I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.

Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don't want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.

It's honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender's Game series doesn't even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that's another topic.) Trump's MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn't much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she's just one person, not a whole company.

Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:

• you obtained before 2020
• were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.

There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.

It would be neat and kinda funny to have the Windows XP installation music play while I am making sure all my media imported correctly. Some nice chill beats for diagnosing where I messed up and fixing missing/wrong metadata.

So, I tried to install lidarr on my windows machine via the exe on the website, but my antivirus flagged it immediately. I am sure i could just work around this by disabling the antivirus for a bit or by composing it manually, but for all I know maybe someone inserted some malicious code. Is this an issue y'all have noticed? How can I tell if this is actually malicious?

I've been customizing the presentation jellyfin library, and this caused me to notice that the only brown faces visible on any of the thumbnails is on Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon. I probably should be more cultured than this. What movies about non-white characters do y'all think I should add to my collection?

BTW, if you haven't watched The Last Dragon, go watch it right now. It's like if Kung Fu Panda took place in Harlem; sure, our protagonist Leeroy "Bruce Leeroy" Green starts the movie at a level of kung-fu mastery that Po doesnt achieve until Kung Fu Panda 3, but the plotline is pretty similar to the 1st movie in that Leeroy is sent on a quest to find a wise master known as Sum Dum Guy so he can reach the final level. Leeroy also is a fucking weeb and never stops being a socially inept dorky loser to the end of the film. I will warn you, though, that the martial arts is very Shaolin from the start and only gets crazier from there, in case that's a dealbreaker for you. Either way it's my favorite movie.

Apparently Jeff Keane is a 40k fan.

/jk

I'm not a dev

Recently, my wife and I had a shouting match over piracy which went nowhere other than making me realize I couldn't back up my positions on anything other than the higher-level ethics stuff.

The argument went something like this:

Wife: piracy is federal crime, federal crimes mean federal prison, i don't want you going to federal prison

Me: thats not how that works

Wife: how do you know? What if they got a court order against you and you had to supply all your files to them

Me: incoherent monkey tantrum noises

To clarify, she is fine with piracy, she just is scared of me getting caught. And my position was "nuh uh!"

My understanding is that the biggest point of risk (of actual legal consequences, specifically) is when you are the one propagating files (because the feds will go after uploaders when able) and when using public torrents (if i forget to use a VPN, dmca snitches might send a "stop pirating" notice to my landlord who owns the router our internet goes through). Not 100% percent sure why these are the risky things, though, and I'm not sure if there's other things i need to be on my toes about.

The argument i have more trouble with figuring out how to answer is the question of "what if the feds change their strategy for some reason and start playing whack-a-mole with individual pirates like me?" What do I do to future-proof myself? Is just using a VPN across all my devices enough?