Hi I'm Cote

I have to race to sign up to volunteer trips because even with dozens of spots available, people rush to devote their unpaid free time to helping the environment. these trips often fill up within hours. people care.

you will see a lot of bad news because that is the kind of news that people pay the most attention to. I know this more than you'd think from my optimism- not only do I live somewhere facing some of the most extreme ecological issues on the planet, I also spend my time studying the Bad Stuff every single day.

happy new year -------------_--------------------

"Piracy is bad, yada yada."

Alright. We can agree on that.

But—and I'm sorry if this comes across as offensive—that position often comes from a place of privilege.

And not just economic privilege.

I live in a country where American comics are not always easy to find, and in many cases they're never translated or published at all.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about some mythical "third-world country". I'm talking about a perfectly ordinary European country where the comics I like simply aren't considered profitable enough to distribute.

I remember digging through obscure websites back in 2006 just to get a glimpse of The New Teen Titans. It was a nightmare, but somehow I managed to read the whole thing anyway.

It took me seven years to get a legally published copy of Blackest Night: Titans. SEVEN. Thank God for piracy, because it gave me immediate access. Otherwise I would have been the only idiot trying to discuss Black Lanterns in 2016.

Why? Because Titans comics are considered niche here. Shops don't stock them. Publishers often don't translate them. And when they do, sometimes the translation is... let's politely call it "creative". (I'm still trying to recover from the translated version of Last Will and Testaments...) You wait years, pay more, and occasionally get a worse product. Wonderful.

The only reason Blackest Night: Titans was eventually published here, as far as I can tell, is that Blackest Night was such a massive crossover event that leaving out an entire tie-in would have created a noticeable hole in the collection.

And don't even get me started on the Wolfman/Pérez era. That only became legally accessible here in the 2010s.

So yes, this might come as a shock to some people, but piracy is not always about being cheap.

Sometimes it's about access—because access is not distributed equally.

If a comic is unavailable in your language, unavailable in your country, unavailable digitally, unavailable physically, and unavailable second-hand at anything resembling a reasonable price, then "just buy it" stops being a solution and starts being nothing more than a slogan.

And for many international readers, piracy is the reason they became comic fans in the first place.

Peace out and read comics.

1) people who are not financially capable of buying a piece of media. They wouldn't be paying anyway (though often times, when these people get financially stable enough to afford it they will buy the pieces of media that they pirated before and liked)

2) people who do not have access to the media due to living in a region where that media is not distributed. Think people in Europe who do not have any comics shops nearby, people in countries like Russia with heavy censorship of queer media. These people wouldn't be paying anyway

3) people who are after media that is no longer destributed, think games by companies that since stopped existing, tv shows that were deemed unpopular and canceled, obscure cartoons. These people wouldn't be paying anyway

4) people who are always trying to get something without paying/paying as little as possible. Chances are, they wouldn't be paying anyway

5) people who want to check out the media before deciding if they want to spend the money on it or not. They most likely will not pay for the media if they can't find a free sample

So what do we see? Most people who do this would not be paying anyway. Companies are not losing consumers to piracy, because most of the pirates weren't people who would be able to buy their product to begin with, or wouldn't be interested in buying it.

Moreover, piracy helps save media. There are countless shows and games and movies that would be lost media if not for piracy. For example, one of my favorite games since childhood: Paraworld. It came out in 2006. The dev company stopped existing in 2014. It's not on Steam, or other such platforms. You can only buy it second-hand, on disks, and there aren't lots of offers. The only reason I still have access to it, is piracy.

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

just spent twenty minutes scrolling the tag and giggling

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.