I finally started looking into emulating on my phone, so I’ve been playing some games from my childhood. Mostly Alleyway and Pokemon Red, with a little Harvest Moon thrown in.
Personally, I feel the same way you do about DRM. If you’ve paid to own it, then it should be owned outright. With this in mind, I would say pirating them wouldn’t lose you any moral ground.
Office is obviously handy. Download a legitimate release and activate using this. Other than that, I only use pirated software on an airgapped computer.
Whenever I search for 1337x or any other site someone recommends, how do I know which one is reliable? Because if I search in Google, DuckDuckGo, or any other search engine, I get results with domains ending in .is .to. .tw .skin .net etc.
Are they all just different proxies to the same thing or is there a list of reliable links?
Here are my recommandations on what is better on PC because of the advantage of mouse and keyboard vs controller by genre:
Strategy: the first thing I wanted to do when I bought my PC is to play Age of Empire 2 and Starcraft 2 and they still are the top games of the genre. It’s night and day compared to their console games like Halo Wars. I recommend also the Civilisation series.
Simulators: Cities Skylines and Microsoft flight simulator are fun games and nothing looks like it on console.
MOBA: AFAIK, MOBAs like DOTA 2 and League of Legends only exist on PC because it’s unplayable on controller. I don’t like these kinds of games, but it’s still something that you won’t find on console.
FPS: A mouse let you have better control on your aim, but it’s less relevant in games with crossplay multiplayer where the aim assist on controller is strong like in Apex Legends and Halo Infinite. Recently, a lot of people enjoy Battlebit.
Although Cities Skylines is the goat city builder it’s not the cheapest game in the world with all of the DLC which adds a huge amount to the game. I’d definitely wait it out with CS2 right on the horizon. If you can get the first game on a wicked sale it’s still worth it but CS2 is looking amazing!
Perhaps a point & click adventure would be a good fit? I’ve played and quite enjoyed The Blackwell Legacy and I’ve heard good things about other games by Wadjet Eye.
I also rip a lot of stuff from Spotify using soggfy, I’ll make long playlists and just leave it running over night ripping everything. It requires a bit of sorting out afterwards into respective folders for artist / album etc but that is a price I’m happy to pay for the saved money of not having to buy all the releases.
Anything I can’t find on either of those but still really want I will usually buy on bandcamp.
For downloading music Soulseek is my main source. I might grab a torrent here and there for a specific release or when it’s just a mess to get with Soulseek (like the Final Fantasy OSTs).
For managing the library and listening to it, Foobar2000 all the way. It can get a while to set it up properly but it will be tailored to your liking. It’s the most advanced player out there. And there are plenty of add-ons (called components) to add features and basically do anything you could need : play MIDI or old consoles music files, play music from Youtube, get tags from Discogs or MusicBrainz, get lyrics, UPnP server… The interface is highly customizable as well. And you can create shortcuts for almost anything, components included (although shortcuts would need a revamp).
Oh and I didn’t told you about queries. That makes tag fields as variables. So now you could make a query on a genre, a codec, an artist… “%codec% IS FLAC” will output only FLAC files. Very, very handy to manage your library. These variables can also be used to rename or move files. You can also use queries to create autoplaylists. These playlists are auto-updated based on the query, you don’t have to maintain them. I have made a bunch for 60s to 2020s music, my favorite artists, or mixed compilations.
A few components to install right away : Playback Statistics and Enhanced Playback Statistics, they will no only give you better play stats (duh) but also new query fields. Masstagger to make batch modification on tags, this will save you a lot of time. Also for now install the 32bits version, many components are not available on the 64bits yet.
So yeah Foobar2000 takes a bit of time, but it’s great, highly customizable. It has saved me dozens if not hundreds of hours to manage my library. And it’s free. It’s my favorite piece or software and I could talk about it all day long.
There’s a couple angles you can take on this. My favourite is from the dotCommunist Manifesto:
Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility—reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge—at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude.
Essentially, this argues that the unethical position is the one that creates the false scarcity.
Another less extreme position would be that many countries allow for exemptions for format shifting: if you buy a CD with some music, you’re legally permitted to rip it so long as you don’t distribute copies. One could argue that someone in your position is operating within the spirit of these laws… provided that you haven’t torrented the videos since that necessarily includes some partial distribution.
Finally, the least generous interpretation would point out that you didn’t buy the videos in the first place, but rather a licence to let Vudu stream them to you. Given that you don’t own anything, you’re not morally entitled to own it in a different format. This is why many people have rejected the streaming model.
As someone in camp #1, I think you’re a-ok ethically, but I thought you might want a broader perspective.
Trying to learn Dark Souls 3. 20 hours in and finally getting used to the controls. Beat the second boss with 2 deaths so feeling a tiny bit less despair for now.
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