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Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

862 points · 126 comments · MitPitt

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mock-possum · 1790230501 · focus · HN ↗
Whoa this is really cool. Wish I had an excuse to use it for something… hmmm.
1. hmartin · 1790274312 · focus · HN ↗
  Also clicking the logo is really fun!
lelanthran · 1790274461 · focus · HN ↗
I have to admit, I spent way more time on this than required (giggling madly at my creations)
california-og · 1790274662 · focus · HN ↗
Some of these effects are actually really easy to do with CSS @font-face & unicode-range. See: view-source:<a href="https://hlnet.neocities.org/font-face-tricks" rel="nofollow">https://hlnet.neocities.org/font-face-tricks
epiccoleman · 1790274791 · focus · HN ↗
Love this, I had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs messing around with it.
xnx · 1790274869 · focus · HN ↗
Nice logo interaction too!
dvh · 1790274997 · focus · HN ↗
For extra fun, you can make font that are the same as original but then you add ligature for some words and you make ligature using the same font but spelling different word. For example "red" ligature will be "green".
1. someonebaggy · 1790275242 · focus · HN ↗
  Do this on a document to determine who is copy-pasting or reading it with AI.
  1. amenghra · 1790279491 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  2. smeehee · 1790282258 · focus · HN ↗
    Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.
    [deleted] · 1790289607 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    servo_sausage · 1790318574 · focus · HN ↗
    Accessibility should only ever be an addition, never a limit.
    Semkas · 1790332868 · focus · HN ↗
    Why should that be true?
    servo_sausage · 1790337398 · focus · HN ↗
    Because proposing to limit something needs better justification than a fundamentally limited group can't use it.
    It's an out of place performative moralism.
    Semkas · 1790347876 · focus · HN ↗
    We will all become, or temporarily be, fundamentally limited at times in our life.
    It's trivial to build something that accommodates an ideal user, the challenge in software engineering is creating a solution that suits many kinds of people, at different points in their life. Refusing to engage with that challenge is a kind of proud mediocrity.
    ryandrake · 1790349117 · focus · HN ↗
    Engineering is fundamentally about building within limitations.
jrochkind1 · 1790275359 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
ZeWaka · 1790275401 · focus · HN ↗
This is beautiful. I think I'll have to use this for a game.
1. demaga · 1790277128 · focus · HN ↗
  I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.
2. cluckindan · 1790291173 · focus · HN ↗
  Beware of licensing.
htrp · 1790275574 · focus · HN ↗
This looks like the cut out magazine ransom letters you see in every movie.
1. Sharlin · 1790277577 · focus · HN ↗
  Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)
busymom0 · 1790275739 · focus · HN ↗
Bookmarked for future use!
mortenjorck · 1790275899 · focus · HN ↗
I have never felt quite so cacklingly nefarious as a designer as I did just now carefully adjusting vertical scale and offset so that the x-height and baseline of Papyrus optically match Comic Sans when mixed together.
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
1. Obscurity4340 · 1790280874 · focus · HN ↗
  Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious
  1. mikestorrent · 1790285218 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah we need to see this
  2. danielheath · 1790287443 · focus · HN ↗
    Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.
    Vinnl · 1790337404 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://imgur.com/a/W2EiufE" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/W2EiufE
    <a href="https://imgur.com/084vLca" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/084vLca
    Obscurity4340 · 1790338419 · focus · HN ↗
    Oddly readable
    Barbing · 1790352748 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not even bad. Maybe it would wear on me, but people have made plenty of fonts just like that.
2. malfist · 1790287134 · focus · HN ↗
  You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off
3. soperj · 1790297505 · focus · HN ↗
  "The new avatar logo is bastardized papyrus in bold" does have a ring too it.
4. coffee-on-thurs · 1790297800 · focus · HN ↗
  Here you go: <a href="https://filebin.net/v31in1w6jh1wp9g4" rel="nofollow">https://filebin.net/v31in1w6jh1wp9g4
  It will show up as "Papyrus and Comic Sans MS Bastard".
  Now why you want this is the real question.
  1. schiffern · 1790299003 · focus · HN ↗
    >Papyrus and Comic Sans MS
    Obligatory: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
    Apparently there's a sequel: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0
    nitefood · 1790328331 · focus · HN ↗
    Amazing! Thanks for a good laugh :-)
    xp84 · 1790353805 · focus · HN ↗
    If font humor is your thing, search for Elle Cordova’s videos on YouTube. They are absolute gems.
  2. alterom · 1790299206 · focus · HN ↗
    I am still laughing after seeing Royal Ransom, and now there's this...
    Thanks for lengthening my lifespan (if what they say about laughter is true), and for a great mood for the day.
    And that's before even making any single font with the tool.
5. ButlerianJihad · 1790343441 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
NietzscheanNull · 1790276035 · focus · HN ↗
This is great!
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
```
  Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating &#x27;_PyRun_SimpleString(r)&#x27;)
```
electric_mayhem · 1790276098 · focus · HN ↗
This is absolutely diabolical and should not be put into the hands of humanity.
What have you unleashed? Hey, look guys we got the next Oppenheimer over here.
phren0logy · 1790276141 · focus · HN ↗
Thanks, I hate it.
1. shagie · 1790297941 · focus · HN ↗
  Courier mixed with courier, but every 11th glyph is scaled 80% vertically (retains 100% horizontal). Monospace remains, but things are off.
philjohn · 1790276823 · focus · HN ↗
temu sans is beautifully on point
1. Sharlin · 1790277531 · focus · HN ↗
  More subtle keming adjustments so that the font looks just slightly "off" would be great too.
  1. shmeeed · 1790283459 · focus · HN ↗
    >keming
    I saw what you did there
    tomsmeding · 1790296421 · focus · HN ↗
    It's an existing joke: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/
  2. Asterism · 1790290362 · focus · HN ↗
    Very dean and modem
  3. thenthenthen · 1790310694 · focus · HN ↗
    Love the Temu variation. You can just use a ‘Chinese’ font and type roman text as well. Most of these fonts use a fixed width for Chinese glyphs, as wel as for the western characters, so i,l,f etc all have ‘extra’ white space around them, resulting in the ‘Temu’ effect, it is absolutely everywhere here in China.
    tuetuopay · 1790321496 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks, I always wondered why this was the case with latin text from CJK countries, as they use the same computers and software than the west, they should be able to do kerning right. I guess the original designers of those fonts are to blame for not making the latin characters "properly" monospace so that it still works.
    thenthenthen · 1790352772 · focus · HN ↗
    Can give the designers some slack, drawing 5000+ gliphs is not an easy task.
    Sharlin · 1790355747 · focus · HN ↗
    The latin parts of CJK fonts are often the crappiest possible Times clone that they throw in as an afterthought.
    deburo · 1790352688 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, so that's why. Do the big Chinese companies handle this well? Alibaba, perhaps? Huawei, surely? By owning the packaging and shipping?
2. gerdesj · 1790286994 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.
khalic · 1790276911 · focus · HN ↗
Seeing the results makes me unreasonably angry… nice job :D
dyingkneepad · 1790277112 · focus · HN ↗
Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!
1. sasaf5 · 1790305478 · focus · HN ↗
  Oh, and all the glueing it takes... I hate that part.
Fliwatt · 1790277543 · focus · HN ↗
There is a lot of fun stuff you can do with fonts. A friend of mine made a self-censoring font: Paranoia Sans <a href="https://github.com/flegfleg/Paranoia-Sans" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/flegfleg/Paranoia-Sans
Sharlin · 1790277863 · focus · HN ↗
Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming
1. sebmellen · 1790281517 · focus · HN ↗
  Took me a moment.. hilarious
altairprime · 1790278406 · focus · HN ↗
Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.
1. kstrauser · 1790280752 · focus · HN ↗
  That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.
2. beAbU · 1790318199 · focus · HN ↗
  All those presets are brilliantly named.
3. ryandrake · 1790348963 · focus · HN ↗
  We have all seen that actual font in real life, too! Amazing in 2026, “text on paper” is a challenge.
  1. Jarmsy · 1790354212 · focus · HN ↗
    What's the actual process that leads to this look in reality?
    projektfu · 1790360169 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm wondering the same thing. Something about making proportional fonts fit into blocks for Chinese text?
4. [deleted] · 1790352546 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
6thbit · 1790279136 · focus · HN ↗
Huh, didn't know the font could control variations over nth glyhph!
thewakalix · 1790279909 · focus · HN ↗
> Bastardica can make simple fonts feel a little, hmm, richer?
This is truly the YTP of fonts.
aanet · 1790280539 · focus · HN ↗
My eyes!!!
logicallee · 1790280670 · focus · HN ↗
Nice, I like it. The fonts are very interesting and captivating.
morbusfonticuli · 1790280674 · focus · HN ↗
I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)
krelas · 1790280949 · focus · HN ↗
If you want to make a designer have a nervous breakdown, upload a copy of Helvetica and make every second or third character be Arial.
1. FuriouslyAdrift · 1790281313 · focus · HN ↗
  calm down, Satan
2. goodmythical · 1790283141 · focus · HN ↗
  All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.
  1. shagie · 1790298362 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. Someone · 1790334626 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
thecaio · 1790281245 · focus · HN ↗
Temu Sans cracked me up
imshaikot · 1790281837 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
zf00002 · 1790283264 · focus · HN ↗
Really fun op!
iFarted · 1790283471 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
lathoa · 1790283990 · focus · HN ↗
I like it
peter_d_sherman · 1790284160 · focus · HN ↗
This is interesting -- not from the perspective of different fonts (although that's interesting too!), but from the perspective of it's a web page that can apparently render fonts on the fly...
That means that it's probably using some library in JavaScript or WASM to implement that.
If that's the case, then I'm thinking, you know, that functionality, that is, font rendering on demand could, in theory, be placed into a CloudFlare Worker (or other Serverless service, i.e. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, OCI Funcions, IBM Cloud Code Engine, Alibaba Function Compute, etc., etc.)...
That could be useful for a variety of applications... including (but not limited to!) word processors, typesetting software, homemade browsers, online games, heck, really anything where custom fonts are needed...
There are two distinct benefits with this, let's call it a "FaaS" (Fonts as a Service!) idea:
1) No need to bundle/ship/include a font rendering engine with software that needs one.
2) Extra Layer Of Security -- Local font rendering software is typically Turing-Complete, and as such, the local font renderer could potentially run viruses and other unwanted programs. I.e., local font rendering is a security risk. By hermetically sealing that code into serverless function off the local machine and having it send only font data one way, the attack surface of the font rendering engine is effectively removed from any local PC.
This being said, the disadvantage is that it can't be used if the Internet or server or cloud provider is down for any reason.
Font data, once created and downloaded, could however be cached by clients for offline situations / offline usage / offline work.
So, there are some interesting ideas here...
0gs · 1790286449 · focus · HN ↗
if people want to play with font generation in a non joke -- and frankly way LESS impressive -- manner, i made likeface.net too. it's a little buggy. but it's cheap and it's generous with redraws
qurren · 1790286978 · focus · HN ↗
My LinkedIn already looks like that
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/FCmzWNa" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/FCmzWNa
and I don't know who to report it to
abdusco · 1790288122 · focus · HN ↗
I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.
hypfer · 1790288155 · focus · HN ↗
I've been recently thinking about custom fonts and ligatures to create a captcha mechanism that is easy to solve for humans but confuses LLMs.
Something like a dynamically generated font where some letters look different, and you have to count details or write down a word or [idea not yet fleshed out].
Won't stop someone dedicated, of course, but nothing will.
1. ctoth · 1790294580 · focus · HN ↗
  I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.
patriciobcs · 1790288257 · focus · HN ↗
cool app, maybe make the logo at the bottom clickable so is easier to see the main page, also very cool.
m463 · 1790290313 · focus · HN ↗
Not much different from most of the optional font packages you can install on linux...
:)
furyofantares · 1790290640 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
flockonus · 1790291611 · focus · HN ↗
Such a cool idea, breath in new live to old fonts!
I wonder what's the footprint and overall efficiency of making a new font vs. combining old ones on client side (typically JS)?
DonHopkins · 1790296252 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
dzulp0d · 1790300676 · focus · HN ↗
Love it. Also, why do shady electronic manuals look like that?
tholman · 1790300963 · focus · HN ↗
Fun story, a good... (checks calendar, oh lord) 8+ years ago, I made a mis-kerned version of helvetica (smelvetica i called it [1]) as a joke, and eventually had the lawyers push on me
> we ask that you stop promoting ‘Smelvetica’ and making the font software available to everybody. Next time, just let us know if you have more ideas on how to modernize our classics, we are always open for creative input.
- [1](<a href="https://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/" rel="nofollow">https://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/)
hackeryojo · 1790302703 · focus · HN ↗
I have been looking for this for a very long time without knowing I have been looking for it. Royal Ransom especially is a masterpiece, I will be writing all of my work emails in these fonts from now on. Thank you. (I work for myself btw)
repple · 1790302771 · focus · HN ↗
love it! Temu Sans.. hahaha
omegadynamics · 1790303560 · focus · HN ↗
this is just Grotesk
ycombiredd · 1790306287 · focus · HN ↗
So at first I misunderstood your tool, thinking it was like a tool I made a little over a year ago that creates new fonts from existing font glyph paths, combining them in a couple of ways. It began as an ambigram generator (png image) using an arbitrary ttf or woff of your choosing and once I had that working, I realized that since I was just transforming vector paths, I could mix paths from multiple fonts, still focusing on ambigram generation.
Eventually, scope crept until it became an interesting and useful thing to be able to combine say, the top half of Arial with the bottom half of Times New Roman's letters (and combine with various boolean operations on the paths, with outlines, etc, and I assumed others would be as pleased with this ability as I was, so I documented some examples and shared it here and in a fontography subreddit.
To my surprise, it got essentially no interest when I posted here, and the response from the typography folks was basically negative with people somehow framing it as a piracy-adjacent thing, and not a fun thing to do, just mashing up vector paths to get interesting unique results. shrug
Seems like you and maybe some other participants in this discussion might actually appreciate this little tool and get some enjoyment and perhaps utility out of it, so I'll share it here. <a href="https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen
There are examples in the README that show what it does in ambigram mode or "font compositor" mode. Enjoy!
1. paulhebert · 1790306948 · focus · HN ↗
  This is cool! Thanks for sharing
  1. ycombiredd · 1791141226 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for the kind comment.
2. amoss · 1790318584 · focus · HN ↗
  Your tool looks interesting but the readme file is very "wall of text" heavy and example light. In comparison the site for this tool shows exactly what it does. Perhaps that explains the difference in response. This is a classic case of the need for "show don't tell".
  1. ycombiredd · 1790351949 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds reasonable. I have a marketing problem. To restate what I get from your and other comments:
    If I really want to spread something that brings me joy to other people so that they might experience it too, I may have to resort to polishing up the presentation. The fact that I'm trying to give something with no strings does not obviate the need to make it look palatable. This is a reasonable take I think. I also think I've known and have had a sense for that, even if I try to ignore it, because "selling" something is typically uninteresting to me. I'll try to keep it in mind the next time I have something I think I want to share with strangers, and put more effort into how it is presented so they might be more inclined to look into the actual thing I'm trying to show them.
    I'll make my own analogy, with it being like trying to share a chocolate cake that looks like literal turds to strangers.
    preommr · 1790361236 · focus · HN ↗
    > I may have to resort to polishing up the presentation. The fact that I'm trying to give something with no strings does not obviate the need to make it look palatable.
    People say shit like this when they're the producer. But then turn around and nitpick when they're the consumer.
    It's not selling something, it's about it being a proxy for if you understand the product well enough to communicate it's key points.
    To wrongly quote Twain: "I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time"
    Abstract_Typist · 1790366192 · focus · HN ↗
    The original quote is usually attributed to Pascal (in French in 1657..)
    <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/" rel="nofollow">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
    ycombiredd · 1791140403 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think we disagree, but the shape of your message confuses me a little. "People say shit like this..." "if you understand the product well enough to communicate..." "then turn around and nitpick", these things read to me as a pretty harsh indictment and a claim about something I did or do.
    What I think I said was that the comments made me realize that it is not enough to make something cool, tell people you made something cool, and expect them to figure out why it is cool with a minimalist, slightly ugly demo page, and that is I really want other people to be able to experience the joy I did, I'll have to take more time on the presentation of the documentation so they immediately see with little effort why they might want to try it. So then the choice for me becomes "how much do I care if something I made will bring a stranger joy?", and spend the appropriate amount of time on that marketing or "selling" angle.
    For this particular project after the initial response, my interest shifted to "hmm, curious that these folks focused more on some alleged copyright or theft angle" and I lost interest in sharing it with people. Until I saw this conversation and thought I'd mention the previous experience, and the comment you replied to was me stating what I think I learned from the comments here.
    Your "communicate its key points" is in line with what I took away from these comments, but the "shit like this and then nitpick" seems a bit hostile, to the point where I'm not even sure it is directed at me.
    Thanks for the comment though.
3. aargh_aargh · 1790323988 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm just a regular Joe, no font expertise.
  Sorry for the brutal honesty, just thought it might offer you an explanation of the difference in reaction.
  OP's fonts look ugly, but intentionally and purposefully so, in a nails-on-chalkboard manner. In contrast, your example images just look plain ugly to me, can't imagine I would have any use for them.
  Sorry again. I do understand the technological fascination with the process, just describing the aestheticity of the result here.
  1. brettermeier · 1790336581 · focus · HN ↗
    Ugly I wouldn't say, it's liked glitched and noisy of some kind. Like any art it can be nice in some contexts.
    Barbing · 1790352673 · focus · HN ↗
    More smaller font examples, just like in the OP, would help evaluate.
    Essentially mirroring the original post, but using the fonts of their own [re]design.
    ycombiredd · 1791141187 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for the specificity. I may eventually redo the README to be more palatable. I've realized I tend to make assumptions about how much "wall of text" people are willing to climb without knowing anything about the content, the writer's style, etc - that is, whether it will have been worth their time to read, and historically have made little effort to make it look inviting or otherwise give them a reason to read, leading to "nope." and clicking away. This is good stuff to remember, as even if I never revisit the fambigen README, I do have other newer things I'd like to generate discussion about, so I'll need to remember these lessons.
4. dostick · 1790352412 · focus · HN ↗
  The difference is that today's tool has a demo website that makes the whole thing self-explanatory. Yours is a repository that speaks "figure it out".
  1. xp84 · 1790353572 · focus · HN ↗
    This comment comes off as unnecessarily negative. They didn’t say they were mad that it didn’t get interest, and just shared it in case it may find an audience here. If you’re actually intending to give constructive advice rather than to discourage them or make them feel bad, there may have been a better way to say that.
Aduttya · 1790307270 · focus · HN ↗
Looking at current AI apps it's more of an integrater into current LLMs rather replacement?
dumbfounder · 1790307374 · focus · HN ↗
I thought you could put in natural language and generate a font. But you can’t. So I made one where you can: <a href="https://fonts.buttface.rocks/" rel="nofollow">https://fonts.buttface.rocks/
vpribish · 1790308105 · focus · HN ↗
you earned my upvote simple with the name "Times New Bastard". goddamn
vladsiu · 1790310023 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
RandyOrion · 1790311279 · focus · HN ↗
Hilarious. My first thought on these fonts is that similar clip art style text is frequently used in Persona 5. Now I know this is an active design choice.
P.S. I saw keming and my mind went blank for a little while.
newtwentysix · 1790313447 · focus · HN ↗
Good one. My friends are having a fun time
jurf · 1790318621 · focus · HN ↗
Ah, yes, the central Europe experience. When I was a kid, all fonts looked like this, because almost none had ďíáčríťíčš lol.
cengizIO · 1790318936 · focus · HN ↗
This is exactly what I needed right now. Somehow, it made me cry out of disgust, anger, anguish, and acceptance all at once. Sneaky Bastard is now my default Obsidian font.
DylanMerigaud · 1790319390 · focus · HN ↗
Scope creep transformed your ambigram tool into something interesting.
micheljansen · 1790320491 · focus · HN ↗
Temu Sans is very on the nose.
Rinkia · 1790320956 · focus · HN ↗
created the ultimate monster, papyrus + comic sans every 3 glyph
ayaros · 1790321081 · focus · HN ↗
If you really wanted to let me be a sneaky bastard, you'd let me mix Helvetica with Arial every nth glyph.
schnebbau · 1790325208 · focus · HN ↗
Well today I learned corner-shape is a CSS property now.
smugglerFlynn · 1790325589 · focus · HN ↗
This is seriously cool, Mitya
TomMasz · 1790335150 · focus · HN ↗
Even the font names are great. I can't think of use for any of these, but I'll keep them in mind should the need ever arise.
dspillett · 1790343377 · focus · HN ↗
TO heighten the effect, you could use ligature support. Perhaps for double-letters (like the tt in letter) only change one of the pair.
Heck, while you are messing around with ligatures you could be really evil and use them to introduce typos, or unwanted corrections (color→colour)…
sumit734655 · 1790351850 · focus · HN ↗
Head panel jecne ke liye
[deleted] · 1790352515 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
vishnuaniyan · 1790357405 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
CodeWriter23 · 1790358776 · focus · HN ↗
This is some derangement I can get into.
samteeeee · 1790359731 · focus · HN ↗
LOLed at "Temu Sans"
xrd · 1790359777 · focus · HN ↗
If I'm reading this correctly, this tool generates a new font by mixing fonts and altering proprieties of the fonts. In other words, a new font is produced.
Could you produce similar effects using pure CSS and/or JavaScript? Maybe it would be less deterministic and maybe the rendering would be slower, but could you do it this way?
hypercard · 1790363908 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
timz · 1790370821 · focus · HN ↗
Could we try with Google Fonts somehow?

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