| May 22, 2009 | Get Back to Where You Once Belonged |
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I'm back in LA, after spending last week in NYC for some Yoostar press demos and meetings. Yoostar was written up in Forbes, Good Housekeeping, NY Daily News, and several other places. Follow our Yoostar twitter feed to stay up-to-date. We've updated Yoostar.com with a new intro video and, and we updated the Roles page to show some of the movie clips you can act in with the Yoostar system. Also, you may have noticed that this blog looks pretty different (and also that I'm posting to it after over two years of absence). While I was in NYC, my friend Lee pointed out that poprocks.com looked "so 1999." He was basically telling me that my online presence was wearing mom jeans. Ouch. I suppose, it's good to have friends who will be bluntly honest. It's like the time Andy told me that I needed an RSS feed for my blog, or the time JP told me I should not ever -- under any circumstances -- leave the house without wearing a bra. Funny, though, no one ever said there was anything wrong those times when I dyed my hair blue or apricot. I've seen the photos, and I'm surprised I didn't receive more critical feedback. Labels: andy, blog, haircolor, jp, la, lee, nyc, press, twitter, yoostar posted by Jess Barron @ 12:57 PM 
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| October 31, 2005 | Can You Distinguish Substance from Fluff? |
Dear fans of math and logic puzzles,  I have some questions for you to ponder. If Jess Barron was in New York City for 4 nights and slept no more than 3 hours-per-night (for a grand total of 12 hours of sleep in 3 days):1. How many fellow journalists did she exchange business cards with during the ONA conference? 2. How many cocktails did she consume? 3. How many hours did she spend in the post-midnight pre-dawn hours running around the city with co-workers and friends? 4. How many seconds was her face in lights on the enormous Reuters billboard in Times Square? I've been pondering these questions for several hours myself on the plane ride back to the West Coast, and the only answer I can determine is A LOT. If you can provide more specific or accurate answers, perhaps you should consider applying to Mensa. Or perhaps you should stop stalking me. Contrary to the popular belief of my co-workers (Dave Carpenter, for example), I do usually like to get 6-8 hours of sleep per night under normal circumstances. My body wants that much sleep, and on some greedy nights my brain would probably be happiest with 9-10 hours of sleep. But the problem I run into again and again is that there is generally so much I want to do and sleep merely gets in the way of my ability to get it all done. There are so many people love spending time with, there is so much work I want to accomplish, and there are also numerous personal projects. As a certain boy famously told me back in February 2002 "You have -- as we say in the office -- 'a tendency to overcommit.'" It's become ever-increasingly true, and it seems like I'll never stop trying to stretch the space-time continuum. My professional work-type duties while in New York included:
My dad's advice when I told him on the phone about the podcasting panel, "Just don't drink too much the night before." In addition to these professional obligations, I had planned to see my longtime friends Jeff and Lee and also possibly meet Jeremy Abbate who wrote a song called "I Wanna Be as Cool as Jessica Barron" after reading my blog without having ever met me. Of course, there were other friends and people I wanted to meet (including Brooklynite Ted Gesing who created the infamous and much-loved Nutria documentary), but I figured it might be prudent if I focused only on these three. Even though neither one of them has yet to compose a single song in my honor, I gave my scheduling priority to Jeff and Lee since they've been my dear friends for 16 and 10 years, respectively. (I met Jeff when we ran against each other for a student government position in 1989. I met Lee while traveling in Turkey in 1995.) After they've put up with me for so long, it's the least I can do. I arrived at JFK at 5p.m. on Wednesday, and called Jeff and Lee during my cabride to the hotel (the Hilton on 6th Ave). Jeff took the subway to my hotel and we hungout in my room and raided my mini bar, concocting what seemed to be some really strong gin and tonics. Though you will actually be charged on your bill for the snacks and liquor you take out of your hotel room mini fridge, breaking the plastic seal on the door still feels more like "raiding" to me. It brings me back to hotel stays during barely-chaperoned junior high and high school class trips when we would physically break the cheap locks on the mini bars and spend the evenings getting drunk on the little nip-bottles we didn't quite understand how to combine and mix. Jeff suggested the idea of eating at The Odeon in the East Village which he (and Citysearch) described as a place that had "a decadent heyday during the hard-partying '80s." Since I can hardly resist anything that's decadent, hard-partying, or from the 1980s, I announced that I was game. Lee called to say that he and his girlfriend Brett would meet us there for dinner. The food was decent. I had an heirloom tomato and goat cheese salad (my two absolute favorites) followed by an entree of broiled scallops. Jeff had a steak. We debated and discussed San Francisco versus New York City versus Los Angeles. After dinner Jeff and I went to the Stone Rose Lounge, a big airy bar inside the Time Warner Center with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. We drank $17 martinis until about 2 in the morning. When arrived back to my hotel room, I couldn't sleep. Throughout the evening I kept calling the West-Coast-to-East-Coast time difference the "West Coast Advantage" to my friends, because it enabled me to easily party until dawn, but as I sat propped up on pillows in bed checking email on my laptop until 4 in the morning, it was clear that it wasn't quite an advantage. Especially since I needed to be at the Associated Press office by 8:45 a.m. for an all-day Flash class to learn how to build automated slideshows with audio soundtracks. Wednesday night (umm, that'd be Thursday morning) I slept from 4:30 a.m. - 7:30 a.m., and I was still 10 minutes late for the class. Though I generally have a strong aptitude for picking up computer applications, it was quickly apparent that I was the worst student in the Flash class. I had to ask the teacher to explain everything and show me everything personally one more time. I was pathetic. And, sadly I can't honestly blame my remedial status on the lack of sleep and amount of drinking. Between timeliness, layers, keyframes and tweening, Flash is a complicated program, and it can easily explode your head. Or, at least it can easily explode my head. I wasn't familiar with being the slowest student in the class, and consequently it was a very difficult day. When I got back to my hotel room a little after 6 p.m., Lee called and told me he made 8:30 reservations at Bread Tribeca. "I made reservations for 4 of us," he said, "So you can bring one of your friends." I was starving, and I wanted to make the phone calls to see if Sam or Dave had arrived in New York yet and extend an invitation to dinner, but first I needed to close my eyes and attempt to extend myself an invitation to an hour-long nap. I set the alarm on my cell phone, took off my clothes, put on a t-shirt and curled up under the covers. As exhausted and drained as I was from a day spent inserting keyframes and creating tweens in Flash class, I closed my eyes but could not sleep. Still, I was determined to keep my head on the pillow. At 6:45 p.m. my phone rang, and I jumped out of bed to answer the call. It was my friend Sam who works on content programming for yahoo.com. He had arrived at the hotel and asked if I wanted to go grab some food. I invited him to dinner and quickly got back into bed to try to catch that elusive nap before it was too late. Twenty minutes later my phone rang again. It was Dave from the Toronto office. He had already arrived and headed out to dinner by himself, but suggested that we meet up later for drinks. I tried for a third time to nap, but quickly gave up and turned on the TV and started changing back into my clothes. Sam, Lee, Brett, and I had dinner at Bread Tribeca. The food was decent. I had cauliflower puree soup as a starter followed by linguine with clams. We also shared a few bottles of red wine. After dinner Dave called and said, "I'm at a really fun karaoke bar in the East Village called Second on Second, you should come over here." It was approaching midnight, and as much as I love karaoke -- I wanted to head back closer to the hotel. I honestly every intention of getting to bed at a sober and decent hour. With that in mind, I asked Dave to meet Sam and me at the W hotel bar because it was the only thing I could think of. During our cab ride to the W, Bill and Chris called. Bill was out with colleagues and asked me if I had talked to JB yet. I told him I hadn't but that I had left a message. I also told him that Sam and I were heading over to the W. Chris and the Yahoo! News team had just finished dinner and were wandering around Times Square near our hotel. I told them we were in a cab headed for the W. They said they might meet us there. Dave found Sam and I at the W, but by y 1:30 or 2, we hadn't seen Bill nor the Yahoo! News folks. We were wondering what to do when Bill phoned to say that he and JB were at a bar called Faces and Names near the Rihga hotel. We left the W to walk over to Faces and Names and phoned Chris and Ron on Yahoo! News to let them know. By 2:30 we were all hanging out together at Faces and Names. By 3a.m. there was talk of heading back to the hotel. JB, Chris, Sam, Dave and I started the walk back, but were immediately seduced by the bright white lights of a neighborhood pizza place. JB ordered us a pie to go, then he and Dave went into the bodega nextdoor to pick up some beer while we waited for the pizza to be ready. We carried brown bags of pizza and beer back to the hotel and decided to continue the party in JB's room. I headed to my room to get Bocce since she had been cooped up in the hotel all day. We ate pizza and drank beer until around 4 a.m. when we were kidnapped and gagged by guerilla marketers for Yahoo! News' Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. Bocce liked the pizza, but didn't necessarily enjoy her time as a walking Hot Zone advertisement. At 4:30a.m. Sam and Dave headed to bed. JB, Chris, and I took the dog outside for a walk, and Chris snapped action photos of me picking up Bocce's poop. Can you say poop-arazzi? I thought you could. After all that excitement, Bocce and I decided it was time for bed. The next day I attended some panels and prepared for my own. It went fairly well (you can listen to a portion of my talk), though afterward I wished I had talked more about content for podcasts than mostly just focusing on the how-tos. After the ONA-sponsored cocktail hour where I met Mark Fiore, some folks from CBS News, Anj from Yahoo!s Toronto office and many others, we all headed back to our rooms to freshen up and then bundle up and agreed to meet up at 8:30 at South's in Tribeca where we would have some more drinks before our 9:45 dinner reservation at 66. While back in my hotel room, I decided to don my Jackie Kennedy outfit which I had packed in case an inkling of Halloween spirit hit me. Post-cocktail-hour I felt it was a great idea to wear a bright pink suit and pillbox hat even though none of my other compatriots were dressed in costume. This is how I roll. Lee and Brett met Sam, Dave, Anj and I at South's. Then Bill showed up carrying an unopened container of marshmallow Fluff that he said he had brought for me. "I hope you're not implying that our Yahoo! Broadband Portal content is fluff!" I said giggling and grabbing the container of Fluff. After a while, the Yahoo! News crew (Neil, Ron, Oren, Chris, Sarah, and Peter) arrived at South's, and we all walked down the block to 66. Jeff and his boyfriend Daniel were sitting in the lounge drinking cocktails when we arrived. Sam -- who was just meeting Jeff for the first time -- commented: "It was obvious that Jeff had known you for years because when you walked into this chichi restaurant dressed as Jackie Kennedy and carrying a giant container of Fluff, he wasn't the slightest bit surprised." At 10p.m., we found out the hard way that NYC reservations for big groups rarely start on time. At 10:30 p.m. we were drinking ginger margaritas in the lounge area and noshing on appetizers as we waited for our back room to be ready. By 11 p.m. (I think) we were seated for dinner at three tables in our own room. I was seated at the end of a table surrounded by my NYC friends. Daniel and Jeff were on my left, Lee and Brett on my right. Before any of the food started arriving on the tables, Bill instigated the idea that he and I would open the container of Fluff and offer it around to the other tables. "Would you care for some fluff?" I said as I did my best 1960s stewardess impression. Our hard work and dedication paid off. We were triumphant. We managed to get nearly every person to try a spoonful of Fluff -- and several brave souls plunged their fingers right into the container. Others used chopsticks. The barbarous and uncouth "Fluff course" of the meal mortified my black-clad NYC friends. Living in San Francisco for five years (and going to Burning Man five times) definitely enhanced my already overactive capacity for absurdity. If a group of twenty of my co-workers are giggling and sticking their fingers into their mouths -- in my mind it was a great ice-breaker. It was the least I could do. Dinner ended sometime after midnight. Lee, Brett, and Daniel headed home and many of my co-workers decided to call it a night, but Jeff, Anj, Dave, Oren, Sarah, Ron, Chris, Mic, Peter and I ventured to Second on Second. We arrived, got ourselves some drinks and put our name in for karaoke to do Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Unfortunately the stack of song requests on the KJ's podium was enormous and we left to head back to the hotel before our name was called. This time the late night after-party was in Ron and Chris' rooms. We drank beers from the mini bars and chatted as music played from Chris' laptop. He played Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths at my request. The TV was on playing an endless loop of Larry King interviewing commentators about the Libby indictment with the volume turned all the way down. It seemed certain that Chris and I will become fast friends. And Anj and me too. Even though we just met -- she and I were having a great time hanging out together. Sam, Dave and I are already pretty tight after working together for over 2 years. (Dave and I have even partied in London together on a work trip...) On Saturday I attended a bunch more panels. My favorite was Digital Visual Storytelling, though the Saturday afternoon panel "Journalism 2010: Who's leading the way?" (which our own Neil Budde sat as a panelist on) was also quite interesting with its now-seemingly-obligatory and impassioned blogger versus "dinosaur" bashing. Afterward we went to the Reuters-sponsored cocktail party. Then we headed to a bar in the East Village, where we smoked flavoured tobacco out of a giant hookah. For dinner we went to Il Bagatto (on Jeff's excellent suggestion). I ate with Daniel and Jeff while unfortunately my starving co-workers (Sam, Ron, Anj and Chris) and their entourage of young journalism students were kept waiting at the bar for almost an hour (unacceptable!). Luckily, they made lemonaide from lemons and befriended the perky bartender (she gave Jeff and Daniel three olives each in their martinis!) After dinner we wandered around the East Village spotting (and accosting) folks in Halloween costumes. There were even more Ali G's this year than last year (this Yahoo! one was my favorite). Then we went to KGB for some drinks amid Soviet paraphernalia. We got back to the hotel around 2:30 and I took Bocce for a walk and then went to bed. I seriously needed some sleep. On Sunday morning I packed and checked out of the hotel, and took a cab to Park Slope Brooklyn to visit Jeff and Daniel at their apartment and meet their Great Dane puppy Ace. Ace is beautiful. He's sleek and gray. He's also HUGE! He weighs 125-pounds and is still growing. Jeff and Daniel say he will soon be 50 pounds larger. Unfortunately it was difficult-if-not-impossible for 12-pound middle-aged Bocce to play with a teenage dog who was ten times(!) her size. Jeff and Daniel made us brunch of pumpkin pancakes, eggs, bacon, and Daniel's homemade (from scratch!) pumpkin pie. It was awesome. And then I got in a car to head back to JFK to fly home. I'm sorry I didn't meet my personal songwriter Jeremy Abbate, but I'm psyched that I ended up getting my photo displayed in lights on the huge Reuters screen in Times Square (thanks Sarah!) P.S. Almost all photos I'm linking to in this post were taken by Chris Sarah, Ron, and Jeff as I left my camera behind this time... Labels: bocce, chris, costume, dog, jeff, karaoke, lee, nyc, ona, photos, radio, slang, travel, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 11:20 AM
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| May 20, 2005 | "You're hired!" as an "Apprentice" Stalker... |
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So, we were in New York and my Yahoo! peeps invited me to attend "The Apprentice" finale and the after-party at Planet Hollywood. (Yahoo! hosts and programs the official "Apprentice" web destination where you can go to find all of the extra behind-the-scenes video clips from the show). I had so much fun running around Planet Hollywood with Chris and meeting/stalking Apprentices. I met Kendra and Tana and Raj and Bill and  George and Carolyn. See all of our photos. It was surprising how easily Chris convinced me to kiss Bren. Omarosa sure can dance... but this photo of Danny may be the funniest. I even met Sugar Ray Leonard. You can tell that we're all BFF. Of course, the best part of the evening is that I got to have dinner with Jeff, Lee, Brett, and Lance beforehand at 5 Ninth in the Meatpacking District. Sure, I enjoy the presence of people from TV, but I enjoy the presence of my friends way more.Labels: apprentice, jeff, lee, nyc, photos posted by Jess Barron @ 5:34 PM
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| May 16, 2005 | Jess and The City |
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I'm in New York City for the week to meet with ABC News for work. Bocce and August and I flew in on Saturday and stayed at Mindy and Erik's place on the way Upper West Side near Columbia. (I think it's called Morning Side Heights?) We saw a teeny tiny baby squirrel in the park. We went to Erik's architecture school year-end party and then went to the East Village to meet Lee, Brett, Will, Daniel, and Jeff. On Sunday we packed up Mindy's car, so that she could leave for Carnegie-Mellon, and then we went to Lee's place in the Lower East Side (which is confusingly layed-out and furnished exactly like his old apartment in SOMA), and we drank a jug of red wine. Then we travelled to Park Slope, Brooklyn to Jeff and Daniel and Lance's compound where we sat at the silver table in their backyard garden and grilled steaks and drank Rasberry Lambic and more wine. Bocce humped Odie (Lance and Mark's dog) who is male and part Collie and much larger and was completely indifferent to her advances. This morning, August and Bocce and I took the F train to Coney Island where we saw Astroland and The Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone, and a clam bar. Bocce didn't want to go on any of the rides. August ate two hot dogs from Nathan's with sourkraut and onions, and I had cheese fries with ketchup. Now we're about to head to the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street, which I stayed at in 2001 when I was travelling for Microsoft to meet with Viacom to discuss interactive music television projects we were working on for UltimateTV. They have a pretty interestingly-designed lobby, and they allow small dogs. On Wednesday I'm going with my work peeps -- Dave, Jen, Heather, and Arleen to the Good Morning America show, but we don't know what the topic is yet. Labels: august, bocce, jeff, lee, mindy, nyc, travel, work posted by Jess Barron @ 3:38 PM
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| January 11, 2002 | Vassar's Wet Dream |
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"This is Vassar's wet dream!" Mindy squealed, as Ethan Zohn won Survivor. "I mean c'mon, he's a heterosexual male and he's an athelete..." "Yeah, no one's gonna think it's an all girls school anymore... This is almost like when you worked in the school's publicity department and you were making the recruitment videos, and you wouldn't use me as a stand-in because I wasn't black or male or athletic or Asian," I responded, still bitter from missing my big break in Vassar's promotional video due to my white female majority status. "What I want to know," said Adam a.k.a. Atom, "Is do they get one million dollars and then have the 40% taxes taken out or do they give them enough money so that they have a million after taxes?" "I can't believe our classmate won Survivor!" Mindy said. "Yeah, if someone from Vassar was going to win Survivor, I would've expected it to be a catty gay boy like J.P. or a pissed-off Women's Studies major," I said. Mindy immediately called Helen on her cell phone, and I called Allyson who is at CES in Vegas, and probably right now shaking her ass at Rum Jungle. (Oh, I'm not jealous. Noooooo. But what if she's hanging out with Bill?!) Allyson didn't answer, so I didn't even know if she knew yet that Ethan won. Damn. No She Said, She Said tonight. After that we thought about who else to call, and I ended up calling Lee to point out how, once again, Vassar's superiority to his alma mater Occidental College (which incidentally goes by the nickname of "Oxy," Eww!) has been made evident. We considered calling J.P. because he's such a pop culture addict, but I remembered how he keeps telling me that he doesn't watch reality TV because his own life is much more interesting. Perhaps the best part about Ethan winning Survivor is that I won $80 in my office's Survivor pool. It may not be a million dollars, but it's enough to buy me a few cocktails (even at San Francisco prices). After the Survivor excitement Mindy and Adam busted out Dance Dance Revolution and started jumpin' around my living space. And then Mindy and I busted into the duet that she and I are singing Saturday night during my birthday festivities at The Mint. My birthday is coming up very soon. We're celebrating two days early on Saturday night. What song should I karaoke? People keep asking me what I did on New Year's Eve, and it's not such an easy question to answer: "Ummm, well, we built drunken pyramids on my kitchen floor and scared the dog." Seriously, how the hell do I explain what was going on in this photo?. Heather also posted some New Year's pics on her site too. Labels: allyson, jp, lee, mindy, sanfrancisco, sf, vassar posted by Jess Barron @ 7:01 PM
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| August 16, 1999 | I'm Going to Burning Man |
 Burn, Baby, Burn: Tonight I picked up my plane tickets to go out to San Francisco next week for Burning Man. I'm starting to feel some substantial anxiety about the trip. Will I survive camping in the desert for five days? Mindy and I finally came up with an idea for a theme camp, although Lee doesn't think it's exciting enough. I would tell you what it is, but Mindy doesn't want me to talk about it until afterward. You can check out my ticket (and notice how it says "you voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending"): I tried to explain what Burning Man was to my mom, but I don't think she got it. I told her it was this huge conglomeration of spontaneous performance art and people just "acting out" all over the place, but she just kept calling it "that concert you're going to." If you're curious about this Burning Man thing, don't worry. I'm going to take tons of photos and probably shoot some digital video as well. And of course, I'll write a few articles for WildWeb and keep a Daily Desert Journal. It now even looks as though I will be involved in the segment for our TV show as well. I'll let you know when it will air. Pavement Poems: I'm going to take a brief respite from expounding in technicolour detail about myself to mention that Ms. Hillary Field of Los Angeles (my favorite Boggle-playing buddy) sent a few of her poetic experiments to Matador Records' Pavement Poetry Project. And before her fans could begin to chant "A for effort, B for delivery..." she was listed among the 25 winners! Alas, she laments that the poem she entered under Jeff's name won better prizes than the poem she submitted under her own name. I do think I like the latter one better, but it seems that the peeps from Matador probably wanted to play out the Scrabble metaphor. And you really can't blame them; Scrabble is such a great game. Allyson Krieger, Miss Thang She Said, She Said: Allyson "Miss Thang" Krieger and I finally wrote our much talked about and long-awaited Teen Vs. Adult TV episode of "She Said, She Said." Alas, I no longer feel as good about the result as I had initially believed. First, as soon as the article went online Lee Charles Baker accused me of messing up his quote. He insisted he would *never* use "overanalyze" and "deconstruct" in the same sentence. Though he *was* copping pretentious attitude with me on the phone when he said the quote, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and changed it to the verbiage that currently sits in the 13th paragraph. Second, I think I lost track of what should have been one of my major points -- the idea that TV shows about teen characters are intriguing because the teen years are a time when people's personalities are being formed. Events that occur during the teen years can have a huge significance on a person's life. Somehow Ray Weigel I neglected to mention this in my article, and for this I should be thrashed. Our "Austin Powers, Hip or Has-Been?" feature came out much better, I think. It's a Shame About Ray: Ray "yo Jimmy" Weigel is out of our office on vacation for the entire month of August. I am not sure how we are all making it through these difficult days without anyone begging us to meet for drinks at the Rainforest cafe in Burlington. My aural pleasure has certainly declined in Ray's absence. And I am finding that I no longer say "duuude" as much either. Thankfully, Erin and Allyson are making sure the Caption Cornycopia isn't neglected. Que Sera, Sarah: On Saturday I went over to Sarah's (my dad's ex-girlfriend's) house to visit. I hung out with Sarah, her baby Misha, her husband Iourie, and Iourie's dad who is visiting from St. Petersburg. Iourie's dad convinced me to take a few shots of a drink called, mysteriously enough, "Russian balm." The stuff was scary. MishaSarah made some delicious pasta salad and we looked at old photos Sarah took of my brother and me in the '80s. Complete-Lee Enjoyable: So you read all the way to the bottom, and you expected to get some details about Lee's visit to the East Coast three week's ago. Nosy, aren't ye? Well, in this case, I am not going to put out so easily. All I'm going to tell you is that Lee passed his NASD test and he's now some sort of uber options broker. I made him a mix tape to celebrate. We got very lost on our first night out in Newark, New Jersey and it took us about two hours to find our way back into the sanctity of the hotel room. We kept seeing the glowing neon lights of our Courtyard Marriot in the distance as we descended and ascended on various on-ramps and off-ramps, but we could never maneuver ourselves over to where it was. I've never laughed so hard during such a frustrating experience. Honestly. I was laughing so hard that I thought my ribs were breaking. And I was driving. This is a good sign, I think. Labels: allyson, burningman, lee, wildweb posted by Jess Barron @ 10:15 AM
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