you should pirate shit

you should download files. it's fun, free, and better for the world than streaming services. "but it's hard" this is a guide. i promise you don't need to be a computerhead. i believe in you.

why should i pirate shit?

• streaming services suck. in every industry, they make their money by financially ruining the people who make the art they profit off of. their algorithms, instead of helping you "discover new art", funnel you into what they want you to watch/listen/play. they're janky & inconsistent & are all missing things. fuck em.
• having your collection of files rules. remember how dads would get excited about their cd or dvd collections? they were right. that shit rules. trust me: knowing your collection represents your tastes, and you're in control of what's in it feels sick as hell.
• it's free! spend your 10 bucks a month buying music from a broke artist on bandcamp instead. easy.
• using media library server software, you can stream your own files to your tv/phone/etc, like streaming services.
• pirate streaming sites also exist but tbh they also suck and I'm not trying to sit through "try not to cum" ads to watch a show in questionable quality with no subtitle options.

read on to Learn....

"Piracy is free" This is true but the 20TB of hard drives you'll buy won't be. This is semi joking but data takes space and hard drives stopped getting cheaper at a good pace over a decade ago. Don't get me started on how fucking hard drives are sold now. If you think you'll end up with an extensive movie or game collection, plan on buying a drive or two. Or get a whole disk shelf, I won't stop you.

Speaking of pirating things, on Windows you absolutely want to get dbpoweramp if you're fucking with audio files. You wanna be able to right click and convert that whole album you just downloaded in FLAC to V0 MP3, and use all 16 of those CPU threads you paid for? dbpoweramp will do that.

Private trackers are great but they're The Linux Of Torrenting. If you're reading this guide and it's all new to you, maybe don't worry about it too much. RIP What.

If you somehow didn't already know, archive dot org is a great place to find old console games or "romz" as we used to call them (including disk based consoles). The redump project is mostly just a database of checksums to confirm a game is a good, unmodified rip, but it's also a great search term. As a note, torrents are fucking broken for huge groups on archive for some reason. So you may have to "direct download" those, as we used to say. I think there's tools to help with that now, I've never used them.

And finally, if you ever want something: ask your friends! If you're around here you're probably a friend or mutual away from someone that will just get whatever you need and send it over.

Oh and get Magic Wormhole installed so your friends can send you stuff!

For all the talk of "forum admin drama" this is why I think it's better for communities to be small and run by actual people. Communities run by big corporations find it easier to stick to the simplest "fairest" rules that follow legal requirements. Communities run by one or a few people are free to apply "unfair" moderation that nevertheless protects everyone in the community.

When you're in a corporate setting it's easy to know what you can and can't get away with, so it ends up being pretty hard to get kicked out of a Wal-Mart. Small establishments don't bother with that, if the bartender at your local bar doesn't want you there you're gone. People who like to be assholes prefer everywhere be like a Wal-Mart, where they turn a blind eye if it doesn't affect their bottom line. They hate the local bar where the bartender knows what bad behavior is and won't tolerate it.

Yeah it sucks if you don't vibe with the bartender yourself, but there's lots of other bars out there. Just don't become the person that wants every place to be a Wal-Mart.