southsamurai

Yeah, that’s been a thing for ages. All the way back to tapes being copied because my parents had the best double tape deck out of anyone I knew. Vhs tapes of skinamax (skinemax? Idk how that should be spelled lol) movies, or regular ones being swapped around.

I still swap files in the same way. Well not the same I don’t use magnetic tape lol. But yeah, if someone wants something, and I have it, all I need is something to put it on. Since I have a disc burner, it doesn’t have to be a drive, though they’d need a drive to access anything on a disc, which gets less and less common. I don’t loan out thumb drives to just anyone, but I’ll usually be glad to copy files to theirs. Hell, that’s actually my preferred method for swapping files. It’s faster and less prone to hassles than p2p methods.

Me and my best friend serve as each other’s off site storage too. He keeps a drive with important/hard to replace files with me, and vice versa. When we visit, we’ll swap out with a second drive that’s updated. Ends up with triple redundancy, since there will be the last drive at each other’s, plus the second drive that’s being updated between swaps, as well as the original files on whatever device is the main source. I have another drive like that that I swap out at my sister’s.

Most of those drives we swap aren’t media, though there is some of that, what with hard to find stuff being easier to keep multiple copies of instead of trying to hunt down again. The media files, those are open to copy off, so it’s a form of sneakernet in that regard, rather than only being backups of stuff of our own.

Nah, if you can mod an app in the first place, it wouldn’t take you long to bypass this.

You gotta check torrents, soulseek, and i2p sources. The more obscure something is, the less likely you’ll find it on the one-stop sources.

There’s never any guarantees with any of them, but it you’re patient and willing to check regularly over a few weeks, I find soulseek to be the best bet for the really obscure stuff. The problem is that not everybody that hoards obscure files stays online constantly, so you have to spend the time on finding things before giving up on it.

Yup, that’s how I do it tbh. I’m on mullvad and unwilling to switch at this point. Kinda sucks, but that’s how it is

Yup, they’re 100% correct

They also suck

This particular article and the study it mentions are kinda dubious in conclusion. They just didn’t generate enough data, imo.

But, that’s whatever.

Anyone want some anecdotal shit followed by an opinion? If so, read on. If not, well, don’t.

So, I’m a writer. Not a successful one in the usual sense, but I have a pretty good sized body of work, and I actually have a few fans.

So, I got published years ago, back in the oughts. Didn’t sell for shit. Couldn’t even talk family into buying copies. Total flop, but part of that was the small publisher and lack of support marketing.

So, fast forward to maybe ten years ago? Maybe fifteen, can’t really recall. Point being that I was reworking the old books, writing new stuff, etc. My homie, Spider, wanted to read my stuff, so I just passed him epub versions. Dude moves them into his books folder that grts shared via soulseek.

Now, it was at least a decade since the published books were out. But. A few weeks after he tells me he “fucked up”, I start getting emails from people that actually read my shit, and wanted to read more.

Some of those people actually bought a different book via amazon. I got more sales to pirates than I ever got through normal methods.

My opinion? The zone in which piracy is going to hurt an author is narrow. When you’re small enough, even a 1% conversion of pirates to paying fans is awesome. And, when you’re big enough, even 1% loss of paying customers is a drop in the bucket you’ll never notice.

But somewhere in the middle, there’s a range where the lack of sales that would otherwise happen can be the difference between writing for a living, and not making a living at it.

But I’d still rather piracy exist, because I hold the same philosophy as that game dev that said culture shouldn’t only be available to those who can pay for it. That’s a paraphrase, and I can’t remember the guy’s name. But it’s the same reason I gave copies of my print books to libraries in the area I live. I would rather people be reading, have access to material, than make a little extra.

Fwiw, I barely made enough off of any of the traditional published books, or Amazon sales, to equal about two weeks pay at my job as a CNA. Total, over years lol. I made some damn good money doing custom fiction, and research & reporting back in the day, though.

Eh, I’ll wait for a better version.

I watch things fairly often, and so far, I haven’t lost anything that was oop before I could make a copy (which is why I go through them, even if it’s just background noise while I do other things). That’s the flow chart; pick the next one, check to see if it’s still available, if it isn’t either rip it or download it, then watch to verify the physical.

But, thank you very much for looking out :) That’s a genuinely cool thing to do

Lmao.

Mine is small, since I have a shit ton of physical media going back into the eighties

So, only about 3 tb, most of which is music in lossless formats. But, I also purge video that I don’t watch at least yearly, so it could be bigger.

Ai, this Ezra. Shut yo damn mouth!

Plenty. Music and books in particular. I’m usually behind on making legit buys, but I treat piracy partially like a library where I can try before I buy.

That isn’t saying I buy everything I pirate, I don’t. But if I like it enough to keep the files, I’ll wait until I find a good sale and eventually get a legit copy in some format.

I also do it in reverse, where I’ll buy something, but pirate a digital copy when it’s more convenient. That’s typically for paper books and music on vinyl. Sometimes I’ll even pirate a copy of a CD if I’m not up to dealing with the ripping (disability means I don’t always have stamina for everything, so stuff like ripping a cd is low priority).

I use stealth for a single game sub that doesn’t have any alternative worth a damn elsewhere. That’s it, but I know damn good and well there’s a lot of similar cases out there.

Well hell, that’s just as cool as using a word in a fun way. You looked it up and just got steered wrong by difficult typesetting. My dyslexic ass would have gotten the same impression as you if I had to scan that on my own and come out with a definition.

I feel that :)

A living language is going to shift. It’s inevitable. It’s necessary to hold a formal version of a language for important things for sure, but for every day conversation, pedantry is just silly. Not only can we never expect everyone to know every word and every usage of every word, mistakes happen. It’s a very human thing to pick up a word and never run across a formal definition for it, and that’s okay.

It’s easy enough to offer a formal definition if there’s a misunderstanding, to get everyone on the same wavelength. But if everyone gets the intended gist, why get all het up? Communication should be fun and engaging, not a battle over semantics and usage.

Well, if you only plan to do one more, this could actually be the penultimate list. But if this is the last one, then the previous one would have been penultimate.

Mind you, I’m 100% okay with using penultimate to mean second best, instead of the actual definition as next to last. It makes sense as a non standard/slang usage, since the last is often the best (depending on the list, of course, but most save the best for last). It’s a good play on the way we use ultimate as both final/last as well as best.

One of these days, the dictionaries will catch up to this usage and it’ll become a standard usage, so you’re getting in on the penultimate use of penultimate as slang, in a way :)

I think the gog version would work better on an older pc, right?

Mid 2ks? Baldur’s gate, in whatever version was usable

I got the impression that was more of a “oh, yeah, I read about that in magazine a” after someone mentions having read about it in a newspaper.

Here, hold my tea.

What? I’m not a fan of beer, and I’m out of cider. I’ll just do this all hopped up on bergamot and tea.

No way anyone but an idiot would do that.