iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️

@brennan.day

224 followers 52 following 219 posts

30/Métis/Queer (he/they) Calgary author. BA English (Hons.) Founder of BerryHouse.ca & fanfiction.lol Author of PRAIRIE BOYSPIRIT I write about craft, Indigenous issues, tech criticism, & culture I follow back! 🔆 brennan.day | 📝 blog.brennanbrown.ca

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 18h

I did an overhaul of the design of my website, and I wrote about the surprising connection to what we believe in, and the Chinese Lunar Year. brennan.day/a-new-design...

A New Design: Tradition, Rituals, and Astrology

Why I redesigned the blog—trading gruvbox for greyscale and 'Moonflower' palette and Bunny-hosted serifs—as a small ceremony to give my writing weight and …

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 28/09/2026

I have to be honest, I view trolls as people before anything else. A lot of the advice you'll get is to not interact with them online, and that you're wasting you're time. But I've never felt like I've wasted time if I'm writing, regardless of who I'm writing to. brennan.day/i-ve-never-w...

I've Never Wasted My Time Writing

Why writing—and writing back—is never wasted time. From Patricia Lange's troll whispering to reparative civility, deep canvassing, Daryl Davis, Megan Phelp…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 27/09/2026

Kindness can, and should, be an intentional design constraint in programming languages and their communities. Ruby was started with the philosophy of creating a joyful experience for programmers, and MINASWAN must be reclaimed. brennan.day/kindness-as-...

Kindness as First-class Citizen in Programming

The world needs more intentional kindness. There's a manufactured backlash against empathy from Elon Musk to Gad Saad's 'suicidal empathy.' Kindness alread…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 24/09/2026

In 1987, a teenager plugged a 300-baud modem into a phone line his mother had given him for his birthday, and started a BBS for anime fans. It's still running today. A non-profit, member-funded UNIX community with thousands of users. It's called SDF. brennan.day/a-love-lette...

A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress

I've finally became an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system running continuously since 1987. I give a history from Ted Uhlemann's 300…

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 22/09/2026

Are you somebody that's always wanted to get into blogging with static-site generators but found the tutorials unhelpful and overly complicated? I wrote a free, 4,000-word guide just for you! brennan.day/static-site-...

Static Site Generators for Beginners

Written for a 32-bit Café thread asking where to even begin with static-site generators. I go over the free resources I'd learn first (and why hand-rolled …

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 20/09/2026

Our data is under attack, and apparently, our entire future is also at stake to boot. What once required corporate infrastructure now only requires iLands spam agents, scrapers, and agent swarms. brennan.day/llms-democra...

LLMs Democratize Extraction and Scale Malice

Responding to Coyote's essay on data ownership, I look at how genAI has democratized the kind of extraction that once required corporate infrastructure—iLa…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 19/09/2026

There's an Internet you don't know about. On why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; and where to host a capsule. brennan.day/creating-a-b...

Creating a Blog in Gemini://

Creating your own corner of Geminispace: why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; where to host a capsule (SmolPub,…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 15/09/2026

As an English major, I have to say: there's no such thing as proper, standard English. It's always been a myth. There's no universal correct way to spell or objective grammar and mechanics. Don't try to police others about that kind of thing. brennan.day/proper-engli...

Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write

Responding to a blog post urging people to 'please learn how to write,' I pull rank with my English degree to argue there's no such thing as proper English…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 13/09/2026

There's an overwhelming joy I feel being alive. I'm so grateful for the unpaid volunteers maintaining important projects. Reclaiming joy is an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace. brennan.day/there-is-so-...

There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.

Taking stock of myself and the world, I reflect on the overwhelming joy of being alive on this Pale Blue Dot—from the billions keeping civilization running…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 11/09/2026

stopomarchy.neocities.org

stopomarchy.neocities.org

STOP OMARCHY: Boycott Tech's Far-Right Backers

Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 11/09/2026

It's been 25 years since the September 11, and I reflect on being five years old and watching the attacks. There's an urgent need to not forget the cruelty and the kindness of that day and its aftermath. brennan.day/a-quarter-of...

A Quarter of a Century Later

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, I reflect on being five years old and watching the attacks from a green shag carpet in Winnipeg, the cultu…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 10/09/2026

With news of even more tech companies deciding to fund DHH and Omarchy, I decided to take a look again at alternative (and perhaps better) visions of the Internet which already exist. We are not as bound to complicit systems as the systems would like you to think. brennan.day/oldnets-and-...

Oldnets and Altnets: A Guide to Building a Low-Spec Daily Internet Out of Gemini, Gopher, and Terminal Tools

Reacting to the Omarchy and DigitalOcean news, I set out a curated low-spec, text-first alternative to the modern web: Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Lynx-friend…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 09/09/2026

DigitalOcean has also just been added, giving an additional $3 million dollars omarchy.org/news/2026/09...

DigitalOcean joins as a Founding Corporate Patron with $3 million - Omarchy News

DigitalOcean is joining the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1 million a year for three years! That’s a $3 million commitment to the development, maintenance, and spread...

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 09/09/2026

Contributing $100,000 a year for three years: - Four Technologies Contributing $1.5 million in tokens: - Meta Superintelligence Labs Contributing $150,000 in tokens each: - Anthropic - Fireworks - OpenAI - OpenRouter omarchy.org/news/2026/08...

Omacom Foundation launches with $18.5 million - Omarchy News

It’s time to dream big. Omarchy Quattro has given people a chance to experience what the malleable computer of the future looks like, and they like it (a lot!). It now feels like a moral obligation to...

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 09/09/2026

Since writing my article, even more people and companies have decided to fund Omarchy and DHH: Contributing $100,000 each: - Ryan R. Hughes, partner at Oodle - Ed Huang, cofounder and CTO of PingCAP - Adrien Treccani, founder of Metaco - Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 08/09/2026

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 08/09/2026

I accidentally discovered that NeoCities' mysterious screenshot bot, an undocumented service called "ScreenJesus" has no rate limits. And that's kind of a problem. How it happened, why it's a worrying little vulnerability, and what could fix it: brennan.day/how-the-myst...

How the Mysterious ScreenJesus can DDoS You

How a bug in my own CI/CD accidentally uncovered a novel vulnerability in NeoCities: ScreenJesus, the undocumented screenshot bot behind thumbnail previews…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 06/09/2026

I've always been a fan of showing my work and pulling the curtain back to show how things are behind-the-scenes. So, I've decided to take stock and audit the current state of the many projects and sites I've began over the past year. Take a look. brennan.day/tending-the-...

Tending the Garden I Have: A Current State of Affairs

Taking stock of my digital garden before the first frost: an honest audit of everything I'm tending online, from Brennan.day and fanfiction.lol to my 565-day writing streak, plus the projects I've…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 04/09/2026

What do we lose when we stop doing the work? How do we become good at *anything* if we merely delegate it to AI and machines? The answer, argued by poets, is the love of the work itself. brennan.day/love-is-for-...

Love is for the ones who love the work.

Taking the final line of Joseph Fasano's poem 'For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper' as a starting point, I argue that loving the verb of creation matters more than daydreaming the noun.…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 02/09/2026

@jimmitchell.org the people really want to know, Jim.

GitHub Issue: Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 on every commit is at odds with this being a “hand-written” manifesto #1

The site and README repeatedly celebrate the work as "hand-made", "DIY", and "independent of big, extractive tech." A few examples:

footer: “One hand-written HTML file, marked up with h-entry.”
README: “One hand-written HTML file. No build step, no framework, no bundler...”
Chapter VI: “Keep it handmade. Keep the mohawks.”
Chapter VIII: “We opt out of the surveillance feed... We opt into a web made of small, stubborn, independent spaces...”

Yet the public commit history shows that all commits in this repo are signed Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>, including the initial commit that created “The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto.”

Claude is Anthropic’s proprietary LLM, and is the kind of well-funded, centralized corporation the manifesto argues against.

Using an LLM to build an anti-platform, anti-corporate, DIY manifesto is, at minimum, odd. Claiming the page is “hand-written” while depending on genAI looks like hypocrisy. Would you be willing to add a note about the LLM collaboration, or stop calling it hand-written?

reactions: 84 thumbs-up, 35 hearts, 8 rockets, 3 eyes

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 01/09/2026

Shopify, Stripe, Dell Technologies, Block, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Coinbase, OpenClaw, and TapTap. All companies that have given millions of dollars to a project run by a far-right white nationalist. Why are we okay with this? brennan.day/normalized-f...

Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH

Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 31/08/2026

For my last post of Blaugust, I decided to take it easy and... write a 4,700 post! :D That's 31 posts for 31 days, writing 54,000 words in total this month. Happy #WorldBlogDay ! brennan.day/100-question... #webdev #indieweb #smallweb #writing #interview

100 Questions for Webmasters

A hundred-question chain meme making the rounds about how and why we make websites. I answer my way through questions on workflow, editors, CSS confidence, webrings, Neocities and Nekoweb, domain…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 30/08/2026

Debian just voted that disclosure of AI use is encouraged, but not required. No corporation (with the exception of Nvidia) has found profitability with AI so far. 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing. Who gains from any of this, exactly? brennan.day/sad-machine/

Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 28/08/2026

Free online courses are in a sharp decline over the past several years. And so, I'm announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing. I invite contributors and learners to help shape it! brennan.day/creating-an-...

Creating an Open-source Blogging Studies Syllabus

Announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing, built on Codeberg. I trace the decline of free MOOCs, outline my…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 26/08/2026

Hope is not an emotion, it is a necessary political strategy for our survival. I discuss about how I will continue to provide hope and optimism as a citizen journalist in my independent publication. brennan.day/being-a-tool...

Being a Toolshed of Optimism

Reflecting on a reader's description of me as 'nice' and the responsibility of having an audience, I commit to becoming a 'toolshed of hope and stubborn optimism' in my writing. Drawing on solutions…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 24/08/2026

Do you blog? From wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, I trace how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. brennan.day/a-450-year-h...

A 450-year History of Blogging

A four century etymological journey from wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, tracing how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing.…

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 19/08/2026

I just wrote a guide to becoming a "rogue scholar" and how to turn your independent personal site into academic scholarship. How? Issue numbering, ISSN metadata, publication info, citation meta tags, Dublin Core, ORCID integration, and more. brennan.day/a-guide-to-b...

A Guide to Becoming a Rogue Scholar

I've been weighing grad school against continuing my own open-access publication, so I wrote a guide to becoming a 'Rogue Scholar' using ORCID, citation metadata, issue numbers, print CSS, and…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 18/08/2026

I've found myself the target of satire. And honestly? I want to see more of it. And I don't want any punches pulled. The Trickster is one of the most important figures in Indigenous storytelling. brennan.day/outjerked-by...

Outjerked by the Trickster

I've been satirized by circlejerk.blog, and I reflect on the history of online circlejerking, Indigenous trickster traditions like Coyote and Chi-Jean, and the concept of survivance. A call for more…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 17/08/2026

I'm reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' as the multidisciplinary creator who designs, develops, writes, and advocates for their own corner of the web and will save the world. And you can join in. brennan.day/webmaster-a-...

WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone

I'm reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' as the multidisciplinary creator who designs, develops, writes, and advocates for their own corner of the web and will save the world. Tracing the history from…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 15/08/2026

Do you know about the Website Specification's 140-item checklist? It covers foundations, a11y, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. I audited my own website, and wrote about CSP debugging, CORS issues, many small improvements, and what I didn't fix. brennan.day/advanced-web...

Advanced Webweaving: Auditing Against Specification.Website

I ran brennan.day against The Website Specification's 140-item checklist covering foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. Notes on a broken web manifest I'd…

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 13/08/2026

I tried to interview an anonymous blogger. It didn't really work out. brennan.day/suspect-happ...

Suspect Happiness in Pursuit: An Anti-Interview with Unstory

On the 50/10/40 split of happiness research, the Declaration of Independence's 'pursuit of happiness,' and an exchange with anonymous blogger Unstory about free will, determinism, and whether we can…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 13/08/2026

yes! I'm pretty proud with how much you can change just from this single file, kinda like how Tumblr works lmao github.com/brennanbrown...

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 12/08/2026

I've completely overhauled my IndieWeb 11ty Starter to make it simpler and more accessible for people getting into JAMstack and the IndieWeb. It now uses Eleventy 3.x with a modular config structure, chota.css instead of Tailwind, and Pagefind for fast, serverless search.

GitHub - brennanbrown/11ty-Indie-Web-Blog-Starter: 🎈 A modern, feature-complete blog template built with Eleventy and Tailwind CSS. Designed for writers who want to own their content and participate in the IndieWeb.

🎈 A modern, feature-complete blog template built with Eleventy and Tailwind CSS. Designed for writers who want to own their content and participate in the IndieWeb. -…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 11/08/2026

Awe and wonder as parts of scientific practice. Scientists spent the twentieth century discovering an entire second sky above the one we already knew, and named it after folklore. Sprites, elves, trolls, ghosts, gnomes, pixies. brennan.day/our-skies-co...

Our Skies Contain Sprites, Elves, Trolls, Pixies, Ghosts, and Gnomes

Yes, really. Exploring the magical world of transient luminous events in the upper atmosphere: sprites, elves, blue jets, trolls, pixies, ghosts, and gnomes. How scientists named these…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 09/08/2026

Do you enjoy concise writing that gets straight to the point, or longform writing that wanders? And, if you're a writer, do you use a writer deck? brennan.day/i-would-have...

I Would Have Written a Shorter Blog Post, But I Didn’t Have the Time: Creating a WriterDeck

On the KISS principle and Pascal's apology for long letters, the cultural shift away from minimalism, and the growing trend of writer decks. A technical guide to creating a distraction-free writing…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 08/08/2026

Frameworks and scripting (not to mention AI) can make us forget that at the end of the day, the Internet really is just HTML. Happy HTML Day 2026! brennan.day/html-day-2026/

Every Tag Has Its Day: HTML Day 2026

A page about HTML's history, written in HTML, for HTML Day 2026.

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 08/08/2026

What do you think counts as acceptable speech online? Would you be willing to defend the right to anybody's free speech? brennan.day/free-speech-...

Free Speech and the IndieWeb

After rescinding a recommendation for BlueDwarf, I explore the spectrum of harm across platforms from X to Substack, and argue that not all harm is equal. On free speech absolutism, cognitive…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 07/08/2026

Are you someone that cares deeply about the metrics you receive when you post? If so, why? brennan.day/what-remains...

What Remains? My AuguStory

On the shutdown of EchoFeed and the ephemeral nature of services, why I blog (legacy, existentialism, making a mark), participating in AuguStory, academic studies on blogging benefits, and the…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 06/08/2026

The Internet is full of interesting platforms that serve as alternatives to corporate social media. It's really cool what indie devs are doing (without genAI) to build digital community. brennan.day/five-interes...

Five Interesting Indie Platforms You Might Not Have Heard Of

After deleting my corporate social media accounts, I've discovered five interesting indie platforms and online communities you might not have heard of: Special Fish, Ctrl + Shift + 3, web1.0 Hosting,…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 05/08/2026

I'm looking for my next adventure, any ideas? I do not want a foundation myth, a fifth thing-I-started. To scratch the itch doesn't mean building more. No, the obvious answer is rarely the correct one. Good writing is inevitable, not predictable, and life works similarly. brennan.day/the-itch/

Trying to figure out what 'the itch' is—my drive to create and contribute to the digital commons. A review of past projects, current interests in Indigenous data sovereignty and self-hosting, and the…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 02/08/2026

Right now, there are over 115 million channels on YouTube. But if I had to pick just one out of all of them? My answer comes easy and without hesitation. brennan.day/sbsk-is-the-...

SBSK is The Most Important Channel on YouTube

Special Books by Special Kids is the most important channel on YouTube. Chris Ulmer and Alyssa Porter's decade-long project interviewing neurodiverse individuals and people with disabilities has…

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 01/08/2026

2 billion people only access the Internet through their mobile device. Yet, we're still often designing and creating with the assumption that everyone has a desktop. We need to prioritize mobile UX for longform writing and publishing, particularly for indie platforms. brennan.day/phoneblogging/

Around 2 billion people access the internet exclusively via smartphones, yet the IndieWeb community largely neglects mobile-first design and phoneblogging UX. A casual survey of writers reveals three…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 30/07/2026

A CPU begins as sand. The silicon of the processor begins as ordinary quartzite, purified into metallurgical-grade silicon, then refined again to 99.999999999% purity How do we not have awe towards such a thing? brennan.day/wow-i-love-t...

Wow, I Love the 'Puter!

The desktop computer is a miracle of human ingenuity, from the microscopic precision of Intel's Core Duo processor to the vast possibilities of offline and online computing. On the tragic decline of…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 27/07/2026

How do we improve the web? The way you improve any web: by adding more connectivity. A web becomes stronger and more durable the more interlinking threads and strands there are. When we link to each other, the ecosystem of the blogosphere improves. brennan.day/knitting-the...

Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!

Responding to Coyote's critique of Bubbles.town and feed aggregators, I argue that the IndieWeb needs more interlinkers—bloggers who meaningfully synthesize and weave together the writing of others.…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 25/07/2026

I've started a digital garden that also let's me keep track of my daily word count. Full technical write-up here: brennan.day/creating-a-d...

Creating a Digital Garden in 11ty: Tracking My Daily Word Count with URLminder

I decided to build brennan.click, a wiki-linked digital commonplace book in Eleventy, with auto-generated stubs created with eleventy-plugin-interlinker, pure-CSS hover transclusion and footnotes…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 22/07/2026

"I added +10,000 lines of code to my project thanks to my LLM MCP Agent!" Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. brennan.day/adding-thous...

Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Isn't Impressive. It's Actually Bad.

Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. Research shows AI-generated code has…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 20/07/2026

You don't need to be a web developer by trade to have your own website. The Internet was made for everyone, at every skill level, and we need to reclaim it. brennan.day/softcore-fir...

Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb

Responding to Adam Newbold's 'Hardcore IndieWeb' guide, I argue for a ladder approach to joining the IndieWeb. Rather than choosing between easy platforms and full technical independence, people…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 17/07/2026

As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers and the broader world? I went to look for an answer. brennan.day/what-have-no...

What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?

As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers…

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 15/07/2026

Clown-white greasepaint doesn't come off in one pass. You need cold cream first, then a soft cloth for the corners of the eyes. On whiteface & Auguste, Richard Simmons, DFW's tyranny of irony, Wisakedjak & the Windigoken, and never learning how to come down. brennan.day/clown-burnout/

Clown white doesn't come off in one pass. A personal story about how I can never take myself seriously no matter how hard I try. Notes on the history whiteface and Auguste, the clown egg registry,…

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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️ @brennan.day · 15/07/2026

okay, take care. sorry

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