Posted on by Matt Thomas

On One Evening in Adelaide

Note: This recollection dates to June 2010, when I traveled to Adelaide, Australia for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop. At the time our school’s governing body, officially Ritsumeikan, but semi-affectionately known around town as “Keichimeikan,” (the cheap school) had begun investing heavily in International Baccalaureate training, and for a brief but memorable stretch I found myself traveling widely across the Asia-Pacific region attending workshops and conferences. Adelaide happened to be the first stop on that circuit.

The encounter described here took place midway through that week. Like many moments that occur while traveling, it was both ordinary and oddly memorable — a short conversation, a near-comic personal embarrassment narrowly avoided, and then a small gap in memory that I still cannot fully explain.

For privacy I refer to the person involved simply as “M.”, and a few identifying details have been softened. The strange behavior of my phone afterward — messages arriving out of sequence and the device occasionally insisting it was in Adelaide or Nagoya — was quite real, though I have never had a satisfying explanation for it.

In Japanese there is a phrase that captures the mood of such moments perfectly: cho fushigi — very mysterious.

Epigraph

Half hours on earth

What are they worth?

I don’t know.

David Berman

I. Adelaide

I was in Adelaide for my first IB Theory of Knowledge workshop, sometime around June of 2010. In those years our principal had suddenly decided that IB travel was a worthwhile investment, and so for a brief and glorious period I was dispatched all over the Asia-Pacific region like a slightly rumpled educational attaché. Workshops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and, in this case, Adelaide.

The school hosting the workshop was one of those extremely well-appointed Australian private schools — immaculate rugby grounds, manicured lawns, a cafeteria that would have put many universities to shame. The workshop itself was perfectly pleasant. TOK people tend to be reflective types and reasonably good company, though after two days of epistemology everyone is usually ready for a drink.

Which is how, on the second evening, a small group of us ended up at a bar a few minutes from the hotel.

II. M.

At some point the table thinned out until it was just the two of us talking. She was from San Francisco. Let’s call her M.

We were sitting close, leaning in the way people do in bars when the music is slightly too loud and the conversation slightly too interesting to abandon. I told her about my small blog, Classical Sympathies, which at the time was still young and full of ambition. She told me she wrote long travel essays and posted them on Facebook where, she said with a shrug, they had gathered a modest but loyal readership.

Like a complete peon, I offered to host them on my site.

She smiled politely and said she’d probably keep them where they were for now.

Which was entirely reasonable.

The conversation moved on. We started talking about family — fathers, specifically — and the strange emotional weather that tends to gather around that subject. It was one of those unexpectedly intimate bar conversations that sometimes appear between near-strangers and then vanish again.

III. A Minor Emergency

There was, however, a complication.

Let us say that during the course of this conversation Young Mr. Johnson began to make his presence known.

Nothing dramatic. But enough that standing up suddenly would have created a situation. So I employed the classic defensive maneuver familiar to men everywhere: crossed legs, careful posture, strategic angles.

A small but significant crisis was unfolding beneath the table.

Eventually the situation resolved itself through patience and good fortune. When the moment seemed safe, I made my exit with what I hoped was dignity intact. We exchanged Facebook information, said our goodbyes, and I stepped out into the alley behind the bar on the way back to the hotel.

At that moment I felt something close to relief.

By the grace of God, I had narrowly avoided making a spectacular fool of myself.

IV. The Missing Ten Minutes

And then something strange happened.

I remember stepping into the alley.

The next thing I remember is being back in my hotel room.

Fully clothed. Completely sober. The evening still early — maybe ten-thirty, eleven at the latest.

What I did not remember was the ten minutes in between.

No walk back to the hotel. No elevator ride. No keycard in the door.

Just a small, clean gap in the record.

V. The Phone

The truly odd part came later.

For the next year and a half my phone behaved as though it had lost its grip on reality.

Texts appeared months after they had supposedly been sent. Messages from April surfaced in October. Time stamps were wrong. Location data wandered.

Sometimes the phone seemed to believe it was still in Adelaide.

More often it insisted it was in Nagoya, a city I had visited only once for a consulting visit to a school in the hills.

It was never anything dramatic — just enough small glitches to make me raise an eyebrow every now and then.

VI. Cho Fushigi

I never saw M. again.

We remained distant Facebook acquaintances for a while. She became, I believe, an English teacher back in San Francisco. Her essays continued to appear occasionally in the feed, and then eventually they stopped.

The phone eventually sorted itself out as well.

Technology, like memory, tends to repair its own small fractures over time.

Still, every once in a while I think about that short walk down the Adelaide alley and the ten missing minutes afterward.

And the only phrase that really fits is the one the Japanese use for such things.

Cho fushigi.

Very mysterious

Dedication:

For Molly. Thanks for the half hour baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may enjoy the two essays linked below, both of which take up similar themes or charged, fleeting, and romantic encounters.

Simona
Mariko
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The X-Files: The Paranoid Style of 1990s Television

Note: This reflection comes out of a long-standing fascination with The X-Files, one of the most distinctive television shows of the 1990s. When it first aired, the series managed to occupy a strange and compelling middle ground between science fiction, horror, conspiracy culture, and something closer to philosophical inquiry. Week after week the show asked the same unsettling question from slightly different angles: what if the world is not quite as stable or intelligible as we assume?

What made the series especially effective was the dynamic between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Mulder represented the pull of belief, intuition, and pattern-seeking; Scully stood for skepticism, evidence, and scientific restraint. The tension between those two orientations created a kind of philosophical engine that powered the show for many seasons.

The episode discussed here is one of the early “mythology-adjacent” stories that sits near the boundary between the show’s monster-of-the-week format and its deeper conspiratorial arc. Watching it again years later, what stands out is not only the eerie storytelling but also the way the series captured a particular cultural mood of the 1990s — a time when technology was expanding rapidly, institutions were increasingly distrusted, and the possibility of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of ordinary life felt strangely plausible.

In that sense, The X-Files was never just about aliens or government cover-ups. It was about uncertainty itself — the uneasy space between explanation and mystery

The X-Files is my second favorite television show of all time, behind only The Wire, and it’s not close.

That may sound like a bold claim given the sheer amount of television produced over the past thirty years, but for those of us who came of age in the 1990s the show hit a nerve that very few cultural artifacts ever have. It wasn’t just entertaining. It was atmospheric. It was unsettling. It felt like it was plugged directly into the cultural nervous system of the time.

To understand why, you have to begin with a simple generational fact. I was born in 1974, just eleven short years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event cast a shadow that lingered for decades. My parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation were deeply scarred by it in ways that people my age never fully understood. Something in the national psyche broke that day. Trust in institutions never really recovered.

Historians later described this cultural mood as “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” borrowing the famous phrase from the essay by Richard Hofstadter. Whether one agreed with Hofstadter or not, the phrase stuck because it captured a very real undercurrent in American life: the suspicion that unseen forces were operating behind the scenes.

The genius of The X-Files was that it leaned directly into that atmosphere. It didn’t treat paranoia as pathology. It treated it as narrative fuel.

Discovering the Show

I was an early adopter.

The show premiered in 1993, and by 1994 I was already watching it in the dorms at Hamilton College with a group of friends. If possible we’d get a little baked first, which in hindsight may have been the optimal viewing condition. The X-Files is a show that rewards slightly altered states of perception.

At first it was something of a cult discovery. A few people watched it religiously while others barely knew it existed. But by the time the second and third seasons rolled around it had become a communal ritual. Thursday nights meant Mulder and Scully.

The chemistry between the leads was immediately apparent.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had what we would now call “shipping chemistry,” though that term didn’t really exist yet. We simply knew that something electric was happening on screen. The characters worked because they embodied opposing ways of understanding the world. Mulder believed everything. Scully believed nothing. Between them the truth hovered in an unresolved middle ground.

The show was also disciplined enough to hold that tension for years. In an era before streaming algorithms and social-media speculation, viewers simply waited week to week to see how the relationship evolved.

Hovering over them was their boss, the perpetually enigmatic Walter Skinner. For several seasons it was impossible to tell whether Skinner was helping Mulder and Scully or quietly managing them on behalf of darker forces. That ambiguity was one of the show’s great pleasures.

In a delightful twist of pop-culture irony, the actor Mitch Pileggi was at one point named TV’s Sexiest Man by a glossy magazine. Which is hilarious when you remember that Skinner is essentially a bald FBI bureaucrat in a gray suit. Such was the cultural power of the show.

The Smoking Man

Then there was the figure lurking in the shadows.

The Cigarette Smoking Man is one of the great villains in television history. Played with eerie understatement by William B. Davis, he appeared whenever the conspiracy thickened.

He looks exactly like the kind of man who would be at the center of a decades-long government cover-up. Three packs a day. Cheap cologne. A lingering Jameson hangover. The sense that he spends most of his time in dim Washington parking garages and windowless offices and only emerges from his crypt when the conspiracy requires it.

It’s a performance so physical that you can almost smell the character through the screen.

Three Essential Episodes

Every long-running show has defining episodes, and The X-Files produced dozens. But three in particular illustrate what made the series so special.

The first is the pilot itself, which introduces Mulder investigating mysterious disappearances in the Oregon woods. A key moment occurs when the agents experience missing time on a dark forest road. The scene establishes the tone immediately: eerie, ambiguous, and faintly plausible.

The second is Fallen Angel, an early classic that introduces the lovable conspiracy obsessive Max Fenig. Max’s jittery paranoia captures the spirit of the show perfectly. When he remarks that “someone’s always watching, Mr. Mulder,” it feels less like dialogue than like a thesis statement.

The third is the masterpiece of dark humor, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. In it, a weary insurance salesman named Clyde Bruckman discovers that he can foresee the exact circumstances of people’s deaths. Played beautifully by Peter Boyle, the character delivers a hilarious and oddly touching performance.

What makes the episode remarkable is that it gently mocks the show’s own hero. Mulder spends the entire series searching for hidden meaning in the universe. Clyde Bruckman, by contrast, believes life is largely arbitrary and tragic.

His prediction of Mulder’s death—immortalized in the epigraph above—is both absurd and strangely profound. It’s also a sign that by Season Three the show had gained enough confidence to poke fun at itself.

When the Mythology Expanded

Like many successful serialized shows, The X-Files eventually struggled under the weight of its own mythology. One of the central narrative engines involved Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha Mulder. Early on, the mystery added emotional depth to Mulder’s obsession with the paranormal.

But as the seasons progressed the storyline became increasingly convoluted. Samantha might have been abducted by aliens, or replaced by a clone, or transformed into something else entirely. Meanwhile the conspiracy expanded to include frozen alien ships in Siberian ice, shadowy government syndicates, and the infamous black-oil virus that seemed capable of possessing human hosts.

At a certain point the mythology began to chase its own tail.

Then, as the final blow, David Duchovny left the show. Gillian Anderson remained excellent, but The X-Files was always fundamentally a two-hander. Without Mulder and Scully together the balance of the series shifted in ways it never fully recovered from.

Why It Still Matters

And yet, for all the narrative tangles of the later seasons, the early years of The X-Files remain extraordinary television.

The show captured a very particular moment in cultural history: the twilight of the pre-internet era, when conspiracy theories spread through late-night radio programs, photocopied newsletters, and whispered conversations rather than social media feeds.

It was a time when the idea that powerful institutions might be hiding enormous secrets still felt plausible rather than merely exhausting.

For a few seasons in the 1990s, Thursday nights belonged to the weirdest, smartest, most paranoid show on television.

The truth, as Mulder kept reminding us, was out there

Dedication

For Dana and Fox. You know we still want to know what went down in that motel room baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay you may also enjoy the two essays below, both of which, in different ways, take up themes of intrigue and mystery.

The Thin Man in Singapore Part I: Washing Ashore
Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?: An Objective Investigation
Posted on by Matt Thomas · 1 Comment

Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?: An Objective Investigation

Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.

The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”

The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.

The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.

Further testimony from Mike is anticipated and will be incorporated into the investigation if and when it becomes available.

Epigraph

There are aliens in our midst.

Wussy

The Jung Problem

At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.

Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.

In other words, the sky fills with things.

Medieval Precedents

This pattern is not entirely new.

During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.

Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.

Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.

The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.

Medieval Europe saw saints.

Modern America sees aliens.

One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.

Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.

But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.

Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.

She might have reported a craft.

The Cold War Sky

By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.

The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.

The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.

Weather balloons.

Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.

Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.

The Mulder Doctrine

By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.

The X-Files

In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.

The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.

Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.

His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.

Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.

A Modern Lens

Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.

Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.

Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.

Which brings us back to Mike.

So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?

It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.

From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.

This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.

Provisional Conclusions

My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.

Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.

Mike has simply moved the story offshore.

The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.

If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.

But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.

In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.

Footnote: The Ocean Logic

It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.

From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.

Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.

POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony

Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.

According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.

When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.

These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.

Mike considers them decisive.

A second observer, Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.

In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.

According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.

At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.

Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Partial Defense of Reddit: An Essay

Note: This essay is not intended as a blanket endorsement of Reddit. The platform has many well-documented flaws: trolling, pile-ons, misinformation, and a general tendency toward chaos. Much of its reputation as one of the rougher corners of the internet is entirely deserved.

The point here is narrower.

Despite its disorder, Reddit also preserves something that has become rarer elsewhere on the modern web: large, open conversations among people who possess small but real pockets of knowledge about highly specific subjects. When these fragments accumulate—through correction, argument, memory, and curiosity—they can occasionally produce surprisingly informative results.

The examples in this essay range from the internal royalty disputes of Jane’s Addiction to a map of alleged sightings compiled by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. In both cases the same phenomenon appears: individuals contributing small pieces of cultural memory that gradually assemble into something resembling a collective understanding.

This is the limited claim of the essay. Reddit is frequently messy and unreliable, but it also functions as a peculiar kind of public knowledge commons—one where curiosity, enthusiasm, and the occasional obsessive hobbyist can still combine to produce insights that might otherwise remain scattered or forgotten.

Everyone knows that Reddit is terrible.

It is chaotic. It is full of profanity, bad jokes, half-informed opinions, and the occasional theory that appears to have been typed at three in the morning by someone who has not slept since the Clinton administration. Entire careers have been built explaining why Reddit represents the worst tendencies of the modern internet.

And yet.

The other day I was reading a thread about the latest implosion of Jane’s Addiction, the once-great Los Angeles group whose internal tensions have been simmering since roughly the Reagan administration. The immediate subject was the collapse of a reunion tour following an onstage altercation involving frontman Perry Farrell. The comments were exactly what one would expect from Reddit: profanity, gallows humor, and several variations of “this band has been breaking up since 1991.”

But as the thread continued something interesting happened.

Between the jokes and one-line reactions, the users began reconstructing the band’s internal history. Someone noted that Jane’s had already declared itself finished several times across the decades. Someone else pointed out that the early sound of the band had been shaped heavily by bassist Eric Avery. Another commenter raised the eternal rock-band problem: royalties.

And this, as it turns out, is where the story becomes interesting.

Money has a way of dissolving even the most inspired musical partnerships. Bands begin as small utopian experiments—four or five people creating something new together—and then the checks begin to arrive. Once that happens, questions emerge that are almost impossible to resolve cleanly. Who wrote the song? Who contributed the riff? Who deserves the lion’s share of the publishing?

Rock history is essentially a graveyard of groups destroyed by arguments over fractions of ownership.

In the thread I was reading, one user mentioned a detail I had not known: a claim that Avery at one point wore or promoted merchandise suggesting a 51 percent stake in the band’s identity. Whether literally true or not, the anecdote captured something fundamental about how these disputes unfold. Creative partnerships may begin democratically, but the distribution of credit rarely stays that way.

The remarkable part was that I had learned all of this not from a music journalist or a band biography, but from a chaotic conversation among strangers.

Which brings me to the modest defense of Reddit.

The platform’s reputation is built on its worst features: trolling, argument, and endless bad takes. All of those things exist, of course. But what critics often miss is that Reddit also contains something else: an enormous micro-density of cultural knowledge.

The process is messy. Someone posts a half-remembered fact. Someone else corrects it. Another person adds a detail from an interview they once read fifteen years ago. Gradually, through the collision of dozens of small contributions, something resembling a coherent picture emerges.

It is not elegant. It is rarely authoritative in the traditional sense. But it is often surprisingly informative.

What Reddit does, at its best, is something the modern media ecosystem sometimes struggles to replicate: it gathers together thousands of people who care obsessively about very specific things. Musicians. Gearheads. Amateur historians. Programmers. Aviation nerds. Movie buffs. Backyard astronomers.

And when those people start talking, knowledge begins to accumulate.

The phenomenon becomes even clearer when the subject matter becomes absurd.

Consider a thread from the cryptozoology corner of Reddit devoted to a map of Bigfoot sightings. At first glance the discussion appears to be pure nonsense. The premise itself—tracking sightings of a large unidentified forest creature—is hardly the sort of topic one expects to produce serious information.

And yet the map itself is strangely compelling.

People immediately begin checking their regions. Someone from Maine wonders why Bigfoot seems to avoid the state despite its endless forests. Another user proposes that two “alpha Bigfoots” are fighting for territorial dominance between Maine and Canada. Someone else links to the sightings database maintained by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. A commenter from rural Illinois notices that two reported sightings occurred along the same river that runs behind his property and proceeds to describe the terrain—swampy woods surrounded by miles of farmland where, he notes, something large might plausibly remain hidden.

The subject is ridiculous.

The conversation, however, is oddly informative.

You learn about geography. You learn about folklore. You learn where people live, how they interpret the landscapes around them, and how stories circulate through local communities. What begins as a joke about Bigfoot gradually becomes something like amateur field anthropology.

This is the strange virtue of Reddit.

The platform functions as a kind of digital commons in which thousands of small fragments of knowledge collide in public. No single commenter possesses the full story. But collectively they often assemble something larger than any individual source might provide.

Which leads to the modest conclusion of this essay.

If you want perfectly verified information delivered in polished and authoritative form, Reddit is not the place to go. But if you want to watch curiosity, memory, obsession, and local knowledge combine in unpredictable ways, it can be surprisingly useful.

It turns out that when enough ordinary people gather in one place to talk about the things they care about—even Jane’s Addiction royalty disputes or the migratory patterns of an imaginary forest giant—they occasionally produce something that the official channels of culture struggle to replicate.

Not perfection.

But knowledge, nonetheless.