sailing the seven seas and you - the dated infrastructure of piracy

as many of us use this platform to also feed that little nostalgia bug in our minds and hearts, i thought i’d like to put up a little bit about how much fun it is to pirate stuff and how nostalgic a lot of pirate client UIs feel, soulseek’s p2p and its fuckass old client is just a really grand old time in my opinion :-) i like to listen to mp3s on my ps vita when i’m out and about and i don’t really use spotify unless i’m on desktop, so i use spotify to compile playlists which i then convert to csv files and i’ve got a fun little terminal script running to pull them from various soulseek sources. very wonderful

the soulseek chat rooms are really cool too, and i love qbittorrent’s ui for similar reasons to soulseek. even the 3ds hshop ui has a lot of charm just by being a white screen with text elements, sometimes the barebones look of it all makes you feel more connected to your machine :-)

i know a lot of people (myself included) are drawn to modern apps with skeuomorphic or just generally dated themes or skins to replicate that feel but somehow it’s only really dawned on me recently that a lot of the internet, especially piracy based software actually does still use these dated elements in a kind of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it way”, and i just find that really wonderful

the cyberdeck movement and pushback to re-own your physical data and media in a time of “own nothing and be happy” feels wonderful to see, linux home servers are always a treat and i would like to make a cyberdeck of my own in the future, mainly to handle p2p connections from my vita to my phone or other stuff so i might make a blog post on that in future once i get my grubby little mits on the hardware required 

thank you for listening to my ramble about archaic tech infrastructure and frontends

“ipads have no soul but desktop computer is like a nervous horse and has the capacity for love” -ellis_ellis_ell