Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Right there with ya. I'm a data hoarder first and foremost. I have two goals when it comes to piracy:

A) If I have ever watched, read, listened, played, or otherwise enjoyed a piece of media, I will have it available at all times.

B) Do what I can to preserve said data so 40 years from now when I'm telling kids about some generic super hero comic, or SNES game, or obscure TV miniseries, I can pull that shit up in seconds instead of being the old senile man telling stories.

I got 30TB of space, I got almost every movie, TV show, stand up special, album, video game, comic book, novel, and essential software that I want (and adding more daily), and it's all served up to whatever friend wants it via Plex or whatever-other-means-I-need-depending-on-the-media.

Meanwhile I'm on my 35th watch through of Archer lol

I had so much time yet so few things to watch and play growing up, I think I've become a data hoarder as a "response" to this. Now I love being able to provide friends & family all the content they could ever want.

I think subconsciously we are all prepping for the end of the world as we know it lol

Sort of. I like archiving and passing on stuff that is useful and likely to be forgotten. Laws and morals just get in the way. Hail Satan, praise Prometheus, and fuck the police!

I adore hacker and torrenting culture. I seed terabytes of data per month and run a media server for all my friends and family. Seeing my torrent client upload speed saturated with hundreds of people from all over the globe is honestly a vibe.

Honestly, the interesting tidbits you learn as you dig yourself into that rabbit hole is actually quite intriguing and fun. So yeah - I'd say it is also quite "fun" for the process itself!

Same

i run a piracy group on telegram and i dont play games barely ever now. I repack games. I like to say my favorite game is repacking games.... I have tons of mine and others games installed and never play them beyond maybe testing the game i just cracked works and the DLC is working etc. I keep installing games until i have no room for repacking clear them out and then start over. Its sick. My poor pc. And now that google has basically killed unlimited gsuites im in major trouble. Paying for cloud storage is expensive.

I don't just pirate for the sake of piracy. If I download something, it's because I either intend to use it or watch it or because a family member asked me to get it for them.

That said, even though I do it for the destination, I love the journey as well. I've been torrenting for a little over 10 years now, and for most of that time, I was just a hit-and-run user because I didn't have dedicated resources for doing it. I ran qBittorrent in a virtual machine, grabbed my stuff, and then wiped it out. Last year though, after years of torrenting without consequences, I got two love letters from my ISP within a very short period of time, and because of that, I decided to redo my setup. I now use a dedicated computer as a seedbox over a VPN and try to seed as much as I can. It's sort of funny. My seedbox sits on a shelf in my bedroom and I always have a strange sense of satisfaction when I walk by or lay awake in bed and see the little hard drive LED flashing away because somewhere in the world, someone's connected to my little computer to grab a copy of something that I also wanted.

Yes. Sharing is caring, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling from having a high seed ratio

Honestly I'm kinda a datahoarder lol so I basically archive things for the sake of preservation. In this aspect I guess this coincides with your point, since many things I pirate I don't really consume, I just might potentially consume, or find it valuable, so I pirate it and keep it lol

Piracy is heavily intertwined with self host/privacy for me so yeah same. I have the whole servarr stack setup but I probably use it the least out of everyone on it. My wife watches several movies a day when she can so its mainly for her. But I love building out the services and adding new things.

Download 500 GB of content in 3 days

Don't watch a single thing in the jellyfin library for weeks

Yeah, I guess so. Tbf I've already been watching less shows / movies in general for a while now.

Kinda. I may have set up a Mac OS VM on my computer and downloaded Final Cut and Logic Pro just to say "Ha! Fuck you Apple!". I have no GPU passed through. I don't know why I did this.

Lurking through communities related to my favorite literary genres while having Z-Lib is like walking into a candy store as a 10-year-old and being told that you can get all that you want free of charge. Of course curating a library is enjoyable lmao

I actually like the download limit that Z-Lib has for regular users. If you use it up, it moght be a good time for you to go actually read what you have downloaded.

I really like watching big number go up (almost maxed on osrs), so piling on more and more cool stuff for the hoard really activates the neurons. The thought of one day having something that someone wants/needs seems so fun to me.

Usually spend way more time curating than actually watching

I love hoarding game repacks for no apparent reason. Used to delete completed games, now I keep every game.

i've had a lot of free time on my hands the last 2 weeks (recovering from surgery) and i've been spending so much time just,,,doing the piracy. setting up my little torrenting station, finding things to download and shit. it's so fun honestly, my only problem is that i don't know what to download next.

Praise the lord and pass me another 22tb drive.

yep, though i at least will listen to the hours and hours of songs as im pirating more and flush out the albums i dislike as i go.

I have a seedbox that I pay for. I was running everything on a NAS and it got too resource intensive. I run Radarr and Sonarr to pull in my content, Overseerr so my friends can add movies without texting me for every request, and serve it all with Plex.

It was a lot of fun setting up and sharing with friends, but I just watched Fast X last night. Can't beat Vin Diesel crashing two helicopters with a car and using then as wrecking balls.

I downloaded and setup games that I won't actually play, once I've had it setup I then wait for it to be on sale.

My Plex server just got doubled from 20TB to 40TB, I only watch a couple hours of content per week.

Yes. I'm now a reformed pirate (no more pirating for me! Save lost media ofc) and I get a similar thrill by removing DRM from my DVD/Blu Ray & iTunes purchases.

piracy is definitely more fun than consuming the pirated content itself.

Beyond "trying out" games. I like the idea of saving things or quickly grabbing things that might not be available for long. For example on a hard drive somewhere I have that early test build of Skate that was leaked like a year or two ago.

I'll also say that as I get older I really appreciate how many more plug-and-play resources there are now. I can get a whole game package that self installs and I'm good to go. No more having to get an ISO from some sketchy Russian site or rolling the dice on TPB and then mounting it to virtual disk. With the power of adblockers/tracking blockers I can stream basically anything from any service with a few clicks from the megathread.

I enjoy getting things for free when I otherwise shouldn't be able to. Piracy lets me indulge that without doing anything illegal so I have hard drives full of stuff even if I never play/watch/read it.

piracy turned me into a cinephile, i must have seen 2000+ movies in the last fifteen years

Lmfao yes. I love curating my collection, even if I don't end up watching something for a loooong time.

I don't watch half the shit I download.

I actually downloaded Dune like 4 times, and spent hours remuxing a perfect franken-version which I'm yet to watch.

My LG C2 supports dolby atmos digital+ audio (but not truehd), and supports dolby vision profile 8, but not 7. Blu rays come with profile 7 and truehd. And streamable version of files come with dolby 5 video, and dolby digital audio. So I ended up converting the original blu ray from 7 to 8, with a multi step process with dovi_tool and ffmpeg, and then when remuxing I used the audio from the webDL version, so I could get both dolby vision 8 from a blu ray mux, and dolby digital audio from a webDL version.

This is the process I did: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25354

All of that was very fun and rewarding actually, but I still end up watching 720p/1080p shows that I want to watch instead.

I’ll say I spent more time and had more fun jailbreaking my old Nintendo consoles than I did playing the countless hours of games I put on them.

There’s something really magical about having to fold a paper clip and put it into the joycon rails to MAYBE get your Switch to boot into Recovery Mode.