“Does it have denuvo (or any other form of malware, including microtransactions)” should be the first question.

If the answer is yes, never look at it again, and permanently blacklist both developer and publisher.

If the answer is no, then go on with the rest of the diagram.

In my case they’re facing a 100% revenue reduction regardless of when (or whether) it’s cracked.

I’m never going to buy denuvo infested malware, and developers and publishers who try to pull this shit go straight into the blacklist.

Nah. Frieren’s appearance and behaviour are straight from the manga, which isn’t that kind of book (seriously, the author just wanted to write about an unassuming elf John Wicking demons and accidentally turned it into a great story about death, and friendship, and whatnot) and only ever uses raunchiness in humorous contexts (the clothes dissolving potion, Flamme’s “secret seduction technique”, Fern constantly considering everyone a pervert, and so on).

This isn’t Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (though that also accidentally turned out deeper than what it was supposed to be, which in that case was smut).

What Madhouse clearly are into in any case is feet (seriously, this show looks like a Tarantino film at times). Serie’s, especially. And Übel’s armpits, for some reason. Both of those are much more present in the anime than the books (also, excellent animation, like the fights or the dance scene, which in the books are usually just a couple panels; that’s probably not a fetish, though).

And Fern acts as a mother to her in the mornings, and when she’s shopping / scavenging. It’s a bit mutual, at this point.

(Though, yeah, I’m fairly certain that Frieren’s childish behaviour is almost entirely intentional on her part, and that she can turn it off and act like an adult when she wants to, which admittedly isn’t very often; she might also be a bit feral from all the time she lived alone in the woods.)

AFAIK you would not have had to open the .lnk file yourself.

Wait, what? A .lnk file is a shortcut… you still have to click those for them to open whatever they’re pointing to.

Unhiding extensions wouldn’t help here, as the .lnk extension is hidden even if you unhide the others, as it’s the extension for shortcut files; you have to edit an obscure registry key if you want to unhide it.

(That said, it being a shortcut it should have the small shortcut arrow in the icon, unless you’ve used a third party tool or the registry to disable it, so it should still be easily recognisable as a shortcut.)

Very disco, though, the way it happened.

I don’t even drive a car, but I’d still download one out of principle (wouldn’t actually print it, though, waste of resources if I’m not going to use it).

I have a shit ton of physical media going back into the eighties

If you care about it, you should make sure that you still have it, and not just useless plastic, and make backup copies (and / or upload it)… magnetic tapes and discs degrade quite fast, and even CDs and DVDs have a limited lifespan… vinyls will probably be fine, though if treated properly.

Big, but orders of magnitude smaller than what all the Steam games I’ve bought at sales and never found the time to play would need if I installed them all at the same time.

“Piracy” really is a service problem.

(Fuck, I’ve got Amazon Prime for the free deliveries — it comes bundled around these parts and is surprisingly cheap — and I still torrent Amazon series because it’s more convenient and gives me better quality…)

Hades didn’t really seem like my kind of game, so I torrented it to try it out. Then I bought it, and later Hades 2, too.

I’ve also bought some comics I’d previously read on the computer, too, if they were good enough and I’ve come across a nice edition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6y8cqayjQI

it’s like checking it out from a library’s collection

Yes, exactly. But better, because by “checking it out” you’re not preventing anyone else from also enjoying it at the same time (on the contrary, by nature of the bittorrent protocol you’re improving the availability of said cultural work, helping to preserve it, and culturally enriching society to a greater extent than libraries can unless they don’t artificially restrict access to digital works).

Is that moral?

When copyright holders can remove access to paid content on a whim, or destroy already finished works because it’s somehow more profitable than selling them, or simply don’t care about preserving the works they claim to be responsible for, archiving them even against their wishes is not only moral, but a moral imperative.

Culture is more important than profits. And if preserving culture is illegal, the law is wrong, and must be ignored until it’s been corrected.

Piracy has always been stealingᵢ. Violently. Using ships, or boatsᵢᵢ.

What you’re calling “piracy” — falling into the “intellectual property” mafia’s trap by borrowing their malicious misnomer — is just plain old sharing.

Copying what we like (sometimes changing and adding our own ideas to it) and sharing it with other people, so they can like, share, and change it too.

It’s how human culture works and has always worked!

Copyright (another intentional misnomer, since all it does is restrict the right to copy — and share, and modify — cultural works) is, at least in its current form, not only detrimental to culture (and its spread and preservation) but an attack on human nature itself.

Sharing, in these dark times when destroying cultural works seems to have somehow become more profitable than commercialising themᵢᵥ, has become not only an essential part of human nature, but a moral imperative for anyone who cares about art, culture, and social progress.

As for the hypothetical profits we are supposedly “stealing”, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, sharing not only doesn’t cause a loss on profits, it increases themᵥ. It’s free advertising.

It’s not about profits. It’s not about authors’ rights. It’s never been. It is, and has always been, about control. About deciding who and when can have access to culture, and who can’t. When we can be human, and when we are not allowed to.

I — Well, sometimes mostly murdering, I suppose, if there was not enough to steal; and of course there was the whole letters of marque thing, which made it political and complicated. But mostly stealing, OK?

II — It being on navigable water is what distinguishes it from pillaging, if I’m not mistaken.

III — In the borrowed words of Sir Terry Pratchettᵥᵢ, “The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”; sharing stories, and any other form of culture, is what distinguishes us from other species. It’s what makes us human.

IV — And even before. “IP” wranglers have a long history of not being reliable custodians of the cultural works they claim responsibility for, and sharing has many times been the only way to preserve said works after their (often malicious) mismanagement.

V — There’s studies, too, if Gaiman’s account is too anecdotal for your liking.

VI — GNU