For quite a number of years I was getting my porn from newsgroups, and then one day the unthinkable happened: my ISP discontinued their newsgroup service. A notification email that most of their customers probably didn’t understand (let alone care about) sent a chill down my spine. My primary source of porn was about to be taken away from me; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.
Imagine that you had a friend who “fancied” cocaine and you happened to have an unending supply of free coke, so you just gave it to them whenever they wanted. Then imagine that you suddenly lost your supply of coke and were no longer able to give them any. I was that addict; it had been so easy to feed my addiction for so many years, but I was suddenly going to be cut off cold turkey. And I was definitely not going to start paying for it! (For one thing, by this time I was married and it would have been hard to explain the charges to my credit card.)
The good news, of course, is that I still had a small stash of stuff on my hard drive. My habit was to keep anything that I liked and delete anything I didn’t, and I was no longer attempting to quit (meaning that I was no longer deleting everything from time to time), so it wasn’t like I had to go without. But the thing about porn is that you always need something new; going back over your old stuff is fine from time to time, but the very fact that you know what’s in a video means that there isn’t any excitement behind it.
Not surprisingly, within a few months I was doing some research to see how others were getting their free porn, and I came across something called BitTorrent. I quickly came across a site called PureTNA and next thing I knew I was back to downloading as much as ever. (I stole the image in this site’s header from PureTNA.)
No, let’s be honest here: I was downloading way more than I’d ever downloaded from newsgroups. BitTorrent allows you to directly download binary files instead of messing around with that uuencode bullshit, and it lets you download them really fast. I only had my computer on for a few hours a night, with the occasional overnight binge, and I was downloading all kinds of stuff. By this point I’d actually switched to mostly downloading videos, although I still downloaded batches of images from time to time as well.
I was still enjoying the technology as well as the thrill of the hunt almost as much as the porn itself. (Again, notice the key word “almost,” which is, let’s face it, an exaggeration.) This meant that I was actually downloading way more than I was actually viewing. I could log onto PureTNA and spend an hour looking around, during which time I might find a dozen files that looked interesting – so I’d simply download them all.
I was starting to build up two types of porn on my computer: the stuff I’d not seen yet and the stuff that I’d seen that was good enough to keep. (Obviously the other stuff I was just deleting.) But the backlog was growing much faster than the stuff I’d seen and liked, and at the rate I was going I never would have caught up if it hadn’t been for the demise of PureTNA.
But alas, in 2011 PureTNA went dark, and there wasn’t a good replacement BitTorrent site. (At least, not a free one.) Once again the addict had had his source cut off, but I was in better shape this time because there were gigabytes and gigabytes of stuff left in my stash that I hadn’t yet seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment