Fun story:

Tonight I pirated the PC version of Firmament (made by Cyan Worlds). I backed the game well over two years ago but the game was delayed, and then when it finally released a year ago, Cyan only released the PC version, and the PS4/5 version —the version I elected to receive — still hasn’t come out yet. I don’t know if it ever will and I’m tired of waiting.

So I pirated a game I bought for a different platform because it never released for the platform I bought it for.

DRM-free versions are [almost] always available somewhere. If it’s DRM-free, I will buy it if I like it. If the DRM-free version isn’t for sale or I can’t easily circumvent the DRM, it just means it came from the high seas instead of a local media store.

And don’t even get me started on how often TV shows aren’t even released on DVD/Blu-ray/4K. Again, I can’t pay for it if no one is offering to sell it to me.

Music can be easy to make, but IMO good music usually isn’t easy to produce still requires a fair amount of time and talent.

Also I never stopped buying good music despite my pirating. The recording industry has certainly stopped wanting to sell us music though, and prefers we perpetually rent it instead. There is exactly one business my town where there is a decent selection of CDs I can buy, and it’s a local, independent new-and-used media store. The ONLY alternatives are walmart and target, who have maybe a dozen or so albums for sale.

P.S. To anyone who releases an album on vinyl but not on CD in 2024: I hate you with the passion and determination of a hundred honey badgers.

I stopped buying Samsung products a decade ago after getting a midrange Samsung smartphone that never got an OS update and had glaring bugs that never got fixed, as well as having bought a new Samsung refrigerator that would make an extremely loud bang sound every couple of hours because of a design flaw in the water line that goes to the freezer to make ice cubes.

I owned other Samsung products that also had problems, but these two cheesed me off the most.

Over the years I have read about problem after problem people have had with Samsung appliances, and problem after problem with Samsung smart phones. Samsung has been downright user-hostile to their phone customers for a while now.

Fuck Samsung.

Green Party. Also, you could get involved in local politics to help get Ranked Choice Voting passed in your state.