UNTITLED FOREVER

You have an evil twin who wants to kill you. You have a different evil twin who wants to replace you. You can play as your evil twin's pregnant wife. During one of the game's story quests you kill an autistic child. During another story quest you are jumpscared by a giant made of concrete. The first boss of the game is killed six different times. The only one of his deaths that is actually canon doesn't happen during the game, it happened in an animated trailer that aired at E3. There's a gun that shoots tentacle monsters. There's a sword that is also a shotgun. There are multiple transgender & nonbinary warframes. You can coat your bullets and swords with radioactive AIDS. You can also fill your flamethrower with radioactive AIDS. One of the warframes canonically had threesomes with a married couple. There are horses. There's an alternate dimension where you fight a child's mood swings. There's a gun that fires dubstep and crabs. There's a gun that fires miniature black holes. There's a gun that you reload by feeding it your blood. There's a gun that's operated with a car key. There's an entire category of guns you can throw at people. There's a book that is also a gun. One of the bosses has a chance to affectionately call you "Little Meat" A lady turned herself into a tree. One of the bosses in the game is your abusive father. You have an alien grandpa who lives at the bottom of the sea. You can own a pet vampire. There's a talking fish. Your babysitter is a reformed war criminal. The last update added an evil boyband. One of the studio's employees got their job by making porn of the game's characters. Hidden in the game's files are a number of fictional cooking recipes. The developers have canonized multiple community memes as in-game features. One of the new characters is possessed by an evil guitar. One of the most lore-important characters in the entire game has never appeared in-game even once and his only known depiction is in a webcomic. The aforementioned character wears a hat shaped like a hotdog. Critical chance can exceed 100%. And 200%. And 300%. One of Mars's moons measures time in Worms.

- There is an evil hive mind that you Can and Have domesticated part of

- There’s an entire city of people with their heads in their stomach

- Humans on earth eat primarily the flesh of a very nice tower whos totally fine with it

- Sometimes the warframes are still people, and a few of them like it a bit too much when you control them

- Gordon Freeman is in Warframe

- Your birth parents canonically wanted to eat you.

- The two queens of one of the factions also want to eat you.

- The hivemind (non domesticated portion) also wants to eat you but isn’t super sure about it because if it does it might go double crazy (the other groups didn’t get the memo or were already double crazy)

- Friendship and love can, will, and have saved the universe.

- The big bad is literally a guy in a literal wall (sometimes)

- One of the two people whos responsible for almost everything bad that happens died to being kissed too hard

- you kill basically gods with a bow (also a part of a basically god) as just like, a regular guy

- In lore, *everything* can be canon. Infinite monkeys are real. The typewriters, too.

- The devs had a crotch censored body pillow of one of their partial warframes sitting with them during a dev stream

- While youre doing things to keep a time bubble from imploding and killing everyone, the stickers you put on your shit are very important

- That child with the temper tantrums who you have to calm down is actually basically you from like a bajillion (a thousand+) years ago.

- Angels are real and they hate you

- As the alternate dimensional version of yoyrself, you can only crouch inside your pocket dimension. Nowhere else.

- The super mechanically brilliant guy who can make working mechanical people in the 100s of feet tall range really likes 1990s tech, doesnt eat his fucking pizza crusts, and is a fan of boybands.

- He also abandoned his twink in the Backrooms, and the guys pretty mad about it.

- There is an assassin who hates you and tries to kill you frequently. You will be coworkers. He will save your life multiple times. He will come to you for help saving his wife. He will try and kill you again after. He will also still show up near your place to stare at you ominously from a distance. He is also a single father. He still tries to kill you. But also if youre playing a replica of his now dead pregnant wife he will leave immediately and drop all his loot.

- your adoptive ma is a plural robot.

- your grandfather (on your adoptive ma’s side), who is a moon sized sentient machine, capable of destroying worlds, is pretty lonely actually and does try and convince the assassin to leave you alone eventually. (After trying to kill you repeatedly also)

- You’re usually one person but sometimes also two very different people. Not in a personality disorder way, just in a ‘you’re a walking paradox now :)’ way

- The assassin who hates you and has and does try and kill you will happily let you pilot his body around in your pocket dimension. (The one where you bitch-slap a child’s friends around until they calm down)

- Nuclear explosions are great for time travel

- You escape a timeloop just to go into a different timeloop by choice this time.

- For a brief while, you could drive a motorcycle in space perfectly functionally. This would also allow you to eat a spaceship kirby style with the aforementioned grendel

- You can play as a skeleton

- despite having weapons that can blow up a transport carrier spaceship in a single hit, you do still need to steal multiple 1990s era rpgs to get through one (1) barricade

- When the development team first announced on a livestream that they were working on a mobile port of Warframe, the screenshot used to show the UI accidentally included a gun named "Crumbguzzler", that no one noticed until the now-creative director Rebecca (who voices the plural robot woman who guides you most of the game) did exactly 30 seconds after the image was shown on the broadcast.

- Rebecca once recorded herself in-character reading through an imgur album of RNG-ed boss names from the Lich system (which includes the Little Meat thing mentioned above) for a now-retired Warframe content creator. She broke down at "Bopp Bipp", who subsequently became a meme associated with her. Bopp Bipp would resurface when their owner joined Rebecca's squad during a weekly community night livestream.

- The game's current design director Pablo once said "[stream chat] just wants to check the gyatt" on another official broadcast. Skibidi Toilet has also been referenced at least a few times by Rebecca and the other staff.

- The Warframe that had threesomes with a married aristocrat couple had her head blown through with a death ray when they got bored of her. She rose from the trash disposal and slasher-flicked them while they were asleep. She's now the in-universe version of the Headless Horseman, ghost mare and all.

- I should elaborate on the ancient galactic empire aristocrats. They would prolong their lives by swapping consciousness with younger-bodied people. One of them, now one of the queens of an enemy faction, tries to do this to you (mentioned in the above posts as "tries to eat you"), but is killed after the attempt fails. The experience is what leads you to regain control of your true form: a child.

- There's a bird themed Warframe that naturally has her own in-game Flappy Bird clone, accessed through her loadout menu.

- There are multiple sentient AIs that are actually the consciousness of someone uploaded into a glass cube as a form of capital punishment during the ancient galactic empire. Two of them run and maintain your spaceships, while another one is a sociopath that can sell you a working game console (and a few games, including the Flappy Bird clone), among other things, if you scan enemies for him to use in his personal large-scale battle simulator that he is completely obsessed with.

- There's an annual summertime event where one of the game's bosses, who runs a death game arena, puts on a water gun fight on Earth after gas leaks in her arena make her gang loopy. It's home to my favorite quotable line, "So you won this time. Best out of.....out of....how many have.....LET'S DO IT AGAIN, MEAT SACKS! "

- The city of people with their heads in their stomachs (and various other crude cybernetics) is actually a penal colony that is a rebuilt clone of a different nearby penal colony city that was annihilated by a giant mechanical spider who has the voice of an evil Disney stepmother shouting at the top of her lungs.

- There's another giant mechanical spider that only speaks in rhymes. It spends all of its time chilling out on a rooftop until you complete an optional bounty quest to destroy it.

- The talking fish is voiced by the same VA that voiced BG3's Astarion, RE8's Heisenberg, XC3's Zeon, etc.

- Space Grandpa literally introduces himself as "Hunhow, Destroyer of Worlds".

- the big bad man in the wall is an eldritch god who started the game's story and altered multiple timelines because it was bored. Same being that jumpscares you as a vitruvian man han-solo-carbonited into concrete, hence the name.

- The game has a battle pass that does not use any paid currency or tier skips. It used to have fully-fledged side stories until those became too much for the dev team to devote resources to.

- The current story era of the game (themed to Y2K) added a chat-based dating simulator. The previous era added a roguelite mode, which takes place in the aforementioned pocket dimension.

- Said pocket dimension was created by our character and is based on a fairy tale book made by Super Mechanically Brilliant Guy's daughter to help us and our comrades learn to control our emotions and powers. At a different point in the story, we help her and her dysfunctional nuclear family repair their relationship.

- the time loop that the alternate version of your character gets stuck in is one where they are executed via decapitation every day for an untold length of time (generally assumed to be a number of thousands of years iirc).

- Super Mechanically Brilliant Guy did indeed abandon his twink lab assistant who watches over Astarion Fish and the other talking animals to pursue the eldritch god in the wall by nuking a city on new years eve 1999 to generate enough energy to continue time traveling. That's a real sentence.

- The Backrooms labs that the twink and animals live and work in are directly below the place that the dysfunctional family (who has no knowledge of this) lives in, which is on the Mars moon that measures time in worms. The operation codename for our character going to the labs to pursue SMBGuy is named after the family's pet cat.

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. 

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:

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:

Vimm’s Roms: NES era->ps3 era roms and emulators to play them. Has user ratings on games. Cons: slow download speeds.

NxBrew: Switch roms/game updates/dlc

nsw2u: More switch roms. Check here if nxbrew doesn’t have the game you’re looking for.

Hshop: 3ds games/updates/dlc. Very well organized and sorted by console region. Bonus ability to generate QR codes to scan with homebrew to begin download directly on your console.

Oldgamesdownload: Old 90’s-2000’s PC games and some gamecube games. Technically, all of the games here are abandon ware, meaning the original company/creator doesn’t sell nor make money from the games anymore period. If you’re into that.

Fitgirl repacks: Heavily compressed PC games, and other various consoles. Small downloads and faster speeds for the size of the games. Somewhat limited game selection.

Steam unlocked: Steam games with easy-to-use installers. Check here if fitgirl doesn’t have what you’re looking for.

Steam Underground: A user forum for piracy support, usually about installing cracked games. Does have some scattered PC game downloads.

Google doc of Skyrim SE creation club content.

Amiibo life: Amiibo bins, can be loaded with some homebrew to load in games without any external source, or, if you buy writable NFC cards, you can make your own free amiibos.

Books:

Library Genesis: a good all-in-one ebook finder. Has books, magazines, scientific papers, ect. Well organized and able to sort by Author, Genre, ect ect. Almost all books in .epub format

Calibre: Not piracy but a free software for reading said .epub files, and other ebook formats. Good for sorting your books.

Sci-Hub: Research papers, academic books, pdfs, ect. Helpful for collage students.

IT ebook: eBooks about learning programming languages.

audiobookbay: Audiobook downloads.

Booksonic: Audiobook streaming.

5e.tools: Dnd player’s manual, guide, ect.

Books on learning various languages.

Mangadex: Manga, Doujinshi.      

Headspace sleep audio.

Various books and manuals.

Streaming:

ustvgo: Free streaming of live tv, has most US cable tv channels.

tutturu: Spiritual successor to Rabbit, allows you to stream your screen with friends.

Yes movies: Movies

Kimcartoon: Cartoons/animated movies

aniwatcher: Anime

animedao: Anime

Computer software:

getintopc: Wide selection of pc (mostly windows) software of all sorts, and different versions. Can personally vouch for the site, I’ve gotten Photoshop, Maya, and Sony Vegas from here over the years.

Other:

the eye: An archive of old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect. Cons: No search function and slightly hard to navigate.

1337x.to: Torrent site for movies, shows, games, comics, ect.

ThePirateBay: The classic.

the eye has been up since 2017 and in the last four years have accumulated 140TB of data (according to their own reports). Part of their growth is just their own work, part of it is absorbing other archives/open directories that were having issues: I know rpg.rem.uz used to be its own archive - gave way to The Trove, which is having its own issues right now unfortunately… - but now most-all of their content can also just be found on the eye. Same with a few dozen other archives.

And they have ‘old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect’, but massively more than you might think just based off how this sounds. Like…

They have it all.

If you want to try and homebrew alcohol, go check their stuff. If you want to try and read books that are out of print or otherwise in public domain (and some that aren’t yet in public domain), go check their stuff. If you want to run a campaign and can’t pay for expensive print tabletop books, go check their stuff. If you want to fuck off into the woods to live off the land (or research how that would work for a writing project), go check their stuff. If you’re trying to learn shit about drugs - any drugs, almost - go check their stuff.

Hell, if you want to go read what looks like literally every research paper on coronaviruses from 1968 up to Feb 2020, you can do that too!

As chickenmcnuggies said its a mess and a half to navigate through their collections, partially with how large it is and the fact quite a few folders were once whole other archives since absorbed by the eye…

We aren't just talking about feeling a little awkward or whatever. People have delayed their transition for years because of this. People have detransitioned because of this. People have developed deep self loathing and shame because of this. People's abusers have weaponized this kind of humor to establish control over their victims in a "socially acceptable" way.