Discs from libraries!
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Participating in a boycott this month? You should be doing all that stuff period.
Nah shop Amazon when it costs them money. As in, you know you are buying at or below cost.
I just bought a few things from Amazon, cheaper than any competition to begin with, but also used the last of my Amazon rewards balance.
Then put everything on a 0% interest offer and religiously pay the minimum until the last bill, and pay it all off then. Just don't forget.
Use them when it benefits you significantly more than it benefits them.
I have been buying a hell of a lot more stuff on eBay, Newegg, B&H, etc lately. And most of the cheap consumer junk that I would buy on Amazon is even cheaper on AliExpress if I'm willing to wait a little longer.
I was kinda pissed when I bought a reasonably priced commodity on eBay and it was delivered in Amazon packaging by an Amazon truck, though.
Newegg Commerce, Inc. (NASDAQ: NEGG) is a publicly traded company. It is majority-owned by a Chinese multinational technology firm. Key ownership details include:
Majority Shareholder: Hangzhou Lianluo Interactive Information Technology Co., Ltd. (also known as Liaison Interactive) owns approximately 54.5% to 57.4% of the company.
Founder Stake: Fred Chang, the company's founder and former CEO, retains a significant ownership stake of roughly 22.1%.
Significant Individual Shareholder: Vladimir Galkin owns about 22.5% of the shares.
Public Float: The remaining shares (approximately 11%) are held by the general public and institutional investors.
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I was kinda pissed when I bought a reasonably priced commodity on eBay and it was delivered in Amazon packaging by an Amazon truck, though.
I've noticed this too, if the same thing's slightly more on eBay it's probably someone ordering it for you on Amazon and pocketing the difference
Yep. Good to know that soulless cretins who just want to make a buck off the backs of people with scruples are still out there.
Yeah, a friend of mine was recently buying markers, and a lot of companies also just... Don't have their own stores. They either redirect to Amazon, or if they to they still fulfill it through Amazon. Etsy is also full of resellers.
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Theres like 80% of the population that still actively shop at Target and Amazon Prime. People buy from Whole Foods instead of the small "mom and pop" European market on the corner.
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Blurays are better quality than streaming.
4K Bluray is the highest quality you'll ever get in your home by like, a lot.
Streaming is a regression.
Doesn't blue ray suck at archiving because their data is more prone to corruption? The only advantage they have is larger storage space.
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Odd choice just pirate and teach others how to aswell. Hurts in this case Netflix way more
Pirating can be legally cut off. DVDs can't
They've been trying for how long now? The pirates always win in the end.
With streaming companies owning the content, buying DVDs is just another way of financially supporting the same companies for worse quality.
Even when one piracy platform is taken down, there are new ones launched in their place. Nothing guarantees that DVDs will continue to be produced in perpetuity, just as digital copies of video games are progressively becoming less and less prevalent.
Matt Damon argued that the loss of DVD sales is why such garbage comes out of hollywood these days.
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Buy second hand, rip, sell again.
Yard sales, pawn shops, thrift stores, and the humble library system can help mitigate that money working it's way up to the coked up pedos that run the film studios.
Theres a way to combine the best of both of them :)
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Yes but after a while you may start to yearn for some rarer things as well. There’s still lots of pre-lost media out there on rotting dvds waiting for custodianship that I haven’t been able to find online. There’s also some newer HD rereleases having single channel and lower quality or something, so finding the original dvds is better sometimes.
Around here the used DVD market (thrift stores, used book stores) has been collapsing - prices down below $1 per disc, and everybody trying to get rid of their old stock. Selections are getting thin.
How does one keep their system secure with pirating? A large mkv of a new movie seems like an effective container to deliver a payload.
So long as you are careful about file formats you shouldn't have any issues, but there are a decent amount of measures you can take.
- Do all your downloads inside a VM that is sandboxed away from your main system, and then monitor the system processes when you run the file. 1.1 if you really want to isolate it watch things on that VM, but that's a bit of a pain
- Have your download system on a vlan that isolates it from the rest of your network.
- Only download from well trusted communities and make sure to verify checksums.
- With a little bit of time to kill you can learn how to run a sandboxed video player on Linux or could go the extra mile and run a system like nixos which is isolated by design
It doesn't have to do with device security, but you should only do downloads over a VPN with a kill switch enabled to stop your ISP from sending you a cease and desist letter. Keep in mind that you are just trading your ISP for your VPN server when you do that though, so you may want to pick one that has been proven to not record logs, I use PIA for that reason, but I have also heard that mullvad also got subpoenad and demonstrated that they didn't hold logs.
Is TOR a practical alternative for VPN? never tried it, but it seems tempting...
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In theory, sure. In practice, we don't see much of that.
Don't run the video player with administration credentials, and keep the video player up to date and it's likely to be fine.
Carefully.
Seriously, I don’t know of any/many issues caused by downloading and playing a legitimate video file (MP4/MKV/AVI).
I feel like, if there are, those are being saved for a nation state level attack and not Fred downloading Shrek 2 questionably.
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Dang it, I'm already boycotting them because i want to actually own my media and support local businesses and a bunch of other reasons, how am I supposed to boycott them harder to include capitulation to Trump?!
Help your friends
The last two years I started going to garage sales for DVDs/Blu Rays.
It's been great. You can get like 5-10 movies for the price of a month of Netflix. Then you can sell them next spring for $5-10 and buy $5-10 worth from someone else of stuff you haven't seen.
although I doubt this will get much of any mainstream coverage, as someone who has been setting up/administering a number of plex servers for the last ~20 years, I have noticed a rather remarkable uptick in not only setting up new servers, but a flood of interest in membership for the handful that I administer.
This has had the interesting side-effect of renewing interest in the fact that you can borrow DVDs/BRDs for free from your local library for the purposes of ripping them. Believe me-- you may think that, in 2026, everything is available for download very easily.... no, it isn't Yes, much more is widely available at (generally) much higher quality than it used to be, but it all relies on how popular a show/film/album is (and continues to be). If you're looking to dl something new/current, you'll very likely have a 2 week - 3 month window it will very reliably be available to download. after that, whether it's available (and for how long) depends entirely on how popular it remains.
Example: The "New Trek" that most old-school Trekkies hate is less-available than, say, a mega download of all 7 seasons of DS9. DS9 is probably available (as a single download and as single seasons/episodes) much more easily than any episode of STD. Or, even, the JJ Abrahms films. Shit, even the Rifftrax commentary version of ST II has more seeders on more torrent sites than any of the 3 JJ Treks. And, to put a pin in this... Star Trek Lower Decks is even more available now than it was when it was airing.
The cool flip-side of this: I never got to see the iconic Fritz Lang film M in the pre-torrent era because I could never find a Blockbuster's that carried it in stock. But, as soon as that barrier to see it was removed (availability), I got to see the prototypical murder mystery thriller film which, still today, holds up as pretty awesome.
Dusted off the mp3s too. Long live VLC
If you have Plex, Plexamp does a great job of streaming music outside the home and having a host of other features (playing similar songs / keeping the playing going / music by mood / etc).
Just missed Bandcamp Friday. Also, get u some flac.
With how much storage costs these days? I'll stick with MP3.
This. If you want to be sure that the flacs are worth it, go do one of those 128kbps mp3 vs 320 mp3 vs flac tests and see if you can hear the difference. I can't, so I just do 128 mp3s and save the storage. Almost 2k songs in 10gb of space :D
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The website would be better if there was also links or resources to alternate.
But also that's hard depending on where you are.
targeting tech companies who, they believe, are not doing enough to stand up against President Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown
Oh ffs, they're not doing enough because they've submitted to him! They literally went to his inauguration to kiss the ring!
But better to wake up late then never I suppose
And before that, where did people think money-grubbing, morally-bankrupt billionaires vacuuming up all their data was going to lead? This was all but inevitable, especially when, without outrage-based engagement algorithms there is no President Trump. These scumbags prop each other up. Don't give them a dime or let them profit off your attention.
No, we don't "Believe they are not doing enough to stand up against", that's slimy spineless wording.
We "KNOW that they are ACTIVELY HELPING"