#archival redundancy

[notthequiettype]

465 lb d'affection

[endlesslytired]

[impossiblefeat]

[olberic]

this recent tumblr scare has me so distressed im back in therapy. im dead serious btw. genuinely like thinking about it kicks my resting heart rate up to a hundred and i start shaking and feeling nauseous and ive been losing sleep because i just lie there scared and in a cold sweat and crying. i love it here so much and im completely sincere in this post. anyways im genuinely dedicated to backing things up this time. i MEAN it when i say im only ever gonna leave this site if it completely ceases to function BUT if i lost 12 years of my life’s worth of posts id be put on a watchlist. all of this is to say today i went back in my archive and deleted 14 292 posts from between april-october 2013 ALONE. fucking hell id hit post limit on supernatural gifs every day.

[kommabortsig]

Dinkelmühle_Graf125.JPG

[zoanzon]

Yeah, so, for the last most-of-a-year I've had a particular project I've been working on to back up all my electronic writing - from the half-dozen places it's been scattered, content going back to early 2016 - into a single fucking repository.

I'm not done yet - still got over 500 sticky notes of stuff to import from my phone - but as of today...

I broke the million-word mark.

It wasn't a New Year's resolution last year to do anything like this, but yeah if you want to set yourself a resolution for this year to do something like, oh I don't know, 'back up a copy of everything 'I' (ie you) have written so it doesn't get lost to the void one day'...

Consider this you sign it's a goal you can pull off.

[girlhoodunderground]

[apocalypticdemon]

i love it when i get possessed by the urge to do something and i feel like i must do it right away Or Else

[inactiveaccount-lovendeepsecrets]

Domestic + Intimate Headcanons

*Minus Caleb only because his myth and cards aren't out yet, and I don't feel confident adding him when there's so much lore and little quirks we still don't know about him. I shall make a separate post for him if this goes well.

But Hi! This is my 1st hc so please go easy on me. I believe some of the bullet points on here are canon, but I can’t help talking abt how cute this all is 🫠 I'm not the best writer and I tried so hard to be impartial, but you can probably still tell where my bias lies LOL

As always these are just my opinions!!

tags: headcanon, fluff, mostly gender neutral, but these lean towards an afab + fem!reader, 18+

***MDNI; by choosing to interact with this content, you have consented to viewing something nsfw despite the warnings and will be BLOCKED***

Disclaimer: I personally think all of them like praise, body worship and are humungous eaters. If the specifications aren't noted under your fav LI, it's because I didn't want this too become too redundant!

✵ ✰ ✷ ✭✮ 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ ❅ ❆ ❃ 𓆰· 𓆃

Rafayel

SFW

• Has definitely set up a date where you do that TikTok trend painting portraits of each other

• Hates the caricature you two posed for at the amusement park

• On more than one occasion you've (jokingly) threatened to frame said caricature at his gallery to shut him up during an argument

• Is an escape artist. He has a long history of being captured/on the run. It’s no wonder he could easily untie himself from your ropes

• I don't think we talk enough about how rich this man is, but I think he'd be quite into second hand fashion. Think runway archives, vintage designer pieces, custom couture, etc.

• Always drives over the speed limit

• Will never tease you during your art lessons with him

• THE best bf to take pictures of you for your social media accounts. He’d suggest different poses while contorting himself in odd positions on the ground just to get the perfect angle

• Sings you to sleep

• Surprisingly good at doing hair. If you need help dying, braiding, or putting your hair in rollers, he'd actually do a pretty good job.

• Created an entire album on his phone of candid photos he took when you weren't looking

• Also made a scrapbook of polaroids from all your scenic dates and vacations together, most of them are of you

NSFW

• He’s a mermaid. He is the motion of the ocean. The hip movements? Stamina? Best (and prettiest) dick game goes to him, I’m sorry.

• LOUD, noisy, and talkative. Starts to ramble when he’s close

• Wax play? [in the submissive]

• Nipple play [in the submissive]

• Edging + Milking

• I think his open vulnerability makes people think he’s more sub leaning, but some of it’s for show

• Because of your bond, he’ll submit; but he’ll do it in such a way that you’re right where he wants you to effectively make the switch

• Make no mistake, he doesn’t mind subbing from time to time. He loves seeing you on top of him, using his body. He feels a sense of accomplishment being a vessel for your pleasure

• There was a tweet that explained how Raf would be a bit of a bully as a dom, but in the best way (recommended read)

• Chuckles and coos at you after each of your orgasms

• Isn’t into watersports, but gets a massive ego boost if you squ*rt

• Is sometimes overly arrogant about toys, but is also so obsessed with you, that he made you get molds of each other on the rare occasions you’re apart for too long

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚

Sylus

SFW

• Has asked his private chef for a one on one culinary lesson to impress you with a home cooked meal

• A patron and secret lover of the arts. Dabbles in the opera, theatre and certain musicals

• He’s*slightly* better at drawing and singing than he lets on, but loves taking the piss

• This man is so funny, but his life and profession is all too serious, making the small moments of banter more precious for the both of you

• Will also hum to lull you to sleep

• Secret polyglot

• His way of ending petty arguments with you is by throwing you over his shoulder and going to bed

• Retail therapy connoisseur

• Surprisingly handy

• He of course, only likes visiting Linkon to see you, but also likes your apartment. While it’s microscopic in his eyes, he slowly understands what small things make a home feel cozy and tries to replicate that at his

• He’s intrigued by your self care sessions and will often indulge, joining in with the sheet masks, aromatherapy, massages and waxing (he likes the heat of the wax lol). He’ll put on a brave face and deny the pain, boasting about his high tolerance

• Spoils you in general, but especially when you’re sick or on your period

• Will carry you around just cause -much like a typical cat owner who loves to randomly pick up and cuddle their cat LOL

• Would buy out a restaurant for the night and have the orchestra play a medley of some of your favourite songs you’ve discovered from his record collection

• There’s really no such thing as small gestures with him

NSFW

• Marking

• Nipple play (giving and receiving)

• Blindfolds

• Certified munch; almost loves it more than penetrative sex

• AND HE 10000% HOLDS YOUR HANDS WHILE GOING DOWN ON YOU— WHY ISNT THIS WRITTEN MORE IN FICS

• Pleasure dom. He’s not sadistic or a bully when it comes to overstimulation (unlike Raf), he’s the very definition of “will talk you through it”

• Absolutely the type to coo at the sounds and faces you make. You could not look more adorable in his eyes

• Likes watching you solo

• Your satisfaction is his priority, so he’s not intimidated by toys. That being said, he definitely owns a remote vibrator

• Phone sex. No question

• In addition to phone sex, he bought those long distance bluetooth couple’s toys that sync up with each other so it’ll react to both of your movements in real time

• In the submissive, he really loves to see you in control of your own pleasure. He’ll encourage you to use him (eg face sitting, leg humping, cowgirl, etc)

• Slight masochist; those cuffs, paddles and chains are for him 😭 he’s curious to see how far you’ll go. By the end of it all, he’ll use his evol to free himself of whatever restraint he’s under

•As far as a degradation kink, I don’t see it for him, sorry. He adores you too much to call his sweetie a “slut”, “whore”, “filthy,” and so on

• Not as rough as he appears. Really the only time he’s rougher than he realises, is when he’s biting you

• If you want it more aggressive, you’ll have to ask. Even then, he’ll be cautious not to overdo it. The last thing he wants is to hurt you

• It’s canon he loves praise. Giving and receiving

𓆰· 𓆃 · 𓆩♡ 𓆰· 𓆃 · 𓆩♡ 𓆰· 𓆃 · 𓆩♡ 𓆰· 𓆃 · 𓆩♡

Xavier

SFW

• Low-key likes to carry you around and his fav way is by piggyback ride (loves being physically close to you and the way you cling to him)

• Will fast all day just for Hotpot or Brazilian steakhouse

• Is much better at baking than cooking

• Leaves you Post-it note love letters in places like mirrors, cabinets, and drawers, before he leaves after spending the night

• Unintentional comedian. He's sometimes taken aback by your laughter, but it only encourages him to keep talking just to hear it again

• He honestly loves sharing things with you; food, books, (his) hoodies, etc. He just doesn’t like sharing YOU

• Would plan a scavenger hunt date

• Is always playing coy because he knows it triggers your cuteness aggression

• The pettiest of petty when he's upset or threatened (look up his affinity lvl 140 video call)

• Sometimes stricter than Zayne when it comes to your health & recovery. He hates to see you over-exerting yourself after an injury and has scolded you before about taking it easy

• Loves to get ready for bed with you at the same time. Showering together, doing skincare together, brushing teeth together; whatever you’re doing he’s either tagging along or sitting there watching you

• When he’s spending the night, he can't fall asleep without you playing with his hair and holding hands

• Learned your favourite flower and has been secretly sneaking into Jeremiah’s greenhouse planting and tending to a small bush of them to gift to you whenever

NSFW

• Thigh job

• Mating press

• Morning sex, specifically morning head (f receiving)

• While going down on you, he def seems like the type to keep going after you’ve climaxed, but he slows down his movements, giving languid kisses to your center to help ride out the wave of pleasure vs intentional overstimulation (though he isn’t against that either)

• It seems that the consensus on here is that he's the best eater of the LIs? I don't necessarily disagree; I'm just not completely sure if that title goes to him quite yet

• The most primal and rough of the LIs. Hair pulling, choking (safely), spanking, leashes

• Also likes it when you’re rough with him

[I know I said I wasn’t confident making any hcs abt Caleb yet, but I have a slight hunch he rivals Xavier for most primal]

• Goes feral when you say his name

• This man is a dom, don’t let the puppy eyes and bunny ears fool you 💀

• He's not as noisy as he is talkative, especially during foreplay

• BOSSY

• I don’t put it past him to feel like he’s in competition with vibrators. He’d rather him use one on you, but knows he’s being irrational

• While he’s not really into feet, he’d suck toes during missionary to see how you’d react

✵ ✰ ✷ ✭ ✧ ✸ ✮ ✵ ✰ ✷ ✭ ✧ ✸ ✮ ✵ ✰ ✷ ✭ ✧ ✸

Zayne

SFW

• Alternatively to Sylus, this man is comprised of small gestures that snowball (hehe) over time. One more meaningful than the next

• While he respects and admires your independence, he needs you to need him. He’ll never vocalise it, but he feels most useful and accomplished when you ask for his help

• Won’t let you carry any bags when you’re out shopping, not even your purse

• Like Rafayel, he also has an album on his phone with pictures of mostly you. Though he feels odd taking your picture when you’re not looking, he’s snuck in a photo or two when you were looking particularly lively mingling with the people at his work event

• Knows your go-to orders at all of your fav restaurants by heart

• Stargazing dates. When either of you are out of town for a while and are catching up on the phone before bed, he’ll tell you to go outside and look at the moon

• After a long shift at work, he’ll kneel by your side of the couch waiting for you to embrace him, hugging and nuzzling your waist

• He also secretly loves being the little spoon

• Subscribed to a delivery service that sends you flowers on your birthday every year

• There’s something about Zayne that makes me think dogs absolutely LOVE him even though he’s not particularly fond of their energetic nature

• Spoils you rotten when you’re on your period. Full princess treatment; plushie heating pads, full body massages, raspberry tea, and hand feeding you snacks. Basically Dr Zayne turns into Nurse Zayne

• He’s more lenient with your cravings, letting you have a small portion of desserts or snacks only after you’ve finished your meal

• Loves your laugh but knows his dry wit won’t always work, so he’ll just tickle you if the joke doesn’t land

• Fell in love with you after the Drunken Intimacy card. It made him realise how much he likes holding you and tending to your needs

• Doesn’t even bother lecturing you about how bad high heels are for your joints and muscles anymore. He now keeps a pair of slippers in his car just in case you start to complain

• He can never resist the urge to kiss your cheek or forehead when he sees you’re fast asleep (Canon 🥹)

NSFW

• Has a weakness for lingerie, lace and stockings

• In the submissive, he’d be just like the kitty butler in his card -the goodest of good boys

• …Feet? I’m not sure if it’s anything freaky. Kudos to whoever clocked that for sub! Zayne months prior to the kitty butler quad banner

• Soft dom, but not as gentle as his voice lets on. He’s already a bit strict with you in your relationship, and he’s the same way in bed. How is he supposed to know what feels good if you don’t vocalise it?

• The only time he’s pretty rough with you is when you provoke him. But he checks in with you to make sure he isn’t being too hard

• Once he loses his control, he gets a tiny bit greedy too (“We’re not done here. Quitting halfway isn’t something I would do” —Silent Poem Secret Times)

• His methods of brat “taming” aren’t anything over the top or domineering. Though he enjoys spanking, he thinks there are better lessons he could teach you to combat your brattiness

• Has definitely gone down on you and stopped altogether right before you climax as a form of punishment

• Shibari + Hitachi -girl run!

• Ice play

• Nipple play (giving and receiving)

• The size of your chest doesn’t really matter to him, he just really likes to hold and massage them. It’s his favourite way to keep his hands warm

• This man is so good with his hands and in more ways than one. The placement and movement of his hands in the Nightly Rendezvous card sent me into orbit. The body worship he’d do is insane

• Needless to say he’s the best at fingering

• You’re irresistible to him. He breathes you into every kiss, deepening as your bodies continue to merge. There’s no sex without passion, even the “quickies”

• Quickies usually only happen when you’ve teased or provoked him too far during (or on your way to) an event. Otherwise, he likes taking his time with you

• He knows your body like the back of his hand. He’s memorised what triggers the sounds, faces, and jolts your body makes

• Much like Xavier, he loves to hear you cry out his name

❅ ❆ ❃ ❊ ❉ ❅ ❆ ❃ ❊ ❉ ❅ ❆ ❃ ❊ ❉ ❅ ❆ ❃ ❊ ❉ ❅ ❆

[notthequiettype]

alomen

[viniferas]

hey i just realized screenshotting those fandom stuff wasnt pointless at all now that twt is imploding once more. my other acc is literally spiking in activity despite getting zero to no notes entirely thats. How the fuck

[cannibalisticcorpse]

ONLY THE BEST FEELING EVER

tfw you read a fucked up fic (pos), tell the author you enjoyed it but maybe to tag it next time (do other people read the warnings cuz honestly I read the tags to find out if a fic is gonna be fucked up and uhhh I was not prepared as a result) and then spend the rest of the afternoon imagining even more fucked up scenarios for that fic.

I don't know WHAT the feeling is, but I am feeling it.

[mecachrome]

📊 LANDOSCAR AO3 STATS (may 2025)

notes

sorry this literally took 2 weeks to write... unfortunately the data was retrieved april 28 and it is now may 12.

other work: i previously wrote a stats overview that covered landoscar's fic growth and breakout in 2023 :) i've kept some of the formatting and graphs that i showed there, while other things have been removed or refined because i felt they'd become redundant or unnecessary (aka they were basically just a reflection of fandom growth in general, and not unique or interesting to landoscar as a ship specifically).

methodology: i simply scraped the metadata for every fic in the landoscar tag (until april 28, 2025) and then imported it into google sheets to clean, with most visualizations done in tableau. again, all temporal data is by date updated (not posted) unless noted otherwise. this is because the date that appears on the parent view of the ao3 archives is the updated one, so it's the only feasible datapoint to collect for 3000+ fics.

content: this post does not mention any individual authors or concern itself with kudos, hits, comments, etc. i purely describe archive growth and overall analysis of metadata like word count and tagging metrics.

cleaning: after importing my data, i standardized ship spelling, removed extra "814" or "landoscar" tags, and merged all versions of one-sided, background, implied, past, mentioned etc. into a single "(side)" modifier. i also removed one fic entirely from the dataset because the "loscar" tag was being mistakenly wrangled as landoscar, but otherwise was not actually tagged as landoscar. i also removed extra commentary tags in the ships sets that did not pertain to any ships.

overall stats

before we get into any detailed distributions, let's first look at an overview of the archive as of 2025! in their 2-and-change years as teammates, landoscar have had over 3,409 fics written for them, good enough for 3rd overall in the f1 archives (behind lestappen and maxiel).

most landoscar fics are completed one-shots (although note that a one-shot could easily be 80k words—in fact they have about 30 single-chapter fics that are at least 50k words long), and they also benefit from a lot of first-tagged fic, which is to say 82.3% of landoscar-tagged fics have them as the first ship, implying that they aren't often used as a fleeting side pairing and artificially skewing perception of their popularity. in fact, over half of landoscar fics are PURELY tagged as landoscar (aka otp: true), with no other side pairings tagged at all.

this percentage has actually gone down a bit since 2023 (65.5%), which makes sense since more lando and oscar ships have become established and grown in popularity over the years, but it's also not a very big difference yet...

ship growth

of course, landoscar have grown at a frankly terrifying rate since 2023. remember this annotated graph i posted comparing their growth during the 2023 season to that of carlando and loscar, respectively their other biggest ship at the time? THIS IS HER NOW:

yes... that tiny squished down little rectangle... (wipes away stray tear) they grow up so fast. i also tried to annotate this graph to show other "big" landoscar moments in the timeline since, but i honestly struggled with this because they've just grown SO exponentially and consistently that i don't even feel like i can point to anything as a proper catalyst of production anymore. that is to say, i think landoscar are popular enough now that they have a large amount of dedicated fans/writers who will continuously work on certain drafts and stories regardless of what happens irl, so it's hard to point at certain events as inspiring a meaningful amount of work.

note also that this is all going by date updated, so it's not a true reflection of ~growth~ as a ficdom. thankfully ao3 does have a date_created filter that you can manually enter into the search, but because of this limitation i can't create graphs with the granularity and complexity that scraping an entire archive allows me. nevertheless, i picked a few big ships that landoscar have overtaken over the last 2 years and created this graph using actual date created metrics!!!

this is pretty self-explanatory of course but i think it's fun to look at... :) it's especially satisfying to see how many ships they casually crossed over before the end of 2024.

distributions

some quick graphs this time. rating distribution remains extremely similar to the 2023 graph, with explicit fic coming out on top at 28%:

last time i noted a skew in ratings between the overall f1 rpf tag and the landoscar tag (i.e. landoscar had a higher prevalence of e fic), but looking at it a second time i honestly believe this is more of a cultural shift in (f1? sports rpf? who knows) fandom at large and not specific to landoscar as a ship — filtering the f1 rpf tag to works updated from 2023 onward shows that explicit has since become the most popular rating in general, even when excluding landoscar-tagged fics. is it because fandom is getting more horny in general, or because the etiquette surrounding what constitutes t / m / e has changed, or because people are less afraid to post e fic publicly and no longer quarantine it to locked livejournal posts? or something else altogether? Well i don't know and this is a landoscar stats post so it doesn't matter but that could be something for another thought experiment. regardless because of that i feel like further graphs aren't really necessary 🤷‍♀️

onto word distribution:

still similar to last time, although i will note that there's a higher representation of longfic now!!! it might not seem like much, but i noted last year that 85% of landoscar fics were under 10k & 97% under 25k — these numbers are now 78% and 92% respectively, which adds up in the grand scheme of a much larger archive. you'll also notice that the prevalence of <1k fic has gone down as well.

for the fun of it here's the wc distribution but with a further rating breakdown; as previously discussed you're more likely to get G ratings in flashfic because there's less wordspace to Make The Porn Happen. of course there are nuances to this but that's just a broad overview

side ships

what other ships are landoscar shippers shipping these days??? a lot of these ships are familiar from last time, but there are two new entries in ham/ros and pia/sai overtaking nor/ric and gas/lec to enter the top 10. ships that include at least one of lando or oscar are highlighted in orange:

of course, i pulled other 814-adjacent ships, but unfortunately i've realized that a lot of them simply aren't that popular/prevalent (context: within the 814 tag specifically) so they didn't make the top 10... because of that, here's a graph with only ships that include lando or oscar and have a minimum of 10 works within the landoscar tag:

eta: other primarily includes oscar & lily and maxf & lando. lando doesn't really have that many popular pairings within landoscar shippers otherwise...

i had wanted to explore these ships further and look at their growth/do some more in depth breakdowns of their popularity, but atm they're simply not popular enough for me to really do anything here. maybe next year?!

that being said, i did make a table comparing the prevalence of side ships within the 814 tag to the global f1 archives, so as to contextualize the popularity of each ship (see 2023). as usually, maxiel is very underrepresented in the landoscar tag, with galex actually receiving quite a boost compared to before!

additional tags

so last time i only had about 400 fics to work with and i did some analysis on additional tags / essentially au tagging. however, the problem is that there are now 3000 fics in my set, and the limitations of web scraping means that i'm not privy to the tag wrangling that happens in Da Backend of ao3. basically i'm being given all the raw versions of these au tags, whereas on ao3 "a/b/o" and "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "au - alpha/beta/omega" and "alternate universe - a/b/o" are all being wrangled together. because it would take way too long for me to do all of this manually and i frankly just don't want to clean that many fics after already going through all the ship tags, i've decided to not do any au analysis because i don't think it would be an accurate reflection of the data...

that being said, i had one new little experiment! as landoscar get more and more competitive, i wanted to chart how ~angsty~ they've gotten as a ship on ao3. i wanted to make a cumulative graph that shows how the overall fluff % - angst % difference has shifted over time, but ummmm... tableau and i had a disagreement. so instead here is a graph of the MoM change in angst % (so basically what percentage of the fics updated in that month specifically were tagged angst?):

the overall number is still not very drastic at all and fluff still prevails over angst in the landoscar archive. to be clear, there are 33.2% fics tagged some variation of fluff and 21.4% fics tagged some variation of angst overall, so there's a fluff surplus of 11.8%. but there has definitely been a slight growth in angst metrics over the past few months!

—

i will leave this here for now... if there's anything specific that you're interested in lmk and i can whip it up!!! hehe ty for reading 🧡

[comiclysmic]

Happy Belated Valentines Day! Have a flaming skull. 🫴💀🔥

Been working my way through The Magnus Archives, and I've been having a ol' jolly time! I'm sure this scene's been done to death (hah) but it was too good not to draw. ❤️‍🔥

Image Description under the cut for redundancy sake:

Content Warning: This description contains violent imagery, including fire, bones, blood, and fear.

Illustration featuring Agnes and Jack from The Magnus Archive. Agnes is a young woman with pale skin and auburn hair. She's wearing a black middle-length trench coat over a white pin-stripe blouse, belted at the middle with a dark grey-black middle-length skirt. She's reaching a hand up to cup Jack's face, holding it to her own, kissing him on the lips.

Jack is wearing a pale coloured scarf and brown gloves, and an olive winter jacket over jeans. His features are barely visible as fire consumes his face, but the one eye shown is wide, a look of terror and pain in them. Blood trickles down onto Agnes' face and hand, though her skin remains unburnt. The fire glows through her hand, silhouetting the bones beneath.

The flames billow out of the holes in Jack's skull: his eyes, the nose, the teeth, the ear, and pour over his head backwards into the dark of the night, blending from white, gold and red to blood red, green and blue. Jack grips at Agnes' arm, frozen in his attempt to escape her grasp.

They stand stark against the black of night, city lights unfocused and faint in the distance. Sparks of red, violet and orange float in the foreground.

[shinosarna]

To all you fuckers saying "BUY DIGITAL MEDIA" lol. Lmfao, even.

Physical media will not save you and were never going to save you. Especially when people making them are the same greedy companies that run streaming services.

Learn to torrent. If you also want to back up your pirated media on Audio CDs or DVDs that's opposite of a bad thing, but buying random pre-made DVDs off Amazon is not it.

There are no real affordable archival solutions for digital media that don't decay with time, as far as I know. SSDs can lost a long time, but flash memory isn't invincible. All magnetic storage can decay over time or with mechanical accidents, and that includes hard drives or floppy disks. Optical disks are vulnerable to disk rot (like in OP).

Torrents seem nice, but P2P connections in the end is just the file on somebody's SSD or hard drive - you just add more redundancies. It can be pretty resilient if specifically organized for, but that almost never is the case, and old torrents for obscure media are almost always dead.

I don't know what is the answer and if anyone with archival knowledge/training would like to pitch in, that'd be great.

[canmom]

"don't post links to pirate sites" as a security through obscurity strategy seems... weak. if a pirate site is so obscure that almost nobody can find it, it's also essentially pointless.

but yes, if a pirate site is common knowledge, the feds will be working on destroying it. so the idea is i assume to achieve an intermediate level of obscurity, where you have to have a certain amount of talent for asking the right people or searching the right things to find it. but... whatever capacity for research you are asking people to have on that front, the feds are equally capable of it, and they have a whole lot more time on their hands for tracking down pirate sites! security through obscurity is a losing game for piracy. the perfect sweet spot where people can find your pirate resource but the feds cannot is something of a mirage.

if not that, than what?

the current piracy system involves a few different tiers of accessibility, and various components that are more or less decentralised.

torrents are the most resilient tech because to stamp out a torrent (with DHT enabled) you have to suppress every seed. so, you have big public torrent trackers like TPB; these are well known and rely on hopping domains and redundancy for security. the ratio of seeds to leeches tends to be low, but the number of users is large enough that there will be at least a few seeds out there for most stuff. torrent clients have gotten a lot better at seeding strategies that take into account your seed ratio and what's currently available in the swarm, so if you just leave everything on seed and open your torrent client fairly often (use a VPN though lol), you don't really need to think about it.

then you have private trackers; these operate on an invite basis. the problem with this is that when the pool of users is so small, the odds of a given seed being online are also small. to prevent torrents dying, they gamify it: you get points for seeding and if you don't have enough points you can't download anything until you seed more. to help people get back in the game there will be 'freeleech' events. being active on a private tracker takes a bit of work.

and of course you have to get in in the first place, which tends to require a proven track record of seeding on other private trackers, and some kind of interview with the operators. getting involved in private trackers is a much bigger ask, you have to figure out where to get your foot in the door, and work your way up to the more insular trackers. it's like a mini subculture. it's valuable, but not scalable.

at the top level of inaccessibility is the warez scene. this is a whole subject that i'm not even gonna get into, go read wikipedia. historically this is where the files actually come from, before getting distributed on public trackers, usenet etc. but good luck getting in there lmao, they are understandably quite paranoid.

of course, for stuff to get on pirate sites you need somebody to go the effort of ripping and encoding it. this is where a major point of failure exists. when RarBG went down recently, the biggest loss was not the existing archive of torrent links, which can be backed up - it was that they were very active at converting scene releases into torrents with a decent balance of file size and quality, which then filter out into the various public trackers. that is much harder to replace! but what killed RarBG wasn't even suppression by authorities - according to their statement, it was a bunch of the admins getting covid or dying or fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war, which made the whole operation impossible to continue. so despite the thousands of people who download RarBG torrents, this single point of failure was overstressed and broke.

as far as the ethics of spreading links to pirate sites go... if it's something like a mega drive, yeah, the chances of a takedown are pretty high if it gets noticed! no question. but those things are by nature short-lived; if you want to use that for archival you're building on sand. there's also databases like emuparadise, but there was no saving that through obscurity, it just took Nintendo a minute to bring the case.

in this kind of centralised case, the clock is ticking from day 1. what we want is to maximise the number of people who are able to save copies while it's up, and then some of those people can put it up again somewhere else and keep the authorities playing whack-a-mole. (for a small collection of files, a sensible measure would be to make a torrent and a mega drive side by side, so that people can download the mega drive and then add the torrent to their client to seed if it gets nuked.)

as for torrent sites, the thing is that torrents rely for effectiveness on a swarm that is either very large or very responsible about seeding. if it's a public tracker, it has to be well known or it's pointless. instead of security through obscurity, the form of security for these sites is try to make the resource itself hard to take down - operating the tracker/archive in countries that don't have copyright treaties, maintaining mirrors, and of course distributing as many seeds as possible so the torrent can stay alive even if the site goes down.

the major problem with a dead torrent site is discoverability. if it's harder to find the torrent, fewer people will download it, the existing seeds will gradually go offline, and of course you can't download a torrent that you don't know exists. and while you could imagine a system of broadcasting metadata about a torrent (title, encoding etc.) in a DHT-like way but that would be so vulnerable to fakes and spam. maybe some kind of cryptographically signed 'this torrent is good' declaration is possible? I know certain torrent clients tout discovery features, but honestly I don't know how well they work. I'm sure there are projects that are way ahead of the game than me on this question.

but yeah anyway trying to browbeat people into not sharing links to pirate media is 1. futile, by the time you see it the cat is out of the bag 2. not a sustainable strategy for security. if you wanna lecture people, 'use a VPN and seed your torrents' is evergreen ;p