Fighting piracy is like a caveman with a pointy stick trying to fight a 3 headed hydra from Greek mythology. The only way for them to truly defeat the hydra is an idea they would never accept because they aren’t allowed to treat customers/consumers as people.

If my desktop didn’t get disconnected every night due to router restart and I wasn’t worried about my VPN killswitch deciding to activate, I wouldn’t mind doing a little bit of seeding of some old stuff.

Those no phones in school rules would have absolutely killed me since I always listened to music in-between classes in highschool. Especially freshman world history class since I kinda relied on my phone for the digital textbook since I almost lost my physical copy I got loaned from the bookstore.

If possible, please use legal paid services.

I’ll start using them when streaming devices start treating us like actual humans. In other words, piracy is always gonna be the #1 option.

Fair enough. It’s mostly 3rd person 3D, but the view isn’t always great, making for some frustration. There are, if I remember correctly, a couple 2D levels where you play as the army bird guy, but otherwise, it’s 3D.

I personally enjoyed Spyro²: Season of Flame.

One of the biggest problems I will say about the game, though, is that you won’t always be able to tell where you’ll land when gliding and will probably lose plenty of lives because of it.

To each their own. I got a used 3DS less than a year ago, so maybe that’s why I find the analog bad. Wear and tear.

Least favorite has to be a tie between switch joycons in general and the circle pad on 3DS.

Joycons on their own are too small to be all too comfortable disconnected and connected they’re slightly better since I can position part of my hand on the back of the switch, so there’s at least that.

And with the 3DS circle pad, it’s just nowhere near sensitive enough. Movements feel too quick, with little to no control over how far the pad move, in my opinion.

As for favorite, I’ll say that in general I absolutely hate track pads and everything they stand for, but steam deck is the only exception. With most track pads I’ve used recently outside of the steam deck, I have trouble clicking since the mouse buttons are built into the track pad and half of the time feel like they don’t work. Though with the deck I find it real easy to just click pretty much anywhere on pad and it’ll click for me.

Only problem I’ve had with deck pads is that sometimes the click is a bit too sensitive for me, so I’ll sometimes accidentally click while on the onscreen keyboard by accident or click while playing a game like Gemcraft, making me deselect a gem or power up while dragging over.

This has the same energy as living just to outlast your enemies.

I mostly play it for the single player mode, but I assume it’s a lot more fun with friends.

Don’t know if it’d be something worth while, but if you’re looking for a game to just pass the time, Devil Dice (or XI in Japan I think) for PSx. Trailer linked is highest quality I could find.

With just shows in general, I have a fair amount. Don’t know the exact amount of cartoons, but I got a 1TB external drive almost full of them, a single live actions show from the 90s, a single live action movie, a few animated films, and a whole comic set. As for games, I don’t count by size, nor do I know how many since they’re not stored on a drive. I specifically got a 2TB external drive (both drives Seagate) for if I ever find more shows/whatever I wanna collect, but I have yet to find something I desperately want.

That, and I still need to use it to back up files so I can switch operating systems on my desktop.

Edit:

No idea how much music I’ve downloaded from yt using things like NewPipe, but I got a good amount. I’d assume this counts as piracy too, since I’m certain the people in charge of the music industry don’t like you being able to do that.

All the few shows/movies on my hard drive I end up watching when I get around to it and feel like watching. Though, recently, there have been 3 specific cartoons I’ve been watching a lot more of due to not feeling like watching other shows.

So far, the only things I have got that were bad quality and unwatchable were 2 cartoons. One you could easily tell it was upscaled and just looked a bit off, making it feel uncomfortable for me to watch and enjoy. The other, first episode in and they cut the theme song and had the channel watermark, for a show that’s a few decades, so I didn’t bother checking the other episodes and just deleted it. With the first show, I looked immediately because there was a specific episode I needed to check, but the other, it took me over a half a year to finally check to see how good quality it is/was.

I pretty much only do it on my phone, pretty much the only place I watch videos. So I just use either Newpipe or Pipepipe, a Newpipe fork.

I don’t care what quality the things I’m downloading are so long as the file size is small enough. There are very few acceptions to that rule. Biggest one is if someone tried to edit shows using AI to enhance them by upping the resolution. Had one series I was so looking forward to watching after a long time torrenting that I had to delete because you could easily tell an AI (or someone who doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing) tried enhancing the resolution and made it unwatchable for me.

Edit: Damn, reread and I wish I could get 5mbps in the apartment complex I’m in! I’d be lucky if my download speeds spiked to 1mbps. All this with what is supposed to be the best ISP in the area, which is also an absolutely shitty company (xfinity).

That’s a theory I can actually agree with. Sounds plausible enough to be true, given what we know about large corpos.

I know I’ve seen that on 1337x and was absolutely disappointed. Don’t remember what I was looking for, but definitely a shame.

It’s absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.

Same. There’s one game I liked well enough after demoing it that I bought merch for the game to support the dev, alongside having bought the game on Steam. If a game is worth the price and is a quality game, I have absolutely no problem going from demo to buying it if I can.

Just started the 3rd public release of Pokemon Vanguard. The almost all the regionals in the game look absolutely fantastic. Doesn’t follow the standard 8 gyms, fight evil team, defeat them, elite 4 pattern from most official and fan games I’ve played. In this one you end up going to some trainer school (vanguard academy), becoming a legal pokemon trainer in the region, and do assignments. So far I’ve only done one and it’s a pretty fun game.

It has 3 difficulty options, options for turning every battle to be a double battle (I assume this doesn’t work on wild pokemon but I have no clue), doing a monorun of every type that won’t let you catch anything other than the type you’re using, and a streamer mode that replaces music that could get you copyrighted. All before you begin the game. Also, I think you can find just about every starter from any of the games, with most of them being regionals with new types, like poison fire chimchar. Even has gen 9 pokemon, which I’m glad is becoming more common.

That’s good to know.

I’ll have to quickly check there to see if they have what I need. Thanks.

Edit:

This was a site I got a file that caused Windows Defender to go ballistics ony desktop a few years back. Couldn’t remember the name. Probably gonna find a patch and see what virustotal says.

There used to be a site I looked at a few years back that I don’t recall the name of, but it definitely felt a little sketchy. Same with the one file I downloaded. Set off Windows Defender real quick and that told me to stay away from that site.

Definitely gonna have to look in virtual disc emulating them. I have a virtual disc drive program on my desktop, so I could look into trying to make that work. That, or I’ll try and find the small disc image thing you brought up to save space while trying to make that vde thing work.

Thanks for the info.

I personally don’t see a reason to torrent music when a simple download of a flac or something from yt if I can’t find it anywhere else is usually fine. But I will say I’m more likely to pirate music from large artists/companies because I don’t support large record companies and their shitty practices.

Similar thing goes for things like Vocaloid, UTAU/OPENUTAU, Synthesizer V, DeepVocal, etcetera, songs because the majority of the time the songs I’m listening to don’t have an official download (or a link to a removed file) or way to get it through supporting the person who made them.

I have no idea what to do or how to even get started with Usenet, so I just use a VPN and torrent as needed.

I personally like playing the bird and robot the most.

That’s usually what I do every once in a while whenever I decide to play. The amount of cool strategies you can do is fun. Especially if you aren’t like me and refuse to learn how to play toad mage or animal companion person.

It’s such a fun game, but I kinda dropped it after I accidentally glitched my game and got my story mode save wiped in an old update.

Warning! First three games feature anthro animals!

• Corn Kidz 64: if you like games that play like they were made for older consoles (n64 in this case) and directly ported to modern PC (requires controller and has no mouse and keyboard support). Currently $6.99USD on Steam. Long enough to leave me satisfied but short enough to make me want more.

• Brok the InvestiGator: describes itself as the very first punch and click, having a point and click mode and a character control mode. Has multiple endings depending on how you play and what you do. Currently $19.99USD on Steam and has for $4.99 and $3.99 respectively a soundtrack and artbook DLC. Base game includes unlockable fan art and official character sheets. Also has a demo that contains all of chapter 1 of the full game, so you can see if it’s a game for you.

• Amorous: NSFW furry dating sim visual novel game. Free to play. Can’t get a real date? Have fun trying to get into the pants of virtual people instead! Warning! Contains nudity and visible genitals! Currently $0.00USD on Steam. Must be logged in to look at Steam page, but no such requirement for the itchio page.

• Ardor: free to play deck builder. Hasn’t been updated much since launch, I’m pretty sure. Play as a hexagon fighting other hexagons on a board of hexagons. Last I checked it currently has attack cards, movement cards, and cards that allow you to infect enemies. After each round you get to use the in game currency to upgrade things like how far an attack can reach, damage, how far you can move, etcetera. All numbers can go up for the right price. Currently $0.00USD on Steam. Has a $5.99USD support the developer DLC that, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t actually do anything.

I have played all these games, so I can vouch for them in various ways. I also tried not going over $25USD before tax to be a little more accessible to people who don’t have a lot of extra funds for games and tried not to go super well known and popular (even though I’m pretty sure Markiplier did a video on Amorous if I remember correctly)

Earliest example of me pirating was when my dad used Limewire. I’d like to think I used it as well, but I doubt it since I wouldn’t have known anything to look up.

Otherwise, in highschool I would go to different sites to find cartoons/anime that weren’t available on Netflix (or Hulu back when it was just about the only competitor). This was before I knew what sites were safe, so I probably ended up getting viruses without knowing.

I imagine it being basically impossible for MMORPG games. How do you keep an MMORPG alive without removing the MMO part?

Depends on the devices I have on hand. Both my laptop and have my VPN, so I am able to get my LibreOffice windows downloads and ahem other things that I am not gonna talk about.

Depends on the game. As great as retro games are, I could never give up newer indie titles like Baba Is You or Brok The Investigator, which would be much shorter games or have other problems if they were made for consoles pre-internet games download days.

Though I will say that retro games like Sonic 1 & 2 on Genesis or Ratchet and Clank on PS2 are pretty much infinitely better than the triple AAA slop they’re throwing at us today.

Especially when we have companies (like sweet baby inc.) forcing characters to be changed to Mary Sue’s all because we need inclusivity. I have no problems with inclusivity at all, but I have a major problem with poorly written characters in games that have absolutely nothing going for them besides being perfect.

A little bit of Crash N. Sane trilogy and starting a new run of Fallout New Vegas on hard difficulty hardcore mode, alongside more slogging through Baba Is You.

Never completed a single run on the games I’ve played in the Fallout series, yet for some reason I decided to start another playthrough and do hardcore mode for the first time because clearly I hate myself. Currently maybe 5-6 levels in and it ain’t easy compared to the really cool melee build save on my desktop.

Analog stick. Most of the time I end up finding that the dpad on my 360 controller doesn’t feel as good to me compared to as an analog stick. That, and the majority of games I used to play growing up used analog stick for movement, so it’s engrained in me.

One of my biggest complaints with the switch is definitely how my hands are too big for me to be truly comfortable with holding them when they’re disconnected from the console. Either one in each hand or one for both hands. That, and I think the batteries in my joycons are a little screwed, so I just said fuck it and got a controller because the last few times I used my switch was connected to a TV.

The biggest thing keeping me from switching away from Gboard are things like the Japanese and Chinese IMEs. I have yet to find an open source keyboard with both of those, while also allowing me to switch to English.

Edit:

Clicked on the article. Clicked on the Trime and Fcxit5 and plugins links. It might be suitable in the future. Hoping this isn’t a situation where I finally find a solution and then the devs suddenly disappear without a trace.

Nothing but have it write stories (not shared or used for anything but just for fun). That, and come up with names for things since I struggle with that.

Yo! Totally forgot the name of that game! Might pick it up because I remember playing one and it was always fun, despite the fact I absolutely sucked at it.

Don’t know where it is, but somewhere in the garage I have a copy of Diner Dash on disc. Definitely a game that was really fun.