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Roleplaying Larry posted:this guy owns All hail the Keenspotter Supreme
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Jul 3, 2021 19:13
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Howard Beale posted:All hail the Keenspotter Supreme I mean he is less embarrassing than half the posters in that thread. I forget how bad web forums could be from time to time. Especially in the mid 2000s
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Jul 3, 2021 20:45
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 loving transcendent
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Jul 3, 2021 21:22
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Riot Bus posted:
This is a result multiple narrative failures, though. We can assume that the character is supposed to be Veth, but that’s working against what’s actually shown. Introductions are important, and Veth is introduced as a stereotypical “frazzled subordinate.” Eyes wide, hair a mess, literally overloaded with the other guy’s baggage, etc. The way the eyes are drawn makes him look exhausted - dark, sunken eye sockets. As he is forced to transcribe a bunch of gratuitous insults, Veth transitions from “frazzled” to “sad”, and the last image is of him gazing back mournfully as he’s forced to leave. So that’s the character. The Veth we’re shown in the library is an entirely different character - and that’s presumably the point: “Veth is an entirely different person when his boss isn’t around!” But that kind of a shift needs to be handled very carefully, for the reasons we’ve encountered. How do you convey that this is the same individual, when every single aspect of their behaviour and appearance has changed? Veth 2 is some kind of blissed-out hippie who’s coming on way too hard. (Like, straight-up, “check out my poetry about writers seducing deaf guys”.) This is where a little bit of continuity would be useful. For example: if Veth still expressed a little sadness and remorse before handing over the book. This would provide a pretty strong cue that this is the same sad guy from earlier, while also clarifying that he’s gifting Snout the book as a gesture of apology. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, there are multiple things indicating that this probably can’t be Veth: in the time it took Snout to fly to the library in a rocket-ship and read a few paragraphs, Veth had presumably returned to his workplace on foot and then gone home, rested, showered, arranged for a note to be delivered, changed clothes, and walked to the library. Also, just in storytelling terms, the “I’m going to be late” note would normally indicate the beginning of a new subplot. Snout’s going to go on some library adventure while he waits for Veth. Consequently, it’s confusing when the “snout reads a ton of random books” tangent ends after only one page. That’s it? Has it even ended? Altogether, there are plenty of reasons to be confused.
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Jul 3, 2021 22:00
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Snout also didn't react particularly strongly to Veth's appearance either, nor did Veth look particularly apologetic about being late. When we already saw someone just tapping Snout on the shoulder to give him a note and then someone who looks exactly the same (face-wise, clothes and height are different but the sameface is still a bit confusing) just taps Snout on the shoulder to give him a book, it's reasonable for someone to assume it's the same person who's just giving Snout something else. Some sort of reaction that indicates "This is Veth, he's here now, he looks tired/a bit sheepish that he is late, but Snout is happy to see him/curious about what Veth wanted to show him" would help tremendously. Also yeah, for Snout to get a note saying "I'm going to be late" only for him to show up two pages later with no real indication that time has passed makes it even more confusing. That's even the kind of thing it would be easy to show purely visually without dialog! They probably don't have wall clocks in Deeganland (maybe they do, who knows) but show a top full hourglass on the table beside Snout and then show it top empty in the final panel. Show the sun at a position in the sky indicating morning/afternoon and then show the sun indicating afternoon/evening. Anything to indicate that Snout didn't sit down with a book and then two minutes later Veth shows up (especially since we only saw one poem which didn't take long to read).
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Jul 3, 2021 22:08
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Instead, there are multiple things indicating that this probably can’t be Veth: in the time it took Snout to fly to the library in a rocket-ship and read a few paragraphs, Veth had presumably returned to his workplace on foot and then gone home, rested, showered, arranged for a note to be delivered, changed clothes, and walked to the library.
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Jul 3, 2021 23:07
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I know this is from a while ago but I couldn't resist
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Jul 4, 2021 00:52
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Zereth posted:Didn't Veth and Orcy Longtorso leave, and then Snout went out and set around in the field until night? This is the next day, Veth had plenty of time to comb his hair. Ok, I rescind that part. I genuinely could not recall anything happening after Veth leaves.
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Jul 4, 2021 02:29
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I can't blame anyone for forgetting it, because it's literally nothing happening for a week's worth of updates.
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Jul 4, 2021 02:59
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ok, I rescind that part. I genuinely could not recall anything happening after Veth leaves. Besides, as somebody else pointed out, Veth apparently had time to get a haircut during the events with the corpse vine clone thing lady.
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Jul 4, 2021 03:00
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Character design is important.
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Jul 4, 2021 04:17
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Chapter 19: Snowsong Part 4 As unlikable and terrible and super Greg was, it is really this dénouement that Mookie has here that cemented people's hatred of this comic. Pam, not being stupid, understand that her boyfriend is an idiot manchild who would only do something this elaborate if his brother had set him up to it. Dominic cops to it and provides the worst reasoning for why all this was necessary possible. I also think that this entire explanation is Mookie desperately trying to backpedal the story in response to the backlash. He fails at it, but I think in Mookie's mind in at least gives a justification for the childishness that was supposed to make it okay that Greg and Dominic recklessly endangered others.  So yes, this is the reasoning for why Dominic had to settle this up. Greg was overloading on strength spells, and despite his pacifism and use of spells like laughter other times, this time was just gonna deck a woman in the face with a magic fist. Obviously he wasn't intending to kill her in this scenario, but I do find it funny that after all the high-minded rhetoric and pacifism that Greg has espoused, he still just is a meathead jock when it comes down to it. Even when women die by decapitation you have to have those boobs out    We get the interlude of three sketches teasing the next arc here, because Mookie had really decided what was to happen at this point. We are just not bad, except Jayden is showing the same strange fabric as the ink which that is long and flowing yet clings to all of her lady bits  Then we get right back into it. So indeed, Dominic's plan to prevent the super villain for murdering everybody when she came to town was a slice of chocolate cake. Mookie understood that he couldn't write that Dominic had a vision that the chocolate cake would work, so he comes up with a jokey explanation of Rita's chocolate cake of course being so good that it would prevent a super villain from going on a murder spree. Again if this was like a lighthearted romp, I wouldn't even hate this explanation, but this is following immediately on the heels of the overwrought suicide melodrama. Also Dominic apparently felt the need to manipulate his brother instead of just warning him of the dangers he faced. No reason is given for this, other than Dominic being the prick he is.  And here it is, the explanation that is just so bad, but that Mookie thought was just so great. Dominic literally set it up so that Greg could play out a juvenile fantasy he had is an eight-year-old, because somehow that would make him not as likely to kill Snowsong. It's literally like he thinks Greg is too stupid to live, and needs to have his entire life controlled from the shadows. And I'm not saying that's not true, but imagine that the explanation you gave to the authorities after something like this happened. Of course they would be pissed!  Dominic is literally incepting Greg to go along with the plan. Here's a big sign of retcon, because I 100% believe that Mookie thought his "things get dark when you turn out the lights" line was clever, only to see people poo poo on it in the forums.  I like that Dominic has he related to get an article printed within a day. Deegans control the Media!   Again none of this justifies why going to the authorities, or bringing their archmage mother in, wasn't a safer, more logical option. Or why, when Greg was endangered by his stupid plan, they didn't immediately go get help!  Of course Luna can somehow do this easily, with no buildup or cost in any way. She just creates a high level magic spell, but of course Luna couldn't have stopped snowsong sell for some reason, they had to have the idiot Deegan son do it.  This pretty much sums up the entire arc, Greg with a stupid look on his face while Dominic justifies his bullshit in the shadows  A true mark of a Deegan is they love when Dominic fucks with them for no reason.  This irrational girl has blown her tragedies way out of proportion! Having all her friends murdered isn't any reason to fly off the handle! Also let's make a mental illness joke! I know this was the mid-aughts, so this poo poo flew more on the Internet, but even as a pun it's incredibly distasteful to say that the reason that the quite clearly traumatized Snowsong did what she did is because she's bi-polar. gently caress you Mookie...  I like how Mookie still has Pam be "grateful"for Greg, did instead of telling him that he was grossly negligent and got multiple people almost killed.  Again, this reasoning is incredibly stupid. And of course now that she's been redeemed, Snowsong is a perpetual blubbering wreck  What a poo poo resolution. gently caress you Mookie.  there's something creepy about the fact that Dominic solution to everyone of the murderers he meets is to send them for some old time religion down at the Cathedral.  Barthis makes it's prisoners sleep on stone slabs.  Not the lesson anyone should have learned from all this.  At least Dominic got some minor comeuppance. I feel like Pam gets punished for this later but I don't remember exactly what happens. But yes, Dominic is so selfless, but interacting with the proles, even in this town which he professes to love, is going to be torture. Dominic sure has matured. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jul 4, 2021 |
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Jul 4, 2021 04:59
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Beelzebufo posted:I feel like Pam gets punished for this later but I don't remember exactly what happens. I'm also sure Greg completely forgets any lessons he learned the next time we see him.
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Jul 4, 2021 05:18
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Beelzebufo posted:
Not to mention he threatens her with "If you don't like that, I'll just send you to the people that've just been revealed to be abusing their prisoners."
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Jul 4, 2021 05:23
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This is somehow worse than just letting Supergreg stand.
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Jul 4, 2021 07:23
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It’s just the culmination of establishing Dominic as an utter control freak who’s never met a boundary that he didn’t immediately want to violate. People would have died if even one thing had gone wrong with this needlessly convoluted scheme of his. As others have pointed out, there were any number of more sensible, simpler, safer, and saner solutions that he could have gone with (like just telling Greg to his face about what he had originally foreseen)… but none of those would have fed into his ego quite as much as getting to secretly control everything all along. I mean, something on this scale would more than justifiably be the tipping point for forever ruining his relationships (BoJack style) with pretty much everyone else who was directly involved in all of this once the full truth came out if he wasn’t a Deegan.
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Jul 4, 2021 08:07
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i like how dominic thinks childhood abuse deserves sarcasm quotes around the word tragedy. the snowsong flashback scene is amazing since either terraciano thinks being told to raise your hand first is comparable to being whipped with a belt by your father in terms of trauma, or that your dad beating you is as minor as some stranger telling you your hobby sucks. either way it's incredible having your protagonist get bailed out by mommy most of the time and then thinking the childhood abuse survivor has some growing up to do
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Jul 4, 2021 13:02
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Reading this actually makes Star Power quite refreshing - yes, every single character is dumb as rocks, but at least there's no puppet master foretelling and controlling every single plotline. Also, brb, gonna go tell my favorite restaurant to give some random person a free slice of cake and see how that goes
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Jul 4, 2021 14:26
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Maxwell Lord posted:Character design is important. That, and contextual cues: Snout is sitting at a table reading. He's hunched over. Someone taps him on the shoulder, Snout turns around, and there's this guy standing pretty much at eye level. In this way, Terracianno has visually communicated that Veth 2 is maybe five feet tall. This is why people confused him with the short character from a couple pages earlier.
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Jul 4, 2021 14:27
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You can really see Mookie straining himself to justify Supergreg. To get Greg into one spandex suit Dominic roped in no less than 5 people (including the media!) and worked his girlfriend to the bone developing a new magic spell. He overnighted a bunch of comic books on the school’s dime and presumedly had to make a trip to his parent’s house to dig out that Supergreg comic. I feel like with every page Mookie must’ve been checking the forums to see if this was the one that’ll convince them to love the comic again.
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Jul 4, 2021 15:01
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Fun how the town’s one cop didn’t tell his boss about this plan, either.
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Jul 4, 2021 15:04
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You know, despite all the.. well, all the above, I do like that Mayor Pam finally put her foot down and said "enough with your bullshit, now go do something you hate". Makes me smile every time.
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Jul 4, 2021 16:04
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Dalris Othaine posted:You know, despite all the.. well, all the above, I do like that Mayor Pam finally put her foot down and said "enough with your bullshit, now go do something you hate". Makes me smile every time. And then gets punished for it by being relegated to a background setpiece from here on out, IIRC  But yeah, even if it’s majorly disproportionate to just how manipulative Dominic just admitted to being, it’s still something.
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Jul 4, 2021 16:30
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a cartoon duck posted:i like how dominic thinks childhood abuse deserves sarcasm quotes around the word tragedy. the snowsong flashback scene is amazing since either terraciano thinks being told to raise your hand first is comparable to being whipped with a belt by your father in terms of trauma, or that your dad beating you is as minor as some stranger telling you your hobby sucks. either way it's incredible having your protagonist get bailed out by mommy most of the time and then thinking the childhood abuse survivor has some growing up to do And the death of all of her friends. Even if she was misguided as to the source, the death of the chosen would be an incredibly traumatic thing for someone to live through. This woman has experienced trauma all throughtout her life, and yet like you said Mookie seems to imply that it's all histrionics and she's bipolar lol. I was actually a little shocked at how flippant Mookie is about Snowsong's pain, I had completely missed that when I read this 14 years ago.
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Jul 4, 2021 16:52
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Gotta love that "Luna infused them with Acibek's Principle" thing. It's frustrating because on the surface it's a lot like Star Trek technobabble, it's a thing that isn't fully explained that makes things happen, but the difference is that technobabble explains "This thing does this" even if it's not explained how. Dilithium crystals are used in warp drive. They don't really explain how (in the early shows at least, they probably get explained in later ones or supplemental material) but we know dilithium makes ships warp. If Captain Dingus of the USS Dorktown says "I gave those undeveloped aliens on that planet dilithium" then we immediately know he violated the prime directive by interfering with an undeveloped planet and probably helped them to create warp drive before they would have naturally discovered it. But nothing is ever explained about Acibek's Principle. It's not explained what it does to spells except "make them better" in some way, except apparently no mage in history ever thought to do it until Luna did, despite every mage knowing about it.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:09
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Isn't the principle something stupid like magic = math. Something Mookie knows so little about, especially research
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Jul 4, 2021 21:19
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Magic = math is the thing that made Luna totally fall for Dominic after he rescued her, it was a paper he wrote or some poo poo. As far as I can tell from a quick five minute search through the original DD in this thread, this is the first time we see "Acibek's Principle" mentioned in being used for magic.Beelzebufo posted:
All it does is "make spell gooder" by adding an adjective to it. I guess if you take Dominic's theory that magic is mathematics as true (which it probably is because Dominic is the smartest person ever) then Acibek's principle is I dunno, making the math more accurate or something?
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Jul 4, 2021 22:18
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Two views on mathematics and magic:"Turjan of Miir", Jack Vance posted:In this fashion did Turjan enter his apprenticeship to Pandelume. Day and far into the opalescent Embelyon night he worked under Pandelume's unseen tutelage. He learned the secret of renewed youth, many spells of the ancients, and a strange abstract lore that Pandelume termed "Mathematics." Beelzebufo posted:
"Make spell gooder" indeed.
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Jul 4, 2021 22:33
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And I like that Mookie felt obligated to not only explain Supergreg (which, sure) but break down each spell used to create him like loving RPG mechanics.
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Jul 4, 2021 22:35
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Acibek's principle is a metamagic feat.
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Jul 4, 2021 22:43
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Pam being punished later aside, the next DD arc is also about punishing women. Domnic Deegan is seriously one of the most misogynistic works of fiction I've seen, maybe the most from someone who doesn't just flat out hate women.
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Jul 5, 2021 04:28
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 The poem was co-written by a guy named J DEEGAN he shares a last name with the guy whose legacy Snout has been OBSESSED with beyond all reason why would he research this no name loving orc instead of Jacob.
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Jul 5, 2021 05:22
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Desk lady is a mannequin
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Jul 5, 2021 05:31
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Zerilan posted:Pam being punished later aside, the next DD arc is also about punishing women. Yeah... like I said, I am dreading this one. What little I've heard of it sounds... very bad in a lot of ways.
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Jul 5, 2021 05:34
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... I think Mookie has genuinely forgotten why Snout wanted to go to this library in the first place.
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Jul 5, 2021 05:54
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Mookie's book titles are always so on the nose and boring.
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Jul 5, 2021 06:00
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Wait wait wait You're looking for Dominic Deegan, right? And you see a poem authored by a "J. Deegan" and some other guy. And you look up books written by THE OTHER GUY? Why? Edit: oh I see I was beaten lol Also, the information desk has a dossier on him with a photo and everything? lol And of course, bottom panel is a reuse of an older drawing of Snout, of course. I think the others might be too. Even the most undiscerning remaining Deegan fan has to start getting annoyed by the constant copy/paste. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 06:20
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there's no way "SEEDS" isn't because he heard of "ROOTS" once, is there? gently caress youuuuu moookiiieeeeeeeeee
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Jul 5, 2021 06:22
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I'm still wondering why there's a guy named Adrak Bulgak and another, I presume different, guy named Bulgak Adrak.
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Jul 5, 2021 06:29
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Is it weird to write a autobiography (presumably) subtitled "The Legacy of Bulgak Adrak"? I really can't tell if that's as weird as it feels like. That just really sounds like a title you'd use to write about someone else. EDIT: WAIT ARE BULGAK ADRAK AND ADRAK BULGAK DIFFERENT PEOPLE??
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Jul 5, 2021 07:20
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