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The Hunting of the Snark

@snarkhunt.bsky.social
922 followers 1.4K following 2.1K posts

Mainly about Henry Holiday's illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s "The Hunting of the Snark" by @goetzkluge.bsky.social ※ My Snark blog: snrk.de ※ SNARK! card game: @snark.games ※ Ambiguous Snark: @finger-in-his-hair.bsky.social

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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 6h
That's by George Harrison, albeit inspired by Lewis Carroll. You won't find a text with this wording in Carroll's writings.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Nice quote, even though Lewis Carroll didn't write that. It's probably from a movie.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
It's a nice quote. Lewis Carroll probably would have agreed to it. However, you won't find it in any of his writings.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
IT WAS A BOOJUM

※ Left: Henry Holiday’s back cover illustration (1876) to Lewis Carroll’s "The Hunting of the Snark.
※ Right: Rearranged allegorical English School painting (by an unknown artist, ca. 1610) of Queen Elizabeth I at Old Age with allegory of Death and Father Time.
(EAN: 4050356835081. Location of original painting: Corsham Court, Wiltshire, England, UK)
Rearrangement: Parts of the lower segment are shown in mirror view.

Details: https://snrk.de/page_elizabeth-i/
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Nice quote, but knowing the past can help to learn something for the future.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Luckily it's not that bad. But in quite a few cases the social media posts of the accusers tell more about about their fantasies and their intentions than about the accused persons.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
In my blog about Henry Holiday's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's illustrations I also addressed the Dodgson debate, which in the Internet usually has a quite low quality. snrk.de/kwm
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
A citação pode ser do roteiro de Linda Woolverton para o Alice filme de 2010. Mas hoje estou com preguiça de verificar.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
É uma bela citação. Lewis Carroll provavelmente concordaria com ela, mas você não a encontrará em nenhum de seus escritos. A citação é (quase) verdadeira para qualquer ser capaz de contar o tempo de Planck de maneira bastante tranquila.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Yes, with ephebophilia I chose the wrong term.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Sadly, some still are using "we" as the pluralis majestatis of "me".
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
snrk.de/drugs
    The drug link is a homespun thing. You’ll find it on a host of random forums.

    But the experts are usually sceptical. Carroll wasn’t thought to have been a recreational user of opium or laudanum, and the references may say more about the people making them than the author.

    “The notion that the surreal aspects of the text are the consequence of drug-fuelled dreams resonates with a culture, particularly perhaps in the 60s, 70s and 80s when LSD was widely-circulated and even now where recreational drugs are commonplace,” says Dr Heather Worthington, Children’s Literature lecturer at Cardiff University.

Source: Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?
(by Sophie Robehmed, BBC magazine 2012-08-20)

Source of this screenshot: https://snrk.de/drugs/    Let me be perfectly clear here: Lewis Carroll didn’t do recreational drugs. Certainly there were drug references in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and these were picked up on by people with interests in that area, particularly in the late sixties. That is not to say that Carroll never took Laudanum for a medical problem on the advice of a doctor. There is NO direct proof (in his letters or his diaries) that he ever took narcotic drugs. You might ask yourself why students insist that he did and why some teachers teach that he did.

        Alice gets linked to the drug culture. No, Lewis Carroll did not use mind altering drugs to increase his creativity. He used his imagination. If you have one, it’s better than drugs. If you don’t, the drugs won’t help you. With apologies to the late Timothy Leary.
        This can’t be true
        A couple of acid blotters
        Chemical Alice the band
        Using Alice to JUST SAY NO

Source: lewiscarroll.org (2002)

Source of this screenshot: https://snrk.de/drugs/
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
As for the Republican felon, it’s probably about ephebophilia.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
You might be interested in snrk.de/kwm/.
snrk.de
Carroll Studies’ Evidence Problem – The Hunting of the Snark
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It's a nice quote. Lewis Carroll probably would have agreed to it, but you won't find it in any of his writings. The quote is (almost) true for any being who can count Planck seconds in a very relaxed manner. Have a good night too. 😴
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I tried it and like it.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Could it be that this is not by Lewis Carroll but from Linda Woolverton's screenplay for the 2010 Alice movie?
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I don't know whether Lewis Carroll knew this painting. Gabriel Cornelius von Max - The Vivisector (1883), Neue Pinakothek, Munich Source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ga...
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
I recommend Lewis Carroll and Henry Holiday’s “The Hunting of the Snark” (snrk.de/snarkhunt). Image source: snrk.de/starry-map/.
https://snrk.de/starry-map/

John Tufail’s “The Illuminated Snark” (p. 15) lead me to this comparison. In 2004 he interpreted the starry night sky in Henry Holiday’s front cover illustration to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” (1876) as a map, where the white clouds represented land with rivers. I liked the suggestion, but did not find any real-world map to which Holiday might have alluded. Holiday engraved that illustration himself.

I discovered John Tufail’s paper in 2009. Only today, after 15 years, I got the idea to compress and flip a large segment of a map of the British isles vertically. That’s my “slowness in taking a jest”. You see the result. Sadly, I can’t tell John that anymore. I appreciated his guidance a lot. The white clouds weren’t the land, but as for a map having been hidden in the illustration, John was right.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The Second Map THE CARROLLIAN The Lewis Carroll Journal Nos. 41&42 ISSN: 1462 6519 August 2026
Letters To the Editor

The Second Map

All readers of Lewis Carroll and Henry Holiday's tragicomedy "The Hunting of the Snark" know the OCEAN CHART, the Bellman's minimalistic map which everybody can understand. But there is a second map, which until this year probably nobody understood.
        In 2009 I learned from John Tufail's "The Illuminated Snark" (p. 15), that there might be a second map in Holiday's front cover illustration to Carroll's Snark tragicomedy. In 2004 Tufail interpreted the starry night sky in in that illustration as a map, where the white clouds represented land with rivers. Then the starry sky would represent the sea. I liked the suggestion, and spent some time with real maps. But I also with help from image comparing search engines did not find any real-world map to which Holiday might have alluded.
        But my search had a side effect. When looking for a painting with a map, I quite early found a painting which had a composition which had some similarities with Holiday's front cover illustration: The Ditchley Portrait (c. 1592, a gift from Sir Henry Lee to Queen Elizabeth I) by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger (https://elizabeth.snrk.de). But the map on which the powerful Queen was standing still did not have any similarity with any shape in the front cover illustration.

I gave up on my map search and looked at other paintings in the Internet depicting Queen Elizabeth I. It didn't take long to discover of Queen Elizabeth I at Old Age with allegory of Death and Father Time (c. 1610, by an unknown artist, see also https://elizabeth.snrk.de) where I found similarities to the back cover illustration to Carroll's Snark. After this, I found quite a few other works of art.

In 2022 I thought that my own Snark hunt has ended. Suddenly, in May 2024, when looking at the front cover illustration again, I got the idea to compress and flip a large segment of a map of the British isles vertically. That was surely a "slowness in taking a jest".

p. 8815 years after my Snark in Henry holiday's illustrations hunt started You see the result [image], so I don't have to explain to which country the hidden map in Holiday's front cover illustration referred (https://map2.snrk.de).

I appreciated John Tufail's guidance (by email and by phone) a lot. Sadly, I can't tell John anymore what I found thanks to him. The white clouds weren't the land, but as for a map having been hidden in the illustration, John was right.

The Snark hunt never ends.
Goetz Kluge

p. 89

THE CARROLLIAN
The Lewis Carroll Journal
Nos. 41&42 ISSN: 1462 6519
Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the
publication of
The Hunting of the Snark
[August] 2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
You might be interested in Katherine Wakely-Mulroney's "The Man Who Loved Children: Carroll Studies’ Evidence Problem, Journal of the History of Sexuality", University of Texas Press, Vol. 30, № 3, pp. 335-362, 2021-09, www.academia.edu/67147027/The...
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Today I used @proton.me's Lumo AI for the first time. I had some questions about "The Hunting of the Snark". Without having been asked, Lumo told me that in snrk.de/snarkhunt a date 1897-12-01 is inconsistent with the correct date 1897-01-12 in my Snark blog. I corrected the error. Kudos to Lumo.
[...] Second, one page on your own site (snrk.de/snarkhunt) dates the letter as 1897-12-01, which looks like a day/month transposition of the January 12 date your main page and Wikipedia give — possibly worth a look if you want consistency across your pages. [...]

Source: https://lumo.proton.me, 2026-09-30
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It‘s not even clear that Carroll was “in the spectrum”.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Why would Carroll approve?
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
That's probably why in Lewis Carroll's tragicomedy "The Hunting of the Snark" the Barrister complained about the Beaver's lace-making. snrk.de/page_vivisec...
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I reach Snark lovers.
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150 Years of Snark @snark150.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Celebrating the Snark's 150th anniversary with a Haskell truth checker: What I tell you three times is true! www.reddit.com/r/LewisCarro...
Celebrating the Snark's 150th anniversary with a Haskell truth checker: What I tell you three times is true!

https://www.reddit.com/r/LewisCarroll/comments/1s6u2ty/celebrating_the_snarks_150th_anniversary_with_a/

----

Today (March 29th, 2026) we can start to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll and Henry Holiday's "The Hunting of the Snark". Carroll distributed first editions of his Snark tragicomedy to selected friends and family before the official publication date. Macmillan officially published the poem on April 1st, 1876, but Carroll prepared 80 presentation copies on March 29th, 1876, many of which he signed and gave away.

On occasion of the 150th anniversary of Carroll's long Snark poem and Holiday's Snark illustrations, I now provide you with a tool for which our snarked world has been waiting since the big bang (or even earlier). The tool checks assertions in a table of assertionsbased on the Bellman's rule: "What I tell you three times is true!". The function atLeastThrice yields all assertions which it can find at least three times in the assertions table.

The function uses a fact checking algorithm which also is used by the most powerful leaders of the world.

The function makes fact checking great again.
The function makes fact checking great again.
The function makes fact checking great again.

Here is my implementation of "What I tell you three times is true" in Haskell:

    atLeastThrice :: [String] -> [String]
    atLeastThrice assertions =
      [head grp | grp <-
        group $ sort assertions, length grp >= 3]

ChatGPT's explanation of atLeastThrice: "Thank you for providing the implementation in Haskell. Yes, your implementation looks correct. The "group" function groups the same elements in the list together, then you are filtering out the groups that have less than three elements, and finally returning the head of each group (which is the repeated assertion)."
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Are @snark150.bsky.social, @finger-in-his-hair.bsky.social and snrk.de sufficiently oddballish for an "extraordinarily unique literature magazine" like @oddballmagazine.bsky.social?
https://snrk.de/starry-map/

John Tufail’s “The Illuminated Snark” (p. 15) lead me to this comparison. In 2004 he interpreted the starry night sky in Henry Holiday’s front cover illustration to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” (1876) as a map, where the white clouds represented land with rivers. I liked the suggestion, but did not find any real-world map to which Holiday might have alluded. Holiday engraved that illustration himself.

I discovered John Tufail’s paper in 2009. Only today, after 15 years, I got the idea to compress and flip a large segment of a map of the British isles vertically. That’s my “slowness in taking a jest”. You see the result. Sadly, I can’t tell John that anymore. I appreciated his guidance a lot. The white clouds weren’t the land, but as for a map having been hidden in the illustration, John was right.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The Guardian missed the 150 anniversary of Lewis Carroll and Henry Holiday's "The Hunting of the Snark". How come? Do the Brits leave celebrating the anniversary of this masterfully written and illustrated tragicomedy to Krauts like me? Is @katharineviner.bsky.social afraid of Carroll (snrk.de/kwm)?
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The previous posts where about Henry Holiday's jokes in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". The post below is about the Snark's "fondness for bathing-machines" (snrk.de/snarks-have-...). The "nonsense" is an Oxford Christ Church College insider joke.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
"Ceci n'est pas un cigare." I added some yellow lines to a detail from Henry Holiday's illustration to the last fit (chapter) of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". snrk.de/page_this-is...
"Ceci n'est pas un cigar." (https://snrk.de/page_this-is-no-cigar)

Detail from Henry Holiday's illustration to the last fit (chapter) of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" showing a simulacrum about which, as far as I know, until now no AI based image content checker complained. And here I mean the simulacrum on the lower left side of the illustration and not the "torso-like simulacrum" (see https://snrk.de/page_this-is-no-cigar/#Tufail) on the lower right side.

Holiday's dark illustration (https://snrk.de/snarkhunt/#561) to the 8th fit of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" is quite challenging. He found a way to hold the beholders of his illustrations responsible for what they "see".

Holiday might have gotten some ideas from his teacher John Everett Millais (https://snrk.de/page_lorenzo-and-isabella/).
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
... un cigare ...
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Of course Lewis Carroll didn‘t provide spoilers. But I do: In Carroll‘s time, writing desks and ravens both got feathers on them.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/goet...
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
jimkersey.bsky.social is back in the blue sky.
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Lewis Carroll understood people well (which helps to be prescient), but he didn't write "The truth doesn't matter. It only matters what people believe." Was it Linda Woolverton, who wrote the screenplay for the 2010 Alice movie?
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
@awkwardisallowed.bsky.social and @annleckie.com, I am one of those terrible people who believe that Douglas Adams got some inspirations from Lewis Carroll. However, both of course knew that spoilers which confirm the readers' assumptions would narrow the interpretation space of their stories.
snrk.de
Search Results for “CarrollAdams42” – The Hunting of the Snark
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
About Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams' "42": snrk.de?s=CarrollAda...
snrk.de
Search Results for “CarrollAdams42” – The Hunting of the Snark
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
#DouglasAdams #Number42 #DeepThought #LewisCarroll #TheHuntingOfTheSnark From snrk.de/douglas-adam... :
From https://snrk.de/douglas-adams-and-lewis-carroll/ :

By Douglas Adams, alt.fan.douglas-adams (quoted in http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=images&as_umsgid=adamsd.1102700746A@news.cerf.net), 1993:

It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do.’ I typed it out. End of story.

That said (by the author himself!), did Adams know after the number 42 popped up in his head that Lewis Carroll used that number in his Alice books and in The Hunting of the Snark? Might he have enjoyed the thought, that some readers would interpret the 42 as a nod to Carroll?
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Update 2026-09-15 (snrk.de/adams42/#Ned...) with a quote from Will Nediger's "Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams" (2005).
«The Hunting of the Snark is subtitled An Agony in Eight Fits (from “Fit the First” to “Fit the Eighth”), “Fit,” writes Martin Gardner in The Annotated Snark, “has the double meaning of a convulsion and a canto.” But this sense is all but obsolete; the OED quotes Samuel Johnson and Lord Byron. It seems unlikely that it was by chance that Douglas Adams titled the episodes of the Hitchhiker radio series (on which the books were based) from “Fit the First” to “Fit the Sixth”.
        If you’re still not convinced, compare the White Queen’s line in Through the Looking-Glass (“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”) to the end of Chapter 15 of Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (“If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”).»

(Source: Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams by Will Nediger, 2005, Word Ways journal, https://snrk.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/WILL-NEDIGER_Lewis-Carroll-and-Douglas-Adams.pdf and https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol38/iss1/6/)
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The Hunting of the Snark @snarkhunt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
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