Do you find piracy more fun than consuming the pirated content?
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 started as a hobby but slowly weened my immediate friends family off of subscriptions because I like seeing the media actually be consumed and now I can’t ever do maintenance on my server because someone is always using something
I’ll say I spent more time and had more fun jailbreaking my old Nintendo consoles than I did playing the countless hours of games I put on them.
There’s something really magical about having to fold a paper clip and put it into the joycon rails to MAYBE get your Switch to boot into Recovery Mode.
I made a Pandora battery back in high school to mod friends PSPs. I still have no idea how the heck removing a pin from the battery causes it to do what it does but heck, I felt like a wizard. But of course with unlimited access to games it meant I tried everything and completed nothing.
I actually downloaded Dune like 4 times, and spent hours remuxing a perfect franken-version which I'm yet to watch.
My LG C2 supports dolby atmos digital+ audio (but not truehd), and supports dolby vision profile 8, but not 7. Blu rays come with profile 7 and truehd. And streamable version of files come with dolby 5 video, and dolby digital audio. So I ended up converting the original blu ray from 7 to 8, with a multi step process with dovi_tool and ffmpeg, and then when remuxing I used the audio from the webDL version, so I could get both dolby vision 8 from a blu ray mux, and dolby digital audio from a webDL version.
Beyond "trying out" games. I like the idea of saving things or quickly grabbing things that might not be available for long. For example on a hard drive somewhere I have that early test build of Skate that was leaked like a year or two ago.
I'll also say that as I get older I really appreciate how many more plug-and-play resources there are now. I can get a whole game package that self installs and I'm good to go. No more having to get an ISO from some sketchy Russian site or rolling the dice on TPB and then mounting it to virtual disk. With the power of adblockers/tracking blockers I can stream basically anything from any service with a few clicks from the megathread.
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.
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.
Definantly a datahorder, I don't watch 99% of the shit I dl =) But I like the choice, if I ever want something I have it archived. So I admit, its more fun for me to dl than watch lol
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!
I enjoy getting things for free when I otherwise shouldn't be able to. Piracy lets me indulge that without doing anything illegal so I have hard drives full of stuff even if I never play/watch/read it.
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