Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I've been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don't think it's particularly healthy to pin 'media pirating' as a personality trait.

If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you're a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there's a will there's a way

Anon willl soon be 14 years old

My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn't an option I still wouldn't go through all that, it's madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.

If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn't mean you shouldn't pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre...

Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.

Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.

Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.

So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.

Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.

The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.

Cringe af

I'm heading back to it.

The streaming was sort of OK, and now it's wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don't have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com

If music was like this, I'd pirate that too.

I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.

I pirate a lot of stuff too but I prefer to buy stuff too sometimes just to provide support

I've pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn't say it's a lifestyle. It's just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don't need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don't pirate music anymore because it's not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don't play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.

YTA

I've been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.

That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn't occurred to me before

When i search roku for a movie made in 1969 and its $9.00 to rent or 15 to "buy" on their shitty platform......

Ahoy, matey

There're a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:

• the quality is always worse than physical media, and
• scrobbing (moving back and forwards in the video, with the arrow keys or by moving the playback head) is almost never instantaneous, it usually requires a couple of seconds while the video rebuffers

Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I've never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they're better?

But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I've not heard a bit a of dialogue.

I mean, if you can afford it you should support industries. I pirate a lot. Movies. Games. Music. Etc. Nothing wrong with that IMO, at this point piracy is the closest we can get to true ownership over anything because the entire industry has f*cked over consumer rights for assumed profit. But I still buy physical releases because I don't want content I enjoy to die and I like building a collection of good content. Blurays are great (although also DRM encumbered :/), nothing beats the smell of new manga, and at this point music streaming is just a far better experience than piracy (I use qobuz). If you're young or poor then do what you have to to enjoy yourself. If you're an adult with a great salary then don't be an entitled prick. If theirs ways to support content you enjoy you should. If such ways aren't provided like most Netflix originals not having blurays then f*ck Netflix release some blurays if you want my money.

I don’t pirate games because Steam just makes it more convenient, and sites like IsThereAnyDeal make it easy to find sales.

However, as someone that’s been a hobbyist developer for 15 years, and never really been able to overcome the imposter syndrome to be able to publish anything, I’d be happy if someone thought my game was even worth the time to pirate, much less be paid for.

Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I'm sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.

What a twat. Imagine your personality being you don't support creatives because you are addicted to stealing.

4chan and randomly using slurs for no reason

I think for movies and music this is totally true. Video games less so but not impossible

I will torrent the latest movie, but I will buy the latest album from my favorite band directly off Bandcamp. Might even buy a t-shirt or some stickers.

From Limewire to QBitorrent, I've been sailing since I've had a computer.
It's crazy that people aren't aware of the alternatives out there, when all it takes is a little googling. But I guess that's just a sign that the likes of Netflix and Spotify have a stranglehold on mainstream consumers though