For all the great things our community accomplishes, and it accomplishes many mighty things, Child's Play for example, the ugly side tends to cast a shadow on our brightest lights. There are the typical blights-fights that erupt over consoles of choice, Bigots online, launch-day robberies, but this sort of rot isn't representative of the community as a whole.

Yet, we tolerate theft. Celebrate it even. It isn't just gamers. At this point, I wouldnt even say it is even just internet culture. It's pop culture. It's an almost accepted fact of life. We all steal. We don't like to think of it as stealing, because stealing is wrong in all but the most dire of circumstances, and no one has an exigent need for the latest Castlevania iso or The Strokes' discography.

We hide behind semantics. I need to download the latest fansub or backup this game I don't even own.

We apply cute labels and fucking celebrate how much we can steal and give away like some kind of perverse Robin Hood. I'm a Pirate! Look at my torrent ratios!

It's as though everyone believes they are entitled to have what they want, when they want, how they want, for absolutely no cost. Well, scratch that, it isn't without a price. We put lots of money into our pilferage. Whether it's buying hardware to alter our systems, memory cards to load full of ROMs and ISOs, top notch internet connections to get all the bandwidth we can to ensure maximum up and download rates, MP3 Players to fill with our ill-gotten gains, Hard Drives to fill with ISOs, ROMs and mp3s, packs and packs of CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, BD-Rs. Piracy is a healthy business, too bad it's a business that inherently corrupts our art.