Omg, thank you so much for this - I had no idea!

Not being able to open image in new tab and download them anymore has made it functionally useless for me.

You’re not wrong and I’m happy that piracy communities exist in spaces where access is easily cheap and accessible if only for the days that those industries get greedier. But for now, I’m happy to pay when it’s affordable and easy to access.

I half agree with what Gabe Newell said in regards to piracy being a service issue and not about price. I think it largely is a service issue. Access is the greater problem. Price is secondary as long as it’s somewhat reasonable. I don’t pirate video games because I can get them reasonably, but he is a smidge wrong insofar as I don’t buy the outrageously expensive games. Steam’s major success is having good sales that keep me away from pirating because the possibility of games I want going on discount at some point is realistic. It’s telling that the only time I did dabble in video game piracy was to relive my childhood memories of Nazi Zombies from the Call of Duty video games. I dabbled in it then because Activision is selling their decades old games for outrageous prices considering their age and their “sales” are weak considering the already overinflated price. I refuse to pay for that. And so I sailed the high seas.

The music industry is still affordable and accessible, so I don’t feel that pressure at all. Back when Limewire was around the pressure was there partially because I was a kid and didn’t have much money and hunting down CDs I wanted for the obscure music I liked was challenging. It was mostly an accessibility issue that Spotify fixed. If their prices move beyond my means then that relationship will no longer benefit me and the sails will raise once more.

I thought I was so smart spamming the caterpillars into the password. I overfed Paul.

The funniest moment has to have been when I Googled “9 minute 34 second Youtube video” and there was at least one video literally titled “9 MINUTES AND 34 SECONDS TIMER COUNTDOWN [574 seconds - 9:34]” and the video was 9 minutes 49 seconds long. I proceeded to Google different numbers of seconds looking for one that hit the perfect number and literally none of the videos, despite seemingly hundreds of videos of very specific times happened to fall on the 9 minute 34 second mark. Like, what insane world is happening in the great depths of Youtube where people spend hours posting completely arbitrary timers on Youtube, but specifically avoid ones that are 9 minutes, 34 seconds in length. I felt set up. I was rolling in laughter. 10/10 would spend my night Googling Youtube timers and overfeeding an emoji chicken again.