I just deleted all my porn

So, it’s about 2:30 am on September 7, 2000, and I’ve just deleted all my porn. I don’t know why, I was doing my laundry, and after putting my clothes in the dryer, I just located my directory of smut and deleted it.

I don’t really think of this as a political act or what have you, but in removing my porn, I’ve freed up 300 MB. I now have 10.3 GB free amongst all my Hard Drives. This doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think porn is immoral or anything, but now it’s all gone.

If the feds seize my computer, at least they won’t know I’m a pervert.

The thoughts occur to me rather constantly. I am engaged. Is looking at another female (that being my preference for my partners) by definition immoral? In real life, I’m rather unimpressed by many women I see, even though I live on a college campus. Matter of fact, most women here depress me. Many are searching for MRS degrees, and the one’s that are not are generally idiots. Don’t get me wrong, I have a similarly negative opinion of males in my college environment, but this isn’t the node for that. Ninety nine percent of people are stupid. I prefer interesting people in interesting situations, and if I’m looking for it, interesting clothing. Interesting being nearly anything that isn’t jeans and t-shirts or what might be the flavor of the month (in this area, Bloomington/Normal, Illinois, it’s tight black pants with a tank-top, bra is optional). If women want men to like them for their personalities, why do they dress like hookers? I avoid these people.

I don’t know if porn is immoral, or if it’s immoral if you’re attached to another person. Like the abortion debate, I don’t feel like I’m qualified to make that decision. I know I’ll probably never have sex with another person besides the woman I’ve decided to be with forever. I can live with this, but the thought remains in my mind, just how different can it be?

No answers here, sorry.

---

Flameboy:
I'm aware of the data recovering techniques used by federal officers. However, I don't think they'd be interested in what I did have.

If the porn wasn't really that big a deal to you then you haven't got anything to worry about. Anyway, you can always get more if you want to later. It's nice of you to consider that your fiance could have been unhappy with you having porn, but some people will say you should have asked her what she thought. Don't listen to them. Using porn is just another aspect of a person's sex life and as such it can be a very private thing.

If you think the feds might be after your computer, though, be aware that just deleting something doesn't mean it's not detectable any more. Files can sometimes still be recovered from a hard drive after the area of the disk that they occupied has been overwritten many times.

When I saw this node, I wanted to sob like a little baby! I remember the frightful day last year when I was carefully trimming my home directory.

Hmm, junk, junk, rm -rf, unimportant stuff... GAH!! I hear my hard disk churning a little too much and I read the command line back -- to my horror, I'm deleting my ~/pr0n! The worst part is, how was I doing it? It just so happened I typed

rm -rf symlink_to_pr0n/

instead of

rm -rf symlink_to_pr0n

One simple character difference: follow the symlink instead of deleting just the symlink.

This is a warning to those who use tab-completion. Be damned careful of what you're rm -rfing! It might not be that symlink you think you're deleting...

(compare: why I don't use ln -fs anymore...)