Is the pirate mirror still the best way to access blocked sites? or How reliable is the pirate mirror

Not just you, dude. The pirate mirror’s been flaky af.

I’ve been using a combo of VPN + DNS changer, and it’s helped a ton. Also, bookmark a few proxy sites—they’re not perfect, but better than nothing.

If you’re desperate, the Wayback Machine sometimes has archived pages, but YMMV.