this scene is just a one big mf vibe

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:

FOLKS, PLEASE…DO YOUSELVES A BIG BIG FAVOR AND STOP USING TURBOTAX!  IT IS USELESS NOW!!!

THE IRS website will let you fill out and file your return THERE ON THE IRS SITE.  You pay like $12 for the actual electronic filing process, and THAT’s IT!

Unless you have tremendous amounts of Schedule D stock shit, TurboTax is NOTHING BUT A RIPOFF!!!

The IRS website is EXCELLENT.  They allow you to look up your past returns, and have every bit of information you MIGHT POSSIBLY NEED!

FUCK TURBOTAX!

LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM IT!!!!!!!

Actually, with Free File it’s FREE

No $12 fee

That’s the point of free

If you make less than an income threshold you get to file for FREE using various softwares that are REQUIRED to be and stay free or they lose the license to work with the IRS as part of the Free File program

If you make more than that threshold you can file for FREE using the Free File Fillable Forms where you type in numbers and click “do the math” and the website does all your math for you

Also fuck turbotax, I’m not even allowed to use it because it’s inaccurate enough that I’d get fired since Congress mandated all IRS employees’ taxes need to be PERFECT as a condition of employment

Here’s a list of free tax filing services, straight from the IRS website:

It tells you how much their income threshold is and if they’ll free file for you at the state level.

DO NOT PAY TO FILE YOUR TAXES IF YOU DO NOT HAVE TO.

So I did Free File yesterday, and I don’t think people realize how broad the eligibility is - it goes all the way up to  $41,000 or less a year in adjusted gross income. (There are also even more generous eligibility standards for seniors and veterans, so you should check those out if you qualify). Odds are pretty good that you are among the 42% of Americans who fit into that bucket.

So screw the predatory TurboTaxes of the world and save yourself a couple hundred bucks a year.

nooo don’t kill me your so sexy aha

"Unmasked"

I wanna add more but maybe next fan art 👍🏾

The Lament for Icarus 2020, Miao He

Great reinterpretation of Draper's painting:

(From the Tate)

✨LIMITED EDITION✨The Pride Knights Playing Cards are now officially available for pre-order in our store until June 30, 2023!

prideknights.com ⚔️🌈

omg this is the most beautiful deck of playing cards I've ever seen! Just pre-ordered mine I'm SO EXCITED!!

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy by Aminetko

L with the T. happy pride ❤️🧡🤍🩷🩵

this is absolutely fucking pathetic now every single fucking streaming service is gonna start doing this shit. all y'all had to do was not watch Netflix and let it flop for a few months and they would have given up

This is very misleading, and that's on purpose.

The data they're using, at least the data that I saw, was from a four day period (May 23rd - 27th) before the account sharing ban went into effect on the 1st of June. They're doing this to try and convince people there's no real means to fight back against them.

Here is the data I was talking about.

And a close-up so y'all can see what I'm talking about.

Notice the sharp drop that came immediately after the spike in new subscribers? Also, notice how they had to cut it off almost immediately?

Don't let them fool you into thinking it's futile to fight back.

Not my art

I know it feels like an understatement but you sometimes make more progress by pointing out that conservatives are fucking rude. going out of your way to call someone the wrong name because you don't like them? rude. childish. this isn't fucking kindergarten, Carl. she said her name is Jennifer. Everybody knows her as Jennifer. You are the one making things confusing. Grow up.

"misgendering is violence": invites discourse over the TraNs DeBatE, puts people on the defensive, opens you up to accusations of liberal snowflakery, comes off as a hypothetical thought exercise

"Who the fuck is Jason? I don't know a Jason. Oh her? You mean Jen? You mean fucking Jen? That's Jen, dipshit." : crystal clear. you're making shit more difficult for everyone because you're a rude manchild.

This was funny but op was a terf so I stole it 🏴‍☠️

— ‘Man, sometimes I forget what a powerful Bender that kid is.’

— I drew an accompanying Katara to this Sokka !

Trying out a brush so here’s Sokka being ‘the village’s best and only warrior’

[theres a katara here now too]

Apparently the dude who runs the crematorium is just fundamentally confused about how advertising works. He actually thought that the way you made an ad was you found a picture that got people’s attention … and then also included information about your company. He was genuinely surprised and baffled when people thought there was any relationship between the (independently nonsensical) captioned image and his cremation business. There were two more ads in the series that are equally, just… so much…

_______________________________________________________________

this is somehow incredibly effective tbh

Petition for all advertisements to be shitposts from now on

(source)

on the one hand, i guess ads for cremation services must be a tricky thing to keep on theme without being too depressing/morbid/etc, so I can see how “just grab their attention with anything, doesn’t have to be related” would be an appealing advertising strategy.

on the other, i am fascinated by how someone who runs a crematorium “couldn’t believe” that people would associate their business with, uh, death.

This side by side comparison sure is something

on the one side we have GORGEOUSLY handcrafted armor. Looks like actual plate, the white tree of Gondor clear and easy to see and echoed on the pauldrons and even pressed into his belt! Which is folded in a LOVELY knot to hold it in place. The chainmail is REAL chainmail. And over all there’s some good wear on it, it looks like Boromir has owned and worked and lived in this armor

And on the other side we have stuff that looks like it was created for a shoe string budgeted made-for-TV Camelot production. It’s CLEARLY plastic. And wtf is that LENGTH that leaves a huge swath of his VITAL ORGANS unprotected???? The symbol is PRINTED on it, not even embossed, and so poorly you can’t even really tell what it’s supposed to be. It looks, as far as I can tell, like someone smooshed a bunch of pseudo celtic symbols together. Those shoulder things are NOT pauldrons. They seem to be some half arsed attempt at coin style chainmail? Maybe? I have NO idea what that shirt is. It looks like maybe the designers were going for a type of Gambeson, but it’s just way WAY too thin. It ALL looks like they hit the after halloween sale at party city for supplies.

cc: @petermorwood

This was a show with no grasp of time, no grasp of distance, and no grasp of even fantasy realism - swimming from Valinor back to Middle Earth? Shrugging off a pyroclastic flow? - so I'm not surprised it has no grasp of Hero Props.

"Hero Prop" is the term for Boromir's armour, indeed any armour, costume or accoutrements worn by a Principal Character in LOTR or any other movie.

"Hero" has nothing to do with the character's alignment, applying to Sauron and the Witch-King as well. It means any costume, weapon etc. made as detailed as possible because the character wearing it will be front and centre in very close shots, where an IMAX screen might make any flaws a metre high.

(Bernard Hill was amazed by the details in Théoden's armour, some of which only he and his dresser ever saw. More here.)

Now there's the Numenorean bargain-basement rig up there, and the full plate of the Action Heroine here.

I don't know what it's made of, but it looks like vac-formed, spray-painted plastic.

Compare it to an example of Elven armour from The Hobbit movies, which notoriously didn't have anything like the development time of LOTR...

No further comment.