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TheSwizzler posted:I think the short version is that they started scripting matches where they had a big, bad tough wrestler (a "hooker", a guy with very strong legitimate skill) who'd take open challengers from the crowd and utterly kick their rear end, and then they'd have a planted guy who would challenge him and win to make sure the crowd left on a happy note It should also be mentioned that as wrestling grew more popular and they started adding world championships and such to draw more fans in, that the guys who were given the titles were the "hookers" mentioned above, who could legit handle themselves should their opponent decide to go into business for themselves and try to change the outcome of the match (in case a promoter wanted to put the belt on their guy without approval, or if a guy thought he'd make a name for himself, for example). This basically continued all the way into the early 1980s, with probably Harley Race being the most well-known of those types of wrestlers. As the wrestling landscape started to change during the mid-1980s, the need for the champ to have to be able to legit stretch guys in the ring if needed started to subside, especially as the territories started dying off and the champs of all the various feds began to tour and defend their belts only within their company's established areas. Ric Flair started winning his various NWA titles under that same school of thought that produced Harley, but by the time he'd really started racking up his multiple title reigns, the title scene was wholly under the control of Jim Crockett Promotions (and later WCW/Turner Broadcasting).
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Mar 8, 2022 23:48
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No Brazzers logo?
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Mar 8, 2022 23:54
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IIRC the carnival wrestling tradition survived quite a while in the UK, I think William Regal came up in it
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Mar 8, 2022 23:54
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BiggerBoat posted:No Brazzers logo? no editing at all it's worth nothing that the feud that created this moment was alexa vs orton, and alexa won the feud via fireballs, black goop and telekinesis powers https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2936494-alexa-bliss-beats-randy-orton-with-the-fiends-help-at-wwe-fastlane-2021 this is the kind of horse poo poo that attempts to compete with aew
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Mar 9, 2022 01:28
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Ad by Khad posted:this is the kind of horse poo poo that attempts to compete with aew if by 'attempts you compete' you mean wholly demolishes AEW in the ratings
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Mar 9, 2022 02:18
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is that why nxt died and went to rainbow hell? because it was demolishing aew in the ratings? hunter was just so happy that his boys were demolishing the ratings that he had a massive heart attack and was never seen again, and all his boys left, and nxt got moved to tuesday? Ad by Khad fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Mar 9, 2022 |
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Mar 9, 2022 02:47
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Ad by Khad posted:no editing at all They had Alexa Bliss throw a fireball into Orton's face? OK I'm officially in love with Alexa Bliss. (And Liv Morgan)
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Mar 9, 2022 02:53
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LOL nobody itt cares about ratings jfc hahaha what is wrong with you
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Mar 9, 2022 03:31
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WWE turned into Street Fighter so gradually we didn't even notice
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Mar 9, 2022 03:33
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oh we noticed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa1t2xB8ZhY
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Mar 9, 2022 03:40
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Yeah that's extremely accurate
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Mar 9, 2022 03:41
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lmfao
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Mar 9, 2022 04:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:WWE turned into Street Fighter so gradually we didn't even notice AEW is a bit more Street Fighter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXFrDpQl2uk They also have a weird relationship with Capcom where they keep releasing limited edition Street Fighter X AEW t-shirts. Stuff like Chun-Li vs. Britt Baker, Sagat vs. Bryan Danielson, Zangief vs. Miro, Dhalsim vs. Darby Allin, etc. But in terms of AEW video game references, Kenny Omega's Halloween entrance is the best. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKpL_sv2PI
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Mar 9, 2022 06:03
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Kenny Omega is extremely my kind of dude. The New Day + AEW in a video game.
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Mar 9, 2022 06:14
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kenny loves street fighter so much he got to be IN street fighter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eq2H8_AJpQ
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Mar 9, 2022 06:54
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shadow puppet of a posted:if by 'attempts you compete' you mean wholly demolishes AEW in the ratings guys im starting to think this dude may not like aew
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Mar 9, 2022 08:42
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gbs but from 2004 posted:guys im starting to think this dude may not like aew They're certainly devoted to the gimmick, I'll give 'em that
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Mar 9, 2022 09:39
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Sydney Bottocks posted:They're certainly devoted to the gimmick, I'll give 'em that well you gotta keep it kayfabe brother, I came up under cowboy bill watts and he would beat our asses and fire us if we broke kayfabe dude
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Mar 9, 2022 10:49
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Love watching that Randy Orton on NXT I tell you.
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Mar 9, 2022 12:06
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lol, a WWE shill in a gbs thread lmao
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Mar 9, 2022 13:14
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Stone Cold Steve Austin to return for WrestleMania https://deadspin.com/stone-cold-steve-austin-to-return-for-wrestlemania-1848622738 quote:It’s a smart and sort-of desperate move for the WWE to bring in Austin for the event. Is McMahon not confident enough in his gaggle of full-timers to fill every seat in Jerry World? Then again, Austin is a needle-mover unlike anyone else in company history, bigger than John Cena or Hulk Hogan at their prime — arguably even bigger than The Rock. There’s precedent for the Rattlesnake’s services being wanted for previous Mania events taking place in Texas. The most recent Mania to emanate from the land of barbeque and George Bush was in 2016. Austin showed up alongside fellow Texan WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels, as well as Mick Foley, to beat up four full-timers, only one of whom, Sheamus, is still employed with the company.
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Mar 9, 2022 13:51
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Peggy Edson posted:lol, a WWE shill in a gbs thread lmao Nah he thinks we're console warriors but for wrestling promotions and care about ratings wars from 25 years ago or whatever lol
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Mar 9, 2022 14:05
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A lot of people claiming to laugh out loud for peculiar reasons
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Mar 9, 2022 14:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDnn5GPvZGw&t=101s Kevin Owens - a set-in-stone main eventer who's kayfabe worried about not appearing on a two-night Wrestlemania - desperately challenging Steve Austin to a Wrestlemania match, by cutting a promo in which he explains exactly why you shouldn't bring back Steve Austin for a Wrestlemania match. It's peak modern WWE imo.
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Mar 9, 2022 15:15
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I couldn't tell you the name of a single goober on any WWE program besides Randy Orton, and that's because of his meme poo poo They should just disband the wwe, it's loving sad now
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Mar 9, 2022 15:25
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That Dexter's Lab Dial M for Monkey ep with Rasslor is still great
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Mar 9, 2022 15:28
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wrestlemania has been having 2 for 1 ticket sales this year, so I would say its very likely vince is "not confident enough in his gaggle of full-timers to fill every seat in Jerry World" yes most of the full-timers don't tend to get to be on the WM cards though, make room for Maria Menounos and Logan Paul
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Mar 9, 2022 15:39
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Peggy Edson posted:lol, a WWE shill in a gbs thread lmao I’m a contrarian, not a shill. A wrestling centrist and not a partisan. Delighting at the powerful emotional bond a bunch of us have to aew and the fanciful ability to portray it as altruistic, successful and coherent.
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Mar 9, 2022 16:04
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yeah, vince mcmahon has been working on the basis that the big stars are the creaking old men who come back and beat the "young" guys in their 30s on the big show for loving years, lol that they've only noticed now they even reference the show six years ago where three retired wrestlers with major spinal issues came back and beat up four men in thirty seconds who all individually worked main-event programmes with john cena
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Mar 9, 2022 16:07
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like this might be mandela effect but i'm sure when austin came out for that bit he was wearing blue jeans and new balances
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Mar 9, 2022 16:13
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Ghost Leviathan posted:That Dexter's Lab Dial M for Monkey ep with Rasslor is still great "FIGHT ME OR I DESTROY THE EARTH!"
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Mar 9, 2022 16:47
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"Wrestling Centrist" made me laugh out loud. I don't even know what the hell I am or why I like this thread. I don't really like pro wrestling but I DO like ridiculous "so bad it's good" and "so stupid it's funny" kind of poo poo, complete with seedy, dirty carnival level styles of debauchery and drug use. Actually, that explains it.
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Mar 9, 2022 17:07
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Beeswax posted:A lot of people claiming to laugh out loud for peculiar reasons Listen, when I say I'm not mad and that I'm actually laughing right now I mean. 
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Mar 9, 2022 17:30
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Xydw6hKgU
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Mar 9, 2022 17:52
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BiggerBoat posted:but I DO like ridiculous "so bad it's good" and "so stupid it's funny" kind of poo poo, complete with seedy, dirty carnival level styles of debauchery and drug use. sorry but this means you DO like pro wrestling
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Mar 9, 2022 19:22
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SirPhoebos posted:I really want to read an in-depth autopsy of Bray Wyatt/The Fiend. Well, why not... Once upon a time, there was a gentleman by the name of Windham Rotunda, who made his debut on the second gameshow season of NXT. He was the son of Mike Rotunda, who briefly had the most powerfully 1990 gimmick in history, before going to WWF to take up the role of Irwin R. Schyster, a wrestling tax collector. As was the style at the time, none of this was mentioned on TV, and instead Rotunda Jr was given the name Husky Harris, alongside fellow NXT alumni Joe Hennig, who was rebranded as Mike McGillicutty. Strangely, Husky Harris vs Mike McGillicutty never did headline a Wrestlemania, but they did both have a brief run on Raw as members of the Nexus under CM Punk before Husky was murder-death-killed by babyface Randy Orton. Having explored the full depth of WWE's creative talents, he went back to developmental and came up with his own ideas. And, from this point on, all ideas (at least the core ones) are coming from inside the Rotunda. And so, a couple of years later out comes the essentially unrecognisable swamp preacher Bray Wyatt and his two associates, Erick Rowan and the late Luke Harper. He's doing a bit of Charlie Manson and a bit of about four movies that I haven't watched, but in the context of everything else going on it was a huge shift the bland scripted poo poo everyone else was doing, and even risked being fun and good. This eventually built to a main-event programme with John Cena, where Cena would get bullied by chidrens, but Cena would win in the end because it was 2014 and that's how that works. This generally sets the tone for two or three years worth of content, where Wyatt would do a rambling Manson speech, his hired goons would beat people up, and rinse and repeat. At some point, he would get an even bigger and goonier goon in Brawn Strowman, another great name from the big book of WWE creative ideas (I think Mike McGillicutty had been rebranded as Curtis Axel and had a gimmick where he pretended to be Hulk Hogan at this point). But at a certain point, the Undertaker isn't actually scary if he mostly sits in a chair and gets beaten by John Cena. And so we start to get into some... "interesting" creative decisions. He would show up as a SPOOKY hologram during a Hell In A Cell match and attack Dean Ambrose. He had a match with Randy Orton where an overhead projector would flash images of cockroaches and worms on the ring, which might have worked had they done it once and not until the audience started to laugh at the SPOOKY worms. He did SPOOKY drag to fight Finn Balor (who helpfully dressed up as a spooky pumpkin). And at Wrestlemania 32 (the one where I checked and Austin is absolutely wearing a loving pair of New Balances) he came out to confront the Rock after a 5+ minute Rock entrance involving him setting he own name on fire and where terrifying monster Erick Rowan was then promptly pinned by the Rock after one move. This left him feuding with Matt Hardy, who had reinvented his career as a comedy evil wizard (which is a whole goddamn thing with its own goddamn stupid TNA lore) and this ended up with him being beaten and thrown in the Lake Of Reincarnation, which helpfully is situated at Matt Hardy's house. He then briefly came back as Matt Hardy's babyface sidekick, which is the most "we have nothing for you" of all things. But, Windham has a lot of ideas. Or he at least watches a lot of movies. So, he disappeared for a while, and then showed back up like this. He's hellworld Mr Rodgers. Except that hellworld Mr Rodgers has an alter-ego named 'The Fiend' who murders people or whatever the gently caress. And, on one hand, this is silly and dumb in a fun, cool way. It's at least new. But he also immediately writes himself into a corner, because he's now Jason Vorhees. And Jason Vorhees is a terrible wrestling character. Very early on, the Fiend ends up in a Hell In A Cell match with Seth Rollins, which they build to by having babyface champion Rollins curl up whimpering in the corner of the ring. The entire match is filmed in spooky red lighting for no particular reason other than that spooky lighting follows the Fiend wherever he goes. Rollins hits his finisher like twelve times and smashes him with every goddamn weapon he can find, until he pulls out a sledgehammer, the referee begs him not to use it using his real name (which is Colby, a terrible name in a match where the other man is legitimately named Windham), and then throws out the match. In the year of our lord 2019, a Hell In A Cell match ended in a disqualification. Then the Fiend immediately no-sells the sledgehammer shot anyway and does his move on Seth while the fans boo and chant for refunds. But, at least this time they would quickly move him to winning the title rather than being the world's spookiest midcarder, and would get to feud against... babyface Miz before the Fiend was beaten by Old Man Goldberg in two minutes and fifty-nine seconds because you're not a real star unless you were punching car windows in the 90s. He then challenged John Cena to a Wrestlemania rematch, which appeared to entirely take place in John Cena's mind, traversing some alternate reality where Cena turned heel and joined the nWo. In fairness, this was April 2020, so this was probably one of the more fun things that happened on a show that otherwise happened in an empty building and in the middle of trying to figure out how to purchase toilet paper, but good god if Aeryn Sun showed up to say that she was in love with the other John Cena it would hardly be out of place. He defeats Cena in the netherworld and Cena goes off to make movies. This then leads into another cinematic match, against former protégé Brawn Strowman. Now, the Cena match broadly worked because even though it was insane and you expected them to open the women's bathroom door and there be nothing behind it, it was built on twenty years of Cena lore. The Strowman match would be two men driving out to a swamp to shout angrily at it while walking around seeing spooky poo poo. At one point, Strowman is confronted by the ghost of Alexa Bliss, who friendzoned him on some Facebook-exclusive content they made years before (or whatever, you can look the lore up in the book at this point). This then leads to Alexa Bliss playing Harley Quinn to the Fiend's Joker. Which I don't want to say is the gimmick she always wanted, but I strongly get the sense is the gimmick she always wanted. Except, and I've said this before, Alexa Bliss is an irl Adult Disney Woman, so it ends up being about 50% Harley Quinn and 50% Annie trying to convince Jeff Winger to join the Glee club and reaching diminishing returns. Leading to more goddamn hand-wringing and pearl-clutching than I've ever heard in my life that someone, somewhere, might be jerkin' it to a 30-year-old big-tiddy woman with pigtails doing a boopy-doop voice on a swingset. Anyway, this naturally leads to Bray Wyatt being set on fire by Randy Orton. And then Alexa beating Randy Orton in a match where things fell from the ceiling and the Fiend would return as a charred zombie. This then led to a Wrestlemania match between the Fiend and Orton where the Fiend would magically heal himself, pop out of a giant jack-in-the-box, be distracted by Alexa's squirt, and then lose clean to an RKO and disappear. Shortly thereafter, he left the company for good. The Fiend died of an RKO on the way back to his home planet. Alexa would continue playing the world's tallest nine-year-old, except at a much reduced price, where it was now claimed that actually she had the spooky power all along, and it came from her magic doll. At one point, the doll would actively feud with ex-MMA fighter Shayna Baszler. Charlotte Flair would then murder the doll, presumably because she was worried about not getting the rub from beating an inanimate object in a fight, and then Alexa would try to eat the doll to absorb its power. I DID NOT MAKE ANY OF THE ABOVE UP, THIS IS ALL GENUINE SPOOKY DOLL LORE THAT MIGHT COME UP IN A TRIVIA QUIZ ONE DAY In summary, Windham Rotunda is a land of contrasts. In actual summary, all of these things were really fun ideas for like, two weeks, until it turned into wrestlers that could do magic, summon ghosts, were immune to fire, and that could provoke internet arguments about whether or not it was illegal to look at a grown woman's butt if she's doing a voice. But also that they were somehow immune to fire but weak against Goldberg. How much of that was him, and how much of that was WWE creative, we'll never know until he shows up somewhere else with new movie ideas. Or until Husky Harris returns at Wrestlemania, who knows.
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Mar 9, 2022 21:42
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thank you for including the clip of the magic doll winking at doudrop and that being the finish of the match
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Mar 9, 2022 22:00
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I’m looking for 6000 words on any of the following wrestletopic oral histories so that I may sell them as inventory for essay writing services: Kevin “Nailz” Wachols sues Vince for sexual harassment The rise and fall, or bloom and wither if you prefer, of Adam Rose The rise and fall, or boil to spoil if you prefer, of Hulk Hogans pasta restaurant. Destrucity: the fall and further fall of Ultimate Warrior, comic publisher and life coach post wwe. Creep to heap: the madness of post-wrestling Randy Savage: musician and would-be felony sex offender up to the time of his passing. shadow puppet of a fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Mar 9, 2022 |
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Mar 9, 2022 22:12
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Ad by Khad posted:thank you for including the clip of the magic doll winking at doudrop and that being the finish of the match i'm more impressed that i managed to shoehorn in references to two separate shows that got cancelled because no-one watched them three if you count nitro
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Mar 9, 2022 22:17
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FullLeatherJacket posted:i'm more impressed that i managed to shoehorn in references to two separate shows that got cancelled because no-one watched them I'm disappointed that you called it a jack-in-the-box and not what it was called, a box like structure.
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Mar 9, 2022 22:29
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