That is a good and valid question. Talking about the US exclusively, piracy is a grey area. Some want stuff for free and now. On the other hand, some are willing to try things before giving money for the real thing or wait. There can’t be only one for piracy.

With videogames, I’d say the number of sales are way lower than 14 years for profitability. I think it may be closer to 5 years or under. By 14 years, the game console has already gone on to it’s new iteration for a few years.

I believe in waiting until the next gen or until developers can’t make any more money for games. “Pirating for good” is either people wanting stuff for free now or the companies are making it extremely difficult to buy stuff. It’s up to the person and not really the masses.

I do believe in the numbers of being locked out without “piracy”. The average person is mostly trying to watch TV and movies, even games, that are locked by region. That requires a VPN at a mostly legal level. Without it, the # of legal accounts would drop and would be more costly.

Piracy of old was the only way and now the new ways are going back to old. This time however, there are more official ways of getting things without sketchy sites. A VPN, modding or a cracked app isn’t going to solve real piracy in the future if companies are letting untapped money sit out untouched.

Are you writing a book or are publishing a book? Those are two separate things and if you search up the word authortube on YouTube you’ll get a bunch of people who are looking to publish and not many for fun. And honestly, most of them are not professionals and shouldn’t have their advice be taken.

Writing a draft is not hard and creating ideas isn’t too difficult (the snowflake method is the most popular way to create ideas from a singular idea.) It’s what comes afterwards: revisions (plot, characters, etc.), editing the words, doing those over and over until it is finished.

You don’t need to publish your first manuscript. It’s fine to just write a story or a few for yourself and later on decide if they are ready to go to a publisher or self publish.

Authortubers I like the most are: shaelinwrites, katytastic and Liselle Sambury. The first two both have degrees I think and shaelin is an editor.

You could try audiobooks from Libby or audible. It’s not the same as reading the physical text but maybe it can help getting through books faster. For digital manga, there’s tachiyomi. Some are scanlations and some are official translations from old publishers like tokyopop and yen press.

I chose an instance ran by the same person who owns the mastodon instance I am on, it’s not that popular compared to the big Lemmy instances.

For my mastodon instance I chose one based off of: being on the official list, region, how many people post on that instance in a day (too many posts = too many users), what kind of stuff they post and the rules I have to follow. You could follow the same idea with Lemmy.

For the most part, I ignore the main instance and just look at my subscription feeds through a 3rd party app. So far, nothing bad has occured from being in a small community.

Also, look for posts on Lemmy or Mastodon about updates for a particular instance. My instance is being updated often and is actively geared against the spam bots and ddoss attacks from the past month.

Back in the day, Undertale. Many made YouTubers and livestreamers have less fun by spoiling the pacifist, genocide and neutral routes and letting everyone only go the pacifist way. If they didn’t then the fans would get all angry. Outside of playing the videogame was also another can of worms.

Don’t know if Deltarune, also made by the creator, has the same problem since I’ve only ever played the game myself and never seeked out the community.

Thanks for the tip!

As an introvert who never wanted my business to be out in the open with my real name attached, no. Was always told never use your real name online and how many times people these days had themselves bitten for doing the opposite it should be obvious by now. Not really the masses fault but the standard from Facebook years ago.

Installed Linux Mint in 2017 when I got real tired of having to reinstall windows (+ big programs) on my laptop which got blue-screened every other month. My laptop was not compatible for Linux and had to switch back to W10. When that laptop broke, I went with an old Mac (Linux broke it so High Sierra) and an old Dell Tower with LM. Gave up the Dell and now have the Mac until I can get a steam deck which I will use as a light linux pc w/monitor. Never going back to Windows.

Went on a 16 day screen fast years ago and felt great afterwards. Had the energy to do things and focus. I still got addicted to the internet again, however over the years the enticement it once had is nearly gone.

• use Reddit for hobby related questions passively.
• use Tumblr passively to look at art a few times a month.
• use nitter passively a few times a month for artists and streamers and indie companies.
• use some forums passively also a few times a month.
• got rid of twitch because it got boring and hasn’t improved since I got rid of it.
• YouTube is the biggest sucker but my watch time is probably 2-3 hours compared to 14hrs a few years ago. Noticed that people are posting even less and most stuff I see is from 1 week–1 month-1 year ago. Actively staying off to get rid of the left over addiction and have an rss feed for any important stuff.
• I started Mastodon and Lemmy last month. I use it everyday for less than an hour and post sporadically.

Used both at one time, Skytube didn’t work as well as newpipe on my devices. Maybe that has changed now since some time has passed. It doesn’t seem to be updated much on fdroid with the last update being 3 months ago and didn’t update for 5 before that.

It wasn’t a bit fan of the video interface, it felt like I was watching YouTube on the mobile site.

The big thing was being able to download the video and audio. Skytube only allows video downloads. If I want offline music, I can only use Newpipe. And Newpipe let’s me decide which quality and file I want per download. It also allows downloads from SoundCloud, media.ccc.de, framatube and Bandcamp.

From what I understand, Skytube is now using Newpipe’s api for the back-end by default, so take that as you will.

As for money, you could sign up for crowdtap. That is a site that is for ages 13+ and you get points for answering surveys. For every 1,000 points it’s $5 in a giftcard, $30 maximum for some cards. Within a month of using it everyday, I got $50 max. It’s the most legit site out of all the others I tried.

Upsides: there are lots of giftcard to choose from (Amazon, Walmart, Sephora, etc.)

Downsides: some surveys ask for very basic information about yourself, you have to have a cellphone number for verification (maybe you could get a VOIP to get around this)

If you are uncomfortable doing surveys, you could create art irl or write things in exchange for money. Lots of people in the art community have commissions. There’s PayPal and Kofi for online payments, PayPal also have their own MasterCard debit cards that you can sign up for to use on sites that don’t take PayPal directly and in stores.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, I hated how Death keeps spoiling everything. And when it was clear it was going to stay that way I dnfed halfway through. Otherwise, the novel would have been fine.

Any book by Neil Gaiman. Just can’t vibe with his style and in turn couldn’t get past ch 1 of Good Omens even though I like Terry Pratchett.

I’m using megalodon and sometimes this happens when pictures are loading after a refresh. Could be that the server is slow.

Usually FOSS unless I need to use a particular program that doesn’t have a good FOSS alternative. My old Mac runs fine but doesn’t have many FOSS alternatives that works with High Sierra, so I have to use cracked apps. Using Windows, Linux or Android it’s all FOSS.