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Covok posted:Are we just ignoring the fact that the Xenomorph is hilariously flawed because it burns through its food/procreation supply in a month in Aliens? Like, we can say he's biological life boiled down to his essence, but he sure acts like pretty stupid life. He just kill/eat/gently caress everything nearby him with no regards for sustainability. It's a creature outside of it's natural environment--whatever the hell that actually is. ImpAtom posted:Considering Alien goes out of its way to emphasize that there is a literal cat on the ship who views the creature with angry hisses and disgust (and in turn the creature largely ignores it), I think the constantly "It's a big space cat" stuff isn't really backed up at all, no. Jones is a cat. The Alien is not a cat. I've seen my cat get angry and hiss at other cats. Clipperton posted:I’m guessing a lot of posters itt don’t get it, since they seem pretty keen on taking the ‘alien’ out of ALIEN and putting it into an anthropocentric box where literally the most evil entity in the cosmos is a limited liability corporation. I'm not convinced the most evil entity in the cosmos is a limited liability corporation but it's a much better candidate than a poor space bug. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 17:14 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 17:09
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Covok posted:Are we just ignoring the fact that the Xenomorph is hilariously flawed because it burns through its food/procreation supply in a month in Aliens? Like, we can say he's biological life boiled down to his essence, but he sure acts like pretty stupid life. He just kill/eat/gently caress everything nearby him with no regards for sustainability. I've always figured it was a perfected "weaponized" form of life. Minimal fuss, maximum kill.
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May 22, 2017 17:14
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Corrosion posted:You're saying the author knows what's significant or apparent about their own work, this is often not the case. This is the funniest thing to post in this thread where people constantly defend Promethus by claiming people are too stupid to understand the author's intentions.
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May 22, 2017 17:15
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Schwarzwald posted:It's a creature outside of it's natural environment--whatever the hell that actually is. See, with this state of mind, now we can entertain the idea that the Alien is scary because somewhere there are things much worse that makes the Xenomorph fit into a natural habitat
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May 22, 2017 17:16
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The cat very clearly hisses at the Alien in the scene where it shows up behind Hawaiian shirt guy
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May 22, 2017 17:16
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This movie doesn't have any of the cool aliens from the toy collection I had as a kid. No gorilla alien, no rhino alien, no flying queen. David, you had 10 years to do something cool!
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May 22, 2017 17:16
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ImpAtom posted:This is the funniest thing to post in this thread where people constantly defend Promethus by claiming people are too stupid to understand the author's intentions. And so you imply that those intentions are my intentions unknowingly? It's a cute insult, I'll give you that, but I've got nothing to do with any of that.
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May 22, 2017 17:17
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ImpAtom posted:This is the funniest thing to post in this thread where people constantly defend Promethus by claiming people are too stupid to understand the author's intentions. Defending Prometheus doesn't require discussing Scott's intentions at all. Everything is pretty explicit in the film itself.
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May 22, 2017 17:18
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lmao I had that rhino He was GI Joes ultimate spring loaded enemy
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May 22, 2017 17:19
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Schwarzwald posted:It's a creature outside of it's natural environment--whatever the hell that actually is. I actually do acknowledge that in the second part of that post.
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May 22, 2017 17:19
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Phi230 posted:See, with this state of mind, now we can entertain the idea that the Alien is scary because somewhere there are things much worse that makes the Xenomorph fit into a natural habitat Not necessarily. It's "natural" environment could be one where creatures have evolved skins that are impervious to their acid so they can use pretty mundane natural weapons against it without fear.
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May 22, 2017 17:20
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Basebf555 posted:Defending Prometheus doesn't require discussing Scott's intentions at all. Everything is pretty explicit in the film itself. Not everyone agrees with those interpretations. Claiming they're wrong because they don't agree tends to devolve into people pointing to how it was Totally Intentional and therefore beyond reproach.
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May 22, 2017 17:21
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None of my reading of the TED Talk ever brings up "Scott's intentions." And I don't try to dance between reading and talking about "What boss man thought." I get that efficacy is something people are concerned about, but don't be an rear end about it.
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May 22, 2017 17:21
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ImpAtom posted:Not everyone agrees with those interpretations. Claiming they're wrong because they don't agree tends to devolve into people pointing to how it was Totally Intentional and therefore beyond reproach. In most cases there's no interpretation involved. It's plot information that's literally there on screen, and people didn't notice it. For example, "why does David randomly poison one of the crew members", is a dumb question and the answer isn't really an interpretation, its explicitly explained in the movie but people just missed it.
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May 22, 2017 17:24
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Covok posted:I actually do acknowledge that in the second part of that post. My mistake! Sorry if I kind of jumped on you. You're point about the alien "just acting like we all do when nothing is stopping us, in a sense. Just consume, consume, consume." is pretty interesting when you consider how Ash says its a "perfect organism" "unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." The company man thinks the perfect form of life is a voracious consumer that doesn't stop to consider ethics.
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May 22, 2017 17:39
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Clipperton posted:I think the question of whether the derelict should be ancient or not is one of those ‘“if you have to ask, you’ll never know” things. Most of the cosmic horror in Lovecraft is the discovery that there's nothing special about upper-class Anglo-American culture and that everyone probably has some non-white and/or lower class ancestry. As a result, mankind will revert to the worship of Old Gods and society revert to racist caricatures of tribal Africans. All of humanity is equated with black people with the discovery that humanity was created to be the slaves of an ancient alien race. The stuff about non-Euclidean geometry is funny because any three dimensional surface has non-Euclidean geometry. It's just the protagonist encountering the fact that the value of a classical British education had dwindled to nothingness in the face of actual science. An amoral universe which doesn't care about humanity? How is that horrific compared to the fact that our own society is already amoral and uncaring? Capitalism makes cosmic horror redundant. Of course, Lovecraft was unemployed and dying of shame when he wrote most of his most famous work. He just externalized the experience of capitalism onto racial theories and actual science. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 18:29 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 18:24
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Hodgepodge posted:Most of the cosmic horror in Lovecraft is the discovery that there's nothing special about upper-class Anglo-American culture and that everyone probably has some non-white and/or lower class ancestry. As a result, mankind will revert to the worship of Old Gods and society revert to racist caricatures of tribal Africans. All of humanity is equated with black people with the discovery that humanity was created to be the slaves of an ancient alien race. On the subject of Euclidean geometry, is Euclidean geometry hogwash or what? I know it is outdated for 3 dimensional shapes, but my friend always feels the need to put on that "smug nerd voice" if I throw the baby out with the bath water. Schwarzwald posted:My mistake! Sorry if I kind of jumped on you. One could take the Xenomorph as the encapsulation of all of mankind's ill: selfishness, consumption, rape, murder, etc, etc. It is everything wrong with society and, to a corporation, it is then the "perfect organism." Something that just consumes and preserves itself with no greater thought.
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May 22, 2017 18:30
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Hodgepodge posted:
Sounds like he was suffering from the same "economic anxiety" that many modern Americans claim they have.
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May 22, 2017 18:31
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Covok posted:Sounds like he was suffering from the same "economic anxiety" that many modern Americans claim they have. Very true. I automatically question anyone since Lovecraft that uses "non-Euclidean geometry" in their sci-fi/horror fiction though because, like okay so, you like Lovecraft so blindly that you don't even know what he's talking about? Or your characters are literally driven mad because they see a circle?
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May 22, 2017 18:35
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When the infinite darkness sends its horrors, they're not sending their best, believe me. They're sending elder gods that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with them. They're bringing insanity. They're bringing mutilation. They're terrors from the void. And some, I assume, are good people. I'm going to build a non euclidian wall.
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May 22, 2017 18:36
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Covok posted:On the subject of Euclidean geometry, is Euclidean geometry hogwash or what? I know it is outdated for 3 dimensional shapes, but my friend always feels the need to put on that "smug nerd voice" if I throw the baby out with the bath water. It never applied to three dimensional shapes. It applies perfectly well to flat two-dimensional shapes, which is what it was designed for. That continues to be useful for all sorts of things, which is why it took so long for humanity to need anything more complicated. It doesn't work for anything that not flat (the geometry of the surface of a sphere for example) or which has more than two dimensions. The sum of the angles of a triangle is not equal to 180° on a globe, for example. Covok posted:Sounds like he was suffering from the same "economic anxiety" that many modern Americans claim they have. It's very similar, albeit from an earlier and more explicitly racist period. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 18:45 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 18:43
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So what's David's post-prometheus timeline really? If I've got it right it's (and some other various Q's now): - Kills Shaw on the way(?)* - Dumps airborne containers onto Engineer-land - Hangs out while the virus takes out every non-plant lifeform on the planet - Does genetic experimenting, gains trust of white xeno's (or xenos in general since those were human specific?), and ends up with the face hugger egg somehow *Not sure on this one, was he genuine about giving a poo poo about her? Or does his threat to do to Daniels what he did to her imply he was lying and just killed her? Also what exactly do the containers really do? In Prometheus they evolve the worms into proto face huggers, gently caress up humans into killer zombie things, and breakdown engineers (prometheus intro)? So when David airdrops the containers they all just do the breakdown thing like the prometheus intro, but everything else on the planet gets a chestburster? And then they also create spore plants that...also make white chestburster-ish xenos? And the chicken/egg thing doesn't really make sense for Queen's. All we ever see is egg->facehugger->Xeno that brings people back to eggs. There's no egg shown so far that makes a Queen. I really thought the whole thing was leading to David revealing he'd made a queen out of Shaw. Shits out of hand ya'll Intel&Sebastian fucked around with this message at 19:02 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 18:58
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Intel&Sebastian posted:So what's David's post-prometheus timeline really? I'm not sure that Scott gives a poo poo about Aliens. He may or may not use the Queen concept.
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May 22, 2017 19:03
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Intel&Sebastian posted:I refuse to read any further back than 4 pages for this bad movie, but i wanna know: is there any explanation for why david has eggs but no queen? it seems so obvious that I cant imagine even bad-Ridley messed that one up, but then again.....the rest of the movie. The eggs are based on these. The layer of reactive mist in Alien could be some form of the aerosolized pathogen. 
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May 22, 2017 19:08
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There need to be a comedy skit about what transpired when David was alone. Since he didn't have any fancy tools it's going to be hilarious seeing how did 'engineered' poo poo. Like getting 2 neomorphs to hump. Or putting goo on some bugs and getting chased by the result. ~benny hill music~
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May 22, 2017 19:08
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I like the idea someone mentioned earlier about the super-fast gestation/growth process being a deliberate engineering decision by David since the earlier attempts led to him painfully trying to teach a slow-growing xeno how to do xeno stuff. This would make a good movie by itself. Like the videos of cats knocking down stuff but it's Xenos clumsily trying to kill poo poo.
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May 22, 2017 19:14
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Hodgepodge posted:Most of the cosmic horror in Lovecraft is the discovery that there's nothing special about upper-class Anglo-American culture and that everyone probably has some non-white and/or lower class ancestry. As a result, mankind will revert to the worship of Old Gods and society revert to racist caricatures of tribal Africans. All of humanity is equated with black people with the discovery that humanity was created to be the slaves of an ancient alien race. Love how Lovecraft buried this poo poo so deep that you only find it if you know Lovecraft was racist and if you're really looking for it - much like Alien really being about a huge lubed up penis loving everything it sees. The rest of just see a bunch of weird poo poo going on and people getting owned by unknowable aliens.
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May 22, 2017 19:15
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Covok posted:On the subject of Euclidean geometry, is Euclidean geometry hogwash or what? I know it is outdated for 3 dimensional shapes, but my friend always feels the need to put on that "smug nerd voice" if I throw the baby out with the bath water. Euclidean geometry is geometry on the X,Y coordinate plane, and it's largely defined by the parallel postulate, which roughly states that any two lines perpendicular to a given line never intercept. Non-euclidiean geometries are systems where even "parallel" lines eventually cross. An example is the surface of a sphere. Any two lines drawn on the surface of a basketball will eventually cross. Edit: the best I can figure Lovecraft meant when he refers to non-euclidiean geometries is that the various alien architectures weren't designed around flat surfaces. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 19:17
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sean10mm posted:Just re-watched part of Prometheus on TV by chance, and I've got to say it's really obviously better than Covenant. It just has more genuinely crazy poo poo going on to hold your attention, and the characters are... I hesitate to say more fleshed out, but at least are distinct from one another and have clear motivations. The pilots name is Idris Janek lol Pastry Mistakes fucked around with this message at 19:23 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 19:21
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"This captain character doesn't actually have much to do..."
"We just got Idris Elba to play him, it will coast on his general coolness. We don't need to write it anymore."
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Huzanko posted:Love how Lovecraft buried this poo poo so deep that you only find it if you know Lovecraft was racist and if you're really looking for it - much like Alien really being about a huge lubed up penis loving everything it sees. In some stories, yeah. In others, it's pretty blatant. But if you read it from a perspective naive to racism, it's easy to miss a lot of the time, especially since he equates race and class very closely, often describing lower-class heritage in racialized terms (especially in The Dunwich Horror and The Horror Over Innsmouth). On the other hand, well: quote:From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood’s credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it—or at least, than leave it by the landward side—and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.
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May 22, 2017 19:26
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Toady posted:The eggs are based on these. The layer of reactive mist in Alien could be some form of the aerosolized pathogen. Makes sense. And I suppose if Ridley didn't give a gently caress about Aliens and wanted to side-eye it out of "his" universe that'd explain it too but seems kind of odd that he'd be simultaneously bold enough to just write out arguably the most popular part of the canon without a mention but also concerned enough to make a movie that's pretty clearly a mea culpa to the Alien fanbase. No matter what his intent was the result was me and plenty of other people sitting through half the movie going "wait....what?"
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May 22, 2017 19:42
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Is this the thread for talking about Alien Covenant?Intel&Sebastian posted:So what's David's post-prometheus timeline really? Wait, is David's flashback of dropping the containers supposed to be something that he actually did? I thought that was just him projecting, visualizing what happened before he crashed on the planet.
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May 22, 2017 19:46
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Snak posted:Wait, is David's flashback of dropping the containers supposed to be something that he actually did? I thought that was just him projecting, visualizing what happened before he crashed on the planet. Totally. They all gathered because they thought it was one of their ships returning, and David dropped the whole black goo cargo right on top of them.
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May 22, 2017 19:49
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Basebf555 posted:Totally. They all gathered because they thought it was one of their ships returning, and David dropped the whole black goo cargo right on top of them. I just assumed that, since it was a weapon, it was used by one faction against another faction. What you suggest is still what I thought happened. Why did his ship crash in the mountains if he was able to pilot it and do the genocide? And what happened to the other big vertical ship?
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May 22, 2017 19:51
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If the other movies are considered, it seems like crashing the double sided dildo ships into a mountain is the proper way to land them.
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May 22, 2017 19:54
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Snak posted:Is this the thread for talking about Alien Covenant? I have no idea how you got this.
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May 22, 2017 19:55
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CelticPredator posted:I have no idea how you got this. Uh... because it's a vision he has while reciting Ozymandias? A poem about imagining the past? And the events we see in it don't line up with what seems to have happened to him otherwise? He sees himself as the great conqueror, but I didn't think that he actually was. Like, for real, where is the other giant ship? It dwarfs the city. It didn't crash. I thought it was a visual cue that this was another time.
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May 22, 2017 19:58
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He really did it and Shaw wasn't killed enroute, she crashes the Juggernaut at some point after David bombs them.
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May 22, 2017 19:59
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I'm just not understanding why that's "obviously a fact".
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May 22, 2017 20:00
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wuffles posted:I'm not so sure that's quite it. I think when Oram asks him what they are waiting for and he says "mother", I think it has a double meaning: not just a host for the facehugger to impregnate...but also, literally, MUTHUR. I know I'm just making wild claims here but I really think that he plans to co-opt MUTHUR to eventually create his queen as part of giving his creation its biomechanical nature, eusocial behavior, and connected consciousness. I'm guessing its going to be more a case of the Aliens evolving a Queen on their own, rendering David unnecessary. It'd follow the same theme of children outdoing/overthrowing/killing their parents.
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