Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

wir hatten ja nichts

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.

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.

DLCs.