Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I'm always struggling to find ebooks and flac albums, sometimes it is fine but sometimes it is impossible. Or they are weird versions.

There's a channel 4 documentary that sounded interesting from just a couple years ago, like 2022 or something like that, that I can't seem to find where Prue from The Great British Bake-Off is tracking down the family of her adopted child (I watch a lot of GBBO, hence why it sounded interesting). It's so recent and Prue is so famous in the UK, I am surprised how difficult it has been to track down.

Might be more known to Canadians than otherwise but for those who remember Ed the Sock: I have his Fromage specials for 2000/2001/2002/2003/2004, but there's zero trace of 05 (except for a handful of clips on 1 youtube channel which amounts to 30% of the full special), and zero trace of anything pre 2000.

Even Kerzner himself says he doesn't have the earlier ones (iirc), and the 05 one at best was:

A) Posted to his Facebook group once and got DMCA'd by Much within hours, leading to almost no one having ripped it as far as I know. B) Offered up as a reward tier item to those who backed one of he and his wife's crowdfunding campaigns, but they also have a history of not following through on those and I've never seen anyone who got any digital downloads for the old Fromage specials.

So here I sit for year number 18 of my ongoing quest to try and eventually find those remaining specials, remembering the morning of August 14th 2007 when I threw out the fucking VHS tapes I had them taped on while decluttering the week prior to a cross-country move.

Complete Das Schwarze Auge (role playing system) Adventure compilations. There are individual documents floating about, but most seem not be available.

Some lost JAV. Specifically some of Kaho Shibuyas. Haven't been able to complete that collection yet. VRs and some older videos that the publisher doesn't even exist anymore. I'd pay even. But until I visit an old DVD shop in Japan they are lost to the Internet.

Thankfully the stuff I'm interested in is very easy for the most part. It's rare for me to struggle with finding something.

There's a game demo we got on one of those demo disks that I played for ages, The Flying Doughman, like a puzzle platformer. I would think I imagined it if my brother didn't remember it too, but from my searches it seems like it's become lost media

1994-11-01: Mean Fiddler Club, London by The Black Crowes. Had it forever ago now lost. It bugs me.

Speaking generally, repair/Haynes manuals for vehicles and home appliances (the ones that exist ofc). Some are out there, but I almost never find the one I want.

I want to try WolfQuest but I ain't spending $20 on it unless I can try it to see if I'd play it more than 10 minutes. I can't even find a key for it on something like G2A, let alone a torrent or otherwise illegal method of obtaining it.

A full archive of the Japanese TV show Supreme Skills. I can find bits and pieces but I don't think I even have one complete season.

Have you tried audiobookbay?

Yes

Haven't been able to find a copy of Big Shark by Tommy Wiseau.

I haven't tried super hard, but season 5 of Tim and Eric's Aweseome Show Great Job is the only one I can't get. I found one torrent, but there are no seeders.

I've definitely had trouble finding specific books. There's a popular book about the local climate here which is only available in print. There is a copy uploaded to archive.org, somebody scaned the whole book in, but it's unavailable for download or check out.

Have you checked archive.org? Or your local library systems?

Also, there are some books which don't have audiobooks that I've wanted to listen to. The Microsoft edge browser has a read to me mode which is really good. If you can find a book in text form, you can sometimes listen to it that way. I've actually converted ePub files into text files just for this purpose.