Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
Stremio?
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Something I learned back in the day: “Never pay for warez”. Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you’re interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
Except the value proposition still needs to make sense, so resigning to just pay the
creatorlicense holder exorbitant rates for ever-more-enshittified services is learning the wrong lesson.They have used their control over the system to grotesquely distort copyright from its original intent of getting more cultural works into the public domain for people to use and build on, to instead lock everything away for lifetimes. Don’t buy into their lies and propaganda that they have any moral high ground.
This is spot on.
I hate you. Because you’re not really wrong in most parts. Ownership of devices pisses me off for what feels like an eternity now. I can’t imagine how sales would go for PCs if you would get not admin-access anymore. But I smell that future coming. At least if we had not all switched to Linux by then. But even if, then the war between corpos and community would be on the “you can’t access amazon from this insecure decice”-front.
Me, personally, currently live at the peak of piracy right now. The pinnacle I’ve dreamt of days back when selling wares on CDs for triple digits was a thing. Sonarr/radar/etc makes it so easy and awesome now. Enter a movie’s name, wait a minute, watch it.
As to your Netflix/streaming-point: add that only muricans had it THAT nice. Some countries had to pay full price yet only got access to like 30% (Romania, Italy,etc.). The rest got filled with local crap. You saw the shit when using search but then it was gone. I had Netflix for a year or so. When it was more comfy than wares. And then it gradually became worse but also more expensive. The usual enshittification
I think your doom and gloom scenario is a little dramatic considering we already have Linux. The free platform where you have full control over your technological experience already exists and has been well maintained for decades at this point. Sure, proprietary software not working on Linux sucks and will continue to be an issue, but there’s typically FOSS alternatives for the useful programs.
It’d be more accurate to say we’ll have two Internets, especially since that’s expressly what Google wants. The ignorant people will all flock to the corpo slopping trough, and people like us will be using Linux devices to access federated sites like this one.
Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says “Android/LineageOS is Linux”, 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn’t a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn’t Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).
Now, if anyone says “Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!” (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you’re more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.
This is true but is only applicable as long as manufacturers still allow alternative OS to exist. It sounds crazy now but the idea of not being able to use an alternative is something that manufacturers are clearly toying with (see the x elite laptops with locked boot loaders, hp secureboot, etc).
They’ve seen the control they can exert over users with mobile devices and they want that across the spectrum. Then it goes back to a point I made in another comment; Linux/foss users can and will still exist but they will be restricted to ancient hardware that prevents them from working on certain tasks. This already occurs: look at a true foss idealist that will only use hardware that can run coreboot/libreboot. You’re generally running hardware well over a decade old at this point. If you want to work on any computationally complex task (ml models, high poly 3d modeling, anything requiring a modern discrete gpu really), you’re out of luck unless you compromise your ideals
The thing is Linux users and other power users think “if manufacturers lock the bootloader there will be a huge outcry and people won’t buy it”. And there is truth to that, there will be a lot of noise online. But most users won’t care and they’ll still buy the stuff. And apple/google/hp/lenovo/etc will push/pay their buddies at facebook/reddit/etc to downplay the discussion/outrage so it will blow over quick and become a normal thing. Then all it takes is a new dmca extension or modification and now overriding a manufacturer lock on a bootloader is an illegal modification
Right but you can still build your own PC. I already don’t bother with a laptop or any of that other garbage because they are just worthless tech garbage. Sure, the new MacBook/Chromebook/etc will be locked down, but they’re already a bitch to get a different OS running on so I’d argue we’re already there.
Essentially what would be required is DRM from Intel or AMD on their CPUs to prevent you from ultimately installing whatever OS you want, and I don’t think that fits their business model. I think they just want to make a bunch of money selling overpriced silicone, and don’t need control of the platform. Sure, your software will be a few steps behind the cutting edge corpo stuff, but you make it sound like people will be trapped on their 2010 Thinkpad. You can still have a high powered computer, you just have to be part of a different ecosystem.
“Intel Boot Guard is an ME application introduced in Q2 2013 with ME firmware version 9.0 on 4th Generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 (Haswell) CPUs. It allows a PC OEM to generate an asymmetric cryptographic keypair, install the public key in the CPU, and prevent the CPU from executing boot firmware that isn’t signed with their private key. This means that coreboot and libreboot are impossible to port to such PCs, without the OEM’s private signing key. Note that systems assembled from separately purchased mainboard and CPU parts are unaffected, since the vendor of the mainboard (on which the boot firmware is stored) can’t possibly affect the public key stored on the CPU.”
From libreboot faq. There is precedent for this and it just hasn’t been heavily exercised, yet
Unless you build the hardware you cannot prevent this from happening. It’s merely a question of how long until 99% of tech devices are basically iphones and you need a very restrictive “developers license” to buy the (likely extremely expensive) 1% that are not that puts legal repercussions on you if you do anything that they do not like
Torrenting is less common but thats because most piracy is just streaming now. Its more profitable to host a streaming site, youre less likely to get a virus streaming compared to torrenting now, and its easier to access and find.
The less likely to get a virus point is arguable but I get what you’re saying
Really the thing is private trackers kind of put themselves out of the game. Like let’s look at a common path to get to some of the more well known coveted private trackers:
Do an irc interview about the rules and culture of a site with a staff member. You will have to study, sit in irc for god knows how long for someone to be available, and pass. Alternatively, know someone already in who trusts you and will burn an invite
Then you’re in. Now you have to upload music, which is much less commonly pirated bc music streaming isn’t fucking stupid and fragmented these days (though pricing keeps rising so maybe we’ll see a return). To get to the point where you can be invited to sites that would actually have movies and tv and games and shit you need 25 gigs uploaded and a 0.7 ratio minimum. Also the sites been around a while and the people on it are meticulous music collectors so finding something to upload is actually challenging, when you do you have to make sure you meet the strict guidelines, etc
That’s a lot! Like learning to use a torrent client is easy. Asking a 2024 tech dummy to learn irc? Come on. At the same time the filter is needed, the people who truly want to be there are what make the communities so great, and the vetting process is what keeps feds out (for the most part they go for low hanging fruit sites like rarbg)
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.
Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.
So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring
This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done
You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling
One assumption I made is that there will be a continuous demand for self build PCs which will be an entry point for a lot where you can run your own operating system and own choice of hardware. My next assumption is that custom ROMs are gonna stick around or at least Linux phones will become usable in the future since tech savvy privacy people are interested in this. Then I hope the EU will continue to step up and the administration after Trump will support certain right to repair legislation. It doesn’t need a giant group of people for a viable alternative to exist and I think there can be compromises between going stallman or giving up on ownership. Media servers and NAS for example are also really loved in a specific subset of people and I do not think people are willing to give up what they have. I get why you think the way you do and maybe I am too optimistic… I just think I’m not
Dependent on hardware that allows for such things. I think/hope you are right and that demand for such things will continue to enable their presence for at least some time but I fear the eventual end of things is hardware that is completely unable to be customized, repaired, or modified in any meaningful way. iphones for everyone.
The tech moguls are cozying to trump hard and that’s not for nothing. They’re going to get something in return.
I hope you’re right though
I’ve made a similar comment on r/austrian_economics and got called a communist for it lol
But yeah, well said.
tbf, there are alternatives to torrenting now. I usually recommend fmovies, sudo-lol, or other streaming websites because the barrier to entry for those sites is just knowing the URL and having ublock origin.
I agree with you though that today’s young adults are not as technologically inclined as young adults of the early 2000s where torrenting was rampant. But everyone understands a website.
Torrenting is hard compared to a visiting a website. Not only do you have to vet each torrent, you have to download a second piece of software (torrent client) to make sure it works, all the while making sure your router is set up correctly. And even if they set all this up correctly, they’ll get a letter/email saying that they downloaded a file illegally since they didn’t use a VPN. That will scare a novice user and stop torrenting.
Real-debrid is a weird one, it’s clearly you paying for piracy, but they’ve been around since forever.
I personally don’t have too much of an issue for paying for piracy. It’s money I would pay to Netflix if their catalog was decent.
Servers cost money.
If anything, these assholes streaming companies should see people paying for pirated content and say, “We should do better” instead of “ThEy ArE sTeAlInG oUr CoNtEnT!”
Edit: I looked up Real Debrid. Their website is sketchy. What exactly is it?
My understanding is that it’s torrent and direct download caching on a massive scale, by file hash or something like that.
They cache torrents, magnets and ddl links at an astonishing scale.
You can put in pretty much any even decently popular magnet or ddl link set and get a direct download link with near infinite bandwidth (my 500Mbit connection is saturated every time)
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you’re right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can’t even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
Yeah, on average you will find less and less tech savvy people in real life moving forward.
But if you were to ask a programming question on the most popular coding site, you would get more responses today than 20 years ago.
Yeah, but what’s the relative quality of responses? I feel like the bar for “tech savvy” or “competent at programming” has dropped precipitously. And unfortunately, the number of people confidently asserting a wrong answer online is high in my experience, including on programming forums.
Think about it this way,
Has the total number of C++ experts gone down since 20 years ago or has it gone up? The total market share has gone down, but total amount of systems running C++ has increased.
Today is more lucrative to be an expert than 20 years ago, and there are far more positions that offer good money.
It’s also easier to make money by knowing very little programming.
So the question is, would the people capable of being a true expert avoid that path today even though it’s more lucrative, I don’t think so.
The only difference is, 20 years ago, only the true experts were online, now they probably don’t enjoy being online as much and are probably big fans of old school hobbies (like wood working)
I’m also inclined to believe what the other person was saying, because nowadays like you say people don’t know how to use their devices to their full potential, but then I remember there used to be a time when I was the only one with a smart phone and everyone else was looking at me like I’m a weirdo for being on this phone during a commute for example, something that today is normal.
The nerdy people are still there and know how to use these tools, the general masses are still as clueless as always, they are just late adopters that never learned anything past what the walled gardens feed them. At least that’s my feeling.
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it’s a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix’s desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren’t left in the lurch.
Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
It’s remarkable how people can see right past what was actually happening and only see what they want to see. Netflix was never trying to be the good guy. Netflix didn’t offer low prices out of the goodness of it’s hearts. It doesn’t have a heart, it has a ledger. The reason why Netflix offered a lot of content for a low price is because the company was trying to disrupt traditional cable. It was always the plan to increase prices, Netflix didn’t become greedy, it always was. It’s just that for a time the companies greed aligned with the publics greed. Once that relationship was no longer beneficial to Netflix it raised the prices, that was the plan all along.
But that’s a zero sum argument. Every company is evil following that logic. No company does anything except for money.
You can make that argument, but it isn’t unique to Netflix.
You’re getting there! Just a little further, now.
There certainly are some companies that seek to do good, or are run by good people. Arizona Green Tea is the current favourite but there are for sure others. The thing is though that there’re huge incentives to being greedy and awful, and a distinct lack of punishment for that behaviour, to the point where so fucking many of these companies are either evil or committing enough evil actions that it doesn’t matter at all the difference anymore.
Also they weren’t saying that the argument is unique to Netflix but ok then.
That’s not overcomplicating it. That’s the exact impetus for Netflix to make their own content (nothing premature about it).
It doesn’t really matter, though. The only cause of companies pulling their content is Netflix’s success. There was no way Netflix could have prevented it.
Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn’t a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.
So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like “we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running.” And Netflix was like “we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with.”
RIP Inside Job
Unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan. Was it a bad show? No! Did I enjoy it? Sometimes. How it developed the cult following that it has, I can’t quite piece together. Fantastic voice acting and sound design can only pull so much weight!
An excellent concept with some interesting opportunities, butchered by regressing it to the same kitschy formulaic plotlines as every other uninspiring adult animation show. I don’t want Big Bang Theory, I want Twin Peaks.
I didn’t care for it either.
I gave it like 3-4 episodes but couldn’t do it. I thought given the cult following and reputation it’d be right up my alley.
Fantastic acting and production quality can elevate any media but especially TV shows. Look at Shrinking for a prime example. It has the production quality of Dispatches From Elsewhere but it’s essentially a three camera sitcom like Modern Family or hell All in the Family. And it’s KILLING right now.
People like the humor of Inside Job and the fantastic quality made it so much better.
I guess if you’re in the market for cola, you’ll look for the cola with the best taste. But seeing a discontinued cola lauded as a fallen behemoth is a bit odd, from my perspective
#everybodysawful
I’m doing my part 🫡
everyone is forced to pay for media
Anon never copy vhs, cassette tape, cd, and dvd. I lived in southeast asia and pirated cd/dvd is openly sold in night market and low foot traffic part of the mall throughout the late 90s till early 2010s, only occasionally they got raid. Before that we basically record show from cable and rental then copy for each others.
But yes, as GabeN proved again and again, piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. Almost.
Exactly!
When I found Netflix, I subbed and stayed a customer for years because they provided the content I wanted at a low price. Now, however, the content has been split across a bunch of different streaming services, and juggling subscriptions and finding the content I want is a PITA, so I don’t bother. I cancelled everything except Netflix, and I plan to cancel that next month once my SO finishes the Netflix originals they want to watch, and we just buy what we want and I rip them to our Jellyfin server (or if I can’t find it legally to own, we pirate).
I’m a bit less concerned about the price and more frustrated by the change in user experience. I understand they can’t have everything all the time, but now it seems like they rarely have what I want, so we end up not using the service much. Screw paying for something I don’t use.
Valve has the right idea. I could jump between services and get a bit better deal, but I actually end up rebuying games I got free on other platforms because the Steam experience is so good. I have a Steam Deck, and it’s really nice to just pick it up and play. My desktop is Linux, and it’s really nice that most games just work w/o fiddling. I still shop around a little, but most of my gaming money goes to Valve because the service works well.
Also too, using cassettes to max mix tapes from the radio
Even into the 90s, I remember making cassette tapes of the local college radio shows.
One of my earliest memories as a little kid was my father putting a tape recorder in front of a record player speaker, and telling us all to be quiet because he was recording it. (Later on we got the fancier stereo with direct audio hookups.)
I remember feeling so excited when I got a shitty toy tape recorder with a microphone. The first thing I did was record all three Tetris songs from my Gameboy.
Netflix didn’t get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said “we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies”.
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just “Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.”, I called this shit. I said “Well that’s just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one’s going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch.”
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn’t charge relying on ads alone, and it’s a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I’m going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
And they somehow just became profitable… while also already legacy owning thr vast majority of content
I can’t prove the data wrong, but I will say it’s not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is. Tons of incentives to do so, little reason not to.
Also since you quote revenue not profit, they were still net unprofitable as of 2023 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/streaming-profit-report-netflix-disney-warners-paramount-nbcu-1235868631/
it’s not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is.
Didn’t Xbox do something like this? I heard they converted all remaining Xbox Live subscribers to Xbox Game Pass.
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money…
Disney’s newer efforts are kinda showing it’s not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they’re holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn’t on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present… and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it’s easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but… think of it this way.
Disney’s been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They’re a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank’s running out of gas. You won’t know it’s running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it’s going it will take awhile…
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn’t going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they’ll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo’s Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren’t even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii… The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn’t already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn’t wind up in bankruptcy, but they’d need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind).
But mufasa IS animated
You know what I mean
It’s also shit. Animation only goes so far.
Say what you will about Sonic. No one involved in those films is having a bad time. There’s a lotta heart there and it shows.
Mufasa is shlok incarnate.
I love that IGN reviewed both movies and gave Sonic a 6 out of 10 despite saying it’s the “Best movie of the franchise” and that Jim Carey was amazing as both Dr. Robotnik and Dr. Robotnik. (For the record Sonic 1 and 2 were given a 7)
And that Mufasa was given an 8 out of 10 despite IGN’s review struggling to come up with anything nice to say.
It not only validates my own (low) opinion of IGN and their track record of hating on Sonic just because it’s Sonic, but it makes me laugh. We’re seeing big corporations slowly losing control.
They can’t tell us what we should like and not like anymore. The market has never been freer to decide what movies they like and what games to play. (Balatro being the only real game at the Awards with Remake, DLC, and Tech Demo being the other options is kind of hillarious)
Also it’s kinda weird, a movie inspired by Hamlet that demands to be taken seriously is considered low grade shlock, and an adaptation of a twenty year old old video game who’s greatest literary contribution is children’s comic books made to promote games, toys, and t-shirts is considered the PEAK of Cinema… Especially when such a thing is actually a sign of society recovering from brainwashing and not falling deeper into it.
I can hear Ebert rolling in his grave and I’m here for it.
I’ll also say this, Sonic 3 is a god damn masterpiece. It got me to take Maria’s death seriously.
In the games Maria Robotnik is such a shallow one-note character who I don’t even dislike, because there isn’t enough of her to form an opinion on one way or another.
Now sure, I’m happy to slap the shit out of anyone who’d dishonor her memory, but… I’m doing that as Shadow, to SHADOW she’s the only real friend he’s ever had. To me, she’s just a cheap attempt to get invested to take a story trying WAY too hard to be grimdark when all I really wanna do is go fast and
eat assgrab rings.Most Sonic characters serve a gameplay function, so all you really need is their archetype. Flying tech guy, Punchy boy, Lovesick Hammer Girl, Kicky boob lady, Skatebird with a skateboard, Trunks-from-DBZ and his crazy physics engine! (Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Rouge, Jet, and Silver)
Shadow however needs his narrative to back him up or else he’s just “Emo Sonic”
So I’ve seen Maria die many, many times, and honestly it keeps getting funnier as she slowly devolved from “Cheap tearjerker bait” to “Meme”
Sonic 3 gave Maria a character, actually showed her bonding with Shadow, and took her so seriously that if she were in any other movie franchise; This would be a film about a girl who makes friends with an alien and with the power of friendship is able to show everyone that he means no harm, and that it doesn’t matter what you look like, and all that with everyone singing a silly song over a campfire…
Sorry Maria, but this aint your faerie tale, it’s Shadow’s grim fable.
So when she died, she did something no Maria story, not in games, comics, or anime has ever done before. Even though I knew it was coming she made me feel, shock, anger, and misery to such an extent that it was all too easy to sympathize with Shadow’s pain.
Don’t forget another thing in common between Nintendo and Disney: lawsuits. And obsession with intellectual property. Not required to be against their own fans, but it is preferred.
At this point I’m surprised I haven’t been sued for wearing a Waddle Dee hat that I paid in public. (I don’t have the Kirby License)
Given Disney’s stranglehold on animation and general lack of interest in high quality 2d animation it’s been quite interesting seeing the market for high quality foreign animation grow so much. At one time Studio Ghibli relied on Disney for distribution in the US, but now they’re a name that can stand on its own (and with the gkids acquisition/merger we should be seeing more Japanese animation hitting American screens and theatres)
I have to expect foreign and indie animation studios to continue to grow in market share as Disney continues to ignore 2d animation and continues it’s overly rapid production schedules that don’t allow for the quality.
Simply put, you watch a non-disney animated film or even just any of Disney’s animated films from before they killed hand drawn animation and there’s so much quality lost, where you go from every single frame being it’s own masterpiece of artwork to just enough set dressing to not look out of place but good luck finding a still you’d want to hang on your wall.
I give it about 10 years before Disney is forced to course correct. Just long enough for kids who haven’t seen a good animated film released by Disney their entire childhoods to become teens/adults and start paying to consume competitors content instead
I give it five
Pluto is also free with ads
🏴☠️🎶"Yo! Ho! All hands, hoist the colours high!"🎶🏴☠️
That’s a weird as heck christmas song.
The One Piece is real!.. and can be seen on [Streaming Site REDACTED]
You pirate because prices are too high
I pirate because I have kleptomania
We are not the same
it’s only theft if they lose it when you take it
theft enjoyers unite
But piracy is not theft, it’s copyright infringement.
Piracy isn’t theft, because on modern media platforms, “buying” doesn’t actually sell you permanent copies. It just gives you temporary access to a DRM’d file that they can remotely disable at any time. If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.
Yeah, that’s what I said. It’s not stealing but technically it is copyright infringement which is not same as stealing. I mean I’m not judging anyone I also sometimes pirate.
fuck streaming, long live piracy
All I’m going to say is every computer I had was equipped with 2 disk drives until 2010. Elder Millennials and Gen X know why.
So you can play videogames while burning disks? Idk.
Don’t tell me you copied that floppy
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My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a “boot disk” that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was “Copy II Plus”), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again… It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.
It was more of a convenience thing. If you had 1 drive you had to babysit the read portion to then install the CD-R after. If you had two it was just load both and carry on for 20 minutes and come back to it.
That was just if you were burning a copy and not ripping. But you’re right it wasn’t necessary. I just remember more than once wanting a second drive so I didn’t have to sit and wait to put the CD-R in after.
It went marginally faster
This post is basically all wrong
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn’t too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn’t allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because “That’s like Kazaa, we’ll get sued into ruin,” but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn’t immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
My first piracy was trading dubbed (as in copied vhs tapes) anime tapes in the 90s because that was literally the only way to get it in small town america unless it was something huge like akira. Although the releases often were dubbed. Kids today don’t know how good they have it with arguing subbed vs dubbed. In the 90s you got what you got and that’s how you watched sailor moon
minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started
It’s currently at $7.25 so think about how much you could afford now!
Stream deez nuts. Glory to the pirates
I want to watch Dark Matter without a million popups, malware or shady “trust me bro” programs.
ever heard of ad blocker and sandbox?
elaborate.
ad blockers are as easy as searching ublock in firefox addon stores. Nowadays one does not need anything out of browser to stream content (except perhaps a vpn), so most likely your_favorite_show.exe(/apk) is malware. But even if it is legit but potentially contains malware you can always use a vm/android emulator (vm actually) depending on the software type.
Going to have to pirate it or pay for ad free.
oh sorry, I thought this was the piracy community. my question would have suggested that I wanted to learn how to do it, if I was there.
r/piracy is still the best piracy community. Unfortunately there is no match in lemmy.
Well, not that one can see from lemmy.world anyway, since they block [email protected]. But for everyone else on lemmy feel free to stop by!
shit, time to make an alt.
Oh, You want to use Firefox with ublock origin and a few other privacy add-ons if your not already, then just find a shady streaming site form the FMHY link that doesn’t sketch you out too much. Your going to have to browse a few until you find one that’s cozy and has what you want. You may also want a paid VPN for privacy if your worried, but I haven’t heard of any one getting in shit for streaming and its very rare for torrenting.
I thought you were having a laugh.
FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah) has a pretty solid guide for beginners on how to find most forms of media safely.
Kodi + Fen Light plugin + Alldebrid + Trakt account. This setup is the easiest for people who don’t want to torrent or setup a NAS. It’s basically a pirated streaming service with the highest quality of streams. Alldebrid is a paid for service though but it is super cheap.
Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
I2p is great , definitely the future
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Join i2p? What do you mean?
I’m just as confused as you are
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so right, I can’t believe how right you are
First rule of usenet. Dont talk about usenet
Good point, fixed
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Why be so combative?
Edit:_why he be?
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
I watched Key The Metal Idol in 56 kbps. Downloaded, of course, because trying to stream using RealPlayer never fucking worked. I’m pretty sure I could fire up a server and client over my home network, to-day, and it’d still pause with “Buffering…” twice per minute.
Anyway, I’m discussing video on Game Boy in another thread, and dial-up quality video was still ridiculous.
Those RealPlayer Southpark episodes were 15mb and had 8 pixels
South Park’s graphics were so bad back then that probably almost sufficed.
Yes, but you are old as a rock.
Those times are lost in the unknowable pre-history of what we call “the internet” today.We’re just as stable!.. Maybe.
it would certainly make me feel better about myself if I knew rocks complain about their backs as much as I do
How do I know you’re not just a rock in a trench coat, complaining about human foibles like back pain to blend in???
Actually, how can I be sure I’m not?
Dun Dunn dunnnnnnn
Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies’ work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
