I was not introduced to Moby Dick by my father. While my dad’s taste did affect a lot of the movies, music, and books that I was exposed to (and d

Growing up with Moby Dick - Kuiper's blog

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2024-12-09 22:30:18

I was not introduced to Moby Dick by my father. While my dad’s taste did affect a lot of the movies, music, and books that I was exposed to (and developed a taste for) as a kid, Moby Dick was something that I discovered on my own, thanks to the internet, and specifically, file sharing sites. For some people, P2P file sharing was something you did because downloading twelve MP3 files and burning them onto a disc was cheaper than buying a CD from a local retailer. But in the corners of the internet where I found myself in 2005, there was sort of a culture of torrenting things just because you could. In an era where games fit on 700 MB compact discs, the idea of filling up a 160 GB hard drive seemed inconceivable, but some torrenters took it as a challenge.

Much like the person who starts their day by opening the YouTube app without specifically knowing what they’re going to watch that day, I would go to torrent portals and message boards and chat rooms mainly for the purpose of discovering new media, and the summer before my freshman year of high school, I downloaded a lot of things just out of a vague sense that they were culturally significant and I would probably benefit from exposing myself to them. It was a place to find classic movies, music, books, and games.