I used to pirate games because there was no legal digital distribution. The pirate version I could get faster and wouldn’t hassle me to put the right disk in the drive before I could play.
Then digital distribution got good, DRM got less obnoxious, and malware got meaner.
I used to pirate music for similar reasons.
I didn’t pirate video because the files were too large, and around the time bandwidth caught up, Netflix got good. Now digital video distribution is awful so I pirate video until they solve the fractured storefront problem.
What’s keeping him in the race is the delusional nature of his supporters. Think about all those points you wrote about what a horrible person he is. How many other candidates could survive even one of those controversies? He lives in an imaginary world of his own creation where whatever he says he believes to be true, and his cult like followers are so brainwashed that their perfectly smooth grey matter just soaks it up like a sponge. There’s precious little he could do or say at this point that would have his base leave him.
This, tbh. Propaganda is a hell of a drug. And the worst part is, it’s not a drug most people willingly take. They’re blindsided, their phycology is abused to suck them in, and before long, without even realizing it, they’re in a completely different reality, scared and paranoid. It’s terrifying and sad.
I remember the golden age of the DVD Man. That noble soul who had all the latest movies on DVD a day after they opened. Quality ranged from someone recording the movie in the theater with a camcorder to perfect copies taken directly from the source.
I was shaving my head. Happened to have the news on the TV in the background and thought ‘fuck, that’s awful’ after the first plane, then ‘fuck, that’s deliberate’ after the second. I guess the twin towers is our ‘you remember where you were moment’ for those of us too young to remember the moon landings.
I was in school at the time. The teacher had it on the tv when I walked in (just after the first plane hit) and I was so excited to watch an action movie instead of doing work. When the camera didn’t change the view for a couple minutes, everyone gave me the stinkeye when I criticized it for being boring.
Then my teacher explained what was happening and told us all to rmember it because people will ask us for the rest of our lives where we were when this happened. I didn’t get it at the time, but he was right.
Crimzon Clover, any version's good but World EXplosion is the most recent. It's a fairly difficult and chaotic bullet hell, but the novice mode should be reasonably approachable as long as you're willing to learn, and the design is superb.
Similarly, the whole CAVE backlog. Not all of them have novice modes or the like, and there's quite a few games not really available outside of MAME. The original DoDonPachi is/was considered the best starter bullet hell for a long, long time and still holds up pretty well, but is more difficult than a lot of modern games on their respective novice modes.
On the indie side of things: Star of Providence (formerly Monolith) is an indie roguelite bullet hell twin-stick-ish shmup with a pretty good amount of depth. ZeroRanger is a much more story-based game that I really enjoyed.
In the aughts, pirates bay felt like the library of Congress. If a single commenter on a B tier forum saw it in a guy’s basement in the mid 80’s there was a sure bet at least 3 people were seeding it and one of them had great upload. If it wasn’t there, you had a dozen different sites with their own dedicated fans posting everything you could ever want.
Now it’s maybe 6 sites, they all have the exact same listings, and the only things with seeds came out in the last year of two. It’s like seeing your local library after a fire.
I can never get a CG invite, personally, I’ve basically given up except for that offer in my bio to eternally curse your enemies for one (still standing btw).
Unfortunately they never do sign ups, open or interviewed, and even if they did interview I’m only on IPT, which nobody takes as proof lmao. I mostly use usenet these days unfortunately, but at least it does have it’s benefits, DrunkenSlug accts are easier to come by and it is faster, and they have many things, but unfortunately lack B movies and other stuff I’m really into, but at least there’s IPT, slsk, yt-dl and internetarchive for some of those.
One of the local secondary schools had a mailserver. No one knew or took security seriously in the mid-to-late nineties. As a result, it also hosted an ftp-server with widely shared credentials that held some 20GB worth of mp3s when it was shut down after three years in service. It was one of the biggest in the country at the time.
Irc and DCC-transfers were huge, too. As CD-writers became common place, a lot of it took place over snail mail or sneakernet. A guy at school had printed lists of all his tunes and took orders to burn them to music CDs.
I think the limited selection and limited transfers/storage made you cherish things more. Today you’ll never finish your library in your lifetime.
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