blame the bouncers, just the legislation and the negative portrayal of Sydney's drinkers. "People leave places shivering and dishevelled with bad vibes," he said. "We feel like vagrants, loitering like we're menaces."

Theo and Edward (from left) on King Street.

It was 2:30 AM and taxis vomited crowds of lockout victims onto the pavement outside the Marlborough Hotel. The bouncers smiled, checked IDs, and waved almost everybody through. But as quickly as one group was welcomed in, another was turfed out.

"We always get rejected," Edward said. "Sneakers, shorts, the wrong brands. They're trying to weed out trouble makers."

Edward and his mates were wandering down King Street, jaws clenched, tossing up whether they should throw it in or push on to Kelly's. "We met a German girl in Marlborough's, she couldn't believe it man," Edward's friend, Theo, said. "In Europe they don't start clubbing until almost midnight, you do that here and you've missed it."

Theo asked me to include a photo of his crew in front of a toppled street sign in the article. "It's like, Sydney's nightlife is turning down, or something," he said proudly. I saw his analogy, but it obviously hadn't occurred to him that it was this behaviour that got us lockouts.

At 3 AM the night was getting old and the crowds were thinning. A trio of Spanish tourists wrestled each other into the street, paused to take a selfie, and then crawled back to the sidewalk. Ubers descended fast, carrying the ejected back into the suburbs.

Zac (left), Matt, and pies

Chairs started going up on tables, the grim reality-inducing houselights switched on and only one place was left peaking: Newtown Pies.

"I used to live here two years ago," Zac said. "It's changed heaps, everything is off-limits. Sydney catered to whatever your subculture was, like hip ­hop or punk. Everyone had their own place. Now that's all gone."

Zac and Matt were refused from the Marlborough and they told me Newtown is slowly losing ground as the lockout agenda infects the wider city. "We're all being made an example of. You think lockouts and you think of violence. But a huge amount of people are being punished for the actions of the few."

"It's just not democratic."

Meidy with some fresh ink. All photos by the author.

Meet Meidy Saputra Salmon. This 35-year-old father of two is currently trying to start a used car business, but for the bulk of his career he's specialised in roughing up people who owe money. He got into the racket by accident. Around 10 years back Meidy had an acquaintance who was having trouble paying him back, so he hired some thugs to grease the wheels. Meidy saw how effectively this worked and decided to take on some clients of his own.

Today Meidy's employers range from individuals, businesses, and even law officers—basically just anyone who needs to outsource some quasi-legal stand over tactics. You don't really need any qualifications to work for Meidy either. Most of his guys get paid by the job, for cash. He tells me he considers most of his colleagues good friends.

Debt collectors such as Meidy work around the law, which clamped down in 2011 when a debtor died during a at Jakarta Citibank "interview." Now bank collectors can't do anything beyond softly reminding clients to pay back their debts.

Meidy, for his part, says he knows the ins-and-outs of the Indonesian legal system and pushes laws around debt collection as far as he can. It helps that he has contacts within the system, giving him some buffer when he needs the law to look the other way.

To find out what sort of tactics Meidy employs to get his cash, we sat down at his favourite coffee place in Jakarta. There we talked about debt, violence, and feeling like you're the good guy.

Meidy and some of his colleagues enjoy a coffee

VICE: Hi Meidy, take me through the process of getting a job. What's the first thing you do?
Meidy Saputra Salmon: We do our research, which is easy as most debtors have some sort of social media account. We consider their financial conditions, and what kinds of relations they have, mainly so that we can make sure we don't confront someone when they're surrounded by their goons. This would result in a fight, which I try to avoid. I've got about 30 guys working for me, and I rotate between guys depending on the needs of the different debtors.

How much of your collecting experience has involved actual physical confrontation?
About 20 percent. Most of the time persuasion is the best approach. You talk to them, persuade them to pay and hint at the consequences if they don't. That and embarrassing someone really works. Everyone has got a sense of shame, so if you shame them, they'll break down and pay.

What are some examples of the shaming techniques? I've heard of calling a debtor's neighbours and relatives and airing his or her dirty laundry.
No, that's a stupid method used by official bank guys. Let me give you a better example: There was an ex-army general who didn't want to pay the money he owed my client, so I told my guys to get a bullhorn. We then walked around his neighbourhood and loudly shouted, this guy owes this amount of money. It only took a short stroll before he gave up and paid his debts. Sometimes we also put up a huge banner on a debtor's front yard with their name and the amount they owe. I actually learned that this method was okay from a law officer.

At work at his car business

What's something violent you've done while collecting?
I once shoved an ashtray into somebody's mouth. He owed my car business money, and went into hiding when we took back the car. Two of his friends came and tried to get the car back, but I told them to beat it. Then we brought him down to the office and asked him for the money, but he kept babbling nonsense. That made me lose it so I shoved an ashtray into his mouth. That got him to pay.

What are some of the more extreme places you've visited to collect money?
I've collected money from guys who are locked up behind bars. You just have to have contacts within the jail system to get inside. Another time I went over to a debtor's spiritual advisor and hinted that if we don't find this guy everyone related to him will get in trouble. I got home and the shaman called me up, ratting out this guy's whereabouts. Turns out he was hiding in the jungle in the mountains. We went up there and got him.

What's the usual amount of money that your debtors owe?
I only take jobs where it's up from millions of rupiah (AU$10,000) to billions of rupiah (over AU$100,000). Right now I'm tackling someone who's in jail and owes (AU$350,000) to my client, but the client hasn't yet paid my five percent fee so I'm just letting it simmer.

After hours at home

Have you ever chased a smaller amount of money?
Yeah, once a guy owed my wife three million rupiah (roughly AU$300). I was getting a headache because my wife was frustrated, you know how it is. Usually I wouldn't go after such small amount, but when it's the wife...

How do you make sure you're not actually breaking the law?
If it comes down to physical confrontation, I make sure that whatever we're doing is in self-defense. So the debtor has to make some sort of first strike, whether it's hitting me or chucking something onto the floor, or spitting at me, or maybe even just shouting at me. I mean, the law isn't specific about what kind of "attack" you are rightfully allowed to defend yourself against. Usually I can justify anything as provocation.

Do you ever feel bad for the people you're beating up?
Of course. I often know it's difficult for them to get the money. That's why I try to take only jobs where I feel like the debtor isn't a good guy. It's also why I start off talking to everyone as a human being.

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Idris Elba arrives at Baftas. Not sure if he's excited or yawning.

Alicia Vikander commented recently that awards season is like "celebrating the same person's birthday." If that's the case, then the BAFTAs, supposedly the most important night of the British film industry's year, is the fancy dinner with the parents where everyone's on their best behaviour. It took place on Sunday night at the Royal Opera House, extravagant to the last, but ultimately too well stage-managed and far too good at avoiding anything that may be branded controversial to be of any interest at all.

Eddie Redmayne, the suave older brother in this scenario, seemed to dominate the evening, despite not winning an award. Eton-educated, knowing exactly how to behave at a soiree, he's the perfect poster boy for the modern BAFTAs. Even journalists, allowed for one night to be on the fun side of the VIP rope, were seen posing for mock-hysterical selfies with Redmayne. Fans screamed his name over and over. "Please sign my autograph," one very audibly cried as he carried on talking to an interviewer. "I've been waiting here for hours."

Most stars took their cue from Redmayne: camera-ready, media-trained, experts at the non-quote quote. There was a vanishingly small but audible #BaftasBlackout protest from the Creatives of Colour group. (John Boyega, Peckham-born son of a preacher and childhood friend of Damilola Taylor, and Idris Elba, native of Dagenham, were the only non-white faces to be nominated this year.) Creatives of Colour handed out flyers and unfurled a banner calling the film business "male, pale and stale". They called for a quota system, chanting that those on the inside were "scared of diversity". No one seemed to take much notice, and they were cordoned off by a security presence at the northern edges of Covent Garden.

The fact is that the film industry, despite its best liberal intentions, is a historically racist, patriarchal bun fight, defined by nepotism and insider-access. A recent survey by the trade magazine Screen found that, of the 75 the most prominent film companies in the UK industry today, all were led by white people. Only a tiny amount had a black, Asian, or ethnic minority executive in their senior management. The BFI, BBC and Channel 4, recipients of public money for filmmaking, provide the lion's share of funding for these companies. Journalists, in search of talking points, can try and make a stink, but it feels like a losing game.

To exacerbate the staid feeling ever further, the BAFTAs have been bought to the hilt by sponsorship. Even host Stephen Fry was furiously tweeting about the #EEBaftas. The night seems designed to be narrow in its ambition, shaved of its edges so as not to offend a brand, covered in a Best of British triumphalism so sticky it's asphyxiating. Just to drive it home, the broadcasters gave themselves a two-hour lag, rather than airing the ceremony live on BBC1. By that time, of course, the winners had been tweeted to the moon and back, and everything of even remote interest had been edited out.

Fry is in his 15th year of presenting, and was his usual avuncular, ever-so-slightly racy self – everyone's fun distant relative, now only seen at weddings and funerals, more and more in need of an earlier night. He proceeded to attempt the Orwellian "KissCam" - a very obvious attempt, like DeGeneres' Oscar selfie, to make BAFTAs go viral. You can picture the creative agency strategy meetings in your mind.

Maggie wonders how she's going to get out of this one.

Leo rudely avoided the octogenarian lips of Maggie Smith when the KissCam landed on them, grabbing her in a bicep curl and bear muzzle to the neck, as if he might, somewhere in his mind, still be fighting Tom Hardy on a snowy mountainside. Julianne Moore was properly ambushed by Bryan Cranston. Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, a real couple who are famously very private, refused to play game when the camera landed on them. This was edited out in the televised version, apparently too awkward for the Sunday night viewer to handle.

Ultimately, the BAFTAs took place without a headline to muster. Even the awards went where they were expected: The Revenant, Leo, and Brie Larson all picking up the gongs they were favourites to win. It was all over in time for Eddie Redmayne to get the bus home.

On we march to the Oscars, to the eagle-eyed scrutiny of yet more suits and dresses, more pre-rehearsed acceptance speeches (The Academy are now asking to pre-screen 'thank you' lists), to more moments engineered only to be shared the world over. The hope of something spontaneous happening has been forever lost in a thousand hashtags.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

It's fair to say that things kicked off on Friday, when Cretan farmers in Athens outside the Ministry of Rural Development protested against the Greek government's proposed new pension reform plans. By 10AM riot police had positioned themselves around the ministry at Archarnon Street and two platoons, with a pile of vegetables chucked by the farmers already scattered at their feet, stood firm at the entrance to push back the farmers determined to storm it.

The traditional Cretan boots worn by many of the farmers

The farmers were part of a large group that's been protesting across Greece for more than two weeks now, against new measures by the Greek government that would increase their taxes and abolish many tax breaks. Across Greece, farmers' tractors have staged blockades on major highways. This Friday, the blockade arrived in Athens with a crew of farmers from Crete, where farming is the island's lifeblood.

A mix of ages, the farmers looked mostly to be fathers with their sons. When I approached the younger men and asked why they'd gone through all the effort to hop on boats to Athens for the day, they shouted: "We were too angry to stay at home." From what they went on to tell me, they're not only angry but frustrated, and determined not to let the new insurance laws pass. The new measures affect them more than their elders, they said, mainly because their simple dream of staying in their villages and cultivating the fields feels unattainable and may collapse altogether.

The first skirmishes began when a farm truck loaded with tomatoes tried to approach the entrance of the ministry to "show the minister their produce", the farmers put it. A street fight erupted with the police reacting first, then the farmers responding by throwing vegetables, bricks, bottles, improvised smoke bombs and wood. With every effort to push them back, the police shield was met with blows from traditional Cretan walking sticks. Soon after, stones began to fly and the first two floors of the ministry now have barely any windows left intact. The riot police responded with tear gas and stun grenades to repel the protesting farmers, making six arrests in the process.

Soon the intensity died down and when I could breathe through the tear gas again I noticed that most of the farmers were just wearing traditional Cretan headcovers and boots. Only a few, wary of what might have happened, showed up with gas masks or helmets. Despite their inexperience with big protests, they threw whatever they could get their hands on with gusto.

Some of the farmers explained that their goal was simply to talk to the minister and prime minister to negotiate the new bill from scratch – a plan that they weren't willing to give up. By noon, things had calmed and the farmers gathered a little distance away from the police, shouting that the cops should be ashamed about those who they were protecting, before singing a traditional song with tear gas-countering maalox around their eyes. Trash bins burned nearby. In the moment of relative calm, I spoke to some of the young men in more detail.

Michalis, 22: "If they don't agree to meet us we'll burn the building down."

"We set out last night from Crete to fight for our future and we will stay as long as necessary. We came here and the police forced us to react. If the bills pass we will carry out the blockades again in Crete and in Athens until we get what we are entitled to so that we don't take the law into our own hands. I'm a farmer, I cultivate grapes and olives. Not just me, but all my family and relatives. If they don't agree to meet us we'll burn the building down. There is no way we will accept the new bill."

Giorgos, 23: "All of Crete lives on agriculture"

"We came here to find a solution, but the police started throwing tear gas at us, as if their own forefathers didn't work as farmers too. The new pension and tax measures should be scrapped for all professions, not just for us farmers. I'm 23 years old and a farmer in Hania, where we cultivate tomatoes, and I never once thought of leaving. But with all that's happening I don't know how much longer I can stay. It's like they're telling us we don't exist anymore, since our main occupation is farming and now we're forced not to produce anything. But all of Crete lives on agriculture."

Giorgos, 21: "We won't let the new measures pass or let Alexis Tsipras sit on a throne he doesn't deserve."

"They're preparing our tombstones for us; we can't accept that. We're 14 days into the blockade of Crete and this time we took over the tax office in the capital Heraklion, without causing a single penny of damage. The police here didn't let us protest as we wanted.

"We won't let the new measures pass or let Alexis Tsipras sit on a throne he doesn't deserve. I am 21 and a farmer, but I see that there is no future in the profession. Nevertheless, I do not want to leave and throw away all my father and grandfather's hard work. I know I won't be hungry because I can grow my own food, but I'll stop working as a farmer. What will then become of the rest of Greece?"

Spyros, 29: "It would have been better if Crete had held a referendum last year"

"I studied electrical engineering but decided to go into farming and stay in Crete. If these measures pass, we're finished. I think we won't become producers again, because from where I come from in Crete, everyone is in farming.

"I hope that the government will think logically and will withdraw the new measures for all those concerned. It's like having to sell off our land and become labourers in our own fields. We're not yet 30, but we don't want to give up farming. The way things are going we'll be forced to have a referendum, which we should have done last year and become independent from the mainland."

Yiannis, 26: "I studied to return to Crete and go into farming."

"Our basic demand is the withdrawal of the new social security bill, which is a coup de grâce for the Greek farmer. I'm 26 years old and graduated in oenology (wine-making) and viticulture (the study, science and production of grapes) because I wanted to work in the fields. I studied it, because like many Cretans, even though it is a hard and difficult profession, this is what we wanted to do. But I'm thinking of leaving for someplace else, maybe Holland or France that has rural areas and is connected to what I studied. Here, the production costs are increasing and the product prices falling. Now with the new bill I'm really thinking of leaving. They're forcing us to go because they're wiping us out."

The tractor blockade then moved from the ministry to Syntagma Square

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A mural inside the United Grand Lodge of England (All photos author's own)

In 2017, British Freemasonry will celebrate its 300th birthday. The exact origins of the infamous secret society are still unknown. While the first Grand Lodge opened in 1717, evidence suggests that Freemasonry began much earlier. The most romantic history, press officer Mike Baker tells me, points to the Knights Templar. More realistically, it may have been the product of the medieval guild system combined with elements of Rosicrucianism. We're at the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) in London's Covent Garden, the imposing stone building decorated with esoteric symbols. The Masons' reputation for mysticism has made them a beacon for conspiracy theorists, ranging from purported links with 9/11 to the Illuminati and New World Order. Now, in the lead up to their tercentenary, the Masons are trying to manage this centuries-old PR problem. The question is, what happens when the world's oldest secret society tries to open its doors?

Part of the Masons' makeover is challenging the most persistent myths. "We actually prohibit politics and religion in what we do," Mike tells me. They're even hesitant about making public statements, "because of our history and because we would not want to seem politically motivated. You know, the conspiracy theories around, with Bilderberg and things like that." So why join if there's no opportunity to meddle in politics? It's all about the values, Mike says. The Masons make charitable donations as part of their community involvement. Right now they're in the middle of funding London's second air ambulance. "The next time you have a serious accident and the air ambulance flies down and, underneath it, you'll see a square and compasses – just think how that happens to be."

One of UGLE's more surprising requirements is that members must believe in a Supreme Being. "As long as it's a creative force," Mike quickly adds, meaning no Satanists. It's true that other orders of Freemasonry, like the Grand Orient in France, will admit atheists. But UGLE has been steadfast in refusing to imitate the French. "It adds a degree of credibility to promising to be good basically," says Mike. "The overall obligations we have, which are purely and simply about being a good person and upholding our values. So that's why the Supreme Being is important to us."

Another mural

While they might not be a religion, allegorical plays and symbolism are key to how the Masons operate. The Grand Lodge is filled with evidence of that mysticism. The main room is decorated by a fantastic checked carpet, ceiling murals, and a mindboggling golden organ. There are also several majestic thrones. During ceremonies, Mike explains, the Worshipful Master sits in the east where the sun rises and the Senior Warden in the west, where it sets. Like so many Masonic rituals, it symbolises the progress of man from darkness to enlightenment.

Thrones turn out to be a theme in the Grand Lodge, with three enormous specimens in the Grand Officer's Robing Room. The walls are decorated with portraits of Royal family members who were Grand Masters before being crowned. The reason the thrones are so large, explains Mike, "is that Prince Regent, who became George IV, was quite a big chap. Somewhere in the region approaching 30 stone I believe, so he needed a big chair." Stools are provided during investiture to keep the royal feet from dangling.

Watch: Confessions of an Internet Troll

What about the famous Masonic handshake, I ask him. Is it real? "Yeah," he says. "They're nothing really odd... All they are is a form of qualification for you to pass from one stage to the next. So after your initiation you're given another token of recognition or handshake, which allows you to pass into the next level... And really it's rather boring." Talking to the press officer, it's clear that part of their strategy is downplaying anything too weird.

A stained glass window at the United Grand Lodge of England

More contentious than the handshake is the issue of female Freemasons. The male-only sentiment is built into their rituals, with Masons bearing their breast to prove their masculinity. In England there are women's lodges which are recognised by UGLE as "regular" in everything but gender. "Regular," Mike explains, "is a word that means that they do things the way that we would expect." UGLE doesn't acknowledge the small number of mixed lodges. It's "a heritage thing" Mike says, and not one that their members are eager to change.

In that respect, the Masons resemble so many other old boys' clubs that are being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But that reluctance to change is becoming a demographic problem for the Masons. The overwhelming number of Freemasons are, unsurprisingly, men. They're also ageing quickly. Right now, there are five times as many members over 80 as there are aged 21-30. The mean age is late-50s. So the Masons are reaching out to younger men. This has meant going online, being role models in the community, and possibly modernising the more archaic texts.

Part of the problem for the Masons is that their distinctiveness is both a blessing and a curse. They're a deist non-religion marked by a disjointed mixture of conservatism and high theatre. Surely some of the attraction for any potential member is that weirdness. After all, what's the point of joining a secret society that wants to be open, transparent, and normal? But with that comes more of the same reputational hammering the Masons want to avoid. I ask Mike if there's ever the temptation to just open everything up? Almost all of their material, he tells me, is available online anyway. However, for UGLE's members, looking would spoil the surprise. Right now they're trying "to demystify it but without removing the element of fascination – that's the difficult thing." If the Masons want to celebrate their fourth centenary, they'll need to square that difficult circle.

@DylanBrethour

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Kanye West perfoms on SNL Dana Edelson/NBC

His extravagance makes Liberace look like Frank Gallagher, but over the weekend, Kanye West tweeted that he was $53 million dollars in personal debt and asked tech billionaires such as Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg to help fund his future projects rather than "open up one school in Africa like you really helped the country."

You can imagine Kanye has a few big bills to pay at the moment. Last week's huge Madison Square Garden fashion show, beamed live to cinemas around the world, was just the latest in a string of very expensive projects. When he proposed to Kim Kardashian, he rented out the entire AT&T baseball stadium in San Francisco and got the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to perform. His last big US tour, for Yeezus, included a 60ft-wide circular LED screen, a custom soundsystem and a 50ft-high mountain that could change into a volcano.

Just days before tweeting about his debt, Kanye had offered to give Puma their "measly" million dollars back after they signed Kylie Jenner as a model, something Adidas-sponsored Kanye saw as "dividing the family".

Perhaps because he regularly compares himself to an omnipotent deity, people don't tend to think too much about how Kanye pays for all this. Still, it seems confusing that one of the biggest music artists in the world would have fallen so far into the red. We spoke to music industry expert Chris Cooke, MD and Business Editor of music-industry website Complete Music Update, to find out if someone as big as Kanye could be broke.

VICE: Hi Chris. So $53million seems like an awful lot of debt for something other than a nation state.
Chris Cooke: It does. I mean we can't know if that's true, but I tend to assume that around two thirds of what Kanye says is bollocks. He has his fair share of businesses, both in music and fashion, and so he could be running up debts there. But that does seem like a lot of money still, and Twitter is a very odd place to admit it if it were true.

I do worry about his expenditure though. How much does it cost to rent out all of Madison Square Garden for a fashion show and beam it around the world? How much does it cost to create a bespoke soundsystem for your tour, especially if you don't play that many dates and keep postponing shows?
Yep, absolutely. For example, as a record company, you make most of your money on the first few albums a successful artist puts out, in part because when you're a big artist putting out records, it becomes incredibly expensive. You want the best studios, the best producers and the most outlandish marketing, and that all effects the profitability of the record. Live too, profitability depends on the ambitions of the artist. One Direction live shows, for example, are basically just them jumping up and down. That's an incredibly profitable way to tour. Whereas Kanye sees himself as more than just a performer - he has artistic vision and so he puts on a big show -but that will affect the profitability of touring. If you're not willing to just tour it for 18 months solidly so it becomes more cost-efficient over time, then you're not going to make big profits.

So how do you think Kanye makes most of his money?
If you're a big star then your single biggest revenue stream is often trademark licensing, which is basically licensing out your name and your brand to other companies in sponsorship deals and products. That will always outperform record sales, partly because you keep most of the money from those deals rather than the record label taking a share. Kanye remains a very bankable artist. He has decent sales. He's streaming this album for seven days exclusively through Tidal, and presumably he's being paid quite well for that.

What do you think is going on here then, if Kanye's not as in debt as he say he is? Did he just get a shocker of a credit card bill and freak out?
Well the callout to the tech world is interesting. In the hip-hop world, it seems as if the people he aspires to be are more like Dre and Jay Z, who arguably have achieved more as entrepreneurs as they have as artists, certainly in terms of their wealth. It's interesting his rant is aimed not at the entertainment business or his record label but at the tech industry. It's kind of saying: you bought Dre's business, why won't you go into business with me?

Right, and maybe as a designer for Adidas, you're not making the same kind of money that you would be if you owned a big stake in Vitamin Water like 50 Cent, or sold your headphone company to Apple like Dre?
Dre made a lot of money with Beats but 50 Cent was pleading poverty last year, albeit as part of a messy lawsuit, so these business aren't always successful.

Do you think that Kim Kardashian, who does countless brand partnerships, as well as perfumes and apps, is making more money than her husband is from music?
Oh yeah, if you're getting to the level where you're doing those kinds of deals then you're making more money from that than anything else. For Beyonce, perfume is one of her biggest revenue streams. That's why One Direction and Justin Bieber have perfume deals, because they're incredibly lucrative. It's almost all profit.

So should Mark Zuckerberg return Kanye's call?
I'm not sure about that, but he could certainly afford it. And I'm sure if he does, Kanye will be the first to tell us about it.

In 17 numbered tweets, no doubt. Thanks Mark.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Outside a café in Delft, a suburb of the so-called Cape Flats in the Western Cape province of South Africa, a security camera picks up a young man standing by a door, lighting up a cigarette. A hand with a gun in it extends from the frame of the door and lights up the screen with muzzle fire—a noiseless bang. The young man falls to the floor, before another man, holding the gun, exits, and double-taps inexpertly to finish the job. The one on the floor shakes with the force of the shot and is still. The other man runs.

Welcome to the Cape Flats—part of a province where 310 gang-related murders took place in 2013 alone. A relic of South Africa's apartheid legacy, it's staggering on the brink of a gang violence crisis that has few parallels in the modern world. It has its own particular mythos, a blend of celebrity status, urban legends, a monster meth-derivative known locally as "tik," and a violence rate that ranks Cape Town 20th in a recent study of the most violent cities on Earth—higher than many high-profile crime-ridden cities in the US, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.

Most news reports and analysts estimate that there are about 100,000 gang members operating in the province, spread out over 130 official gangs. With a homicide rate of 50 per 100,000 residents, and 70,000 drug-related incidents recorded between 2010 and 2011, the situation is truly virulent. Names like the Junky Funky Boys, Hard Livings, and Americans are the most common—in conjunction with the internationally notorious and mythical prison "Numbers Gang."

Officers from the City of Cape Town's Metro Police Unit sifting through seized drugs and paraphernalia.

The situation has escalated to the extent that schools are closed down when the violence and tit-for-tat shootings become too widespread. Premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, has repeatedly called for the deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) in the area. The violence permeates every aspect of every resident's life. According to a report in The Guardian last year, a life is lost to gang violence every five days on the Cape Flats, and 25 to 30 firearms are seized every week.

The security camera footage is shown to us by Charl Kitching of the City of Cape Town's Metro Police Unit, half an hour before we embark on a 50-man operation with him and his team into the Flats. It was taken about a week prior, in a period of escalating gang violence related to the release of key players from prison. "They make damn sure that guy is dead. They don't play games," says Kitching. Along with Alderman JP Smith, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, Kitching and his team undertake this operation as part of the Gangs and Drugs Unit that was launched in 2011 by the Metro Police in response to the crisis on the Flats.

The Cape Flats, as they're known colloquially, are a collection of informal settlements and suburbs that were formed in the 1950s in line with the apartheid government's forced relocation policies and legislation. Historically, the area is also home to South Africa's largest "colored" population; one of the four main designations of race under apartheid that has a mixed race ancestry consisting of European, African, and Asian blood. The Western Cape is the only province that is not majority black African—and also the only province not under majority control of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Colored persons were granted more political concessions than black persons in the 80s by the Nationalist government, and the two groups generally see themselves as culturally distinct. Racism between colored and black folk is not unheard of. This means that when democracy was negotiated in the years between Mandela's release in 1990 and the first democratic elections in 1994, the ANC was not the coloured voters' default choice.

The Western Cape is thus a key symbol in South Africa's political landscape, giving rise to a power struggle that often leaves communities out in the cold. The response to gang crime is not homogenous—it's intricate, bureaucratic, and plagued by infighting. The ultimate irony here is that the race-politics that created the Flats in the first place are now ensuring that a cooperative, effective solution to end its woes is nowhere in sight.

The Metro Unit, consisting of around 600 members, is accountable to the city, thus the ruling provincial government, the Democratic Alliance (DA). Whereas the SAPS, as the primary law enforcement agency in the country, number around 22,000 and answer only to the national executive: the ANC. The broader political playing field, that of the ever-present struggle between the ANC and the DA, is leaving a horrendous mark on a community that couldn't care less about who takes care of the situation—just that it's taken care of.

The Metro Police are generally intended only to enforce traffic and by-laws. In the Western Cape, they've had to undertake further responsibility in violent crime prevention and form supplementary units such as the Gangs and Drugs team in response (unofficially) to SAPS inefficacy—poor conviction rates, endemic corruption, and shocking administration. Rumors of police complicity are widespread, and in June last year a former officer, Christiaan Prinsloo, was arrested in a highly publicized case for supplying gangs with firearms. The conviction rate for gang-related offenses is estimated to be around 2 percent—35 successful murder convictions out of 950 reported murders in the last three years.

Metro now resemble a highway patrol on protein powder. The department has grown by 53 percent in the past nine years. Officially, they can make arrests, conduct search and seizures, and carry more firepower than is usual for any council-controlled cop. As JP Smith puts it, the SAPS have forced them to "reinvent the wheel," with R46 million set aside by the city last year just to combat gangs.

"The public have no trust in the police stations. There is no confidence in SAPS—they are completely discredited to the public," he says. "The National Prosecuting Authority is now talking to directly us, which is unheard of. They're taking cases directly from us."

Smith feels very strongly about the politics of it all: "There's purposeful malicious undermining on a political level, and you see that in the starvation of resources."

The gangs become social institutions, an aspirational cult for the disillusioned and the poor. At night, with the Gangs Unit, the city-subsidized council housing resembles a Soviet-style communist area. The apartments are lined up in neat rows, blocks extending skywards with narrow, poorly lit alleys cracking them open. Everything is tarmac, cement, faded, glum.

The Gangs Unit undertake this large-scale operation on a bi-weekly basis. As we slink through blocks with Afrikaans names like Geduld (patience), residents peer at us from up high. The Unit plays an almost matronly role—tough love. People loitering about are told to get indoors: "Wat maak jy nog so laat buite?" ("What are you doing out so late?") and the entire process is one of search and seizure based on intelligence gathered throughout the week. Some residents take issue with Metro on these seemingly random searches—others are welcoming and friendly.

The officers all tell us that this is the quietest night they've had in months. Generally they can expect lines of frustrated residents throwing rocks, bricks and sometimes even Molotovs at them. Many of the Unit are coloured people from the Flats themselves. They know the areas, and they know the people.

A call comes in of an inter-block shooting. The stench of cordite is still heavy in the air when we get there. The gangsters literally shoot from one apartment block to another across a street. Apparently the residents help them stash guns and blend in with the others as soon as the boere (pigs) show up. In many cases, the Unit tells us, the residents tell them to go find other gangsters; that these ones are theirs and that the OTHER gangsters are the bad ones. The tension and the mistrust, despite the efforts of the Metro to work on a more personal level than the SAPS, is clear to see.

"It would help if SAPS were properly deployed. The fact that you have a 2 percent conviction rate for gang violence tells you the whole story," says Smith in the van. "It's completely political. It's also why they don't want specialised units. Because the guys who have one foot in the gang environment don't want their businesses to be scratched."

Premier Zille has often drawn the same conclusion. Speaking in 2014 regarding the banning of the famed specialized units in 2003, she said: "That leaves only one conclusion: they were shut down by the then commissioner, Jackie Selebi, because he became friends with some 'big fish' who did not want their activities effectively investigated."

Selebi, a former president of Interpol, had previously admitted being friendly with high-profile gangsters. He was convicted in 2010 on charges of corruption but was released on medical parole two years later and died early in 2015.

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The SAPS, however, have had their own successes. Launched in 2010, Operation Combat is an anti-gang strategy spearheaded by Major General Jeremy Veary. In addition to the promulgation of the Prevention of Organized Crime Act, the strategy has seen the successful conviction of 16 high-ranking Fancy Boys and six 28's from Bishop Lavis and Valhalla Park—purportedly as a result of two years of high-intensity intelligence gathering and effort. The overall conviction rate remains low, however. Smith alleges that Veary and his team are unwilling to work with them.

"We are very willing to cooperate and have reached out to them continually. I have made three appointments to . I've even gone through a political colleague of his to set up a meeting," claims Smith. "Three meetings, all of which were cancelled within minutes. It was an open 'diss' to us. We've tried—there isn't willingness."

The ANC and its comrades have also fired back in the public sphere, accusing Smith and Zille of being rudderless and lacking in leadership: "Smith is copying foreign gimmicks at huge cost to the city, with no original idea to solve the problem," wrote Tony Ehrenreich, a trade-unionist and ANC member. "His so-called Crime interrupters have been of no use in this crisis, as the most high profile area is falling apart, while he blames everyone else."

Compounded by the political divisions between provincial and national authorities, the crisis seems no closer to being resolved, particularly due to the recent White Paper draft bill on the "streamlining" of SAPS and Metro Police announced in August of 2015. It was described by Western Cape provincial authorities as "proof of the fact that this remains primarily a political move and that the desire to seize control of the Metro Police services around South Africa was born from and is driven by a party political agenda and not the broad public interest."

Sure enough, a week after our ride-along with Metro in November of 2015, the Mail & Guardian's acclaimed investigative journalism unit revealed that current president Jacob Zuma had met with gang lords in the run-up to the 2011 local elections. Political support was promised by the gangsters in exchange for business opportunities, with the gang lords allegedly addressing Zuma in "friendly" tones. The report was dismissed as fake by the ANC, despite its corroboration by two independent witnesses.

The fact that gang lords can make these kinds of promises and meet with the president is indicative of the sway they hold in the community. Metro Police can only do so much with the resources available, all while their superiors battle it out on a political playground wholly removed from the realities of life on the flats. The officers we accompanied refused to be named for fear of gang retaliation, but they all share a kind of beleaguered inevitability. The night's report ends with a preparatory brief on the next day's mission: the monitoring of the funeral of the kid who'd been shot in Delft.

A senior official caps the night with a smoke. We ask him why he does it, when the communication between community and cop has deteriorated so badly, when the job seems so thankless and the prospects so bleak, so enmeshed in South African stereotypes. How do you police a community that often doesn't want to be policed by you?

He replies: "Eish, man. Somebody's got to start cleaning up this country."

Follow Karl and Shaun on Twitter.

If you say kangaroo enough times, it stops being a furry animal with a pouch and becomes a sound. The ang disconnects from the gar and the shapes your mouth makes are foreign territory. It starts to feel impossible that you've ever said kangaroo in your life before this point. Semantic satiation is the study of repetition—the psychological phenomenon in which the echoing of a word causes it to lose all meaning. There are plenty of curious studies that prove the power of the word or the loss of that power. Language is weird and slippery, but its capability never to be underestimated.

I can't remember the first time someone said it in front of me. But it happens a lot and always in the same tone: "I'm having a total panic attack about it" or "X and Y happened and I went mental, I had an actual panic attack." To take that at face value, it's quite an odd thing to claim a medical episode when you're describing a mild to moderately stressful everyday incident. Why would you say you're experiencing overwhelming and disabling anxiety, feeling like you're being choked to death or having a heart attack, wanting to collapse under the desk, when you're not? If I overhear this in public, I scowl and want to say, "Really? Did you really find yourself paralyzed in a cubicle wondering whether this will be the time you're going to die, puke, or shit yourself—maybe all three?"

If I see it online, where it often manifests, I want to quote the tweet and show the mutation of language for what it is. This is just one example relevant to me and my own mental health, but it's undeniably part of a wider discourse we've carried over into 2016. You'll be familiar with it. It's "I'm so OCD," "he's completely bipolar," "so depressed right now."

Why has this slipped into speech in the first place? It's part of our growing of language of catastrophe. Whether it's the media, ads, or public service announcements, everyone is demanding our attention, and in order to grasp it, the sell becomes exaggerated. In Britain, we've absorbed America's insistence on hyperbole. We totally love or hate something and nothing in between. In case someone doesn't know you're being sincere, repeat "genuinely," "seriously," or "literally," and that'll work. The stakes rise on social media between average young person to person: we'll go kill ourselves, hate our lives, fuck "everything." Of course, brands and businesses regurgitate our drama and Mondays are a cause for faux-depression memes that insist we're all in this together, so we stay in and watch their shows and deserve to eat our dark feelings with their junk. We're a generation of oversharers, and why else are emotions there but to be shared?

There's nothing inherently wrong in it. But when people say they're having a panic attack when they're just stressed, or "OCD" because they like cleaning, it points to either a total disconnect between language and meaning or a troubling symptom of self-diagnosis culture. Or, more worryingly, both. Naturally, anyone should be able to describe their own feelings and moods on their own terms. But at what cost and to whom?

Dr. Zsofia Demjen is a linguist who studies the intersections of language, mind, and and health. She explained why this trend matters. "Using bipolar or schizo or essentially technical words to describe mundane or everyday experiences means the original technical meaning of the term becomes diluted and it becomes more strongly associated with these simpler or more fleeting experiences. It normalizes illness. The potential problem is that 'I'm depressed' now means 'I'm sad.' Then how does someone who actually has depression describe their illness or how they feel? How can they differentiate the much more complex, much more intense thing they have from this thing everyone always claims ownership of?"

David Hartery, 25, has bipolar disorder and it pisses him off when bipolar is wrongly used. "It's always to do with changeability or indecision, or even if they are talking about mood swings, it's always making light of it. Bipolar's quite a hard thing to live with so I think it's annoying and spreads a false idea of what bipolar is, which is harmful." Doug Thompson, who has OCD, finds this adoption of language similarly reductive. "Saying something or someone has OCD is on a level with 'you're being silly' for me. I guess I associate it with being childish. And I'm sat silently thinking, You don't know whenever anyone uses it to effectively say they're just a neat freak."

Ableist language like this matters because when people apply an illness to themselves, they don't have to deal with it daily.

There's something to be said for how it makes sufferers feel; they're going through something stigmatized and often debilitating, while people are essentially being collectively flippant about it. Emily Reynolds is working on a book about mental health. Even she struggles when people misuse the term. "I know people don't mean to do it and it's thoughtlessness rather than spite, but it just wounds me a little bit every time and makes me feel I can't trust that person," she explained. "I'm happy to call out family or friends, but sometimes, at work, for example, you just can't. people throw around 'I feel so manic' or 'he's so bipolar,' I just feel awkward about my diagnosis. Even with my level of willingness to talk about it, I feel small and awkward."

The issue goes deeper than individual feelings. "If we come to understand mental illness as something everybody has on a weekly basis, it facilitates the attitude of 'just snap out of it,'" says Dr. Demjen. "That in turn actually facilitates stigma because then if someone does have OCD say in the clinical sense—see, even I'm having to specify clinical here because already we have this dilution in language—their symptoms end up not being taken as seriously as they should be."

Dr. Demjen talks about something else called negative evaluation, which happens when we refer to other people being bipolar or OCD. "When people say that, they don't mean the person is clinically ill, they mean their behavior isn't seen as positive. And again, if you take the idea that words acquire and change meaning, then bipolar or OCD acquires this negative association. Then someone who is diagnosed with one of these illnesses perceives it as a negative evaluation and judgement of themselves rather than a neutral diagnosis. This facilitates the stigma that they feel and also the potential stigma that others might impose on them because they also have the same associations. If someone goes to their employer and tells them, 'I'm depressed,' the employer has those associations as well." It's a vicious cycle.

You'd never use a physical illness like cancer as a negative throwaway term to mean lazy or weak. But because mental illness is invisible to most, it enables this slip of language to happen.

If you exaggerate this concept, it begins to look ridiculous. You'd never use a physical illness like cancer as a negative throwaway term to mean lazy or weak. However, because mental illness is invisible to most, it enables this slip of language to happen. It's so easy to conflate anything with mental health with feelings and emotions because those are also "in your head." Of all these terms, depression has been casually used the longest. To say "depressed" is to quite literally mean sad, gloomy or dejected and so we're used to naturally hearing that in its own context. That's where language fails with its multiple meanings.

Why have these other terms started to get used, though? Dr. Demjen suggests it's in part to do with disorders being more in the public domain now. "It's positive we're talking about mental health in the true sense, the illness itself, as it reduces stigma." That's definitely something you can notice online—increasingly younger people are casually tweeting about a day off work they had to take for mental health, making jokes at the expense of their illness. These are positive developments. However, as she points out, that leads to the terms being more in people's awareness and that contributes to the casual use.

Thankfully language use can change within weeks, days. "Similar trends in the past have been 'gay' being used as a derogatory term, which is frowned upon and there's an awareness that that's no longer OK to do." It wasn't that long ago that the media used "psycho" in headlines to interchangeably refer to anyone criminal or mentally ill. You'd be pushed to find a publication daring to do that now.

Kate Nightingale from Time to Change, the mental health anti-stigma campaign run by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, says it's down to both individuals and larger communities to consider their words. "Having a mental health problem is hard enough—hearing it trivialized makes it unnecessarily harder. You probably don't mean to stigmatize or hurt someone with a mental health problem—so we'd encourage everyone to think twice about the possible impact of using mental health language in such a casual way." When you speak, say what you mean.

It's not about taking over language and deciding who can say what. It's about having a word to express to people who don't understand, what is affecting us. Many find being diagnosed and given a term for their illness empowering; they can go online and research their illness, the science, the facts, they can hang onto that word when they're having a bad patch. Within the mental health community, the word has immense power. Satiating these words will eventually make them meaningless to everyone.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Illustration by Ella Strickland de Souza.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I'm in a cold rehearsal room in central London with a man I've never met. On his orders, I close my eyes, open my mind, and, with the aid of some vague guidance, am transported to my mom's living room, eight years ago.

The bangs and warbling from neighboring rehearsal rooms disappear and I feel the heat from the open fire in my old family home. I am totally at peace.The man sitting opposite me, coaxing me into this state, is hypnotherapist coach Ed Winslet, chaperone for my first ever "hypno-singing" session—a course that promises to improve your singing voice through the use of hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy is a booming business. It used to be that hypnosis was a mystical, exoteric exercise that only really appeared in vaudeville or traveling circuses. However, hypnosis as hypnotherapy began to emerge in Victorian times, and by the late 20th century had become a widely-accepted treatment for a number of maladies, spawning healthcare programs, bestselling books, and celebrity endorsements. If practitioners are to be believed, you can quit smoking, lose weight, time travel to past lives, have mind-blowing orgasms, get smarter, cure your phobias, get rich, enlarge your boobs, and heal all sorts of physical ailments, purely with the power of your mind.

There are, of course, some things to consider before handing your brain over to a stranger. On the NHS website, the safety guidelines regarding hypnotherapy state that it can be offered by "non-professionals with little training," because, in the UK, you don't legally have to join any organization or receive any specific training to call yourself a hypnotherapist. This means that, without research, people with, say, a serious mental health issue could end up seeking help from somebody who earned their hypnosis stripes at a bachelor party.

Dr. Emma Short, a chartered psychologist and senior lecturer at Bedford University, explains the potential dangers of getting yourself into that kind of situation: "Some of the more extreme phenomena that can emerge in a client during hypnosis are recovered traumatic memory and violent abreaction, which require a very skilled response and access to appropriate referral routes should there be a serious concern for the safety of the individual," she says. "Without careful clinical assessment before proceeding and preparation before treatment, hypnotherapy should not be used, as there are certainly some circumstances where hypnotherapy would be extremely unhelpful."

Similarly, Professor John Gruzelier, a professorial research fellow at Goldsmiths University, wrote of the potential dangers in his essay "The Unwanted Effects of Hypnosis," in which he links hypnosis to chronic psychopathology, seizure, stupor, and spontaneous dissociative episodes.

I put this to Californian hypnotherapist Kerry Gaynor, whose quit-smoking method (The Kerry Gaynor Method) has been endorsed by all your favorite celebrities. "That's nonsense," he says. "It's a non-threatening experience. In fact, it's a natural state—it poses no danger to anybody. It's a very useful tool for achieving goals."

British's TV hypnotherapist, Paul McKenna was taken to court in 1998 for allegedly giving somebody schizophrenia following a session. He was eventually cleared of all charges. Since then, his books—such as the optimistically-titled I Can Make You Thin, I Can Make You Rich, and I Can Make You Happy—have become international best-sellers. In one of the episodes of his I Can Change Your Life TV series, Paul cures a man who has suffered from hysterical blindness (a neurological disorder common around the time of WWI) for eight years following a head injury, making him see again. But can hypnotherapy really be that miraculous?

"I have been working with clients prior to surgery, and I've got them coming out of surgery having no post-operative pain," says Kerry Gaynor. "I don't think medical science can explain that. It's the kind of thing I'd never have believed was possible, but now I'm out here doing it!"

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Before going to the hypno-singing session I got in touch with a few former hypnotherapy patients to gauge how effective it had been for them.

"I left feeling relaxed, but no more than you'd get from a meditation session or a flotation tank or whatever. I was back to normal soon after," said 25-year-old Joe, who had attended sessions for his anxiety problems. "I'm sure it works on some people, but then again so do placebos. I think for it to have an effect you need someone who's more open to the experience."

Ronnie, 29, told me that despite it feeling "quite erotic" and leaving him "buzzing with self confidence" it didn't cure his anxiety. "It certainly didn't work for me. I've found cognitive behavior therapy much more useful," he said.

However, 25-year-old Rose went to a hypnotherapist following a "down-turn" in her mental health as a teenager. She was put on a lot of medication and sent to several therapies, but nothing worked, "I went to see this hypno guy three times. He told me that at no point would I be in a trance and I would be self-aware throughout the process," Rose explained. "Instead, it was about relaxation. He made me analyze myself from an angle I'd never considered before. He objectified my disorder, which meant I could take a hold of it and really look at it. Hypnotherapy didn't cure me, but it made me understand myself a lot more. With logic reinstated I could communicate better with doctors and I was diagnosed with extreme food intolerances, which were causing my mental health problems."

The author in a trance

Being "open" to the treatment is something hypnotherapists often insist upon, and it seems to be crucial to its effectiveness. I approach my hypno-singing session with a totally open mind and a genuine desire to come out singing like Prince. Each time I'm out of the trance I follow the notes up the piano with my voice, and to my delight I reach higher notes and with more ease.

"Like traditional hypnotherapy, the experience is different from person to person," my hypno-singing coach Ed explains to me. "You are tapping into a higher level of your imagination and creativity."

That seems to be a key factor with hypnotherapy: everyone has different experiences. Apart from Kerry Gaynor—who insists his results with smokers were repeatable and that he'd happily prove them under scientific conditions—hypnotherapy hasn't had the same results on any of the people I speak to.

Read on Broadly: Why Are Women Trying to Hypnotize Themselves During Childbirth?

The lack of qualification needed to become a hypnotherapist adds to the confusion that shrouds the practice. Because of this, Dr. Emma Short says, "There are still wide variations in the degree of skill, experience, and, just as importantly, accountability among hypnotherapists."

Understandably, this deters some people. Despite providing it as a treatment, the NHS website claims that the evidence supporting hypnotherapy "isn't strong enough to make any recommendations for clinical practice." However, regardless of its mysterious nature, it does have real-life positive effects on many, even if it's just the power of psychosomatic placebo. "Hypnotherapy can be extremely helpful to some people. We don't know why it works or how exactly it affects the brain," says Dr. Short, "but it does create the opportunity for people to focus clearly on their goals for change."

As my hypno-singing session approaches its end, my singing voice is better than it has ever been. Range-wise I can hit a high A note, which I never could before. I also have a newfound ease and can hold notes for longer. Granted, it could be down to the vocal coaching that Ed gave me in between my hypnosis trances, but I've had vocal coaching lessons before and have never seen such a change.

I have a natural skepticism of hypnotherapy, but I can't really contest the improvement in my singing voice, my heightened awareness of tonality, and the thousands of positive testimonies online for hundreds of hypnotherapists. The effectiveness of hypnotherapy seems to be a combination of confidence building, clear focus on personal goals for change, and the ability to work with, and unlock, the unknown powers of the human brain. With this in mind, perhaps the most incredible about hypnotherapy isn't the actual hypnotherapy at all; it's us.

Follow Jak on Twitter.

Work for the Dole is a legacy of the Abbott Government. Image via

A review into the government's "Work for the Dole" scheme was released last week. It was a legacy of Abbott's government that pretty much summed up his leadership style: ineffective, expensive, and ill advised. Work for the Dole, which has just finished its trial phase, conscripts young unemployed people to do vital nation-building work such as "hospitality tasks" and "general warehouse duties" for 25 hours a week. If participants fail to meet these requirements, they're kicked off welfare.

So how's it been going? Well, leaving aside the ethics of forcing people to work for $8 an hour, Work for the Dole has been about as effective as a box of chocolate condoms. The report found the 50,000 people going through the program were only two percent more likely to find work than those who were left to their own devices. At a cost of a billion dollars in the first three years, that's about a million dollars spent for every job found so far.

But the government, forever optimistic, isn't letting things like statistics get in its way. They show all signs of pushing on, saying the numbers misrepresent the success of the scheme and the program is "effective in helping participants gain confidence and self-esteem." The logic here is that if being unemployed is making you feeling depressed or disenfranchised, doing dishes for $8 an hour could be just the ego boost you've been looking for.

So how did Work for the Dole fail so spectacularly? Well, for one thing the program is underpinned by the assumption the government knows how to spend poor people's time better than poor people do. Instead of writing resumes, training, and knocking on doors, the unemployed were sweeping highways and pulling up weeds. As one former participant told VICE, "I ended up working three part-time jobs with a lot of hours for not much money. They still wanted me to constantly apply for jobs and go to these ridiculous meetings."

For many Work for the Dole became more of a hindrance than a help. "I had to push back a job interview to attend a work for the dole appointment," said one former participant. "When I arrived, they told me to come back later in the day, because their internet never started working till 10 AM." Another told me: "I ended up calling it charades for the dole, it was so pitifully useless." The Age reported that some people were directed to make airplane dioramas for hours on end.

Another key issue was how the Department of Employment chose to manage the program. Work for the Dole's billion dollar operating budget was split between a crew of private contractors, including Matchworks, Job Prospects, and slew of other equally exciting sounding entities.

While their names may be boring, their activities are anything but. Allegations have swirled around these contractors. Many people involved with the program reported repeated difficulties involving the agencies, finding the process punitive. "I was starting up my own business and through Centrelink got into a short course that teaches you to run a small business," said a now-successful Melbourne business owner, recounting her time in the program. "I still ended up in working for the dole and was told that starting or running my own business wasn't an approved activity. What the fuck?"

As flaws began to emerge in the scheme, pressure was applied to the contractors to improve their outcomes. As one participant recounted, "My contact at the job centre, a young guy, was really apologetic. He said that I really shouldn't be in the program, but that his employer was going to lose their contract if they didn't start pumping more people through."

When Malcolm Turnbull leaped into the driver's seat last year, he promised a style of government "that is agile, that is innovative, that is creative." Yet despite this, and despite some reassuring evidence, his government is persisting with this ineffective and expensive policy. Perhaps they're waiting for a quiet news day before rinsing off Abbott's leftovers. Until then, there's never been a more exciting time to be an unemployed Australian.

This article contains some spoilers for Firewatch. So don't read on unless you've finished the game, or have no intention to. You should, though; it's a great game, and only takes three hours or so to get through.

Strange things happen in America's national parks. Perhaps you've read about Dennis Martin. Dennis was a six-year-old boy who, in 1969, went with his family for a camping trip to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. During a game of hide and seek, Dennis's father saw him crouch down behind a bush – moments later, when Mr Martin went to find his son, Dennis had vanished. For almost a month, 1,400 people, including local law enforcement, FBI agents and the Army's Green Berets searched for Dennis, but no trace of him has ever been found.

Perhaps more strange is the case of Jaryd Atadero, a three-year-old boy who in 1999, went missing in the Comanche Peak wilderness of Northern Colorado. Four years after his disappearance, Jaryd's remains were discovered on a steep, rocky hill, 550 feet above the trail where he was last seen alive. Bobby Bizup, a 10-year-old boy who disappeared in August 1958, was discovered in similarly mysterious circumstances. His body was found more than three miles from where he had vanished, 2,500ft up at the summit of Mount Meeker.

The CanAm Missing Project has documented hundreds of disappearances in the national parks of Canada and North America, and also identified a handful of patterns and profiles. Sometimes victims are found next to a neat, folded pile of their clothes. Sometimes the missing people are found alive, but have no memory of where they have been since they were last seen. CanAm's book series, The Missing 411, stops short of drawing any conclusions. Penned by a former vice detective and SWAT officer, it never strays into conjecture or supernatural nonsense – it's simply a document of each case and the people who were involved.

And that's why it gets under my skin. The disappearances aren't connected. There isn't some big conspiracy, or paranormal phenomenon, that's kidnapping and killing people out in the wilderness. But strange things do happen in America's national parks. And the thought of someone I love vanishing, or dying, and then never finding out what happened to them, frightens me a great deal.

It was that fear, and those cases of missing people in Canada and North America, that kept running through my mind as I was playing Firewatch. This is a horror set in broad daylight, a suspense thriller that takes place across a sweeping, open landscape. I've never played anything like it before. Corridors, darkness, a predatory creature stalking you from one moment to the next – these are the staples of today's horror games. But Firewatch finds terror at the opposite pole. Its beaming sunshine and empty meadows feel just as threatening as a dank, narrow dungeon.

Your boss Delilah's tower, positioned high above the Thorofare, is an ominous reminder that you, as Henry, are constantly being watched. Your own tower, supposedly a safe place, high above the flames of any possible fire, identifies you for miles around – amidst the trees, caves and foliage, you are exposed. And then there's the silence, the constant, fragile silence. I personally enjoyed Firewatch a lot more once I'd gone into the options menu and turned the music off. Take a long hike through the forest, with nothing for company but the sound of creaking bark and the occasional crackle of your radio, and you'll experience a kind of dread that I don't think games have pulled off before.

Article continues after the video below

Talking film with Todd Haynes

Typically in horror, it's the slamming door, the distant scream, the off-screen moan that makes me tense up. In Firewatch, it was the nothing. Silent Hill is a big town and you often feel like the only person left alive, but at least you have the monsters for company. Towards the end of Firewatch, it is, very literally, just you.

If games have used sandboxes for the same things over and over, filling them with missions, ambient challenges and collectibles, Firewatch is an open world with a different purpose: its empty expanse makes you feel abandoned. For that at least, I respect its makers, Campo Santo. So many teams, once they'd created a big, colourful world, would be unable to resist the temptation to put things in it – the pressure of convention would compel them to make a more populated sandbox. Firewatch could have easily had side-quests. Firewatch could have had animals scampering around, and if you snapped a photo of one, you unlocked an achievement.

But, to a fault, Campo Santo understands discipline. The same sense of restraint that makes Firewatch's script timid and overly vague makes its environment terrifying. So empty and quiet is Shoshone National Park that the act of simply turning around and looking behind you is loaded with dread – any artefact of another human presence, be it an empty beer can, a torn strip of clothing or a pulaski, shatters the perfect, untouched nature and with it your sense of security.

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I think that's the most interesting part of Firewatch. It's scary when you feel like you're utterly alone. But it's also scary when you feel like there's somebody else with you. It's hard to describe without completely spoiling the game's story, but Henry is in a similar dilemma – he arrives in Shoshone because he's running away from something, but he also wishes he could go back. Being isolated from people is something we all fear. At the same time, the idea of someone knowing you entirely, and sharing your most intimate secrets, is also threatening.

Firewatch plays on the very real fear of going missing and nobody finding you, or someone you love going missing, and never knowing what happened to them. But it's also a game about fear of company, exposure and emotional vulnerability – wandering around a desolate space, surveyed constantly by an unseen presence, it's a game about having your personal space abandoned and having it invaded. At how great a distance would you like to keep people? To what extent would you like to let them into your life?

Beneath Firewatch's primal fears, the fears of dying and being forgotten, and of being watched and stalked, there are deeper questions about our relationships to other people. I like to think that the very ending, where Henry literally reaches out and grabs somebody, is optimistic.

Firewatch is out now for PlayStation 4 and PC – read our (pretty much) spoilers-free conversation about the game here.

@mostsincerelyed

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Bees are dying, sea levels are rising and every green space in Britain is turning into luxury apartments. Thankfully, there are some people out there trying to stem the flow of environmental disaster, including a protein bar company called Exo.

Beef and pork farming, as vegetarians are constantly reminding us, creates huge amounts of greenhouse gasses, and as such are a key factor in global warming. But those animals also create a delicious source of protein, so what can you do?

Well, Exo claim they've found a protein source that has almost no environmental impact, and that source is – crickets. Apparently crickets produce 100 times less carbon dioxide than cows and contain 12 times as much protein as beef. So Exo ground crickets into a "flour" and made cereal bars in flavours like Banana Nut and Blueberry Vanilla.

Let's find out how ground crickets go down, shall we?

TOM USHER, STARVING WRITER

I went for the banana bread-flavoured bar. Said bar is brown, shiny and smells like a Christmas pudding. It's actually all right - once you get past the psychological fact that it was made from bugs, then really it was no different from any other kind of flapjack-type thing that you get in Holland and Barrett or whatever. Considering I've literally eaten just protein bars for dinner at some points in my life then I'd be fine with eating them again, maybe over a candlelit dinner for one at home tonight.

3/5

SAM WOLFSON, HUNGRY EXECUTIVE EDITOR

You know that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is sponsored by an energy bar company to eat nothing but Powersauce Bars, which turn out to be made mostly from old Chinese newspapers? I feel like the same company might be behind these, judging by the consistency. It's so gristly I was still fishing bits out from my gums two hours later. I had the Banana Bread one but the only discernable flavour was Glastonbury chai tents and stale Soreen. This would not stop me eating beef and if anything has put me off eating bananas or bread.

1/5

JOE ZADEH – PECKISH NOISEY EDITOR

I guess it tastes exactly like anything that Ant and Dec would force Z-list celebrities to eat live on television should taste. Like regret. Like desperation. Like "has it really come to this"? It says on the packet that it's like eating shellfish. Cool. Who would eat cocoa or blueberry-flavoured shellfish? Now my mouth is working overtime to get small bits of decapitated cricket out of my teeth. It's a massacre. I don't feel good about crickets dying for this. I was having a decent morning but I don't feel good about myself anymore. This was an awful experience. Thanks mate.

1/5

MITCHELL STEVENS – RAVENOUS SOCIAL EDITOR

I've eaten insects before but I don't want to talk about it, thanks. It wasn't traumatic at all. I thought this would be all right because it's flavoured like blueberries which makes me feel safe, but there was actually a bit of an uneasy crunch to it which really brought me back and made feel a bit queasy. Still, what's one more repressed memory, eh? It's pretty tasty as well to be honest. I'd give it a solid four out of five. Only the stickiness let it down a bit.

4/5

ZING TSENG – FAMISHED BROADLY EDITOR

This basically tastes like every other overpriced energy bar I have ever bought in a foolish attempt to be "healthy". However, a tiny warning on its packaging also says that you may be allergic to crickets if you are also allergic to shellfish crustaceans. This immediately makes me think of the giant alien bugs from Starship Troopers, except processed into breakfast bars for foolish millennials. Maybe after we all start doing spin classes on exo-bikes listening to Avicii's 112th chart-topping record in the year 2028, cricket bars will seem normal. I'll settle for eating an actual banana for now, thanks.

2/5

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The number of non-completely embarrassing pieces of art about rock music, outside of rock 'n' roll itself, can be counted on a sole two-finger salute. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I haven't read because I hate reading about rock music though smart friends say it's great, and the comic book Love and Rockets. Everything else, every other comic book, film, and novel about rock has been not just dancing about architecture but the cliché "dancing about architecture." Velvet Goldmine, while certainly loved by some, is still better known for its soundtrack. Phantom of the Paradise is beloved by me, but is more about being odd than about rock music, per se. Repo Man, probably the best rock movie, is not about rock at all; rather, it's about transcendence and death. No, unless you've deluded yourself into liking, say, the Doors, you have to admit that rock, adolescent hooey, the most glorious kind of hooey there is, doesn't translate to other mediums. But, god in heaven, the old and getting older don't stop trying.

Vinyl, the new HBO phantasmagoria of hard drugs and gormless sideburns, brought to us by Martin Scorsese and Mick "Marianne Faithfull's Ex-Boyfriend" Jagger, is way better than it should be. I can't speak to the quality of the filming itself. My TV watching is pretty much confined to The Expanse, Rick and Morty, and New Girl in the background while I play Warhammer 40K on my phone. TV critics ranging from Vulture to the Washington Post say the camerawork on Vinyl is very fine, and I'll take their word for it. Apparently it's Scorsese's best film work since The Departed. As someone who enjoys both Ben Affleck's Boston oeuvre and that one song by Dropkick Murphys I'd agree it was a fun flick, so that's reasonably high praise.

As far as Vinyl's success at trying to convey what can't be conveyed through film, which is to say what it's like to lose oneself to music and drugs, I'd say it's a solid B. To enjoy the show, it helps to either have never done drugs or seen a band, or to take the production as a kind of magical realism. I, not to brag, have totally done drugs and seen bands, so I went with the latter.

In the opening scene, "record man" Richie Finestra (somewhat though not quite based on Marty Thau and played well throughout by Bobby Cannavale) is sitting in his car in SoHo, buying coke. Two-hundred-and-eighty dollars seems steep for a quarter ounce in 1973 but, as I was not yet a glimmer in my father's eye at the time, the filmmakers would know better. Richie tears off his rearview mirror to cut lines on, using a detective's business card that must have been made of reinforced cardboard. I guess it was more cinematic than using the webbed skin area between your thumb and pointing finger like a normal person would.

After doing his massive line that makes him react like people in movies that take place in the 70s react upon doing lines (and please don't get me started on the rubbing-it-on-your-gums bullshit), his car is then overrun by cascading rockers running Wild in the Streets to the nearby Mercer Arts Center, and he follows. "Punk" is spray-painted in the hallway and even though this is a few years before Punk Magazine premiered and the term itself was still pretty much just being used by a few writers for Creem Magazine, I'm game. And let's not get into my deeply held belief that not a single fan of NYC music between the years of 1967 and 1983 ran anywhere but from the cops, or maybe to the bathroom when the pills went south. It felt strange that the maker of After Hours has a vision of New York that is so corny, so unhip as having young people operate at a speed faster than drugged swagger.

I mention all this stuff that occurs within the first 15 minutes and hardly matters because if you're like me, these glaring inconsistencies coupled with some perhaps necessary personality-establishing, ham-fisted lines, you may be inclined to stop watching. Don't. It gets better. Either that, or I got worse. That's fine, too; I don't look for art to improve me.

The basic plot is Richie trying to save his record label, first financially and later spiritually. After becoming the controlling owner of a now seriously uncool legacy label, he hopes to cash in on the label being sold to German conglomerate Polygram, which is dependent on he and his partners (Ray Romano as Zak Yankovich, a consistent series highpoint, and Max Casella as Julie Silver) all hiding financial irregularities and signing Led Zeppelin. The actors do a swell job of making these big-picture low stakes seem the life or death propositions they are to the protagonists.

Ray Romano. Photo by Macall B. Polay/courtesy of HBO

There are a few main subplots, including a secretary (Juno Temple)'s attempting to move up to A&R by signing a pre-punk band, whose singer is played by Mick's son James Jagger; Richie's wife Devon (Olivia Wilde as a wonder of love and dissatisfaction); and foul-mouthed comic Andrew "Dice" Clay as Frank "Buck" Rogers, a grotesque and aggrieved-by-Donnie Osmond radio-station owner. The show's black characters are generally portrayed as saints, purveyors of soundtrack funk and soul, and objects of clueless characters' casual racism. There's even the cringeworthy validation from fucked-over blues man Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh), told in flashback to Ritchie, "Are you sure you're not a black man?" I'll reserve judgment on that aspect for a few episodes. I want to believe Vinyl won't be corny.

Vinyl is ostensibly about rock 'n' roll music. It works better than most in that regard. The soundtrack is good, a nice mix of old R&B, rerecorded pre-punk standards, and thankfully there's nary a montage set to "Gimme Shelter" to be found. But the show shines as an oversized morality play. Names like ABBA or Suicide work less as plot points than totemic place-setters. The viewer has to decide to take pleasure in hagiography, even if it's about a music that was supposed to reject such sentiments, with Richie Finestra as a Zelig type given total selfish agency. When he rises, Christlike, literally from rubble, at the end of the first episode, it's hard to not be supremely moved. It's only utter fucking hogwash, but I like it.

Follow Zachary on Twitter.