Dreams, Superheroes, Trans Biz

Content Warnings – mild internalized transphobia of the subconscious, pop culture-influenced ableism, boring dream stuff.

I remembered a dream when I woke up this morning, which doesn’t always happen.  I suppose I’d been thinking about TV shows I wasn’t current with as I went to bed last night, including The Flash.  The Flash has spent a lot of time with heavy duty villains making everybody lose hope and mope all season long, which is funny for something that was ostensibly more lighthearted than The Arrow.  Anyway, the most recent plot also has super-gaslighting and super-mental illness stuff going on, say about that what you will, and it influenced my dream.

To streamline the language I’m going to write this as if I’m certain of what happened in the dream, where I am not.  My memory of it is not perfect, but “or maybe this” after every line really kills reading comprehension.  Proceeding thus,

I was waiting for somebody to run an errand and to kill time I was told it was OK to bum around the abandoned insane asylum for ghosts.  I was the Reverse Flash, but not in total arch-nemesis mode, just chilling with the heroes awkwardly, but for the moment I was alone.  The asylum was empty and boring – no “environmental storytelling” to thrill – so I bailed.  The people I was waiting for caught up to me and we went for a stroll through a grotty run-down zoo that had nothing but unhealthy-looking birds.

I was with Cecile and some other random characters from the show and we were getting bad vibes from the birds but trying to ignore it, eating our potato chips.  During the conversation somebody mentioned The Flash having a weird relationship with gender, relating somehow to his superpowers.  A spooky old lady passed by us and we were like, ooh spooky.  We noticed the birds were being cruel to each other – not caring for chicks, squabbling over food, and so on.  The Flash met up with us and said he’d do something about the depressing bird park, and took off again.

Everybody went their separate ways and the dream went to some hapless random guy (also me?) walking the park.  He came to a fake looking cemetery with weirdos in bad samurai costumes, and talking to someone on his phone described them as “Rorouni Kenshin cosplayers.”  Turns out they were spooky Japanese ghosts, causing the park’s bad vibes with their “died-in-a-war” attitude.  They pursue and murder the random guy.

Back to me, el Reverse Flash.  I’m in the filthy bird park and I notice it still has alarming vibes.  I see a spoonbill ignoring its chick, and its bill is malformed into weird grubby strips at the end.  I run into the future because that’s something speed boyz can do on The Flash.  The park is looking nicer, I guess Flash made good on his promise.

The place has more people, more food, but there’s still a crusty edge there.  The Flash had traveled back in time and bought the park and devoted years of his life to offsetting the harm the birds were doing to each other, never knowing it was from the samurai ghosts, and he went insane.  He’d also transitioned and become… the spooky old lady from before.

Now I was the Flash, old ladying around the place and feeding colorful popcorn to my pretties.  Caw caw.

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The Fvckpile

Capitalism as practiced in most of the world – but especially the USA – revolves around one principle: I got mine, Jack, Fuck everyone else.  The future doesn’t exist, consequences don’t exist.  And as we see in fuckos like Biden, when the consequences do come home to roost?  It ain’t as bad as it looks, it wasn’t my individual fault specifically, it’s somebody else’s bad, somebody else’s duty, somebody else’s problem.  If he saw things clearly and accurately, if he wasn’t huffing the statue of liberty’s ass vapors, he’d know that by being rich he has no small amount of personal liability for it, and as president every moment that he doesn’t exercise his massive executive powers to fight AGW, he’s taking on much much more personal fault for the destruction of life as we know it.  He’d be wracked by grief, but spending all his waking effort to make right what has transpired on his watch.

I’m not going to write this story because it’s too bleak to focus on for the length of time required, but take in the short version, if you will.

Upper middle class family.  Dad’s a contractor, mom’s in publishing, they own their own home.  They have  more than a million in assets, but much less available for day to day things.  Nonetheless, a life of comfort.  The only worries they have are ones they brought on themselves by keeping up with the Joneses.  The kids all grow up to be similarly successful, but have fewer assets.  Their mortgages are less generous, housing prices massively higher, but still.  Not shabby.

One of the kids breaks the mold.  He’s a stand-up comedian, turned actor and screenwriter.  He gets a few hot breaks and is pulling royalties off of some kids movies he co-wrote, getting character actor parts with minimal effort, bringing in that cheese.  He is a millionaire with no quibbles – Where his parents had over a million in assets, he has more than a million in the bank.

You can’t expect that to last forever, kid.  You’re gonna be old and wanting the kind of loot that lets you pay for black market organs someday.  So how do you get it?  Pay a money guy, don’t ask questions.  It doesn’t matter what he does to increase your wealth – he just says that he can and has a track record of measurably succeeding.  You have proof it isn’t a ponzi scheme.

Money guy says all the B list celebs are getting theirs from real estate.  Not houses anymore.  It’s all about apartments.  All you have to do, comedian, is give me the money – and I’ll give you a reliable return every day for the rest of your life.  Money guy pools money from various Hollywood types to start a “property management company” that buys up apartment buildings around the country.  Now comedian has a partial stake in apartments from Florida to Oregon.

The apartments are any cheap pile of moldy lumber, with more effort put into faking a good look for the exteriors than any structural or maintenance issues.  They look alright from a distance but once you get in the door you realize it’s all falling apart.  PropertyCo still jacks the price up every year until people are forced to move into still cheaper places – owned by companies like PropertyCo.

Since these apartments are businesses designed not to deliver an essential service but instead to rob poor people blind, moneymaking schemes are added to moneymaking schemes.  Require pet rent, renters insurance, parking rent, etc.  Cut deals with shady insurance companies that will give you a slice if you coerce your customers into using them, or better yet toss together your own insurance company based out of a server in a Connecticut basement.  Have the price for units so high that people can only afford them by having more adults in a single unit than they were designed for, meaning more cars necessary for commuting than the parking lots were designed for, so that in desperation people who work late park in fire lanes and get their cars towed – by tow companies you have other shady deals with.

Inevitably a certain amount of people can’t afford to stay or pay timely due to losing work (possibly by having their only ride to work held hostage for thousands of dollars) or other bad luck, and they get evicted.  You have debt you can sell to a collection company.   It’s basically impossible to lose money as a property management company.

Some sixty year old lady with poor health is among the evicted and she manages to beg her way into the household of one of her children.  At her new residence she starts receiving harassment from a collection agency.  Story cuts to Hyderabad India where a call center full of crash course English speakers follow their scripts to hound people to desperation and suicide, while their company compounds interest on the debt every time somebody sneezes.

How do you convince a decent human to be a collections agent?  It probably helps to hire as many violently twisted people as possible, but no way there are enough people like that in a given community to comprise the entire staff of a given call center.  I imagine there’s some indoctrination session, like, “These are scum, criminals who don’t pay their dues.  They deserve all the scorn you can muster.”

Story follows a guy who took the job.  It paid better than anything else he could find and he needs it because rent is going through the roof, but he senses something wrong, messed up.  Still, he powers through it.  One day that he has inflicted exceptional cruelty upon the “clients,” he snaps out of it, like coming out of a dream.  He has become a horrible person and blames the business.  He burns the place down.

The debt collection agency gathers its insurance and ponders options.  Hey, the corrupt government has made it very easy to do organized crime against targets overseas, you have experience running a call center, just start over with an explicitly criminal call center.  Now the indoctrination is a little different.  “Americans are all greedy fat cats ruining the world for fun and profit, their old folks and disabled people have money but are too stupid to hold it.  Tell them you’re calling from a government agency and they’ll be in big trouble unless they give you their social security numbers, mother’s maiden name, bank account info…”

The new call center cuts deals with US telecoms to acquire thousands of US local phone numbers, makes it look like their calls are coming from within the US, and hits the phone book.  They dial everyone, but whenever they have a hint somebody might be old or disabled?  They hit them ten times as hard, calling round the clock, trying to scare someone into slipping up.

They call the comedian’s mom and pop, get enough info to run massive fraud on them.  Because of their assets they have higher credit limits than most of the call center’s victims and the scale of loss is immense.  Well, you know, even modestly rich USians get enough deference from financial institutions they could probably get out from under the damage, but it’s scary to get scammed like that.  Mom and pop spend the rest of their lives not answering phones, paranoid and scared.

It’s the circle of life under capitalism.  And notice I didn’t even invoke the evil of billionaires, easily the most destructive class in human history, with more resources than god emperors.  I kept the story down to millionaires at the worst.  Money chases money chases money, until the people who have the least are hounded into the grave.  And even people with resources know on some level that vultures are nipping at their heels.  They’ll blame taxes and the government, but it’s the whole sick-ass world.

This property company thing is real.  Mid-tier celebs from Fox News talking heads to liberal Hollywood types are all making their loot from stuff like this now.  I’d say, might be cool if somebody created a property company whose selling point was doing business ethically – minimizing the travail of tenants, not doing business with collection agencies, etc.  But if somebody did come up with that as a sales pitch for the millionaire investors?  It would be nothing but a snowjob and the apartments would still be horrid slums.

Anyway, smash the system, down with everything.  I’m gonna go back to sleep for a while.

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USA People: Escape the Private Sector!

From retail workers who will never escape poverty to techbros striving for their first million, USA people working for private companies are ruthlessly exploited, pushed to the limits of mind and body, and fucked over at every possible turn.  From what I’ve seen, government jobs are more secure and have more built-in protection by far than anything on offer in the private sector.  Looking to escape the boom-bust cycle of getting laid off or bought out every two years, endlessly taking new jobs for fewer and fewer dollars of rapidly decreasing value?  Good news!

The president’s vaccine mandate is passing its late deadline for federal employees (contractors had a more generous timeline), and antivax fuckos are getting bounced from the government en masse!  Job openings galore!  Sure veterans and the disabled get priority, but there will be more than enough jobs to reach the rest of you too.  Go to USAjobs.gov and commit your life to public service.  It isn’t glamorous, but it’s necessary, and so much less brutal than the private sector.  I’m looking at you, Orange Julius and Walmart employees.  Now’s your chance!

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Do Foolery

There was a video game called Monster Rancher once upon a time.  You trained monsters to fight, because cockfighting is for kids.  Sometimes a monster would lose its focus in a fight, and instead of a cool move, it would “do foolery.”  The tongue monster lolled its tongue around, the jelly monster turned into a question mark.

I’m tired of heavy subjects at the moment, and got no time for anything substantial anyhow, so allow me, for the moment, to do foolery.

what IS IT to poast or not to poste? can’t do. who talk is. I wansdgtrodk wto get me thru this smi-charmed kindalife babay babaywc;okvk nodlisnen when u say goodbyeeeeeee.  -Dpoijcfwoivjfeasx etedwsqk I’m mdwofijo  oof ouch owie bnsoaijc bleeeeeeah sdvcpok p gentlemen we have liftoff dw0owhy my titty hurt oisxiajpio io imma keep is xapok xs imma imma tank a nap.  Cool.

it’s your turn. sleepwalk thru my comments. express your inner nyquil. do foolery.

-o-

Disparity in Politically Motivated Murder

Some politically left people are hard line against killing anyone for any reason, especially in Europe these days.  Some of those make allowances for self-defense or waging defensive war or whatever.  These attitudes are very much lacking in the USA.  We are all about the murder.  The states that do manage to abolish the death penalty often find that reversed by the vagaries of democracy within a few years.  I can’t speak for Canada, but it seems like they also might be more into murder than, say, Germany is these days.  Don’t know about other countries either.

But even with our comparatively bloodthirsty attitudes, with the tall talk we make about willingness to pull the trigger on those we regard as evil, where are the bodies?  US lefties have an incredibly meager body count to our name, compared to right wingers.  I sit here and say, yes, I will proudly and easily kill nazi sumbitches, put a knife in their soulless faces.  I can think that, I can say that, I can dream about it.  But at the end of the day, the vast majority of politically motivated violence comes from right wingers.

I have no problem attributing that to inherent goodness.  When you were a little rough with an animal or a sibling, and mommy rebuked you for it, did you feel bad?  Did you feel like you’d been justly reprimanded, that you would do what you could in life, from that day forward, to not be a bad person?  I have no problem saying that is a good thing.  Good people should not want to hurt people, let alone kill them.  The extent to which the evils of white supremacists make me want to shred their bodies with nail bombs or just break their faces?  Is the extent to which they have made me a worse person than I’d otherwise be.

And could I do those things?  If the scumbags get the war they’ve been gagging for since 1860, let’s hope that we all can do what needs to be done – and with gusto, why not?  But in these times of peace, whatever turmoil is happening, the people generating corpses right now are right wingers.  Might be that changes at some point, but I think those particular numbers will always be on their side.

They valorize cruelty.  They despise compassion.  This informs much of what they do and say in life.  Indeed, a common reason for people born into red states to become politically opposed to their own culture is from suffering the cruelty they inflict on their own.  If I saw a man in pain, mortal terror in his eyes, I might take my knee off his neck.  But white supremacists don’t do that.  Right wingers don’t do that.  They want to hurt and to kill.

I can say I’d kill every last Rittenhouse with a smile on my face and piss on their corpses, but at the end of the day, would I?  The numbers suggest that we just aren’t like that, and whatever violence is ultimately necessary to do in the defense of goodness and humanity, the fact it isn’t our first recourse is surely directly connected to our own goodness and humanity – whatever we have left of that – and it might be a good thing.

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There’s a separate topic that came out of the discussion that spawned this post.  Is guns bad?  I don’t like them.  I have liked them in cinema an awful lot, but the reality is unpleasant.  Have you ever had a suicidal or homicidal thought, however fleeting, in your life?  How should you then feel about having a “make person instantly die” button in your fucking hand?  Like standing at the edge of a cliff with somebody.  I don’t like how it feels.  If you can’t dig my position, eat shit.  Step on up for a ban.  I’m generous with those.

Or you can listen to my follow up statement.

If you’re somebody who has never felt like I feel, or who managed to suppress that long enough to become comfortable with firearms, and you use them responsibly?  I have no problem with that, or even with saying that it is possible for you to be a good person.  I’m not saying that comfort with guns inherently makes you a bad person.  I personally believe no private citizen should ever be legally allowed to have an assault weapon, will side-eye the fuck out of you if you say otherwise, but that’s a difference of opinion I’m willing to hold without thinking of you automatically as a bad person.

But you have to admit, it’s easier for bad people to get cozy with killing machines, which again, might have something to do with the great disparity between murders by fascists and murders by their opposition.  I hope you won’t take offense to the statement of some plain facts here, and will spot me a roscoe when the soup goes down, comrade.  Thank you.

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Blatantly Rigged Trial Ends as Expected

I guess all nazis have to do to get away with murder is have their teen sons pull the triggers.  Given the public statements of the judge in murder boy’s case, I want nobody to act surprised by this outcome.  Outraged is cool, yeah, do that.  But surprise?  That would just be silly.

There’s a foul stench of danger hanging over this country, that the barely concealed racist fascism of the turn of our century will go overt, will remove the last pretenses of democracy from our processes and usher in a new era of far greater horrors.  I can understand people feeling hopeless – and especially turning up their noses at our supposed liberal political party – but we can’t stop until this is over.

I mention these things because stuff like the result of this court case is empowering to the fash, which will make them more motivated to turn up in numbers next election, depending on what happens in the meantime.  And what’s been happening lately is a 24-7 doubt parade from corporate media on the ability of the democrats generally and Biden particularly to govern.  The “people say” style of reportage is in full gear, where any nasty fucked up lie from billionaire-funded nazi-ass think tanks turns into a headline.

Protestors will be returning to the streets.  Some are probably there already.  And now murderers have been forearmed with precedent for how to get away with straight-up executing them in broad daylight.  But people will fight on anyway, and I fucking love them for it.  Long live the fighters!  Black Lives Matter.  Black Power Now!

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Lyrics Associations

Some people do Duolingo lessons both ways – in my case from English to German and German to English, alternately.  When signing into or out of Duolingo in German user interface, I found myself practicing words like “abmelden.”  Then when I switch to back to English UI, I found myself paying more attention to the phrases “sign in” and “log out” then I normally would.  Maybe it also has something to do with the fact I often go for a walk right after Duo, so I end up stating that as my intention out loud – “OK… I’m logging out.”

Anyway, the phrase “log out” and similar combos of one syllable words and “out” always make me think of the use of “black out” in Bauhaus’s “Lilies and Remains.”  While your boy David J is fleeing from ghost-ridden Peter Murphy, he hides in a locker – number 13 – and “barely concealed but hopeful, BLACK OUT.  BLACK OUT.”

So as I’m finishing my Duolingo at night, barely concealed but hopeful, I LOG OUT.  LOG OUT.

This is all not terribly interesting, but people don’t talk about these experiences in media very often and I wonder how universal they are – or are not.  Does practically everybody do this, at least sometimes in some ways, or is it only those on a grade toward Tourette’s or OCD or something?  Feel like some of my bloggy comrades may have something to say about that.

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EDIT TO ADD:  The God Emperor of Doing this Intentionally to Make Their Song Immortal has to be Nelly, who must be invoked literally any time anyone ever says the phrase, “It’s getting hot in here.”  Indeed, I wonder if he is profiting from global warming.

Fuccing Breakthru Cases

I have an online acquaintance I don’t know very well.  She’s been bitching about shitty family risking covid constantly – including a lady whose children have no father because of it.  My acquaintance got vaccinated and… currently has covid, surely from one of those family members.  Meeting at my workplace a week ago.  Guy says “I know three people fully vaxxed still that got covid,” boss says, “I keep hearing that at these meetings.”

Any luck and my acquaintance won’t so much as lose her sense of taste, though she’s about as old as me and it makes her more likely than the babes to come off of this scathed.  I told her I wouldn’t blame her for pistolwhipping a family member’s teeth out.  Motherfuckers got to know their limitations.

How are your vaxxed up people doing?

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Thinking About Art

Song lyrics.  What do they mean?  Some people don’t even listen to the lyrics.  And I admit, when Ghostface Killah is talking about “sloo-footed penguins” ducking from “rap damians” I just take it for granted I will never understand those lyrics.  I could google it on genius.com but eh.  Anyway,

The song “More” by Sisters of Mercy.  The lyrics are about being in a relationship with somebody whose passion does not match your own and feeling incredulous about it.  “I don’t know why you gotta be so undemanding.”  I’m like, Andrew, this isn’t rocket science.  Sometimes it’s just like that, bro.  Better luck in the next relationship.

My problem is that song lyrics form some kind of giant index in my mind that is instantly accessed by common words and phrases.  Like if somebody says, “stop” as a one-word sentence, I might think of that part in the chorus of “How Sweet it Is,” or “Stop in the Name of Love.”  And if anybody wants more of anything, even if it’s cheerios, Andy Eldritch’s studio ladies start shrieking at me, “I NEED ALL THE LOVE I CAN GET, AND I NEED ALL THE LOVE THAT I CAN’T GET TOO.”

That’s the pattern.  Random mood or turn of phrase calls up a song lyric, then I ponder it for a minute, and get a head full of these kind of observations.  Thinking about art.  Sometimes, it’ll happen whether you want to or not.

I’ll end this with a song that came to my mind not from word association, just from mood.  It’s a quarter past midnight and life is looking kinda thorazine right now.  “Play it on ’til the dawn, I’ll be lonesome when I’m gone, Everything we done is wrong, Play it on ’til the dawn…”

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Blockchain Will End Civilization – Ask Me How!

CONTENT WARNING:  I am literally not an expert in anything and everything I say here could be dead wrong on multiple levels, so take that under advisement before you start to panicking, OK?  I look forward to comments that will temper my doomsaying.

**********

I was contemplating NFTs and crypto thanks to the latest episode of James Stephanie Sterling’s program and a rash of posts on tumblr besides, and I realized they are a perfect analogy to the cause of multiple extinction events on the planet.  Then I realized they aren’t just analogous – they could really be the straw that breaks the back of civilization.  This connects to my theory about how the rest of human history is likely to go:  Cyberpunk Dystopia, Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland, then Nothing.  If world leaders want to forestall the end of their power, and if I’m right, they’d best do everything in their power to outlaw criminalize and expunge blockchain-based currencies from existence.

It works like this: All you need to do to make money from nothing is run a computer for a while.  Cool trick, eh?  It generates encrypted information that can be exchanged for goods and services.  Now think about this for a minute.

Right now every con artist in the world is working every angle in the world 24-7 nonstop, from Mumbai to Macedonia, to raise every red cent they can.  They’ve all but destroyed the ability of senior citizens and the disabled to use phones, to use email.  Colonized people across the planet have become the vehicle of their own destruction, razing the forests to ash just to get by in whatever economy has been left to them.  Corruption is so widespread and thorough in the “socialist” countries that their infrastructure is inflicting mass casualty events left and right.  And the finance industry in the USA, every time it’s been let off the leash even an inch?  Has pushed us to the brink of utter economic disaster through money-making schemes so byzantine in complexity and somehow as utterly mindless as an amoeba.

Humans work angles.  But so has all life, since inanimate proteins first started to become something we could consider life.  The cutesy educational program PBS Eons has multiple episodes that have this theme and it really puts our coming destruction in perspective.  Basically a type of life finds a niche that allows it to grow out of all bounds.  Unknowable trillions of organisms in the primordial ocean have effected climate change so dramatic it turned the oceans purple once, it turned the Earth into ice planet Hoth once, and it caused multiple devastating extinctions – some before the evolution of the world’s first nervous systems.  Eons always puts a positive spin on it, saying “without this (unspeakable death and horror) that came before us, we wouldn’t be here.  Isn’t that swell?”  But there it is:  under global capitalism we are recreating the biosphere-wrecking mistakes of literally mindless creatures that came before us.

Now all you need is a computer to run for a little while to make money out of thin air.  Huzzah!  This can of course lead to various cryptos being devalued into nothing, but all you have to do to sidestep that is to create a new crypto.  It works even better than cruzeiro bills because those are obliged to have some relationship to the currency of Brazil.  Now when you’ve devalued your currency to nothing all you have to do is make a new virtual country.

All of this is, of course, environmentally destructive.  Every crypto dollar you create requires a certain amount of energy to perpetuate its existence.  Every dollar created within a currency gradually gives less value return than the cost to maintain its own existence, but they never stop existing.  There’s no landfill for these barrels of funny money.  So essentially the crypto gold rush only makes money as long as each currency is maxed out in sequence, and new ones are constantly created.

Multiply this by every spam email farmer from Manila to Johannesburg and the problem becomes more clear.  The creator of crypto may as well have been Tyler Durden, out to destroy the world’s economies in the pursuit of anarcho-primitivism, because nobody in the world can stop this.  A system has been created that allows everybody in the world to build a tottering carbon-sucking Tower of Babel that absolutely will collapse, and like nuclear proliferation, nobody in a position to stop it has the courage or self-control to do so.  It’s the monkeys in the old commercials pushing the “crack” button to the exclusion of the “food” button until dead.

Something changed recently.  I don’t know what, but suddenly “venerable” financial institutions have decided crypto is legit, and are pushing crypto cards, crypto retirement accounts, crypto everything.  Why wouldn’t they?  These are the people who caused the Great Depression and every financial crisis since.  It’s all about mindlessly rushing to squeeze every penny out of every angle until the whole thing collapses, while everyone with an ounce of awareness knows this exploitation just wheels us from one collapse to the next.

Now the video game industry is wanting in on the con, wanting to turn gamers into crypto miners for them.  You think they’re the only internet connected industry that will do this?  The literal internet providers are coming next.  Funny thing is, they might not even know they’re doing it.  Here’s why: The same corruption that ransacked the infrastructure of China is waiting to go platinum in the US of A.  Crime organized and otherwise is going to infiltrate any corporation with access to server farms and steal bandwidth to mine crypto.  And of course, there’s nothing to stop the telecoms themselves from doing a certain amount of crypto mining right out in the light of day.

Our internet will slow to a crawl and start to experience massive outages, and with it our civilization – now hopelessly dependent on it.  In my little quasi-marxist progression of history, this is the Cyberpunk Dystopia.  This era will end when the internet ends, heralding the Mad Max era.  Crypto-currency, if it isn’t defanged through an international blitz, could well be the force that flicks that off switch.

Tell me I’m wrong, please.

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