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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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“Brand safety” killed Jezebel
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I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
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Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.
Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter
But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/
Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/
Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:
https://text.npr.org/734303135
The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars
Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers
But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/
I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas
Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/
(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):
https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/
Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html
The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.
Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.
Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:
https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad
Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.
Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:
https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/
Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:
https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards
This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.
But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":
https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/
More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":
https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look
Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."
This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/
But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:
https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/
A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/
This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:
https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201
G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944
Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,
It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.
When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.
This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.
As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."
The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety
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fumifooms · 8 months ago
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Canines
The hand that feeds
Mickbell Tomas & Kuro Dungeon Meshi
^ 1: Ink-the-artist, I will remove my teeth / 2: Margaret Atwood / 3: C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy / 4: Mitski, I’m your man / 5: Ojibwa, I love you like a rotten dog / 6: KotOR II / 7: Stardrop, Everything that’s ever been mine is covered in teeth marks / 8: Sodikken, People Eater / 9: Mitski, I’m your man / 10: maxime., The life and death of a dog / 11: Mitski, I bet on losing dogs / 12: maxime., The life and death of a dog / 13: hun, I did not bite with Malice / 14: C. Michael Davis, Don't Pet the Dragon / 15: Mitski, I’m your man
v 1: Early versions of the myth as in aeschylus orestes / 2: Ink-the-artist, I will not remove my teeth
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#Yeahh i’m workng on a mickbell & kabru party analysis oops#I’d bleed for anything if it held me the right way. Even teeth#dungeon meshi#delicious in dungeon#Mickbell tomas#kuro#mickuro#mickrin#It’s on topic in my heart#The red means I love you…#The duality between the care & devotion and the hurt & isolation is really what gets to me#Traumabonded kittens highkey#Tw#cw#cw abuse#tw abuse#Web weaving#web weave#webweaving#I hit 30 pics :( would have added more if i could#Idk even anymore… Pls tell me you see the vision#Mick obvi loves Kuro a lot but this was meant to focus on the unhealthy side if that wasn’t obvious. Abuse tactic of isolation etc etc#People always leave. doesn’t matter how or why but his parents his sister everyone he’s never enough to stay#and that’s why he thinks he has to trick Kuro into thinking Mickbell’s the whole world or he’ll discover that there’s more out there.#Stuff that’s worth leaving him for. He has to make the world scary and unknown and not pay him and not let him have connections#That’s why he doesn’t want people to have a choice!! Either Mickbell doesn’t care about you or he’ll make sure you can never be without him#and there being a third option/outcome in this freaks him out!!!#Some of these should be called ‘No Title’ instead but I have bad academic crediting etiquette this looks cooler sorry#He’s scared of course he bites. There’s only throwing bones when feeding a stray. So bare your teeth and chew me up
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neproxrezi · 1 year ago
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man it's really frustrating watching in real time as googling things about something like a new video game gets harder and harder. i've looked up a couple things about ac6, and the results you get have steadily slipped these last few years from barely helpful articles written to maximise SEO, to blatantly machine generated paragraphs of bullshit. just entire websites of completely incorrect information all stated with that same stilted confident enthusiasm, peppered with hyperlinks to the rest of their nonsense articles
adding 'reddit' to your search works for now, at least
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thatonecrookedsmile · 4 months ago
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"Gaze into the space between the pixels on the screen There, you’ll see a place between the signal and the screams Feel the oscillation of the crystal in your dreams Just switch off your brain and let it sizzle in the beams"
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It took a matter of months to finish this drawing. (/j, it only took. 2 weeks? I think? maybe a little less,but that's an approximate)
It's been a while since I made a digital drawing. So far between April and now I have focused more on traditional drawings with digital coloring. These are (mostly) cool to do,but it's nice to go back to full digital every now and then. This is one of the cases where the original idea and the final result don't differ that much from each other,but there was still a certain evolution from when I conceived the drawing and how I ended up doing it. The Main Thing of the original idea is still here,I just expanded it a little.
Also,the lyrics at the beginning are from "Tune Into The Madness" by The Stupendium and Dan Bull. Great song,and one that I was listening to a lot at the time I was reading the book (and much earlier too). Because,you know. Mix of horror and TV. It made sense. (And yes,I know this song is about a totally different game,and the TV context in both stories are very different (as far as I remember, it's been a while since I played LN2) but I thought the lyrics could match the drawing anyway + it's my chance to recommend peak, so yeah) Listen to the song, it's very good! (The video do contains flashing images and lights tho,so viewer discretions is adviced)
Also,alt. versions without the text,because I thought that without the text it looks good too (+ you can now see Bendy's face)
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#bendy and the ink machine#batim#bendy: fade to black#bendy ftb#batdr#bendy and the dark revival#rose sorenson#crookedsmileart#This is the second or third time I've posted something from this book in the tags and that feeling of being late to the party still remains#and that makes sense; But still; dang#sorry fellas; I will eventually do something that isn't 100% focused on one of these books later#(the Demonth event is approaching after all (assuming we get another one of those this year))#spoilers tho: the next drawing I plan to post is also related to the books. sorry again. 😔#This next drawing (sketches; actually) is something I realized at the beginning of this month that I have to do#and I want to post it before the month ends.#Or more specifically; before the very beginning of August#For Definitely Unspecifiable Reasons#Now; trivia from the drawing above that I just remembered#I had the idea of ​​adding logos/messages in both corners of the bottom of the screen#on one side it would say “Brought to You by Arch Steel" with the company's logo#and on the other “Up Next: The Joey Drew Show!” with the show's logo. (which side each logo/message would be on doesn't matter)#it was supposed to be another reference to the book; and it would add more to the rest that happens in the drawing#In the end I ended up forgetting about it. but no problem.#This would require me to create logos and to be honest; I had no idea how to make them. + it would take up time#the final drawing already looks good; there is no need to add these additional things; I think#a neat idea; but in the end; there's no problem with it not being added#bendy fade to black
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I really think most of the men who claim they're voting for Kamala Harris just.......aren't gonna
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hyperfocusthusly · 6 months ago
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A perfect Thursday morning to imagine my blorbos in new and terrifying situations
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girlwarlock · 1 year ago
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maybe it's a coincidence but it's a lil sketch that when i searched the ''intrusive thoughts'' tag (due to some curiosity from a post that crossed my dash) that this thing come up. @wip @changes I really don't like this kind of targeted communication, whether this kokobot is something that tumblr is cooking up internally or whether they're a third party getting the info from tumblr for this kind of targeted spam.
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c4ts4ndstuff · 16 days ago
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hello i am going insane over the Truman Show again
the fact that we the audience are so distanced from Truman, is done wonderfully. before he even becomes fully aware that there's camera's that could be watching them, and figuring out where they are, there are still so many moments were his face is blocked by something, or he's looking away, and creates distance. i don't think he ever talks to himself during the entire movie. the closest we get to being inside his head, is during flashbacks, but even then it's still an outside perspective of the events that are being played when it's pretty likely from context cues that he's thinking about the event. the only times we know what he's thinking, is when he's telling someone he knows about it. and as the amount of people he realizes he can trust dwindles throughout the movie, the less we know of his thoughts. even his entire escape happens off-screen until he almost reaches the ocean wall, and they find him through the cameras. we didn't even know he had a plan to escape still until he's already gone, and Marlon is left to find the ladder leading to the hole in the basement (admittedly, he did give a hint with his "That one's for free" in regards to his final mirror daydream. but again it's something that he specifically decided to share! it wasn't us hearing his thoughts, it was him telling the camera he knew what was going on)
despite being the main character, the movie is specifically not shown from Truman's POV and i think they did an amazing job at it
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queerbrainrot · 4 months ago
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Youtube: we want you to use our service over tiktok so here's a 40 second/1 min 30 second unskippable ad, on top of a second unskippable ad
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iceandironbars · 9 months ago
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Worked some more on the sketch but not sure yet if I'm gonna color it or not or leave it as a sketch, gonna do some more shading
(cropped because of 'nAuGhtY cOnTenT')
I'm gonna post my full art on my AO3 account, I swear
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allpplareequal · 2 months ago
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Anyway 95% of ads on Tumblr now are the same heritage foundation: "Kamala let all of the sex offenders into the country because she is single handedly responsible for immigration" and I know for a goddamn fact that Tumblr "leftists" are eating that shit up despite it being total horseshit, because the purity culture poisoned idiots on this website are looking for any reason to not have to make a difficult choice. Even if that comes at the cost of believing fascist propaganda.
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sixersigned · 3 months ago
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stan voice: finally, i have them all
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aliusfrater · 4 months ago
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hi! we're not mutuals so i thought it'd be better to send an anon, anyways, i recommend braflix[.]ru or watch[.]lonelil[.]ru to get your screencaps! make sure to use brave browser and adblock just to be on the safe side <3 also sorry for the brackets but idk how sensitive tumblr is with links
thank you very much <3
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blujayonthewing · 2 years ago
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I've had Elyss for eight years today and I'm feeling very normal about it
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crickwater · 5 months ago
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I do think it's quite funny that the bg3 developers decided to make a character that's like a sexy vampire who spent years seducing people only to give him plus 0 to charisma
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bisexualmaedhros · 6 months ago
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i've felt like a ghost for the last ~8 years of my life, disconnected from the world and its people, unable to right myself in the current of time, slipping away quietly & passing through walls. aita?
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