“glowfic” apparently. written in a roleplay forum format.

This is not a story for kids, even less so than HPMOR. There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else so that they’ll end up damned to Hell, and also there’s math.

start here. or don’t, of course.

  • @blakestaceyMA
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    2410 months ago

    From a downvoted comment:

    Because players aren’t sure where a story is going and can’t edit previous sections, the stories tend to be plagued by pacing problems- scenes that could be a paragraph are dragged out over pages, important plot beats are glossed over, and so on. It’s also very rare that players are able to pull off the kind of coordination necessary for satisfying narrative buildup and payoff, and the focus on player character interaction tends to leave a lot of necessary story scaffolding like scene setting and NPC interaction badly lacking.

    If your goal in writing this was in part to promote or socially explore these utopian ideas rather than just to enjoy a forum game, it may be worth considering ways to mitigate these issues- to modify the Glowfic formula to better accommodate an audience.

    Yud’s response:

    We are both experienced authors not in need of this advice at this level.

    <no words, no words, they should have sent a poet.gif>

    • @swlabr
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      1510 months ago

      “Editing? Where we’re going, we don’t need editing!” - Absolutely not Eliezer. Too succinct.

      In my pursuit of clarity and precision, the art of composition itself becomes a meticulous process of refining ideas. Each word is a deliberate stroke, contributing to the coherence of thought, rendering traditional editing superfluous. The absence of formal editing is a deliberate choice, reflecting the belief that the initial act of creation captures the most authentic expression of my intellectual journey.

      Now that is what yud1 might say.

      1: By Yud I mean a 99.9% accurate simulation of Yud using ChatGPT, which, according to rationalist doctrine, is the same thing.

      • @froztbyte
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        910 months ago

        Ooh, there’s an idea. Train a LLM on his logorrhoea, output to a variety of places (as often with his face on a profile as not), and watch the little man twist himself up as he tries to position being okay with it while also really hating that it’s happening

    • @V0ldek
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      710 months ago

      Scenes that could be a paragraph are dragged out over pages

      Amazing that this can be applied directly to HPMoR, which doesn’t have the defense of “glowfic”.

    • @sc_griffith
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      510 months ago

      god he’s so stupid, sometimes it staggers me

  • @swlabr
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    1710 months ago

    There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else

    The fact that this isn’t just a ratfic of My Immortal is cowardice to the highest degree

    Also, I will mention it every time it comes up: “dath ilan” is an anagram of thailand and there just has to be a reason, dammit.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      2610 months ago

      Hi my name is Eliezer Rationa’lity Sanity Raven Jaynes and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with libertarian streaks and helpful tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Robin Hanson (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to E. T. Jaynes but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie.

    • David GerardOPMA
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      1710 months ago

      “Oh! Oh! Oh! ” I screamed. I was beginning to get an insight. We started to post everywhere and my pale body became all warm. And then….

      “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!”

      It was…………………………………………………….Kahneman!

      • @bitofhope
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        1010 months ago

        OTOH “mediocre dunces” is an amazing phrase and I will continue to refer to TREACLES as such.

      • @swlabr
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        810 months ago

        This is what I wanted, thanks. Stellar work as always.

    • @Evinceo
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      710 months ago

      When I tried to read it I felt like I was illiterate.

  • @Evinceo
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    1410 months ago

    Ok, I tried giving it a fair shake, and I guess it’s got the same problem as every other forum roleplay: it’s fun to roleplay, not fun to read someone else’s roleplay.

    • @swlabr
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      910 months ago

      Yeah, that’s where I’m at. I don’t think this is Yud doing HPMOR and trying to rope randos into rationality. Well, maybe he’s trying to rope the non-rat glowfic enjoyers, idk. In any case, this is Yud playing with a pal and having fun, I guess? Take that as you will.

      • @gerikson
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        10 months ago

        As long as he’s writing collab forum pr0n and not hindering the creation of the Acausal Robot God, it’s all good.

        Edit Yud is living disproof of the thesis that spending a large number of hours doing something makes one good at it.

        • @swlabr
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          1110 months ago

          I kind of wish there was a space in awful.systems to dunk on malcolm gladwell et al but it’s probably a little too far removed from stem fuckery.

          If you haven’t listened to the “outliers” episode of the “if books could kill” podcast, i recommend it!

              • @selfMA
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                1010 months ago

                hah I’m down for this! I wanted to start on the podcast you linked last night til I got sidetracked, but it looks like they tackle a bunch of my least favorite books that have been dropped on my doorstep like dead birds by family members

                broadly I’d say this is in-scope for our instance, because a lot of the writing tricks that the 90s thrift store fodder pop psychologists used to get famous got adopted directly by futurist authors to sound smart (and get famous), which in turn shaped how our current crop of rationalists and technofascists communicate. it’d be interesting to analyze that awful lineage.

                I’d say the two outstanding questions I have before we go for something like this are around scope and (of course) a good name. do we want this new community to sneer at the genres Deborah listed only, or is any crank/charlatan author fair game? should we start an interest check thread for this idea and discuss these things there?

                • David GerardOPMA
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                  710 months ago

                  i’d say Gladwell fits squarely into TechTakes

                • @swlabr
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                  610 months ago

                  Let’s get that thread going!

                • @Evinceo
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                  510 months ago

                  I’m here for it.

                • @froztbyte
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                  310 months ago

                  I generally don’t get to podcast at all ever because sensory fuckery interplaying with no effective space to listen to them (wfh, and when I go walking etc I listen to music not casts), so for me discussions and posts are where I tend to get the most info about topics

                  But I’d definitely be keen for an antibook club sub, whether here or elsewhere

                  Anecdotally, the only one of these books I ever purchased was Superfreakonomics (after it kept coming up in conversations around me in uni etc). I made it to page 2.5 before I had so many “okay, gonna have to research that claim” notes that 1) I’ve never opened that book again since, 2) it rapidly taught me something I’d had an inkling/guess of but then became certain of: popular != good. It’s been an extremely useful guideline in the years since

          • @Architeuthis
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            510 months ago

            If books could kill is so much fun.

      • @Evinceo
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        810 months ago

        glowfic enjoyers

        A real category?

        Seems like a write-only medium.

        But then, LitRPG also exists, much to my confusion and dismay.

          • @swlabr
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            810 months ago

            There’s a fine line between “no kinkshaming” and Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance

          • @Evinceo
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            710 months ago

            I can’t understand people who watch streams of other people playing D&D but I know those are wildly popular.

            I suppose people also watch other people play video games which is about the point where I started to feel like a confused out of touch elder.

            • @swlabr
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              510 months ago

              While I don’t listen to any “narrative play” podcasts (as I’ve heard them labelled as) I do listen to an amount of improv based podcasts. So on some level I understand the appeal. Also if you like comic books or blaseball or anything lore-heavy, that would be adjacent to narrative play.

              Let’s plays are speedrun adjacent so I also kinda like them. That being said that’s just what I get out of them. Everything I enjoy I have in mind that it ain’t for everyone (boy I wish it were for more people though…)

            • @locallynonlinear
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              410 months ago

              I love DnD and TTRPGs. I even love watching some streams when the quality is high. But I’m with you slides in pocket protector I don’t generally like this new wave of people who bring the expectation to my tables that every scene and every situation is a massive mellow drama mary sue projection for their OC that must be maximized.

              What was that about wit and brevity? Simple done well?

            • @froztbyte
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              310 months ago

              I’ll occasionally watch people play something that I deem as “looks interesting, but not enough so that I’ll want to purchase and play this myself”

              (Also for watching high-skill players do their thing, but that’s a different dynamic I think)

        • @swlabr
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          310 months ago

          Dawg, I wish it weren’t real, but here we are.

    • @Architeuthis
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      1710 months ago

      tvtropes

      The reason Keltham wants to have two dozen wives and 144 children, is that he knows Civilization doesn’t think someone with his psychological profile is worth much to them, and he wants to prove otherwise. What makes having that many children a particularly forceful argument is that he knows Civilization won’t subsidize him to have children, as they would if they thought his neurotype was worth replicating. By succeeding far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations in spite of that, he’d be proving they were not just mistaken about how valuable selfishness is, but so mistaken that they need to drastically reevaluate what they thought they knew about the world, because obviously several things were wrong if it led them to such a terrible prediction.

      huh

    • David GerardOPMA
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      10 months ago

      The case for turning glowfic into Sequences

      Eliezer stopped writing Sequences and probably cannot write more. This is a combination of Eliezer’s chronic fatigue syndrome and being tired of trolls / bad takes in comments. The only medium he can write in without being drained is glowfic. Thus, even though it’s a non-serious format, glowfic is Eliezer’s main intellectual output right now.

      what your donations of ETH buy

      If Eliezer can’t write nonfiction because of trolls and bad takes, won’t turning glowfic into Sequences just make him stop writing glowfic?
      No, I asked him.

      • @blakestaceyMA
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        1710 months ago

        A free full-cast Audiobook of Planecrash is currently in production [,.] using AI-generated voices.

        maybe we, as a species, deserve what is coming to us

        • @V0ldek
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          610 months ago

          So this is how the acausal AI god chooses to punish us. Huh.

      • @Evinceo
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        810 months ago

        many people I know who got more from HPMOR read it carefully, perhaps stopping after every chapter to think about the goals and motivations of each character and predict what happens next

    • @Soyweiser
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      10 months ago

      Reading a bit of this page convinced me to never read this Isekai into hell story from Yud. It isn’t even that im against edgy hell themed stories I mean Dante Alighieri did it well, and the planescape setting in dnd is not bad imho (it does have the same devils/demons split as this story so very original Yud). But the rest reads just as tiringly ‘Lesswrong nerd out rationalizes DnD rules’. Using a specifically crafted sentence in a wish spell to get antimatter bombs to destroy a fort which protects the ‘makes you a god/kills gods’ stone.

      (I don’t mind people who do enjoy it btw, it just screams very not for me)

        • @gerikson
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          610 months ago

          read Freedom and Necessity

          That does sound interesting! Thanks for the tip.

      • David GerardOPMA
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        310 months ago

        i saw Adult 4chan Man and felt existential risk

    • @jonhendry
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      310 months ago

      Going by the illustration of characters at the top of that page, “Kelthar” is a dead ringer for 80s Phil Oakey.

  • @bitofhope
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    1210 months ago

    So if you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and thought…

    I did read HPOMR and I also thought!

    "You know, HPMOR is pretty good

    OK, I didn’t exactly think that. But go on.

    so far as it goes; but Harry is much too cautious and doesn’t have nearly enough manic momentum,

    Dunno about Harry, but the story as a whole could have done with some momentum, manic or otherwise.

    his rationality lectures aren’t long enough, and all of his personal relationships are way way way too healthy."

    Nobody in their right mind would ever think any of this.

  • Steve
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    1210 months ago

    this story takes place in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of literal Hell

    Look, I’m giving it a go but the very first line of the content warnings is a case of “is this written by a grown man or a 14 year old emo kid”

    • @swlabr
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      1010 months ago

      is this written by a grown man or a 14 year old emo kid

      yes

      (the MC is jughead from Riverdale lel)

    • @jonhendry
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      410 months ago

      “And then I made the demons build a half pipe the size of the grand canyon, and I did tricks that have never been done before, and the girls all watched and were impressed.”

  • Sailor Sega Saturn
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    1210 months ago

    I should have listened to the content warning because literally everything the main character (I shall call him Math Elk) says or thinks is completely insufferable rationalist buzzword babbling. Couldn’t make it past two pages.

    It wasn’t an auspicious start when he gets on the plane and immediately treats a social interaction with a woman like a dang financial transaction. OK kept reading, maybe the main character comes from the planet of weird insufferable nerds on purpose.

    It got unbearable when Math Elk did nothing but spew nonsense at Carissa and she seemed weirdly OK with it despite not being a weird nerd. Couldn’t maintain suspension of disbelief.

    • @bitofhope
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      610 months ago

      They’ve gone from math pets to math woodland creatures now?

      • Sailor Sega Saturn
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        Wait math pets?? Tell me more. Are they cute? How can I get one? Will a math pet sit on my desk solving all my everyday algebra problems for me? How cute are they when trying to figure out excel formulas?

        Update: I looked up math pet and it was not at all what I had envisioned.

  • Steve
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    also, thanks for the intro to “glowfic” - for a good chunk of my 20s I was obsessed with my side project which I called “plotplant” (dorky?) which was an infinitely forkable collaborative writing app. I never got it past a few different build attempts because I would always get caught in the weeds of how, if it were successful, the complexity of a story that had loads of branches would be navigated. My own personal xanadu. Anyway, this glowfic looks like a nightmare scenario that would keep me in them weeds, ruminating, “there has to be a better way!”

    It’s so hard to read when every bit has all that meta info next to it! Written by Eliezer or not

    • @swlabr
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      actually I found this ancient text online that helps explain everything:

      Eliezer Monogatari, chapter 69:

      On his mighty steed Oververbosity, Eliezer is fast approaching the cliff edge overlooking the dreaded Chasm of Unreadability. His desire to cram more words and IQfulness into his text has deafened him to the wails of the Ghost of Editors Past, begging him to at least paste into Google Docs and fix a few squigglies.

      In a moment of rational brilliance, he casts Bayesian Reasoning and epiphanisationalises that he can Just Add Metainfo to every line, exponentially increasing his QLAWPW (quality of life adjusted words per word), making him The Greatest Author. His loyal mount leaps into the air over the abyss, buoyed by clouds of self-delusion.

      Of course, he crashes and falls into the chasm. But what’s this? The miasma of unreadability… it’s more clouds of self-delusion generated by the cult of TREACLES! He rises, unscathed, head three sizes bigger than before.1

      1: Scholars are divided on whether this is because the toxic miasma mutated his sense of self-worth or if he hit his head on the chasm floor and it swelled. We will never know.

    • @TinyTimmyTokyo
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      810 months ago

      Glowfic feels like a writing format designed in a lab to be the perfect channel for Eliezer’s literary diarrhea.

  • @swlabr
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    810 months ago

    More like… Project Awful

    boom roasted

  • @Architeuthis
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    810 months ago

    Past 1M words

    That’s gonna be 4.000 pages of extremely dubious porn and rationalist navel gazing, if anyone’s keeping count.

    • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      810 months ago

      University level biochemistry handbook is ~quarter that thick and if EY read that, he’d never consider stiff bacteria as anything other than asinine fever dream

  • @Amoeba_Girl
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    810 months ago

    Interesting commentary on LessWrong

    I don’t think this would fit into the 2022 review. Project Lawful has been quite influential, but I find it hard to imagine a way its impact could be included in a best-of.

    Including this post in particular strikes me as misguided, as it contains none of the interesting ideas and lessons from Project Lawful, and thus doesn’t make any intellectual progress.

    One could try to do the distillation of finding particularly interesting or enlightening passages from the text, but that would be

    • A huge amount of work[1], but maybe David Udell’s sequence could be used for that.

    • Quite difficult for the more subtle lessons, which are interwoven in the text.

    I have nothing against Project Lawful in particular[2], but I think that including this post would be misguided, and including passages from Project Lawful would be quite difficult.

    For that reason, I’m giving this a -1.

  • @Evinceo
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    710 months ago

    It’s actually kind of an achievement that in the ultra-saturated Isakai genre they’ve managed to set a new standard in repulsive premises.

  • @Soyweiser
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    10 months ago

    Why do both Scotts and Eliezers pseudonyms end with ‘ain’? Yvain and Iarwain.

    Edit: and small frustration what is up with the lack of timestamps? I know the internet is getting worse and worse with those replacing the ‘posted at 22 feb 2022’ with ‘posted 1 year ago’ things (as predicted in the transmetropolitan), or just having sites autoupdate the timestamps to seem current for the google ranking (saw a ‘2024’ guide which in the text still talked about 2023 and had a mid 2023 timestamp, so somebody messed up a script there). But no timestamps at all is a bit odd, the only timestamp I saw was ‘Jan 19, 2024, 3:29 PM’ and that looks suspiciously like ‘now’.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      1210 months ago

      what is up with the lack of timestamps?

      For mysterious reasons they’ve screened off their own past.

      There are hidden timestamps, remove the “.post-footer { display: none; }” CSS from the page and they should appear, but yeah keeping timestamps from us is the worst I want to know when stuff went down.

      • @Soyweiser
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        810 months ago

        I don’t even really care that much, it is just a small but ongoing frustration with enshittification of everything digital. (and the Rationalists do nothing! You live in SV damnit, do some effective angry protesting or something ;) )

        • @locallynonlinear
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          1010 months ago

          Why protest when you could spend far less energy and just “not be wrong” and “have no stake” by over-fitting your statistical model to the past?

          • @Soyweiser
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            1010 months ago

            Thanks for filling my ‘make up people to be angry about’ quota for today.

              • @Soyweiser
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                1010 months ago

                I’m very good at it, it is one of my core competencies, which synergies well with the mission statement of awful.systems, in this powerpoint presentation I will…

    • @swlabr
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      10 months ago

      Fake answer: at some point in rat history they thought that Armenian people were genetically superior and decided to take traditional Armenian surnames as their handles, but they both simultaneously and serendipitously bungled the spelling. The names should actually be “Yvian” (pronounced yiv-yahn) and “Iarwian” (pronounced ee-arh-wee-yahn)

      Real answer: probably a tolkien elvish name idk

        • @swlabr
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          610 months ago

          Could it be that Yud read about Bombadil, thought, “man it’s a good thing this dude is with the good guys, or middle earth would be screwed” and then decided to spin that into a technocult about AI?

          • @gerikson
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            610 months ago

            Bombadil is a fat dude living in splendid isolation with a beautiful woman, unconcerned about the evils of the wider world. Perfect ideal for Yud.

            • @Soyweiser
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              His story is also vague as fuck, and according to some his more modeled on pixes etc from our world, so it would fit for him to pick an isekaied from our world into lotr char for his isekai from rationalist fantasy world to hell character.

              lol, nah he prob just picked the name because it was the most powerful and most mysterious character from lotr. With hints of ‘this outside context problem with unknown goals must be appeased at all costs or everything ends’ just like agi! Also he seems to be immortal.

    • @blakestaceyMA
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      10 months ago

      “Iarwain”, cf. Charles’ Wain, wainwright; from the Middle English for “a wagon that transports ears”

  • flere-imsaho
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    710 months ago

    2022, so there’s a good chance this is now abandoned and half-forgotten?

    • David GerardOPMA
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      610 months ago

      Last post in the collection of threads about this is April 2023