marfle-bark

curlfriend material

  • they/them and she/her

josie! a poly pan lesbian in ATX :3!

snow leopard (snep) + husky (ski) = snepski!!

EN native / ES / DE / YI

Music and other art, games, computing, gardening, chemistry, animals, and more~

I will rechost NSFW, it’s gonna happen, watch out ;3
@alt-snepsk-sex for the lewd account

sometimes i just think about my boyfriend and my girlfriend and it makes me so happy :333

one of those “two greek letters and an ampersand” girls


bsky
marfle-bark.bsky.social
email
josiesnepski@gmail.com

lake-scum
@lake-scum

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....


nys
@nys

Every great pirate uses Arrs!

Humorous title aside, when you start to have a bunch of trackers it can be kind of annoying to:

  1. browse available movies/tv shows
  2. download it
  3. make sure it gets indexed (not as big of an issue nowadays)

Enter the Arrs (aka *arrs or Starrs)! These are a variety of programs designed to help you (yes you!) automate searching, downloading, and properly laying out files from trackers (bittorrent) and usenet!! all for free (wow! what a savings!)

BLUF: Here’s the place to start: https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/How-to-setup-for/

Finally, you can setup an Overseerr instance that allows you to browse movies/tv shows in a slick UI and tell your waiting cadre of Arrs what you want! Browse just like the streaming services!!

Read More to find out how you can get these great features!

but nys i don’t want to set anything more up!

ok! then prioritize these names!!

High Quality (Movie) Release Groups
BBQ
BMF
c0kE
Chotab
CRiSC
CtrlHD
D-Z0N3
Dariush
decibeL
DON
EA
EbP
EDPH
Geek
HiDt
HiSD
iFT
LolHD
NCmt
NTb
PTer
QOQ
SA89
sbR
TayTO
TDD
TnP
VietHD
ZQ

then avoid these names!! they are bad at what they do!! i disagree with the decisions they make!!

Low Quality Release Groups
24xHD
41RGB
4K4U
AROMA
AZAZE
BARC0DE
BRiNK
BdC
C4K
CDDHD
CHAOS
CHD
CHX
CREATiVE24
CTFOH
CiNE
CrEwSaDe
DDR
DNL
DepraveD
EPiC
EVO
EuReKA
FGT
FRDS
FZHD
FaNGDiNG0
GHD
GHOSTS
GPTHD
GalaxyRG
HANDJOB
HDS
HDT
HDTime
HDWinG
HiQVE
JFF
KIRA
KiNGDOM
L0SERNIGHT
LAMA
Leffe
LiGaS
Liber8
MTeam
MeGusta
MySiLU
NERO
NhaNc3
NoGroup
OFT
PATOMiEL
PRODJi
PSA
PTNK
Pahe
Pahe (Pahe.ph, Pahe.in)
PiRaTeS
RARBG
RDN
RU4HD
RiffTrax
SANTi
STUTTERSHIT
SWTYBLZ
TBS
TEKNO3D
TG
TIKO
Tigole
VIDEOHOLE
VISIONPLUSHDR
WAF
WiKi
XLF
YIFY
YTS
Zero00
Zeus
aXXo
beAst
d3g
iNTENSO
iPlanet
jennaortega
mHD
mSD
nHD
nSD
nhanc3
nikt0
tarunk9c
x0r

how to!

This is the section where I would describe how to setup the arr suite you need (sonarr for shows, radarr for movies, lidarr for music, whisparr for porn). However, our friend TRaSH has spent the time to make AWESOME guides on how to set everything up. Here’s the place to start: https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/How-to-setup-for/ (if you don’t know where to start, go with docker, there is a link to a great guide).

Properly setup your Arrs will:

  • avoid shitty release groups that are bad at encoding despite it being 2023 or yoink others releases and fuck em up or troll or …
  • through the power of hardlinking (!!) make a file appear in your plex/jellyfin library folder without having to copy it or use space twice!!
  • make life easy! (this was not true until prowlarr imo)

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @lake-scum's post:

Games: don't mess with trying to dl PC games from random sites, it only takes 1 virus to mess you up bad. Stick to console games. The Switch is a perfect system, it takes hardly an amazing PC to emulate it. Nsw2u and ziperto are nice places to go. Keep track of which DL sites are good (1fichier!), and bad.

Games from older systems might exist on IA. Sometimes they're bundled under release groups like GoodCONSOLE. Do you know how many zillions of games fall under the MAME project?

Keep in mind that PC games can also be cheap AF, you can also just buy a lot of decent stuff through bundles (itch.io, fanatical, sometimes even humble). When you have DRM free stuff, trading with your friends is a nice kind of piracy too. I hear there's even a "Goldberg emulator" out there for your Steam titles.

Movies & TV - instead of torrenting, consider usenet. You'll need a usenet provider (buy a 1TB block from somebody like newsgroupdirect for about $10 to start), an NZB service (which indexes stuff into something like ".torrent" files, otherwise handling the mess of usenet is awful. Nzbfinder.ws is okay, I'm sure there's better out there), and Sabnzbd.

Media server - Plex is naaah. How much do you really need to serve stuff around? Maybe you'd be happier hooking LibreElec on an old PC up to a TV. Or get a plain cheap as chips brand-new intel n95 box (Beelink is pretty decent here), they run under $150. Don't bother with white-box Android set top boxes - to get a decent one you are looking at close to a PC puck price, and you're getting a skeevy as hell Android loadout.

what website fucked you up bad? fitgirl repacks and more are excelent for pc games as there are plenty of places to get great pc games. if you are well informed on what sites are bad and which are good you will be fine and if you are ever in doubt you can always run malwarebytes afterwards.

the only viruses i have have been windows defenders false positives because windows defender is a shit antivirus and it always thinks cracks are trojans.

ive ran malwarebytes time and time again and it has consistently found no threats despite windows saying otherwise

of course ram is untraceable so there could always be a virus on my system but that remains true for every technological device and its just how computers run no matter how cautious you are.

also using steam key websites fuck over developers just as much as piracy, im not sure about humble bundle but other steam key sites do some really shady shit to get games that cheap

"How much do you really need to serve stuff around"? uh... like maybe to your phone? or tablet? or TV in another room? Thats not even accounting for friends, roommates, parents... Plex isn't that difficult.

Great writeup, I'd also like to add that Plexamp is a really great mobile app for streaming the music on your plex server, much better than the regular plex app. Basically feels just like spotify but for your personal music collection, I love it.

I believe the free version of ProtonVPN does not do peer-to-peer traffic (the type torrents use). Tested it a month ago and no dice.

That said the one thing I'd add to this guide is I highly rec using a VPN when torrenting to avoid the legal nastygrams from IP holders. I recently decided to switch from Mullvad to Proton (paid version) because the former dropped support for port forwarding.

thank you for this, i'm going to pore over some of the places I didn't know for for reference - and it might even get me closer to trying to sort out my music files.
(also, driveby love for Musicbee - it is just so customisable in terms of what info you're seeing from field columns to UI sections)

this is an incredible resource! Im gonna stop using spotify today i think.
one thing: could someone point me to a good music player for android? I listen to almost all my music on my phone :(

late to this, but foobar2000 has an android version that's very straightforward and simple, and not overly cluttered like some can be. it also works with every album i've thrown at it, with all the metadata working fine. i've run into metadata problems on every other music player i've tried, but foobar2k handles all of it fine

a few things to add:

virustotal.com is a very useful site that will scan files with 70+ antivirus engines and show you all of the results. nearly anything you give it will already have been scanned by someone so you'll get the existing results instantly.

most major antivirus systems include signatures specifically for flagging keygens that don't actually do anything malicious, so if you get something from a scan where the type of "virus" has "PUA.Keygen" or "Riskware/KeyGen" or "Unwanted-Program" or something like that in the name, you can be fairly sure it's a false positive.

the only time i've ever gotten a notice from my ISP about piracy is when i torrented a textbook. textbook publishers are among the most ruthless IP holders (since their whole business model is exploitative and people frequently try to circumvent them) so if you're getting a textbook from a torrent you might want to be extra careful to use a vpn for that.

Oh my god, soulseek brought me back to the napster glory days. Thank you for this. I've already found tons of stuff that was IMPOSSIBLE to get on torrents, and in a matter of minutes. I'm so goddamn hype to get an mp3 player going and load all this stuff up.

I have a very silly question that I'm struggling to find. How do I register for a Soulseek account? I get to a login screen in the app, but I can't find a registration page on the website or a way to progress in the app anywhere but login

If you torrent any Star Trek, make sure you have a VPN! Paramount is extremely aggressive, and they closely monitor for piracy of even the very old Star Trek series. But if you have a VPN they can't do anything about it.

If you do have the money to buy stuff, vote with your wallet and buy DRM-free (Bandcamp for music, some parts of Vimeo On Demand for movies, GOG for games etc).

I personally love to support artists and creators who make the stuff I enjoy, but I refuse to pay for a product that doesn't respect me and limits how I can use it. If I can buy a file that I can backup and use freely on all of my devices I WILL buy it.

Just to add a note (and someone did leave a comment to this effect), but Tachiyomi isn't getting updates anymore due to a webtoon publisher going after them. Basically immediately, a spiritual successor called Mihon got made, and as someone who used Tachiyomi for multiple years and now uses Mihon, it's an exceptional way to find and read manga (and comics in general!) on your phone, including stuff saved locally. I would highly recommend it, it saved my life when my power was out for 4 days and I needed something to do.

Does anyone know any good resources for Japanese music/media? There's a collection of old ass anime drama/character song cds I'm always on the hunt for, but the English speaking internet is no help...

in reply to @nys's post:

so it's funny, my use of *arrs has diminished greatly since rarbg went down -- pour it out for a real one. I don't really have a usecase for using them to scrape freeleech stuff off private trackers, and I never set up other public trackers than rarbg with them. are there other public indexers you'd recommend for casual usage? (maybe this is how I finally check out Usenet...)

tbh the downfall of rarbg made me go back to private trackers. i started applying and hitting up my contacts and i have a bunch of proofs from like a decade on PTP and AB so it wasn’t too hard. r/trackerinvites is a solid place to watch.

just want to throw another name on the low quality release groups pile: HANDJOB. they do a lot of hard work making the smallest deliverable movie files possible while maintaining a minimum level of quality, unfortunately the minimum level of quality is still pretty bad. however with that said, if you're still stuck on slow internet, this might just be the group for you.

#not a joke post

hell yeah. I only use Sonarr/Radarr (without Prowlarr (yet)) in a pretty basic manner (I dont mind the extra space since i clean up my downloads folder regularly etc etc) but those things rule.

I miiiight look into Lidarr at some point but I need to see how well it plays with releases from the private tracker I use for music.

I would check out the trash guides bc you should be able to setup hardlinking which doesn’t use extra space (and with sonarr/radarr you can have it auto delete from qbittorrent after x time). also prowlarr is a godsend cause it puts indexer stuff in one place

ahh I seed forever. i have two servers that have fat pipes (40g and 10g) that sync down to my local and then i move stuff off them after a week but seed forever at a slow speed.

if you are looking to aquire games definately go on r/piracy as all the sites listed on the megathread are trust worthy and there are plenty of shitty torrenting groups such as iggames that you definately want to avoid

i’m coming back after 10ish years so like so many groups have disappeared and most of my accounts are gone T_T back in the early 2010s we had soooooo many game trackers that rose and fell.

Can you recommend any good resources for learning more about high quality encodes / release groups vs. low quality encodes / release groups? I know the basics of compression and container formats, but I realize now I don’t have a great sense for why I like a particular set of tags, other than “those are the good ones”.

Hmmm, I crib most of these from either private tracker banlists or trash guides. A lot of the “low quality” are just people who take other releases and repackage them. Some (like YIFY) are so focused on hitting 00s era filesizes that the files are basically useless. Some people don’t choose great encoding settings or don’t even attempt to tune them or aim for fast encoding bc they don’t want to spend time. It’s been like a decade since I was deep enough into the scene to tell you why some groups are worse than other specifically. Undoubtedly a few of those are just inter-group rivalry that got enshrined but idk how many of that are true. For instance rarbg aren’t terrible x264 releases but typically are banned bc of their habit of nonstandard naming.

It might be interesting to look for releases from TAoE as they tag with the individual in charge of each release and you can get a feel for each one’s preferences.

r/trackers or r/piracy have a few decent threads if you search for things like “what are remuxes” (they might have wiki entries).