Student Life « Student Guide

I DON’T WANNA GROW UP: An Ode to School and a “Meh” to University

From the archives.

Photo by Bernard Capper

It’s weird how much you will come to appreciate school the very second you start uni. It happens to everyone. As the people carrier pulls away, leaving you in your tiny blank cell alone for the first time in your life, you will feel as vulnerable as a new born kitten dragged from its mother’s teats and dumped in a burning wheelie bin.

Before you’ve even Blu Tacked the Bob Marley poster to the cigarette smoke-stained walls, the realisation will hit you that, as great as it is to be away from home, the whole experience is going to be much less exciting than you thought it would be.

Once the first week is over, you will realise that you will never again experience anything with the same wide-eyed naivety as you did for the first time at school. Here are just a few things you will miss.

Photo by Keith Hunter Ray

FOOD
School food, as genuinely awful as it was for you, tasted fucking delicious at the time. Processed “chicken” burgers speckled with bits of bone slapped between two pieces of warm soggy bread and covered in ketchup so cheap and acidic it could strip paint? Yum! I don’t care what Jamie Oliver the fucking cunniliungus face thinks, school dinners rule.

When you get to uni it’s all healthy eating and “Did you know those crisps have monosodium glutamate in? I only eat Kettle Chips because I like to be in control of my body at all times” and “You know you should shit in the lotus position to release all your negative energy, right?” That last bit has nothing to do with food, obviously, but someone did say it to me at uni once.

Posted on December 2nd, 2009 | 25 Comments
Tagged: school, uni

BLEURGHHH - How to Be Ill If You’re a Student

From the archives.

In between all the partying, making friends and doing a miniscule amount of work you will have to do to scrape a pass in your degree, you will also have your time taken up with a thing called “being ill”.

Once you are taken out of the sterile test tube of the family home and are exposed to the myriad health risks that university lifestyle throws up, you’re really going to have to start to look after yourself properly.

Uni is a big festering, dirty shit pit of student digs, going out every night for weeks on end, eating food that isn’t really fit for human consumption and gorging yourself on bad drugs and cheap vodka.

If you ever bother to go to your lectures, sitting in a big room with your fellow students and having germs pumped around a confined room by dirty air conditioning doesn’t help too much either. In short, going to university is going to make you ill. Here’s what you can look forward to.

STDs
With the brave new world of the first year free-for-all fanny-buffet that cheap drinks and awful pop music in the student union brings comes new danger. In theory, every one goes at it like rabbits at university, but in reality after the first few months most people end up chained up in relationships or are put off sex having caught a hefty dose. There is more chlamydia going around your average uni than in a brothel, probably because hookers get checked more often. There were 121,986 cases reported across the UK last year, an impressive 150 per cent increase since 1998. While the symptoms are hard to spot and occasionally border on non-existent you may start pissing fire and passing gross discharge. Also watch out for the American exchange students because they are the ones who are most likely to have genital warts (we don’t know the reason for this but Yank students have higher levels of genital warts than Brits. Fact). Once you get warts you have the virus for life. Treating them involves a lengthy, repetitive and painful freeze/burn combo on your genitals. There are a tonne more STDs you can get and none of them are good. The best advice is to just keep it in the bag. Read more »

Posted on November 25th, 2009 | 10 Comments
Tagged: alcohol, drugs, ill, students

Daytime television for the masses

Photo by Johnnie Craig
From the archives

Without daytime television, students would have an awful lot more time on their hands. They would have enough time to wash their genitals and cook nice meals and study more and sit around camp fires singing songs about carefree squirrels and stuff. Maybe the world would be a better place. In fact, the world would definitely be a better place. Unfortunately daytime TV will never go away, so for the good of the world we have made a definitive list of which programmes you should and shouldn’t waste your precious time watching. Thanks, us. No problem, world.

TELEVISION THAT SUCKS

NEIGHBOURS
Due to its scheduling this mundane tramp through Antipodean triviality will sort of act like your alarm clock. You are bound to have at least one housemate who insists on watching this every day so you can work out how heavy the night before was by whether you wake up in time for the midday or evening show. Nothing ever changes anyway so if you snooze through both it’s no big thing.

THUNDERCATS
You aren’t seven anymore. You don’t get up at 6 AM and eat four bowls of Coco Pops cereal and then doze off in the afternoon (well, we really hope you still don’t). Trying to re-live some lost sense of innocence by buying T-shirts and DVD box sets from HMV is pretty creepy. If you are not careful you will start playing Warhammer 40000 again and then you are one step away from becoming comic book guy from The Simpsons.

STAR TREK
By the time you live in your own house you have no excuse for not having Sky+. Once you get there you will soon begin to wonder why this is on almost constantly every day on about 15 different channels. It’s almost impossible to have a clue what is going on as they seem to have a total disregard for ordering and everyone looks like they have a cauliflower stuck to their heads. It might however have some kind of brainwashing quality as usually discerning people seem to fall under its spell like Xanax-dosed flies to a big glowing orb.

Posted on November 12th, 2009 | 9 Comments
Tagged: chillaxing, home, tv

Drugs 101

From the archive.

Drugs can be fun and amazing but they can also totally ruin your life,make you penniless, change your personality for the worse, send you to prison and kill you. We’d say that the latter half of that sentence was more consistent with what happens to people who REALLY get into drugs.

GHB

Lots of you will experience your first brushes with the wild and crazy world of drugs at university. Some of you will puke up, have a panic attack and never do them again, but the majority of you will keep doing them, in all their different forms, until something really bad happens or your parents find out.

With this in mind, here’s a rundown of the drugs that are currently “doing the rounds” among “the young folk”. We got the guys at FRANK, the drugs helpline, to tell us about them as well.We thought only leather boys who went to fisting nights in Berlin sex clubs still did this but apparently it’s making a resurgence at student nights. People are putting it in Snapple bottles and drinking it. Expect a euphoric high that’s akin to alcohol without the sloppiness, bad breath and aggression. Be forewarned, though – mixing it with alcohol or taking too much will end up with you puking your guts out, passing out on the spot and possibly dying. Do not under any circumstances take it with coke – it will make you feel like your head is going to explode.

FRANK says: A small capful will give you a euphoric effect, make you feel happy, sensual, uninhibited. If you take too much it’ll act like a sedative and a downer and make you really sleepy. Too much will make you feel really disorientated and physically sick. Your muscles can go numb and they can start to go into spasm. You may well make yourself unconscious, maybe it will slow down your respiratory system, maybe it’ll stop.

ADRENALINE INJECTIONS

These little darts of potential pleasure are prescription only but as they are given out to anyone and everyone who is allergic to nuts, or bee or wasp stings, you are pretty sure to know at least one person who can get a year’s supply from one trip to the chemist. They are intended for people whose allergies result in them going into anaphylactic shock, which causes tensing of the muscles and can lead to death by asphyxiation. The EpiPen combats this tension by relaxing the muscles with pure unadulterated adrenaline. Ever read or seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Yup, adrenaline is the stuff they do at the very end that causes a three day blackout. You can get over stabbing the inch long propelling needle into your thigh.

FRANK says: Adrenaline is going to make your heart go faster. It’s not a common thing which people take. It will make everything go faster – your heart, your breathing. There’s a big danger of a heart attack. It’s something that should only ever be prescribed. It’s potentially a very dangerous drug if taken on its own without a controlled medical dose.

FOXY (5-MeO-DIPT)

Foxy is one of those drugs that used to be legal, but got reclassified so it’s really, really hard to find now. It usually comes in white powder form and is the most unpleasant thing to sniff in the whole world – more unpleasant than sniffing your dad’s hangover poo mixed with vapourised sand and fumes of sulphuric acid. The effects are somewhere between that of an hallucinogen and an aphrodisiac, which means you feel frisky and get mild acid visuals. Like all drugs, the situation where you ingest it can make or break your experience. Do take with your new girlfriend at a friend’s house party, don’t take at a squat party surrounded by horny AIDS hippies.

FRANK says: I haven’t heard of that. It sounds like a form of ecstasy. Does it have a fox printed on it?

Posted on November 6th, 2009 | 20 Comments
Tagged: drugs

Protecting Your Pad

WORDS BY JOHN MCDONNELL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TED PEARCE

At some point in your university life you will end up living in an area that is swarming with packs of wild-eyed rudeboys who, given half a chance, will happily clear your room of anything worth more than a packet of Maltesters. Securing your home and deterring would-be burglars is therefore very important. Here are some tips on how to do this.

picture-2

PLACING THE TRAPS
Making your house look as unattractive as possible (despite the fact it is overflowing with 17-inch MacBooks and Lord of the Rings boxsets) is key. Think of it this
way: would you pick up a £20 note if it was covered in dog shit? Well, OK, apart from you, most people wouldn’t. I recently discovered a very effective way to make one’s house look literally very unappealing. This summer I had a fly problem in my house so I bought a load of sticky bits of plastic and stuck them on my windows to catch the fuckers. It was a terrible idea. Within a few days the adhesive strips were covered with dying flies. A couple of days later, these rotting insect corpses had spawned clumps of sticky yellow larvae. Up close, it was one of the most putrid things I have ever seen. Attach a load of these to the outside of your most vulnerable windows and any greasy, weed-addled teen who approaches will be dry heaving if they get within four feet. In fact, soon people will be crossing the street to avoid your house.

SQUIRTING THE PERIMETER
When I moved into my new flat at the start of the year, a loud, camp American man would sit on the wall outside my bedroom window on the phone at 1 AM and keep me awake with his high-pitched squeals. So I did what any normal person would do. I smeared the top of the wall with the contents of a large tub of Vaseline and then splashed lots of thick bleach on top. He hasn’t been back since. If there is a gang of kids sitting on the wall outside your house every day, eventually they will decide to venture a bit closer and, next thing you know, one of them will be scrambling out of your kitchen window with your housemate’s George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine under their arm. You could use the method I have just described to deter teenagers loitering outside your property. A more fun take on this solution, however, would be to spread mayonnaise all over the wall and then pepper this with bits of leftover kebab meat or discarded bits of fried chicken (which will no doubt be thrown nearby). If you can’t be bothered doing that, putting up a sign which says “BEWARE! THIS IS A GAY DOGGING AREA” should also do the trick.

picture-32

HIT ’EM FOR SIX
OK, so you’ve done everything in your power to keep would-be thieves from your house (well, except installing a burglar alarm). But what would you do if someone
does manage to break into your house? First, you pray they stumble across one of your housemates’ rooms first and there is a violent, bloody struggle, after which they flee (having maybe or maybe not mortally wounded your pal). If this doesn’t happen, you need to make sure the burglar has real difficulty getting into your room. If your bedroom door doesn’t have a lock, jam two wooden or rubber wedges underneath your door when you head off to slumberville at night and no matter how hard someone on the other side pushes, they wont be able to open the door. It is of course very easy for someone to simply slide these wedges away from the door and then casually stroll into your room, but most would-be burglars are so stupid they can’t even tie their own shoelaces (hopefully). Should they manage to get in, however, you will need a weapon at the ready with which to batter them to death. If you’re living with a well-to-do chap from the countryside, borrow his cricket bat and sleep with it under your bed. Alternatively, if you’re living with an American, use their baseball bat, and if you’re cohabiting with a medical student, try their squash racket for size. You may want to properly weaponise the bat by banging some nails into it or lining the edge with razor blades. The added bonus of this is that when Ollie is practicing his sweeps and leg glances in his room he may accidentally slash a major artery.

Posted on November 5th, 2009 | 1 Comment
Tagged: crime, home, house

How to Make a Film

WORDS BY ALEX GODFREY, PHOTOS COURTESY OF MOMENTUM.
Dominic Murphy is a British commercials director. He met Vice co-founder Shane Smith a decade ago, and together they’ve made a great film called White Lightnin’, which is just out on DVD and totally deserves your attention. Set in West Virginia, it’s a story about a very troubled man, Jecso White, “The Dancing Outlaw”. He is an impulsive force of nature who lives life to its fullest, whether he’s dancing, drinking, fucking or fighting. Budding directors take note: here are Dominic’s top five filmmaking tips.

LET YOUR IDEA BOIL
Dominic and Shane developed the story for years before being satisfied enough to begin production. Dominic Murphy: This all came about because Shane had got fascinated by Jesco through documentary material, and he went down and met him and they bonded. Shane was excited about this guy, interested in his extreme personality and his whole culture. He reimagined Jesco’s story and came up with a more extreme version of what might have happened to him. Shane sent me this monologue, the story of Jesco White. At first I thought he was a fictional character, but the story had an integrity and made sense to me.

Posted on November 4th, 2009 | 2 Comments
Tagged: how to, movies, white lightnin

The Vice Guide To Gap Years

From the archives

For many students, the best thing about going to university is the gap year. Traditionally, this glorious year of freedom and self-discovery known as G.A.P. (Gigantic All-Year Party) takes place the year before students start their university course but quite a few people are now choosing to take it in the middle of, or immediately after, their studies. Isn’t it better just to jump into an eight-month half-naked trek across the more salubrious slums of the Third World’s tourist resorts than to give up your dream of responsibility-free bohemian bliss forever? If that’s what you’re thinking, read this…

AUSTRALIA
If you travel here on your gap year, you have to be prepared for long slogs in the outback otherwise you risk getting caught up in the tedious holidaymaker parts of the country. Sure, they have big tasty prawns to eat, but culturally it’s akin to spending your holiday in an Outback bar in Islington only without it raining outside. All the best bits about Oz, like Nimbin (a valley about two hours from Byron Bay where they grow literally 1,000 acres of weed) and the Blue Mountains, are off the beaten track so you have to do your homework and be prepared for some serious travelling. Note: Whatever you do, please don’t end up on one of those Oz Experience bus ride testosterone fiestas. Seriously, those things are like 50 rugby-playing guys slapping each other round the face with their dicks and going “yah” a lot. Horrible.

BEACH
The chances are you will end up spending a few nights here with some local down and outs and fellow travellers. Where else is there to go when you run out of money? If you are going to sleep “al fresco” like a dirty old tramp be sure to wake up early and keep your valuables next to parts of your body that can’t be easily pickpocketed. By the way, regularly lying outside exposed to the early morning sun for five hours will leave you with skin like a sunbedloving granny from Essex. You might also get cancer, which is almost as bad.

CAMBODIA
This is a pretty insane place. Did you know that in certain parts you can pay to fire assault rifles and bazookas at cows and other farm animals? Here’s something else weird: our friend Rahul just came back from there and he told us he’d bought a Cambodian police officer’s uniform right off his back. The cop just wandered off in his pants. No lie. He even tried to sell him his gun! Be careful though, some people we know from Brighton went away with a friend who had a little too much of a taste for Cambodia and after getting his student loan on his return to England decided to fuck off back there again. This was three years ago. His parents were recently in the national press offering a £10,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.

DELHI BELLY
Don’t go to India. You will be ejaculating acidic streams of diarrhoea out of your anus as soon as you touch down. It happens to everyone. Also, you will have to face the fact that at one point during your travels you are going to feel really ill and shit your pants. Deal with it.

EUROPE
Sure, South America and South East Asia are cool but there is a whole continent on your doorstep. You know that crap movie Hostel? Well, the former Eastern Bloc countries aren’t quite like that, but they are cheap and full of beautiful girls. An InterRail ticket is next to nothing compared to an around the world flight. Or you could just buy a van, call it Doris and break down all over Stalin’s back garden.

FINDING YOURSELF
This is what it’s all about, man. But while you’re doing that, don’t forget that you are in a strange environment and stand out like a big red greasy carbuncle. Make sure you take any advice the friendlier locals give you. Our intern, James Knight, was about to get a bus over the Laos border into Cambodia when a little old lady came up to him and told him not to get on. James is an open-minded guy so he listened to her advice and instead waited hours for another mode of transport. Later in the day, the bus was hijacked and six tourists were shot. He had a lucky escape.

GAP CHALLENGE
This is one of the many organisations offering pre-college students the chance to work in developing countries like Peru, where you will get to spend all day hanging out with poverty-stricken kids. It may not be as selfishly fun as writhing around a beach on Goa on ketamine with thousands of other British pieces of trash, but it’s more likely to make give you a sense of self-worth and some stories that are better than: “I met this girl from Nottingham and we had sex in the sea, then I got dysentery and now we talk on MySpace occasionally.” Go to www.world-challenge.co.uk to find out more.

Posted on October 28th, 2009 | 10 Comments
Tagged: gap year, the vice guide

Chillaxing: The Vice Guide to Taking it Easy at College

From the archives.

I find in life that it’s best to take it easy when you can. There are very few things better than kicking back and not doing anything at all apart from flick the TV over and rearrange the cushions behind your head while touching yourself underneath your pants. University is probably the second best chance you will have in life, after your toddler years, for a substantial period of taking it easy so it’s very important not to waste any time expelling extra energy. Here are a few simple rules for you to follow to enjoy at least three years of blissful under-exertion.

MOVING IN
Before you even move in to a house, you need to be thinking about the best ways for you to do as little as possible. Rule number one: don’t show your face for the first week. There will be furniture to be moved, repairs to be made, cupboards to be cleaned, stuff to be painted. Casually stroll in after a week and this will all be taken care of. Whatever you do, do not get the room nearest to the front door. You do not want to be woken up at 7 AM once a week by the postman because the textbooks your bookish little worm of a flatmate keeps ordering won’t fit through the letterbox. Get an intermediately positioned room (so there won’t be too much effort needed to get to the front door when choosing to leave the house) and make a pact with yourself only to be risen by fire alarms or armed robbers.

WAKING UP
Never set your alarm clock too early. Have as much sleep as you like. Don’t worry if you miss the first episode of Neighbours, Channel 5 will very kindly repeat it again later on. Making breakfast is way more hassle than you need to deal with, so do anything and everything you can to get help with it. There is little better when dozing in bed in the mornings than hearing the words “cup of tea?” resonating from the kitchen. Never let an opportunity like this pass. You should be able to detect these words through concrete walls and closed doors. Your ears should perk up like those of a gazelle watching over its newborn in the dead of night as hyenas creep closer, and you should instantly reply “…and two slices of toast, please, with plenty of peanut butter. Bring them up.” If you drop a few crumbs on the floor while eating don’t worry about it, leave them. What do you think the mice are there for? The moment you leave the house they’ll have nibbled away those unsightly lumps of food and replaced them with much harder to detect little dark brown deposits that they will kindly hide out of sight under the bed or in the corners of the room.

Posted on October 20th, 2009 | 5 Comments
Tagged: chillaxing

How to Become a World Famous Photographer: Let Jamie Lee Curtis Taete Guide You Towards Snapper Stardom

WORDS BY JAMES KNIGHT
PHOTOS BY JAMIE LEE CURTIS TAETE

Have you noticed how everyone is a photographer these days? Boring, isn’t it? Thanks a lot, digital technology, for convincing millions of idiots that they’re the next Wolfgang Tillmans or Terry Richardson. In reality, a tiny percentage of wannabe snappers will ever make it. The industry is near impossible to break into and the sheer number of people who want in has made it crazily difficult to get your images seen anywhere other than Facebook or Flickr. Having just come back from showing in LA, and with two solo shows in the works, it’s safe to say that 23-year-old Vice photograper Jamie Lee Curtis Taete’s pictures are being seen in lots of places. So we asked him how that happened and what advice he has to make it happen for you too.

Vice: Hi Jamie. Where did you grow up?
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete: In a village called Burbage in the Midlands that no one has heard of. It’s in the dead centre of the country. When did you start taking photos? When I was about 12 my dad got a digital camera and I kept stealing it. Before that I shot on film cameras. I don’t really remember what I was shooting, my memory is awful and I have a real habit of losing stuff or stuff being stolen so I can’t go back and remind myself of whatever it was I might or might not have been taking photos of. I think I may actually have the worst memory in the world. I am great at useless trivia, but anything to do with my past or feelings I can’t do.

What were you shooting once you had your hands on your dad’s digital camera?
I used to go to a lot of gigs in Birmingham. I used to be really into this band called King Adora. They’d attract a lot of Manic Street Preachers fans – lots of feather boas and tiaras and boys in nail polish.
Read more »

Posted on October 16th, 2009 | 7 Comments
Tagged: jamie lee curtis taete, photography

Student travel: Things to See in Europe that Aren’t Boring or Expensive

WORDS BY JAMES KNIGHT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOE HADDOCK

At some point in your three years of minimal activity and maximum sloth you will want to explore the wider world. This will be an urge stronger in those who didn’t spend a year dicking about in Guatemala after their A-levels. For all those who want to recreate the Grand Tour or pretend they are George Orwell, here are a few of the less obvious attractions that the wonderful countries of Europeland have to offer.

ITALY
Forte Prenestino, Rome
Travelling all the way to the home of Roman civilisation to visit a squat may seem odd, but you have to take into account that this is the biggest squat in Europe, and is therefore of interest, especially if you like squats. The Germans think they have the whole squatting thing on lock with their organic beer made from grass and their violin-toting punks who do interpretive ballet set to Wagner, but
Forte Prenestino is the real deal. The Italians call squats centro sociali, which sounds far more romantic than plain old squat, but the same thing that goes on in abandoned warehouses in Peckham goes on here on a grander and generally more productive scale.
It’s basically a 19th century fort full of people putting on fantastic parties, concerts and exhibitions, and it makes London’s anarchocrusty sit-ins look half-arsed.

The Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone Riviera
Imagine if, in the early 20th century, the state gave almost unlimited funds to a daredevil fascist poet, allowing him to expand his lakeside villa at will, merely to keep him from interfering with the government. Well, that’s exactly what the Italian government did. The fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio’s monumental folly on Lake Garda, northern Italy, was built to insane proportions, and successfully kept the busybody wordsmith out of the way. His work is widely credited with inspiring Mussolini and Italian fascism, and there happens to be a battleship in his garden.
Read more »

Posted on October 15th, 2009 | No Comments
Tagged: austria, germany, holland, italy, sweden, travelling

I DON’T WANNA GROW UP: An Ode to School and a “Meh” to University

BLEURGHHH - How to Be Ill If You’re a Student

Daytime television for the masses

Drugs 101

Protecting Your Pad

How to Make a Film

The Vice Guide To Gap Years

Chillaxing: The Vice Guide to Taking it Easy at College

How to Become a World Famous Photographer: Let Jamie Lee Curtis Taete Guide You Towards Snapper Stardom

Student travel: Things to See in Europe that Aren’t Boring or Expensive

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