Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Lol that's how i always get caught.

Everytime I look for alternates I end up with sites that offer torrents of movies that end in .exe. so I end up going back to TPB.

As long you downloading only video/music content you are safe. The worst outcome could be only wrong content

Shady how? It ends up being the right place for 99% of my torrents.

I think it's more a generalised phrase, like when you Google something, but you don't actually use Google. Saying to look at / use pirate bay doesn't mean the exact site, just means to pirate it somehow.

Well as shady as a midnight walk to the convenient store... So not actually that bad.

I have been out of the 🏴‍☠️scene for a while and this was the most trusted one back in the days. Are there other alternatives now?

In a sense I do think this kind of approach matters more than people give it credit for. Most people tend to see piracy as a way to consume media without supporting the rightsholders of that media, but even pirated consumption is still support.

A person who is, say, pirating Harry Potter books and other media is still giving Rowling and her franchise and ideas space in their head, maybe contributing to further conversations about her, and overall inadvertently promoting her whether they like it or not - as opposed to having used that time and energy to consume media from someone more worth the time and effort, like say, Ursula Le Guin.

For example I was watching a video from a YouTuber who does controller reviews. In that video he briefly mentioned two controllers that were of such poor quality that they were literally unusable. He went on to say that he would not be making videos about them, because he found that even when he goes out of his way to give a controller the worst review possible, tons of people still buy them.

Personally, I think that information freedom matters enough that anything published under licenses that are more restrictive than copyleft, permissive ones, or straight public domain is unethical. If private property is theft, and it is, that absolutely extends into knowledge and culture as well. If I were a purist about that, I would go out of my way to use things like the fully free Linux distros, and only consume media under those aforementioned licenses. Truth be told I don't though, I do pirate corporate media sometimes. But I do try to give space where it counts too - trying to use some time and energy to seek out any kind of media that's more open.

Tl;dr: play Battle for Wesnoth.

I mean nobody is going to give you a medal for doing it so why deprive yourself?

And that is valid.

I have never subscribed any of these streaming services. The pressure from friends was intense but at the end of the day I simply felt no need and even less appeal to it.

Nowadays, I hear those same friends how expensive it has become to keep all of these services to follow their interests and how the catalogue has been degrading.

I sincerely do not care.

Not when you're using Firefox with uBlock Origin. Don't use any pirate sites without a good ad blocker.

Thanks to "arr, I haven't had to even look at an indexer in years. I don't miss manually trolling for torrents.

I frequently listen to my coworkers/mutuals list how many streaming services they have and how much they cost a month, leaving the proper maths to only to the listeners because they won't hear the real bill.. I had to quit one that cost "only" 19€ per month because I wasn't able to afford it anymore!