Category: Conspiracies –

Monday – Crunchy Monday –

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Monday, February 26th, 2018 —>-2˚C / +28˚F with light snow falling on crunchy overnight quarter inch of white stuff at 7:16 am in Atlantic Canada —> On Aunt Reggie’s Birthday 🙂 —

Twilight in Keltic Valley

– “Twilight over the Half-Elf Valley ” –

— The actual sky was more orange – As the sun set through a temperature inversion. But when I had to adjust the print so “TaleRocker” was almost visible – the process gave us a much more yellow sky.

Midnight in Keltic Valley.

– “Midnight In Keltic Valley” –

— This {above } shot is modified too – but in order to capture the feeling, I let it stay a bit dark.

 

TaleRocker by Douglas Jay Otterson.

– “TaleRocker” – According to Doug Otterson –

— Doug Says in a text message on the iPhone, “Hey look, I gave you glasses :)” – I was guessing that – on one of his infrequent nights off when he couldn’t sleep he spent a couple hours trying to modify one of his Builder characters. But then I realized that one of the times when he stayed with us in order not to upset his New Brunswick sweetie’s son, he signed on to my account and modified one of mine. On his last visit { Saturday } – He looked at what we’d done in the past week, looked at me, laughed and asked my permission to try to fix something when I was succumbing to complete burn-out – He gave ‘TaleRocker’ a pair of glasses – & after admitting that he gave him glasses, ‘messaged’: “I tried to get him to look a little more like you without chancing anything catastrophic” — Silly me, next time I logged in I had to use one of the tools that can modify characters to turn this guy around to see his face and yup, he’s got glasses.

L'Haeren

– Doug’s ‘Highe Elf’ builder character – Guarding the gate to our new and improved (?) Keltic Valley. –

— I should make him explain his own inspirations – But Doug told me this guy { above } gave him the confidence to try to get a character to look something like the ‘real me’ { After one of my attempts to come up with a replacement for a female builder character who suffered a catastrophic failure and fell out of the world and never came back – Actually looked like his daughter, Rachel as she’d grown up – & I hadn’t seen her since she was about 9 years old – & after he says spent about three hours messing with the facial morphing tools, he thought this one looked a little like me as  tall blond elf  { ‘Highe Elves’ see themselves as being more intellectual than Forest Elves? } & He said he saw me more as a Bard than a Ranger – { We met at a writer’s workshop at Cornell U. in Ithaca, New York } When I whined and didn’t think this guy quite looked like me, he spent more like five hours working on a Ranger and I’ve been using that guy’s screen shot as my Twitter profile for a couple years now –

TaleRocker Icon.

– Adjusted { Exposure } and Cropped – Icon sized image of TaleRocker with his glasses. –

— This is probably okay for an ‘effbook’ profile picture, but there isn’t enough contrast to make it a really good blog icon.

— Doug dared me to use it as my profile picture. I have to think about that. While I hedged and ‘thought about it – he said, “Take his hat off -” So I did and he has bangs that don’t quite fall in front of his eyes and they’re edged in a near indigo blue colour.

— And I’m not going to sit here and type until I wake up with my nose on the keyboard and find fifteen pages of “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” – or something. But I plopped that image to the left because Xhyrean wants to know how that might format things in this blog.

— “Argh”?

— But in all fairness, we got a lot done over the weekend. And I actually felt good about walking out into a beautiful new world before dawn this morning to put out the garbage, walking on the crunchy new quarter-inch of snow with a tiny bit of freezing rain on top of it.

— & Yes, Xhyrean, Everything does look amazing after staring at a computer screen for eighteen hours trying to fix unexpected catastrophes. & Hey guys, we have a tool to save what we have as it is and come back later to restore it if somebody else falls asleep at their computer and wipes out half the universe — 😉

— “Set and Save Checkpoints!”

~~~~~ Jim

“Darkness – Darkness -“

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Copied & Pasted from https://aerendel.org/komix/ :

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“Darkness, Darkness-“

by on February 20, 2018 at 9:11 pm

Posted In: “Boof!” –, “Weird Weather” – even in the game world? –, Computer Game Building Schnarr –, Conspiracies –, Creativity –, Dreams don’t always make sense – Especially when you’re wide awake –, Exploring Caverns –, Life should be more fun. –, Life should be more relaxed –, No bears in the news today –, Quantum Theory and Parallel Worlds –, Uncategorized

 

Tuesday, February 20th, 2018  —> 0˚C / +32F with light rain @8:15 pm in Atlantic Canada —> It’s Kathy Krafchick’s Birthday { & Patty Hearst’s too } —> Happy Birthday to both of them { Not that either one will likely see this … } —

 

The Stars Returned -

– The Stars Returned – & the night sky got dark. Kaeren was there to see it. –

 

— The [ above ] screenshot of Kaeren gazing at the starry sky [ came out too dark ] too dark to show up well here. I [ had to ] mess with the screenshot.

— A lot has happened since the last time I posted here [ re: progress building/putting together the game’s world ]. Kaeren was really busy – planted a lot of flowers, brought Springtime to DelVahria and to Keltic Vale.

— { & Out of Character -} The dark night skies went away and haven’t come back. We read notes and thought that this could be because of racial issues. Races that can see in the dark might keep the darkness –  and the stars – away?

— & Since I’ve been back { as ‘TaleRocker’ } we managed to light our streetlamps – Get our waterfalls to look something like waterfalls – dropped a large rock across the river at the border between Keltic Vale and DelVahria – lost a couple water troughs – And we think we figured out why a lot of the plants that Kaeren planted kept disappearing { apart from the obvious – Forest elves picking them, taking the plants home and transplanting them – } And we think we might have solved that little problem – But we’ll have to hang on and see what happens next –

— After the last time Kaeren got to go star-gazing night hasn’t fallen in, jeeze, weeks in this dimension – two days back on the Earth we came from – Time passes differently here –

 

 

Dark Couds -

– And we’ve seen some dark clouds lately – { & I Did have to mess with the exposure on this one, too. } –

 

— & We don’t know what’s coming here – none of us have been here long enough to know if they have a monsoon season or if hurricanes come this far inland –

— So, um, We’ll keep you posted –

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— { & because I knew and liked Kathy Krafchick – an intelligent, sensitive, artistic young woman who was a bit younger than me – when Patty Hearst was kidnapped – that effected me deeply. I tried praying that she’d come back to her family safely – and because I’d already heard of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ {{ I am 28% Viking – but that has nothing to do with what my ‘radar’ picks up – all sorts of absurd information finds its way into my brain, mind & soul (?) and stays there – }} [ shudder ] — I thought the justice system failed Patty Hearst and all of us when they sent her to jail for not being strong enough (or stupid enough) to resist her captors { and maybe get herself killed. ((?)) } um – }

 

Indigo Skies At Sunset -

– “Indigo Skies At Sunset?” – The orange glow around the mountains might be the temperature inversion effect we were hoping for? –

 

— I don’t know, maybe everything will come out all right in the end — ???

~~~~~ Jim

More Adventures in World Building { Game World Building }

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Sunday, February 18th, 2018 —> -6˚C / +21˚F & snowing ‘lightly’ @ 8:15 am in Atlantic Canada —

Connecting Two 3D Game Areas.

– “Kaeren connecting Stone Lake with Keltic Vale” – Looks interesting, but it’s not for the weak of heart. –

— I’d say I spent about 8 hours working on various areas inside the 3D interactive ‘Role Playing’ game we’re building. But it was probably more like 12.

 

— One area, DelVahria, is especially complicated. Most of it is inside a cave. This needs 3 ‘Heightmaps’ { The visible terrain you can walk on and can’t walk through – usually. } One for the ground and the depths of the cave – a second for the ceiling of the cave { and this one has to be flipped upside down at creation – This is because all the terrain you see is one-dimensional +/or solid on one side, but invisible and you can walk through it without knowing it’s there from the other side. } – And the third bit of heightmap terrain covers the cave and in this case looks like a mountain from the outside. — You have to carefully line everything up or it looks really weird. And then you can’t do anything to any one of the ‘maps’ while they’re all together. – If you try to modify the floor of the cave and use the tool that pulls it down – you also end up pulling the ceiling down over the spot you’re ‘digging out’ and you pull a section of mountain over the cave down too. One little ‘oops’ can take half a second to ‘create’ and hours to undo – So you have to slide all the pieces apart, one at a time – carefully – and make sure you don’t loose one in the process – I send the mountain one way and the cave ceiling the other. Then you make your changes, fix your ‘oopses’ and take a breath, close your eyes and move everything back together.

 

— I tried to connect ‘DelVahria’ with another area yesterday – & had disastrous results – all three pieces went in three different directions. I thought the cave ceiling sailed off into oblivion and I would never find it again. But I crossed my fingers and went off in a straight line, lost sight of other two pieces, and whattaya know? – there it was – something like halfway to Cleveland – naked and totally confused. It took me about fifteen minutes to bring it back home and then another five minutes to get it lined up correctly.

 

— Today I tried half measures – ‘created’ a new area and called it ‘Keltic Vale’ – and left its real estate completely flat – and tried to connect that to DelVahria. I used some of my father’s favourite magic words when the two areas refused to line up completely – no matter how much I tried one map or the other was always at least one silly increment off. But okay – I left them a bit off like that – lined them up as close to perfectly as any two areas ever get, and then knitted them together with a tool whose icon is a band-aid. I tested the borders by having my active builder character run back and forth several times and the character did not fall through a crack in the world and fall screaming into oblivion.

 

— Then I tried to connect these two areas with three others that I knocked myself out on this week. Those three areas are connected east to west with ‘Stone Lake’ being the farthest west. I thought they would all play nice if I connected Keltic Vale to Stone Lake. { See ‘Kaeren’ at work ( above ) standing there while I ‘married’ the edges of both areas, and gave her credit for that. }

 

— But, connecting Stone Lake to Keltic Vale broke apart the three areas that had been securely fastened together. I didn’t have to go quite as far out into never never land to find all the pieces, but then the process of lining them up and ‘marrying’ their edges again, and then using the ‘band-aid’ tool to cement their bonds all over again took something like 5 hours. And I had to test all the glitches – have Kaeren run around and fall through cracks in the world again and hope she could recover from the trauma of falling into another dimension. I really like the builder characters that I do a lot of modifications to, & I go into mourning when one of them disappears forever. – Luckily, that didn’t happen. Kaeren must like me back.

 

Kaeren with night vision.

– “Kaeren with night vision” – This is an un-doctored screen shot. – I usually have to mess with the exposure to get to the point where I can identify what I saw when I took the screenshot in the first place. – That’s ‘DelVahria’ in the distance behind her. –

— That’s DelVahria in the background. Kaeren looks frustrated here, doesn’t she? After hours of messing around with getting Stone Lake and both the other areas linked to Stone Lake back together, messing with borders that didn’t want to play nice, falling through a lot of cracks – And then going off on a wild and crazy hunt for a river that didn’t come back with Stone Lake { The ‘water’ just kind of hovered off in the distance, wondering if I’d notice it was missing – then took a lot of maneuvering and resizing to get it back in place. }

 

— So after hours of that kind of nonsense – The border between Keltic Vale and Stone Lake, which was fine five hours earlier – lost all its integrity and dropped her into the underworld no matter what we did – no matter how many times we used the ‘band-aid’ — I finally logged off and back on and had Kaeren run around a couple other areas for fun and then came back in to do some serious planetary healing and it worked.

 

— But then the link between Keltic Vale and DelVahria was even more messed up – trying to cross a simple no-nonsense straight-ahead border sent her teleporting off into mountains somewhere – and trying to get out of the mountains dropped her through the world again. More than once. So we logged out again, twiddled our thumbs for a while, logged back in and closed our eyes and ran across the border and – holy cow! It worked fine! Maybe this was a case of, “You used up all the memory I’m going to let you play with in this session, – kid.”

 

— AND – The sky went black at night – That hasn’t happened in a long time. I wondered why not and what I might have to do to get the night and the stars back – but there they were. Maybe the ‘world’ has to be up for a long period of time before the background routines allow for darkness and stars at night? Anything’s possible, I suppose –

Dark Skies and Stars!

– “Dark Skies over Stone Lake” – The lines around that area back there { which is what Stone Lake looked like from Keltic Vale before we got busy fixing things after we got the borders to work } – Define that area and tell us it is ‘selected’ while we’re working on it. –

— I was able to get the dark skies and stars to happen over at least one more area after checking out the settings in the ‘Environment’ Control/Editing panel.

Cave Entrance in Daylight.

– “Cave Entrance in Daylight” – With Kaeren about ready to cry and ask if she can’t just please go home and get some sleep. –

— At night the fog behind her is dark – in the daylight – those cave dwellers must have rigged themselves an ingenious method to get sunlight down inside their cave.

 

— So now, after twelve hours of working on this, I think I just spent another four cropping the screenshots and telling you all about what a long day of Game World Building is really like. Ya gotta love it –  or you’ll never stick to it long enough to get anything done at all.

 

— “Run Away Screaming-” “Aaaaaaaaaaa!”

~~~~~ Jim

Does a 4 foot Mountain of Snow (& hidden ice boulders) blocking your driveway look like attempted murder to you?

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—> This was supposed to be our back up blog & repository for blogged articles from other blogs — Now it looks like it’s become our ‘GoTo’ mainstay. <—

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Sunday, February 11th, 2018 —> -2˚C / +27˚F & grey & damp @ 4:55 pm on Pamm’s Birthday in Atlantic Canada 🙂 —

Snow Ridge to the left of snowblower

– After I struggled to get through the ‘low end’ of the ice and snow ridge those wonderful people dumped to block the driveway, I went and grabbed my iPhone and took a couple photos – Schnarr! –

— Schnarr! I’m one of the youngest guys down this corner of our street and when the bleepity bleep bleeping snow plows go out of their way to plow us in like this it DOES begin to feel like attempted murder. Grumble grumble … There were chunks of ice hidden beneath three and four-foot ridges of snow that had to be 2 feet wide and a foot and a half tall, and the snowblower didn’t like slamming into those. I stopped near the road to pick up and/or kick those monsters out of the way and people driving up the street in 4 wheel drive vehicles looked at me like “Holy Snar!” 😉

- Sigh - Snow blower backed part way out of its groove.

– & this is what a little bit of progress looks like from the house side of things. – 27 inch snowblower versus four foot high snow ridge. –

— When Sears Canada laid off its workers and paid big bonuses to its executives a couple months ago – Cathi looked at the snowblower and said, “Hey, good thing we didn’t bite the bullet and shell out that money to extend the warranty on this thing. They announced that they won’t honour those contracts after today.”

Sliced ice and snow mountain.

– And that’s where the snowblower and I gave up today – Couldn’t cut any deeper into that stuff – Please notice the ice bombs and boulders hiding under snow at the left of that hill. –

— The snow mountain doesn’t look all that impressive in the above photo. The snowblower and I cut away more than twice the height of the snowblower’s – um – hopper? What do you call the business end of a snowblower? “Chipper”? Ick.

— But today I discovered that even our anthropomorphic snowblower has a sense of humour. When I started it up it went forward and back – fine – but the blades wouldn’t turn at all. I very cautiously checked to make sure there wasn’t a solid chunk of ice holding the blades stuck, then tipped the thing up and down a couple times to jar it awake. – And, leaving it in non moving mode, I pushed down the lever that is supposed to turn on the blades’ action and cautiously leaned as far forward as I could, to see if it was working. As soon as my face was in range for the snow blowing spout ( is that whatcha might call it? ) – The thing kicked in and got me with a slight wump of snow – I tell ya, artificial intelligence is here… 😉 —

"Doot doot doo - Shovlin out my back door..."

– I think I get at least one shot like this every winter since we came to New Brunswick – Canyon dug through snow mountains to get to our door. –

— Sigh —

Selfie.

“After -” { I should find a thirty year old photograph of me and claim that was me before I tried to shovel and snow-blow the driveway this afternoon. 😉 } –

— Lately I’ve become a fan of my iPhone camera – I used to think they were over-hyped and over-priced until we began having issues with our Samsungs.

Cathi's Painting.

– Cathi’s Painting

 

— & Cathi talked about this painting last night – Her aunt brought her on a trip to Europe in the 80’s – a tour of the Netherlands and Belgium focusing on art museums and artistic stuff.

— I think both Cathi and her aunt ( a concert pianist and supporting member of a national museum of art ) thought the view to the left here, in real life, was awe-inspiring. Cathi took a photograph and then painted what she’d captured and remembered and gave the painting to her aunt for Christmas that year.

— Her aunt loved it.

— Sadly, after her aunt died almost twenty years later, the painting came back to Cathi and of course, it still means a lot to her.

— { It looked like I had it framed perfectly in the LED screen — }

— Sigh, I should quit while I’m ahead?

— Am I? Ahead? – Of what?

— Shrug —,

~~~~~ Jim

Thursday – Morning After Another Foot Of Snow –

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Thursday, February 8th, 2018 —> -5˚C / +23˚F – with bright sunshine on our new foot of snow @ 11:30 am in Atlantic Canada —

Snow blown driveway and blue sky with clouds and brilliant sunlight.

– “Snow-Blown Driveway” – 11:30 am February 8tt, 2018 – With Van, Blue Sky + Some Clouds + Brilliant Sunlight –

— The sunlight was – possibly – too brilliant – I couldn’t see enough in the view-finder to know how level the photo might be – or know a lot of things that are crucial to ‘real  photographers’ — { Schnarr – }

— I tried to stay awake too long to get a jump on clearing the snow earlier, but the great big dump trucks plowing snow were experiencing troubles as they attempted their first clearing of Canada Street ( out of the photo, off to the left and a bit down hill ) – leaving about a five feet tall ridge of plowed snow when they could get up to speed. And that was something like 4:30 am – before the snow had stopped falling enough to say so.

Driveway with snow hills.

– Firewood under tarp { Pile slowly shrinking as we find time to get the wood out of the driveway and into the wood shed } in foreground – And Two good sized Snow Mountain Peaks back closer to the porch with a bit of the canyon leading to the deer hill between the peaks. –

— When the snow began falling yesterday afternoon – it didn’t look like much. I thought maybe they’d over-estimated our potential accumulation again. Nope – Luckily it was lightweight fluffy dry stuff and I didn’t drop dead from clearing the way to the shed where the snow blower lives ( After Cathi cleared the way once last evening ) –

Canyon toward Deer Hill.

– Closer to the Canyon –

— Being partially snow blinded { when trying to see the view-finder } had some interesting side effects – I couldn’t see the little bit of colourful lens flare to the right.

Close up on the van& snowy world beyond.

– & This was another happy surprise – The reflections on the van –

— This time yesterday I was thinkin that becoming a ‘snow bird’ & spending winters in bug-infested alligator-rich Florida might not be a bad idea. Today? It’s cold and beautiful up here. & A higher percentage of Atlantic Canadians are really nice people than most of the adults I remember surrounding me while I ‘grew up’ in the good old USA –

— Sigh — Have a nice day — Have a nice life?,

 

~~~~~ Jim

Me again …

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Thursday, February 8th, 2018 – Can’t see the thermometer, it’s buried under a snow drift. 

"Monsanto guilty of deliberately poisoning the enviornment."

– yeah, yeah, I know – Jim said to avoid politix for a while – But –

— The above article might be something that Donny Trump would call ‘Fake News’ – But, it  might also be leaning to the right, and if that’s the case – when a right leaning fake news service comes out against Monsanto, I noticed – And I read the article linked to the headline, and while I’m at work and can’t dig into the background of the organizations and web sites cited in the article, it certainly looked legitimate – 3 Monsanto employees died in the 1930s from Cancer that was directly linked to the chemicals they were handling? – PCBs? And after a meeting in 1969 their board of directors came to the conclusion that PCBs were dangerously toxic – but their solution to ‘what do we do about it?’ was “Let’s sell off our inventory as quick as we can” (?) And they were betting the US government’s protection agencies would be fighting cases one at a time and that process would be slow enough so Monsanto could claim that if they had good scientific proof showing just how dangerous the stuff was, they would have shut down all PCB production and gone into using their other chemicals, { Like Agent Orange? }

— So once again I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth and the deep down gut realization that you just can’t trust corporations.

— Jassper just may be right.  – Monsanto wants to poison the world for fun and profit?

— So why do I feel helplessly depressed when this kind of truth comes out?

— I don’t want to be anywhere near any Monsanto Executives when they reincarnate – they will definitely be ‘Poop Magnets’ – And they’ll wonder why they feel like the whole universe is lined up against them –

— ( I just want to close my eyes and sleep and dream about something a lot more pleasant, but I’m stuck at work for another four and a half hours – listening to great big trucks struggle to clean up the heck of a snow dump that we just got. ) – “Say goodnight, Doug”

— Good night,

— Doug

—djo—

Canada Revenue Agency { Canadian version of the IRS ? } Has a Page Alerting People to Fraud —

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Wednesday, February 7th, 2018 —> -18˚C / -1˚F & Sunny & Clear @ 9:09 am in Atlantic Canada —

CRA Fraud Alert Page.

– Canada Revenue Agency’s Fraud Alert Page –

— The above is a screenshot, Don’t try to click on any links –

— A close friend told me yesterday that some evil scammers were calling senior citizens in Canada and telling them that the Canada Revenue Agency has a warrant out for their arrest and they better call an “800” number to resolve this immediately.

— Apparently, a dead give away is the fact that the telephone messages do not begin with the name of the person the CRA is supposedly attempting to contact.

— Another dead give away is the Caller ID with some of these calls – begins with a foreign country’s identification code number before the ‘800’ number.

— My friend told me he received a call from a distraught 80 something year old senior citizen telling him he’d received a call on his generic answering machine { with a robotic voice saying “Please leave a message” and nothing more } claiming the CRA had a warrant out for his arrest for Tax Fraud and Tax Evasion and threatening legal action and jail time *** But – the old guy was sharp enough to realize the phone number didn’t look right – it began with “011-855- [ xxx-xxxx ]” The old guy wondered what the extra numbers meant and what he should do, and repeated several times that he ( this senior citizen ) had never committed any ‘Tax Fraud’ and/or ‘Tax Evasion’ that the call accused him of committing. The “011” prefix means the call originated outside of Canada, probably in the USA – and when asked, the old guy said, “No – they never said anything like “This is a call to ” [ Name ] ” – it just started telling him, “The CRA has an arrest warrant out for -‘you’- [ …. etc. ].”

— My friend told his older friend that the call was a scam, made by somebody who is trying to scare anybody they can into calling the number they told them to call at which time they would try to scare anybody who called them into giving them private information, maybe even giving them a credit card number with the ‘secret code’ on the back – so the scammers could charge the limit on that card and hope they were untrace-able and could get away with that kind of fraud. My friend told his older friend to erase the message and ignore it.

— If it really was the Canada Revenue Agency, their caller ID would say “CRA” and maybe more –  and if there really was an arrest warrant out for him they would have been knocking on his door, not calling him on the phone like that.

— [ *** But – on the CRA Fraud Alert Page – farther down below the above screenshot – there is a warning that a Caller ID display can easily be ‘spoofed’ into saying anything. ]

— And apparently the senior citizen is losing sleep over this anyway, terrified he’ll be dragged out of his home in handcuffs and locked up somewhere.

— Schnarr!

~~~~~ Jim

Well Dang – The Rumors Are True – gmail Sucks Big Time –

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Monday, February 5, 2018 –

pardon my language, but a friend told me she couldn’t get a gmail account unless she gave them a cell phone number.

I checked that out, and sure enough.

Not only is gmail mining every bit of personal information they can get from all of their users, but they want to get their hands on the gps data that cell phones store.

I can’t wait until they go bankrupt or have their private parts carved out in public by angry users.

—Like I said, excuse my language.

But google and gmail just lost every shred of respect I might possibly have held for them.

(grumble grumble grumble)

— gag!

 

—djo—