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Plutonis posted:Grimtooth's Traps if you want to be a real stinker I haven't tried it , but I think Grimtooth's material could be fun with a right framing. OOC, tell the players you're about experience a dungeon filled with The World's Most Bullshit Traps and IC, have find magical VR helmets and delve into this messed-up illusion where everything is super-gamey and they have multiple lives like in an arcade and they have to get to the end of it to find out something important.
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Oct 10, 2023 12:20
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Megazver posted:In no particular order: Could you say more about any of these? I'm curious. How much are the puzzles things players solve vs things characters solve? How much do they try to make sense diegetically as a thing someone might actually run into? How difficult are they? How mathy? And anything else you could say, if you're willing to take the time!
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Oct 10, 2023 21:15
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Honestly, just read Martin Gardner and Raymond Smullyan if you like puzzles in general; they're both good as hell
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Oct 10, 2023 21:18
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Jimbozig posted:Could you say more about any of these? I'm curious. Most of them in most of these books are pretty basic, but there's usually one or two neat ones in each one. It's usual D&D puzzle stuff - position items in some order based on a clue, move through a trapped tile floor, figure out what the magic keyword is based on a riddle, etc. Gardner and Smullyan books are classic puzzle books, but most of the puzzles there are not something I'd drop on a D&D group. quote:How much are the puzzles things players solve vs things characters solve? I'm not sure how a character would solve a puzzle in a TRPG, beyond rolling an Int check. quote:How much do they try to make sense diegetically as a thing someone might actually run into? Usually only if you're willing to believe there was someone who was so into screwing with adventurers, they'd set up some bullshit puzzles for them to solve. quote:How difficult are they? How mathy? Being mathy is generally a no-no for D&D puzzles, imo. quote:And anything else you could say, if you're willing to take the time! Well, since we're chatting I can tell you about a couple of puzzles I've used before. Puzzle 1: There is an outline of a door in a cave wall and some inlaid letters - SNORE TO PROCEED. My players spent some time snoring real loud, and casting Sleep on the person with the least HP to make them fall asleep, and tossing the unconscious PC head first at the portal hoping they'd be able to pass through. (Lol, but no.) Eventually they found out touching the letters resulted in some haptic feedback. SNORE TO PROCEED is an anagram for OPEN SECRET DOOR which you have to touch in order to open the magic door. Puzzle 2: So being mathy is generally a no-no, but I enjoy playing up how mean I am as a GM as kayfabe with groups that know me well, so: They come upon a hefty vault door in an underground chamber. There is a geometry problem that I found by googling "hardest geometry problem" painted on the door with "Find the X" written below it. There are also five golem guards in the room in front of the door, positioned in an X pattern. (Although it's not super obvious, because they're pretty far apart.) We're playing on Roll20 - this is important, since the golem token in the center is set up to be moveable by players. If they slide it away, the X they need to find is underneath it, painted on the button that opens the vault door. Here's how it worked out for me: One of the players discovered the moveable golem and PM'd me, like, hey bro is one of the tokens set up wrong? I replied no, it's all working as intended, feel free to move it whenever you feel like solving the puzzle. But it was the end of the session, so we stopped on that and by the next week one of the players, who's a smartie, actually solved the geometry puzzle the hard way. So she says the solution out loud, the door opens, and then the other guy awkwardly shows everyone the button, lol. The mercy failsafe for the puzzle was them doing something that made the golems attack, and then the button would be eventually become visible.
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Oct 10, 2023 22:52
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For Indigenous People day, Coyote and Crow decided to give out a PDF copy of their game for free. This exposed a lot of new people to the game. Reddit has been melting down over three days as white people mald over how combative, rude, racist, exclusionary, and insulting...a polite request not to be racist is.  
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Oct 11, 2023 07:51
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Oh cool, a bunch of people who don't deserve to have a good day, are having a bad time.
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Oct 11, 2023 08:08
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Nice, always glad to hear what reddit thinks about race issues
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Oct 11, 2023 15:51
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Covok posted:For Indigenous People day, Coyote and Crow decided to give out a PDF copy of their game for free. I bought this awhile back, and the setting kind of sucks because of it being written from a place of fear. There are a bunch of these in the book, where they basically say "if you belong to a tribe, then your tribal and their customers are in here! If you don't, then don't use them, even if you read about them.". The default setting for the game is really bare bones in terms of exactly what the setting is. If you're not allowed to use any real world inspiration on Native American history or mythology, then there's actual very little in the setting other than names. The exceptions are the handful of examples just kind of tossed into the book with little to no explanation of where they came from, which make them less interesting that the google search of their names. The main theme of the setting is you're all Native Americans who've never met anyone outside of North America. You pretending to be Native American is the core conceit of the game.
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Oct 11, 2023 16:58
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Countblanc posted:Nice, always glad to hear what reddit thinks about race issues It's kinda dumb to do sweeping statements like reddit too considering different SRs have different cultures
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Oct 11, 2023 17:17
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Subreddits also tend to be either really over or under moderated, with the former leading to new sub reddits that are the later.
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Oct 11, 2023 17:35
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I got C&C when I saw Cam Banks talking about it on Twitter, and I got two or three pages in before I said "Welp, I'm glad this exists, and I'm glad I got it, but I will never, ever play this game."
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Oct 11, 2023 18:12
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CitizenKeen posted:I got C&C when I saw Cam Banks talking about it on Twitter, and I got two or three pages in before I said "Welp, I'm glad this exists, and I'm glad I got it, but I will never, ever play this game." I feel the exact same. It's very cool that it exists, but I am absolutely not who it was written for (my family emigrated to America from Sweden in the 1930s) and I would feel very uncomfortable reffing or playing it.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:18
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If everyone is that concerned about someone playing the game wrong, it should have been a novel or a gamebook or something, tbh.
Megazver fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 19:44
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Megazver posted:Puzzle 1: SNORE TO PROCEED. I love both of these and am going to steal them.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:50
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its funny to get tilted over that stuff because the book has no power over you. you can do whatever yuo want. hack the mechanics and the setting and make it whatever. homebrew it until its barely recognizable. play whoever you want. who gives a poo poo
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Oct 11, 2023 19:57
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:its funny to get tilted over that stuff because the book has no power over you. you can do whatever yuo want. hack the mechanics and the setting and make it whatever. homebrew it until its barely recognizable. play whoever you want. who gives a poo poo The key part of this learning is to not post about doing so on the internet, because you will get lit the gently caress up.
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Oct 11, 2023 20:38
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bbcisdabomb posted:I love both of these and am going to steal them. Thanks! Here's another one, just for you: There is a standard 1234567890 keypad that unlocks whatever it is you want the players to get into. None of the buttons are appreciably worn out. When you face the keypad there is this pattern on the wall:  There is also a McGuffin in the room that will flood it with enough DEATH ENERGY to take some but not all party members down to 0 HP if you don't do the right series of manipulations with the keypad, because brute forcing is no fun. What do you do? Bonus points if you can tell me what webcomic I borrowed the idea from.
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Oct 11, 2023 22:34
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Megazver posted:Thanks! Here's another one, just for you: Or add extra symbols for giggles.
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Oct 11, 2023 23:08
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ninjoatse.cx posted:I bought this awhile back, and the setting kind of sucks because of it being written from a place of fear. There are a bunch of these in the book, where they basically say "if you belong to a tribe, then your tribal and their customers are in here! If you don't, then don't use them, even if you read about them.". The default setting for the game is really bare bones in terms of exactly what the setting is. If you're not allowed to use any real world inspiration on Native American history or mythology, then there's actual very little in the setting other than names. The exceptions are the handful of examples just kind of tossed into the book with little to no explanation of where they came from, which make them less interesting that the google search of their names. This sounds like the inverse of Legend of the Five Ring's setting, which is a little bit racist what with the misused terms and the made-up Japanese names, but there are many setting details to pull from when making a character or campaign.
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Oct 11, 2023 23:41
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Yeah, while I respect the right of people to decide that they don't want their cultural heritage used for entertainment by outsiders, it doesn't really seem compatible with releasing a mass-marketed creative entertainment product about that heritage. It almost feels like commentary about how many roleplaying products will never be played, and may not even be intended to be played, but I'd at least like to imagine I can get my bathroom-reader games to the table eventually, you know?
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Oct 12, 2023 00:03
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I had a similar thought about Dungeon Bitches. The dev posted the preview materials on RPGnet and all the replies were "wow this is cool, I'll never play it!" as though that was supposed to be a compliment.
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Oct 12, 2023 00:25
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Covok posted:For Indigenous People day, Coyote and Crow decided to give out a PDF copy of their game for free. "it's not their job to teach you" is a really counterproductive thing to say if you're interested in indigenous justice or any other liberation movement. if somebody likes and trusts you enough to be stuck in the same room as you for 4-8 hours every week then you're in a better position than anybody else on earth to tell them a thing or two about how poo poo sucks and what to do to maybe make it suck a little bit less. or i guess you can just throw that golden opportunity into the garbage and let google lead them to a prager u video. your call i guess
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Oct 12, 2023 00:30
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mellonbread posted:I had a similar thought about Dungeon Bitches. The dev posted the preview materials on RPGnet and all the replies were "wow this is cool, I'll never play it!" as though that was supposed to be a compliment. There is a game I thought that about : Hungry Desperate and Alone. It was absolutely a compliment, but I can’t imagine thinking it about anything else.
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Oct 12, 2023 00:39
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Chakan posted:There is a game I thought that about : Hungry Desperate and Alone. It was absolutely a compliment, but I can’t imagine thinking it about anything else. There's some others I can think of in the "interesting but basically unusable for actual gaming purposes" like Black Sun Deathcrawl but yeah not a very common thing
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Oct 12, 2023 00:54
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EightFlyingCars posted:"it's not their job to teach you" is a really counterproductive thing to say if you're interested in indigenous justice or any other liberation movement. if somebody likes and trusts you enough to be stuck in the same room as you for 4-8 hours every week then you're in a better position than anybody else on earth to tell them a thing or two about how poo poo sucks and what to do to maybe make it suck a little bit less. The book does say you can ask them questions, but don't expect people to answer and don't expect them to know everything and don't be shocked if they don't have want to give the labor needed to educate you. This is an issue every single minority group faces. It's an extremely common complaint found across multiple different minority groups that their majority friends expect them to do all the work educating them. Sometimes, you don't mind, but the weird entitlement to it that people have is tiring in ways that people cannot begin to understand unless you experience it. Edit: This was more combative than intended but it's just a very...off thing to say. Covok fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 00:56
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ninjoatse.cx posted:I bought this awhile back, and the setting kind of sucks because of it being written from a place of fear. There are a bunch of these in the book, where they basically say "if you belong to a tribe, then your tribal and their customers are in here! If you don't, then don't use them, even if you read about them.". The default setting for the game is really bare bones in terms of exactly what the setting is. If you're not allowed to use any real world inspiration on Native American history or mythology, then there's actual very little in the setting other than names. The exceptions are the handful of examples just kind of tossed into the book with little to no explanation of where they came from, which make them less interesting that the google search of their names. I feel this is an uncharitable take. I mean, if it helps illustrate it, the book is basically asking you not to do the equivalent of playing a Japanese game where everyone is constantly talking about tea, always talking about their honor, and everyone is a Samurai or a ninja. It might sound like an extreme example, but I take this as "a lot of our media portrayals are not accurate or flattering so please refrain from it. Also, don't be THAT GUY who thinks he knows everything about Japan because he watches anime, if you get what I mean."
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Oct 12, 2023 01:00
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CitizenKeen posted:I got C&C when I saw Cam Banks talking about it on Twitter, and I got two or three pages in before I said "Welp, I'm glad this exists, and I'm glad I got it, but I will never, ever play this game." Yeah. The author was a panelist at a con I was at, and the setting looked really neat so I bought the PDF, because I wanted to read it and support the author in some small way, but I know it's not a game I'll ever run, and likely never play.
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Oct 12, 2023 01:01
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Megazver posted:Thanks! Here's another one, just for you:
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Oct 12, 2023 01:23
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Covok posted:The book does say you can ask them questions, but don't expect people to answer and don't expect them to know everything and don't be shocked if they don't have want to give the labor needed to educate you. This is an issue every single minority group faces. It's an extremely common complaint found across multiple different minority groups that their majority friends expect them to do all the work educating them. Sometimes, you don't mind, but the weird entitlement to it that people have is tiring in ways that people cannot begin to understand unless you experience it. i probably could have worded myself better too. i need to stop posting while hangry. reading it again, honestly i think that section is just awkwardly written. you're absolutely right that the game tries to be nuanced about how settler/non-indigenous players should conduct themselves at the table, including how to respectfully ask questions about the game, but this comes right after the game tells indigenous players "do not ever feel like you have to educate non-Native players at the table". tonally, these feel like mixed messages to me.
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Oct 12, 2023 01:51
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Now I just wanna play L5R again. I never did get to be a shugenja during any of my campaigns I was in.
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Oct 12, 2023 01:56
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EightFlyingCars posted:i probably could have worded myself better too. i need to stop posting while hangry. I don't think so. I think its fair to say it's okay to ask questions to one group and not to feel like you have to answer to the other. The writer might have felt that some indigenous people might be apprehensive playing the game because they might be expected to be enclopyedias or the experts. And this was to reassure them not to feel pressured. I can see it, honestly. It isn't perfect, but I also feel like the author, who is Cherokee, would be perfectly in their right to be hyper aggressive if they wanted to, given the poo poo indigenous people have endured and how lovely people can be. Hell, to be honest, the author had a real one on their blog because the backlash to this very mild, polite request was so inflammatory they kind of snapped a bit.
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Oct 12, 2023 02:03
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Megazver posted:Thanks! Here's another one, just for you: Do you just turn your head sideways to see that it reads 38069 from top to bottom?
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Oct 12, 2023 03:26
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My question is 'why would you play C&C with randos'. I'd imagine if you're running this you're running it with friends or people close to you. On the topic of representation, I've been reading the Zeitgest module for EN's Advanced 5E and it's extremely disappointing they made absolutely no effort to ensure the Spanish used for names and such was at all correct. Like, Google Translate would've done a better job with it than the authors of the book did. We're talking extremely basic stuff like forgetting plural nouns take plural adjectives or what order words are supposed to be in in a sentence. Azran fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 10:57
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Ferrinus posted:Do you just turn your head sideways to see that it reads 38069 from top to bottom? you are a powerful galaxybrain shockingly, not everyone is good at headturning
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Oct 12, 2023 11:05
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Megazver posted:you are a powerful galaxybrain Well, the first thing I did was turn my head the other way and be like 6... 9... 0... 8... hang on.
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Oct 12, 2023 16:42
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Megazver posted:you are a powerful galaxybrain Embarrassingly, I am one of those people.
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Oct 12, 2023 18:55
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Megazver posted:Bonus points if you can tell me what webcomic I borrowed the idea from. Paranatural?
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Oct 12, 2023 19:10
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I get (foolishly) stuck on verisimilitude with that sort of puzzle, because to me, while we're all speaking english (or whatever) at the game table, of course the characters in the game aren't. Nor would they be using arabic numerals. We're translating, right? So then, puzzles based on english-spelled words or arabic numerals kind of break that wall a little. I don't know how to do it a different way though. They're "actually" speaking the Frump dialect of Argellian, which derived from a trade-pidgin between the old elvish Lethlorrial and dwarvish Krogth around four hundred years ago, and since both of those cultures used base-12, the numbering system is base-ten (to accommodate the local human and halfling populations) but uses the single-glyph notations for 11, 12, 21, 22, etc.... Now, make a puzzle that is somehow solvable by the players at the table using these facts, which I guess they'd all sort of inherently understand and the ones with knowledge: history would have details of? Do I expect them to puzzle over written references I've made, just to try and figure out how to rearrange some letters to make an anagram of one phrase that is another phrase in that language and then just tell them their characters know what each phrase means? The result is I don't put many puzzles in my non-modern games, which is a shame. one option I've thought of borrows from that scene in raiders where the old guy in egypt translates the mcguffin, you need a staff so long, but then flips it over but subtract one etc. But that's still not really the players solving things, it's the characters going to the trouble to find a source and the source gives them the right info. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 19:18
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Paranatural? you are the webcomic wizard Leperflesh posted:I get (foolishly) stuck on verisimilitude with that sort of puzzle, because to me, while we're all speaking english (or whatever) at the game table, of course the characters in the game aren't. Nor would they be using arabic numerals. We're translating, right? So then, puzzles based on english-spelled words or arabic numerals kind of break that wall a little. The written handouts aren't actually in English either. If you, the player, really really care about this, I'll gently explain that what your characters are looking at are sigils they'd actually use in that world, writing down the language that they actually speak, and the handout you're looking at is a translated representation of that artifact. Megazver fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 19:37
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so when they say "ohwa tagoo siam" they're not really saying that, they're saying some similar and equivalent goofy-rear end poo poo
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Oct 12, 2023 23:51
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