I don’t just pirate for the sake of piracy. If I download something, it’s because I either intend to use it or watch it or because a family member asked me to get it for them.

That said, even though I do it for the destination, I love the journey as well. I’ve been torrenting for a little over 10 years now, and for most of that time, I was just a hit-and-run user because I didn’t have dedicated resources for doing it. I ran qBittorrent in a virtual machine, grabbed my stuff, and then wiped it out. Last year though, after years of torrenting without consequences, I got two love letters from my ISP within a very short period of time, and because of that, I decided to redo my setup. I now use a dedicated computer as a seedbox over a VPN and try to seed as much as I can. It’s sort of funny. My seedbox sits on a shelf in my bedroom and I always have a strange sense of satisfaction when I walk by or lay awake in bed and see the little hard drive LED flashing away because somewhere in the world, someone’s connected to my little computer to grab a copy of something that I also wanted.

I adore hacker and torrenting culture. I seed terabytes of data per month and run a media server for all my friends and family. Seeing my torrent client upload speed saturated with hundreds of people from all over the globe is honestly a vibe.

Yes. Sharing is caring, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling from having a high seed ratio

Right there with ya. I’m a data hoarder first and foremost. I have two goals when it comes to piracy:

A) If I have ever watched, read, listened, played, or otherwise enjoyed a piece of media, I will have it available at all times.

B) Do what I can to preserve said data so 40 years from now when I’m telling kids about some generic super hero comic, or SNES game, or obscure TV miniseries, I can pull that shit up in seconds instead of being the old senile man telling stories.

I got 30TB of space, I got almost every movie, TV show, stand up special, album, video game, comic book, novel, and essential software that I want (and adding more daily), and it’s all served up to whatever friend wants it via Plex or whatever-other-means-I-need-depending-on-the-media.

Meanwhile I’m on my 35th watch through of Archer lol

I had so much time yet so few things to watch and play growing up, I think I’ve become a data hoarder as a “response” to this. Now I love being able to provide friends & family all the content they could ever want.

Honestly I’m kinda a datahoarder lol so I basically archive things for the sake of preservation. In this aspect I guess this coincides with your point, since many things I pirate I don’t really consume, I just might potentially consume, or find it valuable, so I pirate it and keep it lol

Download 500 GB of content in 3 days

Don’t watch a single thing in the jellyfin library for weeks

Yeah, I guess so. Tbf I’ve already been watching less shows / movies in general for a while now.

Beyond “trying out” games. I like the idea of saving things or quickly grabbing things that might not be available for long. For example on a hard drive somewhere I have that early test build of Skate that was leaked like a year or two ago.

I’ll also say that as I get older I really appreciate how many more plug-and-play resources there are now. I can get a whole game package that self installs and I’m good to go. No more having to get an ISO from some sketchy Russian site or rolling the dice on TPB and then mounting it to virtual disk. With the power of adblockers/tracking blockers I can stream basically anything from any service with a few clicks from the megathread.

piracy turned me into a cinephile, i must have seen 2000+ movies in the last fifteen years

I actually downloaded Dune like 4 times, and spent hours remuxing a perfect franken-version which I’m yet to watch.

My LG C2 supports dolby atmos digital+ audio (but not truehd), and supports dolby vision profile 8, but not 7. Blu rays come with profile 7 and truehd. And streamable version of files come with dolby 5 video, and dolby digital audio. So I ended up converting the original blu ray from 7 to 8, with a multi step process with dovi_tool and ffmpeg, and then when remuxing I used the audio from the webDL version, so I could get both dolby vision 8 from a blu ray mux, and dolby digital audio from a webDL version.

This is the process I did: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25354

All of that was very fun and rewarding actually, but I still end up watching 720p/1080p shows that I want to watch instead.

Piracy is heavily intertwined with self host/privacy for me so yeah same. I have the whole servarr stack setup but I probably use it the least out of everyone on it. My wife watches several movies a day when she can so its mainly for her. But I love building out the services and adding new things.

Praise the lord and pass me another 22tb drive.

Lurking through communities related to my favorite literary genres while having Z-Lib is like walking into a candy store as a 10-year-old and being told that you can get all that you want free of charge. Of course curating a library is enjoyable lmao

I actually like the download limit that Z-Lib has for regular users. If you use it up, it moght be a good time for you to go actually read what you have downloaded.

I’ll say I spent more time and had more fun jailbreaking my old Nintendo consoles than I did playing the countless hours of games I put on them.

There’s something really magical about having to fold a paper clip and put it into the joycon rails to MAYBE get your Switch to boot into Recovery Mode.

Honestly, the interesting tidbits you learn as you dig yourself into that rabbit hole is actually quite intriguing and fun. So yeah - I’d say it is also quite “fun” for the process itself!