Fucking Day: The Dirty Book (Patreon)

Tragic news: the title "Pornopoly" is taken.

Man, I had high hopes for that script. The legend of Ulysses Frontal, inventor of nude photography. An innovator that, in a rags-to-rimjobs journey, fucked everything but loneliness. Hero? Robber baron? You decide. In the opening scene, his friend Antonia FStopson builds the first camera, but can't find a use case. Ulysses ponders the dilemma, and then sends history a dick pic. Hard cut to Frontal Towers, phallic jewel of Florida. The wizened Ulysses ponders his snowglobes, wondering if lifelong wealth, fame, and adventure were worth missing out on love. Until Manservant #173 brings a message from the world outside: "It's your baby."

It wasn't meant to be. But 1982's Pornopoly looks like a fun way to share sores with the neighbors.

Then again, Pornopoly keeps the original's rules. I don't get that freaky. A little fire or electricity's fine, but two hours of State Capitalism Simulator sprints past sexual sanity.

Besides, they left "Free Porking" on the table. If you're blitzing us with sex wordplay, go...high effort. After all, sex is about adding intensity until the situation implodes. At least, that's what my folks said. Dating coaches say sex is about imagining someone pre-jilting you, like a disloyal tulpa. To be clear: everyone alive and fucking right now is weirder than Pornopoly’s authors.

My bare knuckles? I came to this suburban key party to bust with Iowa's hottest swingers, not catch a beating. Sure, I built one of Earth's first 8-bit PCs to try to fuck my HOA chair. But these guys are weird.

I love them. Thank Slaanesh for each page of The Dirty Book.

This issue has 69 pages, and perhaps that wasn't tired yet. In 1982, the gag may have had some life left. There's a spirit of manic, half-inept invention in The Dirty Book. Erotica on adding machines is out there, but these wackos thought it had a shot. And enough madmen believed to reach Volume 2.

That's the power of an early porn game magazine. An independent one, unyoked from shareholder value or editorial experience. The Dirty Book is free in ways alien to modern eyes. If you had an Apple II and a sticky keyboard, you were qualified to run the whole project.

It'll be a nice break from divination studies.

See? Perfect game for a wizard school study break. Join higher ed for the cirrhosis, and stay for the pregnancy scares. While Zesty Zodiac sounds like complicated sex dice, it's much more expensive, and needs a torso-sized PC.

Granted, we’re working with disks that might hold my age in kilobytes. But 12 positions isn’t worth 15 pre-dictatorship dollars.

The not-fucking parts of these games really feel like minigames. As gripping as Squall’s trading card addiction is, I’d rather be murdering robots. I’ve never pawed around and thought “Let’s do some Bioshock plumbing first.”

Is "NO CHEATING!!!" a pun? Or just an accident of fate and copy editing? My heart begs for a pun. "Be sure not to overfuck and kill your marriage. This is foreplay for loyal engineers." I choose to believe.

I'd love to keep lobbing context-free primary documents at you. It's how I get off. It's why I'm alive. But The Dirty Book sort-of editors have a question: Are you a dirty old man?

Here, more than anywhere else, the innocence of these perverts shines. Civilization is welfare for dirty old men. Kings became sextuple-widowers before anyone whispered "ixnay on the uillotinegay." Without society’s eager, dutiful support, most dirty old thought leaders wouldn’t live past this sentence.

Rasputin? Should you still make the dishonor roll if sex got you killed? Did Achilles have the best ankles in the game? Though one might also argue this list shouldn't exist. See my previous paragraph.

Great guys, like Rasputin. I have a soft spot for writers that read often and absorb nothing. Lucky, since indentured adjuncting covers my rent. If I hated them, I'd have had a coronary four semesters ago.

Fun manifesto work. The Dirty Book editorial’s established, in their own fumbling, one-handed way, that this isn't for the serious or prudish. A shame, if your dream is playing Pornopoly with two brooding, opinionated nuns fluent in Veep-grade insults. But quality signaling otherwise.

What's The Dirty Book offer Dirty Old Men? Features familiar to anyone that misses gaming magazines (or hates the reaction videos and hate crimes that succeeded them more). Reviews, previews, reader letters, ads, hype, guides to writing your first article or porn game, stop, enhance. Let's learn to write, the Dirty Old Man way.

The very-smart jab at this porn magazine's craft writes itself, so I'll focus on how familiar this tip is. It’s humanizing: whether you write autofiction, 2000-page magic systems, Beanie Baby investment guides, or any of the above with tits, you get the same platitudes. Functional platitudes, but there are nuances I can explain for a few grand a semester. You know where to find me.

Quality point: stray from your outline, and you might do weird shit like put a sci-fi play halfway through your Civil War novel. GoodReads likes a dutifully obeyed outline.

Still, while this is God's holy path for literary, speculative, or journalistic fiction, I think it's held porn back. Based on grainy records, we went decades without paying for one pizza. Then, a doomed generation learned that "imoutou" means "faster." Today, hundreds of stepparents starve to death with arms stuck in condom boxes. Formula takes the spontaneity of great sex, and replaces it with the rote fumbling of most sex.

Don't let my wandering eye mislead you: the bulk of the magazine's a strikingly earnest smut index. Micro-computer games have just left me with a sidequest addiction. For example, between "Dear Hustler"-style tall tales, a utopian essay on computers opening doors for women:

Rock on. Given the context, it’s unclear if male language is C#, outlining, or explaining your second family. But they’re all worthy endeavors.

There's a bit of white space afterwards. The editors fill it with a joke:

Maybe skip male language.

As for the games: Pornopoly represents half the entries, which generally turn Mario Party into Mario Orgy. The default angle for Hot Zork is "lose game, lose shirt.” Yahtzee Crosshaw has a line I don't quite buy for platonic games, but absolutely buy for porn games: you get zero credit for fun multiplayer. Your naked friends are already there. Even a strip cryptominer has a memorable ending. You have to dig deeper to get my PoxDRM money.

Too deep. Stop digging. Let’s paste dicks into pong.

How transferable is the Iceberg Slim routine? If I want to run an ad startup, I can’t just butter up a confused child for a month and then batter them into permanent servitoh no no we are in some deep fucking shit man

I guess Mark’s winning the Super Pimp contest. Oddly, some buttless games slip in:

"Sexual content, none. We just want your smelly, damp money. It still spends."

Publicity’s a strange journey. Promoting your memoir is just as likely to send you to a Russian kick-dancing festival as a bookstore. Crossword Magic wandered into the same magazine as Sex Disk, Personal Love Test, and Raunchy Rhythms. Games I'll skim past to cover letters to the editor. I love me some letters to the editor.

"What kind of person writes to The Dirty Book?" wonders the strawman. Just two, as far far as comedy is concerned.

One: fucking experts that don't understand computers.

Two: computer experts that don't understand fucking.

You know how life drifts toward crabs? I think tech may drift toward fuckbots.

Keep in mind: this is the oldest hellworld prompt. Sci-fi's most dedicated customers remain painfully immune to sci-fi. After endless warnings on fuckbots from Ghost in the Shell/Companion/Futurama/Black Mirror/that first guy that married a hologram, we're speeding toward a fuckbot-based economy. Some lives will get more difficult. Many lives will get much sadder. But at least The Dirty Book can return without shame. They'll be the normal ones.

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