True, but try doing that six years ago. Six years ago (plus or minus 1-3 years? bad memory with timelines), googling "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" did not return the throng of convenient streaming websites and wiki pages and databases that it currently does.
I tried it, got frustrated, tried to hack myself a way to find good stuff by using image search instead, found guro porn instead, got terrified and assumed fetal position in a corner of my room. Gave up on that anime for a while, back then =P
Of course, most of that effect is that search has gotten a lot better over the years, I think.
I haven't felt the need to torrent a show in years.
There's no real need to, but it's often orders of magnitude easier to find a high-quality torrent than a high-quality stream, and torrents offer the convenience of not dealing with buffers and unstable speeds and random connection errors and so on while watching, i.e. a smoother undisturbed experience.
This is obviously valid for all kinds of full downloads in general, it just happens that almost all full anime downloads are torrents.
I tried it, got frustrated, tried to hack myself a way to find good stuff by using image search instead, found guro porn instead, got terrified and assumed fetal position in a corner of my room.
But if you found images of the anime, why were you so unhappy?
I recently published Mortal, a novella-length My Little Pony fanfiction meant to introduce anti-death concepts to an unfamiliar audience. Short description:
This is a character-driven melodrama. It's not particularly rationalist, but it's very, very transhumanist. Unlike, say, Friendship is Optimal, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to people who don't already know the source. It assumes familiarity with the characters and the world.
I am going to talk about how I put together the story and how people reacted to it. This will contain spoilers.
This line exists so you can break out of the automatic "read everything on the page" mode if you want to avoid the spoilers.
This story was structured as something of a bait-and-switch. I watched the reaction to a previous transhumanist horsefic (yes, there's more than one), and I was struck by how easily readers matched the explicitly anti-death narrative to the "immortality is a curse" trope. Rather than fight against this trend, I decided to work with it. The first act is meant to look like a story about learning to accept the inevitability of death. Starting in chapter 3, I break further and further away from that mold until the protagonists finally rebel against the status quo.
The first chapters got a lot of people invested who I suspect would've been turned off by a less familiar opening. Once I was into the third act, I stopped being subtle and used every trick in the book to make the pro-death characters look like the unreasonable ones. Judging by the comments, there's no shortage of readers who were angry at having their expectations flouted, but quite a few seem thoughtful, and some explicitly changed their mind on the subject.