124 of 187 · 66% You did better than 98% of users on this list Your rank: #2,902 of 161,249 users on this list You beat the avg. score of 35
LOL I guess I’m a movie buff. To be fair there were a bunch on here I’ve never even heard of, so whoever made this list tried to really dig for people who’ve seen it all.
There are a lot of really dog shit things in the world of tech that can be solved with a bit of time, some stubborn googling and maybe some special hardware and piracy is only the tip of the iceberg.
Printers are notorious for claiming they’re out of ink when they haven’t come close to the suggested number of prints, and their cartridges literally still have ink in them. So after a bit of googling I found out how to ‘reset’ a cartridges automatic stopping system (its literally 1 physical wheel on the cartridge that you gotta turn back). The only downside is that I don’t get a digital ink monitor, but since it told me it was empty when still half full, I don’t mind.
Like, you can just jiggle with some shit and solve one of the biggest money making scams in the post-industrial world and I don’t think people realise its that easy.
Or, like, repairing your own technology. A few months ago, I swapped out my sister’s laptop screen. Did it myself, I removed maybe 4 screws, no vital parts were exposed and it cost me $40. I even got a choice of matte or glossy.
My point is, any walls that capitalist technology presents you with will be a false one. And one already broken by a dedicated community of interesting people working hard for free to break down that wall.
kids these days will be all “be gay do crime” and dont even know how to watch a cartoon without paying for it smh
IN FAIRNESS
piracy was definitely leagues easier a decade or so ago when thepiratebay was functional, megaupload was still running, and YouTube and Google made only the most cursory attempts to block copyright content. like let’s not pretend that the internet hasn’t got a lot more corporatised in the past decade or so. piracy is still possible and you can and should do it but it’s a LOT harder to do safely and reliably than it was.
^thank u
Sorry, this is all wrong.
1) ThePirateBay is still functional. (It’s not the same pirate bay that it was back in the day, but let’s not get into Theseus’ ship territory. It’s still here and it still works, that’s all that matters.) There are plenty of torrent sites around, more than there were 10 years ago – although overall traffic has plummeted. Now as then, it’s a whack-a-mole game.
2) Why was it “leagues easier” a decade ago? Some countries, not all (not north America, for example), now mandate ISP blocking of torrent sites, but this new complication can be bypassed with one (1) step: a google duckduckgo search for proxies. No government agency or ISP can possibly keep up with proxies, it’s yet another whack-a-mole game. So yes, it was technically easier before, but I don’t see “leagues” anywhere.
3) It was safer before? Are you shitting me? Have you lot forgotten that the legal departments of MPAA and RIAA sued torrent sharers (not even uploaders) and asked for millions of dollars for damages? AND GOT THEM? (By which I mean they didn’t actually get millions since the people they sued didn’t have any, but said people were convicted and ruined and that was the goal in the first place. It was a deeply amoral and cynical scare tactic.) Well they stopped doing that at some point, and focused on hunting P2P and torrent sites. Running a site is certainly less safe today. Using one, though? Depending on where you are, the ISP may be allowed to block you after repeated instances, and that’s it. You’re not getting in trouble with the law or into crippling debt. And either way there’s only a minuscule chance that any of this will come to pass, which becomes zero (0) with a VPN. (Safety of course depends on the country, and in some cases piracy is the least of your concerns. Let’s not get into that.)
4) Ten years ago there was no Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis was in its infancy. If today it’s harder to find PDFs on google, it is orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to find them elsewhere. People just have to unstick their minds from the notion that stuff is either on google or doesn’t exist at all. Geez.
5) P2P still exists. IRC (the sharing channels in particular, #bookz and the like) still exists. Torrenting functions like it always did. All these methods are exactly as easy to use as before, i.e. not necessarily a piece of cake, there’s a learning curve. But it’s the same learning curve it was 10 years ago.
6) So what have we lost? Only YouTube (meh, the film/tv quality was appalling anyway, and music is still there) and direct downloads (at least the permanent ones: there are plenty of them still around, but files expire and you need to keep track of what goes up when. So this goes beyond knowhow, it’s about internet communities. Let’s not get into that either, it’s a huge subject.) It’s a loss, sure, but I wouldn’t call it a terrible blow.
7) And in exchange for that loss, we got streaming sites. This is piracy, too, and it’s much much easier than torrents, and tons of people do it. Any “piracy has declined” narrative either implies that we’re excluding streaming from the discussion for some reason, or is flat out wrong. Ten years ago, grandpa couldn’t possibly torrent a film, and it’s debatable if he even knew how to open the file you helpfully sent him. Now, as long as someone has set up kodi or similar, grandpa can watch it on his tv and it just feels like cable.
8) On why torrents in particular have declined in recent years, see here. It’s a big subject and I didn’t cover all of it, but the main reason is that people had access to easier methods to get what they wanted (some legal and affordable, some illegal and free), so they didn’t need to learn how to torrent. Ergo, they never did. There’s more of course, and there’s definitely a cultural shift too, but that’s a very long story so let’s not get into it. The linked post also includes some thoughts on why torrents aren’t dead and doomed just yet, and ooh, I forgot a very important one: you can’t stream photoshop.
To summarise, internet piracy is NOT more difficult, unreliable, and unsafe today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For reasons why people (young or otherwise) seem less versed in it, please look elsewhere. I have thoughts on that too, but this is already a very long post, so I’ll just leave you with the best kind of thought. I’ll leave you with a doubt:
ARE people less versed in piracy? Are they really? Or is it simply that 20 years ago, internet users were computer geeks by definition, whereas now everyone’s online? Perhaps the percentage of skilled pirates in the general population remains more or less the same, and the only thing that’s dropped is the percentage of skilled pirates to total internet users. I can’t be sure without statistical evidence, but it’s a possibility.
You can literally google “watch _____ free online” and find most movies but the third result just download Adblock or popup blocker and you’re golden it truly couldn’t be easier
I’ve been meaning to make a piracy masterpost for awhile and what better time than now?
Materpost: A curated Githup tutorial of links to more torrent sites, software, VPNs, uBlock origin filters, ect. Basically everything you could ever want starting out. Do be warned though it doesn’t appear to have been updated in awhile so a few of the links are dead.
GAMES:
Vimm’s Roms: NES era->ps3 era roms and emulators to play them. Has user ratings on games. Cons: slow download speeds.
nsw2u: More switch roms. Check here if nxbrew doesn’t have the game you’re looking for.
Hshop:3ds games/updates/dlc. Very well organized and sorted by console region. Bonus ability to generate QR codes to scan with homebrew to begin download directly on your console.
Oldgamesdownload: Old 90’s-2000’s PC games and some gamecube games. Technically, all of the games here are abandon ware, meaning the original company/creator doesn’t sell nor make money from the games anymore period. If you’re into that.
Fitgirl repacks: Heavily compressed PC games, and other various consoles. Small downloads and faster speeds for the size of the games. Somewhat limited game selection.
Steam unlocked: Steam games with easy-to-use installers. Check here if fitgirl doesn’t have what you’re looking for.
Steam Underground: A user forum for piracy support, usually about installing cracked games. Does have some scattered PC game downloads.
Amiibo life: Amiibo bins, can be loaded with some homebrew to load in games without any external source, or, if you buy writable NFC cards, you can make your own free amiibos.
Books:
Library Genesis: a good all-in-one ebook finder. Has books, magazines, scientific papers, ect. Well organized and able to sort by Author, Genre, ect ect. Almost all books in .epub format
Calibre: Not piracy but a free software for reading said .epub files, and other ebook formats. Good for sorting your books.
Sci-Hub: Research papers, academic books, pdfs, ect. Helpful for collage students.
IT ebook: eBooks about learning programming languages.
getintopc: Wide selection of pc (mostly windows) software of all sorts, and different versions. Can personally vouch for the site, I’ve gotten Photoshop, Maya, and Sony Vegas from here over the years.
Other:
the eye: An archive of old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect. Cons: No search function and slightly hard to navigate.
1337x.to: Torrent site for movies, shows, games, comics, ect.
Came across some really old backgrounds that I had backed up on an ancient harddrive. :) Figured some of you guys might be interested in seeing them.
These are images that I used on my first desktop PC (Tiled mode, I believe for all of these.) as well as on one of my Geocities websites. These were shared from “free goodies” websites and a few were made for me by a friend I was co-owners with for a Gundam Wing and Sailor Moon shrine. ❤️
WELCOME TO THE ORIGINAL ANIMATED GIFS OF THE INTERNET!
Way, way, way back in the day, in the 90s, this is how we shared episode or movie scenes for anime series we loved, or for scenes that never got brought over to the States due to censorship. These are super, super, super tiny in resolution and degraded hardcore, because, well, we had shitty dial-up internet connections so file sizes had to be small, and also because everyone was using 800x600 resolutions at the time, so they seemed much larger. If you could see what was going on, that was good enough back then lmfao.
Ya’ll should feel lucky you get some amazing high quality HD gifs these days.
I’d like to remind people of the process for how these were made back in their day. Some super, super, super lucky (or most likely rich) person owned a VHS to whatever video file format ripper of its time. Yes. VHS. Digital uploads for video did not exist yet. DVDs didn’t even exist yet. Like, people had to trade VHS tapes at conventions and flea markets, or with strangers online to obtain some of these tapes. If you had a big collection, you spent tons of money on shipping to get those tapes from your buddy you met on ICQ/AIM from Japan lmfao.
Fansubs and even raw videos were rare for their time for people to get their hands on. EPISODES ON VHS IN GENERAL WERE NON EXISTENT ON THE MARKET. Sailor Moon (like most other anime of the day) was just in syndication on TV. VHS tapes of the series to own/buy did not exist. You could not purchase them because they didn’t exist to purchase lmfao. Let that sink in for a second. Even if you wanted to own it, it didn’t exist. You had to know a guy who knew a guy in Japan that just so happened to be taping the episodes for his own personal use on his VCR while it aired. If he missed an episode that week? You’re screwed lmfao. Better hope somebody made an episode summary that week. This is why people started to trade tapes to fansub “distributers” in good faith that they’d get a translation out of it thereafter.
So some super lucky fan owned episodes of this show, then had to convert their VHS tapes to digital media. Then they had to painstakingly screencapture each image from that, and use whatever program at the time existed to sync up frames to play. I’m having a hard time even wrapping my head around the amount of money they had to have invested in a big enough harddrive to read the digital media… For example, in 97~98 I had a 1.5GB harddrive and that was considered top tier for the typical consumer. If clips, not episodes, but just minute long clips were just around 1~2MB (which was considered really big at the time0, imagine how big an entire episode was???? This is of course before the encodes of today that made digital media as tiny as it is looking as good as it does. And 1.5GB is SUPER QUICK to load up on, especially when you’re not taking into consideration your OS and whatever programs you have installed.
So anyway, I digress.
Then this person makes them as tiny as possible so that when they uploaded them, their website server didn’t ban them from using too much space or bandwith lmfao. It was an insane task (that I wasn’t able to take part in, because, as stated above, ya’ll gotta have Benjamins for that). BUT it was god-send for fans who loved this type of stuff. MOVING PICTURES? SIGN ME UP. Since movie clips were impossible to find because nobody had a good enough internet speed or big enough harddrive to download them, everyone wanted super tiny easy to share images instead. If you had a gallery of this type of media, people went wild to your site. This type of stuff did not come cheap to host, and I know there were a few websites that were always offline because of the overload in traffic.
I know the first image was from Chibiusa.com. The others are from SailorMoon.org’s Sailor Moon Grep gallery (the first iteration that was free for everyone to go wild over, and then exactly as I described above kept happening, and the galleries went offline).
My friends and I ordered so many tapes back in the late 90s from Sachi’s Distribution. They had to have been one of the first, if not THE first, fansub distributors online. Sachi’s didn’t charge for the anime, because that was illegal, so this was 100% by fans for fans, and you’d just have to pay shipping. So you’d check the site to see what they had, then submit an email form with the show and which volumes you wanted (I would order the first volume of shit just to see if I liked it) and then you would go by their system of x number of tapes (VHS tapes motherfucker) = x amount of shipping.
Then you would… wait for it…go get a money order and snail mail it to them for the shipping.
Your tapes would come like 3 weeks later.
These gifs? You’d be fucking THRILLED with gifs like these! And you’d spend 5 hours downloading them from Napster! Because what would happen is that the rich fansub nerds would maybe get the original show on Japanese laser disc (which meant having a damn laser disc player, and having the $$$ to import that shit from Japan) and then someone would translate, then someone else would time the subs, then someone else would start making copies on VHS, and honestly at this point you’d have C rated fansubs (yes there were quality ratings) and you were fucking happy about it. I once watched a like D-minus Fushigi Yuugi tape where you could barely read the subtitles, and could tell the characters apart if you squinted and spun in circles. But you know what? Those episodes had just come out (it may have actually been one of the OVAs) so I was FUCKING. HAPPY.
You kids these days with your Crunchrolls and your Netflixs and your Hulus.
BACK IN MY DAY WE HAD TO WALK BAREFOOT IN THE SNOW, UPHILL BOTH WAYS, FOR ANIME.
Had to reblog this with this reply because this is all so true!!
Sachi’s Distribution is definitely one of the OG fansub millhouses. They were some of the earliest tapes that I remember seeing circulating around. The places you wanted to look for were places that only did them as above, as the Fansub Law dictated that it was “By fans, for fans.” meaning you paid shipping & handling, and sometimes the price of whatever the VHS tape was. Nothing more, nothing less.
My favorite distributers were the ones that offered the VHS tapes as well, because there was more quality control. There were some different brands of tapes you could buy - some were better than others, some would actually affect the way the taping looked (think grain, darkness, shitty fuzzy subs), and some had longer runtimes than other tape brands. So, you could get, for example, three VKLL Sailor Stars rips, and maybe some AMVs that people made (YES, this was a thing that people did on VHS tapes!! Before your fancy Final Cut videos that are so easily accessible on YouTube these days!), and maybe some Japanese commercials thrown on as some bonuses. Sometimes distros would be cool with giving some extra episodes for similar series they were working on for you to check out, too!
I think if I had to mention a specific group that I adored, it was probably Tomodachi Anime. They did a run of Fushigi Yuugi that I still think is better than 90% of the fansubs that have come after it, and they blow the official releases out of the water translation-wise. One of my favorite perks was at the end of the episode when the credits were rolling, they had all these little explanations for jokes or references in pop culture at the time in Japan that made the jokes make more sense, and made you appreciate things you didn’t realize were being parodied.
These translations actually became a huge sought-after release at one point, and is considered the main reason that the series even got an official release at all because the companies in charge of the rights to it back in the day saw the “strange love” for it in the West and saw marketing capabilities (God bless Tomodachi for campaigning for us to get these officially licensed, too). There were insane fan wars that surrounded it too, where competing fansub teams were stealing translations and redistributing it as their own lol (Central Anime, I’m looking at you.)
But if you wanna know my favorite aspect of fansub culture on tapes? The drama between fansubbers and stores, like, actual stores you could walk into, taking these tapes and reprinting them in their store to sell for a higher premium price. Like, we’re talking about shops in NYC that were just stealing stolen content and reprinting it behind the counters and selling it to people that didn’t’ know any better lmao. This lead to fansubbers calling out people in their eyecatches. (See examples here and also here and a fascinating discussion with more screenshots here. EDIT: MIAMI MIKE WAS FOUND). It was always amusing to see who was doing what and against who at any given point. xD
For those of you who are interested in looking at a webpage that showed basically what you were looking at as far as tape distro goes, here is a page I was able to find that showed exactly what we saw:
You didn’t get screenshots, or preview clips, or anything. Just a title, your quality rating (really wanted anything B+ and higher, because the rest was REALLY bad. And this is all based on the perception of the person MAKING THE LIST so you could get the same list from a different page like this, and they would have different standards and you could think you’re getting something better when its really THE SAME TAPE lmao), and a short description.
TBH this (link) was even a really detailed list, because there were times I remember seeing that we didn’t know what “season” or “arc” stuff was from. You’d just see the title of the show, and they’d ask you what you were looking for (so you kinda already had to have an idea of a date or if it was a movie/OVA, which were easier to get ahold of), so this is just….very nice/comforting knowing what you were gonna get lol.
When we were getting organized in fandom… man. It was nice to know what episode number it PROBABLY was, to organize your tapes for what you saw already/needed to see, because, you know, this was just being broadcasted on TV without a way to buy it lol. There wasn’t, like, iTunes links for individual episodes lmao. There were no episode numbers or whatever listed in the title cards, either, and who knew how long shows would run for. You’d see some episode titles in TV guides in Japan, and the description was pretty great to know what you were in for broadcasting. Gave you an idea. (This is also not taking into consideration that in Japan you have different broadcasting stations, so some stations played different shows, or at different times. I’m not sure about back in the 90s, but I know later on it became a contention to tape shows from specific channels because of broadcasting quality differences—some looked better than others.)
But yeah. That’s it. And you’re trusting a stranger on the internet with your money order, and praying you get it in the mail lmao. And, as stated above, IT WAS SNAIL MAIL so you were waiting weeks anyway, so if its like a few months and you don’t see it, well, you got ripped off. XD Or it was lost in the mail. And its not like this page has a Feedback section or something lmao it was all based on word of mouth, so you had to just tell people you knew in your own circle to stay away from them. And good luck looking for pages that state to avoid, because there was even a time before Google and we had to rely on webrings and organization lists from others. Like Anime Turnpike. XDDDD
Anyway this was my fansubs TED talk. Thanks for tuning in.
Two years ago i got CD “Slayers Hyper”. There were random multimedia and couple of screensavers with cute animations.
Unfortunately, programs and
applications
don’t work with modern OS, but at least managed to cut out several pictures with Lina frame by frame.
More
screensaver’s pictures from the CD “Slayers Hyper . In general, the animation goes like this: chibi Xellos quickly shows up in different parts of the screen and says “secret” over and over. Lina is trying to guess where he will appear next (well, or maybe not. It just seems so, because she says “ど こ い つ た の か な 〜”). It the end, Xellos appears in the middle of the screen and repeats word “
secret” by letters.
Gourry spins a little at first, but then stands still with a cup just like Amelia and Zel.
80% caffeine, 20% death
lives for the ๏ฝ๏ฝ
๏ฝ๏ฝ๏ฝ๏ฝ
๏ฝ๏ฝ๏ฝ
