All screenshots courtesy of 2K Games

I'd like to introduce you to some of my closest, most loyal companions.

First up, circumlocutory Joe – a dear friend of mine, a sergeant, who died gracefully (legs blown off, screaming) after the cover he was hiding behind was hit by grenade fire. Then there's Captain not-James-T Kirk. Stupid, gentle Captain not-James-T Kirk: a buffoon who managed to get himself captured, and whom I never bothered to save from the clutches of the enemy, even though I probably could have.

Enter corporals Sean Bell and Andi Hamilton, a thunderous duo of barely-in-shape gung-ho hurricanes: now both dead, cut down mercilessly during Operation Seething Fork, or something like that. PJ "Warhorse" O'Reilly lost the will to live when an alien Sectoid took control of his mind. When he started firing on my other squad mates, we had to put him down like a dog. Luck of the Irish.

Tamoor "The Animal" Hussain, a bearded tank of a man I had recruited from Resistance HQ, had a lot promise. Yet despite his foreboding physical appearance, Tamoor was slaughtered during his first proper tour of duty. There have been others, too. Many more. Gary, Dan, Tom, Mum... life is fragile.

All of my friends – and mum – have something in common. They all ran out of time.

You see, with the freshly released XCOM 2, developer Firaxis has once again crafted a strategy game quite unlike any other, successfully refining practically everything that was so damn good about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the studio's 2012 reboot of 1994's original UFO: Enemy Unknown. But they've also gone beyond expectations, over-delivering in almost every respect, adding significant strategic depth and building new features that consistently delight, surprise and genuinely terrify even the most experienced of XCOM players. Despite putting over 70 hours into Enemy Unknown, I still felt most comfortable nudging its sequel down to its easiest difficulty, until I had a firmer grasp of everything new that this game has hiding in its fog of war.

The game is at its most ruthless when it uses your own time against you, and in order to succeed you have to learn to be efficient. XCOM 2, which pits your human resistance force (namely XCOM) against the alien occupiers of Earth (read our interview from 2015 for more story background), communicates a feeling of brutal intelligence; it makes you feel clever and genuinely overwhelmed with relief for succeeding with each mission, but that success is never easily earned. It also never gives you the confidence to think you'll breeze through the next mission. There's nothing permanent here – make a bad decision, or even the right decision but at the wrong time, and your failure is always a turn or two away, be that the death of a squad mate, a devastating attack on your mobile command centre, or any other number of potentially game-changing threats that lie in wait throughout the game's lengthy campaign. The relief of getting home safe or successfully saving a settlement lingers briefly in the mind before you're firefighting your next emergency. Your eyes are always on a clock.

'XCOM 2', launch trailer

Most if not all of the game's missions require you to "get it done" within a certain number of turns. For example, head into battle and you'll need to complete your objective and get to the evacuation zone before the time runs out – anyone outside of that zone when the timer hits zero gets left behind, captured by enemy forces. In some missions, you'll need to kill all enemies in the vicinity, albeit in just five or so turns, otherwise a dropship will arrive with reinforcements, increasing the pressure on your troops who are already struggling against an enemy that greatly outnumbers them.

In the overarching strategic decisions that determine how you and your ragtag resistance buddies progress through the campaign, you'll find that the passage of time works against you there, too. Every day that goes by is another day closer to the aliens' completion of the Avatar Project, a mysterious program shrouded in secrecy but that definitely threatens to render all your resistance efforts futile. It's essentially the penultimate step before Game Over.

This could have been an incredibly annoying design decision – strategy games often give players the freedom to plan how they want to experiment with systems. But XCOM 2 constrains the boundaries and instead wants you to get things done on its terms. It works surprisingly well as a new tactical consideration, and instead of constricting your gameplay options it instead forces you to think differently, and more efficiently. There's a real sense of speed to everything you do. Additional objectives suddenly become something you need to fit into the current parameters of the mission, rather than just undertake at your leisure. And when you get down to two remaining turns and still need to get four of your six-person squad to evac, it becomes fucking tense.

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During a particularly tough mission, I had to not only take down a VIP target – my primary objective – but also use a piece of resistance-developed technology against a high-ranking enemy officer, to basically rip data from his alien brain. Doing this, I was told, would give the resistance an upper hand; but getting up close with alien forces on the battlefield poses obvious risks. As XCOM's enemies gets tougher and your soldiers rank up, it becomes a strategic decision as to who you take into the field. Take a squad full of your best troops and you're less likely to take casualties; but should you incur any losses, they're far more damaging to the overall strength of XCOM than if you'd lost a newly recruited rookie. But in order to try guarantee success, I took the risk and sent out my finest.

Five soldiers, all experienced, and all running out of time. I had 12 turns. Just a dozen moves to find the currently unidentified VIP, kill or capture them, deal with the fallout (capturing someone means one of your squad is out of action while they're carrying a target), then move into a strong enough strategic position to put one of my men at risk of death by sending him toe-to-toe with a big-ass bad guy. And only then, once all that was done, could I move to the evac point.

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Of course, I fucked it. Two of my guys got gravely wounded, so I was moving them with great care, wasting valuable turns making sure they were never out of full cover – XCOM 2's AI exploits squad vulnerabilities with ruthless precision. Getting the VIP captured went a bit wrong, too – I managed to subdue and carry them to relative safety, but when a nearby car exploded it killed them and halved my soldier's health. Two and a half men down, I was literally operating at half capacity – yet I somehow managed to mind-jack the enemy officer, keeping my eyes fixed on the clock at all times. But then came an unexpected blow: using mind control caused this weird living computer-thing mini-boss to appear, teleporting across the map and cloning itself at will. Pants.

I finally ended up killing it, but used up my last few precious turns doing so. I left that mission with one soldier so injured that he was out of action for over a dozen in-game days. XCOM being XCOM, this caused ramifications that stifled my progress for several hours. I had to waste time rescuing captured soldiers from enemy control, and what squad I had to play with was left severely impaired by the loss of such levelled-up comrades. And every day that I was patching XCOM up, the aliens were getting closer to activating the Avatar Project. The very real stress I'd felt before losing my best on the battlefield was only growing. And time was passing, inexorably, whatever my efforts to catch up to it.

XCOM 2 is a wonderful game, absolutely one of the best strategy titles you'll play this or any other year. It's unusually smart, ruthless and expects you to always be thinking ahead: to your next turn, to your next battle, to your next (possibly final) decision. But for me, its most cruelly unique feature is how all of its mechanics come together to create this constantly ticking bomb, that makes every minute of the game feel precious and important. No matter if you've an entire day to play, or just an hour one evening after you've finished all of your shitty real-life chores, XCOM 2 gives you time, and with it you'll make a real tangible difference to the future of its depiction of mankind – for better, or worse.

XCOM 2 is out now for PC and Mac

@samwrite

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Image by Carrrrrlos via Flickr

It feels like a cliché to even ask, but has any piece of technology since the television transformed our lives quicker and more severely than the iPhone? On paper, Steve Jobs ' "three revolutions in one" seemed like a mere refinement of several other products out there: a step-up from Blackberry, a mini-laptop, the sexy Apple version of a Nokia with WAP capability. But in practice, it's become the defining gadget of our era, one which landed harder and faster than even the internet, which took well over a decade to become more than just Quicktime porno video and the IMDB on a beige dalek in the corner of your living room.

The iPhone has changed not only the way we communicate, as Jobs stated was his intention at the original 2007 launch, but also our behaviour, our way of thinking, our way of looking at the world. In less than 10 years, iPhones have increasingly become the portals to our exterior: work, fun, sex and culture. To consume any one of these things, you have to go through them. To live the world of 2016, you have to have one. People with Blackberrys have become the new people with Netscape or Agas or those bikes you lie down on that always look like they're about to go under a bus. iPhones are the millennial Model T-Ford, the standard and the constant. The only.

But I don't have one. And it's a decision I'm glad of just about every day of my life. It started with an unfortunate encounter about two years ago (two of them, one of me, not a have-a-go hero in sight, an easy-to-shift £300 item in my hand in the midst of an economic downturn), and I'm pretty certain I know which way it's going to stay. It wasn 't ideology that started it, more laziness and a fear of bureaucracy; having to go into a shop to sort it out, the indignity of refusing various upgrades and tariffs and asking for just what I had before, being treated like the person who orders off the "European Menu" at a Chinese restaurant. So I put it off, and the next day became the next week, and the next week became never.

I felt like I'd cheated the system. By refusing to get an iPhone, I had become exempt from everyone else's bullshit.

At first it was difficult and annoying and I suffered a few fair moments of being stood up, locked out and sometimes quite simply forgotten about. But soon, I began to notice a shift in the way I looked at the world. I stopped waking up with somebody else's problem chipping away at my psyche. I started to being able to separate day from night, life from work, important from trivial. There were no more "hey guys, we really need to get on this one-pager today", no requests to get anything in first thing. People started making more of an effort to accommodate me, and in return I started to live by Greenwich Mean Time, rather than my own time. I started looking out of bus windows, reading and watching more and thinking about myself less.

I felt like I'd somehow cheated the system. By refusing to get a phone, by not being around at everyone's beck and call, I had become exempt from everyone else's bullshit. Sometimes I see people having email conversations at ungodly hours and I can't help but feel like I'm watching some strange tradition that I'll never understand, like some weird religious festival in a small town that I'm only passing through. It simply doesn't feel like my shit anymore.

Before it gets twisted, I am not a luddite, a timelord or anyone who would consider themselves 'retro'. My work and understanding of culture is almost entirely rooted in the internet. Like most of my generation, I like trainers, techno and Twitter, Worldstar fight videos and illegal football streams. I believe in the power of technology.

And for a long time I found it hard to justify this contradiction: how can you spend most of your time on a laptop, immersed in internet capitalism, yet make a stance about not having an iPhone? It seemed absurd, hypocritical, highly pretentious. Yet instinctively I knew that I just didn't want one, and that my life had vastly improved since I ceased to have one.

Then came an interview with Aphex Twin at Noyzelab, which has now been deleted. There's a section it where the interviewer reveals that despite Richard D James's vast technology collection and his fascination and knowledge about synthesisers, computers and all sorts of hard and software, he doesn't own a phone. "They just don't make people's lives better," he said.

Look around and you'll see that people are horribly, pathetically obsessed with their phones.

It struck a chord with me. I started researching more into people who didn't own them. Kanye claims not have had one for three years (although Google Images suggests otherwise), Werner Herzog doesn't really use one, and writer Mark Fisher described them as "individualised command centres". And perhaps even more legitimately, there's been a wealth of worrying studies and statistics detailing the impact that they can have on us. A recent survey suggests that 58 percent of Britons feel unhappy or stressed when separated from their phones, for fuck 's sake.

These phones have had a fundamental effect in our concentration levels. Look around you when a train is late, or when you're on a journey of any kind, or even in the pub, and you'll see that people are horribly, pathetically obsessed with them. Staring into them for the answers but getting no real insight, some even thinking its okay to hold entire conversations while looking at the screen. We've become reliant on them for everything, to the point where we don't learn directions, where we don't need to know how to talk to people, where we simply can't be without one. Where the very threat of losing one makes us a bit weird.

The old cliché of human beings as slaves to computers has never been realised. Nobody is really that in love with their laptop. They 're just the things we do our work on, the things we watch half-entertaining American sitcoms on. But iPhones are different. They 're very much tools of the system, the fingers on the long arms of capitalism, reaching into our lives and tapping us on the shoulder to remind us that there's always more work to do.

Because despite his propensity for weed, tennis shoes and Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs was essentially an arch-capitalist, one who knew that making an item for play alone was never going to set the world alight. For an invention to really dominate our culture, it would – like the combustible engine or the aeroplane or the television – have to become part of industry as well. Otherwise it would just be a Tamagotchi with Facebook.

The iPhone is a money-making machine, a totally free market. You can spend your money on them, and you can make your money through them. Even the fun bits of an iPhone are monetisable. They're apps you can buy, they're things you can sell, and advertise and invest in. They aren't Snake or some pixelated version of Tetris. They're an industry, one like us, totally reliant on the totemic figure of Jobs ' rectangle.

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Now, don't get me wrong. There are a lot of exciting things you can do with an iPhone, such as shooting a film like Tangerine on one. And in a way, I admire the utilitarian, easy-to-use ideal of them. But I wonder what will happen if we are ever plunged into the darkness without them. I worry about what is already happening to our visions of ourselves, and I wonder if the boy who became addicted to selfies is really just the start. I worry about a culture where people can't be arsed to watch anything longer than a Vine, and a mental health epidemic, when people are too stuck within their own selves.

It also saddens me, that for all the wonder of science, all the incredible things that technology has done for the world, all those dreams that were realised before me, and the ones I grew up thinking that may one day exist in my time, the bulk of the tech industry these days is dedicated to helping you get your work emails easier. That flying skateboard seems further away every day, but the idea of your boss using an iPhone to find out where you've been and why you're late on that report you were supposed to do seems much nearer.

Partly because it allows me to opt of a nu-capitalism that I can't get on with, partly because I just feel better, and partly because they just don't really excite me, I'm glad I still don't have an iPhone. Soon I might even cancel the contract I'm still paying for.

@thugclive

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'Après-ski' is a soft-core, lowest-of-low-brow ski comedy that pulled in $2 million after its 1971 release. Screenshot via YouTube

When asked what you know about René Angélil, you'd probably say he was Celine Dion's husband, manager, father of her kids, and the architect of her rise to global superstardom. And you'd be right.

When he died of throat cancer last month, the Montreal-born impresario was given a lavish funeral, and tributes poured in from across the entertainment world. Most of the tributes and obits focused on his stunningly successful career managing his wife. One weird detail that was left out, however, was his brief appearance in a film that changed both the Quebec film industry and Quebec's then-notoriously conservative, Catholic Church–dominated culture.

The movie was called Après-ski. Its US English title is Snowballin'. It's a soft-core, lowest-of-low-brow ski comedy, barely watchable today. But shortly after its 1971 release, it became massively controversial, and extremely profitable, pulling in about $2 million , according to its director, Cardinal. It was so popular it was distributed to the UK and US, where it was spliced with scenes from actual pornos to spice things up even more.

The movie seems to hold a special place in Cardinal's heart. You can tell he's both fond of and somewhat embarrassed by it. "Après-ski is not the movie I want to be remembered by. I'm not proud of it, but I did make my name with it."

Cardinal went on to a successful career in Canadian movies, with a Genie nomination for his 1988 feature Malarek (he'd lose to David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers), and now teaches cinema. And for all its controversy, Après-ski went on to become a cult classic, and its soundtrack was recently reissued.

"I asked my students how many of them had heard of it," he says. Very few had. "So I told them to go home and ask their fathers or grandfathers—and nearly all of them said they'd seen it."

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.

Diana Ware has been waiting almost three decades to see justice for her stepdaughter Barbara, whose body was discovered in 1987 in a South Los Angeles alley buried under trash and a gas tank. Since Lonnie David Franklin, Jr., better known as the Grim Sleeper, was arrested in 2010, the elder Ware says she's taken hundreds of bus trips from West Covina to downtown LA to attend pre-trial hearings.

"It's beginning to take a little bit of a toll," Ware tells me.

Her legs and knees are beginning to give out, but Ware trudges on for Barbara—and for her own late husband, who she says died before discovering his daughter was the victim of a serial killer. "He was thinking it was just another murder in South Central," she explains.

After more than two decades of allegedly wreaking terror on the streets of South Los Angeles, Franklin—who if convicted would be the longest-active serial killer in California history—is going on trial this month. The arduous road leading up to this moment has been frustrating for cops and community members alike. Critics of the LAPD say they were lazy in their investigation, neglected to follow up on leads, and regarded the victims as insignificant because they were black women, and some were sex workers. Police paint a much different picture, describing a complicated array of factors that made finding the Grim Sleeper extremely tough, including the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, a surge in violent crime, and even other active serial killers.

In fact, Franklin was only arrested in 2010 after pioneering DNA technology—and a semi-secretive police task force—helped connect him to at least ten murders that stretched from 1985 to 2007, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. The gruesome nickname refers to the "hiatus" police initially believed Franklin took from killing in the 1990s, though it's possible he simply hasn't been connected to murders in that era.

All of Franklin's alleged victims were black women between the ages of 15 and 35. All were shot, strangled or both. Most were callously discarded in bushes, alleyways or dumpsters, in various states of undress. One victim, 22-year-old Lachrica Jefferson, was found in January 1988 with a napkin placed across her face with the word "AIDS" written on it, according to court documents.

Victims of the Grim Sleeper on the wall at activist Margaret Prescod's office in Los Angeles. Photo by David Austin

Although a 2011 grand jury indictment was expected to speed up the death penalty case, delays and bizarre courtroom antics have dragged on pre-trial proceedings for more than five years. Witnesses have retired or died, and new experts have had to be summoned to reanalyze evidence, according to Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman. Meanwhile, the victims' families have been waiting for some sort of resolution, and some have even passed away while waiting for trial.

"That means that some of these victims will have no one to speak for them or about them at penalty phase, or to see that justice was done at the end of this process," Silverman writes VICE in an email. "To me, that is a disgrace."

In addition to Ware and Jefferson, Franklin is accused of killing 18-year-old Alicia Alexander; 35-year-old Valerie McCorvey; 34-year-old Henrietta Wright; 29-year-old Debra Jackson; 26-year-old Bernita Sparks; 26-year-old Mary Lowe; 25-year-old Janecia Peters; and 15-year-old Princess Berthomieux. Franklin is also charged with the attempted murder of 30-year-old Enietra Washington, whom he allegedly picked up in his car, shot in the chest, sexually assaulted, and dumped on the street.

Upon Franklin's arrest, a police search of his property yielded a trove of naked photos, videos, and homemade porn, prompting speculation about how high the real victim count might climb. The LAPD posted a photo gallery online with portraits of nearly 200 women in the hopes of identifying and locating them. Today, at least 35 photos remain, and police are still seeking the public's help.

(Franklin pleaded not guilty to all murder charges when they were first leveled in 2010.)

Horrifying as it may be that a serial murderer would remain loose for so many years, there were a slew of issues at the time that made this case tricky, according to LAPD Detective Daryn Dupree, the current lead investigator on the case. Beginning in the late 1970s and stretching well into the 80s, crack cocaine took South LA by storm, he says, leading to a spike in drug-related crime, drive-by shootings, and murders. This was only further muddied by the activities of other serial killers in the surrounding areas.

"There were so many people dying out there," Dupree tells me. "It was hard for police to decipher the different MOs."

During this era, killings spiked in Los Angeles. Between 1970 and 1979, the homicide rate in LA city alone rose 84 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). DNA technology was limited, so police had to rely on basics like witness testimony and ballistics evidence, and although DNA obtained at many of the crime scenes was run against CODIS—the FBI's national databank—it didn't strike a match.

In fact, it wasn't until 2008 that California adopted a new (and controversial) DNA practice that ultimately provided investigators with the lynchpin they needed to nab Franklin. The state was the first to adopt a familial search program, which uses "unique computer software and rigorous protocols" to link a "family member of a convicted offender with DNA taken from a murder or rape scene," state Attorney General Edmund Brown Jr. explained in a statement after Franklin's arrest.

When Franklin's son was arrested on a felony weapons charge in 2009, a sample of his DNA was sent to the state data bank. There, the lab uncovered a link between Franklin's son and DNA evidence collected at the Grim Sleeper murder scenes, and leap-frogged to Franklin. (Franklin's son himself was never considered a suspect in the case, police say.)

Lonnie Franklin Jr., right, the alleged Grim Sleeper serial killer, at a pre-trial hearing in August 2015. (Photo by Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

On July 5, 2010, two LAPD detectives keeping tabs on Franklin saw him head into Buena Park restaurant called John's Incredible Pizza for a kid's birthday party, according to court documents. One of the detectives donned a restaurant uniform, posed as an employee, and collected napkins, glasses, a fork, and a partially-eaten slice of pizza from Franklin. DNA evidence from these items clinched the cops' case, and two days later they arrested Franklin.

Of course, for many in South LA and beyond, this apparent resolution comes way too late. Critics argue the LAPD waited far too long to warn people there was even a serial killer on the loose. Some say it was only after LA Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek broke the news to the victims' families that the news really went public.

Margaret Prescod, founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, argues the lives of the women killed seemed to be of "less value" to the LAPD (and much of the mainstream media) for too long.

"The women were impoverished, they were black, they were women," Presocd says. "We knew right away that if this many women had been murdered in an affluent part of Los Angeles, that that would not be the case."

Through her coalition, Prescod says she rallied a crew to distribute more than 100,000 flyers in the community, including to the "working women... on the strip." The group also organized weekly vigils outside police headquarters and started issuing press releases in a bid to force police, city officials, and the media to pay attention to the murders.

One of Prescod's first (and ongoing) disputes with the LAPD was over their classification and description of the deaths as "the prostitute killings." Although many of Franklin's victims were sex workers, some perhaps lured into his grasp by the promise of crack cocaine, the LAPD's label was derogatory and inaccurate, according to Prescod, as some of the victims were not even involved in sex work.

"This whole image of who the women were was problematic also, because it gave other women a false sense of security," Prescod tells me. "To say, 'Well if I'm not a sex worker, I don't have to worry,' you know, without knowing that there's somebody out there hunting down and killing women."

Margaret Prescod at her office in Los Angeles. Photo by David Austin

Prescod continues to host coalition meetings, is pushing to get a memorial installed to honor the victims, and remains in touch with many of the family members today. That includes Porter Alexander Jr., whose daughter Alicia was one of the youngest victims; at 18, she was found naked with a shirt knotted around her neck, hidden under a foam mattress in an alley, court documents say.

"He took the most precious thing could have ever, more or less, been given to me," Alexander says in an interview. "He took my child."

Since Franklin's arrest, there's been an HBO documentary called Tales of the Grim Sleeper and a Lifetime movie called The Grim Sleeper made about him. Media coverage of his case has been sporadic, but interest in the trial has grown so intense that there's now a press waitlist to secure a spot in the courtroom audience on Tuesday.

Families like Alexander's will be guaranteed seats. After all these years, the 75-year-old father is just hoping to have his daughter's life understood, and if the jury finds Franklin guilty, for justice to be doled out with no restraint.

"There's no rehabilitation for him. He's too far gone," Alexander says of Franklin. "He either gets life without parole, or give him death."

Follow Hayley Fox on Twitter.

Bernie Sanders on the night of the New Hampshire primary. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pretty much every presidential candidate who isn't Jeb Bush can tell a story about how their parents would never have imagined their child achieving such great things. But when Bernie Sanders evoked the memory of his parents raising him in a small, rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment while celebrating his victory in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, it was especially easy to imagine their amazement. The 74-year-old scruffy Jewish socialist's campaign's success would have shocked them, but it also caught pretty much the entire political system by surprise.

Even for pundits who knew that support for Sanders has been growing in recent months, the New Hampshire results were striking. The Vermont senator won New Hampshire with 60 percent of the vote, far ahead of Hillary Clinton's 38 percent, a bigger margin of victory than most polls had been predicting. Until mid-January, the well-respected data journalism site FiveThirtyEight had anticipated an outright Clinton win in the state. And Clinton has absolutely crushed her opponent when it comes to getting endorsements from elected officials and other prominent figures.

Of course, for a lot of Sanders supporters, including many of the ones who filled the gym at Concord High School for the Sanders primary night party, that lack of establishment support is a big part of his appeal.

Elias Tyrrel-Walker, a 17-year-old high school senior, has been volunteering for the Sanders campaign at local colleges even though he's not yet old enough to vote himself.

"I feel like he's just something new," he said. "It seems like he's running on a platform of ideas people actually care about."

Read: How the Republican Candidates' New Hampshire Predictions Got It Wrong

The party, filled with volunteers who ranged from Tyrrel-Walker's age to Sanders's, was packed with national and international media. There was stomping, shouting, and a set, heavy on disco and funk, from DJ Mel of Austin, who also played Obama's 2013 inaugural ball.

If the primary result didn't make it clear, the Sanders operation is getting more serious than it was when it began: Early in the evening, several dozen supporters found themselves milling outside the high school in 20-degree weather because they lacked tickets that no one had told them they needed. (Finally, well after the primary had been declared for Sanders, they were finally allowed in.)

After the crowd had watched Clinton's concession speech on the big screen, Sanders took the stage and quickly made note of how many voters had come to the polls. "Yuge voter turnout," he said, prompting the crowed to echo back, "Yuge!"

"What happened here in New Hampshire in terms of an enthused electorate—this is what will happen all over this country," he went, before launching into a comprehensive stump speech about government-run health care, free college, criminal justice reforms, climate change, and the rest of his liberalism-on-steroids agenda.

For the most part, Sanders struck a pleasant tone toward Clinton, congratulating her campaign on its hard work and insisting that Democrats unite around whoever is chosen as the nominee. But he also acknowledged the increasingly aggressive intra-party contest.

"They're throwing everything against me except the kitchen sink, and I have a feeling that kitchen sink is coming soon," he said.

But many of the Sanders supporters at the event said tension with Clinton was a nonissue and that they'd obviously support her in the general election if it was necessary to keep a Republican out of the White House.

Silvia Styles, a 60-year-old volunteer who said her politics have been getting more progressive since the Bush-Cheney years, said the Sanders campaign seems to be pushing Clinton left.

"I hear Hillary say the kinds of things recently that Bernie's been saying this whole time," she said.

Brian Tourgee said he had actively considered voting for Clinton in the primary. He preferred Sanders's policy positions but worried about how he'd fare in a general election. Tourgee's 18-year-old daughter Michelle had been volunteering with the campaign, but he's had his heart broken by political campaigns before and didn't get as involved as she did, he said. But he copped to a certain amount of excitement about the election results.

"It's a good time to be a liberal," he said. "I'm not going to run away from that word."

Some Sanders fans, however, seemed shaken by the loud conflicts with the Clinton campaign in recent weeks. Will Stockinger, a recent college graduate who's enthusiastic about getting money out of politics, said it's possible he might stay home on Election Day in November.

"At first I was sure I would vote for Hillary if she got the nomination, but as the campaign goes on I am less and less sure of that," he said.

Stockinger said he sees himself as an independent because he's frustrated with the entire political system. He said the same is true of many of his friends, who span the ideological spectrum from Greens to libertarians. And Clinton seems to be very much a part of that system.

For other supporters, the key to Sanders's appeal is his economic message. Matt Firmani, who traveled from Boston to see the candidate and ended up sitting on stage behind him, said a couple of years ago he was struggling to get by at a minimum-wage job. He eventually signed up for government assistance, which helped him make it through the rough patch and get a much better job at the 3D printing company where he works now.

"I really, really, really do believe in government as a service for the people," he said.

John Mark Blowen, a 68-year-old former draft resister who had steered clear of politics for decades, echoed that sentiment.

"What he's saying is that government is the way we take care of each other," he said. "I don't know if he can win, but he's moving things in the direction of human beings looking out for one another."

The question of whether Sanders could possibly win the nomination is, of course, a highly debatable one. New Hampshire has the advantage of being next to his home state. And Democratic voters in New Hampshire—as well as in Iowa, where he lost to Clinton by a hair—are largely white liberals, the group he's been doing best with so far. In national polls, he's consistently been behind Clinton. And the next states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, have Democratic electorates that are less liberal and much less overwhelmingly white.

But Sanders's first step toward winning in those states is to get voters across the country to take a closer look at him. And his big New Hampshire win is going to convince a lot of people to do just that.

"Keeping it real" is a concept that's helped tether Kanye West to his audience for over a decade. His moves subverted the double-consciousness: He wore his black Chicagoan roots on his sleeve regardless of the white gaze, while he refused to let any monolithic concept of blackness stifle his ambition.

But it's only recently that the same strength, which helped make him a centripetal cultural force, has become truly pernicious. The lead-up to T.L.O.P. has been chaotic: G.O.O.D. Fridays only lasted two Fridays. A petty Twitter rant against Wiz Khalifa exposed West as an obsessive neurotic; he had to go out of his way to defend his anus against Amber Rose. The title of his next album changed from an onomatopoeia ( SWISH) to a game show. Yesterday, he proclaimed Bill Cosby was innocent—in all caps—possibly setting the Freedom Tower on fire.

This might be the first time Kanye West being Kanye West—that is, speaking before thinking—has dragged his album rollout. He started to regain whatever goodwill he lost with last year's "Facts" when he dropped "Real Friends" and "No More Parties in L.A.," the two 2016 G.O.O.D. Friday releases. The acclaim was near unanimous, and placed together, they have a populist appeal: "Real Friends" was a dour rehash of College Dropout's "Family Business," great for the classicists, and "No More Parties in LA" is a current-state-of-Kanye thriller. Unfortunately, those songs couldn't compete with his PR blunders. Usually, the buzz around a great West track lasts for weeks. But this time around, his lead singles have faded from memory, while his alleged penchant for anal-play is still trending and inspiring memes.

West is imploding as the zeitgeist presses forward. Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is a black cultural milestone racking up Grammy nominations. Drake is owning the transparency lane that Kanye West built with chart-topping singles. Beyoncé continues to be more subversive as her fame grows. It isn't just that West is losing his cultural cache; frankly, it's easier for fans like me to redirect the energy we usually waste defending him and use that to focus on other artists.

Watch Spike Jonze interview Kanye West back in 2007

But I simply can't quit West. This was an artist who, in 2004, taught myself and hundreds of thousands of other prepubescents and teenagers (today's creatives) that their concept of blackness was valid—that it wasn't an alternative, but stood equal within black America's multitudes. So we stood with him when he went from a pink polo-wearing outsider to becoming one of hip-hop's most famous ambassadors. Yeezus might be, at its best, a vanity project driven by his fashion industry frustrations, but there was a shared vindication in him carving out his own avant-garde space to rant. His declaration that he was running for the presidency in 2020 might've been kicked off by a barely coherent speech, but the effect was vicarious. West was dancing atop the glass ceiling that's blocked so many of us.

Unfortunately, West's past few months have been caked with misogyny, implicit homophobia, and self-aggrandizement. What was at the center of those first two albums was how they captured the un-sanitized black soul and its dimensions—pride, insecurities, flawed humanity, and potential. When he reached his commercial peak with Graduation he became living proof of the maxim "do you and they will follow." People don't get that famous based simply off artistry. West has garnered a cult of personality driven by the way his humanness is intertwined with his celebrity.

And I think that's why I just can't escape Kanye West. His art is always pushing the game forward. Before others can catch up, he's off exploring new forms of expression. Who else has been able to be this loud and this famous for this long within a white space? So I bristle when his detractors tell him to be meek, to neuter his pride because it makes them uncomfortable.

I'll definitely be following on Thursday as he finally unveils his new album at Madison Square Garden, but this time it will be with more curiosity than glee. Because the truth is, "keeping it real" and "being yourself" can't absolve Yeezus of all his sins. When West publicly discounts the rape accusations of more than 50 women who have nothing to gain, even I, a longtime fan, have to question whether there is something wrong with the picture he's painting. To love something is to ask for the best in that thing. I love Kanye West, but right now he isn't at his best.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

When filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer first met the boastful perpetrators of a decades-old genocide in Indonesia, he was so taken aback by their cavalier attitude toward this horrible atrocity that he decided to spend the next few years of his life unmasking the country's failure to address these crimes through film.

"I thought, My god, it's like I've wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.I couldn't think of anything more important that I could possibly do."

He embedded in Indonesia, talking with war criminals and the victims of their horrific crimes, which resulted in two internationally acclaimed documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Since the films' release, Oppenheimer spends his time traveling the world discussing Indonesia's current political situation.

"I think of myself less as a story teller and more as an explorer. And I see myself as taking these long, intimate, transformative journeys with people within the overall safe space of making a film."

In this episode of VICE's Autobiographies, Oppenheimer discusses the meticulous process behind the creation of his films, retraces the steps he took on his journey to becoming a documentarian, and addresses the impact his films have had in redefining history for the Indonesian people.

Download go90 to watch Autobiographies and more from VICE at www.go90.com.

Wednesday morning, as Americans awoke to the reality that Donald Trump had truly swept the New Hampshire primary, they were met with a second, equally mind-boggling Trump story—Funny or Die surprise-released an hour-long Trump biopic starring Johnny Depp as the Donald.

The film, called The Art of the Deal: The Movie after Trump's 1987 bestselling book, stars Depp and a fantastic golden wig as the business mogul-slash-political candidate-slash-ego incarnate.

The whole thing is framed as a long-forgotten TV movie from the 80s recently unearthed at a yard sale by director Ron Howard, who makes a cameo as himself.

"The plan was to move really fast because we thought Trump would go away, at least as a presidential candidate," Funny or Die's editor-in-chief Owen Burke, who originally hatched the idea, told the New York Times. "When he bizarrely didn't go away, we had a little more time. But that meant keeping the secret for longer."

It's not easy for anyone to actually pull off a clandestine film production without news getting out around Hollywood, especially big-time talent like Depp or Adam McKay, Funny or Die co-creator and director of The Big Short, but they somehow managed to do it.

The results are glorious—there's a surplus of bad 80s TV movie tropes, a theme song by Kenny Loggins, and even an appearance by Henry Winkler. Take an hour break from work and watch the whole thing.

This is an excerpt from Tom Lean's new book for Bloomsbury Press, Electronic Dreams, exploring how 1980s Britain learned to love the home computer. Tom himself has made some small edits to the original text, to make the excerpt work as a stand-alone article.

In the early 1980s, home computing was booming around the world, as millions of people bought their very first machine from the likes of Commodore, Sinclair, Oric, Acorn or Atari. Today it's easy to be amused at how primitive these computers seem, with their blocky graphics, tiny memories, beepy sound and sometimes eccentric design features. Yet in their day they were an extraordinary creative medium; simple yet very powerful too, and open to experimentation by programmers who learned to push them far beyond what their designers expected, particularly when it came to creating games.

When we think of vintage computer games, we all too often think of the two-dimensional tennis of Pong, the repetitive attack waves of Space Invaders, or Pac-Man's entrapment in a haunted maze with no way out. Yet these are just the best known, and probably amongst the least impressive, of a much more diverse scene. Home computing ushered in a period of incredible gaming diversity and experimentation, probably the most creative period in video game history. It would need an entire book to adequately cover all the innovation and creativity of early 1980s games developers. The gaming scene was vast, with thousands of games of diverse genres, produced by hundreds of companies, on dozens of different platforms. However, an examination of just some of the most inventive titles and techniques of the early 1980s illustrates the great technical and creative achievements of game developers.

In Britain, many of the most innovative games of the early 1980s originated on the Sinclair-made ZX Spectrum, but were quickly ported to other platforms too. Released in 1982, the Spectrum was a budget home computer with an emphasis on learning to program. With its "dead-flesh" rubber keys and small stylish black casing, the Spectrum appears more like an overgrown calculator than a computer to 21st century eyes, but appeared fantastically futuristic at the time. Priced at £175 for the 48k memory version (less than one eighty-seven-thousandth of the RAM of the computer I'm typing this on), it was hugely popular, meaning there were not only many people programming for it, but a large market to supply. By 1984 over 3,500 games had been released for the machine in some form or another. The quality and sophistication varied enormously, but it included a large number of critically acclaimed and innovative titles.

Curiously the Spectrum itself was not as optimised for games as some of its more expensive rivals. It needed an adaptor to plug a joystick into it, the sound capability was simply a beeper, and the odd way the machine displayed its visuals could create some strange-looking effects on screen from colour clash. Other machines had more sophisticated sound and graphics, and provided built-in features to make writing games easier. A good example is the Commodore 64, which not only had an advanced sound chip but the ability to use sprites, graphical objects that made animations easier to create. "The trouble was, that guided everyone into making games that all looked incredibly similar," recalled Spectrum games programmer Jon Ritman. The Spectrum had no such hardware support, and yet its simplicity and origins as a machine to be explored made it a flexible medium to create games that did not have to obey the rules. "The Spectrum was just 'here's a bit of screen'. It's laid out in a funny way, which is a bit of a pain," explains Ritman. "But you just draw things. And you could do whatever you want. It might not be as fast, but you can do whatever you want, and I think that as a result you got more interesting ideas on it."

'The Lords of Midnight', walkthrough

Many of the best-remembered titles of the 1980s are action games of various types, but it would be entirely misleading to suggest that this was all that was on offer. Text adventure games were a hugely popular genre at the time. In 1983 nearly 130 were released on the ZX Spectrum alone, the same year that saw the launch of a dedicated computer adventure game magazine: Micro Adventurer. At their best they were immersive works of interactive fiction, notably those actually based on books, such as The Hobbit and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the latter of which was co-created by its original author Douglas Adams. Very quickly, they evolved beyond simple text games, as programmers started illustrating them and adding other dimensions to the gameplay.

The most impressive example was probably The Lords of Midnight, written by a former teacher from Liverpool, Mike Singleton, in 1984. Drawing heavily on The Lord of the Rings, The Lords of Midnight was a quest to defeat the Witchking Doomdark, but offered far more than "YOU ARE IN A ROOM" style descriptions and typed "GO NORTH" commands. Rather, it was a mix of strategy war game and fantasy adventure, based around the remarkable "landscaping" graphical technique developed by Singleton. The first-person perspective this provided created an impression of travelling through a vast fantasy land of citadels, villages, mountains and plains. It was a whole world for the player to explore, populated with enemies and potential allies, and like any good fantasy tale, the game even came with a map. The Lords of Midnight was far more open-ended than typical adventures: there were multiple characters to control, and it could be played as an adventure to destroy Doomdark's ice crown, or as a war game, by gathering forces to defeat him in battle. With 4,000 different locations and innovative gameplay, The Lords of Midnight was one of the earliest games that could be considered an epic. The cast of characters, atmospheric surroundings, enormous size and scope of gameplay made it a game that players could lose themselves in for many hours. Reviewers praised its world, landscapes and coherent storyline, attributes more often associated with books or films than mere games at the time.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film about the kids who remade Indiana Jones shot for shot

Also visually impressive, but in a rather different way, was 1983's Ant Attack. Playing as either a boy or a girl character, a novelty in the male-dominated gaming scene of the time, the game's object was simple enough: players had to enter the lonely ruins of the city of Antescher, dodge the giant ants (or, more aggressively, blow them up with grenades) and rescue their significant other. What was striking was the world the action played out in. Ant Attack was one of the earliest home computer games with three-dimensional graphics, using a technique known as isometric 3D, where the objects in the game were drawn to look like they were solid rather than flat. The game's creator, Sandy White, was a trained sculptor. With little more than shaded blocks, White created a sprawling three-dimensional city for the player to explore. The isometric 3D technique was so novel that the game's publisher, Quicksilva, attempted to take a patent out on it, but it became a widely emulated technique on the Spectrum.

Isometric 3D was taken to another level the following year when Ultimate Play the Game released Knight Lore, an action-adventure quest of collecting the ingredients needed to stop protagonist Sabreman turning into a "werewolf". Ultimate, a trading name of Ashby Computers & Graphics, were rare among British game companies in already having experience of creating arcade machine games before the home computer boom. They became well respected for a series of superbly realised and highly successful computer games such as the platformer Jetpac and action-adventure Atic Atac. The company cultivated an air of mystery; their lead developers, brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, rarely gave interviews, which paradoxically led to even greater press interest and a loyal fan base. Convinced they had a winner, Ultimate delayed the release of Knight Lore for some months to avoid upsetting the market for their other games. Whereas Ant Attack featured an expansive but essentially static city where nothing moved save for the player and the ants, Knight Lore used isometric 3D to create a miniature interactive world. Essentially a three-dimensional platform game, Knight Lore was a maze of claustrophobic dungeons that exploited the extra dimension to good effect, with objects that could be moved around, puzzles that needed to be solved in three axes and hazards hiding behind things. The graphics were also precisely detailed; the animated paroxysms of Sabreman as he turned into a werewulf were a joy to behold. It was an approach widely considered revolutionary; Crash magazine's reviewer declared that it "resembles nothing I've played before".

'Knight Lore', walkthrough

Other programmers were impressed, too. "You could have heard our jaws hit the floor, basically," recalls Jon Ritman of first seeing Knight Lore. "I looked at it and thought that's what I've always wanted to do, as I saw it, make a Disney cartoon that you could play." After Knight Lore, isometric 3D became a staple of Spectrum gaming. Indeed, so many games used the format that some magazine reviewers seem to have got rather bored of it after a while, but it was the basis for a number of inventive and polished games. Three-dimensional games were generally more technically demanding than two-dimensional ones, and few players appreciated all that was required to make isometric 3D work on a simple machine like the Spectrum.

"It required a number things," recalls Ritman, who employed the technique to good effect in 1986's Batman. The smooth three-dimensional animation as objects moved across the screen relied on emptying a space in the graphic and then drawing into the gap that was created. "You work out the area of the screen that's changed because something's moved," Ritman explains. "You work out the order of the room, from the back of it to the front, and then you draw all the things that come in that area that you need to update, in order, all the way to the front." To avoid the Spectrum's problem with colour clash, the action in most isometric games was drawn in monochrome, albeit with different colours used for different rooms to display information around the screen. "And then there was the physics, being able to move things around," Ritman adds. It seems such a simple thing today, but having items moving around in a virtual world, not just scenes being drawn, but objects that the player could interact with, was curiously novel for the time.

On Motherboard: How Nintendo Got the Rights for 'Tetris' from the USSR

A good game was not just about the graphics technique employed, but also about using it to make a fun experience that was large enough to entertain players for a good few hours. Batman, for example, had a 150 rooms to explore of puzzles, enemies and items, requiring another set of techniques to fit the game into the confines of the Spectrum's memory. "It required some intense storage, so the maps and things were incredibly condensed," recalls Ritman. The following year he and artist Bernie Drummond surpassed even this, with Head Over Heels, another detailed, and rather surreal, isometric game. Head Over Heels also offered some impressive gameplay innovations too: enemies that homed in on the player's character as they moved, fiendish combinations of conveyor belts and enemies, and strange Prince Charles-Dalek hybrid creatures controlled by buttons within the game environment itself. Most notably, Head Over Heels had two characters with different abilities to control, the doglike Head and Heels, who could be combined into a single symbiotic organism, allowing a number of different ways to play.

When new, Manic Miner, the madcap 1983 platform game which set a benchmark for early home computer games, had been celebrated for squeezing 20 two-dimensional screens of action into the 48k ZX Spectrum. A few years later, Head Over Heels managed 300 three-dimensional rooms in the same computer, a striking demonstration of maturing programming techniques. Isometric games such as these were probably the most impressive displays of how far games programmers could push the simple capabilities of the Spectrum. They were essentially miniature interactive universes created within incredibly tight computing constraints. No matter how primitive the computers seem today, it's impossible not to be impressed by the things that skilled programmers could make them do.

Electronic Dreams is published on February 11th, 2016. More information/purchase links at the Bloomsbury website. Follow Tom Lean on Twitter, here.

More retro gaming articles on VICE Gaming:

I Miss the Old, Superheroine-Like Lara Croft

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1985 Was an Amazing Year for Video Games

Vic Armstrong doubling for Harrison Ford in 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' (All images courtesy of Vic Armstrong)

The film is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy's dad (Sean Connery) has been taken by the Nazis and is imprisoned in the "belly of the steel beast" (a tank). Luckily, Indy (Harrison Ford) has a horse. Riding through a desert canyon, he chases the tank down, his ancient skills more than a match for the fascist machinery. He draws up alongside the tank, leaps from his horse, executes a perfect landing, beats some Germans up and saves the day (eventually).

"There's a lot more that goes into stunts than people generally imagine," says Vic Armstrong. "It's not just jumping off a horse."

Armstrong is a stunt co-ordinator, stunt double and director with five decades of experience in film. He's won a Technical Achievement Academy Award and is, according to Guinness World Records, the most prolific stuntman of all time. He's talking me through one of his most famous stunt sequences, which he both performed as Harrison Ford's stunt double and helped conceive as the film's stunt co-ordinator.

A stunt of this complexity begins with the storyboard. In Los Angeles, a month before the shoot, the director Steven Spielberg maps out the chase with his team. Then the task is flipped over to Armstrong and action unit director Micky Moore, who have to make the sketches a reality. They pick the locations. This one is "tricky, in that you had to have the tank going along at a fairly close proximity to a cliff face", says Armstrong. Shooting in Almeria, Spain, in a part of the desert now known as Indiana Jones Canyon, Armstrong knew that the sandy soil was good for the horse, because it wouldn't have been able to gallop on rocks, but that the crumbly soil could easily give way, meaning that Armstrong couldn't ride too close to the edge of the cliff.

They brought a bulldozer in to cut an eight to ten-foot vertical cliff face and installed a ramp for the horse to run down, above the tank. Mechanical rigs are buried in the ground, along with pads to land on. Then Armstrong works with the horse, Huracan, who he knows well. Rehearsals take place at Fort Bravo, the local film studios synonymous with the Western. The horse's speed needs to be consistent and matched to the tank so that when Armstrong stands up to make the jump, the horse doesn't duck out sideways or slow down. "In the studios, we have the manure heap, which is the softest place to land and the biggest area to allow for mistakes. So I'd do the jump from the horse onto the manure heap and measure any discrepancies between the rehearsal and the real situation."

Armstrong has to make sure he makes his jump on the horse's up-stride. He has to ride on a rhythm: on two, he's up on the horse with his feet on some concealed pegs that will help him spring off, on three he starts kicking off and, on four, he's in the air. When he does it for the first time on camera he's a split second out, and because all his energy has been absorbed he looks like "Tom and Jerry running through the air". But then he nails it, landing on a "half-inch little pad" on the tank, wearing some padding himself. "I was so fucking pleased to land I didn't care whether it hurt or not."

Vic shooting for the 1974 film 'Dead Cert'

Born in Buckinghamshire, Vic Armstrong grew up riding horses. "My dad was a racehorse trainer, and all I ever wanted to do was race steeplechasers," he tells me. "I rode my first racehorse on the Gallops when I was nine. When I was 14, I started to race, but I was quite big and had to starve myself to get to 11 stone 7, so I only ever stayed as an amateur jockey."

Richard Todd, a post-war star of stage and screen, owned some horses that Armstrong's father trained. "He used to come and watch his horses gallop on the weekend. I was eight or nine and I'd watch him with his open top Bentley and glamorous women," remembers Armstrong. "He'd tell me about the films he was in and I would watch them, then go home and pretend I was him. I'd be Rob Roy galloping up the glens, throwing myself off my pony – sad life, really, playing on my own! But I loved it."

That fantasy element is key to the stunt business, though. "It's basically playing cowboys and Indians," Armstrong says of his profession. "You know you can't do something for real, so you do it for the movies."

This play-acting is allied to physical strength and practical ability. "Growing up with horses made me very practical because you have to do the thinking for something," says Armstrong, "and at the same time you have to adapt your thinking for the animal and be totally responsible."

Arnie presenting Vic with his lifetime achievement award at the Taurus Awards, the stunt world equivalent of the Oscars

Armstrong's journey into the film business began when he met a guy called Jimmy Lodge, who was one of the top horse stuntmen of the day. Lodge came and rode horses at the racing stables Armstrong's father ran. He was working on a film called Arabesque, with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, and he needed a horse from the stables. Then he needed someone to ride that horse. Armstrong stepped up and, for his troubles, was paid "the princely sum of £20 a day, which was over a week's wages in those days".

Pretty soon, the young would-be jockey realised that rather than simply subsidising his horse racing, doing stunts could be a business. "There very few stunt people – certainly no young ones in those days, in 1965," he says.

Young, good with horses and able to learn skills like sword fighting, high work (doing stuff at great heights) and falling ("You're so focused that everything becomes very slow, it seems to take forever to get down... it burns a lot of adrenaline, which is exhausting"), Armstrong worked on a string of big films and doubled James Bond. On the first Indiana Jones film, Steven Spielberg confused him for Harrison Ford and a career-spanning relationship began, with Armstrong doubling Ford as Indy, Han Solo and many others.

Vic and Harrison Ford in Spain, on the set of Indiana Jones

"I've told Harrison a number of times that if he wasn't such a good actor he'd be a great stuntman," Armstrong says of the man he's so regularly stood in for. "He's a carpenter, he's got a logical brain on him and he's an absolute perfectionist – his scripts are always covered in notes at the beginning of shooting."

A picture sent from Ford to Armstrong is inscribed with the line: "If you learn to talk, I'm in deep trouble."

Today, the stunt community is much bigger than it was when Armstrong began.

"When I started there were probably 40 people doing it, and now there are 400, I should imagine," he says. It's still a "lovely business", but it's very competitive and you don't know everyone else in the way you used to. "I was very lucky that I met some of the people that formed the business. I came in at the cusp of the new wave, if you like," says Armstrong.

Vic and his wife Wendy on the set of 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'

One of those men was George Leech, part of a generation of men who used their military experience in the Second World War to carve out a career in the film industry, arranging and performing action sequences. Leech's daughter, Wendy, followed him into the business, and on the Superman films starring Christopher Reeve she doubled Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane. Armstrong was doubling Reeve and so, as Superman and Lois Lane, they met and went on to marry and appear in a series of films side-by-side.

CGI has changed things "incredibly for the better", says Armstrong, adding that he often likens it to morphine, in that it's an incredible drug when used in the right way for the right thing, but if you get hooked, well then hey, it's very damaging. Films can be ruined by CGI, but it means that all sorts of safety mechanisms can be used and then just taken out in the edit. When he was doing Indiana Jones "everything had to be in the camera frame" and thus had to be concealed, like the pegs he used to jump from the horse to the tank. Now, Armstrong can send Andrew Garfield hurtling across a street in Spiderman and the devices he uses to make this possible will never be seen by the audience.

The magic of the screen remains, though, and heading toward his 70th birthday, Vic Armstrong is back in the desert outside of Almeria, filming in Indiana Jones Canyon, still playing Cowboys and Indians.

Vic Armstrong will be discussing his career at the Glasgow Film Festival on the 19th of February. Tickets are available here.

@oscarrickettnow

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Whichever way you look at it, initiatives to mitigate the dangers of on-street sex work are going to yield imperfect results – even when they're effective. Because for as long as sex work is criminalised, most meaningful efforts to change things for the better technically have to be made outside of the law.

So West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council should be lauded for their pioneering scheme, set up in October of 2014, which allows sex workers to trade without fear of arrest on an industrial estate in Leeds' Holbeck district. The scheme has been credited with making sex workers more likely to report those who prey upon them to the police, and has reduced complaints from fed-up residents.

However, three weeks before the initiative was made permanent on the 11th of January this year, 21-year-old sex worker Daria Pionko was murdered within the zone, which operates between 7PM and 7AM and is managed by the authorities. A University of Leeds evaluation carried out before the murder stated that "the perceived decrease in police presence during operational hours is a concern and has contributed to sex workers not experiencing an increase in feeling safer". The report's author, Dr Teela Sanders, made a number of recommendations, including calling for extra policing, better street lighting, CCTV and number plate recognition.

A memorial to Dara Pionko

Although West Yorkshire Police are not in any way culpable for Ms Pionko's death, the question remains whether or not policing for sex worker safety within the managed area has been neglected or mismanaged. With other local authorities considering the trailblazing scheme, it would be wise for their police forces to take note of the undoubtedly difficult lessons the managed area in Holbeck has to teach.

VICE submitted a Freedom of Information request on the 8th of January to West Yorkshire Police, asking if Dr Sanders' recommendations had been considered and inquiring about the perceived decrease in police numbers. On the 3rd of February the request was delayed for a further 20 days to allow the police to decide whether or not it was in the public interest to release the information.

Despite the delay, there is evidence that the managed area has been skimped on. During a Leeds City Council meeting on the 14th of October last year – more than two months before Ms Pionko's death on the 23rd of December – Holbeck Councillor Angela Gabrielspoke out about underfunding generally.

At the meeting, Cllr Gabriel said: "Progress has been made. But everybody decided that it was Holbeck's problem and it was going to stay in Holbeck. We have had no resources."

Cllr Gabriel declined repeated requests for an interview to discuss the issues she raised in more detail. Her reticence is reflective of the sensitivity of those involved in the managed area, which is being run under the Safer Leeds multiagency partnership and includes local sex worker charities.

In many ways the project has been an absolute success: improved trust between sex workers and the police, due to a dedicated liaison officer, has led to an 80 percent increase in offences and attacks being reported, with two rapists being jailed as a direct result of the scheme. The project's partners are all overwhelmingly supportive.

That said, when I spoke to a charity outreach worker – who wished to remain anonymous, saying it was not possible to comment openly because of the nature of the partnership – she said that despite "a huge amount of good will" between the partners, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of extra safety provisions was "because we're living in an age of austerity".

The industrial estate in Leeds' Holbeck district in which sex workers operate between 7PM and 7AM without fear of arrest.

In fact, by this March, Leeds City Council's budget will have been slashed by £180million – a drop of more than 40 percent in five years. West Yorkshire Police are in a similar situation: over 2016 and 2017, their budget will be reduced by more than 30 percent, with extra cuts scheduled for November.

In this situation, it's not impossible to envisage hard-pressed decision makers shrinking expenditure through the reduction of police numbers in the Holbeck zone, where the de-facto decriminalisation of the area's ingrained sex industry presents the potential of freeing up the police resources previously used to curb it. Making the possibility of reduced policing more viable is the fact that many sex workers find traditional patrol methods obtrusive anyway.

"It's not good for business. I just want to do it and go home. I don't want to mess about with the police. One of the police says to me, 'You're not going to have any fun with that attitude,' and I thought, 'You're taking the piss – as if any of us are having fun down here anyway,'" said 24-year-old Jane (not her real name), who is a heroin addict and has been a street sex worker for two years.

WATCH: 'The Digital Love Industry', our documentary about how tech is shaping the way we have sex.

Jane was waiting to be picked up from the managed area when I visited for a few hours in January, shortly after it was made permanent.

"If something bad happens I'll deal with it myself. I don't need to bother with the police. It's just a waste of time. I tell you exactly what it is: girls want to come down here, get their money, go home, get their drugs, go to sleep and do exactly the same the next day until they sort their life out," she said.

During my visit police cars passed intermittently and a charity support van was parked up by the side of the road. Early in the evening a police cycle patrol also passed through, though there was no sign of police officers on foot during the time I was there. One of the two officers on the bike patrol informed me that the sex workers don't like having the police around.

"Sarah"

This wasn't the case for 32-year-old Sarah (not her real name), who has worked around Holbeck for 15 years "on and off". Sarah was a heroin and crack addict, but has cleaned up and now does sex work to provide for her children.

"I've said it for years: there needed to be somewhere where the girls can go, where the guys can go, where it's all contained," she said. "It's been going a while now and it has made things better. The police liaison officer who works with us has been fantastic. There have been more police since Daria's murder, but I think it'll go down again. But there's not much the police can do once you're in someone's car. What we really need is a row of garages with, like, parking meter things and cameras outside. You put your money in, you go in, the shutters come down and you can do your business inside and not have to worry."

Dr Sanders hinted at such a solution in her review, asking the authorities to "consider the place where the sexual transaction happens as the place where there is most risk for sex workers. This place is not addressed in the current Managed Area model." Initiatives that solve the problem are already running successfully in Germany, Holland and Switzerland, but are not being considered by Safer Leeds.

READ ON BROADLY: Stigma Puts Sex Workers at Higher Risk of HIV

The problem is that in those countries prostitution is legal and regulated, whereas in Britain it is not. "Unfortunately we're not there yet," commented the charity outreach worker I spoke to. In the absence of legalisation and legislation to govern the industry, the police and their partners will have to think of other ways to unobtrusively protect Holbeck's sex workers that don't result in just leaving them to it.

"The managed area is regularly patrolled by officers from the local neighbourhood policing team as part of a specific patrol plan," said a West Yorkshire Police spokesperson, who would not answer my question regarding reduced police presence. "The results of the independent academic evaluation, which includes the recommendations around CCTV, street lighting, etc are currently being reviewed by the Safer Leeds partnership in detail as it continues to look at how the managed area should continue to operate as part of the city's wider strategy around sex work."

There is no doubt that policing the managed area is a difficult and delicate undertaking, or that West Yorkshire Police have taken a brave and progressive step by agreeing to do it. Nevertheless, one has to hope that their flagship policy won't be compromised by the need to save money.

@ryansfletchers

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Jackson Pollock's "Mural on Indian Red Ground" in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (All photos by the author)

More than once I have heard it said that Jackson Pollock, not Reagan, won the Cold War. After all, in those first two decades, when it was a matter of deciding which regime best symbolised the future, Pollock's abstract expressionism showed America to be a reactionary force capable of forging ahead. On the crucial front of the imagination, the Soviet Union could only retreat.

With these thoughts in mind, I headed to see one of Pollock's masterpieces now being shown in Tehran. How did this exhibition come about and what subtle impact might it have?

Contrary to what some international media have claimed, it is not the first time that the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has shown Pollock's "Mural on Indian Red Ground", one of the great works of American contemporary art in its collection. Nor have they refrained from showing their Warhols, Oldenburgs and Lichtensteins. That particular revolution happened 15 years ago. The only requirement that the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance seems to pose is that curators find an appropriate context for showing these works. In this case, they work as counterpoints to the work of Iranian artist Farideh Lashai (1944-2013), herself a modernist of prodigious imaginative powers, who is the main focus of the exhibition.

When I meet the Iranian curator, Faryar Javaherian, I tell her that I am particularly impressed by Lashai, especially some of her video art, both lyrical and surreal. But, it turns out, those videos were neither as short nor as surreal as I had thought. They had simply been clipped under censorship instructions. One of them was a particularly beautiful rendition of the classical poem Layla and Majnun. Since, in Lashai's video, Layla appeared most often unveiled and even undressed, the public version had to be reduced to about 20 seconds, and it made very little sense. Something similar happened a few years ago, when one of the panels of a Francis Bacon triptych had to be removed for supposedly depicting a homosexual scene. The triptych became a diptych.

I comment to Faryar that in both cases completely new artworks have been created. Perhaps there is some kind of silver lining in that. She smiles but looks pained.

Contemporary art in Tehran is experiencing a boom, both artistic and commercial. Faryar notes that, 20 years ago, Iranian art had regressed almost to the basic function of all art – that of being the heart of a heartless world – as it helped exorcise the horrors witnessed during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Coming back from the front, the young men who had some talent for drawing and painting produced tepid images of ideal landscapes and flowers. No one who has been through hell wants to relive it, Faryar argues, something I could confirm after meeting with war veterans in Tehran. Perhaps the first contemporary art gallery of the Islamic Republic was the Beheshte Zahra cemetery, where martyrs' photographs are covered with simple decorative elements.

Today, things could not be more different. Young Iranian artists are full of blast and thunder. They gather every evening in the courtyard and cafes of the Artists' Forum in Honarmandan Park, around which a distinct art scene has been developing. The Forum has become a sanctuary for artists. It is also a meeting point. With so few outlets for expressing their irreverence and creativity, young Iranians have turned contemporary art into a powerful social force.

Later that day I visited one of the best galleries in Tehran. Etemad is located at the very edge of North Tehran, where the city climbs up the snowy mountains. Everything is different in North Tehran. The air feels incredibly pure if you've been exposed to the dangerous pollution levels downtown. Tiny streaks of snow water create an enchanting atmosphere. And then there is money, or rather opulence, which stands out in the fancy restaurants, sports cars and luxurious condos all around you. At Etemad I am entertained with tea and cookies while looking at metal rods which reveal themselves as "portraits of famous people" – including, rather scandalously, Ayatollah Khomeini himself – if seen from the right anamorphic perspective.

Upstairs I meet Arefe Arad, one of the best young artists in Iran. She was born in 1983 in Sari, a small city on the other side of the mountains. This is her first significant exhibition.

When I meet her she is saying goodbye to a family of prospective buyers, an affluent family from North Tehran. The daughter is dressed in the mandatory headscarf, which she combines with a suit not too different from a Pollock painting. When they leave, Arefe guides me through her work. She is dressed just as unconventionally: all in black, from the headscarf to the Doc Martens, heavy makeup and a long gothic cape.

Arefe had worked on metal sculptures before. Now all works on display are made of velvet, satin, termeh (a type of Iranian handwoven cloth) and organdy. She makes bodies by patching different fabric pieces together. If the result evokes different kinds of human-size alien creatures and monsters, that is very much deliberate. She tells me she wants to create monsters – textile models close to mythical characters with no identity or individuality. These sculptures are flexible, viscous, patched together in deformed shapes. She says they are a reflection on the everyday life of Iranian women.

It is very late when I leave. Stopping at Tajrish Square in North Tehran, where young people converge, I see immediately what Arefe means when she speaks of women as patchworks. One young woman goes up the Tajrish escalator wearing a black headscarf covering all her hair, a very proper hijab few women in North Tehran are keen on, combined with knee-high pink stiletto boots. The whole square turns to watch her walk. Such extravagance is all too obviously a reaction against the mandatory dress code. As Fayar had put it to me, "This is how you defy the law. It is the same with parties. When these young people throw a party, it's not a party, it's an orgy."

READ: Sex in Tehran – My First Iranian Orgy

Later, when I talk to a group of university arts students, two things become clear. First, the famous Tehran parties are a class privilege. They are something allowed only to the "bourgeois kids" in the north, who have the money and the influence to wiggle themselves out of any possible trouble with the morality police. A sure indication that this is true is the way the only cars pumping pop music out of their windows in Tehran are very expensive sports vehicles, a useful indication to the authorities of who is driving them and how to react.

I also return to my argument that the stringent legal code mandating headscarves and baggy overcoats for women are perhaps being appropriated by young women in creative and ultimately empowering ways.

The reaction mirrored the pained expression I had seen from Fayar earlier. These are not creative cultural hybrids, but distorted chimeras. The authorities want a token of subjection and that is why every woman in Iran must carry her headscarf, wherever she is, as a public proclamation that her choices are in the end worthless. The humiliation is powerful and deliberate. At the same time, they fight back by blemishing in every way they can the almost aesthetic dreams the clerics have developed for Iran. The result is not creative but destructive, just as the parties in North Tehran are less festive celebrations than distorted affirmations of the will against a stunting force.

The next day I visit a second gallery and am again confronted with monsters and chimeras. The Aaran gallery, near Honarmandan, has just opened a solo exhibition by Mehran Saber. Both the gallery and the artist had a clash with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance a few years ago, involving long discussions about the possible copulating intentions of some abstract shapes on a painting. Mehran left Iran, but now he is back, perhaps trusting that there is a new openness from the censors. His most recent work depicts "shapes that are stretched, distorted and caught in suspended situations", as the exhibition catalogue puts it.

Hybrid creatures, often twisted and pressured, push and pull. These are not aesthetic ideas, but the very nature of life in Tehran. That is why, as so often in Persian history, art offers us the best window into Iranian politics and society.

If there is one person who has navigated these troubled waters with aplomb, it's Sami Azar. As director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, he made it worthy of the name for the first time since the beginning of the Islamic Republic. He then worked for Christie's as their Iranian representative. He has recently founded his own auction house in Tehran and is, according to everyone I talk to, doing extremely well.

Why has this become a city of monsters, I ask. Sami Azar is also an art theory professor as well as a businessman, so he tries to put it a bit more theoretically. Monsters is perhaps not the best word, but he agrees that the grotesque has become the predominant category for Iranian artists. "Many young artists create a monster-like grotesque and present it as the catastrophic result of identity crisis."

But Sami Azar is also optimistic. Tehran has a very large art community and is certainly taking advantage of scale. There are thousands of very good young artists and hundreds of galleries, some already world-class. That makes the future of contemporary art here very promising, he tells me. The connection to social and political life is now stronger than ever. Artists use art to express their most serious concerns and this is turning contemporary art into a powerful social and political force, perhaps for the first time in modern Iran. What will all the monsters become when they grow up? My impression is that we will soon start to find out. A new Iran is in the making. That was already the case before Geneva and the lifting of sanctions, but the process will now be much faster.

It was getting late, so I left the arts quarter and headed north. I had a party to attend.

@MacaesBruno

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Sam Lake is Finnish, through and through – his real name is Sami Järvi, and he was born in this currently ice-crusted corner of the Nordic countries. But when scanning his desk at Remedy Entertainment, the Espoo-based studio he's the creative director of, for clues as to what inspires him to write games that tap into American culture, one thick tome stands out. The Dictionary of American Slang. It's half hidden but you can't miss it, peeking out from underneath presumably some pretty important documents, actively underpinning them – just as Lake's twisted take on all things pulpy about modern Americana serves as the foundation for Remedy's celebrated story-focused games.

First came 2001's gritty crime drama Max Payne and its sequel of two years later. Then, in 2010, the company released the supernatural thriller Alan Wake, soon followed by its American Nightmare spinoff. And now comes Quantum Break, a new sci-fi IP for a new generation, a console exclusive for the Xbox One. It's a risky position to be in – launching a brand-new series is never easy, and doing so on a system that's far from the market leader right now, with Microsoft's machine substantially lagging behind the PlayStation 4 in sales terms, increases the chances of it failing to capture an audience sizeable enough to make the endeavour worthwhile. But while he's clearly nervous about Quantum Break's release, Lake is confident that the game Remedy has made is more than worthy of player time and money.

"Doing a new thing on a new platform, pushing the technology forward, creating a new story in a new world with new core gameplay – there are a lot of 'firsts' in this game, and every one of them alone is a challenge," he tells me, as I take a break from hands-on preview time with the game. "Combine them, and it's a lot to handle. We stop at times and ask ourselves if we're crazy, and I suppose we kind of are, just a bit. But at the same time doing something new keeps you exploring, doing fresh things. It all takes time – this has taken a long time, just as Alan Wake did. But I'm happy with having been on this journey."

The development of Quantum Break goes back some years, with its first public trailer shown at the Xbox One's own reveal, in the spring of 2013. Its release, on April 5th, will be supported by a live-action TV show, with episodes shown between the game's acts, which is both directly influenced by your in-game decisions and comprises plotline colour for what happens in the game's next act (as decided by "Junction" sections, which give you the choice of two routes for the plot to take). The transitions from the real-life actors doing real-life stuff, albeit for pretend, and the graphics isn't quite seamless, but Quantum Break is a damn handsome game. It's not running on any off-the-shelf engine, either – Remedy has built its own, from scratch.

Sam Lake (top) and Kyle Rowley (bottom)

Quantum Break runs on the Northlight engine, which gameplay designer Kyle Rowley says is a project that's been going on behind the scenes since the Max Payne days. "We have an amazing tech team, one of the best visual effects teams in the world, for games, I think," he says. "They've worked in movies, on Gravity, and some of the Harry Potter films. Those guys are really strong. And then the AI and animation systems, they're done from scratch. This is a next-generation animation system." The way that the game's protagonist, Jack Joyce – played by X-Men's Iceman actor, Shawn Ashmore – moves is incredibly fluid, while the stuttering, glitching effects of his time powers – more on those in a second – are wonderful in motion. Quantum Break looks the part, before you've so much as finished its first act.

And how you play through the game is a mix of familiar third-person combat – guns, grenades, waist-high walls – and entirely new abilities that encourage you to not duck behind cover at any opportunity, but to take on enemies in fast-paced shootouts. Jack's time-controlling powers – which he receives when an experiment goes awry, showering both him and the game's antagonist, Paul Serene (played by Game of Thrones' own Littlefinger, Aidan Gillen), in "Chronos energy" – allow him to slip behind foes without them seeing him, create a temporary time shield to deflect bullets, briefly suspend opponents in the air for a simple take-down, and much more. And it doesn't mess about in revealing these powers – Quantum Break wants you to experiment with your arsenal as soon as possible, holding little back for unlocking later in the game.

Aidan Gillen plays Paul Serene, the villain of both the game and TV show (as seen here)

"Initially, the game was slower," Kyle recalls, "but when we started adding the time powers, it became obvious that the game was a lot more fun when we sped everything up. We didn't want people to think, early on, that they were just playing a regular cover shooter. So we introduced the time powers quickly, to encourage people to use them. And the game is quite difficult if you choose to play without using the time powers – enemies are aggressive at hunting you down, and the damage they deal is high. So you have to make use of your powers, just to survive."

I can vouch for that. Attempt to take on Serene's private army, part of a shady corporation called Monarch Solutions, without deploying Jack's superhero-like skills, and he'll be shot to ribbons. You need to move fast, always, as hunkering down and hoping to pop heads from afar simply won't work, most of the time. "In Alan Wake, the AI was very zombie like," Kyle says. "But here, the enemies have full search patterns, they take on flanking behaviour, all the good stuff that you might see in a quality military shooter." Again: do not sit still. You will die.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE in conversation with best-selling author Chris Hedges

As electric as the action becomes, though – and it does, only escalating the further you get, with enemies beginning to use time-shifting gear of their own – this wouldn't be a Remedy Game without a solid story behind the spectacular scenes. The TV side of Quantum Break shows that Remedy are taking the narrative aspect of their latest venture more seriously than anything they've done before – "The bar is really high on TV right now," Lake says. "I think that TV is living through a golden age right now, so I don't see it as an old medium." And he's certain that the world Remedy has created, with its original characters and organisations, isn't going to begin and end with this single game and complementary series.

"The way we look at creating a new franchise, and a new concept, is that we look at it from the perspective that it doesn't just have to be a game," he says. "We put a lot of effort into building a foundation that can support more than just one game. First of all there's the potential for sequels, multiple games; but also the trans-media angle. Be that a movie or TV series, or books or whatever – I just want to create a cool set of characters, and have them engaged in conflict across great stories, in a world that's inspiring. That can work in any medium.

'Quantum Break', The Game Awards trailer

"That being said, I don't think we'd want to repeat what happened with Max Payne, where the movie rights were sold and then we saw nothing of it until the final film. It would be nice to think that if that happened again, we'd be more of a part of the process, being able to link it further into the future of the franchise. But we'll see if something like that happens."

The Quantum Break you'll be playing in early April is, its makers hope, just the first chapter in a longer story. This is the base from which everything else will grow. (Although Quantum Break's future doesn't mean we won't also see an Alan Wake sequel at some point, judging by what Lake tries his best to not tell me: "I'm definitely not saying no to sequels, and looking at what we've done now, it'd probably be refreshing to do a sequel after this game.") For want of a better expression, I put it to Lake that this is his, and Jack's, superhero origin story.

Here's how Shawn Ashmore looks in the game

"For sure, that's definitely what this story is. We feel that all our games need a definitive ending, but more and more we look at what we're making as the 'first season'. So Quantum Break is Jack's origin story, how he becomes a superhero. There's some Spider-Man in there, in terms of the idea of science going wrong, and through that the hero gains his powers, and doors open to this new world. That's what we're seeing here. A time travel experiment goes wrong, he's blasted with Chronos energy, and he gains superpowers – and at the same time, the villain is born. So as you say, it has these familiar elements to it, but very definitely with our spin on them. I kind of feel that with Alan Wake and Max Payne, I grew to not be worried about using 'classical' story elements, because you can always produce original work from there. I don't think anyone else but us could do a Remedy game."

Related, on Motherboard: The Six Timeless Tropes of Time-Travel Movies

And here he is in the TV show

There's always been something rather cultish about Remedy. The studio's games look great, and play like their triple-A cousins, slickly and with plenty of sizzle. But there's always something a step to the left about their productions, too, and Quantum Break feels like it's coming from a similar position to Alan Wake and the original Max Payne. Here's a game that you think you know all about, just from looking at it. It's a third-person cover shooter, big whoop. But then you dig into it. You poke around the environments and uncover what its makers call optional storytelling components – collectibles, broadcasts, Easter eggs. You begin to appreciate the incredible depth of the world that's been crafted here, and how it's quite unlike any sci-fi-themed games before it. You click with Jack's time powers and suddenly you're racing through levels, only to hit a Junction and genuinely find yourself pausing for what feels like an eternity, painfully torn between two directions.

Lake's right: only Remedy could have made this game. An American story shaped by a Finnish writer from a desk that looks out over a landscape so commonly covered in snow. It's partially familiar, yet fundamentally different from its genre peers. And based on what I've seen so far – the entire first act, a full episode of the show, and more – it's a title to make time for.

Quantum Break is released for Xbox One and PC on April 5th – find more information at the game's official website. Travel to and from Helsinki and hotel accommodation to make this feature possible were covered by Xbox.

@MikeDiver

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What's great about Valentine's Day is that it gives people in long term relationships a guarantee for sex. What if, after being together for a couple of years, the majority of your sexual encounters start taking place just before falling asleep at night – your teeth flossed and your pyjama top still on? The 14th of February is just around the corner, promising to make your sex life adventurous again. As long as you plan the entire evening in advance, that is.

We wanted to know how couples around the world are having organised sex this year, so we asked our international editors to visit their local sex shop and ask each owner about this week's best sellers.

UNITED STATES

Photo and interview by Gabriella Lewis

"Last Valentine's Day, people were into kink because of Fifty Shades of Grey, but we're not selling as much of that stuff this year. Sex games and couples' toys are really popular, like the Eva Now – a hands-free couples vibrator which was actually crowdfunded by two Williamsburg girls.

We've had a lot of women who don't normally wear lingerie come in to buy some, because that's what their partners want. We also just started selling chocolate versions of Clone-A-Willy and Clone-A-Pussy – DIY molding kits that will turn your junk into an edible replica for your Valentine. I hope people will try them out!"

- Sam, Co-Owner of SHAG in Brooklyn, NY

UNITED KINGDOM

BJ didn't want his photo taken, so here's a photo of the store's entrance.Photos and interviewby Tom Usher

"The stuff we sell isn't usually just for Valentine's, because it's more extreme, more specialist. If it is for Valentine's and it's a couple, they tend to get cock rings or something like this 12-inch veined double header, which they can both use. With normal sex shops the guys get what the girl wants – so things like fluffy nightgowns and stuff – whereas here it's with two guys, so the thought process is more, 'I want to do that to him.' Masculine sexuality is more aggressive.

Red things sells well – but then it sells all the time as red in gay culture is associated with fist fucking, not Valentine's Day."

– BJ at Expectations – a gay fetish store in Shoreditch, London

GERMANY

Photo and interview by Daniel Sigge

"Fantastic sex on Valentines day is a game for two. This magic bullet is for both hetero and gay couples – it's fun for everyone! Buckle up, put it on, get it on. You can fuck for up to two hours with this cock ring. In general, cock rings sell well in Berlin. And who wouldn't like to get a ring as a present on Valentine's Day? But I also have some fantastic new condoms you should try.

Berlin says hi and happy Valentine's to you all!"

- George Gorgeous, Owner of Gorgeous in Berlin

SERBIA

Photo and interview by Petra Zivic

"In Serbia, Valentine's Day only became popular after the fall of communism. All we know about it comes from American movies, and we are a long way from celebrating it wholeheartedly. Serbians buy more sex gifts for their partners on New Year's than on Valentine's Day. I think teenagers care about it more, but our customers are mostly married couples.

Still, out most popular items are thongs and G-strings in various colours, packed in the shape of flowers. It's really a lovely gift. Another hit is this female thong called Butterfly Kiss, which stimulates your clitoris and G-spot at the same time."

- Boza, Manager of Your Dreams in Belgrade

MEXICO

Photo and interview by José Luis Martínez Limón

"We definitely sell more in the run-up to Valentine's but mostly small things like condoms, lubricants, vibrating rings... Mexicans won't really go for sex toys on February 14th. When they do, it is usually a couple who want to try something new. Our best sellers are dildos – we sell almost the same number of those on Valentine's Day as on any other day of the year."

- Manuel, Salesperson at Libido in Mexico City

THE NETHERLANDS

Photo and interview by Wout van Gils

"The stuff we've been selling most in the run-up to Valentine's Day has actually been pretty tame. In the past week we've sold a lot more lingerie than in the weeks before, and not as many dildos and vibrators as we usually sell. The red panties and bras are always quite popular, and this week is no different. We've also been selling a lot of our surprise packages, for the more adventurous types. You know, fun for him and her. They contain dildos, vibrators, lubricants – that sort of stuff. But you never know exactly what you're going to get."

- Rogier Speekenbrink, Erotic Discount Center in Amsterdam

ROMANIA

Photo and interview by Gabriel Sandu

"Valentine's Day is the only time of year when the number of women who buy stuff in our shops surpasses that of men. Sales are on the rise in general, but it seems to be the only time of year when women buy gifts for their spouses. Normally, Romanian women will buy something for themselves. In the run-up to Velentine's Day they look for small, funny gifts like edibles – panties made out of candy or vagina-shaped lollipops, which they buy to convince their boyfriends that they should eat them out more.

Those who want to really take advantage of the holiday also buy furry handcuffs (red for women, black for men) and pillows with boobs on them. Two days ago, a girl ordered a giant red dildo. She said that it is the gift she's giving herself for Valentine's Day so she needed it to be red."

- Dragos Enea, Owner of Erotica in Bucharest

SPAIN

Photo and interview by Juanjo Villalba

"Valentine's day is one of the best times of the year saleswise – like Christmas and the summer. This week, the most popular products among women have been aromatic and lubricating oils. Men on the other hand have been buying technologically advance vibrators. Luxury clit and G-spot stimulators, too. I find this really positive because it means they care for their partners."

- Adeline Aránega, Owner of Kitsch in Barcelona

DENMARK

Photo and interview by Sarah Buthmann

"The ass is more on the table now than it has ever been and so this week we are seeing an increase in demand for strap-ons for straight couples. The G-kii g-spot vibrator is also a big hit.

Then there's the LELO Lyla, which has also been in high demand. It's a nifty, little, egg-shaped, remote-controlled vibrator that can be inserted into the vagina. It can be a couple's dirty little secret if you're at a party together or having a romantic dinner. The man can control his woman with the click of a button. It's a huge turn on."

- Kate Lis, salesperson at Lust in Copenhagen

SWEDEN

The We-­Vibe. Photo by Aretha Bergdahl. Interview by Johannes Räihäand

"I can definitely see a change in sales in the run-up to Valentine's. We get a lot of guys shopping this week – mostly buying gifts for their girlfriends. Couple related stuff. The We-Vibe is a best seller. You insert the larger, flatter side of the toy in the vagina, while the smaller side rests on the clitoris and vibrates. The male then enters and both parties can enjoy the vibrating sensation. So it's a very fun toy for both partners. We also see a peak in the sales of high class, silent dildos. People don't mind spending a little extra to make it special around this time of the year. As for the sad singles, they usually buy sex toys at approximately the same rate, all year round."

- Anonymous shop assistant, Lovetoys in Stockholm

CANADA

Photo and interview by Jake Kivanc

"People come in on Valentine's Day to get gifts that are very romantic and intimate, rather than just fun or experimental. A lot of folks will come in trying to create a scene using several little items – love notes, candles, massage oils, small toys. Or they might go for a bigger ticket item like an expensive vibrator. People's favourites are things like under-the-bed restraint systems, colourful bondage tape, fun lubes and condoms – that sort of thing. Sometimes, people come in and ask for "the best" product but there really isn't one.

With the Canadian dollar being so low, we've had to increase our prices on some of our imported products, but we're trying to put a greater emphasis on Canadian products. Happy Valley does a lot of great butt plugs and sleeves for us out of Peterborough, and we get a massage oil from out in BC."

- Ignacia Ibarra Black, Employee/Head of Donations at the Come As You Are Co-operative in Toronto

Illustration by George Yarnton.

There are lots of things you can get into as an adult, like the American Civil War or spinning or pottery or cocaine. Picking up new interests is socially acceptable; in fact, many people would see it as positive, a sign that there's still some fight in you, that you haven't yet succumbed to a life of getting drunk enough to do something stupid one night a week and spending the remainder of your nights getting slightly less drunk and talking about it.

But football feels like a thing that you're not allowed to get into beyond the age of, let's say, six. Football is a thing you're born into - your dad pressures you into supporting his team by wrapping you up in his sweat-hardened match scarves and forcing you to idolise other men who are fitter and more successful than him. You're supposed to spend hundreds of pounds collecting bits of sticky paper with players' faces on to put in a book of non-sticky paper and then repeat this ritual annually. You're supposed to talk about with your mates, in the playground, as an early framework through which to understand mob mentality, corporate ownership, injustice, disappointment, illogical hatred, and the emptiness of failure.

New football fans can't win. Existing fans treat them like the Rachel Dolezal of pub chat, their social desperation plain for everyone to see. Football abstainers start to look at them the way you look at your parents when you realise they're actually a bit more right wing than you thought they were. "I just never had you down as the type," they say, while mentally crossing them off a list of people they might invite to see Spotlight with them.

I know this, because, I, as a 25-year-old man, have recently got into football. I had no interest in it as a child, mostly because I hated playing it. I wasn't like a little monster fat child whose cheeks burst with a rosy gluttony every time they ate a Mars Bar, I was just shit at team sports and had no interest in losing. (With the benefit of hindsight, my lack of sports enthusiasm might have served me well, as my PE teacher throughout secondary school turned out to be a paedophile and was recently convicted on historical charges of buggery.)

Instead of football, I got into TV. When you people spent your Saturdays in pubs watching the game, I would spend them on the couch watching Aaron Sorkin dramas and things from the 90s starring Christopher Eccleston.

About two years ago I started checking out Match of the Day because all that boxset television leaves you feeling very disconnected from the actual world. I like that something newsworthy is almost certain to happen in football, and I like the idea of relegation and promotion, which makes me feel safe that there is order in the world and also because it isn't too different from the X Factor.

Another reason I like football – it's the only place I can see fellow bald bastards on TV.

I really was just giving it a go as a way to feel less alone on Saturday nights when people cancelled plans last-minute, but I've got to say, it's quite good, isn't it? Narratively, the structure is pretty solid because it's so hard to come from behind, which means almost every kick creates a state of permanent trepidation where almost every second is a slide towards almost certain failure or success. That's actually better than some episodes of The Good Wife.

Over the past 18 months or so I've got really stuck in, and it helps that this season there have been some well-paced series arcs, like Leicester's rise to dominance and Chelsea's fall from grace. It's like they got a new writing team in to really pep it up. It's New Girl in season three.

The problem now is that I am suffering from a real deficit of knowledge and authenticity as a football fan. All the teams have personalities. I sort of get the basics - that Arsenal train players up and Chelsea buy them in. But what about Stoke? What's their deal? Do I even have to care? And what's the difference between them, Sunderland and Southampton? All these S teams are a nightmare for me.

More concerning is that I don't really understand the gossip. I know that footballers are all scumbags who cheat on their girlfriends, beat each other up, believe in weird conspiracy theories and treat 1980s racist stereotypes like the Welsh treat their language, desperately trying to keep them alive in the face of modern trends. But it's hard for me to work out the finer details. You never see "bonked Danielle Lloyd in an Oceana toilet" on a footballer's Wikipedia page and the websites that do talk about that sort of stuff do so in a nod and a wink way, referring to "action off the pitch" that I don't really understand.

What should really happen on Match of the Day, just after they announce the starting line-ups for each team, is that Gary Lineker should say: "The home team has five players who've been done for assault and four racists although no arrests in their last five games. Should be a tasty match-up as the number ten from the visitors has fucked the striker from the home team's wife, but then she did previously go out with the manager's son who's watching on from the executive box, unable to move after being beaten with an inch of his life at an underground bare-knuckle boxing competition. Jonathan Pierce is your commentator for this one, with Dan Wootton providing some context."

The biggest issue I face is picking a team, and this, more than anything else, reveals how I haven't got the hang of football fandom yet. I grew up in Hornsey, north London, and so by rights I should be an Arsenal supporter. And I sort of feel like one: I like it when they win, more than the other big clubs, and most of my mates are fans. But there is something so utterly galling about a 25-year-old suddenly becoming an Arsenal fan, that I'm sure if anyone else I knew did that I would think they were a prick.

Well, not a prick exactly but, you know those people who haven't watched all of Girls but they've seen like three episodes and they whine about how all the characters are privileged unlikeable idiots who know nothing about the real world, like they've had some critical breakthrough, even though that's exactly what the show is about? I don't hate the people who send those emails, but I feel weary about them in the same way a lifelong Arsenal fan would feel about me showing up in a Ramsey shirt and asking which year it was that "we" won the league.

Tottenham would be a natural next choice, what with my Jewish heritage and near proximity, and I did like it when I went there for my only ever football game and you could buy bagels in the stands and everyone was chanting "YID YID YID". But my issue there is that I do quite like it when Arsenal win, and so I don't think I could muster the steadfast hatred needed to qualify as a Tottenham fan. That's definitely not an option is it? Liking Tottenham and Arsenal. I've been told that it's not.

So where does that leave me? I don't want to support any team I have to travel too far north for, and being literally the most southern man in Britain, I'm sure teams in the north of England are thankful for that. Palace I quite like, but I've heard Alan Pardew might be a dick (again, not sure why) and besides, the overground is often closed on weekends and I don't think it's becoming to show up to a football match in an Uber. West Ham feel like too much like an in-joke I'm not part of and I think becoming a Chelsea fan now would be akin to buying shares in Bebo.

My new team! Maybe.

So what about Watford? They're quite cool. I like Ighalo. And I don't know any Watford fans so I couldn't be accused of bandwagon-jumping, because who would accuse me? Plus Elton John, who I am recent best mates with, used to be chairman. And I think black and yellow would be quite a good colour scheme for my complexion.

But then again, I'm probably basing all this on my TV-induced view of the world, where scrappy underdogs eventually become celebrated champions and anti-heroes always meet a demise of their own creation. Does that happen in the Premier League? Or do they just wait till the season's over and then spend a few billion returning everything to the status quo. Wait don't tell me. No spoilers.

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(via BBC)

Oh look hey look the new Top Gear line-up has been announced! Chris Evans is in it, plus a hundred other people. 'Nobody cares! Top Gear is bad!' — you. 'No I don't like this! There's no Jeremy!' — your dad. 'A and a woman? Typical box-ticking BBC! PC Britain gone bloody mad!' – Daily Mail columnists and readers of Daily Mail columnists. But what about me? What am I saying?

What I am saying is: look at the fucking state of this collection of shoes.

A BRIEF OVER ANALYSIS OF THIS FUCKING SHITSHOW COLLECTION OF SHOES, AS SPORTED BY THE NEW TOP GEAR PRESENTERS IN THEIR NEW TOP GEAR PRESS SHOT

Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a hallway. Mahogany, deeply varnished wood. A sideboard with a brass vase upon it, overflowing with berries and flowers. A thick-shag Persian rug nestles beneath your feet. In front of you, a door. A sense of trepidation rises within you, excitement. It is your birthday. Through that door is your surprise party. Who will be there? What will the decorations be? What gifts and delights await you? Open your eyes, walk through the door. It's Chris Evans, Matt LeBlanc, plus a hundred other Top Gear presenters.

Your birthday is a banter vacuum, isn't it? I know banter cannot be detected in photographic form – banter is microbial, a cell-level phenomenon, science's most attuned and sophisticated equipment can only detect the trail of banter left behind by a true banter particle, so ethereal is banter, so fizzing and fast-moving – but there is a dearth of it here. Like: imagine Rory Reid (maroon Burtons bomber jacket) explaining YouTube to Eddie Jordan (the 'dad's got a new heart' bloke next to The Stig). Imagine Sabine Schmitz (only woman) confusing Chris Harris (tiny man) for a production runner and asking him for a green tea. And whatever former Touring Car racer they've got trapped in the Stig costume just standing there silently, his arms folded, constantly On, glaring through a visor at a baffled Matt LeBlanc. And then Chris Evans edges into view, like a giraffe cursed by a wizard to live life as a divorcée architect confused about how to dress for his adult daughter's 21st birthday meal, and says, slowly at first, but repeating until it is loud and forceful: wahey, lads! Top actual Gear!

Anyway let's go left through right and then, like the last succulent bite of a Michelin-starred dinner, save whatever the fuck are on Chris Evans' feet for last:

RORY REID

Rory Reid was the one they recruited from open auditions. They looked at the five presenters and single mute savant racing driver they already had and went: no, we need a dude who still buys those T-shirts with a giant ornate cross on one side and the words 'SPIKE INK' on the back. Need a dude who sincerely considers getting his ears pierced whenever he is in the queue at River Island and sees the affordable jewellery selection. We need a dude who only goes on Facebook once a week. And lo, they found Rory, who decided to turn up to the most major photoshoot of his entire life in an unwashed pair of Roshe. Roshe: good solid trainer. Not at least wiping the sole of them with a damp kitchen sponge before getting your photo taken? Rory. Rory, Rory, Rory. If they weren't already planning to quietly phase you out halfway through the coming series, they are now.

SABINE SCHMITZ

You know Sabine Schmitz is the woman one because she is literally wearing a T-shirt with the Venus symbol on it, so men – rubbing their eyes in disbelief at the idea of a woman capable of driving and having an opinion about engines – can double-check that yes, this is a woman they are looking at, an actual human woman, albeit one who can wear ASDA George jeans with the best of them. Sabine has somehow managed the impossible, and that is rock jeans and sheux while being a woman. Like: I have never seen that done before. The overlong jeans. The crinkle towards the hem. And then: shoes, wide and shapeless, black poking beneath navy, positively Cowell-esque. I'm actually so astounded by this shoe and jean-length choice that I'm starting to think the BBC PhotoShopped them on. That Sabine turned up in actual tasteful lady clothes, and then, right at the last second, someone in the art department was like: hold on, lads, can we put the symbol of Venus on her T-shirt and somehow put her in jeans and sheux? We really need to iron out any possibility of her outfit giving some 45-year-old dude in Coventry his first erection in half a decade.

MATT LEBLANC

Matt LeBlanc is also wearing jeans and sheux, which I find disappointing. Like: Matt LeBlanc is here for two reasons, i. to add a little glitz and glamour to proceedings, to have softball banter with Chris Evans – Chris Evans saying "I bet you call them fries, don't you! What are these then, Matt, you American? 'Pants'?", and the studio audience laughs – and ii. to make this ensemble-cast Top Gear reboot a bit more fucking sellable to an international audience. And then LeBlanc shows up in jeans, and sheux, and the kind of jacket even Superdry wouldn't put their brand name on. Thoroughly disappointing.

CHRIS EVANS

As mentioned we will come back to Chris Evans because: fucking hell.

CHRIS HARRIS

Chris Harris is a YouTube car vlogger, if you can imagine such a thing – like I understand why the young people go on YouTube and watch beauty tutorials and prank videos, and Teens Reacting To Very Ordinary Things, and ASMR, but quite why someone would go: hmm, got a few minutes free from responsibility in this, my short and finite time on earth. Might kick back with the 'Pad and watch a video of a man driving on YouTube – and he is wearing what I think are Onitsuka Tigers. These are a very 'I'm just popping out for coffee, guys, does anyone want anything?' trainer. Bland, inoffensive, and among the exceptionally low standard for footwear set in this photo, the clear winner.

EDDIE JORDAN

Eddie Jordan is wearing purple Stan Smiths – Rafs, as well – which patently shouldn't be allowed. I'm sorry: I don't care how rich you are. I don't care if you're an eccentric millionaire who still plays the drums in a band. I don't give a shit if you think blue lenses in your glasses are a good look. A 67-year-old man with a goatee beard should not legally be allowed to wear purple Stan Smiths. The Change.org petition page will be hearing from me about this.

THE STIG

The Stig is just wearing racing shoes, so they can't be judged, but they are still deeply bad.

AND SO TO CHRIS EVANS

I... I mean, fucking hell. At first glance these shoes are the kind of deliberately hobbled All Saints-style boots you get that are very 'shabby hi-chic' but also you wouldn't want to walk through a puddle in them because they are fundamentally for show, and then no, squint tighter and look closer: there is like some faux fur element to these, nestled between the boot and the ankle, turned down, kind of like if Vikings wore Uggs. And now I'm thinking: is this a mid-life crisis in the form of a shoe? Is Chris Evans okay? He's wear distressed jeans and a stiffly new leather jacket. There's a hoodie in there. And then down to the shoes: they don't go, at all. Look at these shoes.

What the fuck is going on with these shoes.

Where does one even go about buying these shoes.

I like to pretend to myself that Chris Evans is a happy man: he is wildly rich, he has the TV contacts to revive old formats from back when he was popular essentially as a high-profile showreel to show to BBC bosses, he has a radio show, a wife, a settled family, he once spent three years getting pissed with Billie Piper, which is the first and only item on my bucket list, and yet: look at his face. Look at his shoes. Face: smiling. Shoes: howling in despair. The shoes are telling a story of a deeper Chris Evans, a sadder one. A dream gig shared with a thousand other people. The Clarkson role on a Clarkson-free car show. The captain on a sinking ship. And look again: the shoes know. The shoes know that the entire target audience of Top Gear is going to watch whatever Amazon does with the old presenting team. The target audience of Top Gear doesn't want to watch Chris Evans wear three leather jackets at once while talking to a vlogger. They don't want to watch The Stig race against a woman. They don't want Matt LeBlanc, being American. They don't want this. Nobody wants this. And the shoes know. Look at those shoes – sad, sighing apart like Bagpuss, sighing apart like Chris Evans himself – those shoes know. They know.

@joelgolby

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Caroline Lucas describes a creepy Europe that hides in your wardrobes. All photos by Chris Bethell.

Another Europe? Surely the one we've got is screwed up enough as it is? We don't seriously want to live in a Multiverse of competing Europes, always bickering about what new subsidy to give French farmers, or whether a 170 degree banana is still 'bendy'. Do we?

Apparently we do. Because apparently the present one is not, as Nigel and chums might see it, a Gomorrah of all that is soft and left and flower-arranging grants for Latvian rapists on day-release. No, it is, we are repeatedly reminded, a 'bosses club'. A 'racist place'. The place where capitalism goes to Netflix after a long day of neo-colonialising.

Which is why, on Wednesday night, the back room of Brick Lane's 93 Feet East is packed with a rainbow coalition of different shades of red and green, from Left Unity, to Syriza UK, to Unison to Caroline Lucas to Jeremy Corbyn's Momentum, and on. This, we're told, is the launch of Another Europe Is Possible, the start of the Referendum campaign for progressive/hard-left/enviro types, who really want us to stay in Europe, but don't want to stay in Europe for the same reasons as David Cameron wants us to (or even that nice Mr Alan Johnson).

There are already an array of these micro-groups in existence, shading different pots of opinion on our upcoming binary question. Vote Leave, Leave.EU, Get Britain Out. Better Off Out. The way the system's been structured, everyone gets to form a group - you and I could make one tomorrow: Stronger To Leave The.EU To Save Britain's Europhobic Ocelots, or whatever. But in the end, they will all have to fuse until there is only one 'nominated' group on either side leading the cheering, with corresponding access to state funds.

For now, though, the terrain is about a broader argument - what Europe could be, rather than the hard facts of what it is now and whether we want to be in it. So we get a sort of leftist central casting version of stuff that happens and that may also be influenced by Europe. A junior doctor hot off the picket line tells us how the NHS is basically good. And... Europe. A man from Friends of the Earth told us that global warming is basically bad. And... Europe.

Some are even from other parts of Europe. Marina Prentoulis represents 'Syriza UK'. She assures everyone that Syriza, despite diligently bending over and taking Mrs Merkel's big hard austerity strap-on, are still very much in favour of an EU that bankrupted their country, then left them to clean up themselves. Some might call this Stockholm Syndrome. But no: "After all, can you name an international institution that has not been dominated by neoliberalism?" she counters. "UNICEF?" everyone internally speculates, "the WHO?" "SADEC?" "Syriza?".

After the situation in Syriza, it's back up the alphabet to the situation in Syria, via Syrian PhD student Mohammed Ateek. Long story short: still bleak. What this had to do with David Cameron's historic opt-out on the provision of tax credits to EU citizens who've been resident less than four years was unclear. But it is always good to hear about Syria, and as we all implicitly understand, it is simply scripture that every leftist meeting is required to have one refugee talking about how incredibly hard it is being a refugee.

After Mohammed talks about his friend who drowned, the evening feels very sombre. So as is tradition, it's up to a member of the NEC of the NUS, in this case Sahaya James, to lighten us up. This she does by swallowing her gender studies textbook and reconstituting it as a range of verbal bingo calls.

The EU referendum, she announces, is a double distraction. From heartless Tory cuts, and from a refugee crisis driven by 'the aftermath of imperialism'. There is, she goes on, a false dichotomy between those inside the EU and those outside it. She is not only in favour of another Europe, she basically wants to expand the Schengen Zone until it contains the whole whole world. "Open all the borders," she sloganeers. People clap. Even though it would be highly confusing to the other Europes, this Europe would at least be easy to achieve, depending as it does merely on a few Greek border guards leaving their posts.

Hywel Williams MP is introduced as the leader of Plaid Cymru at Westminster and the room pricks up its ears. Many in here have likely never seen a Welsh nationalist up-close before, just as many Welshmen have never seen a black man outside of TV repeats of Luther. This is a culture jam in front of our very eyes. Hywel informs us that Welsh nationalists are strongly pro-Europe. That it gives them breathing space to chill when they feel too claustro under the yoke of English oppression. Plus, Welsh-speaking Wales is eligible for EU social grants - Cohesion Funds - because they're defined as a marginalised ethnicity.

Of course, they were against it in the 80s, but that was 'the capitalist Europe'. Coincidentally, this was also before Cohesion Funds. He's also dismayed that the Britain Stronger In Europe people have gone with the Union Jack on their logo, when it's quite clearly a symbol of oppression. "We're here on Brick Lane," he says, "So I don't have to tell you what that means." The room nods sagely. It means cool laminated film posters for your dorm wall and all the cereal you can eat.

Ruth Cashman is listed on the press release among 'voices from the grassroots', as representing 'Save Lambeth Libraries'. The room sits bated. How will TTIP impact upon Lambeth's libraries? Will there still be mouldering Large Print copies of Anne Rice novels for Somali refugees to flick absently through while waiting out the endless visa application process? The stakes could barely be higher. To save them, it will be up to you to vote 'Yes' to Europe (while at the same time bearing in mind that another Europe is possible and the present one is merely a construct of the capitalist colonialist mentality).

Sadly, Ruth is eventually introduced as being 'from Unison', and skips all mention of Lambeth's situation-critical book depositories, preferring to concentrate on how very racist Europe is re: migrants. She comes to a crescendo while arguing that the next time Syriza gets bullied by the Troika, they ought to be able to count upon the working classes of all the EU nation-states. This sparks a flurry of hot applause throughout the room. Yep, next time, we'll just fire up the Hammer-n-Sickle Bat Signal.

Caroline Lucas rushes in late, presumably from another emergency at her veal farm, and warns everyone that the present Europe, while necessary, is a 'desperate and dreary view that depends upon more free trade and less free movement'.

"To adapt the wonderful Arundhati Roy," she grins in sign-off, "Another Europe is possible, and on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." The crowd applauds this creepy Europe that hides in your wardrobes, The Phantom Of The Europera.

They're off. It's actually happening. Soon, Caroline's Europe is going to duke it out with Ruth's and Sathaya's and Ostrich Weed's and David Cameron's and that bloke up the pub who always confuses Romanians and Romans. Which Europe is right for you? We're building a vision here, as much as we're making a choice. Another Europe Is Possible want to argue that we're not just passengers in Europe. It's not a box we tick, it's an evolving piece of our politics.

Later, at the bar, one supporter is taking the long view. It's common sense, he asserts. After all, Europe's been united more often that it's been divided. The Hanseatic League, Austro-Hungary, the Roman Empire, Charlemagne. True. And perhaps if Neville Chamberlain had stuck around, we'd be part of a sea-to-shining-sea European Union of well-manicured German-speaking states. European unity isn't a universal good. It's only as useful as what's inside it. And that's both the point and the problem with tonight.

@gavhaynes

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Illustration by Jacky Sheridan.

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 guffing 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 favourite 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 uni to do sport and tells everyone about how great sport is. I knew she had a bit of form for doing some pretty rare stuff because she organised 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 gak 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 6pm 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

@joe_bish

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Before the puddle, there was only the grey misery of January. After the puddle, there was shell shock and scorn. But for one brief moment – for one brief, six-to-eight hour window – the Drummond Puddle defined the month it occurred in: the Drummond Puddle was the light shining in all of our lives. As the rain came down and the wind whipped into us from the sea, we all stopped, at our desks and on our commutes, faces turned to the screen in delirious white-blue bliss, watching a load of Geordies frolic around in a shallow puddle. For one perfect moment, the Drummond Puddle was everything. For one perfect moment, the Drummond Puddle was all of us.

The 6th of January, 2016. That was when half a million people discovered what Periscope was. Through this app, streamed live, we watched as hapless weatherbeaten strangers attempted to traverse a difficult puddle across the entrance to a bridge in Jesmond, Newcastle. And then something else happened: as the viewership peaked, boomed viral and busted to nothing at astonishing light speed, students turned up, people with surfboards and lilos, Domino's pizza delivery boys, journalists. An impromptu party atmosphere broke out as the light faded out of the day. And all of us watching had the same exact reaction: Ah, that's ruined it now. That's ruined that. The innocence of the puddle is corrupt.

There was a curious sense of ownership about the puddle: from the 100-odd people in the Periscope chatroom to the mute viewers at home to the man on the lilo who splashed around in it for a selfie. We watched as a woman in a mustard jacket stormed through with nothing but seething disregard for the puddle. Jeered at cyclists. Laughed at the girls in box-fresh Nikes. The puddle was the January weather made crystalline, a visual metaphor, a live-feed of people falling over our favourite conversational topic. And it happened in one perfect moment of time: a dreary Wednesday on the first week back in the office after new year. A day or a week either way and nobody would've cared about the Drummond Puddle. But the 6th of January, 2016? There could be no better time.

But what of the people involved in the Drummond Puddle? What of the people at creative agency Drummond Central who set the live-feed up? What of Anthony Kane, a man dubbed the "pink lilo cunt"? What of Tom Ough, journalist, a man sent to write a story about a puddle? What of the chatroom collective that built up around the puddle? What of the characters and the memories? What was the exact Domino's pizza order delivered to a puddle? What? Who? How?

Through a series of incredible conversations, reader, I found out.

(All illustrations by Dan Evans)

AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE DRUMMOND PUDDLE

Starring:

Niall Griffiths
Journalism trainee, Periscope chatroom member #300.

Beth Hazon
Managing Director, Drummond Central.

Kev Lynn
Senior Designer, Drummond Central, who said the immortal line "look at that, he's got his ringpiece out" when someone mooned in the puddle.

Tom Ough
Newcastle Chronicle journalist sent to document and report on the puddle.

Anthony Kane
Radio producer, first man to take a selfie in the puddle.

Angela Hamilton
PR, Newcastle City Council.

Nick Dutch
Head of Digital, Domino's PR.

Nick Sallon
Content Strategy, Periscope.

Chris Kemper
Developer, retriever of the wet floor sign.

Dr Alex Niven
English Literature professor, Newcastle University; north-east documentarian.

Not starring:

The Woman Who Sold a Bottle of Drummond Puddle Water On eBay, who declined our many requests for comment.

Niall Griffiths, trainee journalist, Periscope chatroom member #300, voice of the people: I was on lunch break and I saw my colleague retweeted it, then I went into the chat room thing and saw about 100 to 200 people in there, but I just stayed on there in the background while I was doing work. I can assure you I was working. I just kept on in the background while that was going on.

Beth Hazon, Managing Director, Drummond Central: Yeah, the puddle is there all the time. But the weather has been very crappy in the North East, so over November and December we had a lot of rain and that puddle has been there a lot of the time. Our creative floor looks over the puddle, so it's something that we would have regular conversations around – watching people navigate their way around it, through it. There is a guy – one of our copywriters, Steve Wilks – who had the idea to live-stream it when he was on the bus. He came in and had a conversation with one of our social media managers – a guy called Richard Rippon – on how we could stream it, because then we could do our work but also watch it at the same time, because we are all split on different floors. So the live-stream started as just a very practical suggestion for our own amusement.

Kev Lynn, Drummond Central Head of Design, unofficial puddle commentator: We've got a double window, so you have to lift the first window to get to the second one, so we put a phone there. But then it wouldn't stick, so we had to Blu-Tack it in many places. It was a bit of a botch job, like, but it managed to stay there all day. That was about it: we didn't realise that we were being recorded at first, and then we did. Then Beth was upstairs saying, "You're being recorded, watch you don't swear!"

(Photo via Beth Hazon)

Beth: It was only up for about six hours in total – it went up mid-morning and we were all watching, and then we were totally stoked when it got to like 100 views.

Nick Sallon, Content Strategy at Periscope: Over half a million people watched #DrummondPuddleWatch on Periscope (547,828 live viewers, 24,263 replay viewers). There were around 100,000 tweets relating to the puddle in the 48 hours that followed alone.

Kev: We were hoping that it would get 200, but then it actually went viral, and we were just running around, clapping our hands.

Niall: I showed everyone in my office when I saw the retweet – we have two separate offices, so I showed everyone in both, then we were all on it. I believe only the first 100 can talk in the chat room so they don't allow anyone above that watching to chat, so I was lucky I was in that first 100. They expanded it later – or people dropped out, I don't know – and I did see a friend from back home on it. But I was the only one from work in there.

Anthony Kane, radio producer, famously took a selfie of himself on a lilo in the puddle: We were sitting in the office and it was so addictive, and pretty much the whole sales team had stopped working and were sitting watching it on one Mac. I just thought, 'I really want to be there, this is so frustrating.' I just felt like I had to do something, not with work but just to be there. We needed to be at the puddle. At that time it was only like 5,000 people, so it felt like it was just between us lot, but we were checking our phones as we were driving down and it got to like 20k and we started freaking out that all the people were gonna be watching us when we got there. We didn't wanna make ourselves look like a pleb.

"WE NEEDED TO BE AT THE PUDDLE."

Tom Ough, Newcastle Chronicle journalist, leading puddle reporter: I became aware of Puddle Watch at some point over lunchtime. I wasn't the first to spot it by any means, but pretty soon everyone had taken a look.

Tom: I was working on something else when my editor came over to tell me he had a job for me. It was Puddle Watch. Naturally I was delighted. It was my first week of my placement on the paper and I knew it was time to win my spurs.

Beth: Me, personally, I like the person in the mustard jacket who went around the side, thought about it for a while, and then went around the lamppost.

Kev: There was a little old man who stormed through puddle, didn't look at anyone, wasn't bothered he was soaking. He just stormed right through.

Tom: I had a soft spot for the cyclists who would stop for neither man nor puddle and sailed on through.

Niall: There was this one guy who saw the puddle in the distance and didn't even break stride – he just went for it. His mate tried to follow suit but didn't do it as well. But yeah, it was graceful and a thing to behold.

Anthony: I don't know whether it was because they'd heard of it or seen it or whatever, but some people were just, like, charging through it. They were so aggressive, like, "THIS ISNT STOPPING ME." And I respect those people because they made me look like an absolute fool.

Niall: I do remember there was a wet floor sign placed there at one point and that guy had a great reach – just great form shown there.

(Photo via Chris Kemper)

Chris Kemper, Drummond Central developer, retrieved the wet floor sign from the puddle: The sign is indeed ours, and is currently – and was before its time in the spotlight – chilling with the blue roll in the cleaning cupboard. The person responsible for the sign being there in the first place was Phil Cole , who had the idea to put it there, and who then actually went and did it.

Tom: I enjoyed the tale of the woman with a pram who marched across as if the puddle weren't there, pram and all. And there was a quite sweet episode in which a guy got his shoes wet to help a girl across the muddy bank. Somewhere out there is Newcastle's answer to Francis Drake.

Chris: In terms of good techniques, I always admired those that jumped over it. I got sent out for coffee while it was quiet, so I had to cross the puddle and opted for the push-off-the-wall technique, so that served me well going over. I thought I was going to have a big issue coming back with my hands full of coffee, but I managed to clear it with minimal spillage, so that was good!

Alex Niven, Newcastle University academic, puddle scholar: Yeah, I just walked right into it. As I remember, I walked passed this guy – there's usually a homeless guy reading a sort of crime thriller; I don't know if he's there all the time, but he's usually under the tunnel just out of shot – and saw the puddle, and then, very clumsily with my cerebral academic head on – some might say pretentious – I very clumsily clung to the lamp-post and attempted to jump over the mud on the upper end of the puddle.

Chris: The best ones were always the ones who thought going via the wall was the easiest option, because they'd end up lowering themselves (and in most cases, their very clean trainers) onto the mud, and having to then work out how to traverse muddy grass.

Alex: I'd got my cheap Sainsbury's boots and they were quite muddy for the rest of the day. But as I say, I'm not too fussy about footwear.

Kev: The best had to be the two girls who went right, then left, then right, then left again, then they came over – but one had a bright white pair of Nike Cortez on, so her friend who was first through the puddle put her homework down over the muddy part so her friend could walk over without the Cortez being damaged...

Chris: There was one person who actually tried going the other way, but not only that, put paper down first to walk on that. When she tried the first step, the paper moved instantly, and I was hoping we'd see a fall, but sadly it didn't happen. It just took so long for her to cross via the paper. I was on the edge of my seat watching. I just wanted to see a fall.

Niall: There was two girls with surfboards as well, but they weren't as funny.

Kev: ... but she got wet and filthy anyway. I think that was the moment that got us howling. That was when it went from 300 viewers to 2,000 in a matter of minutes.