Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Cat map

Posted on by

Oh man, cat people….

Case in point, this article in Vox: “Japan just created a Google Street View for cats”. Basically, some cat fanatic in Japan made a Google Maps street view for cats. No I don’t know why. But now, it’s explained in the article, we can see what a city look in Japan looks like to a cat.

Of course, that is not what anything looks like to a cat. It is what a Japanese city looks like to a very short person. Because a cat’s daytime vision (see the photo below) is much more fuzzy, less sharp, less colorful (no reds at all), dimmer, and full of shadows. A cats cautious movement reflects that vision. What to us is a lawn in the late afternoon sun is to them a lawn with its western half it in deep shadow. And I also believe a cat’s vision would detect movement much more acutely, so that while we see a street, a cat would see birds in the bushes, a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk, a car passing, and a some littered paper blowing by. We would put the movement into the context of a street, but for a cat the movement is the context.

I realize that this is the least important thing you’re read all day.

And I’m not even finished. You’ll notice one of the stills from the map linked above shows a shop in the background, a bench in the foreground, and some fool calling the invisible cat from the shop door. We can ignore the fool, if only on principle, and the shop, and focus instead on the bench. I’ve always thought that a cat’s way of looking at space is much more modular than ours. That bench, for instance. We see a bench, and notice there’s room under the bench. To a cat there’s the top of the bench and, completely separate, there is the space underneath the bench. They are two different spaces, and their connectedness is meaningless and probably unrecognized by the cat. Because to a cat every opening big enough to get into is its own separate space. A box on the floor. A grocery bag. A cat will crawl into a bag and that bag will then be separate from the room it is in, to the point that a cat can crawl into a paper bag and fall fast asleep, feeling completely secure, no matter what is going on around it. And while a bedroom for us is one room and a closet, for a cat it is a whole collection of spaces independent of each other. The top of the bed and underneath the bed are completely different, the various cubbyholes and hidden places in the closet are completely unique spaces. It sees a bedroom the way we would see a large house. And I don’t think this map gets that across. But imagine an empty bag on the sidewalk between the bench and the shop. To us it would be a bag blowing across the sidewalk. To a cat it would be another modular space, just as much a part of the geography as the top of the bench or under the bench or that shop door beyond with the fool saying here kitty kitty in Japanese.

I once saw a map of a neighborhood from the point of view of a mockingbird, the block divided into various mockingbird territories that, property lines be damned, were all over the place. I’ve never been able to find that map again–those were analog times, when things popped up, blew our minds, then disappeared forever–but it got me to looking at the world from the point of view of different species, such as cats, or Argentine ants, or the rotten kids next door back then on their Big Wheels at eight in the morning. You can while away half your adult life thinking like that. I recommend it.

This handy picture is from pictures-of-cats.org. I had no idea there even was such a site, though I looked no further than this site, being allergic to pictures of cats.

So it turns out this handy picture I googled is from an excellent little essay on cat vision, very brief and to the point, something I ought to try. Alas, both author and photographer are unknown. The site is called pictures-of-cats.org, which set off my self-conscious hip cynicism big time, alarms going off, you would have thought a car was being broken into inside my head. I had no idea there even was such a site, and I looked no further than this pic, being allergic to pictures of cats.

Language death

Posted on by

Comment to a Facebook post and yes, I know it’s dull.

The head of the Assembly of First Nations is calling for the nearly 60 indigenous languages spoken in Canada to be declared official along with English and French, an expensive proposition but one that he says is becoming more urgent as the mother tongues of aboriginal peoples disappear.

Perry Bellegarde, who was elected National Chief of the AFN last fall, agrees it would not be easy to require translations of all indigenous languages to be printed on the sides of cereal boxes and milk cartons.

“That would be the ultimate goal,” Mr. Bellegarde said in an interview on Wednesday at the three-day annual general meeting of the AFN, Canada’s largest indigenous organization. “But let’s do small steps to get there.”

The problem is, if course, that perhaps ten of those languages are spoken in the home by more than a thousand people, and it’s in the home that a language survives. Some of those languages might be down to single digits of users. I know, by the way, that there are already official aboriginal languages in parts of Canada, as here in the United States.

And as in the US, there are dozens of immigrant languages that have more speakers than nearly all the aboriginal languages except Cree, I think, and Inuit. You can see the problem. If language rights are defined as a First Nation right only then you can declare aboriginal languages official without doing the same for immigrant tongues. However, as the call for official status for aboriginal languages is based on the UNESCO declaration of language rights, the same protections apply to immigrant languages as well….

Language death (one of linguistics’ more dramatic terms) is a worldwide problem, and one that has existed since the origin of language itself. Each extinction is a bitter loss, as every language has ways of viewing the world that are distinctive. About half of the world’s 6000 languages will be gone by 2100. Social media, though, might keep some around a bit longer. This is not a first world nations versus third and fourth world nations either, though it tends to be presented that way. Europe has at least thirty languages on the verge of extinction, some by the century’s end, including some with just one remaining speaker. And a couple European languages disappeared in the last few years (one in Latvia, another, a variant of Scots Gaelic, in Scotland). Throughout the world small languages die out as much larger ones spread. This is a world wide phenomenon, and across all kinds of language families.

One of the problems is that as a rule the smaller the language, the more complex the grammar tends to be*. Languages simplify as they expand. Brazilian Portuguese has shed many of the rules of Portuguese in Portugal, for example. And Portuguese has obliterated aboriginal languages throughout Brazil. Spanish has done the same. And French. Russian. Hindi. Han Chinese. Swahili. Tagalog. Latin. Quechua. Aramaic. Sumerian. And of course English, which like all the others I just mentioned, is typically easier to learn to get by in than the aboriginal languages it replaces, though much of the specificity of other tongues is lost**. (It is now–Old English would not have been so easy.) And English has a vastly larger vocabulary, a richness that seeps into other languages with fewer words. English nouns (or any language’s nouns) can be adopted without altering the language the word is being adopted into. Le hot dog. La hamburguesa. But adopted verbs too often turn into verb phrases and into sentences. You can hear this with bilingual people all the time. English nouns dropped into the middle of Spanish sentences, retaining Spanish grammar, but switching to English when they use English verbs. I think once people begin using another language’s verbs is when the problem really starts. That is how so many languages begin to disappear. (This is based on personal observation, I haven’t read this, so it’s not authoritative.)

Obviously the immersion in media spoken in a larger language is a leading cause, but keep in mind that it will not always cause a language to lose speakers. Languages died long before the invention of mass media. Languages have been disappearing since language began.

One of my favorite books ever is Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler. A brilliant work, I’ve read it a couple times. A history of the comings and goings of the great languages. English is having its day now. It too shall pass.

.Notes: Continue reading →

You are only ten per cent of you.

Posted on by

Here’s a brief but mindblowing article from Science Daily. The cells or our body–skin, blood, brain, all of it–are only 10% of all the cells in our body…the other 90% are bacteria…and yet we are the interaction of our actual bodies (and genetically, our genome) and all those bacteria. The Holobiont they call us, i.e. you and your bacteria, and the Hologenome, your genes and all those bacterial genes (a galaxy’s worth of genes, I suspect, untold numbers). Everything we are, right down to our emotions and health and interactions and thinking and mating habits, might be a result of a combination of our bodies and our bacteria. Perhaps “might be” is being too conservative, perhaps everything we are and think and do is a result of a combination of our bodies and our bacteria. We are just now getting a glimmer, just a hint of how this works. But essentially what you think of as you is actually an ecosystem of you and a zillion bacteria, and what you think of as, say, your cat is your cat and all it’s bacteria, and the mutual affection you have for, say, your cat is actually you and your bacteria and the cat and its bacteria reacting to each other. But wait, there’s more. That woman at the bar who sat next to you and you talked to all night and are still thinking about today? That wasn’t just her perfume that made you swoon. It was pheromones, everyone knows that. Pop science. You can even buy supposed pheromones to increase your attractiveness to the opposite sex. But think about what those pheromones really are. Is it the scent of pheromones themselves that kept you focused on him or her all night? Or was it pheromones interacting with the bacteria that thrive in the lush, warm, sweaty, hairy places beneath our arms and between our legs (and, hairlessly, behind the ears for some reason). Mostly it was the scent of millions (billions?) of bacteria heated by the increased blood flow to her armpits and groin and behind the ears. You attracted her the same way. You and your bacteria dug her, and she and her bacteria dug you. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is..

.

Anyway, here’s the article….

Don’t look now, but the pronoun “I” is becoming obsolete. (Science Daily)

Continue reading →

Life After Death

Posted on by

My wife’s heart stopped beating for five minutes. She had a severe infection and her electrolytes had plummeted to the fatal point. Luckily it was in the emergency room and they were able to bring her back. She came to with amnesia. She’s regained/relearned most, and few can tell there was an issue. But she has no memory whatsoever of being in the hospital. Indeed, she has no memory of the weeks prior to her being in the hospital. All of the memory was essentially deleted. Shorter term memories are stored in a part of the brain that is highly sensitive to a lack of oxygen, with anoxic effects similar to that of Alzheimer’s. She was asked by who knows how many people if she remembered being dead, and all she could say was she remembered absolutely nothing. Life after death for her means being brought back from the brink by a defibrillator and an excellent team of doctors. I suppose had she been of a religious or spiritual bent, her imagination would have filled that void since then. But she’s not, and the memory void remains a void, and all she knows is what she’s been told–that she was not breathing for five minutes, lost a few million neurons, and then was revived. She has no belief in a life after death, except that she is living it now, and is quite happy to be here.

Ingoorrooloorrloorroona noorroo

Posted on by

Using genetic analyses, it’s currently believed that the first wave of modern humans who migrated out of Africa did so around 90-130K years ago. Those first wanderers reached Australia perhaps 50-70K years ago, and today’s Australian aborigines are probably descendants of those people, and if not the very first (we have 65K year old artifacts galore but as yet no DNA) then certainly of peoples who came in soon afterward. There were other waves–perhaps pulses is a better term–of people out of Africa afterward. Each “wave” was probably a remarkably small number of people, maybe a few hundred, maybe even less, a few dozen, who then eventually branched out across the world. Some of those additional waves may have also reached Australia, or perhaps not. They’re still arguing that one. Genetics, though, does show that aboriginal Australians descend in large part if not entirely from that first wave. We know this because at the end of the last ice age the land bridge between Asia and Australia was submerged, creating first the Indonesian archipelago and then, as the oceans rose further, separating New Guinea from Australia about 8,000 years ago. Australians, among the first people to leave Africa, became isolated at the end of the earth in Australia, and had very little to do with the rest of humanity for thousands of years until Captain Cook came nosing around. Their culture evolved in splendid isolation. Dreamtime.

I’m bringing this up because when you look at Australian languages, they seem about as far afield from the Indo-European languages–which includes English–as you can imagine. The last time someone spoke something that was the root of both an Australian aboriginal language and English was probably somewhere in East Africa, perhaps 150,000 years ago or more, almost to the point where modern humans–Homo sapiens–emerged and began speaking language. There’s no way to figure this out, of course, I’m just extrapolating from the timelines genetics and the sparse archeological record have given us. And I’m thinking in terms of the small family bands or perhaps tribal groups radiating across Africa for maybe fifty thousand years before some eventually crossed the Red Sea into Arabia and kept walking. At some point in there the people that became Australians would have lost contact with the people who became, say, Europeans. It may have been a family splitting up. A hunting band. Maybe a scattered group of related bands. Whatever. We last had contact with each other somewhere in Africa well over a hundred thousand years ago. Which gives you an idea of just how separate English is from any of the languages spoken by indigenous Australians. The last time we could understand each other was maybe six thousand, or maybe ten thousand, generations ago. You can almost picture that, ten thousand generations. Think back to your own grandparents, and their grandparents, and then their grandparents and on and on and back and back, time measured in people’s lifespans. You could talk to your grandparents, and–if you spoke the same language–perhaps their grandparents. You make yourself understood to their grandparents. It might get a little iffy after that. I’d have a helluva time making myself understood to an English speaker twenty generations ago, when everyone really did talk like Shakespeare. Go back another twenty generations before that and it would get even harder. Another twenty generations beyond that (i.e., sixty generations ago) we’d just stare at each other, confused. And that is only 1500 years. Multiply that by a hundred to get back to where a proto-European and a proto-Australian could understand what each other was saying.

But to really get an idea, here’s a page full of transcriptions of sayings in various Australian languages. They all pretty much sound as they look, the double r’s are rolled or trilled, sort of halfway between Spanish and German, and the g is hard, so ng sounds like the ng in ungood and not like the ng in orange. Never mind the grammar–it varies wildly across the continent, which still has 150 spoken native languages (down from perhaps as many as 750 before the Europeans came), though many, like Bardi, have less than twenty remaining speakers.  And like all small languages, the grammar is more complex than a language spoken by millions of people (the more speakers, the simpler the rules become). But just looking at these phrases, and sounding them out, and seeing how utterly alien they appear to us, you really get a feel for the span of time it’s been since our shared ancestors went their separate ways. My ancestors and the ancestors of aboriginal Australians have been speaking mutually unintelligible tongues almost since Homo sapiens appeared on the planet. A hundred thousand years maybe? A hundred and fifty thousand? Two hundred thousand? Who knows. But if I’d seen two people adding sticks to a small fire, I’d say they were kindling a fire. A Bardi speaking Australian who saw the same thing would say ingoorrooloorrloorroona noorroo. That’s what a couple hundred thousand years will do to mutual communication.

Permian extinction

Posted on by

Here I am watching UCTV again. I love UCTV. It’s basically lectures by people smarter than me. Sometimes I understand them. The linguists, the historians, this paleontologist showing funny slides of the Burgess Shale. He’s talking about the Permian extinction, at the dawn of the Triassic. He says that 96% of all species disappeared. That I knew. This is what they can deduce from the fossil record, all the extraordinary variety of life in the Permian was reduced to virtually nothing as the Triassic began. But then he said that it appears that the mega-extinction occurred in a span of two hundred thousand years. That I did not know. I had heard millions of years, even low millions, but two hundred thousand years? He reeled off the theory, the evidence, the processes of annihilation involved, and how they came out to around 200,000 years. That is fast. It may not seem fast to us–language itself may only be two hundred thousand years old–and four generations of people living to the limits of human life expectancy, from the birth of the great grandmother to the death of the great granddaughter, barely stretches two hundred years. But in the expansive span of evolution and even greater expanse of geologic time, two hundred thousand years is less than a minute in a day. It’s almost instantaneous. Annihilation, when it happens en masse, happens suddenly. Apparently one of the few therapsids–a mammal like reptile, closer to us than to dinosaurs–survived, which was good for us, otherwise I wouldn’t be here writing this and you reading it or doing any homo sapien things. And we’ll end this thus, otherwise it will be a book.

Ruminations on why you would rather look at a funny cat video than read this.

Posted on by

“Here’s another way of saying it: We are the first few generations to receive most of our sense of the world mediated rather than direct, to have it arrive through one screen or another instead of from contact with other human beings or with nature.”–Bill McKibben, The Mental Environment (2013)

Language itself totally changed and shaped our perception of the world, what we see and what we say our two dramatically different things, with what we see being much more accurate than how we say it. In many ways, information brought to us visually on screen–movie, television, computer–is more accurate and unfiltered than what we read in books, newspapers or magazines. Widespread literacy dramatically changed human perception. But visual information on our screens subverts language…a reversal of a long time trend. Language began to supplant vision, at first at the origin of speech itself a quarter million years ago and then again, dramatically, with the invention of writing. The printing press and widespread literacy began to change how people viewed the world and processed information. Sight and language battle for control in getting us information. For a couple centuries there as reading became universal (first in the United States, we were the truly literate nation after mandatory education was introduced with the founding of the republic) the written word took precedence and people would almost always believe what they read over what they saw. Movies, television and the internet are allowing the ocular part of our brain to increase its control of our information process. People read less now and look at video more. So what the internet has done is to weaken the power of language in our perception by allowing us to watch video. It has also, first through email conversation and then through texting and finally Facebook, made writing more akin to speech. Writers like me are constantly struggling with ways to get people to trust language again. So what we are seeing now is the retreat of written language in the brain as there are more ways now than ever before to watch instead of read things.

Another thing to consider is religion. Even in a world free from any sort of video or writing, as in the middle ages, when most people in Europe read not at all, their perception of reality was less accurate and direct than it is today because religion completely shaped the way people saw reality. You can see that just reading medieval and middle ages texts. Instead of seeing things directly as they were, everything was filtered though religious dogma and belief. So language had enabled religion and written language had enabled codified religious dogma which could be recited to people who couldn’t read, and which then severely limited people’s perception of reality even though few of them could read and there were almost no media at all. Free of ironclad and enforced dogma now (no one gets burned at the stake for blasphemy anymore in this country) we certainly have more appreciation of nature than they did then. People have been walking through the forests now for centuries. We preserve forests in national parks and lace them with hiking trails. But in the Middle Ages and even into the Enlightenment Europeans were terrified of forests. Mountains were a source of evil. Deserts full of ghosts and djinn. Nature more scary than it was beautiful. Even rainbows had their dangerous wee people.

The written word changed all of that. The more we read, the less scared we are. Now, with visual information coming to the fore again, via television and the internet, people seem to be more scared, or at least more wary, scared of each other. Partly, I think, because the brain takes in anything visual as self-experienced, it does not distinguish between you being in a car accident and watching a car accident on TV. It feels it viscerally as if you were in the crashing car. And now, when it sees scary video on the news or YouTube or even scary crime stories and reality programs, it automatically sets off fear and concern, often absurdly out of proportion, because our brain cannot analyze it the way we can with language. It sees everything as reality. Language does not do that. Reality programs are not possible as literature.

So today it is not so much that people who watch the internet all day long are out of touch with real life, it’s that the brain sees everything on TV or the internet as real life, no matter how ridiculous that is, or how out of context that video was. Just shoot it with a hand held camera and it looks real. Language can add context. When we read our language based analytical skills give context, and when we even listen to spoken words–news, for instance–we automatically add context. We look for raw footage of disasters precisely because there is no narrator to ruin the you-are-there sensation. 

The problem now is not the current internet drive world’s lack of direct contact with other people and nature. It is the lack of analytical context, which, unfortunately, is entirely based on language, whether written or spoken (or even thought–we think in language, but we do not see pictures and film in language.) You cannot have, apparently, a world full of video and simultaneous logical explanations. The two literally do not go together, since the parts or our brains that take in visual information and the parts that logically analyzes it are two different things, indeed are in different lobes (back and front, respectively). We haven’t yet figured out a way to merge the two.

I’m working on it, though.

Obsolete

Posted on by

Had one of those digital conversations on Facebook tonight about a map. A bunch of people talking about how and why a certain map had never been made. I said they had been made, I was looking at one, I had it in a book on my desk. The conversation continued about how and why one had never been made, as if I’d said nothing at all. I repeated that I have one of the maps they all insist had never been made, in a book on my desk. But apparently the map in the book, being tactile and analog, did not exist. Facebook is strictly digital. Analog is of no use whatsoever on Facebook.

Everywhere I look in my office are books, everywhere. Must be a thousands of them. Hundreds more in the closet awaiting shelving. And piles of maps. Yet the only portions of all these intellectual riches that exist to Facebook are whatever Google has digitized. I can link to those.

When the Phoenician alphabet caught on and transformed writing–and reading–it rendered cuneiform obsolete. Cuneiform was much more difficult than an alphabet. Mastering it took years of training. Within a few centuries of the introduction of the alphabets, cuneiform stopped being used at all except by a few Mesopotamian academics and priests and when the last of them died in the first or second century A.D. it was no longer a living thing at all. It was extinct, deader even than the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs left us with birds. But there was not a living descendant of cuneiform at all. No one could write it, no one could read it, no one could translate even a word. It was just scribbling, utterly devoid of meaning. And with cuneiform’s extinction, went all meaning in the content in millions of documents, documents written in cuneiform stashed, buried, entombed or gracing ancient walls. All of it, hundreds of millions of words, were little more than strange looking geometric patterns etched it clay or hewn in rock or written in ink. For all intents and purposes, the entire written history of civilization in the Fertile Crescent until then had vanished. Nearly three thousand years of it gone.

Think of it this way: if a writing system is a technology, then a new, improved technology had rendered an older, less user friendly technology completely worthless. A Roman staring at a cuneiform inscription was just as mystified as we are now. Though we at least, have experts who can read it. They are few and far between, though, those experts. To the rest of us, cuneiform looks like triangular gibberish.

Books aren’t gibberish. We can read them easily enough. Flip one open and you can begin reading aloud instantly. But you can’t read and turn the pages of an actual book on the web, nor post them in Facebook, nor link to them in this blog. And unless I take a picture–and I won’t–you’ll just have to take my word on that map. But it’s here, in a beautiful volume published in 1996. Which was the year I began working in the Internet industry, and using email and the web, and within just a few years saw my library, my magazine subscriptions, my box of handwritten essays and journals, my thousands of photographs, hundreds of maps, and my entire record collection vanish before my eyes whenever I turned on the computer. Analog isn’t extinct yet, but it’s getting there.

Pharaoh ants

Posted on by

Noticed some pharaoh ants, Monomorium pharaonis, crawling on me (and my desk) lately. Just a couple. I followed them across the desk with a magnifying glass. They are incredibly small (maybe a sixteenth of an inch long) and a nearly transparent yellowish-brown, with a darker abdomen. Unlike the colonies of the ubiquitous Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) that extend along nearly the entire coast of California, pharaoh ant colonies typically number a few hundred tiny individuals and just a couple queens, and basically you have to try hard to notice them. I have no idea how long they’ve been on or in or around my desk.

Of course I looked them up. I love ants and have a small library on myrmecology–the study of ants–among my other compendia of useless knowledge. This time I went tooling across Google to see what I could find and I found this incredibly fascinating article from a few years ago in Pacific Standard: Bedbugs Have Evolved to Live With Mankind. It’s about bed bugs–did you know there were originally bat bugs?–and not ants, but it mentions their natural enemies. And apparently their number one enemy is, of all things, these tiny little pharaoh ants. Pharaoh ant queens have a thing for bed bugs, and their subjects hunt the annoying little bloodsucking beasts down mercilessly. No matter how thin a hiding place the beg bugs cram themselves into, the tiny pharaoh ants can get in there and drag them out. They are so effective at this that a pharaoh ant infestation can quickly annihilate a population of bed bugs. Which is what they did for centuries for us. Until, that is, we began keeping cleaner households, and then spraying them with insecticide. Unfortunately for human beings, bed bugs are resistant to almost any bug spray. Pharaoh ants are not. As indoor pharaoh ant populations faded with the chemical assault–helped along by the rise of voracious and hugely numerous Argentine ants–beg bug populations rebounded. Nature is funny that way.

So I think I’ll let my pharaoh ants hang around. They’re almost impossible to see and just a minor annoyance at best. And who knows what critters might be hiding in or behind or under my desk, even–cringe–bed bugs. They are everywhere the bedbug experts tell us. You never know how bed bugs can get into your home, your bedroom, your office, and will never know where they came from. There seems to be no way of stopping them. But a colony of incredibly tiny ants might just do the trick. Nothing is biting me. Not in the house anyway. Maybe it because of these tiny ants. Outside I am at the mercy of nature. But inside, I am protected by the pharaohs.

“Monomorium pharaonis worker with single sugar crystal”–a beautiful photograph by Julian Szulc off of Wikipedia.

Behind the door

Posted on by

I once peeked at the source code on my Facebook page. It seemed to go on forever. I wondered just how many characters that was, so on a whim I copied it, opened up an MS Word document and pasted it in. Control a, control c, open doc, control p. Less than ten seconds. But nothing happened. The page was blank, frozen. I let it be and went back to something useful. A few hours later I went back to look. All the source code was there, 187 pages of it in dull utilitarian ten point font, single spaced. Alas, Word was trapped in a Sisyphean hell trying to proofread the thing. Hours later and it had only gotten to page 12. At 187 pages a word count was an impossibility, I knew, and a character count was one for the cosmos. So I put the beast out of its misery and deleted it. 187 pages vanished into electrons. I scooted back here, safely above all that HTML. But it’s weird, now that I’ve seen behind the door. What is all that code? What does it all do? As Facebook alters civilization itself, and perhaps, some excitable types say, our very evolution as a species, just what is that code, really? HTML, sure, but how many other HTML sources have changed us so completely? The internet is full of HTML, but very little of makes us unfriend each other. Or befriend people we don’t even know. Or get all worked up about nothing. Or post stupid cat videos, over and over. Perhaps we’re not supposed to know. I heard an old science fiction radio show once. A guy started wondering about things, like why was it they were all doing what they were doing, and started nosing around, where no one ever looked before. Turns out they were all part of a game in some advertising agency. He told somebody else, and soon everyone told everybody. Everyone knew it wasn’t real. The game was ruined, so the agency ended it, and thus ended that universe. Don’t blame me.

HTML 1