Well Then

Sometimes my biz goes over like a lead balloon.   That’s coo.  I feel like with PZ in low mode and others dribbling content, I should be bombing you with some words to fill the void.  Any ideas?  Summer, amirite?  It would be nice to imagine we’re all checked out from bloggerie because we’re having 80s beer commercial parties with thick sunglasses, zinc oxide on our noses, boardshorts and bikinis.  Huey Lewis blasts from the boombox and seagulls try to steal our cotton candy.  Some sexy people walk by and our sunglasses slide halfway down our noses while we act all like, yeah, summer summer summertime, ooh the summertime.

Nice to imagine, but I’m sure it’s more to do with sufferings cause by heat, political strife, and personal tragedies or travails.  Time has its gnarly foot upon our necks.  I should be asleep right now, but here I am.  And then, I’m gone.  good night.

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988

Did you know they came up with a standardized suicide hotline for the USA and Canada?  I don’t know about other countries, but here and across the moosey border you can dial 988 to reach somebody to talk to when you feel like giving up on life, somebody whose job is to help you not do that.  This is pretty new, think it just rolled out last year.

It’s tough that some feelings need to find verbal expression -like, you need to be able to say what you’re feeling to somebody- but that the expression of those feelings in mixed company can do harm to others by reinforcing their own bad feelings.  You often see “group therapy” spaces on the internet turn into death spirals of ruin and misery, rivaling the pro-ana blogs of tumblr and incel chatrooms.

If your thoughts are frequently catastrophic or apocalyptic, that’s understandable of course, but it’s better not to turn all your online conversations into that.  Get more hobbies, get mental help if you can, and if you’re earnestly thinking about suicide, call 988.  I’m sure there are a lot of barriers, a lot of unideal circumstances for getting help when you need it, but something can be better than nothing.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m the last person you wanna talk to when you feel suicidal.  I have a dark perspective and a pathological aversion to gentle untruths.  I think the world is in bad shape and can get worse (although we can live through it – we really can), and I also think death is perfect relief from all of what ails one in life – you will not exist to feel bad because there’s no afterlife.  However I kinda fucken hate that about myself, especially lately.

At the end of the day I hate death and love life, and I think that often the people who want to live the least are the people who deserve to live the most.  I just don’t think I can really get that across.  It never comes out of my mouth right.  Be alive, people.  That is all, because anything more elaborate I try to say about it is always undercut by asides and caveats and philosophical horseshit.

Good luck out there.

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Stop Freaking Out

Does freaking out help you to engage in political action that improves the world?  Get you to rally to the defense of the oppressed?  Make you vote when you have to?  Does it paradoxically cultivate in you an ability to lucidly prepare for disastrous circumstances through communal organization and grass roots activism?  Then get your freak on, I guess.  If it doesn’t, maybe shut the fuck up before you spread more hurt and pain than necessary to people around you.

This may seem ironic from person who has engaged in no small amount of public political and climate despair, but I’m coming around the bend on that.  Been talking again with somebody who is harmed by amped-up fear in comment sections, like, even when he doesn’t believe it on a rational level, the tension immediately gets him in the nervous system and ruins his day.  And as he’s trying to calm his nerves, he’s complaining about the level of fear people are promoting on the internet, how useless it all is, and I can’t help but concur.

It’s very easy for me to imagine a trans person who in fear of a trans holocaust just offs themself on election night.  (My erstwhile despair commenter wontbehereforlong is no longer in the comments, and that might be why, afaik.)  I don’t care if the fuckheel wins and ameriKKKa goes full nazi.  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if we reach temperatures like the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the icecaps melt and all the beautiful megafauna of the world go extinct, replaced with ugly ratty little things squabbling over bones in the wasteland?  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if somebody is finally enough of a creep to use nukes and a small exchange renders some of the urban centers of the global north uninhabitable for a while?  Stick around, babe.  What if plastic pollution reaches a kind of critical mass disrupting reproductive cycles and cellular activity, causing populations of all organisms to crater until natural selection works out the kinks over a thousand barren, burning years?  We have each other, kid.

We have things to do, and you’re invited to the party, mon frere.  Life can go on, if you try to live.  There are so many places in the world right now that have to live with ten times the ugliness the USA is bringing on itself, but people there live on, as best as they can.  Trans and gay people exist in the most oppressive countries in the world.  Women have abortions where that would get them life in prison.  People read banned books wherever they’re banned.

This isn’t Grand Theft Auto, where you accumulate stars from doing illegal shit, and when you have five, every cop psychically intuits your exact location and showers you with machineguns from helicopters and APCs, and suicide bombs you with crown victorias.  The illegality of being trans or jewish or cetera doesn’t instantly mean complete extinction of your kind or even you personally.  You have friends and most of you are going to live.  Hell, even truly universally reviled people like convicted pedophiles have somebody in their lives who would try to help them survive when the whole world says “die.”

It ain’t over til it’s over, and when this election is done, even if the nazis win?  It still ain’t over.  People are hurt by panic and fear.  Also, you’re giving bullies exactly what they want, and what are conservatives if not bullies in their purest form?  When that islamophobic mass shooter in New Zealand filmed himself killing people, some progressives on the internet (looking at you, wehuntedthemammoth comment section) said they felt obligated to watch the video, “to be informed,” or because bearing witness to the senseless deaths would grant those lives a meaning in their heart, or whatever.  OK, sure, whatever.  But you know what the killer wanted?  He wanted you to watch the video (and pewdiepie).  So score one for nazis, again.

This is a significant part of why I unfollowed James Stephanie Sterling on youtube.  They’d beat that drum, day in day out, about how trans people have no political allies, nobody cares about them, they’re all gonna die.  It’s nonsense, even on Terf Island.  Trans people have some amount of allies everywhere they exist.  Jewish people in WWII had some small number of nazis and imperial japanese people smuggling them out of the line of genocide, besides resistance people of every other stripe.  The USA isn’t going to instantly transform into The Man in the High Castle because a little strip of land in Washington DC got taken over by nazis.  The idea that regressive states are the only ones that can rebel is kinda silly.  New York and California have the numbers by population as well as economy, and they aren’t just going to say, “cool, we’ll kill all our gay people for you now.”  Don’t be fucking absurd.

I know you can’t control your fear, much like my bud can’t control his limbic system’s response to panicky people.  But maybe you can just think twice about hitting the keyboard and making some innocent third party feel as bad as or worse than you do, when it achieves fucking nothing.

Am I wrong?  Is publicly shidding your fucking pants every ten seconds helping us win the next election?  Fuck me then, keep dropping those deuces.  If not, maybe step away from the computer and take it down a notch.  Touch grass, smoke grass, whatever.  Deal.

This is directed at me in 2016.

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Low Key Mentally Illin’

Some digestive issues reminding me of having a cancer diagnosis and getting surgery for that stuff a few years ago, got me feeling morbid and hopeless, like, I’m never gonna make my mark as big as I want it to be before I die.  Might not even live long enough to make sure my dude is set up for after I cark it.  This is just a feeling, mind you.  I’m probably going to be fine, but still.  Don’t wanna be doing what I gotta do but can’t make myself do what I wanna do.  Low key.

I wanna rock, I wanna make ecstatic music, wanna write stories for the people that make ’em say, that weirdo over there was world class.  I wanna win.  At the very least, I’d like to pay off this mortgage.  I’m tired and sad, and that’s how it’s gotta be for a lil’ while at least.  I’m sure my neurotypical sauce will regen eventually.  Probably help to stop doing all this overtime at the “bail out the ocean of human need with a thimble” factory.

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My Heart is Broke

Nirvana lyrics babey.  I am a person of my times.  “My heart is broke, but I have some glue, Help me inhale, mend it with you.”  Not to endorse such activities, but man.  My day job brings me into frequent contact with people that have massive problems that I can never help with.  I do help people, all day long, but also, every single day I have one or more that I was not able to help – at least a few times people who were literally dying.

Sometimes, this bleeds through into my outside-of-work time.  You know, when you see somebody on the bus that’s definitely getting beaten by that sullen neo-nazi boyfriend sitting next to her, but what can you do?  99% of the time, fuck all.  Anyway, tonight I talked to somebody in a bad way and beyond my powers to help.  Good luck, comrade.  Life is a motherfucker.
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2000 Words to Close the Fundraiser

The last donation I got was epic.  My donor didn’t expressly forbid me from naming them, but I’ll err on the side of discretion.  Love you!  Same to everybody.  I think of crowdfunding as being a lot of small donations, but instead I only had a handful of donors, and they were generous.  I don’t win a popularity contest, but my friends are very cool.

Aside from the very nice close-out to my fundraiser, I’m kinda having a time here.  One of the teeth I had worked on is more sensitive to pressure now and when antagonized it can cause a headache that persists for hours.  Concerned I might need to go back and have them change that from a crown to a root canal.  Whatever, I’ll come up with a payment plan this time, like a sensible person.  I feel like I might have a fever, but I’m almost certain it’s psychosomatic.  I’ve felt much more feverish in the past when I wasn’t even there.  (note:  next night i continue writing, no fever.)

I explained before how I ended up needing this kind of work in the first place.  But why does it cost so damn much money?  My insurance covered like a few thousand, I put a few thousand on a credit card, and my remainder was several hundred, which I paid out of pocket.  This is what it’s like for the working poor in the USA.  The rich stole our entire lives and now sell it back to us at marked up rates, which our rich politicians like to call “freedom.”  Cool shit.

One could feel like smashing the system, going full anarcho-primitivist, but some elements of infrastructure are necessary to sustain the lives of the disabled, the elderly, children, and more.  I got pretty tired of social media anarchists acting so leftier-than-thou it was like they’re a priesthood.  Ironic behavior from the no-gods-no-masters crowd.  Reflecting on my disillusionment with those assholes, I realize they don’t give an earthly shit about human lives lost on the path to their magical never-gonna-happen future.  Bad people.

Anarchy probably has some cool applications tho.  I consider myself a personal anarchist.  As I explained it there, I believe society should have laws, but everyone of strong conviction should be willing to break them.  When terrorism against the rich starts to happen, I will concede the guilty should be punished according to the law, but I won’t say that the terrorists did a bad thing.  The guy that blasted Shinzo Abe probably gets that.

I dunno.  I’m getting to sleep easily enough but waking up every two to three hours, and my day job is thinking and being social nonstop for several hours at a go.  Maybe tonight will be better, and I’ll feel more generous toward the fuckos whose crystal castles are purchased with my dental expenses.

My dreams, I’m not really remembering.  Violence, running around, hokey monsters, work tasks.  Finish the thing, do the thing, don’t mess up now.  I have a meeting tomorrow with mandatory camera.  My makeup will probably be something in the neighborhood of Heath Ledger Jonker.

…Observe my craggy glory.  Not gonna count the words from the video.

Being committed to shooting shit with no script, no editing, and one take, I realize in the video it could seem like I’m implying the largesse of my donors was due to personal wealth, which I doubt is the case.  Besides, I’ve thrown similar donations at others in better times over the past few years myself, and made offers that were declined as well.  We all do what we can when we can, right?

But let me focus again on the subject I led off with.  This wasn’t a crowd; it was a generous few.  I look at FtB and I see the art of blogging on its way out – not through any fault of its own.  Some bloggers are hobbyists, some are established names running out the clock until the last people who read blogs die off, from this social media asteroid impact.  As I’ve mentioned before, I can deal with the end if the company is hospitable.

I keep getting tempted to talk about this among fellow FtBloggers, as if I haven’t already said everything there is to say about the subject.  It ain’t much.  The type of nexus that social media provides is critical to the success of growing or maintaining an audience now, and having the content you provide exist outside of those spaces?  You aren’t going to get flighty modern people to follow those links.  This blows because if we did operate entirely on social media instead of wordpress – which would be possible – we would be (more) subject to the whims of crapitalist godlords, able to get blasted out of existence with the wave of a hand.

But maybe I feel tempted toward the subject because that isn’t all there is to say about it, and I haven’t figured what else my mind is itching about.  It’s kinda like the skin cell perspective that has me, in moments of gentle delusion, wondering if there’s a solution.  A problem is observed, which in itself suggests to the overthinking mind that said problem can be solved.

Neocities is an attempt to bring back the wild days of site-based internet, but from where I stand, it’s similar to wordpress.  There’s a unified platform for creators to do their own things, and if somebody is inclined to look, they can do so.  But how do you get them to look?

The usual solution is for creators with off-social media sites to create an account on all the majors, like fb and xitter, link to the main run of their content.  But to make that social media presence useful, they have to actually participate in those sites as well, which is draining and wastes time best spent creating.  How do you keep up with all the moderation changes, roving hordes of nightmare people looking for an excuse, and ToS changes that bowdlerize and oppress minorities and capitulate to the interests of power?  How do you craft the kind of witty bon mots and shitposts to be heard in a howling tempest the size of a fucking planet?  And multiply that effort by the number of platforms you’re expected to be on?

The whole thing makes me tired as hell, especially as someone who is considering self-publishing novels soon.  Probably I’ll pay for advertisements somewhere.  Don’t know what the wisdom is on that either, at this point.

It seems to me that this is a consequence of the balkanization of culture that the internet has facilitated, which seems to be a defining element of our epoch.  It is extremely easy for people to ignore top 40 radio and TV and movies, to find subcultures that speak to their prejudices, and run so deep into them that outsiders become unimaginable.  For just one example, I’m always amused by the extent to which fanfic people assume anybody else in the world knows or cares about that entire domain of thought, that subculture that dominates their waking hours.  Sorry babes, you all seem like bizarre cultists from my point of view, like a new religion splintering into warring sects while the unrelated religion on the hill occasionally glances out and wonders “what’s that noise?”

But this is all of us.  We’re all making our worlds smaller because the big picture is so overwhelming.  I know I can’t even stand listening to shitheads.  Way back when bin Laden inaugurated the millennium by smashing a bottle airplanes on the edge of a ship buildings, I still went to TV for culture.  I watched all those clowns on The Daily Show and Colbert etc., to feel a sense that my country hadn’t completely bought the neocon agenda, that some people didn’t love war and xenophobia.  I found atheist content on yewchoob and, somehow, on the precursors of this blog network, to feel like not everybody in the world saw religion as a benign phenomenon, as a sacred thing that should go unquestioned, even as it’s on the lips of so many fuckos with bombs and guns.

But I became too radicalized to handle the talk show boys, who treated the rise of Trump as a joke.  They didn’t change; I did.  I haven’t even made the time for the clips of them that Mano posts.  Their faces remind me of a very bitter moment, one our relationship could not survive, regardless of whatever steps they’ve taken to make up for it.  And our movement’s web presence?  That’s a joke so bad it killed us dead.

I can’t speak to specific numbers, but judging by comment count, our traffic must be a tiny fraction of what it once was.  How could it not be?  Deep Rifts 2.0 / Elevatorgate broke us down to rubble.  Sometimes PZ laments that being a conservative is where all the traffic and the money is, of course always quick to say the cost would never be worth it.  But it’s true.  Our community, such as it was, thrived on invective and strife and dunking on fools.  When it became clear the most classically dunky faction was the regressives, the majority of us followed atheism down the nazi hole.

The remainders in the progressive side were split on how nice we should be, with FtB somewhere in the middle.  The most SJW are the most gone, too delicate to weather a desolate world, or perhaps just more interested in causes other than atheism at this point.  That’s fair.

I remember when Dubya got elected for the first time in 2004 (not when he was appointed by judicial hijinks in 2000) me and other cranky young people marched around Seattle hollerin’.  Wherever a speaker would get on a soapbox, they’d flog their own projects or personal beliefs, in a way that would lose X amount of the crowd.

When did I finally drop out?  When a guy that was cranky about the christofascist aspects of rethuglican governance tried to lead people in a blasphemous chant,  like fuck god or fuck jesus or something.  I’m like, yeah, fuck those guys, but I want whatever movement I’m part of to go somewhere, not devolve into provincial concerns that are gonna guarantee we stay in the margins of society.  It was getting late, time to march to the bus stop.

I’d like to be a charismatic preacher for atheism, shake snakes at the reverse infidel (fidel?), but it’s hard to make myself feel it, while jester-ass clowns like DickDawk and Chundershite are still out there being us.  Yeah, they don’t represent your beliefs or mine from our point of view, but they do to the world.  Who knows who I am?  You do, and I love you all, but to the general public, we’re the same thing as those utter fools.  Ya feel me?

I’ve seen people using “culturally christian” as an insult for atheists since some months before Dicky Boy decided to own it.  It makes us mad when used that way, even as we’d accept it as accurate without much emotional weight attached in other contexts.  As I consider it in this moment, I think it’s time to use SJW language to fight back.

Like some people are asexual because of trauma and that is valid, some people are atheist because of trauma, and that is valid.  Invoking the religion that causes so much trauma as a way to dunk on atheists is triggering.  Of course it is.  It’s a microaggression, at the very least.

If progressive theists can’t take the truth of our position on board, can’t make room for us at the “interfaith” table, wanna tar us all with the same brush as the fuckboy side of our movement, they should at least know they’re being abusers to the disenfranchised, they’re punching down.  When they shit on atheists, they’re being oppressors.

Doesn’t ring as true as I’d like, while our banner continues to be used to promote fascism.  Fucking succckkks.

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That rambling pointless mess was 2000 words on the nose according to google docs’ way of counting.  It took the spare time of five days and felt like pulling teeth, haha.  Ugh.  Anyway, I’ll probably be quiet again for a minute.  But I’m glad to know some amount of people will come around whenever I do.  Thanks again, and vaya sin dios.

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Funds, I Raise Them

My fundraiser to make up for dental expenses is at 81% of goal.  Now would be a good time to make any last donations because it takes up to 3 days to transfer from paypal to my bank account and my ugliest bill comes up Thursday, which is the day before I get paid.  Also paid 30 bucks for a tetanus shot tonight.  Life is funny.

Anyway, scroll down to see the all the posts I have written to order here, whose titles start with word counts.  These types of creations can be yours, for the low price of 10 words to the dollar.  Plz donate thx.

I had to pay close to $700 unexpectedly which is gonna make all the bills that come due before I next get paid extra painful.  So I’m hastily raising as much as I can within two weeks.  If I go over target, I’ll put any excess toward paying down some of the thousands in credit card debt I racked up from the same dental shituation.  Donate and I will write you a blog post on your topic of choice, containing ten words for every dollar you donate.  If you chip in a few bucks you can get a haiku, right?

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The Fvcked in the Mouth Fundraiser

Ahhhh shit you know what fucken time it is.  It’s medical fundraiser time…

I maxed out my health care credit card again.  One of those things that doesn’t exist outside of fucked up hellhole countries, I know.  Furthermore, I had to go out of pocket about $700 bucks for this dental care.  I don’t expect my adoring publique to pay thousands of bucks for the card debt, but maybe we could get some chonk of that $700?

This is time sensitive because I don’t get paid for another two weeks and what I have left in the bank won’t cover groceries, the phone bill, the storage bill, two automated payments for previous medical debts that are still running and due to hit before I get paid again…  You get the idea.

Can I raise $700?  Donate and I will write you a blog post on your topic of choice, containing ten words for every dollar you donate.  I know, that’s not a very good rate, but I gotta get these dollas.  If you chip in a few bucks you can get a haiku, right?

Let’s jam…

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Is This Real? Dare I Dream?

Our bloges having been laid low for an outrageous amount of time by one scam email, do I dare to dream that it’s over?  I awaken to find freethoughtblogs dotcom loading… Perhaps it is a fluke, and our woes are merely waiting in the eaves to pounce again.  Time will tell, but for the moment, oh…  sweet freedom!

edit to add:  Since the last time you saw me, not much to report.  I had a few half-interesting dreams and lost most of them to the alarm clock.  Been workin’ overtime.  House is still a mess from moving in months ago.  We got an ant infestation and seem to have successfully quelled it, for now.  And… I’ve had some random thoughts and forgot them before I had a chance to share.  This blog was my random thought collector.  I was lost without it, apparently.

edit to add:  In one of those dreams I got to be a ciswoman having gaydy sex, tribadism-style.  Nice, but there’s always some BS going on, it’s never what you’d conceive of in your waking hours as “goals.”  In the other dream there was some kinda battle royale kill-or-be-killed situation with different people or small factions trying to eliminate each other for the right to survive.  The more overtly baddy guys were about to get the rest of us when the “good guys” decided hey, why are we being good?  No solidarity, man.  I felt like there was some real good plot idea in there, something to do with the way the baddies were acting, that I could have used for a story.  Maybe it wasn’t as clever as it seemed in the early AM.

edit to add:  Oh yeah, one more thing that happened.  Not to be a starfucker on main or le problematique, but my boyfriend made elon musk’s ex-gf say “ooh” a couple of times.  Probably old news to people who hobnobbed with celebs on twitter before it became the xitter, but feels kinda wild to me, that sometimes you can interact with thems.
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People Are All Crazy! Then What?

Had a conversation today that put me in mind of this post I wrote.  Like in that one, this one has to contain ableist language, but hopefully not be seen as an endorsement of such, or an invitation to do that in my comment section.  In fact, read that post first, because I don’t wanna repeat the same junk.  Long story short, what if the things we rate as cognitive deficits and malfunctions are vastly vastly more commonplace than we assume?  What if, as an emotionally stable person without any major risk of delusions, you were in a minority?  Can we sane few right the world gone mad?  Can we steer this ship of fools unto the safe harbor of sanity?

Nope.  There are no cures for most of what can ail a mind, just a life of care and carefulness.  Assuming we are even fortunate enough to know how bonkers we are.  A lot of people who are walking around assuming they are fairly normal or similar to others, not susceptible to delusions, are one weird day away from joining a cult and giving their lives over to it.  One moment away from being told “the truth” on a facebook post and forever thinking something that would make a gullible child look twice.

Atrocity Guide on yewchoob has a video about a cult that includes interviews with an ex-member who got out and is doing well.  Nice.  But what happened?  At a seminar the cult leader gave, he saw a golden light radiating from the man.  The deeper he got into it, the more impossible things he bore witness to.  And yet, on the other side, he realized those were all hallucinations, provoked through the power of suggestion.  Hearing this sensible guy say these things, you have to wonder, could it happen to me?

If it’s never happened to you before, well, probably not.  I think some people just have wild imaginations, or are more prone to influence.  But who knows?  Also, as you age, who is to say how your faculties might change?  As an atheistical type, formerly of the fiery brand, I used to imagine we could eliminate magical thinking from the world by getting everybody hip to philosophical materialism.  The holes in the logic of religion are trivially easy to point out, to talk under the table.

But nobody is impervious to bullshit, and it’s so pervasive in the world that it deforms the perception of reality on an everyday basis for vast swathes of humanity.  They’ll never buy reality because the fantasy everybody around them was taught every day forever just feels more correct, in their hearts.  Words to the contrary, they just sound like silly noises.  Maybe they don’t have the exact words to argue against you in the moment, but they’re sure somebody smarter in the faith, some preacher would be able to get you to see the light.  Because they have the same point of view as I do, at the end of the day.  Their truth is so obviously self-evident, it doesn’t need a rationale.  You don’t see me doing atheist apologetics much.  We all know what’s what, right?

The misguided person I spoke with today, she felt mighty foolish and didn’t know what to do with herself.  Not her fault.  I got the same conclusion here as I did before, but feel it more today than the last time I wrote it.  We need laws against lying.  The ACLU will say no, reaching across the aisle to join hands with political propagandists and corporate salesfuckos, but nay.

We can’t prevent all types of exploitation forever, we can’t protect people from themselves perfectly, but if human life and well-being has any value at all, we, as a society must find a way to reduce the harm caused by dishonest persuasion, better than we do now.  It’s like how we have laws against murder, knowing full well it will still happen at some point, no matter what we do.  But the laws give us a mechanism of enforcement, a disincentive.  Right now, in the USA, you’re literally praised for being the biggest con artist.  It’s fucked up and I hate it.

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