You guys and your internet porn! Back when I was a kid porn was something you found in a moldy box in the cellar while goofing around on summer vacation. If your parents were at work you spent the afternoon reading all kinds of stuff, but you had to put it back in the box and get it hidden away before your parents came home and wondered what you were giggling about.
Porn (or whatever) hiding tip for Mac users:
Pick some never used application, Microsoft Messenger for instance. Control-click on the application icon and select “show package contents.” Stuff in there won’t show up in routine file searches, neither by name or in image/video searches.
Be warned that the file names will still appear in “recent items” under the apple menu and under “open recent” in programs like quicktime, preview etc…
I have no reason to hide my porn.
I used to try to have a system like that, up to developing an easily-greppable file format to keep track of all of those details (so I could run a search for everything I had featuring three redheads and a blonde wearing bikini tops and playing with eggplants, if I wanted), but I found that my collection was growing faster than my ability to catalog it, so now I mostly just have them organized by site of origin.
These days, I just watch videos on the Internet and I have some prose erotica on my hard drive which are filed by topic. As I’ve mentioned on here before, I used to have a folder on my computer labeled quite blatantly: Cocks.
Tragically, I ended up losing all of those files and was too foolish to have a backup.
Someday, I will rebuild the cock folder.
In a folder on my second hard drive labelled ‘yiff’* and with sub folders that look unremarkable unless you know porn (yaoi, het, cough Batman, etc). I only hid it because I lived with my sister and didn’t want her snooping. Toys are in a toiletries kit in my closet. Oh and the bookmark folder is simply labelled ‘stuff’ just so casual over the shoulder watchers don’t notice.
- there’s actually very little furry porn, and the furryness is not why I saved it. I do have a couple of folders that are sadly poor in content and I wish I could find more stories that I actually like. …I should actually save them I suppose.
I can’t believe I admitted this.
I choose to put all my porn in a single visible location because of my experiences with the laptop of my dad, when his computer broke down he asked me to see if I could fix it, every single folder: my documents folders, backup folders, system folders was filled with porno, and nasty porno, evil ugly, probably borderline illegal porn (torture porn, fake (?)Incest porn, animal porn, senior citizen porn) not judging or anything, but still stuff you do not want to be confronted with without warning.
I just hacked into your computer and you should be ashamed of yourself for having such filth! I downloaded a bunch of it to prove it.
I consider porn a private affair. Since I take my laptop to study groups with me, I run the risk that one of my fellow students might decide to snoop around on my computer. I don’t care if they find out that I play Nethack or that I write short fiction in my spare time, but there are some bits of information I’d like to better control.
To the extent that I’m hiding it from specific people, it’s just because those people happen to get more access to my computer account than most. Which still amounts to very, very little. I’m a bit of a privacy and computer security wonk, but that has more to do with me being a small-L libertarian than anything about porn.
As for categorization, I have folders named in very vague terms relating to site of origin, fetish in question, or whatever–usually I find my clips by searching under specific terms based on something that I’m thinking about, so I create a folder for whatever that search is (be it “tall latinas”, “short hair” or whatever).
That’s brilliant! I would steal that system, except that I’d get my porn mixed up with my real out-of-date operating systems.
I wouldn’ta told that story, cainxinth.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
Until our hard drive died last year, I had exactly the same setup, “test” account and all, and used exactly the same excuse. I also used to keep erotic lit in a file called “A” buried deep inside (heh) some subfolders of documents named for companies I had worked for years before.
Until we moved last year, I had a bag of dvd’s in my workshop in the garage. That went to whomever used to pick through our trash at the old house. Before that and pre-marriage, I had a box of magazines, VHS tapes and dvd’s under the bed.
I don’t store anything anymore, just streaming filth for me these days.
Everything is on my Vista desktop. Separate internal HD (“Z drive”) that can be accessed by password-protected user accounts for me and my GF (she likes porn nearly as much as I do, so we share), but not by guest users. I also have it set up to share wirelessly over my home network so I can watch from a laptop around the house.
I’ll sometimes keep, ummm, really interesting stuff in my own account for a little while, until I decide whether I want the GF to know that this week I’m interested in midgets, erotic oil wrestling, etc.
As for organization of the files, I’m always evolving new schemes. I really know my actresses (hey, some people track baseball players, it’s a hobby ;-), so for the last few years I’ve relied on two-letter folders for actresses, and then some others for obvious groupings (“JJ” for Jenna Jameson, “AW” for Abby Winters models, “DP” for random double-pen movies, etc.).
It’s bizarre, because I don’t keep ANYTHING else in my life that organized, but somehow when it comes to that stuff, I like knowing where something is at all times.
I don’t have any. I have a wife.
Yeah, well, me too, but she ain’t around 24/7, and sometimes a man just wants to bust a nut without any complications…
Joe
or you might…
- be innocently helping friend who just bought a new camera, but doesn’t speak English well enough to read the manual, so you help him.
- You see that the camera comes with a CD which has some sort of software that does graphics editing …
- you don’t really know how to use the program, but you install it for your friend…
- you sit quietly while the program scans his computer for a little longer than seems necessary…
- you suddenly see a million thumbnail images of what the program found…
- and embarrassment ensues…
Encrypted hard drive partition, named something innocent.
Almost all of my erotic material (the majority of which is admittedly pretty R-rated) is in comic book format. The hardcopies live on a bookshelf in my bedroom, while the scanlations of things not yet licensed in English are right out on the desktop, sorted into folders by author name. In the Documents folder I also have a sub-folder called “antique postcards”, which contains scans of (duh) antique erotic postcards, sorted by publisher and probable date (although most of that that counts more as “quaint curiosity” than porn), one called “illustration” for antique/vintage erotic illustrations, and one called “random” which contains mostly fanart and the odd non-vintage photograph.
I didn’t say my imaginations useless.
Two external hard drives, one for pictures, one for videos, named “Smut” and “Smutfilm” respectively. Almost a terabyte’s worth.
Maybe we should trade internets. I’m finding a whole buncha the the stuff, and I’m not even looking (that is to say expressly not looking). I dunno if this is best suited for its own thread, but is it more that they never draw the right animals, or draw them too people-ish, or too animal-ish?
Gaaaah! There was a Dan Savage like this recently. Apparently it’s pretty common, older folk not knowing the virtual paper trail they leave while on the computer.
I keep mine on the internet, where it lives. Someone I know got a stack of adult DVDs through her job and we laughed over what to do with them? Keep them with the other DVDs? Hide them somewhere, even though she lives alone? (They were crappy and from the '90s – or might as well have been – so we ended up donating them.)