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08/09/2024: Arrgh Me Mateys

(Warning: This blog mentions my history with piracy along with me ranting about anti-capitalism and classism. Arrghhh…)

No, I decided not to become a pirate. Instead, I’m going to talk about my history of piracy as people are now starting to go back sailing the seven seas for several reasons. From streaming sites getting rid of your favorite shows and movies on a whim to increasing prices on which plan you have, which means now the cheapest option they have is ADS (aka the main reason why people fled cable back in the 2010s’)!!! This disguised me as I thought streaming was an alternative to cable where you have to pay hundreds of dollars per month for a cable bundle and you end up watching only 3 channels! But now I found out its not, which makes me sad.

Now I shouldn’t be complaining because I’m currently living with my mom, who has a good paying job and can afford to pay Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ for our family to use.

But I am.

It’s because I feel bad for the working class who can’t afford to watch their favorite things just for the streaming sites to get rid of them with no warning or increase the prices. It’s the same thing for people who live in poorer countries where for some, the cheapest Netflix subscription is basically their monthly paycheck! And that’s just terrible.

It’s like the streaming sites are punishing them for being poor and for not have a good paying job in order to afford to watch their favorite things on their servers! Then when they can, they end up watching maybe, one show on one streaming site and another show on a different streaming site. It’s basically cable all over again!

Seeing the headlines of Netflix (and other streaming sites) increasing the price for the billionth time makes me mad as half of the stuff they put on their site now these days, sucks in general while they get rid of older shows and movies that is someone’s comfort food due to the license expiring! And how to people respond to this? Just cancelled their subscriptions and sail the seven seas as it’s cheaper.

Of course, this isn’t the first time people have done this. They have been pirating stuff since the 90s’, but it was only nerdy boys who live in suburb America and techno loving bros from Eastern Europe who do it all the time. Now, everyone does it. And everyone finds it COOL to pirate stuff that they can’t find on the streaming sites!

And unlike in the past, it’s now safer to pirate your stuff without getting the nasty virus on your computer. Of course, there’s still bad websites out there that tricks you in thinking your downloading some pirate contract, just for it only to be computer virus instead! That’s why there various guides on which pirating site is safe and which one isn’t.

Then there the other issue with pirating content is that there is a chance you’ll get caught by the government, where they’ll end up going to your house to arrest you for downloading that one show you used to watch growing up! Of course, they’re not going to do that. I know that in Germany (where I lived for a few years), you have to pay a €1,000 fine if you get caught because it’s actually illegal to stream and download pirated content over there! But here in America, you’ll instead get an email from your Internet service provider (ISP) saying that they caught you downloading something illegal and that the next they catch you doing it again; they either cut off your Internet speed or worst, end up getting banned from their provider!

The second part is the main reason why I was too scared to pirate stuff for the longest time is because my mom is the one who pay for the Internet. It’s my biggest fear that if mom gets an email from our ISP that they caught me pirating stuff; then she’ll go after me for ruining it for the family and that she needs it for job as she telework from home!

Thankfully, there’s a solution to this as all you need is a VPN route that changes the IP address and a torrent client with a kill switch and bind it with your VPN router. I know that my family has been using a VPN router for over 15 years, so that will decrease the chance of getting caught by our Internet provider. And I made sure to put a kill switch on my VPN route too in case the Internet goes out (which happens occasionally around where I live).

So now with all that set up, I can finally be like the nerds and the techno bros in the 90s’ who download all the cool stuff for them to keep! Then I remember that this isn’t the first time I have been exposed to pirated content: my late daddy did!

It was around late 2004 when daddy came home from work one day with some movies in a cheap, thin DVD case. He told me that he bought them from a friend (or so) for maybe $3-5 and he knows that I would like them. One of the movies he got me was The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. But the real kicker here is that the movie was still in THEATERS when daddy bought a copy! It turns out how it works is that someone snuck in a video recorder and records the entire movie in one sitting, without getting caught and later convert it into a DVD file!

Of course, 9 year old me didn’t think too much about this back then as I found this cool. I know that my family doesn’t go out too often and it’s nice not have to wait 6 months for the movie officially come out on DVD!

But I remember the downside of watching the recorded movie bootlegs is that it also record people’s reaction and movement in the theater, which was distracting to me. Well, there was always some type of catch when it comes to watching recorded pirated movies that is still in theaters. Despite that, daddy would end up buying more movie bootlegs for me and my oldest niece to watch until he died in late 2007. To this day, we still have the bootleg copies in our living room!

After movie bootlegs, I moved on to watching TV bootlegs. So I mention in one of my blog that when my family moved to Germany in 2009, I had to watch bootlegs of one of my favorite show, Total Drama, on the Internet since it never aired in Germany and the show was heavily censored on the British version of Disney XD. Of course, I got scared doing something so illegal because I thought I might get caught and mom had to pay the price because of my actions! So I had to be real careful and only watch the bootlegs when no one was home.

As for where I watched them, it was on YouTube (back when copyrights weren’t strict), which was a safer option at the time than going on an actual pirating site. It was thanks to YouTube, I managed to watch the skipped episodes of the 2nd season and the rest of the series, since the show later got cancelled on the British version of Disney XD.

Doing that made me remember a weird event in my life from watching the bootlegs of the show. It was in 2014 when I found out that season 6/5b of Total Drama (Pahkietw Island) end up airing in Italy, 1 MONTH before it aired in America! I got real mad for Italy for getting first dibs on the new season! But then I remember that I can watch the new season on YouTube instead. So I figure, no big deal. I have done this before…right?

Well, expect for the part where the show was in Italian! The thing is that I don’t speak any Italian, even though I have Italian blood on my late daddy’s side and I’ve been to the country 3 times when my family was living in Germany in the early 2010s’! Because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable watching the Italian dub (even though I should) for some reason. So what did I do?

Watch the episodes with no audio while listening to "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", a 17 minute long song by Iron Butterfly. I know, I’m very strange; but the episodes were only 22 minutes long and once that song is over, I go play another song to close out the episode. Don’t worry; I eventually watched the “official” English bootlegs a month later without the background music.

There are other things I did on YouTube besides watching Total Drama bootlegs, I also rip songs from there and convert them into MP3 files. I first did this in the 11th grade for an easy APUSH assignment, where we have to make a music video based off the two songs that our teacher has us pick from. After doing that and getting an A- on it, I started ripping more music off of YouTube.

Prior to that, I used to record music on the TuneIn app and listen to the hundreds of songs that I recorded, which they then sadly got rid in 2019 due to copyright issues with some of the podcasts they have on the app. Afterwards, I start finding the songs that I have recorded on the TuneIn app on YouTube; convert them to MP3 files and put them on the Music app to listen. I later found a way to put album covers on the converted files to make them look nice when I listen to music on my iPhone.

Then I stopped downloading songs from YouTube in 2015 when I start buying songs from the iTunes Store thanks to having money for once! So I decided to be a good, law abiding citizen and buy my music, the legal way. Then I eventually start paying for YouTube Premium (via credit card that my mom payoffs each month) in 2017 because of not only for YouTube Music, but also to stop ads from popping up in my videos since they were very distracting to me! When I decided to ditch YouTube Premium, I’ll go back to ripping the songs from YouTube and put them on the Music app, where I still have at least over 200 songs that I ripped from high school.

In 2021, I started playing emulated video games that I download from the Internet on my laptop via RetroArch. While I do have an actual Wii (which can also play GameCube games), WiiU and a PlayStation 2 (which can also play PlayStation 1 games), the problem is that used copies of the games for those systems are over $100, even more if it’s from a well-known franchise such as The Super Mario Bros. or The Final Fantasy series.

Of course, I can hack my console and put emulated games there as many people here on Neocities has screamed on the top of their lungs that it’s one of the best things they have done since someone invented the sandwich! But problem is that I (sometimes) have a bad habit of skipping steps when doing things, thanks to my autism. I’m worried that if I did a step wrong on hacking my console, I basically end up breaking it, which I don’t want to! One day I’ll do it, but for now, I’ll stick playing emulated games on my laptop since I’m more comfortable doing it from there.

So emulated games can solve that problem by playing those games on your computer (and/or on your hacked console), with no cost! But Nintendo (one of the big 3 gaming companies and whose games I played the most) is known to get very finicky with people pirating their stuff as once in a full moon, they like to take down sites that host emulated Nintendo games, which anger many who rely on the websites for downloading their old games! So I have to take that in consideration.

But the good thing about emulating games is that I can finally play the games that I played as child, but could never beat them for some reason. One of the first games I played on the RetroArch was Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Unite!, a late Game Boy Color game that for some reason I could never beat when I was a 7 year old. I even mention this in the Game Boy Color section in my Gaming Consoles subpage as I used to own the physical copy before I sold it off in 2015 (which I still regret to this day). But playing an emulate version on my laptop and actually beating the game for once, made me happy as there’s now a way to play old games that I had to give up for reasons.

I also played other gaming classics that I never had a chance to play when I grew up. Because of that, I tend to emulate only up to Gen 6 video games as that era was my childhood. Hopefully, I try to play more of them along with the other (and modern) games that I bought for the Stream and the Switch and try to take down my gaming backlog too.

Now these days, I mainly pirate anime and emulate classic video games as it’s one of the few things I’m comfortable doing as I sail the seven seas. I only pirate anime series that I wanted to watch, but isn’t on Netflix or Hulu. But at the same time, not pay for a Crunchyroll subscription, where I end up watching only 1 anime and it’s a one-off! Now that’s wasteful.

Like I mention before, I’m emulating classic video games as I don’t feel like buying new video games right now or support modern AAA companies where they like to release poorly made games and overwork their workers to death. While I still like Nintendo, they occasionally like to do anti-capitalism stuff such as shutting down fan projects and taking down emulators, which make me have second thoughts on supporting them. Especially when they like abandon older consoles and games as soon they release a new and shiny console, which is going to happen to the Switch next year.

Beside those two things, one of the biggest things I did this summer is pirated the new season of Total Drama! Wait, didn't I write a blog (the one I mention way above) that I was going to wait until it finally aired on Cartoon Network? Yes, while I did watch the first episode legally, but not the rest.

That's because in that blog, the show has been out for a year and all the diehard fans have already seen it, so there is nowhere on the Internet to talk about the show now since everyone has already seen it (and at the same time, risked getting spoiled). I hate it when I feel left behind as I was going to wait for the official release when the new season came out in Italy last year, thinking it won't be long until it aired in America. You can thank scheduling conflict on Cartoon Network’s side for that as we’re now the last country to see the new season! Jerks!

Of course after seeing the 1st episode (and having mixed reaction over it), I was originally going to wait until the next week to see the 2nd episode. But I couldn’t wait any longer and decided to go back on the same route that I did in high school! Unfortunately, I can’t rely on YouTube to have the bootlegs anymore since copyrights on the site are now strict to the point that if you tried to put one episode of the show there, it’ll be gone in a flash!

So I went with Plan B by swallowing my pride, put on my pirate hat, turn on the VPN router for safety and sail the seven seas to a pirating site that has all the episodes. Funny thing is when I watched the 2nd episode there; it was a pirate-themed where the captains from each team wore pirate hats! It was basically a sign from the universe that they know what I did!

So after a few days, I finished season 7/6a and LOVED IT! It looked like the people who saw the bootlegs beforehand were right as they said was one of the best seasons they saw since SEASON 1 (which is a big deal as no other seasons can match the highly praised 1st season)!!! Now, I’m kicking myself for not watching the season when it first came out last year! At least the plus side of seeing it now is that it’s keeping me (mostly) distracted from reading the terrible news.

Eventually, I saw season 8/6b which aired early this year, on the pirating site and…it’s not that good. Like, it’s not like season 5/5a (All Stars) bad. But it’s basically like season 2 (Action), but with its only 13 episodes long and had a (somewhat) disappointing finale. But it had some good parts, which kept season 8/6b from being that bad.

But don’t worry; I’ll still legally watch the show on Cartoon Network when there’s new episodes (even this means waking up around 8am on a Saturday morning to do so) and when there’s reruns (which include [for me] a 5am Tuesday rerun slot).

At the end of the day, I’ll still pirate even though I live in a middle class home and that my mom can afford to pay for all the streaming subscriptions that my family have. Like I’ll only do it if it’s the last resort or if I don’t want to pay over $100 for a retro game/console just for it to not work because the CD is too scratched up or it has missing parts. I know that there’s people who won’t pirate as they think it’s wrong, that they want to legally support their favorite creators/companies by buying their things legally or they don’t know how to do it. I get that and I’ll respect their decision as long they’re not in my face about it.

But I wish companies would stop jacking up the prices every few months in order please their investors as it’s one of the few reasons why people are going back towards piracy. I also wish they stop deleting the content that will make it hard for people to watch their favorite stuff and have to go on the pirating sites to look for it. Then you’re wondering why people are starting to buy DVDs again after streaming took over in the mid-2010s! It just sucks man.

But to end this blog on a light note; here a screenshot of one of the captains from the 2nd episode that I mention a few paragraphs ago, wearing a pirate hat.

Yes, that’s Wayne holding (and was looking through) the telescope backwards because he’s not that bright. But he’s a good boy either way. :)