Inspired by a post since deleted, I feel bad for probably coming off judgemental about the poster’s taste in the movie that drove him to consider sailing.
The earliest desired media I can remember that drove me to figure out sailing was DC Talk, a Christian rock band. Pop music was not allowed in my house, so a Christian group was tantalizing and scandalous to a rebellious, young Vanth. Things escalated from there.
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I was poor. Pirates selling copied disks on the street was all I could afford
Growing up in a 3rd world country. When my father gave me a PS2 it was hacked to play pirated games. We also burned CDs on our PC before that.
I remember chilling in the basement and using the PS2 to listen to music. Of course, I gamed on it plenty, but having the music player and DVD player function was pretty convenient too.
Young and didn’t have any money. Certainly not enough to blow on movies or shows. Since then it’s been a jumping off point into learning more and more about computers. Networks, data transfer, Linux, virtual machines. I’m looking to get some certifications and get into IT now, and I probably wouldn’t have the knowledge to do so if I hadn’t spent my years on the high seas.
Wanted a game. Was too expensive. said “fuck it” and set sail.
Wanted a game, back then wasn’t available in my country unless I travelled 3 hours to a city that had one store that had the game, also was too expensive and no way I would’ve convinced parents to spend it on game. Shores of high sea are always at your doorstep.
Funny story the other way around: the year is 2002 and I live in Laos. Bootlegs Everything Galore, all movies games music cost $1 or about. I discover a game, and then begins a quest to buy The Real Version because it’s a small studio and I really like it all, the storytelling, the modding tools, the community… A quest that would end up in Bangkok looking like the proverbial insane foreigner looking for the most stupid way to spend his money.
I found it eventually, in a shop that didn’t look any different among all its brothers in Pantip Plaza. Took me a while lol.
Are we counting like Ares and Limewire? I just wanted to listen to music and could never pay it. That turned into software I wanted but couldn’t buy. Then I stopped for a while and started up again years ago not wanting to pay for streaming
I haven’t seen that name in ages. I think Kazaa Lite, Imesh and Audio Galaxy were the first file sharing programs I ever used.
Ares! I can’t find an English wikipedia article about it 😮 Just found out it was written in delphi and opensource.
Those were the days… DC++, Ares, Limewire, Napster, Emule, Bearshare… so many things just to download the latest Linkin Park. Only for it to end up being porn 😅
I never really asked why everything was porn. But like… why?
Cause people like porn. I’ll be honest, when I downloaded some music video or something that ended up being porn, I usually wasn’t too disappointed, with the exception that I now had to go find what I was originally looking for again and wait for it to download. Shit used to take forever back in the day.
I think it was a game that needed activations to play and I ran out of activations or something. Predictably, pirating it was the better experience in every way.
Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.
A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.
I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.
I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.
For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that where definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.
A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.
We even had that problem in the UK with Carmageddon. It wasn’t a problem to locate the correct files, though!
I’m honest so I will tell the truth: I like cheap stuff.
Most of the stuff I was looking for couldn’t even be found on store shelves. Before online shopping and streaming, if it wasn’t the latest release or biggest hit, you probably wouldn’t be able to find it locally. You’d waste time browsing up and down aisles of junk only to leave disappointed, then try again at another store, hoping that by some miracle they’d have it.
Then I discovered that terabytes upon terabytes of content was available, nearly instantly and conveniently, on the internet. All you had to do was click a few buttons and you had what you wanted. That was about 25+ years ago, and the recording industry still has not adapted to offer a service that even comes close to what was available back then.
Oh, you think seeders are your ally, but you merely adopted piracy as an adult. I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn’t pay for anything until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but expensive.
The peers betray you, because they belong to me. I will show you my torrent collection, whilst preparing to show you my ratio. Then I will set my upload speed limit to 0.
In the early 00s I pirated a lot of music, but now I buy records and pay for streaming because it’s affordable and good.
I used to pirate software but now I just use FOSS because it’s free and good.
I used to pirate games but now I just wait for steam sales, which is cheap and good.
I used to pirate lots of movies and tv shows but then got a Netflix account and it was reasonably priced and good… until it wasn’t. Then I set up a full stack of usenet/ sonarr/ radarr/ overseer/ Jellyfin and boy oh boy is that good.
But now I have a baby and don’t watch tv anymore so I pirate pretty much nothing.
Congratulations!
That Baby will want some Peppa Pig (mine are over a decade old now so yes I’m out of date) in the future so your stack will come in useful again!
My Babies want Anime now
Holy shit I also pirated DC talk hahaha. Wasn’t allowed to listen to it .
What would people think of they hear that I’m sailing the high seas?
Oh, and Audio Adrenaline! It came up bc of all the Boeing crap in the news.
A 747 fell out of heaven, Crashed through the roof of a 7-11, You’re working on a slurpee, Things get hazy, Reach for a twinkie now you’re pushing up daisies, Do you know where you’re gonna go?
Morbid little weirdos.
I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it’s a better more enjoyable experience sailing.
It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.
To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.
And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.
But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.
So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.
I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren’t all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.
Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don’t do advertising. Pisses me off.
So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I’m curating a music collection I’ve pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it’s feasible to replace Spotify but I can try
My childhood home only has dialup Internet. First year at college I found out someone ran a DC++ instance on the network and it was over from there. I got a 2tb HDD because I had to, and could, download enough movies/shows to last me the summer. I stopped for a while when I moved out and actually had broadband, but then Netflix stopped being Netflix and became $NFLX, and with all the other services popping up I heard the call of the seas again
