How to Pirate Movies and TV shows

Today I'm going to teach you the easiest ways to pirate movies and TV shows.  Ultimately this is a followup to my post the other day about the evil Oatmeal comic where, it must be said, it is the devil which shows our hero how to pirate Game of Thrones.

Here's what you do:  go download Couch Potato and/or Sick Beard, and tell them what you want.

Done.

I think the ultimate comment is made by the image on Couch Potato's homepage (and by the way, you gotta admit, their domain name is très chic).  For posterity, I'll copy it here:

It actually took a while for this to sink in for me, but then I can be a little dense sometimes.  You see the arrow?  It's pointing at the couch.  As in, the imperative, you sit down here.  Just sit down.  You don't even have to do anything.  Just sit on the couch.

Sit.  On the couch.  Tell me what you want, and I'll go get it.

Personally, I just use the standard Bittorrent client (or Deluge on Linux) and go to the Pirate Bay, or one of the  hundred other torrent sites.  TVTorrents is nice if you're after TV shows, but requires registration (a "private" torrent site).  I'm kinda picky and I'll spend time choosing exactly which pirated version I want.  But from what I understand, these apps do a pretty darn good job.

You can even tell it what you'll be wanting in the future, and it will patiently wait for it, and download it for you when it arrives.

I have friends with almost petabytes of downloaded data, erm, movies and TV shows.  I really don't understand why they do that, but on the other hand I  kinda do.  It's a hoarders mentality, to be sure.  I always say to them, "you know you can download this stuff whenever you want.  Why maintain an industrial strength SAN storage network in order to accumulate all these bytes?  But I guess in the end it's just the lure of the thought of having all this vast quantity of entertainment or art at one's fingertips, that is the lure.

You do realize that you can download far, far more than you could possibly ever watch?

Free. Gratis.  And with only the most astronomical chance of legal trouble.   Even then, first time you'll probably just get a warning from your ISP--at which time you can take simple measures to avoid being caught again.  The internet routes around damage.

It's kinda like speeding, and approximately as evil.  The kind of evil that means survival and success, mind you.  Sometimes you just have to stand up on the side of sanity to keep the herd healthy.

Sometimes that means hurting some people's feelings.

Yes.  It's a little mean.  But I think you know from experience that sometimes even perfectly nice people can get us all killed.