keep the tapes circulating 🏴‍☠️☠️⚔️

blog intro | check out @lawfully-abiding-citizen!

frequent tags:

#piracy ─ discussing such

#keep the tapes circulating — popular phrase on here that means “spread the word and share the media around to preserve it”

#definitely don't do this ─ you should totally do this (but i didn't say that)

#resources ─ stuff you can save & do for benefit

#privacy & safety ─ concerns and how to protect yourself

#anti capitalism ─ exposing corporations and the like. also serves for anti-copyright purposes

#streaming — streaming services, such as disney+ plus & netflix, or otherwise somewhere online to watch shows & movies (typically corporate-owned, but sometimes illegal websites too)

#media to save — direct links to download such

#media preservation ─ saving media from being lost and inaccessible, namely via pirating/torrenting & sharing

#physical media — a materialistic device which you can play videos on. HDDs, SSDs, USBs, DVDs, blu-ray, VHS tapes, etc.

#internet archive ─ archive.org & wayback machine

recommended resources:

r/piracy reddit megathread — everything you need to know

fmhy (free media heck yeah) — one of the best online resources for piracy. you should check out the beginners' guide & glossary, and there is also a discord server!

here and here — easy and reliable tutorials where i learned to torrent from

↑ (eyestrain warning for the second link) ↑

post links to shows/movies you can download that i recommend watching:

nimona

she-ra | [internet archive] | dubs/subs version

kipo and the age of wonderbeasts

arcane

rwby (haven’t watched it yet but i’m very interested)

voltron (i don't lmao iykyk #vslur)

infinity train (haven't watched it yet but apparently it's beloved; also a great example of why media preservation is so important)

the owl house

amphibia

hazbin hotel (just download helluva boss & the pilots for both shows directly from youtube — i use 4K video downloader but usually choose to save in 1080p)

it's kind of ironic really, because i'd literally only made this blog 5 days before, and went inactive already afterward for a few months because i was so devastated over losing ~2.5TB and didn't see the point in starting over.

but i didn't really start over, except for all the torrenting of shows because i'd set my destination folder within the drive instead of in my laptop's direct downloads - in fact, what i didn't mention above was that it had failed while i was fucking torrenting throughout the day, and it was my first time in doing so since i'd finally learned the night before. it was extremely unfortunate, to say the least!

anyway, other than that, all the other edits and stuff i'd been collecting by the fandoms i'm in were archived on a previous HDD that i'd upgraded from, though it only went up to april 2023 (and keep in mind, i lost the rest of it in july 2024). the weird conundrum i had was that the most important content had thankfully been saved before the backup, but i'd spent so many hours overall downloading & organizing at least double the amount since then (of lesser sentimental value to me) that i felt super discouraged for a while.

anything i wanted to access again after the cutoff had to be found via memory of when i saved it, from who and which social media site (likely instagram), and whether i could easily search up any parts of it if i'd linked to it in my private discord server in which i used as a storage space (i know that's not a great idea, you don't need to lecture me, but my world won't totally end anymore if something bad happens ─ also this was back before they implemented AI).

eventually after the year ended and i only had my shows in 1080p back, i decided to carry other files over to a new 4TB SSD from either the archive, my phone's camera roll, or just wherever i'd re-downloaded them from originally. then i started adding new ones again as they were posted online. it'll always feel like something is missing because i'm a perfectionist, but my collection feels complete enough again (2.33/3.63 TB) and in hindsight the depression of losing my time & effort wasn't as life-changing as it felt like it'd be.

all that to say what i now know and need everyone else to learn so that they don't repeat the same mistake (it's never a guarantee, but it's pretty solid in effectiveness): make backups of your treasured stuff and keep them consistently updated! i just copied everything i currently have to my house server a couple days ago and i may be able to again on a free:ddns server too.

pirate everything that you care about owning & preserving.

I'm not sure if you're the one that owns the Amphibia drive and files from your post about it but if you do, I wanted to let you know that there's an episode missing

Season 1 Episode 19 Toad Tax

Not sure if there's anything you can do about it but I thought I'd let you know in case you were unaware

Thanks so much for sharing these! It's so great

i'm so sorry i took a while to get back to you!

i went through the trouble of torrenting the season again from elsewhere just to borrow that episode, but when i pasted it into the folder on my SSD and tested the next episode to see if the credits looked the same, it turns out S01E19 is actually NOT missing; it's just included under E20 (and only partially named) as a full 24-min video like on disney+ streaming!

i cut it into two different videos and reuploaded them to the drive as S01E19 & S01E20 (+ their titles) ─ so it should be fixed now!

we now have a set date for kipo's removal from netflix ─ that is, just under a month away from now on june 26th!