Have you ever stopped and thought about how we permeate our personal electronic devices? There's an old Reddit line (at least I first saw it on Reddit) that goes, "When I die, wipe my hard drive. I couldn't help but think this way when I saw the Casey Jones podcast on Twitter participating in a critique of a desktop I found at Goodwill with GBs of direct import DVD gay porn from the early 2000s.

"I wanted to install Quake on this machine, but I feel bad for breaking the tomb of gay King Tut," the podcaster tweeted about the find. The office rig, similar to the gray and black OptiPlex, has a surprisingly clean interior. Despite being from the era of non-modular, top-mounted power supplies with rainbow-colored spaghetti cords, it even has tidy cable management that would make PC-building influencers blush.

And then there is digital content. It's gigabytes of DVD rips and critique text documenting past eras of adult entertainment. Its layout gives the impression of a professional website, either a draft for such a site or a geeky blog covering the industry. This is not like finding someone's porn stash at the bottom of seven subfolders labeled "tax documents"; it's a portfolio. Ironically, though, one of Casey J. Pod's screenshots shows a document called "Gay Movies 301-400" sandwiched between a "Financial Overview 2016" and an "IRS Letter."

Several commenters likened it to the "Library of Alexandria," which, joking aside, really does feel like some sort of time capsule for gay porn reviews. I mean, who gets porn on DVD nowadays?" behind the staid exterior of this dilapidated office desktop, there is a sense of surprise and delight to see the former owner released, but there is also a sense of discomfort, like being in someone's home while they are away. That discomfort is amplified by the question of what happened to the former owner: it must have been quite abrupt to let go of a PC you've used for 20 years without wiping it first, but Casey J. Podd doesn't mince words: "The owner of this PC is probably quite dead.

I have a passing concern about the privacy of the original owners of this computer and whether they would have wanted their work to be published in this way, despite the running theory for the intended purpose of the review. At the same time, Casey J. Podd's description of his discovery and the release of some of the DVD rips and reviews on Archive.org with personally identifiable information removed seems like a blessing to the body of work, and a $10 Goodwill desktop at the start of Pride Month. It feels like a snapshot of the scene surrounding gay pornography at a very specific moment in time that I stumbled upon.

"It goes without saying that our late professional porn critic was a man who paid close attention to his work, no matter what anyone thought," "Casey J. Pod" wrote of the collection, later continuing: "The late author had many friends and in difficult times He had many friends to whom he could turn in times of difficulty."

The author's name was also used in the book.

So here's to the anonymous pornographer and his vast body of work. If you believe you know the former owner of this PC, Casey Jones Pod would like to be contacted.