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To me, mostly, the issue is about IP ownership and not about how he treated workers. On one hand, Kurvitz is clearly an eccentric egotistical artist. That personality was compounded by the accolades, the stress, and the crunch (I don't work in games or tech so I don't think I can even comprehend what that does to people). He wasn't the only one going through the stress and crunch, but this entire world is his baby, and he wants to do it right. From an artistic standpoint, I get that. That IN NO WAY absolves him of the way he treated people, especially friends, throughout the creation of the game. I do honestly believe this narrative (and it is a true one) is being pushed to muddy the waters surrounding the IP issues. On the other, Ilmar, the other Estonian guy with the partner who somehow owns shares in the company?, and Kender to some extent seem like they've made a clear power grab. The difficult artistic original creators get forced out through a variety of not recorded situations and when faced in court it becomes a he said she said. Ilmar gives up very little/no information in the interview because he knows all he has to do is wait it out. None of the staff deserved to be treated the way they were. No one does. It doesn't matter if you're doing your job properly or not, the work you make is good or not, or anything. No human should be subjected to that. There is currently a case afaik against a big New York based artist (Tom Sachs for those curious) for something similar. Eccentric artist gets too high on his own bullshit and treats his staff/interns like complete garbage. Lukewarm take, the issues between Kurvitz and the staff at ZA/UM are a separate (and honestly in the end more important) discussion. The IP issues are what people have wanted to know about and what they want resolved. Will the staff get an apology after it's said and done? I don't know, I hope so. But until this IP mess is sorted, Kurvitz and his egocentric eccentrism are going to be laser focused on that specific goal. They already tried to buy him out, he's doing this on principle. Even him going to NetEase is probably paying for the "they look expensive" legal team. Hottest take, while my heart does go out to the staff that poured so much of their clearly massive talent into the game, I do not believe Disco Elysium is theirs to have ownership of. This world has clearly been conceived over a long period of time, spanning decades of TTRPG games and a book that revolve around characters created from people in their lives. It is clearly the thing that has occupied Kurvitz' mind and world for most of his life. It is easier to flesh out a worlds framework than it is to build something from scratch. Did the staff at ZA/UM create large parts of the game within all this framework? Yes, absolutely, some of which I hold very dear both to the story and my experience with it. I do not, however, think that gives them the right to it, or to wrestle it away from the person who brought these concepts into existence, gigantic rear end in a top hat or not. My hope is that the IP stays with Kurvitz, and that the workers get the apology they deserve. If it is true that DE2 is being shelved by ZA/UM, then they can continue their gainful employment under a company that (seems to) respect them, and Kurvitz can attempt to do whatever he wants with the world that is his, or fall out of the spotlight forever.
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May 30, 2023 22:33
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It’s me, the loyal fan of the communist video game Disco Elysium who believes the workers who created it deserve no ownership of it.
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May 30, 2023 22:56
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its a bigger issue than that and i don't know how far i want to get into it. its easy to say that big-name creators are overrated and are wrongfully credited for a collective work, despite how we treat things like movies, music and literature where a single guy tends to take credit for a collective effort. the problem is that the contrary position is pretty attractive to publishers because the conclusion is that if nobody is given credit as the main creative force on a work, that means nobody is essential and everyone can be treated as a replicable cog. its less of a topic when it comes to like, music because the practice of crediting a song to a single person despite all the producers, session musicians, studio staff, etc who worked on it is a long-standing social convention. we don't really have that convention with games yet.
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May 30, 2023 23:00
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Vegetable posted:It’s me, the loyal fan of the communist video game Disco Elysium who believes the workers who created it deserve no ownership of it. The only workers who had ownership have had it taken away with no intent to share that ownership with others. There is no outcome where whether the remaining workers deserve ownership matters here.
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May 30, 2023 23:01
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Vegetable posted:It’s me, the loyal fan of the communist video game Disco Elysium who believes the workers who created it deserve no ownership of it. I don't believe they deserve ownership of the IP created long before them, I do believe they deserve ownership of the company and game itself. The world is not theirs, the product of their labour is. I could/should have been clearer that my feelings are towards the IP itself, not the game.
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May 30, 2023 23:02
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like - in practice, rejecting the idea of a creative lead being credited with a work doesn't really lead to a collective taking credit for it. it leads to people following the IP itself without regard to who's working on it, which is an ideal situation for publishers this is pretty common in games - how often do you hear people say like, "they should bring back Castlevania/Mega Man/Contra" without regards to who would actually be making the game, and if it's the same people who made the games people loved? it's much less common in media where there are very long-standing conventions on artistic credit
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May 30, 2023 23:05
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Vegetable posted:Why is there a need to insist that IP theft is more serious than interpersonal and professional misconduct? You can say that both are bad and one doesn’t take away from the other. You don’t need to diminish the grievances of employees to whom Kurvitz was a dick. The comparison is meaningful only in a nebulous philosophical classroom exercise. I am not a legal expert, but being an rear end in a top hat shithead isn't a crime and IP theft is, right?
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May 30, 2023 23:05
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Feels Villeneuve posted:like - in practice, rejecting the idea of a creative lead being credited with a work doesn't really lead to a collective taking credit for it. it leads to people following the IP itself without regard to who's working on it, which is an ideal situation for publishers Basically the only ones to break this convention are some Nintendo people, Kojima, Josh Sawyer, and maybe a few others? EDIT: I agree that it does speak to the potential for publishers to capitalize on IP without having to care about writers. It also speaks to the ability for a well crafted world/system/universe that has already been created to be made with any talented writers. If IPs that good were easy to make, big studios would just do that instead. It's much easier to scoop up existing IPs with a following and hire good versatile writers. If the IP in question is sold fair and square, that's one thing. If it isn't...well I suppose that's why we're talking about it. Claes Oldenburger fucked around with this message at 23:11 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 23:07
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Claes Oldenburger posted:Basically the only ones to break this convention are some Nintendo people, Kojima, Josh Sawyer, and maybe a few others? there is no accepted convention for this in games that is close to universally accepted. it's just sort of a big mish-mash
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May 30, 2023 23:09
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sid meier and american mcgee feeling pretty vindicated right now
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May 30, 2023 23:10
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zhuge liang posted:sid meier and american mcgee feeling pretty vindicated right now EA's current state is funny because when they started Trip Hawkins specifically tried to market developers as stars, which is why their first games were packaged like LPs and looked like this
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May 30, 2023 23:13
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Feels Villeneuve posted:there is no accepted convention for this in games that is close to universally accepted. it's just sort of a big mish-mash Totally, and it shouldn't be that way. It happens in basically every artistic medium. From the fine art world, Andy Warhol notoriously didn't do much of the actual work.
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May 30, 2023 23:14
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I vaguely recall hearing about the actual ratio of who wrote how much of DE's script in a video or a podcast: Kurvitz slightly more than 50%, Hindpere around 20%, the rest of the writing team writing the rest. Now, I think it was either Kurvitz or Hindpere who mentioned it, so take it with a grain of salt.
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May 30, 2023 23:35
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Vegetable posted:It’s me, the loyal fan of the communist video game Disco Elysium who believes the workers who created it deserve no ownership of it.
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May 30, 2023 23:36
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Can someone please break down the moralist, ultraliberal, fascist and communist responses to the long video
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May 30, 2023 23:38
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Fascists, you are all fascists, cmon!
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May 30, 2023 23:56
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As a communard, I want the content to become public domain.
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May 31, 2023 00:11
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Crain posted:Aside from how this all legally shakes out, I'm getting the sense that the IP is dead. I'm just not really seeing a way forward. Any sequel that doesn't have the original members involved will be pretty doomed due to how widely known the legal situation surrounding the IP theft is to the fans. Whatever comes next might not be an outright failure, but it's not going to be Disco Elysium. People won't care it's fine
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May 31, 2023 04:43
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Megazver posted:I vaguely recall hearing about the actual ratio of who wrote how much of DE's script in a video or a podcast: i mean, Argo Tuulik says he thinks that's a very over exaggerated estimate by kurvitz, from what argo describes, the characters he wrote, feel like close to 15-20% of the game, possibly more, but also could be less.
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May 31, 2023 04:58
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zhuge liang posted:sid meier and american mcgee feeling pretty vindicated right now Don't forget the world's greatest video game developer, Madden.
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May 31, 2023 07:04
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imhotep posted:i mean, Argo Tuulik says he thinks that's a very over exaggerated estimate by kurvitz, from what argo describes, the characters he wrote, feel like close to 15-20% of the game, possibly more, but also could be less. Exactly. And that's just Tuulik. If we're looking at the Final Cut, and based on the doc, it's clear Tuulik and Justin Keenan handled all the vision quests. Given that there were 6+ (credited) writers for the base game, the idea that Kurvitz ultimately wrote 50% of DE seems like...a very Kurvitz statement. Of course there's also the LudoNarraCon chat which, if one believes Keenan and Tuulik, makes retracing who wrote what meaningless in the first place. Dialogues were regularly edited and reworked several times by multiple writers: https://www.gameshub.com/news/features/disco-elysium-narrative-writing-process-18597/
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May 31, 2023 08:00
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I think, and DE agrees with me maybe/sometimes, that the worker is always allowed to beat the boss with hammers. Q. E. D.
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May 31, 2023 08:09
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Feels Villeneuve posted:like - in practice, rejecting the idea of a creative lead being credited with a work doesn't really lead to a collective taking credit for it. it leads to people following the IP itself without regard to who's working on it, which is an ideal situation for publishers Bringing up Castlevania specifically is kind of ironic since Koji Igarashi, one of the former lead producers on Castlevania, ended up leaving Konami and later made Bloodstained which is one of the best Castlevania games ever made despite not being able to legally call itself Castlevania.
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May 31, 2023 08:10
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Well I finished the book. IMO the cleaned up machine translation is far superior to "professional" translation. What I dismissed as awkward flavour text often actually has important meaning when put correctly. Am I correct that the fate of the girls was not explicitly discovered as well as their connection to Ziggy? And how the airship model ties into all of this? Other than a possible metaphor on why everyone is forgetting them.
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May 31, 2023 08:58
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Best Friends posted:The question becomes why do we need to discuss them together? Imagine you got hit in a hit and run, but every time the hit and run is discussed conversation also somehow includes that you didn’t pay your taxes in 2020. These unrelated topics are being linked together consistently, which then makes it plausible that they’re being linked to justify, on some level, the ip theft. The black man murdered by the police was no angel. Why see he smoked some pot 5 years ago. The entire purpose of discussing these issues together is to justify the former through the latter. And that poo poo works, all the time.
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May 31, 2023 09:02
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Watched the PMG video. Not particularly interested in trudging through the inane debate over conflating of issues, obfuscation/distraction, or what is/isn't important. I am curious about a couple things though - ZA/UM has never been owned Kurvitz and Rostov, at best they have been minority shareholders. Regardless of whether or not Kompus engaged in illegal activity to secure a majority stake they would not have had a controlling stake in the company as Linnamae would still have the largest stake - so what exactly would have changed in their situation? - The lead technologist for ZA/UM confirmed Kurvitz asked him to "share the source code of Disco Elysium with him" so it could be used at a new studio they were planning to start - assuming this is true, how is that not IP theft? I have no idea what to believe but I will say neither side come off as particularly sympathetic, the only person I really feel for is Argo Tuulik. He just seems so genuine and I want to give him a hug, I hope they somehow inherit everything and make a Cuno spin-off.
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May 31, 2023 11:11
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I don't have time to watch the video but out of interest who actually accused Sawyer and of what?
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May 31, 2023 11:55
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No Dignity posted:I don't have time to watch the video but out of interest who actually accused Sawyer and of what? ZAUM Studio/Kompus used this as the justification for firing Kurvitz, Hindpere, and Rostov. They claimed that Kurvitz (and presumably the other two) attempted to steal the source code of Disco Elysium and approached Sawyer to continue the IP at whatever company he worked for at the time. If you skip to about 1:58 in the video Kurvitz talks about this as both the reason they were given at the time they were fired and also what ZAUM confirmed in court when litigation around employment (presumably a wrongful termination suit) was brought forward by Kurvitz's lawyers. This is partly why I and others itt had problems with how the documentary crew framed this. All the toxicity claims made by ZAUM/Kompus as the real reason they needed to be fired from the studio are ex post facto and clearly attempts to muddy the waters and discredit them (and whatever claims they may have about Kompus embezzling company funds to engineer a majority stake). Now, imo the claims from the current employees about Kurvitz's behavior are credible, but those claims are clearly being used by Kompus to distract from the claim that he embezzled company funds to become the majority shareholder. Other than the allegations of his behavior I think the biggest mark against Kurvitz is that he didn't consult a lawyer before signing contracts that gave ZAUM UK Ltd. permanent control of the IP. In the interview he mentioned that prior to this change the company only had time-limited ownership of the IP for three games or a set amount of time, whichever came first. Signing that away without consulting a lawyer first is just colossally stupid and probably speaks to his allegedly terrible performance as a team lead - he was clearly out of his depth when it came to the more formal business and management aspects of game development since prior to the studio Zaum seems to have been a weird anarchic mess. E: Reviewing the footage again it seems like ZAUM may have claimed that Kurvitz, Hindpere, and Rostov attempted to approach Ubisoft, Microsoft, or Larian in addition to whatever company Sawyer worked for. This is another spot where the documentary crew dropped the ball imo. If there are indeed court filings in whatever UK labor courts where ZAUM confirmed why the trio were fired, I'd assume those filings are public record but I'm not a filthy Brit so idk MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 13:51 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 12:40
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MeatwadIsGod posted:ZAUM Studio/Kompus used this as the justification for firing Kurvitz, Hindpere, and Rostov. They claimed that Kurvitz (and presumably the other two) attempted to steal the source code of Disco Elysium and approached Sawyer to continue the IP at whatever company he worked for at the time. If you skip to about 1:58 in the video Kurvitz talks about this as both the reason they were given at the time they were fired and also what ZAUM confirmed in court when litigation around employment (presumably wrongful termination) were brought forward by Kurvitz's lawyers. Thank you for the explanation!
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May 31, 2023 12:49
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Sekenr posted:Well I finished the book. IMO the cleaned up machine translation is far superior to "professional" translation. lmao
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May 31, 2023 15:16
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Man, all of these reveals point towards the fact that DE2 will come around, be made by the same people, and it'll be good
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May 31, 2023 16:08
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Bringing up Castlevania specifically is kind of ironic since Koji Igarashi, one of the former lead producers on Castlevania, ended up leaving Konami and later made Bloodstained which is one of the best Castlevania games ever made despite not being able to legally call itself Castlevania. yeah and despite all this you still see people talk about "man, they should bring back Castlevania" when Konami is brought up. tbh that's one of the examples I think of first
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May 31, 2023 16:13
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Feels Villeneuve posted:yeah and despite all this you still see people talk about "man, they should bring back Castlevania" when Konami is brought up. tbh that's one of the examples I think of first If we REALLY want to get into IP fuckery and Konami let's talk about Metal Gear Solid and Hideo Kojima. Though less international money fuckery is involved.
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May 31, 2023 16:24
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DE was better than mgs2-5 combined tho
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May 31, 2023 16:24
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Imagine metal gear solid combined with disco elysium
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May 31, 2023 16:27
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goblin week posted:Man, all of these reveals point towards the fact that DE2 will come around, be made by the same people, and it'll be good There is certainly room to hope. Although I think it's definitely going to have a very different feel to it if it is completed. Like going from Pillars of Eternity 1 to Pillars of Eternity 2.
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May 31, 2023 16:33
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EorayMel posted:Imagine metal gear solid combined with disco elysium At the end of every dialogue: Writing: Kurvitz Art direction: Kurvitz Music: Kurvitz
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May 31, 2023 16:45
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Claes Oldenburger posted:At the end of every dialogue: Lol
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May 31, 2023 16:51
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It's extremely convenient for owners that game development drives people insane. There are a ton of lovely people in game dev, but working in game dev also involves circumstances (created by the owners) which make people act like poo poo. People break down, they scream, they cry, they drink too much, they write angry emails. Seeing this behavior, the owners can say "hm, we don't tolerate lovely people on our beautiful harmonious team which only takes collective credit," and purge the people who've been driven insane by the process - the people who want credit, money, and better working conditions. "Teams are stronger than heroes" becomes a way to single out the complainers as 'heroes' who are disrupting 'the team'. I have no idea if that's what happened here, but it's a dynamic I have seen play out from afar (again, defensively, I think I have to say this hasn't happened to me — I just started cutting a bunch but stayed a very good polite worker until the day I quit). I think a lot of game development works this way. A cadre of owners accepts highly motivated workers, exploits them until they break, then throws them out for their behavior once broken—keeping the rights to all their work. Years later, when all these anecdotes of abuse come to the surface, at the moment of crisis when the workers say "no more, no more, this can't go on", the owners can point to the broken people and say "we got rid of them, see?" Of course a lot of people in game dev are just sexist toxic assholes and deserve to be sacked, too. A lot of people really do create toxic environments around them, and getting rid of them is a good thing. So I don't know. Maybe I am just brain vomiting.
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May 31, 2023 17:03
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steinrokkan posted:Don't forget the world's greatest video game developer, Madden. the funny thing is that John Madden was heavily involved in the early versions of the Madden games. He wanted them to be super accurate and viewed them as an educational tool.
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May 31, 2023 19:21
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