Why did you say six months?
He's coming.
This matters. This is important. Why did you say six months?
Why did you say five minutes?

Saturday, February 11

Blups React

More A/B testing.

😐🙂🙁😍😬😰🤢😡

🖤💗💛💙💚💜💖💔

Ugh.

If you look at at at that on Android it's a train wreck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:11 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Blupface

😀🤣☺😆🙂😎😘😚😛😝

😁😃😐😅😊🤓😗🤗😜🤔

😂😄☹😭😉😍😙😇😋😒

😑😏😮😩😴😔😕😟😧😱

😶😣🤐😫😌🙁😖😦😬😓

🙄😥😯😪🙃😲😞😢😨😰

😷🤕🤤😤🤠😈👺👻🤖😸

🤒😵😳😠🤡👿💀👽💩😹

🤧🤢🤥🤑😡👹☠👾😺😻

😼😿🐱🏍🐱👓🙉🐶🦁🐮🐭🐻

😽😾🐱💻🐱🚀🙊🐺🐯🐷🐹🐨

🙀🐱👤🐱🐉🙈🐵🐱🦊🐗🐰🐼

🐸🐔🐾🦍🐕🐆🐃🐏🐪🐁

🐴🐲🐩🦏🐈🐎🐄🐑🐫🐀

🦄🐽🦌🐒🐅🐂🐖🐐🐘🐇

🐿🐢🦈🐳🐠🐙🦅🦃🐤🐧

🦎🐍🐬🐋🦐🐚🦆🐓🐥🕊

🐊🐉🦑🐟🐡🦀🦉🐣🐦🦇

🦀🦉🐣🐦🦇🐛🐞🕸👅👤

🦅🦃🐤🐧🦋🐜🦂👁👄👥

🦆🐓🐥🕊🐌🐝🕷👀👣🗣

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Wednesday, January 04

Cert This

Got an email today (yesterday now, actually), from MyCERT, the Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team.

Usually such notifications are to report spam or phishing attempts coming from a server in the mununiverse, meaning some poor soul got their CPanel or Wordpress account hacked.

This time it was instead a cyber harassment complaint.

Relating to a small JPEG image.

Of a cartoon.

On an item, on a blog, posted in 2012.

Discussing censorship.

MyCERT copied our hosting provider, so I sent them - our hosting provider, that is - a query asking if the image violated their terms of service, which seems unlikely.

If I get hit with a valid DMCA request I will comply fortwithly, because otherwise our hosting provider will comply by yanking our connection (which they need to do to keep their legal immunity under the DMCA).

But I'm more likely to edit user comments for spelling than to remove an image because it "harassed" someone.

Update: Our hosting provider said, and I quote:

Looks like free speech to me. Closing ticket.

Incero. Love these guys.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:16 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, October 27

USS Clueless Archive

USS Clueless seems to be well-preserved at archive.org. If you want to revisit the site from when it was active, this link seems a good place to start.

When he was retiring from political blogging, Steven made a zip file of all his posts available. That's also been preserved by archive.org, but you have to hunt around a little to find it.

I've uploaded it to my own server as well, and you can download it here.

Update: Commenters have noted that the archive is not complete. Work is under way to produce a complete archive of USS Clueless and the original Chizumatic and make it publicly available. The server is safe and in good hands.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:08 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Sadly, not all of his anime reviews are on archive.org. The old ones are there, but newer series like AsoIku and Strike Witches 2 are missing, as are some TMWs.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, October 28 2016 09:10 AM (CLiR9)

2 Steven's server has been preserved, and we're working on getting a full archive copied off the old hardware and uploaded to a new home.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 09:31 AM (PiXy!)

3 This archive has the same problem we discovered with Erbo's: Apparently Steven used software called MemoWeb to crawl his site and produce an archive, and MemoWeb hosed all[1] the links. It also truncated longer posts--his Transnational Progressives one from August 2002 cuts off less than halfway through.
[1] I don't know if "all" is an accurate word, but it probably was. Every link on the page I mentioned is screwed up, although someone willing to put effort into it could probably repair them.
On another site, Erbo said he'd like to put the archive on Github and crowdsource fixing it.

Posted by: RickC at Friday, October 28 2016 09:43 AM (ITnFO)

4 Damn, thanks for letting me know. We can fix the links, but we can't so easily restore missing content.

That makes the server restoration even more important. We'll be reaching out to people to help with that, since I'm based in Australia.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 10:04 AM (PiXy!)

5 Though we should definitely compare the USS Clueless archive at archive.org and see what can be done with that.

A Github project to do that is a great idea.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 10:07 AM (PiXy!)

6 Not just USS Clueless; today I was bookmarking you guys on Steven's blogroll before that's gone. I also note I cannot see his reviews or TMW. I think that's what y'all were alluding to above? If so, thanks! Where's the tip jar?

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Friday, October 28 2016 10:30 AM (ug1Mc)

7 Yes, the same server holds his older Chizumatic content (2004-2007) and his review index.

We have an offer to help with this, and will likely set up a tip jar to fund the permanent hosting and any incidental costs.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 10:41 AM (PiXy!)

8 Cool. I'm in for the tip jar, and any assistance needed.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, October 28 2016 11:33 AM (dGpmn)

9 Does the offer involve getting his Qube? That would be ideal, if possible, although I remember him saying several years ago he lost the ability to log in. Hopefully something like "get in via serial port" is an option.

Posted by: RickC at Friday, October 28 2016 12:03 PM (ITnFO)

10 Yes, the plan is to open up the Qube and pop the drives out. They're standard IDE drives and the operating system is Linux, so while it's old it shouldn't be too difficult.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

I can not really contribute much right now, but I would be willing to put in something towards it. Having followed Steven for around a decade and a half gives the archives a more than merely sentimental value.

Which reminds me - did USS Clueless ever host his CDMA versus GSM article?

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, October 28 2016 03:06 PM (hlTo6)

12 Yes, I think that's where I first read it. I found it archived here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 03:17 PM (PiXy!)

13 And to clarify for people who now ask, why did GSM win then? GSM later adopted CDMA; that was why going from 2G to 3G was such a big deal. GSM 4G/LTE uses a more advanced approach called OFDMA, which wasn't practical back in 2001

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 28 2016 10:25 PM (PiXy!)

14 Regarding #10, awesome.
If GSM is actually CDMA, it's especially annoying that Sprint/Verizon phones aren't compatible with anyone else.
My pet peeve: endless articles on Tom's Hardware and Arse Technica about Chinese phones that'll never be released in the US (although you can get them on Aliexpress, wink wink nudge nudge) and can't be used on Sprint/Verizon anyway. I think I've mentioned this before but I switched from AT&T to Sprint 4 years ago, because my company's office suite doesn't get signal from the GSM carriers, but the CDMA ones work fine. Puts a limit on what phones I can have.

Posted by: RickC at Saturday, October 29 2016 05:05 AM (ECH2/)

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Tuesday, December 29

42 Days Of Suggestions

[Stickied. I forgot I could sticky things.]

As I mentioned, I'm planning to watch and review 42 films in the space of 42 days - the summer school holidays here in Sydney.

I can probably find 42 films to watch, but I'm certainly open to suggestions. Just three requirements:

I haven't seen it before.*
It must have some redeeming quality.
It must be available in some reasonable way.

List

1. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow *

2. Twelve Monkeys ***

3. Brave **½

4. The Iron Giant **½

5. The Prestige

6. Inside Out ***

7. Inception

8. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

9. Skyfall

10. Dark City

11. The Shawshank Redemption

12. The Martian

13. Mad Max

14. The Mouretsu Pirates Movie

15. Frozen **

16. Interstellar

17. 300

18. Crank ***

19. Metropolis

20. Watchmen

21. Sucker Punch

22. Pacific Rim

23. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

24. Only Yesterday

25. A Monster in Paris ****

26. Shoot 'Em Up

27. Minority Report

28. Secondhand Lions

29. To Kill a Mockingbird

30. Arrietty ***½

31. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

32. Army of Darkness

33. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back ***½

34. Desperado

35. Sin City

36. Batman Begins *

37. The Lego Movie ***

38. Double Indemnity

39. The K-On! Movie ***

40. The Adventures of Tintin **½

41. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya ***

42. Star Wars: The Force Awakens ***

(I may rearrange the order depending on what I feel like watching from day to day, but I plan to get to everything on the list.)

Scores

**** Everything it could have been and everything I could have wanted. It's rare for a film to do both; I'm not objective in my ratings and don't pretend to be.

*** Very good, well worth watching, and recommended.

** Adequate. Or perhaps it was well-made but didn't grab me, or it grabbed me but was badly flawed. Something you might watch on a rainy afternoon and not count your time wasted.

* Not very good at all. Not recommended unless you are feeling particularly perverse.

Ø A stinker with no net merit whatsoever. A black hole where talent and money went to die.

* Which you can't possibly know unless I've mentioned it here, so fire away.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:08 PM | Comments (29) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Nanoha A's movie and the Mouretsu Pirates movie.

Also Keroro Gunsou Movie #5. (Which takes place on Easter Island.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, December 21 2015 01:18 PM (+rSRq)

Bug alert:

I just did something strange to the formatting for my page and I don't know what. Help?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, December 21 2015 02:25 PM (+rSRq)

3 Never mind. I found it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, December 21 2015 02:26 PM (+rSRq)

4 Yay!

The Mouretsu Pirates movie might be a good one. I've lined up a few recommendations at work, and got an iTunes gift card in our office Secret Santa.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 21 2015 04:02 PM (PiXy!)

5 So the list at the moment:
1. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (1 elephant) 2. Twelve Monkeys (3 monkeys) 3. Brave 4. The Prestige 5. Inside Out 6. Inception

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 21 2015 04:20 PM (PiXy!)

6 The Princess Bride
Better Off Dead
The Gods Must Be Crazy

Jackie Chan's City Hunter (I don't know if you can track down a copy - I ended up with a Hong Kong LD, plus a rough translation from Usenet which clarified things, but wasn't absolutely necessary)

Posted by: Hypozeuxis at Tuesday, December 22 2015 05:35 PM (KR/O2)

Have you ever seen The 36th Chamber of Shaolin? It's one of the very best kung fu movies, a shining star in a sea of dreck. Very much worth your while, but it may be a bit difficult to find.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, December 22 2015 05:59 PM (+rSRq)

8 Hypo - I've seen The Princess Bride many times, and The Gods Must Be Crazy once or twice. Haven't seen Better Off Dead, but it's not on Netflix or iTunes, so I'll have to look around.

Steven - I haven't seen The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and it's available on Netflix, so I'll put that on the list.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 22 2015 07:17 PM (PiXy!)

9 Tampopo The Triplets of Belleville Secondhand Lions

Posted by: Don at Wednesday, December 23 2015 03:45 AM (0kRhp)

10 When I click on the "Edit" after my comment, it merely reloads the page rather than lets me fix the comment. (Each title should be on a separate line.) This happens in both Safari and Chrome.

Posted by: Don at Wednesday, December 23 2015 03:54 AM (0kRhp)

I don't think there's supposed to be any ability to edit existing comments. I sure have never seen any such button.

If there's a bug here, it's probably that button showing up.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, December 23 2015 06:34 AM (+rSRq)

12 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/How about "Minority Report"?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, December 23 2015 08:35 AM (+rSRq)

Dammit.

How about "Minority Report"?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, December 23 2015 08:36 AM (+rSRq)

14 John Wick.

Shoot 'Em Up. Which is John Wick done as black humor.

Sin City... the first one, which is very good, as opposed to Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, which is good only if you're deeply familiar with the comics, and even then it's not so great.

The Adventures of Tintin.

The Stranger. My favorite Orson Welles movie, despite it not being anywhere near his best work.

Moneyball. Because I don't know how much you know about baseball, and I'd love to hear what someone who isn't a fan of the sport thinks about the film.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, December 23 2015 01:12 PM (zAcee)

15 Shoot 'Em Up is on my iTunes account, though I don't remember buying it, so that goes on the list.
I'll take a look at the others - they all sound like good suggestions, but none of them are on Netflix. Netflix Australia doesn't have much of a catalog.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 23 2015 01:38 PM (PiXy!)

16 Minority Report is on Netflix. Added.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 23 2015 01:40 PM (PiXy!)

17 Don - no-one seems to have Tampopo. I'll give Secondhand Lions a try.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 23 2015 03:53 PM (PiXy!)

18 Quite probably safe to skip Sucker Punch, even if it is pretty to look at. I'd suggest Primer and A Scanner Darkly.

Posted by: Artee at Thursday, December 24 2015 11:18 AM (5blmT)

19 Sucker Punch is worth it just for the best live-action rendition of an anime fight ever.

That alone makes up for the rest of the film.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, December 24 2015 11:59 AM (zAcee)

20 The best review of Sucker Punch I ever read was basically: "Things The Internet Likes: The Movie". It's visually spectacular, and braindead, and I own a copy on DVD that I dust off from time to time smile

Posted by: Artee at Thursday, December 24 2015 12:12 PM (5blmT)

21 I looked for a copy of Primer today. It's not on Netflix or iTunes, and JB Hifi didn't have it either. If I can get it it will go on the list. (This thing will run until the end of January, so that seems likely...)
I don't mind watching a movie that's a visual spectacle with an idiot plot, as long as the director doesn't deeply believe it's more than that. Also, I already have Sucker Punch; I think it was on a 2 for $20 sale.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 24 2015 01:20 PM (PiXy!)

22 Two (or three, depending on how you want to count them) more for you:

The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. Big goofy fun with cars in Japan. Notable for being the entry in the FF franchise almost entirely lacking in Vin Diesel. Also notable for a female lead with an almost perfectly square face and a jawline that could cut diamonds. I was shocked at how much I liked it.

Desperado and/or its older, less expensive prequel El Mariachi. EM was shot for $7000. D was shot for $7million. One has Antonio Banderas and a young Salma Hayek. The other was shot for $7000. Both were directed by Robert Rodriguez who also did Sin City and its sequel. I'm a big fan of Desperado, not as huge a fan of EM... mainly because it looks like it was shot for $7000, and the acting is, shall we say, spotty.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, December 24 2015 02:05 PM (zAcee)

23 The Lego Movie Iron Monkey -- non-gloomy kung-fu action Casablanca (just in case you haven't seen it) Cars (because you mentioned you could be talked into giving it another shot; it's not my favorite Pixar by a long stretch, but it's still worthwhile)

Posted by: Griffin at Thursday, December 24 2015 03:48 PM (fEEE3)

24 The City of Lost Children

Planes: Fire and Rescue. No, seriously. The first might have just been an attempt to do Cars with an airplane, but the second actually had a decent story.

Oh, and to go with Desperado and El Mariachi, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico", also with Banderas and Hayek.

Gattaca

Dark City

Kamikaze Girls - A Gothic Lolita stuck in the hinterlands of Japan hooks up with her polar opposite, a biker chick, and it gets bizarre from there.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, December 24 2015 04:49 PM (5Ktpu)

25 Rush--the 2013 Ron Howard movie about the James Hunt/Nikki Lauda rivalry (warnings for nudity, coarse language, and disturbingly realistic/gory portrayals of '70s-era Formula One crashes)

Truth in 24 and Truth in 24 II: Every Second Counts--Audi's self-made documentaries about their 2008 and 2011 Le Mans campaigns (warnings for Audi corporate braggadocio and Jason Statham narration)

Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Friday, December 25 2015 12:18 PM (XC8ds)

26 I second Rush. A very good movie that happens to be about Formula 1, as opposed a Formula 1 movie that happens to be very good.

I'm not big on the Truth in 24 films, though. That's just me.

If you haven't seen it already, might I suggest Big Hero 6 for your list? I just finished watching it (literally, like, 10 minutes ago) and was quite impressed. I think Pixar would have been happy with it if they had done it which they didn't.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 25 2015 02:08 PM (zAcee)

27 Unfortunately (if that's the right word) I've already seen Big Hero 6. I like it a lot; it's a little uneven but a lot of fun. And I loved the setting of San Fransokyo. I want to live there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 25 2015 02:47 PM (PiXy!)

28 I'm not surprised you've seen it already, honestly... about a quarter of the world did when it came out, after all. If I wasn't allergic to people, I would have gone to see it in the theaters. Lovely film.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 25 2015 03:10 PM (zAcee)

29 "Lion in Winter"

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Saturday, January 23 2016 12:09 PM (lU4ZJ)

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Tuesday, October 06

Still Alive

Posting should return to abnormal soon.

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Wednesday, July 15

Sorry About That Glitch...

We had a firewall issue that blocked access to our DNS servers, which effectively shut down... Everything.

Then we had a NAT issue after I fixed the firewall. The two problems were related, but I'm still not sure exactly why they happened in the first place.

Anyway, all coming back to normal now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, March 29

Sorry About The Site Glitches

Our statistics database filled up. This wasn't immediately obvious from the logs, and since it was due to a size limit being set too low rather than running out of server resources, it wasn't obvious from the state of the server.

It's been addressed now, the server processes have been restarted to clean up any hung connections, and all should be well with the world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:40 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Should I notify you of the "Bad Gateway 502" error I just got a few seconds ago, which went away when I clicked refresh?

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:15 AM (jGQR+)

2 Actually, yes. That reminded me that I'd put in a patch to try to resolve the problem and needed to take it back out, because it's probably un-helping now that we're stable again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:30 AM (PiXy!)

3 I was only getting 500 errors.

Also, wasn't there some policy of auto-closing the comments on posts over a certain age? Some spammer just picked one of Brickmuppet's year-old posts. (Is there a name for spam that pretends very well to be a person?)

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:34 AM (TJ7ih)

4 As a rule of thumb, if the site glitches enough that you notice, please let me know.

There's always some sort of crap going on on the internet, but if you have to hit refresh more often on mee.nu than, say, amazon.com, I should be able to fix that. They have a lot more resources than I do, but they have to do a lot more as well. Should even out.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:37 AM (PiXy!)

5 Mauser, yeah, on the 500 errors, it depended on when you saw it; you either got a 500 error from the blogging software, or a 502 error from the server because the blogging software was doing an automatic restart.

And yes, I'll check on the comment-closing feature and get that fixed up. That's a useful spam trap as well - I track IPs that comment on closed posts and blacklist them

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:41 AM (PiXy!)

Pixy, new posts are now defaulting to "comments disabled".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 30 2015 09:52 AM (+rSRq)

7 Oops! Sorry, I'll get that fixed ASAP.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 30 2015 04:14 PM (PiXy!)

8 Fixed now. There's a "template" post containing the default settings for newly created posts; when I closed the historical posts to slow down the stream of spam, I accidentally closed the template post as well, and the default for comments switched from on to off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 30 2015 07:14 PM (PiXy!)

9 Sorry to bother you, but Brickmuppet is being spammed again.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 30 2015 11:30 PM (+rSRq)

10 Opened a fresh can of Spam-B-Gone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2015 04:17 PM (PiXy!)

11 I've never quite understood the statistics produced. The numbers get very large compared to the apparent traffic.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 01 2015 11:14 PM (TJ7ih)

12 I'm going to do something to break it down. More than half our traffic seems to be webcrawlers - Google, Bing, sites like that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 01 2015 11:48 PM (PiXy!)

13 Wow. This comment section is exactly what I am looking for. Come check out my website so I can download a worm onto yours. HAHahaha. BTW - some spam is getting through... :-)

Posted by: kurt duncan at Friday, May 29 2015 07:48 AM (QKmzp)

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Thursday, May 15

Spam Spam Spam Spam

One of our spam filters wasn't working due to a network configuration error. Hence, spam. Lots of spam. Spamlots of spam.

Should improve now. There's still a DNS hiccup that I'm waiting to correct itself, but I can't hurry that along.

Update: DNS hiccup should be fixed now. Double-fixed soon.

Update: There we go, double-fixed.

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Wednesday, May 14

It's Alive!!!

Sorry about the outage. We got hit by a meteorite and reduced to our component atoms. It's taken us this long to reassemble into functional molecules.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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57 queries taking 0.0282 seconds, 250 records returned.
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Saturday, February 11

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Wednesday, January 04

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Praise for Ambient Irony

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