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!

ISP's are all trash assholes, And there is a good chance you are operating with a data cap or there is plans in the future to implement one. Be aware if you do have such a cap, especially when you're just starting out and want to download ALL THE THINGS. A 3GB file certainly doesn't seem like a lot, but it can add up quickly especially if you're also downloading games and doing wfh.

Be aware of them, cause they can add an unexpected bill when you hit them while downloading The Shrek Collection after 50 other films.