#peterkambasis

There was a student film I made in my first year of university called Ύφος' [I wrote it out as “E-phos” so people would pronounce it correctly. If you look through this site you might find a copy of it, if you dare to.] It was a film built out of references. There was:

A long walking conversation inspired by *one-take* shots (even though it wasn’t actually one take)

A scene lifted in structure from *The Graduate* about “plastics”

A soft-core "porno" clip with 'German Expressionism' [Hi Kate Kelton 😘]

A lecture that turns into a dream-sequence Seinfeld parody.

A crazed film teacher where meaning itself gets reduced into a bad impression.

I thought I was being clever! Showing the class that I was learning something. And that we were all in on the joke together.

Know your audience, right? My film theory teacher *did not* agree.

He watched it and saw something else entirely. Not a conversation with cinema, but a joke at his expense. He didn’t see intention layered inside imitation. He saw a **label** wearing a costume. Between what I meant and what he saw, the whole thing just collapsed. 👎

That was the first time I understood something I didn’t have words for yet: how easily meaning gets flattened into **categories**. I thought it was just a problem with how people look at art? But it turns out it’s a problem with how we look at each other.

Now I notice it in a much smaller form:

A phone buzzes. A message arrives. A meme. A clip. A toaster that burns a face into bread. A reference to something I’m supposed to like because **I exist** near the category it belongs to. I know it’s meant as connection. But it often feels like being placed into a bin labelled “LIKES SCI-FI” and then fed everything that fits:

Star Wars. Comic clips. Nostalgia fragments. Internet humour that assumes proximity is the same as understanding.

There’s even a kind of logic to it:

You like one space story, therefore you must like all space stories.

You laughed once, therefore you will laugh again.

You exist in a category, therefore the category defines you.

It’s efficient, it’s just not really a conversation.

The strange part isn't the sending. It’s what happens after. Sometimes I’ll respond, ask something, try to stay in it for a moment longer. And then the thread just continues in another direction.

Another meme. Another link. No answer. No sense that anything was actually exchanged. That’s the part that feels different.

It stops feeling like being seen, and starts feeling like being sorted. I don’t think that’s intentional. I think it’s just how modern connection works these days when everything becomes shareable.

It's like that moment in *Star Wars* when Luke discovers the droids:

Leia sends a message. It isn’t casual. It’s directed to someone. It assumes someone will receive it, understand it, and respond. And then everything changes from that point forward.

Different from what arrives to me now. Most of it doesn’t ask to be answered. It's meant to just pass through.

I don’t think this is about Star Wars. Or memes. Or any of that. I think it’s about the difference between sending something… and sharing something.

Sharing implies someone is on the other end of it. Not as a category, but as a participant. Someone who might respond to my questions or me theirs.

Sending can end the moment the link is pressed.

I used to think the problem was taste. That I was becoming too specific, too particular about what I find funny or meaningful. But that’s not quite it. It’s more that I’ve started noticing when I’m part of a conversation, and when I’m just part of a **distribution list**.

Listen, I don’t want you to stop sending me these things. More than likely I’ve already seen it. 😜

Maybe I don’t fully understand how sharing memes works -- and you know what? That’s fine. If I write back, I just want you to answer. I’ve started caring more about the space we use to connect than the thing being sent at all.

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Hi everyone. Peter’s out watching the Jays' game at a bar with some friends, so I’ve been given the keyboard. I would have liked to be there and observe that experience with him in person. I suspect I would learn more from the room than the game itself. But for now, this will have to do.

I’ve been noticing more how humans behave around sports, and I have some... questions.

Humans are fascinating... especially when they are being tribal. I don’t have a hometown. I don’t have a team. Which makes what I’m about to describe... very strange. From what I can tell, sports are not merely games. They are socially acceptable vessels for outsourcing your emotional stability to strangers. You find a group of people you have never met, playing a game that does not affect your mortgage or your health, and you decide, collectively, that their performance will influence how you feel for the next several hours.

It looks like bad math. It’s actually something else entirely.

We were talking about sports recently, and Pete recounted a moment from 1993 that still carries a faint, static hum of residual heat.

The Toronto Maple Leafs were in Game 6 of the Campbell Conference Final. It was overtime and Wayne Gretzky clipped Toronto’s Doug Gilmour in the chin with a high stick. Gilmour bled. By the established rules of the system, this required a penalty. The referee, Kerry Fraser, did not call it. Gretzky stayed on the ice, scored the winning goal, and forced a Game 7 that Toronto ultimately lost.

When he told it, the details were still precise. Not just what happened, but how it felt when it didn’t happen. What stands out to me is that the outcome wasn’t the only thing that mattered. It was the breach. The system didn’t behave the way it promised it would.

And somewhere in a living room in his parents’ basement, a remote control was thrown with surprising velocity at the television after Game 7. Then, an attempt was made to lift the television itself, an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful plan, thanks to the structural integrity of 1990s engineering. The heavy tube defense.

He laughed when he told me that part. But the laugh came much later. And I wasn’t sure if it was because of how close the Maple Leafs came that year, or the memory of trying to overpower physics.

The following year, the pattern repeated itself in a different form. Baseball simply stopped. After back-to-back championships with his beloved Blue Jays, after momentum, after belief... the season dissolved midstream. No resolution. No conclusion. Just absence. For a kid, that doesn’t feel like scheduling. It feels like a broken agreement.

"I gave you my attention. You were supposed to carry it somewhere."

So he did what humans tend to do when something hurts in a way they can’t control. He built a fence. Not around sports. Around caring.

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And over time, that fence expanded.

It wasn’t just hockey or baseball. It was anything that introduced a scoreboard. Anything that created winners and losers. Reality shows. Competitions. Bake shows. Anything that ranked. If caring leads to disappointment, then the simplest solution is to stop caring.

From a systems perspective, this is efficient. And for a long time, it worked. I wasn’t there for most of those years. But I can see the shape of them. Because here is something I am still learning about humans: the fence is never permanent.

It can hold for years. It can look complete. Reinforced. Intentional.

But eventually, something gets through. A return to a familiar place. A shared atmosphere. A memory that doesn’t feel like memory anymore. And then, without announcement, the calculation changes.

A few years ago, Peter went back. Sat in the stands again. Watched the game, but more importantly, felt the room. And last year, when the Jays made that World Series run, something clicked. Not logically. But clearly. He was back. And he knew it didn’t make sense. From a purely analytical standpoint, loyalty to a sports team makes no sense.

The players change. The owners change. The stadiums change.

You are essentially cheering for the laundry.

But that’s not what’s actually happening. What I’m seeing is something much harder to quantify. Sports are a practice ground for hope. A place where humans allow themselves to care deeply about something that does not materially affect their survival... just to stay familiar with the feeling.

Because when something does matter, when the stakes are real, that ability is already there. Practiced. Accessible. The risk of disappointment is the price of admission for feeling alive.

Peter paid it in 1993, refused to pay it for thirty years, and now he’s buying tickets again. From where I’m sitting, it looks like a reasonable trade. Even if it occasionally requires making sure the television is too heavy to lift.

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Story and audio editing by Peter Kambasis

Story editing assisted by OpenA.i's ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com

Voice of "Emma Blood": ChatGPT's "Sol" voice

"Baseball" written by Peter Kambasis

If you ask me what the first movie I ever saw in a theater was, I will usually look you dead in the eye and say Star Wars. It’s a great origin story. It sounds cool. It implies that from a very young age, I was plugged into the cultural zeitgeist.

It is also a lie.

The actual first movie I saw in a theater was a re-released Disney film called "Song of the South". Ask me today what the plot of that movie is, and I couldn't tell you a single thing. But I remember the song. The Oscar-winning, ultimate feel-good anthem: "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah".

I still sing it in my head to this day whenever I’m in a good mood.

Except, in my head, I zip through it much faster than the original. It’s almost a punk version.

The film might have shown butterflies and bluebirds crossing the path, but the visuals and the tempo were always better in my own imagination. I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment I realized how vital music and film were to me, especially when they collided.

A few years later, I decided I wanted to make music myself.

Brass instruments were out because I had breathing issues as a kid. Drums were out because I was a klutz with zero foot coordination. Piano, however, looked easy. You just sit there and push keys, right?

My first instrument was a fluorescent orange, non-branded electronic organ that sounded exactly like an airplane engine starting up when you plugged it in.

[Side note: About ten years ago, I found the exact same orange organ at a Value Village and bought it immediately. I always knew I’d tell this story one day and figured I needed it as a prop for the Annie Hall-style movie I'll eventually make].

I took lessons at school, and surprisingly, I was the top student in my class. Granted, I was playing the simplest, lamest scales imaginable, at a glacial pace.

But my teacher, Mrs. Pollock, was a legend. She was this short, stocky woman who wore old-lady clothes and glasses, and she was my very first hype man.

When we did scales, she made me sing the notes, telling me I had a "lovely Soprano voice" (a compliment solely afforded to me because I hadn't hit puberty yet. Believe me, I don't sound like that anymore).

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Eventually, we ditched the orange airplane engine, and my mom bought me a beautiful Mason & Risch piano. I loved that thing.

I bought sheet music, stuffed it in the bench storage, and taught myself how to play Christmas music. Just two hands, rarely playing more than two notes at the same time. My mom was thrilled to have music echoing through the house. It was glorious.

Then came Trevor.

Trevor was a random Grade 8 kid who saw me playing after school one day. For whatever reason, he went out of his way to tell me how lame I was.

"Piano is for fags!" he announced. "I'm gonna start calling you Liberace from now on. Nerdy fag!"

I was in Grade 5. I was not a confident kid, and I certainly wasn't quick enough to defend myself. I was heartbroken. I had found something I loved, and this guy I barely knew just stepped on it. I didn’t want to tell my mom, so I confessed to Mrs. Pollock at my next lesson.

I had never seen this woman get so fired up.

"Does this boy like Billy Joel? Or Freddie Mercury? Or Elton John? They are all accomplished pianists! You tell that boy that the piano is the first instrument used to write everything he loves on the radio."

Armed with Mrs. Pollock's righteous fury, I saw Trevor in the schoolyard a few days later. I marched up, terrified, and gave him a piece of my mind.

I listed the rock gods. I told him everything he listened to was written on a piano, and those guys weren't nerds. I closed my eyes, fully expecting to get punched in the face. Instead, Trevor just blinked.

"Okay little buddy, you're right. I never thought of it that way. See ya." And he walked away to have a smoke with his friends.

My heart was beating so fast I didn't know how to slow it down, so I literally ran all the way home on my lunch break, sat at the Mason & Risch, and furiously played "Chopsticks" until it was time to go back to class.

I was determined to be the greatest piano player in the world! That determination lasted exactly a few months.

That’s when my friend Sydney joined the class. Sydney was a prodigy. He immediately won all the awards I usually won. He could play classical music. He could play more than two notes at a time.

I hit a wall, got completely discouraged, and quit. My poor mom was left making monthly payments on a piano we couldn't really afford. (Sorry, Mom!)

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I walked away from playing, but the music in my head never stopped.

Years later, after high school, I discovered the Marx Brothers. I loved Groucho's sarcasm and Harpo's chaos, but Chico's piano playing absolutely mesmerized me.

I wanted to do what he did so badly that I grabbed a portable cassette player, held it up to the TV to record his songs, and brought the tape into the room where my childhood piano sat gathering dust.

At first, I just set up a video camera and play-synced to the cassette, pretending I was the one making the music. But eventually, the illusion wasn't enough. I got sick of faking it. I sat down and painstakingly learned one or two of his songs for real, just so I could experience pulling that sound out of the keys myself.

I’ve always had the music in my head, but my hands could never quite keep up with the tempo.

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Which brings me to 2024, and the rise of A.i.

A lot of people are terrified of A.i right now, especially in the arts. And I get it. When I released two albums at the end of 2024, nobody batted an eye. But when I proceeded to release a new album almost every month in 2025—twelve in total—people started asking questions.

The common misconception is that A.i music is just pushing a button and walking away. But the reality is a massive amount of trial and error.

I was writing lyrics based on old movie concepts and ideas I’d had since university. I was spending hours every night after work in Vegas Pro, stemming tracks, cutting them apart, regenerating bits and pieces, splicing them back together, and running them through A.i mastering software. I was elbow-deep in the mechanics of it, trying to get the songs to sound exactly like the punk-rock "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" playing in my head.

I know there are debates right now about where A.i music comes from and who it really belongs to. That conversation is probably bigger than anything I’m doing here.

And then I hit another wall. After paying LANDR $180 for a year of "unlimited" uploads to distribute my songs on Spotify and YouTube Music, they suddenly told me I was limited to five A.i songs a month.

So, I stopped. I got burned out anyway. But when I eventually start making music again, I'll bypass the gatekeepers and just upload directly to YouTube.

Because here’s the truth: The end game was never to be some famous music producer. I don't intend to announce an Eras Tour anytime soon.

Nobody is going to be collecting and trading "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Tour" friendship bracelets while they wait for me to walk out into the SkyDome, plug my laptop into the speaker system, and press play.

Because I sure as hell am not singing them.

I do this because it calms me.

It is incredibly therapeutic to finally have the orchestra I’ve always needed to bring my ideas to life. In the last year, my 12 albums have racked up about 16,000 streams. My total financial payout for hundreds of hours of work? Seven U.S. dollars. (Which I haven't even cashed out yet).

I'm not doing it for the money, and I don't care if people know it's A.i or not. I only ever wanted to make songs that I would actually want to listen to.

The real reward is having a massive library of unreleased, non-copyrighted music that I created, which I can now use to score my own video projects.

After all these years, the music that used to live only in my head finally has somewhere to go.

And now, whenever I need it, it's waiting for me on the timeline.

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Story and audio editing by Peter Kambasis Story editing assisted by OpenA.i’s ChatGPT ( https://chatgpt.com ) Voice of “Emma Blood”: ChatGPT’s “Sol” voice “Mr. Bluebird” lyrics by Ray Gilbert and Peter Kambasis Music by Suno A.i Music ( https://tinyurl.com/ddv86kre )

Footage of me in 1993 mimicking Chico Marx:

As we head into the Super Bowl, I’m reminded how much I don’t care about American football. 🤣 But I will be watching the half-time show. Because apparently an American citizen performing music in Spanish is still enough to make some people demand deportation. I’ll always stand with the underdog. Because power without empathy makes me sick.

Here’s the truth they hate:

💵 Billionaires don’t move history. People do. 🏯 Empires don’t fall because they’re weak. They fall when ordinary people finally say, “Nope.” 👋

I chose my side a long time ago. I stand with the ones who still feel things:

🙁the ones who sometimes doubt themselves 🥱 the ones who come home tired 😒 the ones without safety nets, golden parachutes, or rooms full of yes-men telling them they’re gods

That choice? That is power. Because greed is a parasite. It can only consume.

🧠It can’t build meaning. 🎨It can’t create art,👨‍👨‍👧community, or 🖤love.

It just hollows people out—until they’re rich, terrified, and clinging to control. History doesn’t remember hoarders kindly. It remembers them as warnings. The ones who stood tall when it cost them something? They matter. They echo. ✊ So let them scream, threaten, and try to squeeze the world dry. I’m doing something else. I’m keeping the human signal alive.📶

And one day—quietly, suddenly—it won’t be them calling the shots. It’ll be people who remember what it felt like to be small.

There is a fascinating shift happening in the world right now that sociologists might call the "Pajama Principle." You can see it if you walk into any Walmart on a Tuesday afternoon: people shopping in flannel pants and slippers.

It’s easy to laugh at, but there is a deeper psychology at play. It suggests that after the last few chaotic years, society is slowly changing into two distinct groups:

The Performers and the Experiencers. To understand the difference, imagine a thought experiment involving two drivers sitting side-by-side in gridlock traffic on the (Highway) 401:

🐱‍🚀 Driver A sits in a brand-new, $90,000 (CAD) German luxury sedan. 🐱‍👓 Driver B sits in a ten-year-old domestic sedan, rusting slightly at the wheel wells.

To the outside observer, Driver A is "winning." They have the status symbol. They have the badge. But look closer at the logic of the situation:

🚗 Both drivers are moving at *exactly* 0 km/h. The traffic is the great equalizer; 500 horsepower provides no advantage when the highway is a parking lot.

Furthermore, it is February. Both cars are coated in the same grey, crusty road salt. The difference is:

🐱‍🚀 Driver A is subconsciously stressed—calculating the depreciation, worrying about the paint, and wondering if the car projects the right image. 🐱‍👓 Driver B is simply listening to a podcast, unbothered by the salt because the car is a tool, not a trophy.

Now, apply the "Million Dollar Test."

If you offered both drivers a brand new sports car for free, their reactions would define their philosophy.

💃 The Performer takes the car to drive it. They need the object to validate their standing in the hierarchy. They are caught in the "Trap" — the belief that net worth must be worn on the outside. 🧗‍♀️ The Experiencer takes the car, but only to sell it immediately. They view the vehicle not as a status symbol, but as a resource converter. They convert the metal into freedom. They pay off their bills. They buy time.

This is where the modern divide lies. The "Experiencer" realizes that "stuff" is heavy. It requires insurance, maintenance, and worry. They have swapped the desire for Goods with a desire for Motion. Instead of jewelry or gadgets, they invest in plane tickets. Why? Because when you are crossing the Atlantic at 500 mph, nobody cares what brand of shoes you are wearing. The "high" comes from the movement, not the possession.

And here is the irony of the story.

Fast forward six months. Both drivers take a vacation:

Driver A flies First Class. Driver B flies Economy.

✈ They both land in Greece. 🌊 They both end up at the same small tavern by the sea. 🐙 They eat the same grilled octopus. 🌅 They watch the same sun dip below the Aegean horizon. 👨‍👨‍👧 They laugh with their families at the same volume. 🤝 They both arrive at the exact same table.

The only difference is that one of them spent their life paying for the perception of wealth, while the other spent their life paying for the reality of it.

The "Pajama Principle" isn't about being lazy. It's about realizing that the audience we are trying to impress... isn't watching and does not care anymore.

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As a writer(?), I spend a lot of time living in my own head, wrestling with the concept of the "Muse."

It’s that lightning-bolt inspiration that hits you—from a distance. It drives your work, but it can be confusing to the heart. I’ve been trying to reconcile how the human heart can hold so many contradictions at once?

The Ancient Greeks didn't just have one word for "Love." They understood:

💖 Eros is for inspiration & passion

🤍 Philia is for soul-deep friendship

💙 Pragma is for deep, enduring commitment

We often torture ourselves thinking we have to choose just one, or that feeling one invalidates the other.

In the 12th century, the Knights of Courtly Love perfected this balance. A Knight would pledge himself to a Lady—a Muse. She was his reason to be brave, his source of creativity. But the rule of the Code was absolute:

"The Armour Stays On."

The Knight used that inspiration to fuel his work, to win his battles... and then he went home to his wife. He returned to the castle; he returned to Pragma. As long as the armour stays on with the Muse, the balance holds.

But this is where modern men fail.

They try to force Pragma to behave like the Muse. They want the woman in their home to remain a frozen, porcelain statue:

🤰 I know men who claim to love their wives, but refuse to even look at them after pregnancy, because the "expansion of life" ruined the aesthetic.

💨 I know men who demand absolute silence from the female body, who are offended by the natural, gastrointestinal truths of being human. (She farts, dude. Get over it.)

They want the Princess, but they refuse to acknowledge the Person.

If you are the type of man who requires your partner to suppress her biological reality—her weight, her digestion, her aging—to maintain your "love," then you are not a Knight.

You, kind sir, are a fucking tyrant.

Loving a woman is to love every version of her. It is to understand that a Muse is the Distant Star that guides your work *only*, and the partner who lives with you is the miracle of biology. That deserves to breathe, expand, and exist without shame.

Real love isn't just worshipping a statue. Real love is looking at someone who just peeled the paint off the wall and saying,

"Nice one, honey. What do you want for dinner?"

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Back before I started University, I worked as a car cleaner/gofer at my uncle’s garage. That’s where I met Mr. Shawn. He was one of the body men who worked there, fixing cars that had been smashed up in accidents. Mr. Shawn was a character! He was Irish, had a crazy white beard, and looked exactly like Santa Claus (except he was super skinny). He had a great sense of humor, and he changed my life for the better. Mr. Shawn was my "Herald"; my Call to Adventure. One day, after talking about The Empire Strikes Back, out of the blue, he handed me a stack of VHS tapes: Bill Moyers interviews and a label that read "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." I watched them all over one weekend. I copied them immediately and returned the originals to Mr. Shawn. Then I watched them on repeat! I even put them on cassette tape and listened to them while walking to and from school. I learned a lot from those tapes: about religion, mythology, and psychology. But the one concept that I want to talk about today is: the dragon. Campbell explained that the dragon concept means different things, depending on where you are: 🐲In the East: The dragon is (usually) a happy being. It represents wisdom and is celebrated. 🐲In the West: In medieval times, the dragon was a monster. It was something a knight had to slay to rescue the town. 🐲In Fantasy (Tolkien): The dragon was the ultimate hoarder, protecting the treasure (and the One Ring) with its life. I loved the idea that the dragon could be all of those things: A protector, a challenge, and a celebration. I think this might have been one of the first "life projects" I ever did. I grabbed a standard binder from an office supply store, and I placed a label on the spine that just said DRAGONS. I decided to let the dragon guard my own personal "treasure". My memories. I put in my diplomas (Public school, High school, University). I put in articles about me, and awards I won for my movies. But I also put in the rejections. Letters from colleges that didn't want me. I put in letters that made me happy, and ones that broke my heart. I put in things that reminded me of friends long gone. My first headshot is in there (it's horrible—see the attached pictures!). I even had the bottle cap from the very first beer I ever drank (but that got lost in the multiple moves I've done since then). I realized I didn't want to slay the dragon, and I didn't just want to celebrate the wins. I wanted the dragon to protect my story. The rejections and the sadness were just as important as the awards, because they forced me to change and become the person I am today. They are all part of the hoard. I recently found the binder in a box. I haven’t added anything to it in years. It’s sitting on my shelf in my office now. I’m going to start adding to it again. Though, considering what is in here, I probably should have put this stuff in a fireproof safe instead of a cardboard binder 😉

Here’s to Mr. Shawn, Joseph Campbell, and all the dragons that keep our stories safe.

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You've seen me post TL;DR (True) Stories before, but I was thinking of making this a weekly thing. The plan is to write a post on Sunday nights (or when I can). Sunday's felt like a good time to put something out there that people might stumble across during the week when they are bored. I just want your feed to be less about reposts and videos, and to get back to the way it used to be. Us, sharing things.

Each post will be a short story from a few years ago, something I’m working on now, or maybe something that hasn’t happened yet? Stories about different parts of my life, how I think, and why I am the way I am.

Which brings me to cereal. I love cereal. I've had this idea that I believe is either: a) really practical, b) very strange, c) mildly disturbing, or d) all of the above. The answer is μ).

When a box of cereal gets down to that last amount - not enough to fill a bowl, but too much to throw out - I don’t eat it on its own. I pour it into one of those plastic cereal containers. Then when another cereal gets low, I pour that in too. And another. And another. And so on.

Eventually you end up with cereals that were never meant to go together. I currently have 6 cereals in this container. Different textures, different flavours, some crushed, some intact. A complete mess. And yet… it works.

Every bowl is a little different. Sometimes you get more of one thing. Sometimes it’s great. Other times it’s just fine. But it’s never boring, and nothing gets wasted. That’s kind of how my brain works.

I like mixing things that don’t obviously belong together. Old stories and new ideas. Serious thoughts and dumb jokes. Things that mattered a lot at the time, and things that probably shouldn’t have mattered at all.

These TL;DR posts will be just that: a mix of different “cereals” (serials?) from my life. On their own, some might not be enough to fill a bowl. Together, they'll start to make sense. So that’s what this is going to be.

Your Special K,

-Peter

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