My Beautiful Wife has been traveling a lot for her job. Lots of weekend tradeshows, mostly.

I’m not going to lie. After twelve years, it’s kind of nice to have “selfish” weekends where I can do what I want and eat what I want and watch movies that my missus has no interest in seeing. It’s nice to roll around the entire bed instead of clinging to the edge after my missus rolls to the middle of the Serta in her sleep.

Bachelor life is good!

I eat sushi. I watch a comic book superhero movie or stupid mostly-kids movie; this time Sherman and Peabody. I lounge around in my underwear and give the dog noogies until she growls at me. And that fills up a solid day.

Bachelor life is good!

For a day.

After that, the sense of incompleteness begins to overwhelm the fun of independence.

I remember the very first time my parents left me alone in the house when I was seven. I watched the car back down the driveway and counted out thirty seconds after their exhaust puttered away to make sure they weren’t going to double back. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the big Oneida spoon we used as a ladle. I filled it to the brim with Seven Seas Creamy Italian salad dressing. Mom always acted as if my college fund was being converted to salad dressing and every drop that touched my lettuce was destroying the machinations of her compound interest model. So that was my big act of rebellion. One ginormous mainline spoonful of Seven Seas Creamy Italian.

Bleg. Gross. Not exactly what I was expecting. It was a lesson we all need to learn: If a little bit is good, a lot is not necessarily better.

I’ve had a little bit of bachelor life, and that’s plenty. I cannot wait to hug the living shit out of that woman when I see her tonight.

A while back I mentioned that I have a friend who was big into pirated bittorrent movies. She was unemployed and broke for a long time and free movies helped fill her stressful days with a tiny bit of sanity and normalcy. I went on to say that I, personally, was over bittorents. I’ve got a badass home theater downstairs with a 110 inch projection screen and tiered seating. Never again would I watch a low rez copy of a movie where somebody snuck a handi-cam into a Malaysian theater under their coat, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to watch another movie in a three inch corner window of my laptop. Call me a snob. I’ll gladly wait for Video On Demand (VOD) and pay for my high resolution content, thank you very much.

Yeaaaah. A funny thing happened on the way to the Moral High Ground.

For all the crackdown by the MPAA on bittorent streamers and seeders, the quality of movies on the bittorent sites is getting better, not worse. And plenty of quantity, too. There are a buttload of high def movies available for download. Many of them still in theaters. Many of them without Korean or Chinese subtitles. My only rub was sending downloaded movies to the movie projector. Well… That and, yaknow, the ethics of stealing entertainment content.

TorrenTV was supposed to do the sending-to-Roku (which sends to the projector/TV) trick. It did not work. I wondered why there wasn’t more hue and cry over what should have been a simple communication process: laptop to Roku (to projector/TV). I found the answer. I now know why nobody cares that TorrenTV doesn’t work. It’s because there is an established app called Plex that does the job just fine. It’s free and it works.

The evil genius of Plex is that even if the bittorent movie doesn’t download with an icon or a movie poster or metacontent, Plex will go suck metadata off the interwebs and package it up for you. “It doesn’t look stolen, Mom! See? It looks like iTunes or Vudu or CinemaNow.”

What’s your point, Shawn?

My point is that The Scotsman Theater now has a tap into an entertainment library that is only a week or two from theater release. Or five. I watched Boyhood on the big screen. Not an ounce of jitter or signal loss. I watched Horns and Stonehurst Asylum before they released into theaters. Whoever is bootlegging these movies is doing an amazing job with the digital transfer. Or digital hijacking, perhaps.  They aren’t downconverting the video compression at all.

I’ve been watching the rate at which the primo torrents drop, and I’m pretty sure there’s a correlation to when the DVDs are pressed at the factory. Somebody on the production line is slipping a copy into their smock and uploading it to bittorent when they get home.

If I’m “meh” on a movie I will watch it with Korean or Chinese subtitles, assuming it’s a clean transfer. Walk Among the Tombstones and This is Where I Leave You. November Man.

This brings me full circle back to the ethics question. First came the “Can it be done?” question. Yes! Next, “Is the quality any good?” Shockingly good, yes! “Is there anything available on the pirate sites I’d even care to see?” Yup. “Is it right, is it ethical, and is it fair to all involved?” Crickets. No. No it’s not.

Shawn self-moderation is going to be an interesting exercise. What’s the old maxim about cheating on your wife? “A man is only as monogamous as his options?”  Likewise, a Scotsman is only as ethical about stealing entertainment content as his options. And this Scotsman has a lot of options.

It’s not the money. It’s the availability. There has been a helluva drought in quality streaming titles for the past five months. Being able to watch a movie while it’s still in the media hype-machine cycle is the deeper draw of bittorents.

As you can imagine, I’ve long been a proponent of movie studios releasing to VOD on the same day the movie opens in theaters (much to the chagrin of my buddy who manages a movie theater). Unless studios can solve the bittorent distribution sites, I can’t imagine them not forcing the hand of the studios to combine VOD and theater release. I’d pay $15. I’d pay $20. I don’t want to steal. I merely want options.

My little test run with 2014 bittorents tasted pretty darn good. I can’t imagine that chugging a firehose of entertainment content wouldn’t taste even better.

But I’ve been wrong before.