This is my first Tumblr post, sorry if idk how to use the platform, lol. I made this myself and have an Imgur post for more details. I hope you all love it and feel inspired to crochet <3 https://imgur.com/a/qwAGRxa
If you want to get caught up on the Beast Games controversy (which is just one of the endless twisted shit he's being accused of right now):
(I'm going to be using "MrBeast" to mean the company, and "Jimmy" to refer to the man of the hour)
Jimmy has an upcoming Amazon show called Beast Games. If you haven't heard of it, it's described as Squid Game-esque, and is marketed as the biggest game show ever put together. There are 2,000 contestants (though it was originally advertised as 1,000, and the contestants weren't aware of the change), competing for a prize of $5 million, the largest game show prize in history. Contestants commit to 9 weeks of filming, with the first stage taking place in Las Vegas as a kind of qualifier.
Prospective contestants said they were asked if they were willing to die for MrBeast, if they would be buried alive, or be shot into space. The contract they signed also required them to say they are willing to die for Jimmy. A lot of them said they applied anyway because they desparately needed the money for a variety of personal reasons (like medical debt or student loans).
However, contestants have described the horrific conditions they were subjected to on set, having been treated like animals. Just to be clear, these are still allegations, and MrBeast has denied it as 'inaccurate'. But there is overwhelming confirmed evidence indicating that everything they have been accused of is 100% true.
Apparently the show starts with Jimmy appearing looking down at the contestants as a Jesus figure, surrounded by money, while the contestant's were told to scream praise at him "like he's god". He proceeds to watch the challenges from above, sitting on a throne like Nero.
The contestants were asked to give up their medications and inhalers to the production staff. Medical staff were worried as to what would happen, and allegedly secretly told contestants to hide their meds in their clothes and smuggle them onto set instead of allowing them to be taken away. When the game actually started, contestants who had given up their meds were denied them for days. Many of the meds were also lost by staff and never found. At least two had seizures because they were refused their epilepsy medication. It took several minutes for medical staff to reach them when it happened.
They also had to give up their clean underwear for some fucking reason, and many never got it given back during filming, or even after, because the staff apparently lost it.
Women were refused tampons and pads, and were bleeding through their clothes. They were told by staff that they didn't need them, because it "wasn't a medical emergency". The crew were seen laughing at the women begging for clean underwear. Contestants were also refused new contact lenses, and told they couldn't take out their old ones.
Contestants were also starved, with one saying he went 20 hours without being fed. The meals they did receive were almost nothing - one consisted of a miniscule amount of cold oatmeal, a few pieces of raw vegetables, and a hard-boiled egg. They were sometimes given Jimmy's shitty Feastable chocolate bars (you know, the ones that are also controversial because MrBeast lied about their nutritional content), so they could be filmed gushing over how incredible it was. One contestant described how her group would secretly collectively hoard the chocolate as supplies, because they had no idea when they would next be fed, if at all.
People with dietary requirements like allergies were especially fucked, because they were served the same thing as everyone else instead of replacement meals, so they just couldn't eat. A diabetic, after finally being given her insulin, long after she was meant to have it, was denied food she needed to take it. She was told she didn't genuinely need to eat. After a lot of groveling, she was given half a banana.
When other contestants went to staff to beg for food, medical care, or other help, they were refused it, and apparently some were screamed at or cursed out for having the nerve to even ask.
There was barely any water available, so in the Nevada heat sunstroke was almost universal. Contestants were vomiting or passing out, and some were said to be hospitalised from dehydration. Occasionally, gatorade was temporarily available for rehydration, but the staff didn't announce it (their microphones didn't work properly apparently), so most contestants only learned about it through word-of-mouth from their teammates. Within days, the gatorade ran out.
There were also sometimes brief windows where medical care was made available, but again, staff didn't actually inform anyone when this happened, with people only hearing about it through the grapevine.
Sleep deprivation was also a huge issue. Because the challenges took place at night, contestants had to sleep in broad daylight on the turf floor of the stadium in a cheap sleeping bag. They were only allowed to sleep for 3-4 hours at a time.
The male contestants realised they could get ahead by simply attacking the female contestants with no consequence. Female contestants were knocked out cold during the games, and dragged off by production staff. This wasn't just during the challenges either - food was so scarce that when meals were passed around, contestants would steal or fight over each other's food, and the male contestants would sometimes beat the female contestants and take their meals by force.
The teams were incredibly unbalanced. Although there were a wide array of contestants, all the challenges were physical. The young athletic male contestants formed their own groups, and wouldn't give team vests to women or elderly contestants, apparently physically ripping them off of them.
There was almost no medical staff, and only two ambulances for 2,000 people (plus crew). Horrific injuries are reported, the majority suffered by women, from beatings and tramplings. One thing we know to be true is that local hospitals began receiving Beast Games contestants with serious injuries, including broken bones.
One contestant described to the New York Times how she was elminated, leaving the tournament bruised and bleeding. She was offered on camera a $1,000 consolation prize, only for the staff to then turn off the cameras and immediately take the money back.
Eliminated contestants were offered $1,000 to sign an NDA. When an article about what happened came out, MrBeast called all the contestants and offered them another $1,000 in compensation, as well as free therapy.
MrBeast blamed the poor conditions on Crowdstrike (what?). They've said they'll conduct an internal, not independent, review, and use this as a learning experience for the next stage of the competition in Toronto. One of the actual reasons is that Jimmy actively sought out workers who were not part of a union, so they wouldn't be beholden to safety standards.
MrBeast has been blatantly trying to censor online criticism of Jimmy, and coverage of both this and the myriad of other controversies emerging over the past two weeks, on YouTube, Reddit and Twitter. Additionally, DogPack404, a former employee of MrBeast who released a video on him, received two cease-and-desist letters from law firms representing Jimmy, accusing him of personal defamation and breaking an NDA. YouTube has also been protecting their most popular and lucrative creator, demonetising, age-restricting and shadowbanning videos on him.
The fact that Jimmy is being accused of so much abominable shit that this isn't even the biggest controversy right now is fucking wild.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE MrBeast controversy everyone's talking about, honestly out the million repulsive things that have come to light these past two weeks this probably one of the least discussed. Some more stuff (for which CWs apply) came out two days ago that's equally vile, so the Beast Games thing has been somewhat forgotten for the time being.
Also, a lot of steps have been taken by Jimmy and pals to suppress all the many controversies. Make no mistake, the MrBeast brand is a billion-dollar media empire; many massive corporations like YouTube and Amazon have a significant financial incentive to protect Jimmy's public image at all costs, other large YouTubers want to stay on his good side, and former employees have said that they're afraid to speak out because of how he might retaliate.
Hey this is one of ez's friends me and others haven't heard from him in basically a year at this point now I was wondering if maybe you guys still talk (your his cousin so I assume you guys do) could you maybe like help me ask him stuff like what's going on or maybe even get me into contact with him (because he's deleted his Instagram and everything else i know of like discord besides Twitter,his roblox account, as well as his flipamin) cause all we know if that he's taking a break but it's been so long we are all genuinely worried now I don't expect you to answer you haven't seemed to have been active on your twitter or here but I'm just trying to message you on the only place I could sense your dms on Twitter aren't available to me please respond as soon as you can
Hi, yes I am their cousin. As far as I know they are doing fine. Their mother posts on Facebook every-so-often. I haven't personally spoken to Ez in quite a while so I can't say much. I don't have any of their contact info and isn't really my place to ask since my cousin is 10 years younger. I hope that helps. They will be turning 18 in a couple years I think
Pinning this since I genuinely think Piracy is a great skill to have and I want to share it with anyone who'd like to see it
Okay so! You need to download something!
Be it a movie, a game, a software, a book. Where do you even start? You know people catch viruses or fines pirating, so how to do it, and do it safely? This is going to be a bit verbose, so coloured text has the most important info. THIS WILL BE LONG but you can just skim it! (P.S. there are some goodies for artists in the end so do take a peek there if you do art and would like courses or procreate brushes) By the end of this you should be able to download or stream almost anything.
(Disclaimer: I'm not super knowledgeable on the technical side of things, just a moderately seasoned pirate. Will explain stuff to the best of my abilities, but there will be wild semplifications. If there's any issue, or precisations you'd like to make, or just need a hand with something, feel free to reach out to me directly on here!)
Putting a cut here so I don't spam your dashes <3 - now, here we go:
First off: ADBLOCKERS. It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: a little browser add-on that will prevent you from seeing ads and popups ever again. Yeah, no more ads on Youtube either btw. Most malware you risk getting while pirating is the result of ads and pop-ups!
Important: Chromium based browsers will start dropping support for adblockers starting 2023. These include: Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave. (Brave has its built-in adblocker, but it's very controversial, has a huge focus on crypto, and tries to push its own crypto trading ads on you, among other things.)
This is simply happening because Google (who mantains Chromium) is in big parts an Ad Company, aka makes money from selling ads to you.
Mozilla Firefox is not affiliated or mantained in any way by Google, and will support Adblocking indefinitely. Just so you know.
The BEST Ad Blocker around is uBlock Origin, by Raymond Hill (gorhill). It's recommended that you use it at all times, as it will not slow down your browser but will improve your user experience drastically! Official add-on installs: Firefox, Chrome (until 2023)
How does it work?
There are two kinds of downloads: Direct Downloads and Torrents.
Direct Download Link (DDL): you click on the thing, the browser downloads it. Simple! It's an 1 on 1 communication between you and their servers. Pros: no hassle, super easy, nothing else to do, pretty safe. Cons: downloading big files is sloooow, and if your connection falters just a few seconds, you gotta start from the top again.
Torrenting: the good stuff. It's "Peer to Peer", or P2P. The way I understand it: you're put in a room (a "swarm") with a bunch of people. Some want the file (Peers and Leechers), some already have it and are giving it around (Seeders). You all share small pieces of the file around, and eventually everyone will get a complete file.
Seeders are the most important part: a torrent with zero seeders will not start (no one is giving out the file). A torrent with 200 seeders will be immensely faster than one with 3 seeders.
It's good etiquette to seed back what you download, in a 1:1.10 ratio: you upload what you downloaded (1:1) and then a little more. Sharing is caring!
Pros: fast, you can stop and resume whenever you want, you can find torrents of mostly anything, easy to download big files.
Cons: unsafe without a VPN (might get fined), a bit harder to understand, might take an hour or two to set everything up.
We will get more into Torrenting right now, as it will be the main way to pirate things.
How to Torrent files?
You will need: a Torrent Client, a VPN (optional, recommended), and either a .torrent file or a magnet link. Don't panic, this is easy!
Torrent Client: a little software that will actually manage the downloading. There is no reason to use anything else than qBittorrent: it's free, open source, frequently updated, has no ads, and has a neat little feature that we will see later. Download and install it and you're all set!
VPN: ok, so. You *can* download things without a VPN. I've done it a bunch. Please know, it's unsafe. VPNs are, like, the condoms of piracy. Depending on how strict your Internet Service Providers are about piracy, without them you might get a hefty fine, or simply a warning, or nothing at all. With torrenting, sadly, ISPs can kind of exactly see what you're downloading. VPNs fool your ISP. I'm not a fan of how much VPN services are fooling us in thinking we need them - but sadly us pirates DO need them.
I would personally not recommend free VPNs, they aren't too reliable in my experience. I also advice to use a VPN that allows "port forwarding" as that will make the downloads faster.
The most loved VPN service in the pirating community is Mullvad. It's VERY secure, actually cares about your privacy (unlike Nord, or even Proton sadly), has no yearly plans to rope you into nasty subscription models. It's so privacy oriented that you don't even need an email, they will simply give you an account number and you will use that. They do NOT want your data. Super neat!
Their service is 5€ a month, and I suggest paying only one month, downloading a shitton of stuff, and then just leaving it be until you need another month of downloading bonanza.
You will see they accept and encourage crypto payments. Please don't judge them too harshly for this. I hate crypto as much as the next tumblr user - but this is not for crypto bros, this is because they really would like to not have your data if possible. There's people who want to avoid leaving behind any sort of trail showing that they, personally, purchased a VPN, and this option serves them.
Torrent files, magnet links: a torrent file is an actual file you download and open in your client. You download "bee_move.torrent", open it in qBittorrent, and it will start downloading! A magnet link simply bypasses having an actual file. it's a link that you will directly open in your client and will tell it what it needs to know, and acts in place of a .torrent file. They're virtually the same. There are dedicated torrent sites that let you search for the torrent you want, and offer either a torrent file or magnet download. Let's see how to find them!
Where to find stuff?
r/piracy Megathread - there are links to pirate anything that could be pirated. Navigate to the section you need and follow the instructions! There are usually both Torrent sites and direct download links. The masterpost isn't being mantained anymore - as of 31/10/2022, I'm still having luck with it and finding it a great resource. There are other masterposts though. For example, the Awesome Piracy megathread and the r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH wiki. As of April 2023, it’s being rewritten!! Hell yeah!! Go check it out!
But some of the torrent sites listed on the masterposts are broken! :(
I hear ya, I hear ya! It's perfectly normal. For technical / legal reasons that I cannot comprehend, torrent sites need to change URLs often. This is where unblockit comes in. I'm not sure how it works, so I'm just going to say that it's magic. It gives you working links to all the best torrenting, streaming, DDL sites. From books to music to, uh, adult material. I usually refer to the masterpost to know which sites are the most trustworthy, and then use unblockit to access them. Generally, for example, you will want to avoid ThePirateBay, and prefer 1337x instead.
ALMOST DONE!!! There's one last important thing to set. This is a safety measure, for those who use a VPN service and want to make the most of it.
At times, the VPN connection you are using might falter for some seconds. These few seconds that it's not working, your torrent might still be downloading, exposing your IP address briefly and letting your ISP catch you. There is an easy and quick way to prevent this from happening. It's called binding the VPN network interface to your torrent client - it's a big name, but it means you tell your client (qBittorrent) to ONLY connect to the internet via the VPN. No VPN? No connection. No IP leakage. Linked guide above will take you a couple minutes at most.
This is the basic stuff! :D You should be able to download pretty much all you need just from this!
However, since I'm a nerd, here's some other useful things, or more niche sites.
There are tips to make torrenting with VPN faster - I gotta be honest man, I still don't understand *how* this "Port Forwarding" business works, and for some reason I cannot get it to work right now with Mullvad (previously I had North which doesn't support this feature at all). My internet is too slow for me to really mind, anyway. But you should look into it if you're using a VPN and getting slow download speeds on torrents with 20+ active seeders.
Now, this is for all the artists out there. Online-courses.club has, like, an INFINITY of art courses and tutorials, and even some software. It's INSANE, super helpful, some of these courses would otherwise cost SO much. I've been getting a lot of use out of it. They're mostly DDLs, too! I can't recommend it enough!!!
Now, time for brushes. I've had a lot of difficulty finding good brushes for Procreate that didn't cost too much. This telegram channel has a neverending quantity of Procreate brushes: t.me/free_brushes. Sometimes Photoshop brushes crop up too. For some popular brushes, they ask for "donations" to download them instead of giving the actual download, which is a big yikes honestly. Thankfully, it's rare. In there, if you scroll really far, there's also a link to another smaller group to download Max Ulichney's brushes.
My favourite way to pirate and share music is Soulseek, a neat little software that work as a Peer To Peer service, but between you and a single other person at a time. You share all your music folder, and others can download from it when you're online. In return, you can download other people's music from their shared folders. It's lovely, the quality of the files is GREAT, the community is actually really chill and honest, since it's just a bunch of peeps sharing mp3s and flacs.
There's also a LOT of telegram bots to download music or videos from several platforms. @MusicDownloaderRobot downloads from Spotify, @joeymusicbot from Deezer, @mediadownbot rips videos and music from stuff like reddit, tiktok, facebook, twitter etc, and t.me/BotsArchive has a vast collection of bots just like these. They can come in handy!
Lastly, since I am Italian, here's some resources to find italian material.
Those around my age or older might remember TNT Village as the n.1 source of italian torrents. It's closed down, but the magnet links for archived stuff are still out there. Only way to access them that I found rn is this Telegram bot: @tntvsearchbot. Source code here for those who understand this stuff.
There's also programmiedovetrovarli, great resource for famous software (Adobe, Office, etc) with instructions in italian. Needs adblocker to be deactivated on their site, but has no popup ads, just standard banners.
Well, this was a lot! Thank you for reading, I hope I was able to help in some way!
Please remember: illegal does not automatically mean unethical, or immoral. Everyone is free to choose what to do and think about piracy. Don't ruin this for those who choose to engage with it, and don't push this on those who'd rather steer clear. I am personally sharing this with you, because my personal opinion is that pirating is often moral, and avoiding giving money to certain corporations (Adobe and Disney come to mind) is always preferred when you can't or don't want to outright avoid and boycott their products altogether.
If you can afford to, always support small creators and artists.
If you cannot afford to, then consider that pirating and enjoying their creations, then spreading the word and talking about it online, is still beneficial to them!
origamiaround
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
2087
blakekathryn
