Modern Day Piracy

Why do people think that pirates are suddenly funny again? It's honestly nothing short of retarded (excuse me retarded people or friends/family of retarded persons if you happen to be reading this, especially retarded people, because it's sort of impressive to know you're on the Internet), this influx of pirate humor, insipid jokes in the same vein of ninja banter, which are also, coincidentally, unfunny. AMERICA. PIRATES. NINJAS. NOT FUNNY. STOP QUOTING WILL FERRELL MOVIES.

This really isn't meant to be an anti-pirate joke manifesto; I wouldn't stoop to such pedestrian fare. Oh no, I'd crawl much, much lower. You know me by now. After all, I recently used "retarded" in a pejorative manner. Give me some credit for sinking to the bottom, time after time!

While I did recently use the word "retarded" in a pejorative manner, I also recently rediscovered the magic of illegal downloading. Magic. Remember the childlike wonder we all shared downloading tracks by our favorite artists *gasp* sometimes before they were even released! Recall the frustration we felt when someone took forever to leech a song off us, especially when we saw he was using dialup! What a rube! What contempt we felt for such a backwater hick, scamming some crappy pop punk track off our hard drive! Shame and disgrace.

That was almost ten years ago, and anyone who reads this know how the story ends. Heavy metal stalwarts Metallica bitched and moaned some JNCO-clad, wallet-chain rocking thug was spreading a half-assed demo of their ass-awful track "I Disappear," before the authorities shut down Napster and denied the world community our right to pirate music as we please. That was in 2001.

Since then, the music downloading waters have been murky. We join whatever ship will take us into its crew. Kazaa and Morpheus seemed like particularly strong corsairs until they befell the same fates, and sail the seas with skeleton crews, wracked by litigation-induced scurvy. Some say the Flying Dutchmanesque Limewire silently roams the waters, but I have seen it with my own Internet browser spyglass, and it too is manned by a skeleton crew, a shell of its former self. Anyone will believe tall tales of the high seas, if there's promise of an underwater city of illegal music downloading.

For the longest time I subsisted off of a fellow seaman (laugh, I wrote it), who was basically like Tina Majorino's character in Waterworld, with the means to download music illegally in his possession, but was unable to tell me how to do it. I accepted such a fate as a barnacle on his Internet piracy efforts, and enjoyed the booty (laugh, go ahead, it's a PIRATE JOKE ASSHOLE) he acquired from his swashbuckling. This lasted for years upon years.

Recently I found the "dryland" that Kevin Costner was searching for, which is odd because previously I made an Atlantis reference to illegal music downloading. So consistently inconsistent. I will not divulge my means, because that would be asinine, but also, any individual skilled in the ways of the Internet would be able to figure out such introductory Internetting procedures. Finally, I am able to provide for myself in this unreasonable expensive world. Only the disgustingly wealthy ever hope to purchase enough recordings to really get down to quality artists and move past the crap that is pushed at us day in and day out, unless we have these music pirating resourcing at our fingertips.

Past all the aggravating pirate imagery and history lessons about peer-to-peer downloading applications, this is a flare shot into the air for the continued existence of music piracy. Without it, we'd be a little more broke than we already are, we'd be introduced to fewer new artists, and we'd lose out on yet another unifying experience as citizens of the 21st century, along with picture messaging and trying to defriend Tom on MySpace. Does this sort of rhetoric make me a modern day pirate? Maybe. Do I like that association? Sure. Strike me down as a martyr if you will, or rebuke me for stealing from others. Keep those godawful terrible pirate jokes to yourself though, because they aren't the least bit funny. Retard.

Sorry again, retarded persons, and friends and family!