Angel
she/her/they nonbinary transfem
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2016
- Messages
- 9,940
- Nebulae
- 8,986
After nearly 6 years (LP+NEB), I think it is finally time to hang my roleplay hat, at least for a good while (never say never again).
It has been really fun to be around in the community and participate in all kinds of activities, with people who I have known for a good while now (some even up to almost 10 years), but as any controversial figure, surely some will be 'happy' that I won't be around that much anymore, which is only fair, given the extensive closed up History when it comes to many situations.
As for the 'stuff' part of the title, I intend on updating this thread with a collection of stories and even explanations regarding situations of the past which weren't fully explained/had a lot of speculation (and many times lies spread like wildfire).
I am usually pretty much unfiltered and never bother to 'appease the mob' or to 'play politics', but I am hoping to take it a step further as I begin unravelling random bits and pieces, all the way from 2012/2013 to now (if anyone actually wants to ask about specific circumstances or my opinion on whatever topic, now is the time)
As for 'thank yous', list is too long and many names aren't even around anymore, so... oh well!
Peace
GTARP and the decisions surrounding it, me leaving Lemonpunch, banning Cryptic, issues with Moon, Jonne Bravo, 50% of the shares
So, as you all know, @alex (correct me if I'm wrong about this stuff) wasn't there in the very beginning of Lemonpunch, however at some point he was contacted by Gurrazor regarding HL2RP, because at this moment, the server was too big to handle the size of the playerbase, plus we were having some pretty heavy DDoS attacks on us by a bunch of rival communities.
Alex first came along to help with all of these issues and eventually got integrated into what became known as 'Community Management' or in the case of Lemonpunch, community director.
Fast forward a while, Gurrazor wants to bring back him project from previous communities in GTARP, having the launch coincide with the release of GTA V. The infamous Larry Gibbons was the server director at this point and I was an admin on HL2RP, although this was during a time of my own inactivity. This was around September 2013 or something along those lines. Jonne Bravo was increasing his popularity among the community, with the very important danish and Scottish and so on as his 'supporters' and Moon as SD etc, at which point Jonne eventually becomes Community Manager for Lemonpunch.
GTARP runs into massive issues with the current server directors, everyone is inactive and staff are mostly incompetent and new, many of them never having been staff before, because those that came over from HL2RP transferred back and very few were dual staff, those that were barely played. Due to a few personal divergences with people in HL2RP, I went onto GTARP and became an Operator there, along with @AlexD being an admin. We were pretty much the only staff members who were active and actually knew how to use staff commands (I know, lmao), so everything that was to do with staff created experiences for the playerbase was being done by us as well as the majority of conflict resolving.
Unfortunately, due to limited commands, we weren't able to do many of the tasks required for the server with our current station, so I went to Jonne Bravo and asked him to me a favor - the same way when Cryptic came to me for me to give my opinion on promoting Jonne to management (and pretty much convincing him), it was time for Jonne to do me a solid one and bat for me to get promoted to super admin - so during a nice evening, the three of us were on teamspeak and I messaged Jonne saying 'this would be a good time' as we were discussing issues with GTARP, Cryptic said something about me doing a good job and Jonne replied with 'yeah, he should get super admin' (I was playing GTAV on console at this point), to which Cryptic replied that, no I should get a more advanced position, but there wasn't one besides Community Manager that Jonne held at the time, so 'Head Moderator' was created, making me responsible for communicating between management, and HL2RP/GTARP server directors. Honken at this point, a super admin for HL2RP, gets promoted to Community Manager at the same time.
We hold a meeting and choose AlexD and Bork and Dirty Harry to become the new Server Directors for GTARP, Moon is doing great in HL2RP and everything seems to be on track as plans for GTARP's revamp are coming along just fine (keep in mind, at this point @alex was still pretty hands off in server side drama/affairs). The re-launch approaches, so we set up a meeting with the GTARP server directors to give us an idea on what is going on (this was after 2 months of preparation) - the meeting being me, jonne, honken, shidopie, cryptic, gurrazor and the server directors. One of the server directors doesn't show up, the other vanishes and the last on shows up high as fuck saying 'we haven't made any progress, fuck' (a few days before launch), at which Cryptic goes ballistic. We end the meeting almost instantly and begin discussions among ourselves about what we could do to try and save GTARP, so we decide to demote all the server directors for failing to direct anything for the server in those 2 months and every time they were asked saying 'things are coming along just fine'. Jonne was against the demotion, Honken was in favor, Shidopie was in favor, Cryptic was in Favor, Gurrazor was just talking about being busy with university and I wanted to demoted the SD who was high and the one who just vanished, while keeping along the one who couldn't show up. It ends with all 3 being demoted.
This was a fracturing moment for what would be the events of the coming weeks. All 3 SDs were pretty popular figures within the community and were very good friends with some of the most vocal voices (still to this day, many of those voices are the exact same, which just goes to show how much weight they actually have in the Community's direction, and many of these 'big events' were minefields on how to keep them happy while doing what was perceived as 'the right thing' for the sake of stability).
Jonne makes his stance against the demotions known to the usual teamspeak users, Cryptic is being shit on all the time and their issues grow and grow. I take the approach of stability along with the others of not actually stating out opinion on the matter and instead standing by the decision we took as a group (I still think Jonne should have backed Cryptic, despite disagreeing. His personal opinions were not as important as not igniting the flames and keeping everyone from exploding into drama). This reaches a critical point, at which Cryptic decides to take a break from the community and gurrazor makes his infamous statement as people continue to ask for his head of 'Lemonpunch will cease being if cryptic is not here'. As Cryptic takes a break, Honken resigns.
Jonne states he would do a better job than cryptic, the community says Jonne would do a better job than cryptic. The community gets what it wanted, Jonne ascends to Community Director while Cryptic takes a leave, Gurrazor goes on vacation. After a mere week(s), maybe just days, Jonne realizes the shitstorm that it is to be in Cryptic's shoes and resigns his position and straight up starts griefing.
At this point, it is me, Shidopie, and Alex around. Shidopie just bails, as he was never really active, he was there to be the cool guy (everyone loved shidopie even when hating on cryptic), so it's just me and Alex (who still wasn't very involved at all).
Here we enter another contentious point - me and Moon drama and me vs the HL2RP staff vocal bits while shielding those who were 'scared' of stating the opinions publicly because they didn't want the harassment.
A group of HL2RP staff members come to me with video evidence of moon spawning in grenades (the server director) and using them from observer to kill CPs and saving his rebel. Then I begin a log hunt and find staff members of his group abusing vendors to obtain guns/other items as well as setting armor/hp after and sometimes during firefights. Then we have Moon spawning in SHIPMENTS of AR2s and claiming he got them legitimately (do know that at this point, staff members did NOT have access to logs, besides a select few, me included). The same group from the grenade incident threatens to leave if nothing happens, so I talk with moon and tell him that I will remove his AR2s and that we will move past the grenade incident, as long as it doesn't happen again - Moon tells me that he will not remove the AR2s, that he will do as he wants because he is the SD and it wasn't my business to meddle in the server.
I'm pretty much out of options for support here as every other head staff is MIA and so I decide that I need to put across the message that he can't just do as he wants and so I tell him he will be demoted if he doesn't comply and stop abusing his staff+actually do something about the other abusing staff. He continues to stonewall me, so I probate moon for a week. Moon makes it a public issue, the staff who originally complained did not want to come forward into the incident, being afraid of repercussions and the remainder of HL2RP staff were either in the abuse bag or oblivious, but again, for the sake of stability I decide not to come forward with all the evidence and the issues that lead to the probation, because at this time Moon did not have a suitable replacement and I couldn't actually replace him without Cryptic.
Not sure if I regret the decision of not coming public about it, but I certainly don't regret the decision of probating him, despite the backlash. This was a pivotal point in the expectation of staff actually NOT abusing commands (about... 80% of staff abused observer/set armor on the daily).
The dust settles for a little while, cryptic returns, Jonne splits off with a bunch of people to make a second community, in the meantime shit like the 'King CAB incident and manifesto' happens.
Side topic: The King manifesto - for the continuity of CAB, Cryptic decided to kill King's character in an event, which lead to King sending around a manifesto about we being a dictatorship. Since me and Cryptic were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel in terms of popularity at this point, we decide that we would make it seem that it was me who decided to kill King's character, take the backlash from the manifesto and members who supported it, so Cryptic could begin stabilising his position once again as the de facto unquestionable supreme leader.
We decide to shut down GTARP somewhere in the timeline I've describe earlier, and now with everything settling back, I get promoted to Community Manager and 'Head Moderator' gets abolished once again (later on brought back for Chester, I believe? Can't remember).
We hold a meeting, me, Cryptic, Shidopie, Gurrazor and @alex (this was where Alex began his climb to the 'main guy' in the community).
In this meeting, I was offered part of the
for my role in the community (get paid from the donations), which I declined. It was also at this infamous meeting that Gurrazor claimed that @alex WAS co-owner of thriving ventures and held 50% of the shares (or this would come to be very soon).
As we began discussions, it became apparent that Cryptic was still very shaky, shidopie was the usual and Gurrazor was busy with university, which at some point lead to me and Alex disagreeing with something against Cryptic, Gurrazor was meant to make the final decision and as he began siding with me and Alex, Cryptic started speaking in swedish, then all 3 of them started screaming in swedish, at which point alex said 'if you're not going to speak in english, you don't need us here', I agreed with him and we kinda just sat there talking among ourselves, and this was when me and Alex started working together through the shitstorm and Alex became involved with server side stuff, with many times me bypassing cryptic and talking to him directly on steam/teamspeak about on going issues that needed fixing and getting his recommendation on how to proceed - Cryptic was being shut out of the decision making in his own community, because he was going absolutely mental and quite unstable/erratic.
It became clearer that Cryptic's future at the community was coming to an end, and while Alex was still a shadow figure, I knew very well that my position in the community was held by Cryptic and Gurrazor, so I decided it was time to play 'politics'. Started siding with the Scottish and Danish crowd (the main vocal people/staff) and playing with them on the server on my rebel, this stabilised public perception of me and everything was stable for now.
Cryptic comes to me one day and asks me to try and 'negotiate' with Johnnyguitar about the DDoSing, so I go onto his teamspeak and talk to the community leaders over there, things seem to improve, they talk to Gurrazor and Alex I believe and the DDoSing stops (by a large margin). One name I saw there was "HOTPOCKET", who turned out to be 'their guy' and a key figure of this story.
Things are coming along well, Jonne's side community begins to fail, also because it was getting DDoS'd! So as this goes on, Jonne contacts me (we're still friends, despite the drama that unfolded) and tells me Cryptic was behind the DDoSing, I asked for evidence, but there was none, so I move forward, shrugging it off for now. Then, a few days later I see Cryptic talking to Hotpocket quite a few times in locked channels, in LPs TS and other TS's I got access to while talking to other communities, as well as names I recognised from Gangwars and Experiment (what is the importance? Well, in Gangwars and Experiment, you would get DDoS and DOXed all the time, this was part of 'gameplay' pretty much, a few of them went to jail/died since then, from the US, for armed robbery and shootouts with police...), theI started asking around and gathering logs of evidence from other communities that got DDoS'd and eventually Jonne's that all connected to Cryptic at the end.
I ask Gurrazor and Alex for a meeting and tell them what I think is going on, while saying that I actually don't think they're involved or know about it, but that it is going on. Without much of an answer from Alex and Gurrazor telling me that nah, all is good (even though it wasn't) I decided I didn't want to be associated with management anymore, since the main figure of it, was DDoSing other communities. Later that day, Alex messages me on steam saying he can't do anything about it yet, but for me to be patient. Come to think of it, perhaps I should've listened.
Cryptic calls a staff meeting and this is where I famously went rogue - removed everyone teamspeak admin and spilled the beans on everything that was going on regarding the DDoSing, then proceeded to permaban Cryptic from everything and left (I could have deleted every log, the entire forums, everything on TS and raped the server, since I had full access to everything, but decided not to, because I've criticised that behavior from others when they leave, so to do the same would be hypocritical as hell).
As I do this, my 'standing' skyrockets within the playerbase, I get literally over 100 messages about how I was finally doing something about Cryptic - but the PR machine kicked in, I was just misguided by evil Jonne Bravo (who became disliked by many at this point), Cryptic then smartly threw out many, many promotions to key elements in the community (to people who were privately super anti-cryptic), including @Rictalspace Dirty Harry, Comatose... so on. Bunch of new SAs, Admins, Community Managers... the attempted ousting of cryptic on my behalf (while taking myself out in process) had failed (like every other attempt on Cryptic, I didn't actually think it would work) and things were back to normal - until eventually the big @alex vs Cryptic showdown happened and Alex came out on top.
It makes sense - Alex was at this point still on a pedestal as clockwork jesus from the overwhelming majority of the community, Gurrazor knew Alex was the one thing keeping the DDoSing and the development of the server in order, the remainder of management were actually anti-Cryptic, and unlike me, patiently waited for the correct time to deliver the final blow, along with the support of the community who until now had flopped between 'we hate you' to getting a goodie bag and going silent until the next explosion.
So, as you all know, @alex (correct me if I'm wrong about this stuff) wasn't there in the very beginning of Lemonpunch, however at some point he was contacted by Gurrazor regarding HL2RP, because at this moment, the server was too big to handle the size of the playerbase, plus we were having some pretty heavy DDoS attacks on us by a bunch of rival communities.
Alex first came along to help with all of these issues and eventually got integrated into what became known as 'Community Management' or in the case of Lemonpunch, community director.
Fast forward a while, Gurrazor wants to bring back him project from previous communities in GTARP, having the launch coincide with the release of GTA V. The infamous Larry Gibbons was the server director at this point and I was an admin on HL2RP, although this was during a time of my own inactivity. This was around September 2013 or something along those lines. Jonne Bravo was increasing his popularity among the community, with the very important danish and Scottish and so on as his 'supporters' and Moon as SD etc, at which point Jonne eventually becomes Community Manager for Lemonpunch.
GTARP runs into massive issues with the current server directors, everyone is inactive and staff are mostly incompetent and new, many of them never having been staff before, because those that came over from HL2RP transferred back and very few were dual staff, those that were barely played. Due to a few personal divergences with people in HL2RP, I went onto GTARP and became an Operator there, along with @AlexD being an admin. We were pretty much the only staff members who were active and actually knew how to use staff commands (I know, lmao), so everything that was to do with staff created experiences for the playerbase was being done by us as well as the majority of conflict resolving.
Unfortunately, due to limited commands, we weren't able to do many of the tasks required for the server with our current station, so I went to Jonne Bravo and asked him to me a favor - the same way when Cryptic came to me for me to give my opinion on promoting Jonne to management (and pretty much convincing him), it was time for Jonne to do me a solid one and bat for me to get promoted to super admin - so during a nice evening, the three of us were on teamspeak and I messaged Jonne saying 'this would be a good time' as we were discussing issues with GTARP, Cryptic said something about me doing a good job and Jonne replied with 'yeah, he should get super admin' (I was playing GTAV on console at this point), to which Cryptic replied that, no I should get a more advanced position, but there wasn't one besides Community Manager that Jonne held at the time, so 'Head Moderator' was created, making me responsible for communicating between management, and HL2RP/GTARP server directors. Honken at this point, a super admin for HL2RP, gets promoted to Community Manager at the same time.
We hold a meeting and choose AlexD and Bork and Dirty Harry to become the new Server Directors for GTARP, Moon is doing great in HL2RP and everything seems to be on track as plans for GTARP's revamp are coming along just fine (keep in mind, at this point @alex was still pretty hands off in server side drama/affairs). The re-launch approaches, so we set up a meeting with the GTARP server directors to give us an idea on what is going on (this was after 2 months of preparation) - the meeting being me, jonne, honken, shidopie, cryptic, gurrazor and the server directors. One of the server directors doesn't show up, the other vanishes and the last on shows up high as fuck saying 'we haven't made any progress, fuck' (a few days before launch), at which Cryptic goes ballistic. We end the meeting almost instantly and begin discussions among ourselves about what we could do to try and save GTARP, so we decide to demote all the server directors for failing to direct anything for the server in those 2 months and every time they were asked saying 'things are coming along just fine'. Jonne was against the demotion, Honken was in favor, Shidopie was in favor, Cryptic was in Favor, Gurrazor was just talking about being busy with university and I wanted to demoted the SD who was high and the one who just vanished, while keeping along the one who couldn't show up. It ends with all 3 being demoted.
This was a fracturing moment for what would be the events of the coming weeks. All 3 SDs were pretty popular figures within the community and were very good friends with some of the most vocal voices (still to this day, many of those voices are the exact same, which just goes to show how much weight they actually have in the Community's direction, and many of these 'big events' were minefields on how to keep them happy while doing what was perceived as 'the right thing' for the sake of stability).
Jonne makes his stance against the demotions known to the usual teamspeak users, Cryptic is being shit on all the time and their issues grow and grow. I take the approach of stability along with the others of not actually stating out opinion on the matter and instead standing by the decision we took as a group (I still think Jonne should have backed Cryptic, despite disagreeing. His personal opinions were not as important as not igniting the flames and keeping everyone from exploding into drama). This reaches a critical point, at which Cryptic decides to take a break from the community and gurrazor makes his infamous statement as people continue to ask for his head of 'Lemonpunch will cease being if cryptic is not here'. As Cryptic takes a break, Honken resigns.
Jonne states he would do a better job than cryptic, the community says Jonne would do a better job than cryptic. The community gets what it wanted, Jonne ascends to Community Director while Cryptic takes a leave, Gurrazor goes on vacation. After a mere week(s), maybe just days, Jonne realizes the shitstorm that it is to be in Cryptic's shoes and resigns his position and straight up starts griefing.
At this point, it is me, Shidopie, and Alex around. Shidopie just bails, as he was never really active, he was there to be the cool guy (everyone loved shidopie even when hating on cryptic), so it's just me and Alex (who still wasn't very involved at all).
Here we enter another contentious point - me and Moon drama and me vs the HL2RP staff vocal bits while shielding those who were 'scared' of stating the opinions publicly because they didn't want the harassment.
A group of HL2RP staff members come to me with video evidence of moon spawning in grenades (the server director) and using them from observer to kill CPs and saving his rebel. Then I begin a log hunt and find staff members of his group abusing vendors to obtain guns/other items as well as setting armor/hp after and sometimes during firefights. Then we have Moon spawning in SHIPMENTS of AR2s and claiming he got them legitimately (do know that at this point, staff members did NOT have access to logs, besides a select few, me included). The same group from the grenade incident threatens to leave if nothing happens, so I talk with moon and tell him that I will remove his AR2s and that we will move past the grenade incident, as long as it doesn't happen again - Moon tells me that he will not remove the AR2s, that he will do as he wants because he is the SD and it wasn't my business to meddle in the server.
I'm pretty much out of options for support here as every other head staff is MIA and so I decide that I need to put across the message that he can't just do as he wants and so I tell him he will be demoted if he doesn't comply and stop abusing his staff+actually do something about the other abusing staff. He continues to stonewall me, so I probate moon for a week. Moon makes it a public issue, the staff who originally complained did not want to come forward into the incident, being afraid of repercussions and the remainder of HL2RP staff were either in the abuse bag or oblivious, but again, for the sake of stability I decide not to come forward with all the evidence and the issues that lead to the probation, because at this time Moon did not have a suitable replacement and I couldn't actually replace him without Cryptic.
Not sure if I regret the decision of not coming public about it, but I certainly don't regret the decision of probating him, despite the backlash. This was a pivotal point in the expectation of staff actually NOT abusing commands (about... 80% of staff abused observer/set armor on the daily).
The dust settles for a little while, cryptic returns, Jonne splits off with a bunch of people to make a second community, in the meantime shit like the 'King CAB incident and manifesto' happens.
Side topic: The King manifesto - for the continuity of CAB, Cryptic decided to kill King's character in an event, which lead to King sending around a manifesto about we being a dictatorship. Since me and Cryptic were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel in terms of popularity at this point, we decide that we would make it seem that it was me who decided to kill King's character, take the backlash from the manifesto and members who supported it, so Cryptic could begin stabilising his position once again as the de facto unquestionable supreme leader.
We decide to shut down GTARP somewhere in the timeline I've describe earlier, and now with everything settling back, I get promoted to Community Manager and 'Head Moderator' gets abolished once again (later on brought back for Chester, I believe? Can't remember).
We hold a meeting, me, Cryptic, Shidopie, Gurrazor and @alex (this was where Alex began his climb to the 'main guy' in the community).
In this meeting, I was offered part of the
for my role in the community (get paid from the donations), which I declined. It was also at this infamous meeting that Gurrazor claimed that @alex WAS co-owner of thriving ventures and held 50% of the shares (or this would come to be very soon).As we began discussions, it became apparent that Cryptic was still very shaky, shidopie was the usual and Gurrazor was busy with university, which at some point lead to me and Alex disagreeing with something against Cryptic, Gurrazor was meant to make the final decision and as he began siding with me and Alex, Cryptic started speaking in swedish, then all 3 of them started screaming in swedish, at which point alex said 'if you're not going to speak in english, you don't need us here', I agreed with him and we kinda just sat there talking among ourselves, and this was when me and Alex started working together through the shitstorm and Alex became involved with server side stuff, with many times me bypassing cryptic and talking to him directly on steam/teamspeak about on going issues that needed fixing and getting his recommendation on how to proceed - Cryptic was being shut out of the decision making in his own community, because he was going absolutely mental and quite unstable/erratic.
It became clearer that Cryptic's future at the community was coming to an end, and while Alex was still a shadow figure, I knew very well that my position in the community was held by Cryptic and Gurrazor, so I decided it was time to play 'politics'. Started siding with the Scottish and Danish crowd (the main vocal people/staff) and playing with them on the server on my rebel, this stabilised public perception of me and everything was stable for now.
Cryptic comes to me one day and asks me to try and 'negotiate' with Johnnyguitar about the DDoSing, so I go onto his teamspeak and talk to the community leaders over there, things seem to improve, they talk to Gurrazor and Alex I believe and the DDoSing stops (by a large margin). One name I saw there was "HOTPOCKET", who turned out to be 'their guy' and a key figure of this story.
Things are coming along well, Jonne's side community begins to fail, also because it was getting DDoS'd! So as this goes on, Jonne contacts me (we're still friends, despite the drama that unfolded) and tells me Cryptic was behind the DDoSing, I asked for evidence, but there was none, so I move forward, shrugging it off for now. Then, a few days later I see Cryptic talking to Hotpocket quite a few times in locked channels, in LPs TS and other TS's I got access to while talking to other communities, as well as names I recognised from Gangwars and Experiment (what is the importance? Well, in Gangwars and Experiment, you would get DDoS and DOXed all the time, this was part of 'gameplay' pretty much, a few of them went to jail/died since then, from the US, for armed robbery and shootouts with police...), theI started asking around and gathering logs of evidence from other communities that got DDoS'd and eventually Jonne's that all connected to Cryptic at the end.
I ask Gurrazor and Alex for a meeting and tell them what I think is going on, while saying that I actually don't think they're involved or know about it, but that it is going on. Without much of an answer from Alex and Gurrazor telling me that nah, all is good (even though it wasn't) I decided I didn't want to be associated with management anymore, since the main figure of it, was DDoSing other communities. Later that day, Alex messages me on steam saying he can't do anything about it yet, but for me to be patient. Come to think of it, perhaps I should've listened.
Cryptic calls a staff meeting and this is where I famously went rogue - removed everyone teamspeak admin and spilled the beans on everything that was going on regarding the DDoSing, then proceeded to permaban Cryptic from everything and left (I could have deleted every log, the entire forums, everything on TS and raped the server, since I had full access to everything, but decided not to, because I've criticised that behavior from others when they leave, so to do the same would be hypocritical as hell).
As I do this, my 'standing' skyrockets within the playerbase, I get literally over 100 messages about how I was finally doing something about Cryptic - but the PR machine kicked in, I was just misguided by evil Jonne Bravo (who became disliked by many at this point), Cryptic then smartly threw out many, many promotions to key elements in the community (to people who were privately super anti-cryptic), including @Rictalspace Dirty Harry, Comatose... so on. Bunch of new SAs, Admins, Community Managers... the attempted ousting of cryptic on my behalf (while taking myself out in process) had failed (like every other attempt on Cryptic, I didn't actually think it would work) and things were back to normal - until eventually the big @alex vs Cryptic showdown happened and Alex came out on top.
It makes sense - Alex was at this point still on a pedestal as clockwork jesus from the overwhelming majority of the community, Gurrazor knew Alex was the one thing keeping the DDoSing and the development of the server in order, the remainder of management were actually anti-Cryptic, and unlike me, patiently waited for the correct time to deliver the final blow, along with the support of the community who until now had flopped between 'we hate you' to getting a goodie bag and going silent until the next explosion.
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