I feel like lately I’ve been doing more piracy than actually using the content I’ve been pirating. Curating a library has been so enjoyable lately, I’m not the only one right?
Yes. Sharing is caring, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling from having a high seed ratio
It’s honest work. Not a capitalists idea of work, but actually doing good for your community because you enjoy it and care.
I’ll say I spent more time and had more fun jailbreaking my old Nintendo consoles than I did playing the countless hours of games I put on them.
There’s something really magical about having to fold a paper clip and put it into the joycon rails to MAYBE get your Switch to boot into Recovery Mode.
I can totally relate. I spent the time to jailbreak my 3rd and load with ROMs to then never play them lol I should charge that up again…
I made a Pandora battery back in high school to mod friends PSPs. I still have no idea how the heck removing a pin from the battery causes it to do what it does but heck, I felt like a wizard. But of course with unlimited access to games it meant I tried everything and completed nothing.
Right there with ya. I’m a data hoarder first and foremost. I have two goals when it comes to piracy:
A) If I have ever watched, read, listened, played, or otherwise enjoyed a piece of media, I will have it available at all times.
B) Do what I can to preserve said data so 40 years from now when I’m telling kids about some generic super hero comic, or SNES game, or obscure TV miniseries, I can pull that shit up in seconds instead of being the old senile man telling stories.
I got 30TB of space, I got almost every movie, TV show, stand up special, album, video game, comic book, novel, and essential software that I want (and adding more daily), and it’s all served up to whatever friend wants it via Plex or whatever-other-means-I-need-depending-on-the-media.
Meanwhile I’m on my 35th watch through of Archer lol
I feel the same way about music, which is why I am an obsessive buyer of physical music.
This. I love just raiding local libraries for disks, checking them all out, and archiving. Only have a few tens of gigabytes rn (I’m a newbie), and only a few gigs of “downloaded for free” music, but I’m enjoying both the media and the process. Mostly just YouTube-music scraping with ytmp3, but looking to get more serious soon.
Link rot on YouTube is insane. I have been scraping old demos in case the accounts get reported or zapped for impolitic speech.
What a strange thing to say. No I pirate because im broke and want to save money lol
I started as a hobby but slowly weened my immediate friends family off of subscriptions because I like seeing the media actually be consumed and now I can’t ever do maintenance on my server because someone is always using something
I don’t just pirate for the sake of piracy. If I download something, it’s because I either intend to use it or watch it or because a family member asked me to get it for them.
That said, even though I do it for the destination, I love the journey as well. I’ve been torrenting for a little over 10 years now, and for most of that time, I was just a hit-and-run user because I didn’t have dedicated resources for doing it. I ran qBittorrent in a virtual machine, grabbed my stuff, and then wiped it out. Last year though, after years of torrenting without consequences, I got two love letters from my ISP within a very short period of time, and because of that, I decided to redo my setup. I now use a dedicated computer as a seedbox over a VPN and try to seed as much as I can. It’s sort of funny. My seedbox sits on a shelf in my bedroom and I always have a strange sense of satisfaction when I walk by or lay awake in bed and see the little hard drive LED flashing away because somewhere in the world, someone’s connected to my little computer to grab a copy of something that I also wanted.
Lurking through communities related to my favorite literary genres while having Z-Lib is like walking into a candy store as a 10-year-old and being told that you can get all that you want free of charge. Of course curating a library is enjoyable lmao
I actually like the download limit that Z-Lib has for regular users. If you use it up, it moght be a good time for you to go actually read what you have downloaded.
I had so much time yet so few things to watch and play growing up, I think I’ve become a data hoarder as a “response” to this. Now I love being able to provide friends & family all the content they could ever want.
I think subconsciously we are all prepping for the end of the world as we know it lol
I do always think about a scenario where the internet goes down for one reason or another. I’ve got houuuuuurs of content to keep me busy.
I can only think of one scenario where the internet would be shut down and that would be during a blackout sadly.
Bet it happens for political reasons. First rule of suppressing revolutions is to cut communications.
Ham radio enthusiasts will start feeling very pleased with themselves then. Until jammers are brought in anyway.
It’s going to be difficult to jam outside of the cities. I imagine people are going to set up private wired networks in their neighborhoods, or use Wi-Fi mesh. The good news is that at that point, laws against piracy will be totally moot.
That’s when we hit em with the mesh networks.
I raised to be one, so I just LOVE searching for this stuff, but nowadays so much more fun because so many good pirates share their experiences, and they make it so MUCH more fun to check and find stuff so MANY alternatives I love it this is superb.
Sort of. I like archiving and passing on stuff that is useful and likely to be forgotten. Laws and morals just get in the way. Hail Satan, praise Prometheus, and fuck the police!
praise Prometheus
Why thank you, friend :D
We all appreciate the gift of fire.
Yes I just see it as a necessary evil. It’s also nice to know if corporations ever decide to wipe all their content off the Internet or something I always have my trusty hard drives packed with all my favorite media.
I never understood this until I saw link rot in action. Great projects just disappeared when people forgot to renew domain names or hosting contracts. Others went away when big services like Geocities vanished. Wikipedia and Google censorship took out a lot of others.
What do you mean by “Wikipedia and Google censorship”? I’m actually super curious, are there examples of stuff being censored and removed from wikipedia for example? Like projects or games?
Yes, frequently. They also like to keep stuff off of Wikipedia with arbitrary “notability” rules. There used to be a great community of Wikipedia critics, but I’ve lost all the links.
You only underestimate the importance of archival and preservation once.
Regret is a powerful teacher!
Piracy is heavily intertwined with self host/privacy for me so yeah same. I have the whole servarr stack setup but I probably use it the least out of everyone on it. My wife watches several movies a day when she can so its mainly for her. But I love building out the services and adding new things.
Praise the lord and pass me another 22tb drive.
Beyond “trying out” games. I like the idea of saving things or quickly grabbing things that might not be available for long. For example on a hard drive somewhere I have that early test build of Skate that was leaked like a year or two ago.
I’ll also say that as I get older I really appreciate how many more plug-and-play resources there are now. I can get a whole game package that self installs and I’m good to go. No more having to get an ISO from some sketchy Russian site or rolling the dice on TPB and then mounting it to virtual disk. With the power of adblockers/tracking blockers I can stream basically anything from any service with a few clicks from the megathread.
I enjoy getting things for free when I otherwise shouldn’t be able to. Piracy lets me indulge that without doing anything illegal so I have hard drives full of stuff even if I never play/watch/read it.
