Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I had so much time yet so few things to watch and play growing up, I think I've become a data hoarder as a "response" to this. Now I love being able to provide friends & family all the content they could ever want.

I started as a hobby but slowly weened my immediate friends family off of subscriptions because I like seeing the media actually be consumed and now I can't ever do maintenance on my server because someone is always using something

I think subconsciously we are all prepping for the end of the world as we know it lol

Right there with ya. I'm a data hoarder first and foremost. I have two goals when it comes to piracy:

A) If I have ever watched, read, listened, played, or otherwise enjoyed a piece of media, I will have it available at all times.

B) Do what I can to preserve said data so 40 years from now when I'm telling kids about some generic super hero comic, or SNES game, or obscure TV miniseries, I can pull that shit up in seconds instead of being the old senile man telling stories.

I got 30TB of space, I got almost every movie, TV show, stand up special, album, video game, comic book, novel, and essential software that I want (and adding more daily), and it's all served up to whatever friend wants it via Plex or whatever-other-means-I-need-depending-on-the-media.

Meanwhile I'm on my 35th watch through of Archer lol

I don't just pirate for the sake of piracy. If I download something, it's because I either intend to use it or watch it or because a family member asked me to get it for them.

That said, even though I do it for the destination, I love the journey as well. I've been torrenting for a little over 10 years now, and for most of that time, I was just a hit-and-run user because I didn't have dedicated resources for doing it. I ran qBittorrent in a virtual machine, grabbed my stuff, and then wiped it out. Last year though, after years of torrenting without consequences, I got two love letters from my ISP within a very short period of time, and because of that, I decided to redo my setup. I now use a dedicated computer as a seedbox over a VPN and try to seed as much as I can. It's sort of funny. My seedbox sits on a shelf in my bedroom and I always have a strange sense of satisfaction when I walk by or lay awake in bed and see the little hard drive LED flashing away because somewhere in the world, someone's connected to my little computer to grab a copy of something that I also wanted.

Lurking through communities related to my favorite literary genres while having Z-Lib is like walking into a candy store as a 10-year-old and being told that you can get all that you want free of charge. Of course curating a library is enjoyable lmao

I actually like the download limit that Z-Lib has for regular users. If you use it up, it moght be a good time for you to go actually read what you have downloaded.

Beyond "trying out" games. I like the idea of saving things or quickly grabbing things that might not be available for long. For example on a hard drive somewhere I have that early test build of Skate that was leaked like a year or two ago.

I'll also say that as I get older I really appreciate how many more plug-and-play resources there are now. I can get a whole game package that self installs and I'm good to go. No more having to get an ISO from some sketchy Russian site or rolling the dice on TPB and then mounting it to virtual disk. With the power of adblockers/tracking blockers I can stream basically anything from any service with a few clicks from the megathread.

Honestly I'm kinda a datahoarder lol so I basically archive things for the sake of preservation. In this aspect I guess this coincides with your point, since many things I pirate I don't really consume, I just might potentially consume, or find it valuable, so I pirate it and keep it lol