How to use torrents and get stuff

There comes a time in the life of humans in which they grow tired of whining, and while my first purpose of this blog was to bitch about random stuff that didn't really bother me at all, I find myself bored of it enough to stop me from writing at all. So for now, until I get bored of this too, I will try to share my random knowledge of crap so that others can do stuff they might not know how to do. While this might sound honorable and you might feel inclined to think more of me, the truth is that the only knowledge I possess, beyond the usual stuff like how to chew food or how to take a bath, is stuff you can use to break the law or do "evil" things, although in the end knowledge is just knowledge and thus you can learn what I teach without doing anything "wrong". So, to begin I decided to teach you how to tap into the internet in the way that has survived the copyright apocalypse: torrents.

Now, before beginning your pursuit of the world of downloading crap you won't need to survive in the jungle I should say some stupid disclaimer like "do this to download legally" or "don't download pirated stuff". But the truth of this world is that the one who doesn't pay taxes become rich, the liar becomes adored and the one who uses others as tools or shields becomes powerful, so it would be hypocritical of me to tell you what to do with what you learn. In the end just remember the only truth that you need in life: you have free will so do what you want, but you should be prepared to carry the consequences of your choices. If something goes wrong no one will come to save you, and even when you might manage to throw someone else under the shit storm and save yourself, you won't be able to blame anyone else if that person decides to kill your family and leave you crippled so that you can only remember what you lost for the rest of your miserable life. With that said, lets begin explaining how to tap into what the hopeful call the collective human knowledge and what others call the new Sodom and Gomorrah.

To begin I should explain some of the basic terminology of the torrent users. Leeching is downloading from others, seeding is allowing others to download what you have, ratio is the numeric difference between the two and, naturally, a leecher is someone who "hits and run" files (downloading without uploading later). Now, if you really cared about everything else I could tell you what torrents are and how it works, but you can google everything these days so if you want to learn specifics google that. Let's skip toward the real question of today: "how do I get things?" First you need 2 things: a program that allows you to download the shit and the page from which you can get torrent files to find what you want. I personally use utorrent, which is what I will be using for this "tutorial", so if you know nothing about torrenting try that one. You can get it for free at http://www.utorrent.com/  (I'm using adfly to cover from being listed under traffic source, if you don't know how adfly works, just wait around 5 seconds and then click "skip ad" on the top rightmost side of the page and it will send you to the utorrent page, if that bothers you, feel free to copy/paste the link as I wrote it).

After you have downloaded and installed utorrent you need to test it. To download a file you need a torrent, which for the purpose of this basic tutorial is the list of crap you are getting and the places from which you are getting them so that the program can download them. I usually use www.torrentz.eu (adfly link too, remember to click on skip ad on the top). Torrenz is a search engine that looks in some of the most used list pages (pages that offer .torrent files) so that you can search for the thing only once. Since from now on it would be easier to see, I will use some screenshots:

 

This is the main page

 When you enter torrentz page you will see that page, you search whatever you want and it gives you this:

The red arrow is simply ads, ignore those. The green arrow shows the results from what you searched (I searched abandonware because it's not nice to incriminate myself) The green square with the 14 means the seeds (people who has completely downloaded the file and are uploading it) and the blue square with the 2 are the leechs (people downloading it currently). Another thing to notice is the green rectangle with the check mark next to my green arrow, that rectangle means the torrent is verified by users (voted as legitimate) and the number next to it is the quantity of users that voted it as real against the users that voted it as not. That green one next to the 52 jeux pc... means that there are 2 votes as real more than votes as fake. If the square was red it means more people voted it as fake (either it doesn't have what it says, it has a virus or it's corrupted). I would recommend you avoid the red ones but, you know, free will and all that. After you choose the torrent you want, you can click on it for the specifics. It will look like this:

The red square in this picture are the pages from which you can get the .torrent files, the green one is the difference in down/up votes and the trackers show the number of seed and leechs. Underneath that you get the list of files that the .torrent contains and underneath that is the comment space. It's useful to read the files you are downloading (just in case) and the comments (if something goes wrong people will complain about it). In any case, from this page you choose from where you will download the .torrent, which in time you will choose your own lists of preferred ones. Oh, remember to ignore the "download direct" one, thats an ad. For the purpose of this guide I chose thepiratebay.sx (which is one of the most common ones since they are famous for making the news a lot of times in the past for surviving the copyright witch hunts (google it if you want to, it's kind of funny). After clicking on thepiratebay you will see this:

Ignore evertything that is red. To get the torrent you will need to click on the "get this torrent" that I boxed in green. The white square under that is the torrent description (usually tells you more about what you are getting or shows you screenshots) and underneath that its user comments, if you read these you can get a preview of what you are getting. In any case, when you click on get this torrent you will open a magnet link, which will open utorrent (you installed it earlier right?) and ask you where do you want to save your new found crap. You will see it like this:

The blue arrow is where you will see what you are downloading(uploading) The red arrow points where you will get the details of what you are downloading if you click on it, and the green arrow is the connectivity status. If after some minutes you don't see the green circle (ignore the facebook and twitter ones) you have to open some ports in your connection, which can be done by clicking on it (it will be a yellow triangle I think) and following the instructions from the page it will send you. Now, I will end this guide here, because I think it would be nice for people to explore on their own and learn for themselves the rest, but if you enough of you have problems with anything in here I will be happy to make another post with more pictures to help with anything else (including opening ports) or giving specific trivia about stuff so that you can show off to others.  In any case, good luck downloading crap and living your life as you can.