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| Porn Users Forum » What makes a meaningful collection? |
| 1-8 of 8 Posts | Page 1 |
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| 08-13-16 11:04am - 3053 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User  Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
What makes a meaningful collection? Have any of you reflected about what makes a collection meaningful? Has doing so changed the way you collect porn? I think a meaningful collection becomes something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. For example, imagine that an artist produces a series of four different paintings of the same subject, and sells them to various customers. Ten or twenty years later, perhaps two are on the walls of the same collector's home, the third has been in a storage unit somewhere for years, and the fourth hangs on the wall of a restaurant. If a museum acquired all four, displayed them side by side, and preserved them for future generations, then their value both to the museum and to society at large would be greater than the added value of the four individual paintings. Individually, each is more a fragment of that artist's work, and preservation is more uncertain. Looking at this example, it shows how both completeness and themes give objective meaning to collections. Of course, collecting porn needs to be fun, and should only be as serious as you want it to be. Your own personal, subjective enjoyment should be the most important ingredient in your collection. In my case, when I started collecting porn in the 1990s, my collection was pretty small and pretty typical, just a mixed bag of pics and videos that I happened to come across which I thought were worth saving. I had a folder for most niches, "Solo," "Lesbian," "Squirting," "Amateur," "Celebrity," etc. I was quite young and had not fully come to terms with my pee fetish yet, so I would sometimes save some pee content, then periodically feel guilty about it and delete it. Fast forward to 2005. I had come to accept my pee fetish for another prolonged stretch, and it had become the largest niche in my collection. There was one pee site I had been meaning to join, can't say which one for reasons I will explain later, but one day I noticed that the domain was expired and the site pending deletion. It drove me crazy. I asked around on porn forums for contacts for the company, but I had no luck. The period to renew the domain ended and the site was deleted. I scoured all corners of the internet, hoping to find someone who saved a copy of the site, but no luck. I came away with a pitifully small handful of content, and it seemed to be all that was still in existence. That led me to reflect on how ironic it was that likely thousands of people had joined the site, yet no one had saved a full copy or anything close to it. I reflected that if one person saves a full copy of one site, and nothing more, then that collection might be more meaningful than dozens or hundreds of haphazard collections combined. At the same time, I knew that saving complete copies of sites would quickly exhaust my resources due to the cost of storage. So, I decided to narrow my focus to pee content only. For pee sites, I would save a full copy. For the many sites out there with a small amount of pee content, I would save only that, and consider it complete. So, my collection would be complete, within the bounds of this theme. Fast forward to the present, and I still build my collection around the same principles. Nowadays I have more money and less time than before, but I have been persistent and it has payed off. As to that site that closed in 2005, I met the owner years later. We emailed about pee fetish stuff for months. I told her about that old site, and she said that they weren't paying attention at the time and forgot to renew the domain. She thought she might still have a copy of the site on her old drives, and eventually she found it and sent it to me as a gift. I am sworn to secrecy about which site this was though, so that is why I can't say it here. Right now, my collection includes pee content from over 600 sites. I can't give an exact number at the moment, because my 8 bay enclosure appears to have corrupted three of my drives, so my drives are all disconnected while I restore those three from backups and troubleshoot vs replace the enclosure. While it's size could give me bragging rights, I would much rather prefer to be humble. For one, I realize that there are very few venues in society in which having a porn collection this large is a point of pride, but fortunately PU is one of them. Also, the experience of building this collection has shown me clearly both what porn is out there, and what porn might be irretrievably lost to time. Due to the sites that I have missed, I have already failed in my goal of building a comprehensive collection. If I had my current resources back in 2000, I likely would have succeeded at covering every pee site in history. But, I can still have the complete collection from one more site, and that is what keeps me going. So, for me, building a meaningful collection means focusing on the pee fetish theme and striving for completeness. For you guys here at PU, have you ever thought about these things? What gives your collection meaning to you? Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. | |
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| 08-13-16 12:38pm - 3052 days | #2 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
I take the opposite approach. For me, a collection is one or more pieces. Of whatever. For porn, it's whatever photos or videos I happen to enjoy or like. Which can change over time. So if I have 1 video, or 10 videos, or more videos, that's my collection. And since I'm very disorganized, I don't sort the videos and galleries very well. If I had more energy or drive, I might sort what I have into categories, but it just seems to be too much work. Though I do respect the effort some people put into their porn collections. But that's not for me. | |
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| 08-15-16 10:44am - 3051 days | #3 | |
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Toadsith (0)
Active User  Posts: 936 Registered: Dec 07, '07 Location: USA |
Personally, my own collection is themed around content quality more than following a singular theme. While I appreciate the dedication it takes to archive all pee content on the web, my digital is really for personal use with little interest in posterity. I do have vintage magazines, expensive photo books, and some hard copies of movies more directed more towards that purpose. The digital collection, on the other hand, shifts and evolves. Not too long ago I ejected almost all non-HD content from the collection, as it looked so blurry and just awful compared to the new material. That said, certain exceptional content made the cut despite its terrible format. The main thing is that my tastes in porn, as with my taste in all forms of entertainment, is very diverse. About the only thing you won't find in my archives is illegal porn and male-on-male porn. Pretty much everything else is represented with the exception of some extremely specific niches. I like to think all of the porn represented is of a high quality though, a curated selection. However, it isn't something I plan on sharing with the public. As for categorizing it, I've used multiple methods over the years, but these days I usually sort it by the source website with the exception of particular performers that I really admire or specific niches that would only have small amounts of content from any one site. I would like to use a content management system that would allow me to access my collection online, apply tags to each set or video, and sort them accordingly. Of course this would require a media server and some form of server-side processing like a PHP/ MSQL-based website, but I've never gotten around to actually setting such a thing up. Someday perhaps. "I'm not a number, I'm a free man!" Second Grand Order Poobah in the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo | |
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| 08-15-16 02:55pm - 3050 days | #4 | |
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Wittyguy (0)
Active User  Posts: 1,138 Registered: Feb 04, '08 Location: Left Coast, USA |
I take the position of the silent majority on this site and confess that “my meaningful porn collection” is meaningful to no else but me. Not that my tastes are exotic or limited to a few niches, rather it's due to that recurring line I frequently find myself using when writing reviews: “search and navigation sucks”. I don't really care much about model names, site of origination or specialty content. Everything just gets dumped into a few generic folders to be rediscovered at a later time. The bulk of my collection is pics which I at least edit down before tossing them into files for future viewing. I only collect 720 sized vids since I don't want to clog up my hard drive space since I only view porn on a standard monitor and don't plan on going big screen in the future. My only requirement is that I have to like what I save because I go back and look it (hoarding is not my nature). Excessively low rez content and stuff that doesn't interest me any more gets the boot. My collection works for me. For anyone else who looked at it, they'd probably say their dog could a better job at it. I had to laugh at Toadsith's line about someday coding out a search engine for their collection. Having been here since the birth of the forum, I'd say that at least 4 or 5 PU members have gotten all amped up about building this holiest of holy grails only to never really hear back on their progress. All I can say is that if someone here does manage build this holiest of holy grails that 1) You know people will come (I know, bad joke), and 2) You will have a statute built in your honor for the porn hall of fame … to be situated between the guy who invented ass-less chaps and the first cable repairman uniform ever used in a porn film. Lastly, I sort of wonder if us collectors are really just dinosaurs. Before declaring me a heretic and burning my hard drives at the stake, hear me out. Most us grew up in a time when people still collected actual tangible things. We also got our taste for internet porn during the wild west days of the internet when you couldn't bank on porn sites being around, couldn't trust the government from not trying to regulate it, and before the dawn of the tube site when you had to join sites to see good quality vids. In other words, I think at least for the gen-xer's, there was an incentive to collect because you couldn't necessarily bank on porn being there forever and we were more culturally primed to collect this taboo product. In comparison, today's youth have always been able to access porn for free pretty much where ever and when ever they wanted. Because it's always free on tube sites or pirated it's also now associated as being a generally low quality though ubiquitous product. They don't need or even own computers, hard drives, etc., a phone is all you need to access the world. The cultural ethos today is to collect experiences, not objects. And, certainly not least, social media rules the world. If I were to reverse the amount of time I spend on social media with the time I spend on porn my collection, my collection would be a few movies and a dozen pics. Add all this up and my completely uneducated guess would be that the millenials and the next generation have fewer porn hounds than us geezers. I wonder if the question is so much what a meaningful collection is or is not, rather it's if anyone cares about collecting any more. | |
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| 08-15-16 02:59pm - 3050 days | #5 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
LPee, I read that story of your persistence before and I have to admit that I'm still impressed. I think I split the difference between LPee as a true curator and other people who simply amass porn in no structure. I have quite a vast collection, spanning close to 30TB, and I catalogue it all in two separate lists, both of which are just MS Word tables. I catalogue by site/DVD name and then list the models. Using Word (or Excel) makes the list easily searchable. The second list is a newer addition that I created when I realized that sometimes I'd want to find a favourite scene. So I created a list that has all those. That second list is about 180 pages shorter than the full one so it is easier to find stuff. I also back everything up. So I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but I think a meaningful collection is often what the collector makes it. I think a 'collection' does have to have some structure though. The fact that my porn collection is catalogued and backed up means I'm just not some pervert with a ton of porn!  | |
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| 10-08-16 11:05pm - 2996 days | #6 | |
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Toadsith (0)
Active User Posts: 936 Registered: Dec 07, '07 Location: USA |
So, I was thinking about the whole organizing the collection thing, and then I realized that the software probably already existed, as in Media Server Software. Enter Plex, a media server software with apps for your phone, your Roku, Playstation, tablet, and whatever else. Those of you with massive video and photo collections, you could set up a dedicated computer at home with access to all your hard drives, plug it into the internet, and boom: You've got unlimited access to your own collection no matter where you are in the world. It was designed for home and "traditional" movies and music, but it should work just fine for porn as well. If Plex doesn't look quite perfect, Emby is their competitor. Same idea. "I'm not a number, I'm a free man!" Second Grand Order Poobah in the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo | |
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| 10-21-16 11:27am - 2984 days | #7 | |
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Cybertoad (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 2,158 Registered: Jan 01, '08 Location: Wash |
I dumped about 4TB a few years ago kept maybe 800gigs of favorites. Now I have favorites with niches and one review folder that is why I put the new stuff sometimes in the heat of the moment you say thats looks awesome and well you play it and then not so much so I have a large review. I have niches and then under niches top favorites the collection now is only 1.5 TB easily accessed I figured having three big drives was silly with that much I would never have watched it all. I keep some older stuff from 8 years ago or so that were just awesome scenes. There are a few go too ones as well in a short folder. I kept it simple so its not a collection as much as just a access file system. My vast music collection is the same with about 40K songs which I separated by decade and a few by bands/singers. I have a vast record collection to that is in only favorites order so being organized is only PC related. Since 2007 | |
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| 10-22-16 12:39pm - 2982 days | #8 | |
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Drooler (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 1,831 Registered: Mar 11, '07 Location: USA |
It's interesting to see how other people create their collections and categorize the content. I don't think the approach that I take has been mentioned in this thread, so I'll explain a bit. For me, the aim is to find photos of good to excellent quality of women who are #1 sexy and #2 beautiful in that order. I'll reject stuff of women who have lovely bodies but who are not sufficiently photogenic. An appealing personality means a lot. The second important thing is to organize the collection by model names and to add as much acceptable content of the really great models as I can. New models are always coming out, so it just keeps going on. And it stays "meaningful." I wanted something new, so I left England for New England. | |
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