Gettingit.com: Internet For Assholes

Internet For Assholes

This week: Porn for Assholes

by Lou Cabron

Published December 8, 1999 in Whoa!

Looking for the information superhighway's red light district? It's a wild and exciting journey, unlike any you've ever taken. But be warned. Online porn has many drawbacks. Free sites always point to pay sites, which inevitably cost too much. And then there are those annoying pop-up windows that hover over legitimate porn pages, urging users to navigate to some aspiring porn magnate's family of primo wanking material.

See also...

... by Lou Cabron
... in the Whoa! section
... from December 8, 1999

Even larger problems lurk in the technology itself. Nonconsensual porn windows that appear when you don't want them are establishing themselves as a porn-lover's chief menace. It all started when those assholes at Microsoft installed "smart browsing." So when your boss types "hor" into your browser window, it helpfully prompts "HornyButtSluts.com" because that was the last page you accessed starting with those letters. This, of course, dramatically undercuts efforts to look like you're working.

But the makers of Web pages themselves can fuck you over even more thoroughly. While trying desperately to close a browser window displaying a porn site, the last thing you need is a chunk of JavaScript intercepting that command and replacing it with one that opens another porn site. Among JavaScriptoids, this is known as an "onUnload" property of the window, and it's a great money-generating device for the pages. They're probably getting twenty cents for every onUnload click. But they've hijacked your browser to display the pages, which is a major pain in the ass when your boss is coming around the corner fast.

Penis.com bills itself as the hardest place on the Internet to leave. There's a Greek myth about that somewhere, except it involves snake heads rather than penis pornography pages.

The moral of this story? The Internet is full of assholes.

It's a sign of the times. As one semi-porn Web page points out, "If there is any rule of technological advancement that is universally true, it is this: A technology is successful when someone figures out how to get men to spend money using it while masturbating."

But sometimes pornographers are unscrupulous. My pet peeve is computer strip poker games that you download off the Net -- because invariably they're trying to sell you a more expensive version. After you've wasted three hours getting "Brandi" to lose 24 consecutive hands in a row, they inform you that you can't see the final JPG where she takes off her bikini until you mail them $29.

The only thing worse is free software that fires up a mandatory ad before you get to use their product. (This means you, RealAudio.) I prefer software that's a little more laid back. You know, you boot it up and it says, "You're on day 1,242 of your 30-day free trial."

Watch out for stealth advertisers! Cruising for a date with online personals, you may find someone named "Slutty Dream Woman" who posts, "I will only go out with guys who check out my Web site," which turns out to be "sexywetdreams.com." Here's a handy tip. Someone genuinely interested in a date probably won't go the extra mile of registering an obscene domain name.

And very few date-seekers advertise their availability with the phrase, "I love to fuck" like the folks at sexywetdreams.com.

Face it, sport. She's only after your money.

And if she's not, you're gonna have an awful lot of competition.

The solution, of course, is to find free porn sites. Often they're even better than the pay sites, because they can offer those offbeat gems that appeal to your sense of kink. Try developing a fetish for Montana's "Testicle Festival." Every year in Montana they fry 4,500 pounds of beer-marinated bull nuts (also known as "Rocky Mountain oysters"). The festival takes place in -- get this! -- Clinton, Montana. Festivities include women exposing their breasts to phallus-shaped hoses, lurid rituals involving whipped cream, and judging from the pictures on the site, a guy with a beard who's either getting blown or gelded. Pathetic hicks gather for the "wheeling out of Ole' Testy," the town's life-sized wooden bull, and they're even marketing aprons equipped with hidden penises and vaginas. (Must be a Montana thing.)

No matter what your fetish, there's a Web page to cater to it. Dream of teeny, tiny 6-inch high lovers? Shrinky428's AOL Web page is there for you. There's also Yahoo's directory of microphilia sites, and a handy size-fetish Web ring.

It turns out that geeks love stories about exchanges of power, or even sites that hint of dominance and submission. Of course, there's Gothic Babe of the Week. The beauty of the Internet is there's a site for virtually every fetish. Women in holes! Naked men hitting each other with pies! Women in casts! Dead chicks! Bakery porn! A thorough search of the Web even turns up clown porn, which for years was thought to be just a legend. It's another miraculous triumph for the Internet. If you look hard enough, you can even find photos of Ruth Buzzi doing Yoga.

Yes, thanks to the Web, pictures from Ruth Buzzi's high school yearbook are only a few clicks away. It's like any other yearbook. ("We, the graduating class of 1954, do hereby dedicate this issue of the Pawmystonian to world wide unification...") Except that the homeroom treasurer went on to star in Laugh-In and bad Saturday morning programs like The Lost Saucer. And some asshole scanned it and put it on the Web.

Amazingly, the page also includes a list of 22 Ruth Buzzi-related links.

At least they're being honest. It takes a real asshole to put up a site like this. And if you follow a link labeled sex with Don Knotts, you expect to find sex with Don Knotts! Not some taunting message calling you a repulsive pervert... ("[M]aybe you were hoping to be put in the middle of a sweaty pile with Mr. Furley and the Ropers.")

At a site called Pigdog, they even installed a big red button labeled "porn" that leads to a list of links with titles like, "She's young and ready to party," "This one's fresh and ready," and "This young starlet will do anything to get the part." At this point, anyone who hasn't read the small print is in for a surprise. "PoonieDog is your premium source on the Web for quality hacked-up pictures of random people's heads stuck onto porn photos," it warns. "And it's free! What a deal!"

It's the oldest joke in the book, and it's a lot of fun. Promise "hot pussy pics," then point to the "fuzzy kitten" page. The resulting traffic may even overwhelm the site's server, and then there'll be one fewer cute pet site on the Internet.

You can create the same effect yourself. Some Web-hosting companies limit the number of megabytes that can be served out every month. This means that if you access the site on the first of each month, then reload its largest image continuously, you can effectively remove it from the Web altogether.

Then, try doing it backwards! (Er, the prank, that is.) Make a page consisting entirely of pictures of your ass, then post to astronomy newsgroups announcing "pictures of the moon." Promise that they're "updated daily" or "very high resolution."

For extra asshole points, you can put up a banner ad pointing to a pay astronomy site!

Lou Cabron is GettingIt's resident asshole.

Internet for Assholes runs each Wednesday on GettingIt.