CDs have been making a slow comeback for the past year or two, and global CD sales actually went up last year for the first time in over a decade. If it’s anything like the vinyl or cassette resurgence, I imagine it won’t be too difficult to find places that sell CDs in a few years.

Yup.

I was vaguely interested in Dark Souls for years, but every time I tried, I bounced right off it. I went through a cycle where every year or two, I would pirate one of the souls games, try it out, give up on it after an hour or so, and do it all over again the next time I was sufficiently compelled to give the series another shot. This happened until several years ago when I tried Dark Souls II, and for some reason it finally clicked. I played my pirated copy of Dark Souls II for about 10 hours, before a random crash corrupted my save file.

After that happened, I immediately bought the game on Steam and proceeded to play it for the next month and a half, until I eventually beat it. I’ve since purchased every souls game plus Elden Ring on Steam, and recently imported a copy of Bloodborne GOTY edition after spending $700 on an exploitable PS5, just so I could play it at 60FPS. None of these legitimate purchases would have ever happened if I hadn’t been able to repeatedly pirate Dark Souls for about five years.

Which sucks, because Arkane was one of my favorite developers before the quality of their output fell off over the past five years. I loved the Dishonored games, and Prey is the single best immersive sim ever made. I was looking forward to DeathLoop, but it ended up being kinda meh, and Redfall has been so universally panned that I haven’t even bothered to try it.

Unironically, yes. Multiple studies dating back years have found a link between high intelligence and various mental health issues.
There was one particular paper I read about a decade ago, where researchers surveyed a bunch of collage students to find demographic trends based on their preferred operating system. From what I recall, the demographics of Windows users were not too far off from those of the university as whole, and Mac users were similar, aside from women being significantly over-represented. Linux users on the other hand, were almost all men, and nearly every mental health issue imaginable was over-represented by a huge margin.

I have a somewhat large share on Soulseek. It’s fun to occasionally go through the chat rooms and ban all the blatant racists and homophobes.

There’s gamecopyworld for game cracks, I’m not sure about general software though.

It’s been alive and well for quite some time now. I’ve been using it since 2018.

I think people pay for streaming services, which is what I assumed was meant by the original post.

I see several people have already mentioned Soulseek, the one other place I’d recommend is rutracker. You have to sign up, and it’s in Russian, but it’s probably the easiest place to grab entire discographies, and you can occasionally find things there that aren’t on Soulseek.

Of course if you’re really serious about music piracy, getting into the private tracker scene is the only way to go. redacted.ch specifically, is probably the most comprehensive music archive on the Internet right now.

Edit: I just realized no one has mentioned stream rippers yet. If what you want is on a steaming service like Deezer or Qobuz, and hasn’t been shared elsewhere, there are tools to download it directly from the streaming service in full quality. Getting these set up can get a bit technical, and they often require a premium account, but there are Discord and Telegram bots that act as a fronted for these tools running on a server somewhere, which is the easiest way to use them.

Looks like it’s limited to 2020 and newer actually, but I also don’t think this existed when I got my TV in 2021.

Came here to post this, but you beat me to it. Jdownloader is incredible and also works wonders for downloading massive collections from archive.org

If you have an LG smart TV running WebOS, there’s an exploit in the web browser you can use to gain root access and install the homebrew channel. It’s literally just going to a website and clicking a couple buttons. From there, you can install a number of different homebrew apps including the aforementioned Jellyfin, as well as ad-free YouTube, RetroArch and of course Doom.

The homebrew channel also lets you run an ssh/telnet server that gives you remote access to the TV’s back-end command line and filesystem. I found this functionally extremely useful for allowing the TV to still get online while having it behind a DNS server that blocks access to all of LG’s telemetry domains.

If it’s webOS based, you can jailbreak it and install Jellyfin.

Jellyfin running on my jailbroken smart TV.

The only torrent I ever removed my seed cap for was a set of DVD-audio ISOs. I had it downloading for months, but it never got above 5%. Eventually I found the same disc images on another site, so I dropped them in the download folder and rechecked the torrent, which came back 97% complete. The only files missing were box art scans and NFOs. I let that thing seed for about five months.

I haven’t bothered with any sort of NUS downloader in years because converting the content has always been a pain in the ass. In the past couple years there’s been multiple WiiU rom collections uploaded to archive.org . Just recently, I set up my WiiU with a 4TB hard drive and used JDownloader to pull the entire North American WiiU library in USB installer format over the course of a couple days. Installing everything was a bit of a chore, but at least I didn’t need to deal with any conversion on the PC side.

Xenoblade Chronicles took years to come to North America. I remember seeing multiple petitions trying to get it released over here.

Fuck, apparently I write like ChatGPT. I didn’t think anything was off about the original comment because I write in a very similar way. Information is always structured under headers or in bulleted lists.

I’m disappointed they’re just doing the John Oliver thing again instead of something more unique like making the sub about literal high seas piracy.

Either server logs, or the hackers sending them part of the data they have to prove they’re ligit. I assume the latter would have happened if Reddit had shown any interest in negotiating.

I took that to mean no one at Reddit bothered to check what was stolen.

Not that Picross isn’t a game, but there are speedruns of Microsoft Excel. I’m not convinced something having a speedrun proves it’s status as a game.