OK, so i went to start watching the show Seinfeld, and i can either watch the DVD set that I have sitting on the shelf, or I can download episodes from the dark net.

So I bring my laptop to a “safe place” (in other words, not my home ISP) and begin downloading this Seinfeld Complete torrent that I found. Now it’s a huge set of files, so I only download the first season because I wanna see what it’s like.

I get home. I play the first episode and the quality is kind of crappy — it’s 16 x 9 instead of 4 x 3 and I know they shot the series for regular TV back in the day; and I go to put on subtitles because sometimes I like to see the words and not just hear them. And what do you know, it doesn’t even have a subtitle track! Fuck that! It’s not Seinfeld Complete if it has no subtitles.

So I switched to my DVDs instead, and the quality is much better.

I mean, these piracy guys … why do they do such a crappy job? If you’re gonna break the law (and risk all the legal penalties), at least you should do it right!

Maybe there should be better training for these intellectual property wranglers. Since they cut funding for PBS, maybe we could divert it there. Piracy Training Initiative Takes Congress by Storm! — i can just see the headlines.

In 2005, i pirated every disk of what Star Trek existed at the time — Star Trek (Original Series), Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager — all the classics (which i borrowed from legitimate sources). Now in 2025, i still have those discs i burned twenty years ago, and i’m using the video from each series for my own personal collection on the computer: the circle of piracy is complete! (I guess it’s a testament to the bit-rate, etc choices they made … that the video is still useful. And a further testament to the not-very-expensive DVD-Rs i used — Memorex, Fujifilm, etc. — because they still work fine!

Nothing like doing your own pirating; get it right from the source!