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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yup.

    I was vaguely interested in Dark Souls for years, but every time I tried, I bounced right off it. I went through a cycle where every year or two, I would pirate one of the souls games, try it out, give up on it after an hour or so, and do it all over again the next time I was sufficiently compelled to give the series another shot. This happened until several years ago when I tried Dark Souls II, and for some reason it finally clicked. I played my pirated copy of Dark Souls II for about 10 hours, before a random crash corrupted my save file.

    After that happened, I immediately bought the game on Steam and proceeded to play it for the next month and a half, until I eventually beat it. I’ve since purchased every souls game plus Elden Ring on Steam, and recently imported a copy of Bloodborne GOTY edition after spending $700 on an exploitable PS5, just so I could play it at 60FPS. None of these legitimate purchases would have ever happened if I hadn’t been able to repeatedly pirate Dark Souls for about five years.



  • Unironically, yes. Multiple studies dating back years have found a link between high intelligence and various mental health issues.
    There was one particular paper I read about a decade ago, where researchers surveyed a bunch of collage students to find demographic trends based on their preferred operating system. From what I recall, the demographics of Windows users were not too far off from those of the university as whole, and Mac users were similar, aside from women being significantly over-represented. Linux users on the other hand, were almost all men, and nearly every mental health issue imaginable was over-represented by a huge margin.










  • I see several people have already mentioned Soulseek, the one other place I’d recommend is rutracker. You have to sign up, and it’s in Russian, but it’s probably the easiest place to grab entire discographies, and you can occasionally find things there that aren’t on Soulseek.

    Of course if you’re really serious about music piracy, getting into the private tracker scene is the only way to go. redacted.ch specifically, is probably the most comprehensive music archive on the Internet right now.

    Edit: I just realized no one has mentioned stream rippers yet. If what you want is on a steaming service like Deezer or Qobuz, and hasn’t been shared elsewhere, there are tools to download it directly from the streaming service in full quality. Getting these set up can get a bit technical, and they often require a premium account, but there are Discord and Telegram bots that act as a fronted for these tools running on a server somewhere, which is the easiest way to use them.





  • If you have an LG smart TV running WebOS, there’s an exploit in the web browser you can use to gain root access and install the homebrew channel. It’s literally just going to a website and clicking a couple buttons. From there, you can install a number of different homebrew apps including the aforementioned Jellyfin, as well as ad-free YouTube, RetroArch and of course Doom.

    The homebrew channel also lets you run an ssh/telnet server that gives you remote access to the TV’s back-end command line and filesystem. I found this functionally extremely useful for allowing the TV to still get online while having it behind a DNS server that blocks access to all of LG’s telemetry domains.