And the selection felt limitless – endless entires into nearly two dozen categories. And in contrast to chatrooms and forums, I didn’t feel the pressure of two-way communication I could just read and jack my dick in peace. I was a reader as a kid anyway, and so the site’s all-text format suited me fine. Nifty (or the Nifty Archive) played an outsized role in my online sexual development, partly because it was a one-way enterprise that felt safe and relatively discreet. I had memorized all the urls of favorite sites, and knew exactly where to go when these rare opportunities presented themselves. This was long enough ago that browers didn’t autocomplete urls, and I was operating on a shared family computer, so bookmarks and history were completely out of the question. I can still remember being a bad kid on the internet and waiting endlessly for my parents to leave me alone with the computer long enough to look up the previews of the newest Handjobs magazine each month (I couldn’t afford to download the full versions, and my days of piracy were a ways off still), and then skate over to /nifty/gay. The Nifty Archive has been dear to me for as long as I’ve known it, but what becomes of an all-text empire in the time of unlimited, uncensored hardcore visuals?
