May 9, 2014

Cocooning on public transportation: Victorian, Midcentury, and Millennial snapshots

Now that folks are becoming aware of how pervasive and stifling the trend toward cocooning has gotten, the awkward army has begun to mount a more active defense.

“OK, so we’re physically cutting ourselves off from one another -- is that really the worst thing in the world? Maybe we’re truly connecting over the internet anyway.”

Uh no, dork, batting five-word texts back and forth over the course of a few hours is not emotionally connecting like a simple two-minute conversation, voice-to-voice or, God forbid, face-to-face. And it doesn't answer the original charge of being anti-social -- even if you were connecting normally with the person you're texting while riding the subway, you're still closing yourself off from everyone else on the damn subway, and blocking out your surroundings when walking down the street, sitting in a coffee shop, etc.

This response is obvious and persuasive to all normal people, so that the cheerleaders of cocooning have taken a new approach to attempting to normalize abnormal social behavior -- “people used to act this way before.” How warped could such behavior be, if it had persisted for so long during an earlier time?

Here is an item by some airhead opinion writer expressing the new approach, referring to “old pictures” that show subway riders staring down at their newspapers rather than engaging one another in conversation. Nothing new to see with the phones-everywhere trend, just a contempo variation on a timeless theme, so move along folks, back to your cyber-cocoons and man-caves.

The writer must be a Millennial if she doesn’t remember the ‘80s, and is left to speculate what the past was like by lazy Googling rather than asking someone who knew, which would’ve quickly set her straight. (Real-life contact wins again.) It’s striking, though, how little awareness Millennials have of the past even from mediated sources like TV, movies, and pop music. Where are they getting the image of subway riders staring at newspapers?

In fairness, they may be thinking further back to the Midcentury, when public cocooning was in fact common. This is giving them too much credit for being aware of the world before they were born, but I can’t think of a better way to get to the snapshots of earlier cocooning periods that the title of this post promised.

First, here is a collection of complaints from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, when cocooning was reaching its peak before folks started to socialize and connect more during the Ragtime and Jazz Age. One complains about people using newspapers as distracters and fencer-off-ers while they sulk around on public transit. Sound familiar? But notice again how the complaints trail off during the 1910s and are gone by the Roaring Twenties.

But the Jazz Age wouldn’t last forever. Here are some “old pictures” showing Midcentury subway riders, who are indeed wrapped up in their own private little worlds despite being packed in like sardines, using a mass media product to focus their attention no further than their personal space and to physically fence themselves off from their fellow travelers.





These pictures do disprove the idea that we are forced into cocooning nowadays because of technological changes. Folks in the ‘40s and ‘50s didn’t need portable electronics, let alone web browsers, to isolate themselves in public. It goes the other way around -- there’s a change in the social mood, and people use whatever is available to further their new goals. Back then, it was newspapers, now it’s devices for web-surfing and texting.

But what happens when the mood changes, and people don’t feel like cocooning anymore? Hard as it is to remember, there was just such a time in the not too distant past.* All of a sudden, newspaper-starer-at-ers become rare on the subway, and appear to be mostly members of the Silent Generation (the Millennials of their day), whose formative years were shaped by Midcentury cocooning. The pictures below were a thing a few years ago -- “Woah, look how different the New York subway used to be!” -- but even the past five years are too long to remember for people who want no connection to people other than themselves.








Not only did these people have newspapers still available, they had paperback books and toward the end of the period, portable stereos, casette players, and CD players. Yet, it looks nothing like the world 15 to 20 years later, when everyone would be locked into their book, iPod, or smartphone:



True, people from the '70s and '80s are not engaging each other in lively conversation -- they’re strangers riding mass transit in a high-density hive of alienation. It is unrealistic to expect them to chat as though they were suburban dwellers recognizing one another at church.

And yet, they’re at least giving each other their undivided attention. They don’t appear to be focusing on anything in particular, and are “leaving the door open” like college freshmen do when they’re waiting for someone to invite them to something somewhere.

They look unsettled because of the rising crime rate and the growing sense that nothing could be done about it, that you just had to get used to it and cope with it as best as you could, of course with the support of others, who were going through the same situations themselves. Most of them are looking through a thousand-yard stare even inside of a narrow subway car.

If you look through “old pictures” or old videos from the ‘80s and early ‘90s, you’re struck by how dissociative the people look, talk, and move. Not necessarily glum, as on the subway, but just focused outwards and not monitoring the self inside. Every moment looks like it was an out-of-body experience. See this video clip of the Jersey Shore from 1994, thanks to a commenter from awhile ago, and this post and the gallery in the first link, showing the mall culture circa 1990.

Perhaps the tiny uptick in complaints about web browsers everywhere is a signal that the cocooning trend will bottom out in the next five years or so. The complaints of the late Victorian era set the stage for the more outgoing climate of Jazz Age, just as the complaints of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and The Feminine Mystique heralded the more outgoing clmiate of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.

It’s not an attitude that can be forced to speed up the process. We just have to keep our eyes and ears open to see when others start showing signs that they’re ready to connect again after hibernating for so long.

* Those who were there have managed to block it out because of all the “awkward!” memories they have of more free-wheeling times, while Millennials refuse to explore that time more out of resentment over missing the boat. It’s more than mere incuriosity (though lord knows that’s another defining trait of theirs). They feel gipped that their whole upbringing has been full of lies about how the world would explode if they didn’t wear two bike helmets or didn’t let their parents know where they were going for the day.

36 comments:

  1. The video from Wildwood brought back some memories, thanks for the link.

    Growing in Philly, I spent many summers down the shore, mostly at Wildwood and Sea Isle. It was a very different time in the 80s.

    true about the subway riders in the 80s. One reason people did not wear headphones, it would be too dangerous to let your guard down. Also in Philadelphia , the risk was high that a thug might try and steel a walkman from you.

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  2. What's the problem though, at least they're being informed while they avoid each other. The "outgoing" ones, as you said, are staring vacantly into space, not "connecting" either. Seems like you have a personal neediness that's being ignored. Does your vagina ache for a connection, or what?

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  3. On that Jersey Shore video... I vividly remember those hair and clothes styles and they were sported just before the Change in 1992. The one girl's top with the shoulders removed was a very short-lived fad; that video transported me to the Spring of 1992 at my middle school campus.
    Just one year from then, most would be styled radically different, and 1994 was as if 20 years had passed rather than the 2.

    Movie was 1994, but had to be shot earlier, at least what was in that clip.

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  4. The author of the NY post article, Karol Markowitz, has a bio page here.

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  5. And from this tweet we can guess she's at least 32.

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  6. "at least they're being informed while they avoid each other."

    Yep, no one read papers, read books, watched the evening news, or learned anything by word of mouth for three decades while they were outgoing. That whole Vietnam War thing, Watergate, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," Iran-Contra, the Olympics, elections, Bernie Goetz... and all the other stuff in "We Didn't Start the Fire." It all passed right by the outgoing culture, what with their lack of time holding newspapers in front of their faces in public.

    Rather than grasp at spergy rationalizations, just ask how else people could stay informed without constantly cutting themselves off from others. You might learn something. "Oh yeah, reading the paper, etc. at home, rather than while out in public."

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  7. "And from this tweet we can guess she's at least 32."

    Shame on her, then, she should know better from personal memory.

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  8. "Seems like you have a personal neediness that's being ignored. "

    I've also noticed that the cheerleaders for cocooning are turning psychoanalytical -- not surprising. "You want to people in the community to 'connect with' each other? Ummm... cuh-reepy!" You must not remember the good ol' days either.

    Fear of all strangers is a sign of infantilization, and disdain of social connection a sign of brattiness.

    Try out life beyond the toddler stage sometime -- we swear, it's more fun.

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  9. "Movie was 1994, but had to be shot earlier, at least what was in that clip."

    That struck me at first, too, but then it was the Jersey Shore -- they might not have given up on trends so quickly. Even today girls there wear their hair on the big side, compared to other parts of the country.

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  10. "One reason people did not wear headphones, it would be too dangerous to let your guard down."

    That's another part of why people were less inward-focused back then -- they had to keep their eyes and ears open for signs of trouble, or calls for help. Unlike in falling-crime times where 20 year-old girls go jogging around city streets at night, wearing a tight top and booty shorts, with earbuds jammed in their head. Definitely would not have seen that 25 years ago...

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  11. A little OT, but what do you think of whole milk? is it healthy?

    Paleodieters tend to dislike milk,

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  12. I've also noticed that the cheerleaders for cocooning are turning psychoanalytical -- not surprising. "You want to people in the community to 'connect with' each other? Ummm... cuh-reepy!" You must not remember the good ol' days either.

    *Wanting*, yearning, longing for it and just whining about it when it doesn't change, in the absence of reflection on what causes it to be otherwise is neediness, yes. And no, the violence level is not the explanation. It might be a correlation, I don't know, it might be a factor. But to think that people were engaging each other more actively because they had to link up against the creep leering around the corner is just simplistic. There are lots of factors - a push towards increased labor "flexibility" making people uproot themselves and move into unfamiliar areas where they don't have ties, a more precarious economic existence that infuses their lives with more stress, less people "like them" in their community making it harder to engage and relate to your neighbors, political polarization that tries to makes people look like radicals for supporting a minimum wage or being hesitant about mass immigration, etc, I'm sure I'm missing a bunch. It's not just the younger generation that doesn't socialize as much any more, even the boomers are having to swim up current to mainting the social life they were used to. My parents used to throw a lot of parties and have friends over all the time, they barely do it anymore. As for informing oneself, the political and especially the economic discourse has become so technical and esoteric that the average person just can't hope to keep up with it to a respectable depth. Talking to people now about those kinds of topics means you're about to get a spiel on the illegitimacy of "fiat currency"/gubmint evil or some other nonsense they saw on youtube. The massive uptake of pot use probably isn't helping that either.

    So if you want to connect, go hang out with your buddies and watch some sports, or find a neighbor that looks like you and talk about lawn maintenance.

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  13. Likely.
    I noticed the one girl with her hair parted on the side with bangs not big at all. That was a transition style from the big hair to the flat hair. I started wearing that style in the spring of 1992 and kept it for almost a year. In the fall of 1993 some were still wearing it (preps and some of the kids like in that video) but nobody was wearing the hair pulled back with the bangs sprayed high. Returning to school in the fall of 1993 was a surreal experience. My whole life everyone wanted to look their best and be the best and that was completely gone. I welcomed a lot of that, but I also thought a lot of it was gross, like heroin chic and the grunge bands with their tats, nudity, and whatnot.

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  14. People "connect" and socialize most when things are looking good, when prospects are good. There's been a squeeze on average people that makes it difficult to keep up the good spirits and relaxed state of mind that is conducive to openness. The violence level might be a catalyst to push normal, law abiding people together against the outlaws, but that's not going to matter so much when the people on the inside are also being attacked on an even more important vector - their livelihood and future prospects, and when they don't feel like they can easily relate even to people who are nominally on the same side. Luckily the state system seems to have come through here and prevented a crime spree free for all by locking up anyone with a mean looking mug.

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  15. Speaking of different areas and different styles, when you brought up the snood, I think it's called, I had no idea what you were talking about. A visit to Tampa near a college almost a year ago was my first sighting of one of those things. I've ended up seeing a grand total of two in my town and I live a couple blocks from a community college.

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  16. When I get on the bus or train, except for people sitting with their friends and talking, which there's always quite a few of on every bus or train I've been on, people pretty much sit in silence and don't engage with one another, whether or not they have a device or book in front of them.
    I personally don't understand the need to pull out a device or a book to be phoning or reading or listening to music 24/7, and I'd rather relax with no desire to talk to anyone. I think most people who don't use devices have the same motivation, not because they have more interest in others.
    I'm not so sold that having a device or book in front of you on a train or bus signals a big sea change in how willing you are to interact, which is pretty much not at all for the vast majority of folks.
    Also, the level of people looking at devices in the '80s pictures seems a lot more like my normal experience when travelling on the train or bus than the supposedly representative Millenial and Mid-century era pictures, more like a smattering of people on devices and books than most people (long distance train journeys and flights are a bit different).
    There might be something in people from "cocooning" times having a harder time relaxing and letting dead time be dead time, just sit down and let go and travel on the damn train, but I don't think that using these devices or media has much to do with shutting people out, really, and I don't see the big change.

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  17. "They feel gipped that their whole upbringing has been full of lies about how the world would explode if they didn’t wear two bike helmets or didn’t let their parents know where they were going for the day."

    MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS | TEEN IDLE

    I don't know why but I feel conned
    I wanna be an idle teen
    I wish I hadn't been so clean
    ...
    The wasted years, the wasted youth
    The pretty lies, the ugly truth
    And the day has come
    Where I have died
    Only to find I've come alive
    ...
    I wish I wasn't such a narcissist
    I wish I didn't really kiss the mirror
    ...
    The ugly years of being a fool
    Ain't youth meant to be beautiful?

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  18. "But to think that people were engaging each other more actively because they had to link up against the creep leering around the corner is just simplistic."

    No, it makes perfect sense. A documentary on the New York blackout of 1977 quoted a resident at the time who said that "the Son of Sam made New York City feel like a small town" because it was something that everyone was talking about, anxious of, and trying to figure out, make sense of, and cope with.

    Why do people go out in groups? Perhaps the most basic is "safety in numbers." Don't go out alone -- that would be foolish.

    Lots of the grassroots community groups that sprang up were directly related to crime prevention -- the neighborhood watch programs that used to be everywhere, the safe spot houses for children who suspected someone was following them, programs to help teenage runaways, the missing children on milk cartons campaign, and so on.

    As I've laid out in another post (search for mimicry and cocooning), the rising crime rates and trusting / outgoing social mood feed into each other. First people become more trusting and outgoing, which gives criminals more / easier targets, and also puts normal folks in greater contact, meaning they'll step on each other's toes more. More outgoing is followed quickly by rising crime. Crime gets to a point where it's too much, so people start cocooning as the only solution. With fewer targets, criminals have a harder time, and normal people are not stepping on each other's toes while they're locked in their own home. Cocooning is followed by falling crime. Then crime gets so low that people figure What's the harm in leaving our private homes and hanging out in public? Which drives the crime rate up again.

    All those alternate factors you listed to explain why today's climate is so cocooning did not apply back in the Midcentury -- country was almost all white, inequality was falling / bottoming out, labor movement was strong, civic-mindedness was near a high, etc. They may exacerbate the level or form that cocooning takes these days, but they are not the main thing. The cause of Midcentury cocooning was the rising-crime period of ca. 1900 to 1933.

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  19. "MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS | TEEN IDLE"

    Her delivery sounds like she's hopeless. When I read the lyrics only, I figured it would be a punky-angsty delivery. Young people have to get a little bit angry before things change. And it probably will be a fringe group of confident Millennials (a very fringe group) who will be the next Rolling Stones, who were Silent Gen.

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  20. "Also, the level of people looking at devices in the '80s pictures seems a lot more like my normal experience when travelling on the train or bus than the supposedly representative Millenial and Mid-century era pictures,"

    You may live in a place that is below the national average. If you make the closest comparison -- the New York subway, over time -- it looks very different. Everyone is on a device these days, graffiti is completely gone, Penthouse magazine cannot advertize inside the cars, kids (or adults) don't lay down sideways across the seats, etc.

    I didn't ride mass transit in the '80s, but when we moved to the DC area in '92, I remember the metro being more like the New York subway used to be, only without so much graffiti. And now it's still like New York, only now are both full of device-diddlers.

    "people from "cocooning" times having a harder time relaxing and letting dead time be dead time, just sit down and let go and travel on the damn train, but I don't think that using these devices or media has much to do with shutting people out"

    It seems like both, since they're using them as a physical barrier and/or staring straight down, as though they were looking at their toes but didn't want to appear so awkward. "Uh no, not staring at my shoes... at my phone, which is on the way to my shoes."

    "I'm not so sold that having a device or book in front of you on a train or bus signals a big sea change in how willing you are to interact, which is pretty much not at all for the vast majority of folks."

    Where are you getting the idea that the vast majority of folks have not changed their willingness to interact with others, compared to the '60s, '70s, and '80s?

    It may help to take in the bigger picture -- it's not just on public transit, but in coffee shops, sidewalks, outdoor seating, any area of a college campus, nightclubs, restaurants.... everywhere. Nothing strikes you as awkward and weird about that? Honest question. I wonder how aware the Millennials are of how different the world has become, or if today only feels incrementally different, rather than different in kind.

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  21. "*Wanting*, yearning, longing for it and just whining about it when it doesn't change,"

    Yep, we've just gotta shut up about the way that society is heading -- welcome our Mexican invaders, welcome the dog-eat-dog economy, welcome godlessness, welcome cheap junk from China, welcome the TSA, welcome government spying on its citizens, welcome everything.

    In case you haven't noticed, none of that has been getting better -- getting worse for 30-35 years now. You miss your old America that was mostly white? Stop whining. You miss good construction? Stop whining. You miss connecting with others in the house of God? Stop whining. You miss architecture that didn't feel like prisons? Stop whining.

    Whine whine whine, Americans these days are so damn needy. Don't they realize how epicly awesome it is to just plug into Xbox Live, stream porn, and immerse yourself in the immersive world of Game of Thrones?

    All we need to do is lobby Obama to speed up the "broadband in every home" program, and Americans won't need to interact with each other at all. It'll be epic!

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  22. "What's the problem though, at least they're being informed while they avoid each other. The "outgoing" ones, as you said, are staring vacantly into space, not "connecting" either. Seems like you have a personal neediness that's being ignored. Does your vagina ache for a connection, or what?"

    Easy to say that, since the bad guys are locked up, and you've probably lived most of your life in a safe world. Once the crime rate starts rising, you'll be changing your tune.

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  23. " their livelihood and future prospects, and when they don't feel like they can easily relate even to people who are nominally on the same side."

    wrong, the 80s were economically tough times for most people, yet everyone was much more social and the culture more good-natured and happy. immigration was also high in the 80s, so rule out the "immigrants cause cocooning" theory.

    Democrats couldn't figure out why the Democrat working-class kept voting for Reagan, but I guess its because his policies created a better social environment for them.

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  24. It may help to take in the bigger picture -- it's not just on public transit, but in coffee shops, sidewalks, outdoor seating, any area of a college campus, nightclubs, restaurants....

    It's hard for me to make the comparison there since I don't have that much experience from long ago, and I question whether I'm accurate when it comes to 10 years ago versus today (would it just seem different to me as I was a teen).

    True, there are lots of lonely people, aching for connection these days,and I don't get the impression people even like to go and sit near someone they don't know, ask them even a question, cross their path if they can avoid it, etc (I really don't). There could be lots more lonely, isolated people now. And yeah online life is no substitute for a life - you can talk to people you'd never meet, but it's non-commital, cold, slow, people hide by anonymous and false identities, people get absorbed into "communities" obsessed with ideas and memes they can't communicate with the flesh and blood people around them.

    Just the public transit contrasts seem wrong at least in magnitude with my experience, with '80s images you posted up seem closer to now than the now images, in their balance.

    Trains that are totally packed out with commuters, those really don't have much interaction or acknowledgement. People can't move, they're stressed out from work but they don't have space to relax, they do their best to ignore one another. Otherwise public transit usually seems like, out of 20 people, 3 or 4 friends or people on dates, 5 or so on devices or reading, everyone else not on devices and not really interacting very much, although they glance at one another's faces, smile, sprawl out from time to time. Not much like those Midcentury pics.

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  25. "They don’t appear to be focusing on anything in particular, and are “leaving the door open” like college freshmen do when they’re waiting for someone to invite them to something somewhere."

    Yeah, but what if you never get invited? Ironically, falling-crime is a lot harder on introverts than extroverts, since introverts rely on other people to get things rolling.

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  26. "Yeah, but what if you never get invited? Ironically, falling-crime is a lot harder on introverts than extroverts, since introverts rely on other people to get things rolling."

    I disagree.

    Consider - nerds and geeks aren't the outcastes today like they used to be.

    In our more introverted era, natural introverts and natural extroverts have more in common than in more free-wheeling epochs.

    As for why this blogger prefers periods of high violence and homicide, I won't even fathom a guess.

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  27. "Consider - nerds and geeks aren't the outcastes today like they used to be."

    Not really, nerds had much more social lives in the 80s. You never saw individuals becoming totally isolated and reclusive back then like you do nowadays, which has become somewhat common.

    And I don't think that nerds and geeks are necessarily introverted or that introverts are nerds and geeks. There's a difference between being a social outcast vs. a real introvert.

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  28. Cahokia, I think Agnostic is referring to criminals coming out of the woodwork and having easier targets during more outgoing times. He's not celebrating crime, just the conditions that make crimes easier to commit, as overall life is more enjoyable then.

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  29. off-topic, but an interesting comment from Steve Sailer - rising-crime tends to embrace laiisez-faire views, while falling-crime portrays competition as evil:

    "But after 1929, businessmen couldn't afford to fund intellectuals anymore, so the prestige of competition-based thinking plummeted. Only governments could pay for scholars in the mid 20th Century, so intellectuals in the 1930s quickly generated lots of rationales for why competition was bogus, as proven by all those busted businessmen who can't ante up for universities anymore, and central planning by the government was ideal both in practice and theory. One side effect was the collapse in prestige of the Galtonian tradition and the rise to dominance of the Boasian."

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  30. Two weeks and no new postings. I hope you're OK.

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  31. I am starting to get concerned for our Fearless Leader as well.

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  32. Agnostic, if you're there please let us know you're okay.

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  33. Agnostic, latest victim of the falling-crime cocooning trend. It's even happening to us, brothers and sisters.

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  34. In the event he isn't dead, he might be interested in this defense of "schlock" music.

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  35. Has Dusk in Autumn become Nighttime in Winter? If so, thanks for the blog, it's been interesting.

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