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 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 do the same and watch very little of it. Or I just watch the same things over and over again.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
My comic scans collection are my most prized files for sure.
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??
Sounds awesome! Can you list some cool examples you have hoarded?
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.
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.
piracy is definitely more fun than consuming the pirated content itself.
piracy turned me into a cinephile, i must have seen 2000+ movies in the last fifteen years
Kinda. I may have set up a Mac OS VM on my computer and downloaded Final Cut and Logic Pro just to say “Ha! Fuck you Apple!”. I have no GPU passed through. I don’t know why I did this.
There is hackintosh for that even apple supports some AMD GPUs
Yes. I’m now a reformed pirate (no more pirating for me! Save lost media ofc) and I get a similar thrill by removing DRM from my DVD/Blu Ray & iTunes purchases.
