Free Movie Downloads, Some Effort and Frustration Involved

Free Movie Downloads, Some Effort and Frustration Involved

First step, for me, was to download BitTorrent 6.0, which you can get from http://www.bittorrent.com/download. There are versions for Windows, the Mac and Linux.

Be aware that there are Agents of Evil at work in the universe, putting False Bit Torrent Software online, with the intention of (a) plundering your bank account and (b) stealing your immortal soul. Be careful what you download and where you download it from.

Once you have BitTorrent you will be able to grab some juicy downloads, as this page explains. I assume these downloads are legal, otherwise the site would have been taken down and all the people involved sent to jail, but , while I assume these downloads are legal, I could be wrong on this.

If you do end up in jail or get hit by a US $200,000 fine, well, sorry about that, and good luck with your next reincarnation.

Once you install BitTorrent and open it, you will see, if you are in the process of downloading some torrents, the picture up the top. Note the GET STUFF opion. Click on this and you have options for getting movies, TV, music and games. If you click on MOVIES, eventually (give it time) you will see a page with a FREE MOVIES option at the top left. Click on that and (once again, eventually) you will see page one of many for some really great movies, such as TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN, billed as "invasion of the Animal People, space invasion of Lapland. Monsters walk the earth in ravishing ramp ..."

Ravishing what? I'm downloading this one now, and I just can't wait to see what. I'm sure you can't wait either.

I'm also downloading SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS and I've already downloaded JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER. Also LOST WORLD, which I understand is from 1925.

(Funny, one of my previous reincarnations took me all the way through 1925, but for some reason I missed that movie. Have no recollection of ever having seen it before.)

Some of these movies are labeled as "cult" material, but I don't think this means you have to join a cult to be allowed to watch the movie.

On the technical side, BitTorrent is file sharing software, and using it involves your computer becoming a kind of waystation for files which are being swapped around the Internet. That's all I know and that's all I wish to know. For those who aspire to become uber geeks, Wikipedia has an entry on the BitTorrent protocol, which is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

This article says, in part, the following:

[BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.]

An entry on programs ("clients") that use BitTorrent is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_client

This page says, in part:

[The first client was created by Bram Cohen in the summer of 2002, and most of the other ones started out from BitTorrent and on, even more are being created right now.]

There is also an entry about a company associated with this peer-to-peer protocol, this page being:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent%2C_Inc.

This page says, in part:

[BitTorrent, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, is an American corporation that develops Internet content distribution technology based on the BitTorrent protocol. The company was founded on September 22, 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's CEO and President respectively. BitTorrent, Inc. also maintains the BitTorrent protocol.]

For practical purposes, if you download Bit Torrent 6.0 and use the GET STUFF button, it is a way to get at costless movies and mp3s and so forth.

However, there is a certain amount of work and frustration involved.

For a start, the files are a mish-mash of different formats. Some, for example, are in the form of Nero image files. If you know what Nero is, and if you have Nero (it is not freeware) and if you know how to use it to burn an image file to a CD, then you will be okay. I am in that happy position, but, if I was not, I would be scratching my head.

I soon encountered formats I did not recognize, including MOV and mp4. My version of Windows (XP Professional) did not recognize them either, so I had to Google my way to freeware players for the mystery formats. And learning how to use them took a little bit of time.

Additionally, downloads are massive, usually half a gigabyte or more, and are far from speedy.

Looking at the screenshot of 6.0, if you right-click on any torrent then you will see a slew of options, including REMOVE and also REMOVE AND (DELETE TORRENT or DELETE TORRENT + DATA or DELETE DATA).

And, speaking of the data, where is it? The right click gives you the option OPEN CONTAINING FOLDER, and that folder is where that particular torrent's data will be stored.

Some of the files I downloaded proved to be mutilated in some way which made them useless, and this adds another element of frustration.

That said, it's kind of fun, and the free stuff does contain some interesting retro material which is engagingly different from the slick modern stuff we have in the modern age, the age of Halo Three and Blackwater.

To wrap up, if you want to write something online about me, thanks to Google Alerts I found a new wiki which is about me, the URL for this being as follows:

http://www.aboutus.org/ZenVirus.com

It's very bare bones at the moment, with a message up the top saying "This is a collaborative website. Please make constructive edits anywhere you see fit." There are associated JOIN US! and LOG IN! links.

I made the user name Hugh Cook. Once I'd made it, the first thing that I was presented with was a page which let me make a "personal page" and add a portrait ...

When I have time, I might add a little biographical information. Something, for instance, about the seven years I spent with a Mayan Revival peyote cult on the Yukatan peninsular.
Or the happy years I spent with Blackwater, meeting people of interesting ethnicities and killing them. Or I might give an account of some of the adventures I had in the company of Santa Claus, Jesse James and Frankenstein's daughter.

Or I might write something about the project I'm trying to finish off right now, an SF fantasy book with the title ANOINTED OF GOD, the mission statment of which might be, if I were to make it, something like "Let me see how deeply I can shock you."

But right now I see that TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN has finished downloading. It's at 100% and is now, myseriously, "seeding."

Can't wait. Absolutely have to look at this. Now.

But a final word before I shoot through to Movie Heaven. I'd been seeing this word "wiki" around for a while without knowing what it meant, and what it means is a web page or site that anyone can edit, like Wikipedia. In the e-mail that I received after I made my user id for the new wiki about me, I got a link to a page which explains about wikis and wiki culture and how to get started editing. The page his this:

http://www.aboutus.org/WikiAnatomy

A good place to start, I think, if you want to learn more.

The main online wiki about me, by the way, is Steve's wiki, ChronicLesoFanageOfDarkness.info

And this wiki has, I now discover, its own wiki, which is as follows:

http://www.aboutus.org/ChronicLesoFanageOfDarkness.info