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Rob Gallagher

@gealga.bsky.social
353 followers 334 following 178 posts

Lecturer in Digital Media, King's College London. Co-director MA Digital Futures. Author of Videogames, Identity & Digital Subjectivity (Routledge 2017) and Artgames after Gamergate (Palgrave 2025): link.springer.com/book/9783032044341

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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This looks rad: special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies on 'brainrot, AI slop, and the enshittification of the Internet', with a killer lineup of contributors doi.org/10.1177/1367...
doi.org
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
September's Field Work NTS show is up - please enjoy a "guitars that don't sound like guitars" special, ft. Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi & Jake Muir, among others www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...
nts.live
Field Work 12th September 2026
Playing Experimental, Ambient, Drone. Experimental and intercepted transmissions every month with Field Work friends and family. Accompanied by GIFs at http://fieldworklondon.tumblr.com. From the host...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Nolan's Odyssey <<<<<<< Yang's Lysistrata
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
very poor citational politics from Lush here. GIVE TERRANOVA HER FLOWERS
a window display in a branch of UK retailer Lush, purveyor of sector-leadingly lurid & pungent handmade soaps & cosmetics. Signs read "SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT FREE" & "THE REAL COST OF YOUR CLICK"
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
exhibiting artistic videogames means painstakingly configuring a multisensory playglade & then having to hastily print an A4 sheet that says FRAGILE - PLEASE DO NOT MOVE THE ROCK CONTROLLER FROM THIS STUMP
Alan Kwan's game Scent installed at Bristol's Undershed gallery. Next to the big lithic controller sat on its tree stump table is a sign that reads FRAGILE - PLEASE DO NOT MOVE THE ROCK CONTROLLER FROM THIS STUMP
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Sebastian Möring @sebomat.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
📚 Out now in open access: Games and Literature, ed. @dilan-c.bsky.social, @annakinder.bsky.social & @sebomat.bsky.social (@wallsteinverlag.bsky.social). 23 chapters on games, narrative and preservation 👇 www.wallstein-open-library.de/978383536017...
wallstein-open-library.de
Games and Literature | Wallstein Open Library
Are computer games literature? »Games and Literature« explores the intersections of literary studies and digital games. This volume examines how games function as narrative media, cultural artefacts,...
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Games Transformed @gamestransformed.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Call for Proposals 🔊 Help us shape the Games Transformed Festival by submitting your proposals for the festival programme or exhibition area! The deadline for submissions is July 31st, 2026. Submit now: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
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Paolo Ruffino @paoloruffino.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Very pleased to announce the publication of Game Engine Culture(s) by Mimesis International, a collection I have co-edited with my friends and colleagues Matteo Bittanti and Valentino Catricalà milanmachinimafestival.org/game-engine-...
milanmachinimafestival.org
Game Engine Culture(s) — MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
doing some external examining for a uni I once worked at & touched to see that the .jpg of James Hadley's 1882 Aesthetic Teapot I uploaded 7 years ago is still the header image for the English dept's Queer Histories module on the VLE 🥲
the masc face of James Hadley's Aesthetic Teapot (1882). Here's his handle, here's his spoutthe femme face of James Hadley's Aesthetic Teapot (1882). Here's her handle, here's her spout
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IOCOSE @iocose.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Join us tomorrow at King's College London for the Reverse Contradictionary workshop! 🕓 16:00-18:00 🏛️ Room BH (NE)1.03 Bush House North East Wing, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG 🔗 Registration link: lnkd.in/eD-92qYr
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
this news totally passed me by... 'Morelli, Freud & Sherlock Holmes: Clues & Scientific Method' blew my head clean off as a grad student & is an article I still think about a lot (even more so in the age of scouring images for hints of being AI-generated)
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
ymmv, but some good tunes to ride out an oppressively torrid spell with this month I think www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...
nts.live
Field Work 20th June 2026
Playing Electronica, Experimental, Ambient, Drone. Experimental and intercepted transmissions every month with Field Work friends and family. Accompanied by GIFs at http://fieldworklondon.tumblr.com. ...
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Do you make art and weird things with computers? Would you like to meet other people who do and talk to them about it? This June we're hosting a creativity unconference at King's - CUAK for short. Sat June 27th - Bush House - 9.30am-5.30pm Info and free tickets: www.possibilityspace.org/cuak/ 🦆
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Digital Humanities @ King's College London @kingsdh.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Interdisciplinary conference | Multisensory XR: From 'Tech for Good' to Ethical Immersive Experience KCL, London, 6-7 Jan 2027 Organised by the Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception and @joannazylinska.bsky.social Abstracts by Sept. 1 multisensoryxr.sites.er.kcl.ac.uk/2026/06/36/
multisensoryxr.sites.er.kcl.ac.uk
CFP: Multisensory XR – Multisensory XR :
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
might fuck about & get extremely into point 'n' click adventure games for the next 6-8 weeks
a plaster cast protecting a fractured scaphoid bone
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
I'm helping host a panel for the DFI's Festival of Storytelling next week - we'll be talking about games and nonlinear storytelling - @playthroughline.com @heidi-colthup.bsky.social and John Wills will all be there sharing amazing insights! Free tickets here: www.tickettailor.com/events/dfist...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
while we savour the Bogost Yoshi take, a lil reminder that I published a book last year asking what it would really mean for videogames to 'grow up' & arguing that the medium's growing pains have left it ideally placed to explore the popular loss of faith in prevailing economic and political models!
Quotation from Artgames after Gamergate: 'behind the question of whether videogames have matured as a medium lies another, bigger question: what would it even mean for gaming to grow up in an era where the milestones that once defined adulthood have become either unobtainable or undesirable for many Americans? If it is no longer a given that individuals will grow out of hobbies like gaming, nor are they as likely to marry, have children, buy a home or climb a career ladder. Meanwhile, economic volatility, ecological fragility and geopolitical unrest are making better futures of any kind harder to imagine.'Quotation from Artgames after Gamergate: 'it was gaming culture’s failure to come of age that made videogames the perfect vehicle for exploring the experiences of a millennial generation trying to work out what adulthood should look like in the wake of events that had made existing models seem either anachronistic or unworkable. Their games look back to and borrow from games of the mid-late 1990s: an era when it was still possible for many Americans to buy into neoliberal centrists’ promises of peace, prosperity, growth and
progress, to believe that the internet would connect, enlighten and
empower them, that colourblind credit markets would usher in a classless, post-racial society, and that technocratic governance would do away with political factionalism. These promises turned out to be just as hollow as those of gaming companies who market each sequel and hardware upgrade as a revelatory paradigm shift.'
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
I not only think it's quite possible to articulate valid critiques of AI without recourse to ideas of Human sanctity, I think it's probably quite important that we do!
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
not a very summery NTS show this month, but a particularly nice one I think - some some Vox Populi, some Biosphere, a couple of tracks from a pleasantly moody/tender instrumental psych LP by the Kilbey bros. www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...
nts.live
Field Work 23rd May 2026
Playing Electronica, Modern Classical, Dark Ambient, Drone. Experimental and intercepted transmissions every month with Field Work friends and family. Accompanied by GIFs at http://fieldworklondon.tum...
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Jason Hawreliak @profjay.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Game dev folks, we are looking to survey people involved in the gaming industry to explore developer attitudes towards Generative AI in videogame development. The survey will take between 10-20 minutes. 1/2 brock.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
brock.ca1.qualtrics.com
Qualtrics Survey | Qualtrics Experience Management
The most powerful, simple and trusted way to gather experience data. Start your journey to experience management and try a free account today.
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Rasheed gave such a great keynote at last year's Digital Games Research Association conference - quite something to be that thoughtful & incisive & bleakly funny about making games grounded in historical trauma while also, you know, living through a genocide
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
In-laws have moved, & with them their extremely based Georg Elser relief
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
does feel telling that imagined applications for AI in gamedev - things like set dressing or dialogue for ancillary NPCs - are often in areas where devs have historically found leeway to crack idiosyncratic little jokes, pay tributes, gripe about living & working conditions under capitalism etc...
Screenshot of a text found in a library in Shining Force III (Camelot, 1998) 'Some states still cling to the class structure. Class consciousness is rising'A worker's room from Dark Savior (Climax, 1996). A man is lying on the ground but we are assured 'He is not dead. He is tired from too much work'. On the walls are posters showing a pin-up in a loincoth flexing his musclesscreenshot from Phantasy Star Online (Sonic Team, 2000). The onscreen text reads 'These are our recommendations right now: Find and bring back a greedy landlord!'
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
I'll be chatting w/ colleagues from philosophy, psychology & DH for this @kings-dfi.bsky.social event on the 27th - come & hear what feminist lit crit, game studies & trans studies can tell us about gender's role in discourses of digital distraction www.tickettailor.com/events/centr...
tickettailor.com
Sold out – Ecologies of Attention and Perception – King’s College London, Strand, Strand Building S-2.23 [floor MINUS 2, room 23]
Ecologies of Attention and Perception – King’s College London, Strand, Strand Building S-2.23 [floor MINUS 2, room 23], Wed 27 May 2026 - Please join us for the celebration of the re-launch of the Cen...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
as a voice actor it's not every day you're confronted with a line like "entering the depth of Uranus" & I personally think the announcer in Cyber-Commando (Namco, 1994) rises to the occasion admirably youtu.be/fuR1DxW3D-8?...
youtu.be
Cyber Commando (Arcade) Playthrough (Cyber Sled Sequel)
YouTube video by TheConsole Killer
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
New open access article with @giotita.bsky.social! Who/what is considered fit to imagine the future today? As reactionaries churn out programmes for post-democratic technofutures, we argue that collectively reclaiming the future will require a rethinking of agency link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
Futures at the Threshold: Between Autonomy and Automation - Philosophy & Technology
This paper argues that contemporary visions of the digital future frequently sideline democratic politics, sometimes to the point of explicitly proposing post-democratic futures. These visions reflect...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
none of the C21st plutocrats at the Met Gala making sartorial moves on anything _like_ the level of Habsburg financier Jakob Fugger in the 1498 portrait I saw this weekend
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
April Field Work show is here; 2 hours of skewed chamber music ft. Scott Walker, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anna Homler & a divinely deranged interpretation of a composition by Hildegard von Bingen, plus a smattering of Thomas Stearns Eliot to see out this cruellest of months www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...
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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Come work at Birkbeck! We're hiring a full-time, permanent Lecturer in Digital Media and AI. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH875/l...
jobs.ac.uk
Lecturer in Digital Media and AI at Birkbeck, University of London
Discover Lecturer in Digital Media and AI jobs and more in higher education on jobs.ac.uk. Apply for further details on the top job board.
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
properly cockle-warming potted biography of a guy who made some of the all-time garage rollers & turns out to be an anti-imperialist sweetie it seems daily.bandcamp.com/features/per...
daily.bandcamp.com
“I Was Never Interested in Being Owned”: An Interview with Persian, the Anonymous Iranian Pioneer of UK Rave
In a rare interview, the producer who usually shuns press opens up about his work.
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Incredible that they managed to get a working electronic dial-A-boy emulator running on the Nintendo Switch™!
a screenshot of the game Heart of the Killer (my favourite chapter) showing heroine BB warily surveying the 'electronic dial-A-boy', a toy with the form factor of a rotary phone, which offers a selection of five fit boys to dial
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Monday!
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
cool that the UK gets an annual public holiday just to meditate on how much this record slaps www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLb4...
youtube.com
Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?
YouTube video by Diamanda Galas, FM Einheit, Caspar Brötzmann - Topic
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
What are you going to do if they don't believe you? www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...
nts.live
Field Work 28th March 2026
Playing Electronica, Dub Techno, Ambient, Leftfield Pop. Experimental and intercepted transmissions every month with Field Work friends and family. Accompanied by GIFs at http://fieldworklondon.tumblr...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Interested in how novelists, poets & autoethnographers write experiences of digital gameplay? Join us online on April 13th for the next meeting of @kings-dfi.bsky.social's Ethics of Immersion reading group - details & sign-up link at www.kcl.ac.uk/events/ethic...
kcl.ac.uk
Ethics & Immersion in Gamer Life-Writing | King's College London
Please join us for the third session of the Reading Group on The Ethics of Immersion: Beyond ‘Tech for Good’ organised by the Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception at King’s College Lon...
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pmstudiouk.bsky.social @pmstudiouk.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
In this week's Lunchtime Talk on Fri 27 March, Dr. Max Haiven will explore how games have shaped 21st century capitalism and how to use social movements via games to fight back. Book a ticket on our website: www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/13848/were-being-played
watershed.co.uk
We're Being Played
In this Lunchtime Talk, Dr. Max Haiven will explore how games have shaped 21st century capitalism and how social movements are using games to fight back.
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Kind of ancillary to the article's main thrust, but gives a sense of the different ways in which games have been a reference point & resource for the right... www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
theguardian.com
What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government
The long read: Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
meet me at bar Jank
Screenshot from Dark Savior (Climax Entertainment, 1996)
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Poppy Wilde @poppywilde.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
New FUNDED PhD opportunity with me, @doktornick.bsky.social, and @bomlab.bsky.social on 'Playing in Public: Game-Based Interventions for Sustainability, Community and Environmental Engagement' as part of the CreaTech Frontiers CDA scheme! Deadline: 10 April Details: www.bcu.ac.uk/research/our...
bcu.ac.uk
Playing in Public: Game-Based Interventions for Sustainability, Community and Environmental Engagement
This project explores socio-economic and environmental challenges faced by local communities, contextualised in local histories, through playful interventions with CreaTech, tested through public acti...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
randomly wound up watching King Kong '76 this week after a long day reading posts about the strait of Hormuz & was not ready for the extent to which it's an oil shock movie - not subtextually, but in a "the evil oil corp who kidnap Kong have him emerge from a 50ft petrol pump" way
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Note the zero-sum framing here - nothing is actually being offered to those 'vocationally trained... often male, working-class voters' beyond the revanchist thrill of seeing things taken away from uppity women with 'interesting jobs'
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Colleagues are running another games & social justice event at @kingsartshums.bsky.social in late May - come along to play-test some games & catch a roundtable on designing and teaching games about and/or for social justice. www.tickettailor.com/events/kings...
tickettailor.com
Select tickets – Gaming Social Justice 2 – REACH Space
Gaming Social Justice 2 – REACH Space, Thu 21 May 2026 - ‘Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop natura...
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
finished watching Adam Curtis' Shifty & can report that Sonic notches up two appearances to Mario's zero.
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
if the 96,331 words I wrote about these games doesn't convince you to try them, perhaps this exquisite montage of floppy Sonics & pachydermatous labour organisers & dreamy spritequilts & low poly Instituts für Sexualwissenschaft will?
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Had a lot of fun talking to Andrew about the book!
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Digital Scholarship at Oxford @discoxford.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
And if our previous event has inspired you - we have a Call for Papers now open for lightning talks at our upcoming online symposium on games preservation! #gamespreservation #gamesstudies digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/event/videog...
digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk
Videogame Preservation: Practices and Approaches, an Online Symposium
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Jeremy Gilbert @jemgilbert.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Fun and Games - call for papers for a special issue of @newformations.bsky.social on games, gamification, game culture etc: jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2026/02/17/f...
jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com
Fun & Games: Call for Papers for a special issue of New Formations
Fun and Games  Call for papers for a special issue of New Formation: a Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics ( New Formations is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that has been publ…
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
colleague brought their tweenage kid to my book talk (half-term); they conducted themselves impeccably across 90 mins of blather about asset libraries & enclosure & then spent the drinks reception playing book-themed hangman & offered everyone sour cherry tictacs. The kids are alright.
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Wild to burn billions inadvertently proving what post-structuralists concluded decades ago wrt subjecthood being a mirage produced by the scintillation of signifiers & wilder still for there to then be a never-ending supply of midwits queuing up to ask Is Computer People Now?
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Rob Gallagher @gealga.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
some of y'all need to remember that
A quotation from Literature & Evil, in which George Bataille (1957) asserts: 'The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear.'
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