What would it do to American Football (standard, touch football or flag football) if you removed tackling from the game?
This is ostensibly what Shredding does to Ultimate and this is why it wrecks the game.
The logic may seem a bit abstract and convoluted but once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it. Shredding breaks ultimate.
Welcome to my world.
Shredding, and how it breaks Ultimate Frisbee®
First off, to understand what Shredding is, you truly need to understand what Ultimate Frisbee® is. I mean, understand what Ultimate Frisbee® really is.
Jared, Irv and Joel were all playing either flag football or touch football prior to inventing Ultimate and they modelled Ultimate (what they originally called Frisbee® Football) after football. Dollars to donuts, Hellring and Hines were also playing some sort of football at the time as well.
Ok, so I have a question for you. Put your phone down and think about this question, this is a very important question. When you watch Ultimate Frisbee®, a game that admittedly is a derivative of football, how and why does it not look like football?
What is the difference?
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Do you see it?
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In football (of all types; tackle, touch or flag), after each play, the game comes to a complete stop, a pause happens, the teams reset then play restarts until the next stoppage and so on.
But Ultimate doesn’t do this.
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THIS is the major loophole that transcends the entire game. This is the loophole that Shredding exploits and the loophole that renders the game terminally braindead.
Do you see it yet? Do you see how this loophole is a fatal flaw?
OK, you still don’t get it. Trust me. Shredding wrecks Ultimate, let me try to explain as succinctly as possible.
The framework for American Football has a set of guardrails created to contain the flow of the game.
An incomplete pass
Running out of bounds
Fumble/interception
Four “downs” with gaining ten yards
But, whether it’s flag football, or touch football or it’s tackle football, the predominant guardrail in American Football is tackling. The entire game is centered around tackling.
What would football be like if you removed the ability to tackle the player with the ball? It would ruin it.
What Jared, Joel, Johnny, Buzzy and Irv did was that they replaced tackling with the requirement that a receiver has to instead plant a pivot foot.
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Now do you get it?
No? Damn.
C’mon people, think this through. When I told you that Shredding breaks the game, I wasn’t lying or talking smack. It’s the God’s honest truth. I’ve taken a shit ton of grief over the past 30 years for making this claim, and I’m still here.
Can you see how shredding makes a mockery of the framework?
Why would replacing an explicit stoppage of play in the form of a tackle in a start-stop-resume paradigm, with an implicit stoppage of play with only a pivot foot, present a gaping hole in the framework for the game?
Why is Frank claiming that this that literally breaks Ultimate?
Now?
Uggh, this is frustrating, probably for both of us, so let me spell it out.
In shredding, there’s ostensibly no such thing as a pivot foot. At least not in the conventional sense. There is no stoppage of play explicitly or implicitly.
There, now do you understand? The entire framework for Ultimate “Frisbee® Football” never took into account someone coming along and legally violating the game’s most fundamental guardrail, the core tenet of “tackling”. The entire ruleset for the start-stop-resume paradigm gets completely thrown out the window with Shredding.
Wow, you still don’t get it. Let me simplify this even more.
One last time.
If you could legally run with the disc in Ultimate, what would it do to the game?
Being able to run with the disc in Ultimate would ruin the game.
When you mix Shredding with Ultimate, you get Football with no tackles.
Game.Over.
Shredding is a legal way of running with the disc.
In other words, at the end of the day, when you understand what shredding is and what it does, you’ll understand why the game needs to be overhauled. It’s ostensibly football without the ability to tackle the runner. It’s no wonder why the game doesn’t get any respect or us players, to this day, have to endure the Dogs and Baskets question.
Don’t shoot me, I’m only the messenger. These four, geeky kids from Columbia High School had no business creating a team sport. Somewhere, someone is being asked one of these two questions today, “Ultimate, is that the thing with the dogs?” or “Ultimate isn’t that the thing I see the kids play down in the park with the baskets?” and hopefully now you have an idea why we’re asked this question every, single day. Ultimate is a very dumb game.
Here are five examples that prove that Ultimate’s frame is a Downs and Tackles paradigm just like flag football, touch football and tackle football:
When you run out of bounds with the disc, it's not a turnover because you've already earned a first down
After a reception, you get as many steps to stop as you need because the moment you catch the disc, you've earned a first down but the play doesn't stop until you are 'tackled' (i.e. you plant a pivot foot)
When you lay out for a catch, you're permitted to stand up (in spite of the fact that it literally says in the rules that this is a travel). It's a sanctioned travel and you're allowed to stand up and plant a pivot foot to begin ‘the next play’, because you've earned a first down.
After a catch, receivers almost universally take one extra step when they are coming to a stop to all them set up their preferred pivot foot. Nobody notices this as a travel, because almost everybody does this.
Stopping as quickly as possible or stopping in as few steps as possible excludes this extra step (no where in the rules does it stipulate that players are entitled to this extra step).
This is blatantly illegal.
Half the time, coming to a stop as quickly as possible or in as few steps as possible would end up with the receiver having their right foot as their pivot foot, instead of their left foot (or vice versa).
However, because the play is over and the receiver has earned a first down, and the quarterback has been tackled, the next play is now starting so he chooses his preferred pivot foot and play starts again.
This is all a fact.
**The Downs and Tackles paradigm also explains why in the rules, players are not allowed to change direction or accelerate while coming to a stop after a reception.
“After catching a pass, the receiver is only allowed the fewest number of steps required to come to a stop and establish a pivot foot.” 9th Edition
Coming to a stop and establishing a pivot foot is Ultimate’s version of a ‘tackle’. This is where one play ends, and the next play begins.
Make sense? In other words, what they were basically saying here with this rule is that the play is dead until the next play begins, and changing directions or accelerating can’t happen until a tackle (pivot foot is established).
The rule change in 1995* was two years after I had broken the game. The new rule only made legal what I had already been doing for ten years because the rule on what constituted establishing a pivot foot or coming to a stop was always somewhat ambiguous.
Understand that this rule is a Downs and Tackles rule in the context of the pre-1995 rules, prior to the amendment that allowed a player to run before the third ground contact.
If the UPA understood that the game was based on the Downs and Tackles paradigm in 1995*, they would’ve never made it legal to throw before the third ground contact. (this amendment doesn’t makes sense in the Downs and Tackles paradigm but with Shredding, I had exposed a loophole that needed to be closed up, so they legalized running prior to the third ground contact, with restraints)
Don’t hate me because I broke your game.
It’s my game too.
**Writing this last sub-section out really helps me understand why I was hated so much in the 1990s by the Ultimate Community in California at the time.
It’s no wonder why so many people had such an intense dislike for me. The offense I was developing ran roughshod over the entire Ultimate Frisbee framework without me actually realizing it.
I was just trying to win but in doing so, I trampled all over Ultimate’s Downs and Tackles Football model.
Shredding, especially back in 1990, was a complete violation of the Spirit of the Game....because the Spirit of Ultimate, was in the in the spirit of Downs and Tackles.
How was I supposed to know?
I was just reading the rule book and pushing the envelope one what was and wasn’t legal, just like anyone else who wanted an edge would do in any other sport.
Was I supposed to not do that, just so I wasn’t hated?
It was a different time, in a different era and nobody was doing what I was doing what I was doing back then…not even close.
Sorry?
Frank Huguenard
Hell, half of my old Foxhole Atheist team in 1988 hated me for trampling on the game, which is why I had to bifurcate the squad and venture off on my own in the first place.
For the Indianapolis AlleyCats to renege on their agreement to have me coach their team my offense, because I’m hated for my offense, and then to turn around and use my offense without me is possibly the most brutal outcome I could have possibly imagined.
I’ve been hated collectively by the Ultimate Frisbee community for thirty five years because I play the game differently and UltiWorld accuses me of Hate Speech?
Seriously? You can’t make this up.
Neurotransmitters
The human brain chemistry is meant to be a finely tuned biochemical factory that produces an extremely delicate balance of various organic compounds that target various receptors in the brain to encourage learning on how to move about in this world.
Neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin are all produced to elicit a positive reinforcement success response, and other biochemical reactions are there to ward off self injury through a negative reinforcement failure response. If we had a massive dopamine response every time you put your hand on a hot stove, we’d have a serious problem.
We’d never learn.
When you artificially flood the brain with high doses of these neurotransmitters, you can throw your entire brain chemistry completely out of whack and you can be subject to neurochemical addictions. Cell Phone apps are all known to maliciously be designed exactly to do this and some video games that are worse than others in this regard (Worlds of Warcraft comes to mind).
The entire business model of the gaming industry is tailored around massive amounts of dopamine being produced by the brain. Researches have known for decades that flooding the brain disproportionately with things like dopamine impairs learning and can lead to a form of functional retardation.
Why is this relevant here?
Due to the fact that Ultimate is mash-up of two different sport frameworks, based on combining a play-based paradigm (like baseball, football, tennis, volleyball and pickle ball) instead of a continuous play model (like hockey, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, etc.), massive amounts of dopamine are being produced by the brain, when in reality, there should be a pain response in most of the situations.
Think about it. Basically every single rule in Ultimate favors the course, unrefined and mediocre player over the refined, advanced and exceptional player.
Every.Single.Rule.
This is why the game is both so addictive and also why it’s nearly impossible to evolve.
When I coach my system, players act like I’m taking their heroin away from them.
That’s because that’s basically exactly what I’m doing. I’m depriving them of their dopamine fix and they hate me for it.
What Shredding is, and what it isn’t
Now then, as long as we’re clear on what Ultimate actually is (football without the ability to tackle the ball carrier), let me try to explain what shredding is, and a little bit of history.
As forementioned, I began playing Ultimate in the late 70s at Purdue and by 1986, I was already growing bored with conventional Ultimate and I was busting at the seams wanting to do something, anything, different with the game.
The night before a tournament in Chico, California in 1986, I devised would was the earliest implementation of the hex formation in Ultimate. My team, the Foxhole Atheists, implemented it the next day and we won the tournament, something our team had never accomplished before that.
(Note: here’s a diagram from my Z-Boyz.org website in 2004 of the obvious hexagonal setup, but the original formation/configuration dates back to the mid-1980s)
The hex configuration opened up the field significantly, created dozens of new attack angles and organizational triangles and it facilitated all kinds of unique offensive flow potential and by the late 80s, I had begun to incorporate a heavy emphasis on what would eventually come to be known as dribbling. Eventually this resulted in a schism on our team between those who wanted to pursue this more interesting and dynamic type of offense, and those who wanted to maintain the status quo.
So in 1989, I blew up the team that had been the Foxhole Atheists and started a new team from scratch with the idea of implementing an offense that was philosophically more aligned with basketball. To incorporate a basketball framework, we had to predominantly focus on a full blown dribbling mentality to be able activate various basketball principles and philosophies. Everybody on the team had to learn how to dribble, meaning everyone on the team was a handler and all handlers in this system are, by definition, ambidextrous.
The first couple of years were pretty lean and it wasn’t always smooth in transitioning over to a completely different mentality, but by 1993, we started to hit our stride. I remember a tournament at Stanford in April of that year when we all started to experience success and as a group, have seeing the potential of this offense come to fruition. It was pretty exciting really, to implement something so radical and finally be able to realize that we were on to something. Something yuge.
If you’re having a hard time imagining what dribbling in Ultimate is, think of dribbling as a highly refined, highly advanced, highly deliberate and highly intentional form of give-and-go moves. Dribbling is give/go, but not all give/go is dribbling and in fact, almost all give and go moves are specifically not dribbling at all.
If you were to ask me what the main differences are between dribbling and give/go, I would say that primarily, most give and go moves (virtually all of them) are done without the players running with the disc while the intentionality in dribbling is to demonstrably prove to the defense that you can run with the disc [dribble].
That may seem like an odd, self-referential argument, but that’s kind of the point. It’s almost as if part of the definition of the word dribble, in Ultimate is that you’re doing it to just to let the defense know that you can.
Since running with the disc (dribbling) destroys the game, the first intention that I teach to players is to put the idea into the defense’s heads that you can run with the disc and more importantly that you’re a threat to do it at any moment. The very intention, is that you are deliberate with the intention. The more you dribble, the softer the defense get, and the softer the defense gets, the easier it is to dribble and so forth and so on.
Eventually as you go through this process, you’ll realize that just about everything you’ve been led to believe about how you have to play ultimate is fundamentally and completely untrue. For example, fundamentals that we’ve been taught for decades, like having to run through a reception turn into decelerate into a reception and having to catch the disc with a pancake grip turn into catch the disc on the rim. Rather than catching the disc and immediately turn up field, you can now invert your pivot back in the direction the disc came from. Rather than compromise your throwing mechanics by stepping out around the marker to throw a flick, you can throw a flick in a natural, upright stance (like Disc Golfers do).
When I’ve said things that violate those beliefs, y’all thought I was crazy. You don’t understand, when I said shredding wrecks ultimate, I meant it. The entire framework for the game is retarded (by definition). Jared, Joel, Johnny, Buzzy and Irv had no business creating a team sport.
When I’m dribbling, I’m never very far in either time or distance from the disc and anyone watching can see that I’m clearly running with the disc (like running with a dog on the beach). From this standard that I’ve set, there’s actually no one in the game who understands or executes dribbling like I do; not Freechild, not McDonnell, not Bansfield and not Williams.
I’ve never seen any footage of any of them (or anyone else for that matter) actually dribbling but when people would ask me “Frank, why isn’t that dribbling? How are you defining and discerning what is and isn’t dribbling so that we know the difference?”, I had to be honest with myself and admit that I couldn’t give a good answer. They were correct, so I renamed what I do to Shredding and that’s also what I call my entire offensive paradigm.
Photo of 2008 Potlatch All-Stat game in Seattle.
I’m flipping off Lou Burruss, who ruined our chances of winning the game with his idiocy.
So what’s the difference between dribbling and Shredding? Shredding is a highly refined, highly advanced, highly intentional and highly deliberate form of dribbling.
I like to think of Shredding as a form of Martial Arts. It’s very Zen, it’s very philosophical and it’s also a form of combat. I also like to use the system of belts in martial arts to measure and track a given player’s progress. In all the game today, the players we see closest to dribbling (Malks, Bansfield, Nethercutt, Williams, Freechild, McDonnell, etc.) are only at the orange belt level right now. The only player I’ve seen above that would be AJ Merriman, and I’d give him a yellow belt, but he’s on his way up the ladder in a big way.
No ego, that’s objectively just how much further my standard of shredding has evolved than anyone else. Hell, I’ve been doing it over 35 years, my standards better be significantly more advanced than everyone else and they are.
So, back to origin story of Shredding back in the 90s and how that came to a close.
We named the team MonkeyShine, in honor of the style we were able to play at, which was a cross between the LA Lakers Showtime Lakers and the Harlem Globetrotters. It was pretty funny really, because people just assumed that we were all about messing around with trick throws or whatever, but we were seriously competitive, in spite of our style (or better yet, because of our style).
MonkeyShine had a decent run with some amazing successes and the offense clearly worked against many elite teams but in 1997, my friend and partner was stricken with breast cancer and I withdrew from the Ultimate scene for a few years until after she passed in late 2001.
Soulla was just a baby, really. She died shortly after her 42nd birthday.
For what it’s worth, as I was going through all of this pain and anguish at the time and I was also working at a high end audio video streaming company. The long and short of it was that while my friend was going through chemo, surgery, radiation, convalescence, etc., I had to move me and my kids twice, deal with my Silicon Valley career, try to help my friend get better and somehow try to find some peace of mind.
In the midst of all this, in the summer of 2000, I had 5 bosses over a six week period of time because the company I was at was going through some serious turmoil and upheaval. At the peak of all this craziness, I invented and had a fully functioning prototype of a new software app that, feature for feature, had every bit of both Skype and YouTube, five years before anyone had ever heard of either. Skype got bought for $3 billion, YouTube got bought for $3 billion and you guessed it, I got fired.
They thought it was a stupid idea and waste of company resources.
The story of my life.
Billy Barou
I re-entered the scene in 2002 and me and three other players (Ken ‘Ken-Brah’ Nowak, Daryl Nounnan and Matt Rodney) formed the team that ultimately became Revolver a year later and while we tried to implement my offense with that team, there was too much resistance and not enough time to reach critical mass. It takes a concerted effort, over a period of time, to make this shift into a dribbling centric philosophy.
I had been hearing Rumblings over the past several years that Jam (the Bay Area’s powerhouse team from the late 90s to around 2010) was “running Frank’s offense”, but I was out of the scene and not paying to much attention. But when I got back in, there was enough interest in my offense at least for this new team to discuss having me coach the it.
Many people over the years have asked the same, old, tired, pathetic question “If shredding is so great, why aren’t any elite teams running it?” but the fact of the matter is that Jam was an Idris Nolan push-pass, into the teeth of Hurricane Michelle, away from winning the UPA National Championship with Plink-O, which was a derivative of shredding. The next year they lost both Seth Blacher and Chris 'Toaster' Hayden, their two best “dribblers” so that was the end of Plink-O, but this was an obvious example of an ‘elite’ team running a variation of my offense.
One of the biggest challenges with Shredding is that it requires a significant amount of time for a team to transition from one paradigm to the other. It’s not like you can go to a weekend seminar and “get it”, especially if you’ve been playing conventional Ultimate for a long time and you’re fairly well rigid in your patterns of thinking.
Part of the reason for this extended amount of time it takes to transition to this kind of offense is that opposed to all the other games that have dribbling (soccer, ice hockey, basketball, lacrosse and field hockey), Ultimate is the only sport where dribbling is a collaborative, cooperative effort. You have to train everybody more or less simultaneously to get them all on the same page.
It was a huge challenge at this point for me to fit in on conventional teams that were not mine, and I didn’t have the energy or inclination to start over from scratch and build a new team all over again. That said, playing on these teams with my system only reinforced what I already knew to be true.
The more I shredded, the more I knew that everything about Ultimate was wrong. The cuts, the throws, the beliefs, the offenses, the throwing mechanics, the balance (or lack thereof), the defenses, etc. It was all wrong. and yet the game itself refused to change. It was the classic case of the immovable object (Ultimate) vs. the unstoppable force (Frank Huguenard) and when I say unstoppable, I mean fucking unstoppable.
In 2004, another friend in Santa Cruz, Brian Johnson, recommended that I watch Dog Town and Z-Boyz. That film changed my life and the skater I resonated most with in the documentary was Jay Adams. Jay and I were born only eight months apart (I’m slightly older), we were both from broken homes and we both were more interested in innovation and pushing the envelopes of our respective crafts rather than being interested in accolades or trophies.
What struck me most about the film was how the Zephyr Team were the heretics and how the rest of the legacy Skate Board world looked down on them and treated them with so much scorn and derision, much in the same way that I had. But the lingering question that I had after watching the documentary was; how is it that Skateboarding had blown up into this multi-billion dollar industry while Ultimate had stayed stale and stagnant for so long?
Dogtown mentioned how Craig Stecyk wrote for Skateboard magazine under the “John Smythe” pseudonym, taking no hostages and trash-talking the entire skate board community into oblivion with brash claims about the Z-Boys revolutionary new style and so I thought the I would copy this idea and Billy Barou was born. I even used Z-Boyz.org as my website for several years, as a platform to publish some of my ideas.
Billy Barou is Judge Smails’ putter in Caddyshack and I thought it was as good of a name as any to use as a pseudonym so I went with it.
My online persona was my alter ego. It was me, but it wasn’t really me. Eminem had this song, The Way I Am that always resonated with me. The more the community hated me, the more I leaned into it and Billy Barou was just a way for me to make a mockery of the whole thing. I am, whatever you say I am, if I wasn’t, then why would I say I am? It was really perfect, more than you can imagine. It was completely liberating. I was already hated, so I might as well make the most of it.
Ultimate’s Spirit of the Game Ideology created a culture of false decorum where, as long as you gave the appearance of acting within acceptable social standards you could literally get away with murder. It has always been complete hypocrisy and I had reached my limit.
Spirit of the Game asked me to be someone that I wasn’t, and if I could be me, who the fuck was I supposed to be? So, like Em said, I just became whatever you thought I was and I trolled the crap out of the community.
We do a little trolling. It’s called, we do a little trolling.
You can’t have a game based on mutual respect, and then disrespect someone just because they think different than you. What’s the point of that? If everyone already thinks the same, there’s really no need for mutual respect, is there? So I enjoyed having an alter ego to post under to poke fun of the whole hypocrisy of the culture.
Anybody who took the time to meet me or who spent five minutes talking to me knew who I was and that Billy Barou was just a caricature, but I let Ultimate players at large draw a completely different impression. Why not? I had taken enough of their abuse for the previous 20 years and I had reached my breaking point.
As Janis sang, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” and at this point in my life, I had lost my friend, my career, my family was in tatters and my ultimate team MonkeyShine was a thing of the past so I was a free as a bird and I let loose. There were a lot of players who agreed with most of what I was saying. They just lacked the freedom and the conviction to express it.
I guess the point of this is that virtually no one really ever understood that the joke was on the community.
It’s not about me, it’s never been about me.
The more you make it about me, the more you miss the point.
It’s about you.
Dischoops
No article about my half century story of Ultimate would be complete without giving Dischoops an honorable mention. Once I had broken Ultimate, I realized that the entire game needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.
You can’t take a game like football, remove the primary guardrail mechanism for the basis of the game (tackles), and hope that it’ll work. It doesn’t. It couldn’t possibly work.
For years I had been hearing about this game called Goaltimate and the people telling me kept saying that my skillset and style would be perfect for the game. After Soulla passed away, I played Goaltimate for the first time and I don’t think I was 15 seconds into my first game before I realized, ‘holy crap, this is the shit’. I completely destroyed Goalty. My quick looks, balance, change of direction, change of speed, footwork, handles, field vision, etc. were great in Ultimate, but they were incredibly exceptional for Goaltimate and I annihilated the game.
I formally submitted an overhauled set of rules to the UPA in 2003, and of course they completely ignored me. Then I switched courses and thought that maybe whomever was behind Goaltimate organizationally would be easier to approach and convince so that was an obvious next step.
That would be Jim Herrick and Rick Connor. Jim is a straight up old school Ultimate player, two time Natties champ with the Rude Boys, UPA Hall of Fame member, all around good great guy and the inventor of Goaltimate. Rick spent $250,000 trying to professionalize the Goaltimate, paid to have it on ESPN, trademarked the name and promoted it.
I drove down in 2005 to San Diego for the California State Games (a statewide ‘Olympics’ style format weekend with all kinds of various sports represented) and I had been talking all kinds of monster smack, telling everyone on RSD that I was the GOAT and to prove it, I was going to play in sneakers and destroy the tournament.
There were four teams, and two fields, so two games going on most of the time until the finals. Herrick kept taking a break from the game he was playing in (when he was on the other field) to come watch me and he kept muttering under his breath, “I don’t get it, you’re not running very hard, you’re wearing sneakers and you’re completely unstoppable. This violates everything I thought was true about the game.”
I figured that not only my demonstration, but the fact that I called my shot by saying before hand that I was going to annihilate the tournament wearing sneakers would be enough to convince Jim and Rick to overhaul the rules for Goaltimate.
As Jim said this article, “it ain’t bragging if you can back it up, and Frank backed it up”.
But Rick wasn’t sold, he had sold two houses and raided his 401K to go ‘all in’ on Goaltimate, he wasn’t about to admit to himself that he invested a quarter of a million dollars into football with no tackles so he wouldn’t budge. I feel bad for the guy really.
I went ahead anyway with my plan and came back to Cupertino after San Diego and published my rules for Goaltimate 2.0. However, as soon as Rick heard about this, he threatened to sue me for copyright infringement so I said, “fine” and Goaltimate 2.0 was rebranded as Dischoops and the greatest team sport ever invented was born.
We had a great run in the SF Bay area from 2006 to 2010 with some of the best, elite players in the region enjoying the game including Taylor Cascino, Bart Watson, Matt Bruss, Allen Thoe, Dan Snyder, Brian Bogle, Paul ‘Gump’ Davis, Ian & Connor Ranahan and others, but by 2010, it had more or less run its course and it petered out. It was odd, really, the players very joyful and all had huge smiles on their faces playing Schoops and we drew some significant, spontaneous crowds in San Francisco (something I’ve never, ever seen with Ultimate) and the game is phenomenal, but we never got enough traction to achieve escape velocity. Here’s a short clip of some highlights.
In 2012, I moved to Boone, North Carolina, to live at the spiritual retreat center where I’ve been ever since.
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