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?
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.
I adore hacker and torrenting culture. I seed terabytes of data per month and run a media server for all my friends and family. Seeing my torrent client upload speed saturated with hundreds of people from all over the globe is honestly a vibe.
What do you do to protect yourself? Just a VPN?
Think Whonix but instead of TOR it’s the VPN. It should stop common leaks but if the VPN provider is compromised I’m toast.
I just live in a third-world country, it has its own drawbacks tho.
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.
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.
Man, I remember crossing the 10GB threshold for my music collection back in high school. I’m at 54GB now, just music. Back then my friends and I all had iPods set to “manually managed”, so we all shared what we had with each other without fear of losing anything. Then we figured out how to copy all of it off the iPod to a hard drive and sort it properly.
Fuck… I still have shit with creation dates as far back as 2003. Is this how it feels to be old??
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.
Same exact thing with me. It’s so hard to make myself sit through games since I feel like everything is just a download away, but I get SO excited when a friend comes to me for a file.
I do the same and watch very little of it. Or I just watch the same things over and over again.
Honestly I’m kinda a datahoarder lol so I basically archive things for the sake of preservation. In this aspect I guess this coincides with your point, since many things I pirate I don’t really consume, I just might potentially consume, or find it valuable, so I pirate it and keep it lol
I recently bought 4x18tb hdds and made a NAS to preserve all the things I love. Even have archivebox on a different machine that saves the stuff to the NAS!
Hoarding feels amazing lmao
It’s not piracy, it’s arrrchiving!
preservation … sure as a fellow horder I disagre
Download 500 GB of content in 3 days
Don’t watch a single thing in the jellyfin library for weeks
Yeah, I guess so. Tbf I’ve already been watching less shows / movies in general for a while now.
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.
Haha but there was nothing like learning the Russian words for accept / next vs. cancel so you could operate the install wizards.
With the awesome chiptune music going in the background too.
piracy turned me into a cinephile, i must have seen 2000+ movies in the last fifteen years
I actually downloaded Dune like 4 times, and spent hours remuxing a perfect franken-version which I’m yet to watch.
My LG C2 supports dolby atmos digital+ audio (but not truehd), and supports dolby vision profile 8, but not 7. Blu rays come with profile 7 and truehd. And streamable version of files come with dolby 5 video, and dolby digital audio. So I ended up converting the original blu ray from 7 to 8, with a multi step process with dovi_tool and ffmpeg, and then when remuxing I used the audio from the webDL version, so I could get both dolby vision 8 from a blu ray mux, and dolby digital audio from a webDL version.
This is the process I did: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25354
All of that was very fun and rewarding actually, but I still end up watching 720p/1080p shows that I want to watch instead.
This is actually insane, the kind of shit I live for lmao
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’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 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.
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…
Honestly, the interesting tidbits you learn as you dig yourself into that rabbit hole is actually quite intriguing and fun. So yeah - I’d say it is also quite “fun” for the process itself!
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.
You only underestimate the importance of archival and preservation once.
Regret is a powerful teacher!
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.
piracy is definitely more fun than consuming the pirated content itself.
