Archive for the ‘CFF’ Category

Showdown at Slabtown II Finalcap

‘Tis over! After three days of tournamenting, and mini-gaming, and plain ol’ regular playing, it has come to an end. Let’s get to details!

58 people competed in the Open tournament, and 49 in the Classics tournament. Strong turn-out! And folks really put a lot of work into their qualifying entries. You had to put up some hot scores in order to make it into the final rounds.

And then once the final round started, oh man, things got shaken up fast. Some big names got eliminated in the first round of the finals.

And through it all Robert Gagno emerged victorious in – get this – not one, but BOTH tournaments! He swept it! No easy feat. He played great throughout the tournament. And when crunchtime came, in the final rounds, he pulled it off like a champ. He came down with this parents, Kathy and Maurizio, and they all basically operated as a team throughout the weekend. Team Gagno. (On a personal note: I got 2nd place in the Open, and while I felt like I played pretty well, I’m not sad! It was totally cool to watch Robert sweep the event. Major props.)

Nice showing by Portland players in the event. All our constant playing and competing must be paying off… with DIVIDENDS! Whatever that means. Nice showing by the core CFF contingent, too. But there were some notable absences (Replay!).

Here are photos taken by Robert’s dad of the winners line-ups. Check out their flickr page for a lot more great pictures.

Classics Division Winners. l-r: James Edes (4th), Cayle George (2nd), Robert Gagno (1st), Aaron “Dropshot” Nelson (3rd).

Open Division Winners. l-r: Fred “Fred” Franken (4th), Robert Gagno (1st), Steve Lampros (3rd), Ryan “ROM” Gratzer (2th).

Eden Stamm was top qualifier in the Open. Cayle George was the top qualifier in the Classics. Zoe “Legs” Vrabel was the top female qualifier, and she also won the PBR skateboard in a mini-tourney (thanks PBR!).

Big thanks to Aaron, Jake (Revtest), Fred, Eric, and Noah for organizing the event. And thanks to Slabtown for providing a rad venue. Mega thanks to Ricochet for their tight tournament machines, and for their really awesome mini-game machines. Here’s a video of Jeri from Ricochet showing off the NES Light Gun game.

Danny Backglass won the Time Machine reverse-flipper tourney, and Mike Smith won both the Tommy Bad Cats and the Star Trek NES Zapper tourneys. Way to go! Also, thanks to Quality Entertainment for their machine. Thanks to Chris Rhodes for bringing in Aztec, and for everyone who brought in their sweet machines. The line-ups were nice. Very well-rounded and interesting.

Check out this page on the message board for the full results.

Lastly, some pictures:

Grandmaster Danny Backglass watches, approves

Eden and Cayle in the Classics finals

More classics action

Eden rocking some Royal Flush

DDT rocking the Frontier

Robert in game 1 of the final round.

ROM in the final round

See you next year!

Showdown at Slabtown II – Casual Flowblock

At the stroke of midnight – two hours ago – dropshot called out, with his grotesque horsevoice, the final games of the qualifying round. And not too surprisingly, some mad rank exchanges took place right at that final toll. Danny Backglass, on a heroic 900,000+ game of Aztec, leaped from 12th place in the Classics (not a qualifying placement) to 4th. And in the Open division, Opto did something or other on Whirlwind to skyrocket his placement from so-so to good! A moment after these games were registered, all the machines were swiftly turned off – the mad shuffle complete, the qualifying round OVER!

There’s a lot to go over right now. And I do not think I will be able to cover it all, late as it is. But I will try to note the things that pop into my head. First off, Eden Stamm arrived today from Canada and succeeded in posting a slew of big scores in the Open division, thus securing his 1st place qualifying position. He was solid all the way through. And in the Classics division, Cayle George ended the night on top.

There was a very strong turnout in both tournaments. It was busy all day, but the final few hours were especially crammed with contenders jockeying for qualifying positions. Mega thanks go out to Sara, Nhu, and Katrina for managing the scoring in the final hours. It looked really hectic, and you all really took care of business. Also thanks to Emma for her superlong day shift. Plus thx to Isaac, Noah, DannyB, Jake, Dennis, and EVERYONE who helped out and/or took a scoring shift (I am missing many in that list).

Here are the leaderboards:

Open leaderboard (top 16 qualifies)

Classics leaderboard (top 8 qualifies)

And the individual machine scores:

Open:
Simpsons
Demolition Man
Whirlwind
Terminator 2
Frontier
Seawitch

Classics:
Royal Flush
Aces and Kings
Aztec
Solar City

Okay, I am super tired. Here are a bunch of pictures I took today! Click each image for full size. The pictures cover some afternoon action, mini-games (NES Gun Flippers, Reverse-Flippers, and Tommy mode), Classics set-up, and more.

And here’s a video I took with my camera of some Classics action! That’s Eric Hill, one of the event organizers, in the foreground playing Aztec.

So! The Classics finale matches start tomorrow, Sunday, at noon! If you’re in the top 8, ya gotta be there on time. This is IT!

And during the classics matches, there will be the side-battle for the PBR longboard. This battle will be with the 17th-20th place finishers in the Open Division (but it also depends on how they qualified in the Classics…?? I don’t get it, really – JUST BE THERE OKAY!), and will be starting at noon.

Then, around 2:30pm, the Open division final matches will begin. If you qualified in the top 16, be there earlier than 2:30pm. Don’t be lame (looking at you OOO).

The Ricochet mini-games! In the fourth picture above, you can see Jeri Ellsworth, one half (with Trish) of the inventive minds behind the fun set-ups, using the NES laser Gun to play Star Trek. As far as I know, Dave (10th picture) has the current high score on that machine – around 34 million. And Danny B (7th picture) has the current high score on the reverse-flippered Time Machines (around 4.2 million). I’m not sure who has the high on Tommy Bad Cats – but I’ve heard it’s around 25 million.

Alright, I’ll have another round-up tomorrow once it’s all over. I hope you found this post informative, and I hope I didn’t anything crucial out. See you tomorrow!!

Showdown at Slabtown 2010 Friday Wrap-up

Day 1 of qualifying at the Showdown comes to a close, and what do we have? We have this:

Open Leaderboard

Basically:
Robert Gagno – 1st
Cayle George – 2nd
Danny Backglass – 3rd
Romulanx – 4th

and etc.

Open division machine scores:

Simpsons
Demolition Man
Whirlwind
Terminator 2
Frontier
Seawitch

And the Classics Division Leaderboard

Royal Flush
Aces and Kings
Aztec
Solar City

Nice turn-out tonight. It felt busy. We’re showing 40 entries so far. Even stronger than last year at this point. A lot of the weekly regulars have shown up (though not all! what up), as well as some fresh faces, plus there’s a solid contingent from Seattle, and from British Columbia. And more of them to arrive tomorrow. Action starts tomorrow at noon. And there’s, no doubt, gonna be a lot of shifts in the leaderboard.

Ricochet has set up some rad side-games. Get this! They have a Data East Star Trek machine with flippers that you activate using an NES Gun! There are sensors at the bottom of the playfield, and you shoot the gun at the left or right sensors, accordingly. Its really difficult! But I was definitely improving with each try. Whosoever has the high score by the end of the tournament wins half the coin box. 25 cents to play.

Plus, they set up Bad Cats Tommy Style – with the bottom foot of the playfield covered up in black tape, so you can’t see the flippers!

And – third side-game machine – Time Machine is set with reverse flippers. The right button triggers the left flipper, the left button triggers the right. Super challenging. Top score on any of these machine by the end of the tourney wins half the respective cashbox. They are really fun, unusual, and creative side-games to be running during the tournament. Fun ways to step away from the qualifying machines and just get wild!

Sorry, I did not take pictures of anything tonight. I’ll take and post some pics tomorrow. And I’ll also post another status report after the qualifying rounds ends, midnight tomorrow. Good luck tomorrow, everyone. Let’s see some sick scores!

Second Annual Showdown at Slabtown

Hey hey, next weekend is the second annual Showdown at Slabtown!! It’s a three day tournament, with big cash payouts to those who qualify for the final day’s matches.

Check out the Showdown page for more details, plus some stuff about the rules.

And read the message board thread for some hot discussions!

This style of tournament, though different from Portland’s weekly tournaments and from the Ground Kontrol Pinbrawl, has a strong focus on an individual’s skill and strategy. While you are trying to beat other people’s scores, you’re also allowed the time and space to do your best without having to worry about being eliminated after just a couple bad games. Two days of casual flow qualifying on Friday and Saturday! Hang out, watch the players, watch your placement go up and down, and have fun!

But then on Sunday, things change! Once it’s down to 16, you’ll be matched up against the other players, playing three 4-player games, and then advancing (or not) from there.

A lot of people will be entering this tournament. It’s a good way to check out the scene, get sorta serious about your game, TRY HARD, and maybe win some money!

Here’s an overview:

Slabtown
1033 NW 16th
Portland, OR

Open Tournament will be held on 6 machines and qualifying will be held from:
Friday, July 30 3:00-Midnight
Saturday, July 31 12:00-Midnight

Finals will be held on: Sunday, August 1 following Classics finals

Classics Tournament will be held on 4 machines and qualifying will be held from:
Friday, July 30 3:00-Midnight
Saturday, July 31 12:00-Midnight

Finals will be held on:
Sunday, August 1 at 12:00pm

1 ticket=1 game
1 ticket- $3
4 tickets- $10

Open tournament machines:
Seawitch
Frontier
Whirlwind
Demolition Man
The Simpson’s Pinball Party
Terminator: II

Classic tournament machines:
Aces and Kings
Royal Flush
Solar City
Aztec

Machines are provided by Quality Entertainment, Ricochet Pinball, and some individuals. Thank you to all y’all, and to the organizers, and Slabtown! It should be a lot of fun. There are two big pinball tournaments in Portland each year, and this is one of them!

In the meantime, read our excellent (live)blogging coverage from last year’s Showdown:
Showdown at Slabtown – Updates
Top 16 announced
Showdown at Slabtown wrap-up

And like last year, we’ll try to keep this blog up to date with the latest qualifying scores (daily round-up).

Trackie!!!! Day recap

So, Trackie!!!!! Day happened about a month ago, but I know you’re all still on the edges of your respective seats to know how it went and/or relive it through my sparkling prose.

Trackie!!!! Day, the most beloved of holidays, where fashion meets Fathom, where velour meets Viking, where DDT’s bare chest meets your eyeballs, occured on Mothers’ Day weekend, so those of us who prefer pinball to parents met up at the lovely and quant Ship Ahoy tavern for some meat and cheese (there was, natch, no love for the vegans at this fest) and dollar games on WCS.

Fueling up on Visos before hitting the streets. (credit: Scoop)

Mystery checks out his pinball skillz (credit: Isaac Ruiz)

Invisorated, we headed onward in our van of sin and destruction, blowing smoke in the faces of our enemies (or, I guess, Opto’s car, which was following us). Next stop was Apex, a pretty new bar on 12th and Division that you should check out. First off, they have a TV dedicated soley to the type/name/brewery/ABV% of their tap list (word to the wise: beer/cider only, folks. Also, cash only! Act accordingly)! Also, a separate pinball alley that houses Theater of Magic, LOTR, IJ4, and Ripley’s! Thirdly, a bank of mirrors on the wall above the machines, serving both your rabid spectators and yourself, should you choose to look up. 

See? (credit: ipdb.org, Heather, and my sweet MSPaint prowess)

So obviously we had to have a mini-tourney to test our mirror-pinball chops. It was on ToM. ROM won, possibly because his name is very similar to the name of the game. We also discovered that I am actually the girl on the Xenon backglass (see right). Next on the list was GK, because what kind of pincrawl (meh, I’m ambivalent about that word) doesn’t stop by the largest pinball destination in Portland? There, we did a one-handed mini-tourney on Demo Man (if I remember correctly, you had to use the handles, not the flipper buttons), which DDT won one-handily. (Ha!) We stayed there until the bar opened, so that those of us ammenable to the notion could slam a Pabst before we started off toward Slabtown. Slabtown’s challenge of choice was sit-down Party Zone. Scoop kicked ass with 30+ million.

Then, we were hungry, so we went to Opto’s Parlor of Pins, a private venue also know as the Davii household. We ate pizza and drank beer.  DDT and Dropshot both GCed Centaur on the same game (DDT exceeded the original GC as Player 1, Dropshit went above and beyond to re-GC it:

yowza! (credit: do i have to credit myself?)

We also met the youngest tracksuit!  His name is Vinnie and, according to him, he’s “four and a half.  But I’m still shy!!!!”  Those were the only two sentences he said to me before grabbing the juice I poured him and running away.  I’d hate him if he hadn’t inherited his dad’s dashing good looks:

the PatC legacy. (credit: PatC; also I still rule at MSPaint)

Isaac took some cool pictures in Noah’s garage, but it took me like half an hour to make that Pat and Vinnie thing happen so I’m gonna cool off on the nÜ media for a while (also, oh my Lord, I hate PCs).  I’m just gonna cut to the chase instead, because this is already a month late and I think my boss may fire me if I don’t start doing my actual job instead of writing in my pinball journal.  After Noah’s we went to the Standard.  Mini-tourney: straight-up highest score on Black Rose.  Prize: a super cute piece of Shell Bell’s homemade jewelry.  Kickback won, and his lovely ladyfriend got some pinball-related bling.

We finished it off, 12 hours later, across the street from whence we started.  At C-Bar, there was a battle between the winners of the four mini-tourneys (to refresh your memories, I know I’m long-winded and parenthetical: ROM, DDT, Scoop, Kickback) on Indiana Jones.  ROM was victorious and got some sort of lightsaber thing that you’ll see in the final picture if I ever post this.  Emma was also spotted with a pinball lamp of some kind, I don’t remember why.  The whole PatC family got some schwag for being a family of trackies!!!!  And Sauce won worst tracksuit.

Okay, that was Trackie!!!! Day.  We’ll do it again next year.  Stay tuned for ROM’s much more timely Portland Pinball Map announcement.  Here, have a picture:

TRACKIE!!!! DAY! (credit: Scoop)

Trackie!!!! Day

It’s been well over a year since the synchronized flipping of a fleet of tracksuit-clad warriors hit the streets of Portland. We swish-swished from bar to bar, tearing up machines, staying hydrated, stretching before and after, calibrating our stopwatches, and checking our pulses as we simultaneously checked on the pulse of the Portland pinball scene.

And now tomorrow’s the day when we do it all again! So, pump up your shoes and step into a lifestyle of comfort and leisure. (Personally, I think of tracksuits as like stylish pajamas that are acceptable to wear outside…)

The day starts off at Ship Ahoy at 1pm. We’ll play there some, and then move on to the next spot, and after that the next spot, etc. DDT (pictured above) has planned all kinds of cool shit. Such as! Mini-games, like skillshot tests and various other styles of casual tournament play. So bring dollars ($$) to wager against your fellow tracksuiter. There will also be open casual play, if that’s all you’re feeling. But the real fun comes from betting! And trust me, there will be some fun and unusual mini-tournamos.

And there will be prizes!! We’ll have shwag and stuff, plus a load of VISO to fuel us along the way! The good folks at VISO have supplied us with goods to keep us fired up for the whole day. Attentive readers will remember about a year ago when we created a fake VISO logo and put it on this site for a couple months in order to pretend that we were sponsored or something (pictured right). Most of us drink a ton of the stuff, and we wanted to show our support for the local brand. Well, now they’re giving us stuff for real! Thanks, VISO!

If you don’t plan to be at Ship Ahoy at 1pm, but you still want to catch up with the group at some point, I will make a point of twittering our current location on the Portland Pinball tweetertweet. So, check that for the latest loc.

Also, bring cameras!

This is gonna be a rad day. See you tomorrow.

2nd Annual Portland Pinbrawl at Ground Kontrol

If you don’t feel like reading farther than the first sentence of this post, know this: Portland Pinbrawl 2010 was EPIC and it lasted until 1:30 a.m. and Jeff “Deathsave” Gagnon added a second Johnny Mnemonic to his half-working pinball machine line-up back in Ye Olde Seattle and I learned how to spell the word “mnemonic.” But if you were looking for something deeper than one run-on sentence, read on, wise baller, read on:

At last year’s inaugural Pinbrawl, 120 people showed up, about half of them the registering on-site the day of. This year, the tourney was capped at 128 participants, and 127!!! of them pre-registered. Brett Erickson was the lucky 128th soul, preventing J.D. Yeager from being the only participant with a bye. Sorry, J.D.!

photo from sachiko-no!'s flickr

The bracket was a force to be reckoned with. For one thing, it was huge, sizewise. And for another, dayum, were the players good. Keith Elwin, #2 pinballer in the world, graced us with his presence, knocking many ballers to the curb and, I’m sure, drinking all the IPAs in the Northwest while he was at it. He started off the tournament facing down Danny Backglass on The Simpsons Pinball Party. And if you want anyone battling the #1 player in the US, it’s DannyB wearing his CFF vest and whaling on a Ground Kontrol machine. He loves that shit! Keith won the first match, but not by much, and DB managed to force him to game three. But eventually even the most hardened pinball gangsters can fall to Keith Elwin’s flipper skills.

Other notable early matches: Replay and Deathsave met on the Shadow right off the bat; ROM beat Dropshot in round 2, knocking last year’s second place winner to the losers bracket way earlier than expected; VRPA was pitted against itself in the form of Eden Stamm vs. Robert Gagno, a pretty low-scoring couple of games on Roadshow where Robert came out on top (in a twist of fate, the two of them would meet again later on in the evening, in the losers bracket); and Cayle George, last year’s Pinbrawl winner, also the champion of multiple consecutive Shorty’s tournaments, lost against William Brown in the second round, sending him to the losers bracket as well.

photo from sachiko-no!'s flickr

It was barely afternoon, but you could tell this Pinbrawl was getting intense. Also around this time I discovered the delicious faux-meatball sub at Backspace (I went 0-2, trading in my pinballing for meatballing and PBR) so some stuff happened that I wasn’t aware of. DannyB was hacking his way through the losers bracket, hoping to stay in it long enough to get his revenge against Keith. He knocked Bounceback out before moving on to Dropshot. According to a confidential source, “I buttfucked dropshot at simpsons. Just made him look like a fruit salad. And, he cried a little. 2-0.” My computer pretty much doesn’t recognize any of the words in that first sentence, but I’d never edit or censor DannyB. And he just kept going. Edmund Nash, Elijah Nelson, Mark Mahoney, Dave Dimoff, Jason Kickback America…not bad players, but they all fell in the face of DannyB’s pinball wrath.

Over in the winners bracket, Keith defeated Robert Gagno (probably the youngest competitor at the ‘Brawl…if any young 21ers want to take issue with that statement, bring it on, I don’t factcheck, I bodycheck) on Bride of Pinbot and moved on to Star Trek, where Mr. Russ Wallis, aka Skillshot, surfacing out of semi-pinball-retirement (aka fatherhood), was waiting to take him on. And take him on he did; Russ knocked Keith to the losers bracket, where he had to play Cayle. It went to 3 games on Scared Stiff for these two huge competitors. On the third game, Cayle was miles ahead of Keith when a game malfunction left them playing their third game on Spiderman. Cayle walked away victorious, knocking Keith out of the tournament entirely. Russ had to play Deathsave in the winners bracket and was unable to sustain his high (Skillshot’s tournament advice: get three hours of sleep the night before, apparently it works wonders), getting knocked out by Mahaffey in the losers bracket; Mahaffey also knocked out Robert Gagno, who beat Eden for the second time in one tournament before losing to Mike.

Cayle and Opto were on Funhouse and this was about the time I had a free second to watch and also was feeling my beers (you can trace my drinking habits based on how legible the paper bracket is; check it out at Dropshot’s house. The bracket is a fucking work of art if I do say so myself), but it was a ridiculous match! It went three games, and the whole time I was freaking out and clutching Slamtilt’s arm (oh, Slam was still in it at this point, too, but I neglected to watch any of his matches so they’re not really documented here) but OptoNoah came out on top, winning games 2 and 3 pretty handily. He also managed to beat Mahaffey, and the final three matches were played out on the stage.

photo from sachiko-no!'s flickr

Decided beforehand, the winners final was on Viking, the losers final was on Flash, and the final final was on the prize machine, Johnny MNEMONIC (sorry, really excited about being able to spell this word now). The winners final was Deathsave vs. Steve; Steve’s a tilty motherfucker and I was interested to see how these older machines would treat him. Jeffsave made some intense saves; in one ball, he had two times where he got the ball back onto the playfield from the bumper in the left outlane (not technically a bangback, who knew?), and he ended up knocking Steve into the losers bracket to play Noah. They played on Noah’s home Flash machine, but hey, them’s the breaks. During Game 2, Steve tilted his own ball and Noah’s next ball, automatically forfeiting the game. It would have been tough to come back from that, and he didn’t, so it was an all-CFF final. John “Tilt” Wray was in fine and belligerent form, heckling from the audience, and the final was pretty ridiculous. Noah had to win two best-2-of-3 matches against Jeff. He won the first one 2-0, yikes, so everyone was pretty on edge to see how it would all turn out. The second game went 3 games before Jeff finally pulled out of his (whiskey-induced?) slump and defeated Noah to win himself a duplicate of a game he already owns.

So the machine didn’t go to a native Portlander, but from what I hear it’s still in town. CFF had 8 of the final 16, a vast improvement over last year’s 4. Everyone had a lot of fun. I assume GK sold a lot of Pabst. And I did just as well as I did last year, when I didn’t show up. Except at least this time I got drunk, so you can blame Pabst for any errors in this blog post, as well as the fact that Noah won a PBR mini-fridge he doesn’t need. This tournament was, to put it simply, a blast. Next up is the Slabtown Showdown on July 30-August 1st, and it’s gonna be sweet. So see you then, or at the Slabtown tourney in November, or at Shorty’s, or at next year’s 3rd Annual Pinbrawl. And always remember, CFF TIL DEATH.

Recent News

Deathsave Beat Opto to claim this years pinhead at Portland PinBrawl!

Where did Johnny go anyways?

Current date: 4/25/10

Two Day Casual Flow Buck Hunter Pinball Tournament

Howdy partners!

Remember how much you used to like Bambi when you were a little kiddo? Wasn’t he so fuzzy and cute, and he had those little animals friends who bounced around the magical forest with him and cracked jokes and stuff?? And don’t forget! That back then while you were young and didn’t know much about what life had to offer, what you did know was that you wanted to hug him and be his best friend 4 life??? I remember that, too. That ruled.

But then remember how you grew up a couple years and watched it again, and at the part when Bambi’s mama got shot up and killed by that heroic hunter the whole thing stopped being sad and was instead totally funny? I don’t know about you, but that part made me go, “FUCK YES!” And it was at that seminal point in my life (after I got grounded for swearing) where I decided for forever that the best animal is a dead animal, and that deer in particular can kiss my butt.

In that respect! Local pinball operator Quarterworld has delivered to Portland the newest pinball machine from Stern: Big Buck Hunter Pro. And to kick off the launch of this new bloody beast, Quarterworld and the Bar of the Gods (BOG) has set up a sweet two-day tournament on it.

Details straight from Qdub:

When: 2-16-10 to 2-17-10

Where: Bar of the Gods
4801 SE Hawthorne
503-232-2037

Rules: They are quite simple. You have two days to Grand Champ the table. Who ever is the GC at midnight on Wednesday wins.

What do you win… a cool $100.
#1 score walks away with $50, and yes you can win both GC and #1 score.

If you put up a top score at any point tell the bartender. He’ll get your info so we can get ahold of you. Just in case you’re not there on wed. at midnight. Oh yes, and there’s NO entry fee.

He also noted that the scores on the machine will start out at a measly 1 million or something. So, somebody is going to get the GC – guaranteed!

Now, go shoot the shit out of some motherbucking bucks.

Dreamy keychain

Hey gang, and stars, and everyone in between – I thought I’d share an image of this super rad glow-in-the-dark-in-my-brain CFF keychain! It was made by pinball maven extraordinaires, Jeri Ellsworth and Trish of Ricochet Pinball. They presented them to us at the most recent Voodoo Too Classic Cup… so if you’re a member and you weren’t there, then your only chance of getting one is to be the first one to don a comfy sweater and then tell me how right I am about… I dunno, maybe about how colorful and crazy images of elaborate combo shots are enhancing the substance of this website like 2x-3x. Or, better yet! Design your own combo image and submit it. Because I have an extra keychain, and I’m willing to give it away!

A few lucky people got their CFF keychains in mirror color (like, it’s a mirror). So, if you’re like Danny Backglass, you can whip out the mirrored keychain while waiting for modes to start so that you can quickly check up on your carefully cropped bangs.

Thanks Ricochet! You guys are not only circuit board whizzes, and also not only righteous operators, but also good people. Sorry about complaining about machines when I lose. And sorry that I failed to restrain Danny when he kicked Road Show multiple times in front of you after I beat him in that tournament. I’m supposed to be his mentor in all things chill.

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