The dystopia is coming. If it's not already here.

I'm pretty new to torrenting as well. To answer your questions based on the personal research I've done.

1. You absolutely require a VPN. Definitely a paid one. The free ones are not of good quality and a lot of them are more than likely to be detrimental to your privacy. Also P2P is not a requirement for torrenting. All it does is it enables you to make more connections in the swarm and making the torrent download faster. Some good recommendations of VPN's with port forwarding I've seen thrown around are Proton VPN, Airvpn. Options without port forwarding are Mullvad, or IVPN.

2. I've been using 1337x for movies and TV shows and it's been great. I've also heard Torrent Galaxy is good as well. As always though be really careful with what you download no matter what. Always run a scan on files you download.

3. Qbittorrent is the best.

Fair lol

I’ll always have a soft spot for Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga, and the Lego Marvel games. So many hours were spent playing with my brothers.

You should be so proud of yourself! That's a major accomplishment doing the research and figuring it out yourself.

I believe that information and knowledge should be free anyways (at least in a perfect world), because that leads to the betterment of society. Also if you are able to use the knowledge you learn from the things you pirate I think you’ll be able to come back and support those things that got you to where you are.

I really like Brave search

Proton VPN, Airvpn, and Mullvad are all reputable. Proton and Air have port forwarding if that's a requirement for you.

Well I just didn't see any harm in feeling out a lot of different pirates opinions to see some different perspectives I maybe didn't think of.

I really enjoy having Plex as my media server. It’s about the same amount of hassle as Emby, and there’s also Jellyfin which I haven’t dabbled into yet.

I really like airvpn.

Womp womp

It is kinda hard. Just riding on their “Trust me bro”. I do appreciate how open 1password is at least, they seem somewhat trustworthy as a company for now.

How does Kodi compare to Plex? Are there any features it has similar or different?

Just to have a discussion and get to see some of the different opinions out there.

Yeah it's crazy how much the world has changed even in my short lifetime, especially with the mass adoption of digital media. It's going to be so difficult for people to retain their rights to what they purchase.

I use Starlink. $120 per month for 100<MBPS down and 15 MBPS up in Eastern Oregon.

Yeah that's where I was kinda leaning since it's just for my household's use. Especially since I've already purchased it once.

Yeah Private Trackers are typically protected from copyright notices.

Yessir

Yeah you've hit the nail on the head. I was merely trying to gain some perspectives outside my own. Ethics is not something for me to define at all. That being said, I've decided that I have paid for the media and as such have a right to retain full control over that media as long as I don't sell it or distribute it widely.

May I ask for your reasoning?

I like using Jackett as a search engine across a ton of sites. I can usually always find what I’m looking for.

I’m a huge HTYD fan so I’ve been regularly playing Rise of Berk everyday.

Yeah it's fairly comperable. A while after we got it our town got fiber optic so that's obviously better speeds for around the same price. However a big incentive was how mobile Starlink is and we experience quite a bit less instability than the ISP's around here.

Yeah it's just for me personally I like to make sure I support the creators of the media I consume. Just what works for me.

Yeah I know it's not legal in my country and state, but was just trying to get a feel for different opinions on the morality of my question. For me I just like making sure the creator of the media I really enjoy get's some kind of support, that way I'm voting a little with my dollar. So far I'm really thinking I've paid for the media once and once is more than enough.

Would you care to elaborate? I don't really see how it would be wrong?

Yeah I knew this would be a skewed sample of opinions, but I was also warry of posting this anywhere else since piracy is a touchy subject on some other instances. Also yeah I'm thinking that since I've purchased the media I should have full rights to do with said media whatever I please (other than selling it).

Been thinking about trying Azire, do they provide static ports?

Oh that's neat. Yeah I use Airvpn currently, but would be interested in Proton or Azire if I could automate with a script like you said.

I’ve been playing a lot of The Finals and been really enjoying it.

As irritating as it is. I do understand. The internet and things on the internet can’t just be free, and ads is how we pay.

I do highly disagree with how many ads they’ve been playing with implementing.

I really like using Brave. Seems to strike a good overall balance. It has some annoying things like the crypto crap, but luckily you can customize a lot of that so you don’t see it.