There are a lot of really dog shit things in the world of tech that can be solved with a bit of time, some stubborn googling and maybe some special hardware and piracy is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Printers are notorious for claiming they’re out of ink when they haven’t come close to the suggested number of prints, and their cartridges literally still have ink in them. So after a bit of googling I found out how to ‘reset’ a cartridges automatic stopping system (its literally 1 physical wheel on the cartridge that you gotta turn back). The only downside is that I don’t get a digital ink monitor, but since it told me it was empty when still half full, I don’t mind. 

Like, you can just jiggle with some shit and solve one of the biggest money making scams in the post-industrial world and I don’t think people realise its that easy. 

Or, like, repairing your own technology. A few months ago, I swapped out my sister’s laptop screen. Did it myself, I removed maybe 4 screws, no vital parts were exposed and it cost me $40. I even got a choice of matte or glossy. 

My point is, any walls that capitalist technology presents you with will be a false one. And one already broken by a dedicated community of interesting people working hard for free to break down that wall.

kids these days will be all “be gay do crime” and dont even know how to watch a cartoon without paying for it smh

IN FAIRNESS

piracy was definitely leagues easier a decade or so ago when thepiratebay was functional, megaupload was still running, and YouTube and Google made only the most cursory attempts to block copyright content. like let’s not pretend that the internet hasn’t got a lot more corporatised in the past decade or so. piracy is still possible and you can and should do it but it’s a LOT harder to do safely and reliably than it was.

^thank u

Sorry, this is all wrong.

1) ThePirateBay is still functional. (It’s not the same pirate bay that it was back in the day, but let’s not get into Theseus’ ship territory. It’s still here and it still works, that’s all that matters.) There are plenty of torrent sites around, more than there were 10 years ago – although overall traffic has plummeted. Now as then, it’s a whack-a-mole game.

2) Why was it “leagues easier” a decade ago? Some countries, not all (not north America, for example), now mandate ISP blocking of torrent sites, but this new complication can be bypassed with one (1) step: a google duckduckgo search for proxies. No government agency or ISP can possibly keep up with proxies, it’s yet another whack-a-mole game. So yes, it was technically easier before, but I don’t see “leagues” anywhere.

3) It was safer before? Are you shitting me? Have you lot forgotten that the legal departments of MPAA and RIAA sued torrent sharers (not even uploaders) and asked for millions of dollars for damages? AND GOT THEM? (By which I mean they didn’t actually get millions since the people they sued didn’t have any, but said people were convicted and ruined and that was the goal in the first place. It was a deeply amoral and cynical scare tactic.) Well they stopped doing that at some point, and focused on hunting P2P and torrent sites. Running a site is certainly less safe today. Using one, though? Depending on where you are, the ISP may be allowed to block you after repeated instances, and that’s it. You’re not getting in trouble with the law or into crippling debt. And either way there’s only a minuscule chance that any of this will come to pass, which becomes zero (0) with a VPN. (Safety of course depends on the country, and in some cases piracy is the least of your concerns. Let’s not get into that.)

4) Ten years ago there was no Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis was in its infancy. If today it’s harder to find PDFs on google, it is orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to find them elsewhere. People just have to unstick their minds from the notion that stuff is either on google or doesn’t exist at all. Geez.

5) P2P still exists. IRC (the sharing channels in particular, #bookz and the like) still exists. Torrenting functions like it always did. All these methods are exactly as easy to use as before, i.e. not necessarily a piece of cake, there’s a learning curve. But it’s the same learning curve it was 10 years ago.

6) So what have we lost? Only YouTube (meh, the film/tv quality was appalling anyway, and music is still there) and direct downloads (at least the permanent ones: there are plenty of them still around, but files expire and you need to keep track of what goes up when. So this goes beyond knowhow, it’s about internet communities. Let’s not get into that either, it’s a huge subject.) It’s a loss, sure, but I wouldn’t call it a terrible blow.

7) And in exchange for that loss, we got streaming sites. This is piracy, too, and it’s much much easier than torrents, and tons of people do it. Any “piracy has declined” narrative either implies that we’re excluding streaming from the discussion for some reason, or is flat out wrong. Ten years ago, grandpa couldn’t possibly torrent a film, and it’s debatable if he even knew how to open the file you helpfully sent him. Now, as long as someone has set up kodi or similar, grandpa can watch it on his tv and it just feels like cable.

8) On why torrents in particular have declined in recent years, see here. It’s a big subject and I didn’t cover all of it, but the main reason is that people had access to easier methods to get what they wanted (some legal and affordable, some illegal and free), so they didn’t need to learn how to torrent. Ergo, they never did. There’s more of course, and there’s definitely a cultural shift too, but that’s a very long story so let’s not get into it. The linked post also includes some thoughts on why torrents aren’t dead and doomed just yet, and ooh, I forgot a very important one: you can’t stream photoshop.

To summarise, internet piracy is NOT more difficult, unreliable, and unsafe today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For reasons why people (young or otherwise) seem less versed in it, please look elsewhere. I have thoughts on that too, but this is already a very long post, so I’ll just leave you with the best kind of thought. I’ll leave you with a doubt:

ARE people less versed in piracy? Are they really? Or is it simply that 20 years ago, internet users were computer geeks by definition, whereas now everyone’s online? Perhaps the percentage of skilled pirates in the general population remains more or less the same, and the only thing that’s dropped is the percentage of skilled pirates to total internet users. I can’t be sure without statistical evidence, but it’s a possibility.

You can literally google “watch _____ free online” and find most movies but the third result just download Adblock or popup blocker and you’re golden it truly couldn’t be easier

I’ve been meaning to make a piracy masterpost for awhile and what better time than now?

Materpost: A curated Githup tutorial of links to more torrent sites, software, VPNs, uBlock origin filters, ect. Basically everything you could ever want starting out. Do be warned though it doesn’t appear to have been updated in awhile so a few of the links are dead.

GAMES:

Books:

Streaming:

Computer software:

Other:

locusimperium:

So I tried this recipe.

And it is GREAT.

It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.

Life hack: add white chocolate chips and sea salt

I made these today for the equinox with sea salt caramel chips and they are simply amazing. Let’s see how long they last with six people in the house!

Noting for later (as we need more butter for this, and probably won’t do a grocery shopping till the weekend).

The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Haven’t tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.

I’ve reblogged this before and I’m reblogging it again because I’m about to make it again tomorrow and I wanted to add my own tale of just how amazingly delicious it. it was SO incredibly simple to bake and with an extra dusting of brown sugar on top and served warm and soft they gift you with the taste of the nectar of the gods when paired with a small glass of milk. this image is from when I first made them a couple years ago:

GO. MAKE THESE !!!!

Needed to make a dessert in a hurry to bring to Thanksgiving, and this recipe worked excellently. I did not have the right kind of sugar for the topping, so instead I used a packet of lemonade powder, which gave it a nice citrusy zing.

Making these for myself as a reward for doing the no fun thing I’ve been putting off. Added half a lemon of lemon juice and a bit more flour. Let’s see how it turns out. >:3

Verdict: tasty.

These are really, really good, btw. (sorry, no pics…) :/

would you take it?

I wanted to take a second to personally thank Daily Wet Heavy for destroying my tumblr archive forever

had an autism moment at the computer part store today

tumblr staff have...

STOP GIVING THEM MONEY! stop trying to make crab day or whatever else happen. paying for stuff from the shop is rewarding them for ignoring the userbase continuously and doing things the majority don't want, even if the things they're doing and allowing can cause actual deaths. staff shouldn't be praised and get profit for ignoring their users in exchange for trying to turn tumblr into twitter 2 ft. tiktok. at this point i don't even care for "staff are people 🥺 be nice" arguments, because even when people are being very polite in feedback, they're perfectly fine ignoring it in exchange for implementing changes nobody wants or asked for, all because new users may like it more (and forget anyone who's used the site for years, apparently).

leave bad reviews. don't buy things from the shop. send feedback, even if they never reply. email them and @ the staff, send asks to the wip blog. don't just blindly buy into "we need to support the site, buy xyz shop product", they don't deserve more money for giving a worse product.

DO NOT USE TUMBLR LIVE

So I've been warning people to not use the tumblr live feature and i had this discussion in the notes of one of the people i warned @mikescubes

said person already used live themselves and was not aware of what all TumblrLive's partner MEETME collects with its feature and i wanted to take the time to make a post going over the privacy policy for anyone who is interested

for the first part here MEETME talks about how creating an account (downloading) (or having a tumblr account that auto updated to include the tumblr live feature (which is a vast majority of the tumblr mobile population in the US rn)) automatically makes any information they collect visible to any of the partners they have the three partners mentioned there Skout Flurv and Boy Ahoy are all dating sites that promote primarily their location tracking fuck all knows what they want with your live data most likely they want to advertise singles near you??? but MEETME's other current partners are apps like PlentyfFish Zoosk Chispa and Badoo which is Match.com and Bumble

the main important parts to notice from section ii of the privacy policy is the location information limit mobile ad tracking and do not track signals the rest of the section mainly puts the onus of revealing private information that can be used maliciously on the user ie. don't share your password say your full name in a live video where you live etc. as far as the location information goes what its saying here is that they collect the location information when you first register for tumblr live when you first log in and whenever your phone is on even if youre not using tumblr live what does it use this information for??? well advertising purposes of course!!!

now they try to get around saying they dont track your location or share it with other users by using this word precise several times now what that means is they have a rough geotag of your location

(your ip address they dont say here its your ip address but in later parts of the document they do in fact say they collect your ip address and if you want an idea how close an ip address can get to your exact location enter your ip address in google maps sometime)

theyre being intentionally vague about that so when you see on the live tab something that says near you you could probably not follow that exactly to said persons house but you can damn well be you will at the very least find their city

heres a reminder to all of you who havent most phones now bury in the settings an option to disable adID do it now!!! but remember that TumblrLive can still use all other information they gather they do not at all process do not track signals so you arent safe there and what data would that be that they can collect other than your location and adID??? glad you asked!!!

this is a non exhaustive list which means there is DEFINITELY other data they collect about and from you

so they collect: your email and phone number any info in your tumblr bio any metadata connected to any photo youve ever uploaded adID ip address cookies and beacon which devices you use which features you use which pages you visit which chats you use anything in your private chats or posts anything from any connected social media accounts how well ads are doing what youre interested in and in some cases even your biometric information

and what do they do with this information???

ads of course

and to give anything they want to cops :)

i dont make this post in order to like ruin peoples fun when it comes to this new feature or to try to talk down to anyone or make anyone feel stupid or anything im not here to make fun of people or belittle anyone but i think its real fucking important people know what privacy rights they are forfeiting by having their phone on right now with this new feature

also everyone please feel free to give a kind fuck you to tumblrs current ceo @photomatt

be pro-aging but wear sun screen. sun protection is not beauty industry propaganda it will save you. wear it. or else.

he’s not ugly he’s handsome

distinguished

rugged 

This motherfucker survives a lightning strike and you have the gull to call them ugly?? If mother nature cant kill them what chance do you have when this mofo comes after you?!

Reblog Lightning Bison for protection from lightning.

When you reblog Lightning Bison, Lightning Bison gets 200 metres closer to the journalist who called him ugly

He’s sacred now, btw.

1K17 Szhatie, a Soviet Cold War-era secret project to put a heavy laser battery onto a mobile chassis and use it to shoot down ICBMs and helicopters

dumping my "ryan gosling edited into S.T.A.L.K.E.R." folder

how i see this post

The threead continues:

The book linked is free to read and download. See the link above.

ABCDEFGHI KLMNOP RSTUVW Y

i dont even get a numerical score... the economy is in shambles

well now that you said it i'm not gonna fix it

Our son Sam has told us that the D&D art file we use for a screensaver on various devices bothers him.

Because it makes him frustrated that he can’t look at some of them longer. He wants to know what is happening in some of them.

I told him that is one of the reasons we play Dungeons & Dragons, so we can go find out together, in our collective imagination.

Not really D&D related- but I feel compelled to add to this that not only are these GORGEOUS pixel arts- they are also in fact not animated. There are no frames used. There’s no extra pieces of art. Just one layer.

These pieces are so old that they stem from a time where animating cost way too much memory and/or only 256 colors could be used at one time, so the motion is achieved by ‘color cycling’. Half the available colors would be reserved for that very color cycling. It’s mchecking bonkers, please go watch this video if you feel like learning the technical details of how these artworks were made! They were screensavers that would match the actual time of day that you were in. Somehow. Just by cycling color palettes. Wild shit.

(Especially relevant time stamps for color cycling: 5:50, 9:55, 37:26, at 49:54 he gets into the technical side of HOW this even works)

Yup.

I’ve always enjoyed how they depicted some of the landscapes at different times of the day/weather/season.

Like these two areas. Daytime and nighttime at the village by the waterfalls.

And the high mountains hidden by rain in one and visible in the other.

yall r gonna post a man's entire portfolio of art and not give credit?

anyways these images are by mark ferrari, a color cycling pixel art master, you can check them out in their html color cycling forms, with sound effects and ability to change the time of day of the image, here and here

Our son Sam has told us that the D&D art file we use for a screensaver on various devices bothers him.

Because it makes him frustrated that he can’t look at some of them longer. He wants to know what is happening in some of them.

I told him that is one of the reasons we play Dungeons & Dragons, so we can go find out together, in our collective imagination.

Not really D&D related- but I feel compelled to add to this that not only are these GORGEOUS pixel arts- they are also in fact not animated. There are no frames used. There’s no extra pieces of art. Just one layer.

These pieces are so old that they stem from a time where animating cost way too much memory and/or only 256 colors could be used at one time, so the motion is achieved by ‘color cycling’. Half the available colors would be reserved for that very color cycling. It’s mchecking bonkers, please go watch this video if you feel like learning the technical details of how these artworks were made! They were screensavers that would match the actual time of day that you were in. Somehow. Just by cycling color palettes. Wild shit.

(Especially relevant time stamps for color cycling: 5:50, 9:55, 37:26, at 49:54 he gets into the technical side of HOW this even works)

Yup.

I’ve always enjoyed how they depicted some of the landscapes at different times of the day/weather/season.

Like these two areas. Daytime and nighttime at the village by the waterfalls.

And the high mountains hidden by rain in one and visible in the other.

yall r gonna post a man's entire portfolio of art and not give credit?

anyways these images are by mark ferrari, a color cycling pixel art master, you can check them out in their html color cycling forms, with sound effects and ability to change the time of day of the image, here and here