this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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My self justifications are thusly...
I typically don't try to "keep up with the latest or greatest" of things. So I feel zero guilt at finding ROMs of all the video games from my childhood and emulators. Neither do I feel bad about hunting down old PC games that are abandonware instead of trying to find some Steam version (which will stop working soon with my ancient computer anyways soon so... pppfffttttt).
Most of the books (comic, fiction, nonfiction) are of old stuff that has been out for years so whomever was going to make money off the sales has already made their money. The only people who are being denied any potential income are the resellers.
Most streaming services, whether I pay for them or not, run adds that had about a 90% chance of freezing my old entertainment computer to the point of requiring a restart. This dropped to practically zero after moving from windows to linux. Also, most of my devices are so old that the services I had been paying for wouldn't work on them anyways... so... :shrug: ... fuckem.
I've never felt that something "wasn't worth it" because I got it for free as far as media. Usually when I go on a download spree of video games its because I've gone a bit manic and decided that I want to try to play every Final Fantasy game up to FF9 or all the MegaMan games or something and I'll just burn myself out after playing the crap out of them.
I have, however, purchased books because I kept reading/hearing them referenced as being worthwhile or interesting and found myself thinking... "wow... that's 25 bucks and a week's worth of reading I can't get back." I also, have had a bad habit in the past of just purchasing books because they looked halfway interesting on impulse, tossing them into one of several trunks full of books, and they'll sit there for 10 years before I even realize that I had the book.
Another thing that I have considered after years of thinking about it. These items were never going to be purchased by me, so me reading a scanned copy of a comic book from 20 years ago or me not reading it effectively results in the same amount of money leaving my pockets to go... somewhere. I say "somewhere" because I'm not paying the comic book writer/artists/inkers or the actual development teams of video games, I would be paying some other intermediary who pays their intermediary who pays their intermediary who might be required to pay some sliver of their revenue to the people who actually made the thing I'm playing/reading.
It also doesn't hurt that I'm middle aged and barely make enough money to make ends meet on a good month even though I live a pretty frugal life. I've come to accept that its not worth beating myself up too much about.