When I was a poor student I pirated everything. Music, software, games, you name it.

Now that I have a good stable income, I pay for the things I want because I want to encourage artists and developers. But corporations and capitalism are ruining it all.

So, I’m changing my habits. Paying money where it actually has a significant impact on the creators, (like going to live concerts and shows, buying albums directly from the artist or from their own site, buying indie games from small studios, going to watch movies from studios that respect their employees and artists and unions) and pirating the ever loving shit out of everything else coming out of a large corporation.

First time, it was because I was a kid that couldn’t pay for the movies/music/games I wanted. The high seas provided me with a solution for that.

Then I started making money and Netflix streaming came along making it both cheap and convenient. I docked my ship and forgot about my pirate life for a long time. Everything was good, living a quiet life…

But then the corporate greed caught up and ruined everything. Streaming prices became absurd, content got fragmented to way too many services and they fucking started introducing ads.

So here I am, setting sail once again. I didn’t need or want this, but they have forced my hand with their infinite greed.

In the early 00s I pirated a lot of music, but now I buy records and pay for streaming because it’s affordable and good.

I used to pirate software but now I just use FOSS because it’s free and good.

I used to pirate games but now I just wait for steam sales, which is cheap and good.

I used to pirate lots of movies and tv shows but then got a Netflix account and it was reasonably priced and good… until it wasn’t. Then I set up a full stack of usenet/ sonarr/ radarr/ overseer/ Jellyfin and boy oh boy is that good.

But now I have a baby and don’t watch tv anymore so I pirate pretty much nothing.

I went back to it recently. It’s mostly down to Amazon deciding that paying them was no longer enough, you had to watch their ads as well.

Well now I don’t. I installed Jellyfin, paid up for two years of VPN, and got another HDD. I’m set. I’m all done with asking nicely for a better service so I got my own.

I sub to Spotify because it’s easier than pirating. I’m a creature of convenience. If there was one streaming service that had all movies that have already had their cinema run, and all TV shows, and was all in one UI, and nothing ever got taken off it, and it was a reasonable price (say the price of two current streaming services), I’d probably pay up for it.

But there isn’t. They don’t want to offer it. They all want to be king of their little corner.

I was poor. Pirates selling copied disks on the street was all I could afford

I’m honest so I will tell the truth: I like cheap stuff.

I’ve been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don’t pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.

I paid over $1k about 10 years ago for music software. My computer killed itself, so I made a new one and redownloaded the software…but the company said I’m an imposter. After years of fighting with them, they refused to activate my paid software despite proving my identity and showing proof of purchase. I didn’t choose to pirate, the system chose for me

For me it was the Simpsons when I was a kid and a relative would record it off satellite TV for me. It just carried on from there. I started recording stuff off TV myself, recording music on audio cassettes and eventually copying VHS tapes.

Then I got a PSX console and my parents “knew a guy” who burned games.

After that I heard about Napster and started downloading MP3s on the family PC. When Napster was shut down I moved onto other apps like Kazaa and Limewire.

Then I got a DVD burner. At first I just copied DVDs but when I got broadband I started downloading torrents and burned the files to DVDs.

About 10 years ago I started storing those files on a NAS. Planning on moving to Jellyfin in the next few weeks.

Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.

For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.

It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.

To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.

And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.

But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.

So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.

I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren’t all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.

Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don’t do advertising. Pisses me off.

So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I’m curating a music collection I’ve pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it’s feasible to replace Spotify but I can try

Was a student, couldn’t afford CDs.

Nowadays I

1. don’t want to subscribe to too many streaming services, each just having a few things I want to watch. Also I broke my neck and I’m now on disability, there’s no budget to waste, at all.
2. Like to watch old shows and “rare” movies that aren’t available anywhere.

Probably being unable to buy music when I was in my teens.

No job, no income, no way to get to the store anyway, and to top it off… half the music I liked I wouldn’t have been able to find anyways. (Fan songs/parodies)

So I learned that (free) YouTube downloaders and MP3 converters existed.

A bit later than that… NES/SNES games I wanted to play but those consoles were before my time. So I learned emulators existed.

So basically stuff I didn’t have access to otherwise.

I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it’s a better more enjoyable experience sailing.

I had the Soldier of Fortune original game disk, but lost the box with the CD key. Mailed the devs/publishers asking for help, sending a picture of the disks, and they basically told me that I should have been more careful. Googled “soldier of fortune CD key” and ended up on one of those now-defunct websites which collected cracks and CD keys, discovering that not only you didn’t need the key, but you could also just download free stuff.

Now I pay for Prime Video, Netflix and Spotify and buy lots of games on steam/gog, but I also created an app used by thousands of people every month to help them sail the four seas