What drew you to the high seas?
What drew you to the high seas?
Inspired by a post since deleted, I feel bad for probably coming off judgemental about the poster's taste in the movie that drove him to consider sailing.
The earliest desired media I can remember that drove me to figure out sailing was DC Talk, a Christian rock band. Pop music was not allowed in my house, so a Christian group was tantalizing and scandalous to a rebellious, young Vanth. Things escalated from there.
When I was a poor student I pirated everything. Music, software, games, you name it.
Now that I have a good stable income, I pay for the things I want because I want to encourage artists and developers. But corporations and capitalism are ruining it all.
So, I'm changing my habits. Paying money where it actually has a significant impact on the creators, (like going to live concerts and shows, buying albums directly from the artist or from their own site, buying indie games from small studios, going to watch movies from studios that respect their employees and artists and unions) and pirating the ever loving shit out of everything else coming out of a large corporation.
I paid over $1k about 10 years ago for music software. My computer killed itself, so I made a new one and redownloaded the software...but the company said I'm an imposter. After years of fighting with them, they refused to activate my paid software despite proving my identity and showing proof of purchase. I didn't choose to pirate, the system chose for me
First time, it was because I was a kid that couldn't pay for the movies/music/games I wanted. The high seas provided me with a solution for that.
Then I started making money and Netflix streaming came along making it both cheap and convenient. I docked my ship and forgot about my pirate life for a long time. Everything was good, living a quiet life...
But then the corporate greed caught up and ruined everything. Streaming prices became absurd, content got fragmented to way too many services and they fucking started introducing ads.
So here I am, setting sail once again. I didn't need or want this, but they have forced my hand with their infinite greed.
Cable installer guy came to the house one time... Hooked up internet and asked me if I was going to Torrent or not. I had no idea what he was talking about as this was 2005.
Did some googling canceled my cable subscription and I never looked back.
Got off the The seas when Netflix was big... And then all that changed again..
So here we are again.
I didn't have money as a kid. I still don't have money.
Corporate greed.
I love sea men, and free stuff.
TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don't give two flying hoots about me.
Currently, I pirate because I can't rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can't own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn't pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn't pirate the media I consume. I'd still data hoard because it's a literal addiction, please help!!)
I don't pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they're ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don't like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don't trust what I can't verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg's Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I've long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).
Convenience. Well, nowadays that is. And I only started again after the enshittification of streaming services started. I buy all my games legally, just motion picture that I get from the seas.
As a kid/teenager it was more about the money. We cracked games to play on LAN parties without everyone having to have a (retail) copy etc.
I think it was a game that needed activations to play and I ran out of activations or something. Predictably, pirating it was the better experience in every way.
My childhood home only has dialup Internet. First year at college I found out someone ran a DC++ instance on the network and it was over from there. I got a 2tb HDD because I had to, and could, download enough movies/shows to last me the summer. I stopped for a while when I moved out and actually had broadband, but then Netflix stopped being Netflix and became $NFLX, and with all the other services popping up I heard the call of the seas again
In the early 00s I pirated a lot of music, but now I buy records and pay for streaming because it’s affordable and good.
I used to pirate software but now I just use FOSS because it’s free and good.
I used to pirate games but now I just wait for steam sales, which is cheap and good.
I used to pirate lots of movies and tv shows but then got a Netflix account and it was reasonably priced and good… until it wasn’t. Then I set up a full stack of usenet/ sonarr/ radarr/ overseer/ Jellyfin and boy oh boy is that good.
But now I have a baby and don’t watch tv anymore so I pirate pretty much nothing.
Crazy prices for movies and software like Photoshop. I'm still subscribed to YT Music, but I have to pirate music as silly wars between labels and artists result in music being removed from streaming services from time to time. For the same reason I don't want to buy movies online - we don't own shit.
The pirates innovated and made content available long before the corporations did.
Before streaming services took off, it was the only way to get movies and music (besides some IRC rooms). There were even a few golden years where movies would get leaked to torrents in full quality, before the theatrical release.
Music too was easier to find on napster, limewire, and torrents, than your local music store.
Ironically mine started without nefarious connotations.... The family computer in the mid 80s was a minor novelty to me for ages, only good for simple text games really. Then...
My brother grabbed a cracked game toward 1990 off a BBS. The game itself I don't even remember, but it had a cracktro that stunned me. Graphics I'd never seen, actual music out our little adlib card... Was crazy enticing.
Being stuck in the Midwest US while enamored with DemoScene is a hell of a drug. Every few kb down that modem was like crack.
That then opened a new world of games as well... Things my older brother had no interest in. Things my parents obviously would not have allowed. You know... The Good Shit ™️.
Obviously once codecs caught up video and audio quickly became a thing. My closest buddy and I would burn stack after stack of CDs to take a spindle at a time over to share between us and others.
Then the data hoarding set in... What good is just having these shiny things for yourself when you can share? True joy doesn't exist without spreading it to others.
The sickness persists... Stronger than ever despite becoming a pessimistic old man. Multiple gigabit connections: check. 200tb arrays just for torrents: check. Seed times tracked in years: check.
Remember when 14.4k was the most epic thing for grabbing those disks at lightning speed? I certainly do.
I've been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don't pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.
I was poor. Pirates selling copied disks on the street was all I could afford
I'm honest so I will tell the truth: I like cheap stuff.
Ideology. every cent a capitalist doesn't make because of me is a small victory.
For me it was the Simpsons when I was a kid and a relative would record it off satellite TV for me. It just carried on from there. I started recording stuff off TV myself, recording music on audio cassettes and eventually copying VHS tapes.
Then I got a PSX console and my parents "knew a guy" who burned games.
After that I heard about Napster and started downloading MP3s on the family PC. When Napster was shut down I moved onto other apps like Kazaa and Limewire.
Then I got a DVD burner. At first I just copied DVDs but when I got broadband I started downloading torrents and burned the files to DVDs.
About 10 years ago I started storing those files on a NAS. Planning on moving to Jellyfin in the next few weeks.
I went back to it recently. It's mostly down to Amazon deciding that paying them was no longer enough, you had to watch their ads as well.
Well now I don't. I installed Jellyfin, paid up for two years of VPN, and got another HDD. I'm set. I'm all done with asking nicely for a better service so I got my own.
I sub to Spotify because it's easier than pirating. I'm a creature of convenience. If there was one streaming service that had all movies that have already had their cinema run, and all TV shows, and was all in one UI, and nothing ever got taken off it, and it was a reasonable price (say the price of two current streaming services), I'd probably pay up for it.
But there isn't. They don't want to offer it. They all want to be king of their little corner.
I live in a kinda poor country, the money for a game can be used for 4 or 5 days of food, that is with regional pricing. Otherwise it's a whole month. That and also it's satisfying to give back to the people, KB by KB copies get to new owners that will enjoy them.
I had the Soldier of Fortune original game disk, but lost the box with the CD key. Mailed the devs/publishers asking for help, sending a picture of the disks, and they basically told me that I should have been more careful. Googled "soldier of fortune CD key" and ended up on one of those now-defunct websites which collected cracks and CD keys, discovering that not only you didn't need the key, but you could also just download free stuff.
Now I pay for Prime Video, Netflix and Spotify and buy lots of games on steam/gog, but I also created an app used by thousands of people every month to help them sail the four seas
Was just trying to watch the original Star Wars from when I was young and found out that it is simply not available for sale. My money is no good! Then I found this Project 4K77.
Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.
A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.
I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn't tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.
I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files...it was not a good time.
For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn't pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone's battery, they didn't shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.
It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.
To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.
And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.
But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.
So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.
I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren't all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.
Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don't do advertising. Pisses me off.
So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I'm curating a music collection I've pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it's feasible to replace Spotify but I can try
Walking into CD shop and buying album was something I couldn't afford as 15y old
Was a student, couldn't afford CDs.
Nowadays I
- don't want to subscribe to too many streaming services, each just having a few things I want to watch. Also I broke my neck and I'm now on disability, there's no budget to waste, at all.
- Like to watch old shows and "rare" movies that aren't available anywhere.
Originally, I was too poor to afford software. Then my CD/dvd books were stolen and I couldn't afford to replace the media I'd been collecting my entire life. I bought an external drive, an s-video to RF modulator, a Bluetooth keyboard and connected my computer to channel 3.
Eventually Pandora and Netflix were released and I stopped pirating. I spent most of a decade buying all of my media. Then I tried to buy a complete set of Good Eats and it wasn't possible.
There was literally no way to purchase every episode legally. So I took the $500 I was going to spend on that box set and put it towards an ebay'd server and some drives.
By the time the streaming wars started to gain steam, I had everything automated, and was pushing 50TB of storage.
As a lil boy of 8, I wanted computer games but I never had a fast enough computer so if my parents ever did buy me a game, it often wouldn’t work or would be too slow to play.
Fast forward to wifi in the house and I got San Andreas working on my IBM T42. Good times.
Probably being unable to buy music when I was in my teens.
No job, no income, no way to get to the store anyway, and to top it off… half the music I liked I wouldn’t have been able to find anyways. (Fan songs/parodies)
So I learned that (free) YouTube downloaders and MP3 converters existed.
A bit later than that… NES/SNES games I wanted to play but those consoles were before my time. So I learned emulators existed.
So basically stuff I didn’t have access to otherwise.
I was in middle school and I saw my friend had all the episodes of ATHF (aqua teen hunger force) and I wanted to be able to get free episodes of stuff. Silly but true.
You can therefore blame the mooninites for my piracy.
Pitstop 2. I copied that floppy.
My dads friend used to burn random movies to DVD and give them to us. Eventually, he showed my dad where to get them and my dad showed me. I think it was the uploader axxo on isohunt that my dad would always download from. I nearly completely forgot about that, thanks for making me think about it! We really had no idea what we were doing, we used to use utorrent and everything. That family computer was riddled with viruses. It took us about an hour to remove some random extensions that changed our default search engine one time
Everyone just copied everything from each other. Floppy, then Twilight CDs. Then came the internet and exploring music there was better than sitting around waiting for a song to come on the radio to quickly press record. It was normal when I was young to share, not really an active choice.
My wife and I were piss poor and getting finance degree at a third rate state college. I was paying my way with PC support. One day I spent money I didn't have to buy a Wndows NT certification book and used the university's T1 line to pirate NT 4.0 for myself and MS SQL and Oracle 7 for my wife (I also bought a CD of Red Hat Halloween). Almost thirty years later we literally saved a presidential election and are the ones keeping significant parts of the US infrastructure from falling apart. All thanks to piracy.
Intellectual property is the lamest form of property put forth by the propertarians.
Basically as soon as I found out about it. I really got into it when I later discovered emulation. Never felt bad about it; I was pretty much only looking for games I literally could not buy because they could only be had via retailers, and they didn't always carry every title.
Most of the stuff I was looking for couldn't even be found on store shelves. Before online shopping and streaming, if it wasn't the latest release or biggest hit, you probably wouldn't be able to find it locally. You'd waste time browsing up and down aisles of junk only to leave disappointed, then try again at another store, hoping that by some miracle they'd have it.
Then I discovered that terabytes upon terabytes of content was available, nearly instantly and conveniently, on the internet. All you had to do was click a few buttons and you had what you wanted. That was about 25+ years ago, and the recording industry still has not adapted to offer a service that even comes close to what was available back then.
I was a teenager who wanted to be a 1337 haxxor so I found out what warez were, and then wanted to play a bunch of games for free.
Wanted to play some games, didn't have money but I did know someone that knew someone that knew someone that ran a BBS that had some pirated games.
Yes, I'm that old.
wir hatten ja nichts
My brothers were using limewire like 20 years ago when I was a preteen. So I started using limewire, and quickly surpassed them in skill. Jumped to TPB when they got popular. I now host the family media server, and take requests 😬
Still haven't taken the time to set up sonarr radarr and the like. Would probably simplify my life a lot. But I've got a system and it works 🤷♂️
Hmm, this is an interesting question, as I live in a 3rd world country it is hard to pinpoint exactly which event drove me to this beautiful world.
With that said, the first console that we ever had (sis and I) was a PS1, it came with Gran Turismo and DBZ Ultimate Battle 22, I think.
Anyway, I was probably 6 years old, and my dad took care of chip it (took it to a place, it is common to do that in Mexico) and then I got the pirated games for dirt cheap in flea markets and such, a similar event happened with the PS2.
But when I truly sailed the seas for myself, at least in a gaming scenario, happened when I got my Nintendo DS phat, I quickly knew about a R4, and managed myself to find ROM sites, homebrew, heck I used to use Windows Live Messenger in that little thing lol (DS Lite at that time).
I mean, I pirated software for PC and possibly burned some games for the PS1/PS2 before having the DS, but having unlimited portable fun with the DS (and then the PSP) was when I turned into a no return point.
Was born into it really. Got my first PC. Knew nothing. Slowly learnt stuff off my sis who was going into engineering. Thru her I met a guy who was dating a friend of ours. He was like hey sign up for this BB and you can get tons of free shit. He pointed to D2 which I played like mad. I signed up and just got thrown into the scene. Ended up being an admin of that board for a bit. This was around the time Oink was at its peak. Like 2y later, gone.
Went to uni myself and just supplied everyone with free stuff for school. Even profs lol.
And that’s just how I stayed. Felt good buying everything I used after I got a job out of school tho. Still use some of it today! But for most media, it’s just like why NOT sail. If movies were a buck a pop like they should be, I’d probably furl up my Jolly Roger. Till that day tho 🏴☠️
I started downloading music, because it was free.
Over the years I've found many more excuses to justify it though.
P.s. Down with big corpo etc. etc.I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it's a better more enjoyable experience sailing.
VB 6. We were learning it in school and I wanted to learn on my own as well. Spent a lot of time on IRC after that.
I started years ago when cable was on top to get away from ads, I stopped for a few years but since ads have been making a comeback I started back up, screw ads
Ssi randomly stopped paying me
Oh, you think seeders are your ally, but you merely adopted piracy as an adult. I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't pay for anything until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but expensive.
The peers betray you, because they belong to me. I will show you my torrent collection, whilst preparing to show you my ratio. Then I will set my upload speed limit to 0.
Being a poor elementary school kid who wanted to play the trendy singleplayer games.
I think the first thing I ever pirated was Cars. I was like 13, They didn't have a VHS for it at the library and our home internet at the time was too slow to even think about streaming, so I figured out how to torrent and it took like 6 days to get a complete copy of the movie.
I ended up sticking to pirating and pack packratting all the movie files locally specifically because our internet was so bad.
When I discovered soulseek and could stop paying $20-$30 per CD. Incidentally, I bought an iPod round the same time and couldn't copy my mp3s over, and that's the last time i ever bought an apple product
When I was learning programming, free software for schools wasn't (officially) a thing yet.
Lots of folks pointedly looked the other way so I could have a home copy of the development environment I was learning.
I found a website that showed my how to use RSS feeds to automatically download TV shows. Having my favorite shows download automatically overnight was very convenient. There was no streaming services for TV shows back then and even if there was, my internet was way too slow for that. I had a portable media player with a massive 80GB hard drive that I could load my pirated TV shows and ripped DVDs on when I was away from home.
Availability, since I was a kid till today, most things are not available in my country. Convenience is a bonus. Price is a negative because my usenet/indexer cost is more than netflix/prime/disney and 2 more local services of my country.
My dad introduced me to Napster and Weird Al.
Originally, it was being a child and not having any money of my own, and my mom getting out her wallet to enter card information on a website she had no previous knowledge of, for something she would never use personally, was a whole... thing that I can probably count on my hands the number of times it actually happened. So I stopped even asking and figured it out myself.
Edit: also, we had netflix but sometimes the shows I wanted to keep up with were still airing and I couldn't wait.
Now, I just don't think any company that would take my money in exchange for, generally temporary, access to media/software really deserves or needs my money all that much, and especially not more than I do. I also strongly resent that there is not a public and legal domain for things that are older than like 5 or 10 years and not actively being worked on.
Exclusive sports deals, geo-blocking, and the general greed of streaming companies that just keep increasing their prices while you don't actually own anything.
Wanted to not pay for stuff. Still pirate movies and tv shows. Games not so much.
Overpriced, privacy-invasive streaming services that require shitty proprietary software to use them
Young and didn't have any money. Certainly not enough to blow on movies or shows. Since then it's been a jumping off point into learning more and more about computers. Networks, data transfer, Linux, virtual machines. I'm looking to get some certifications and get into IT now, and I probably wouldn't have the knowledge to do so if I hadn't spent my years on the high seas.
Earliest example of me pirating was when my dad used Limewire. I'd like to think I used it as well, but I doubt it since I wouldn't have known anything to look up.
Otherwise, in highschool I would go to different sites to find cartoons/anime that weren't available on Netflix (or Hulu back when it was just about the only competitor). This was before I knew what sites were safe, so I probably ended up getting viruses without knowing.
I first wanted a copy of miitopia. But didn't know atbrhe time. Then I just got some nodded apks and game roms
When my mom's old laptop became mine in around 2011 it wasn't even powerful enough to run Minecraft at more than 13 FPS, so I sure as shit wasn't gonna spend the occasional money I got on a steam card at 7/11 to load up an account I couldn't even use to play the games well with
I think every game I've ever pirated from childhood and actually liked enough to finish has been paid for now though
Back then: The prices of shit and ease of procurement. Nowadays, I’ll buy reasonably priced software because I’m not a broke dick and like to have support if needed. Though, understandably, there’s still a lot of bullshit software that’s way too expensive. But I lean towards foss software when I can get away with it.
But for streaming/cable/satellite? I’d rather wipe my ass with that money. I’ll go to the theater if a movie looks good enough, just to change things up, but with so much awful shit being produced… nope.
I pay for music streaming on Deezer, but also have a carefully curated media library and run Nicotine 24/7 to share on slsk.
I guess it’s a toss up between money and principle. 🤷♂️
Just born to break the rules.
As a child my parents didn't want to give me their credit card (like fair enough), but so I had to find other ways.
Then payed for netflix for a while and was pretty happy with it. Since you have to have like 13 streamubg services of which only about half are available on my country I found Plex. Now I use Jellyfin and couldn't be happier.
I really wanted to give Assassin's Creed Valhalla a try soon after it came out, as it had been a few years since I'd played any of the games. So I began looking into how I could get it for free.
I didn't really enjoy the game but what I discovered was much greater than just one game.
When I was barely a teenager my dad used to buy me games and 3d software (I wanted to make games and animations) at the flea market. There was a guy who cracked and sold software for a living. It's a family tradition ! I fully intend to pass it down too
I'm very fond of DC Talk's So Long My Friend.
To answer your question, it was probably music that sent me sailing the high seas. The only way to get music back then was to tape songs off the radio, download them online or buy a bootleg CD off the street.
Otherwise you'd have a spend a tonne at the few music shops we have/had.
During my early years of life, my late father used to pirate a lot of movies. And my brother went to same path as my late father. Saved a lot of time and money.
My uncle hooked me up with an R4 for my DS and 3DS.
The first software I remember pirating was Cinema4D.
I started my own media library with Jellyfin due to the increased fragmentation and price increases. Earlier I co-payed a netflix account with my friend.But I still pay for my Spotify Account.
My dad got into Kazaa in the mid-00s, then Limewire, before discovering Mininova and TPB. Just kinda saw what he was doing and thought it was interesting. (We were often told not to touch the computer as it'd "knock off his download"...)
I seem to recall one of the first things I pirated was... er, Pirates of the Caribbean, which I watched with my friends huddled round my laptop. Quality times.
DLCs.
Geographic restrictions. I live in Czechia. I can afford to pay for content and generally do if I can, but there is quite a lot of content I want that is not available via any content service whatsoever here. For that I sail the high seas.
I started because I wanted to get around censorship in my country. I also wanted to view stuff in the original language and here we dub everything.
My parents were the ones who pointed me to the high seas. I was a kid (12-13yo) when Napster came out. Being the family geek, they told me to look into it since they heard about it on the news and wanted free music (early case of the Streissand Effect before it was termed as such). So I did. And we got free music. Even asked them to get me a CD burner for my birthday after that and they did.
As a kid on the earlier days of the Internet, I came across all sorts of ways to get free stuff. Games and Music at first, especially game cracks/warez. Then once torrents came on the scene, movies and shows.
I actually don't pirate much anymore. Rarely pirate music since I've had Spotify for like 10+yrs now. Same with games since Steam and all the other digital storefronts have so many sales. I still pirate emulator ROMs once in a blue moon. Movies/shows would be where I pirate the most (though like once a month if that), even though I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. Even between those 4, I can't find everything I want to watch.
But yeah, 99% of the time, I just don't want to pay for things. The other 1% is that I can't pay for something (mainly in the emulators/ROMs space). That's all.
Back in the day, sometimes USA TV shows would not air overseas for months depending on the schedule. Often spoilers online would ruin some parts. Piracy solved this. Then they started doing same time release worldwide but you had to use buggy streaming services and the quality was poor. Then they tried selling shows for much more than their worth on a per episode basis. Piracy fixed all these problems. Netflix was a good, reasonable solution and then they all decided to dontheor own thing. Piracy it is then.
Its funny that even Netflix knew that the greed of others was their biggest risk as they planned to be streaming HBO before HBO and others caught up. Its a pity they didn't emulate the quality.
Gronk found fire. Gronk thought good idea. Gronk shared idea. Fire never belonged to Gronk. Idea never belonged to Gronk.
I wanted to watch Game of Thrones, but I couldn't, because there was no legal streaming service available back then. (This was in 2015 or something).
That's when I discovered the Pirate Bay and its wonders..
Hotline for the MacOS warez scene to get games in high school (circa 1999ish).
When i first started as a kid, i just wanted games, shows, movies and music without having to pay for it, as i would not be able to afford it all. First movies from P2P-clients like napster, kazaa and limewire. My older brother taught me what i needed to know to get started with torrenting later, and i built up a great ratio on 3-4 private trackers to get what i needed. This continued until soptify and netflix came along and i had some more cash on hand. The initial service was good enough for me to stop pirating.
So after about a decade of being a landlubber, i started pirating again. The services are fragmented, they treat you like shit and using any of their services is a privacy nightmare. As this dawned on me, i regretted having ever stopped pirating, because now i barely had any stuff at all. I didnt own a thing, and i did not like it. So now i had to spend a lot of time building up a library from (almost) scratch. I have a jellyfin-server running at home with about 600 movies and some of my old favorite shows, while also picking up some of the new stuff that i want. I dont have to sit thru all the bullshit on netflix to find a show/movie i like anymore, and the experience is pure bliss in comparison. Still lacking a bit in the music department, but that is also growing and i again enjoy some of the music i listened to before that is not available on spotify. I dont exclusively pirate though, i purchase some music of bandcamp, games of gog (and steam) and audiobooks of libro.fm.
Next time there is an enticing offer that does not involve downloadable drm-free files, im not falling for it. Fool me once etc etc
Emulation when I was younger (and to a lesser extent now. I own the vast majority of old consoles/games I have any interest in playing these days). These days it's near exclusively TV/Movies and pretty much entirely because of convenience. Between myself and the others in my household, we have near every streaming service, I just can't be fucked to figure out which one what I want to watch is on.
I really need to get around to turning my old pc into a media server.
It's all thanks to my older sister who pirated a lot of games for me including Garry's mod back in like 2007 or so. She introduced me to uTorrent (that app is shitty as of right now, use qbtorrent.) which i am pretty excited for. This is like when i was 7 (I am 25 years old now) and before the ISP restrictions in the US, we pirated all sorts of games, movies, etc. What my sister used to do is we rent movies from blockbuster and my sis used to rip the movie files from the DVD to a burnt DVD-R. We would do that every time we rent a movie that i've liked.
She used to pirate music too as well as pirate episodes of Supernatural before AT&T gave her a bullshit cease and desist letter to her. Afterwards, she stopped pirating media and it makes me sad to see this happen to her. Luckily, at least direct downloads are better than torrents nowadays.