Nerve.com, the lovesexdating site for the type of people who follow the Hipster Grifter saga closely, has hit upon a clever plan to propel itself onward and upward through the recession: fewer nekkid pictures!

One side-benefit of Wall Street's turmoil: cabaret club The Box hasn't been entirely booked up by cash-waving bankers this year for holiday parties. And that let Nerve, the sex-and-babycare web publishing group, take over the venue last night for a party. Here with his wife Alisa is Rufus Griscom—now a father-of-two—trying to recapture Nerve's erotic heyday. After the jump, an unusual branding opportunity for Hendricks gin, sponsor of the event. (NSFW).

Since "Young American Bodies" has the same theme as every other "serious" web show, I figured this series about several young people's romance and sex lives would be trash, only this time with some naked shots. But it turns out the show on IFC.com (which first ran on Nerve.com) is good honest filmmaking. Like most mumblecore the dialog may seem pedestrian, but that's part of the refreshing realism: no one's overacting, none of the characters are hotshot rockstars or heiresses, nothing is "aspirational" or "viral," and I find myself actually wanting to watch the whole story. Below is the second episode, which begins with a dangling dick and ends in a smirk-worthy sad-sack moment.

Yesterday, we speculated about what Nerve.com blogger (and member of defunct 90s band Johnny Bravo) Branwyn Lancourt meant when he said that he "enjoyed the fried calamari, so to speak" on his date the other night. What sort of depraved sexual act was he referring to? Our diseased minds went haywire. But no: he e-mailed us to let us know that it wasn't some sort of euphemism (and also sort of implied that we're assholes, but that's OK.) What he meant follows, as does a totally awesome YouTube film he made with his twin brother! (Quote: "Fuck you for wanting me to look you in the eye! I don't want to know you that well." Also: "Kafka was a clerk!")

Highbrow smut purveyor Nerve opened a "dating confessions" section on its website today, and quickly drew a flood of scuzzy testimonials that confirmed what everyone already kinda knew about Nerve's audience: it consists of sluts of all sexes and sorts, along with people burned by the mostly-idiotic practice of online dating (who'd have thought??). Fair enough, their stories at worst are trainwreck-watching fun, and well timed at that. Here are some stories of sex, betrayal and sadness, with an emphasis on the latter, culled from the confession booth:

Last night the company formerly known as Nerve Media held a party held in the Nerve offices to celebrate the launch of a third online magazine and to unveil their new corporate name: Material Media. Great name for an online company, right? But while they were able to come up with a new name for their empire, they couldn't settle on one for their new green-lifestyle site. No name means no URL. And no URL means no real launch. The mock-ups projected on the wall looked kinda nice though. Nikola Tamindzic and I showed up for the free hooch and the rumored absinthe.

In a column called "Beating Joel Stein," (not, sadly, a how-to guide) the L.A. Times "humor" columnist introduces you to the finalist of his Comedy Special Olympics. Dude writes for Nerve and Babble and his piece is about circumcision. Sounds like a battle of equals to us. [LAT]

So Nerve—which used to be a sleek sexy magazine, and then split off a company that ran personal ads, and is also a place that gets snippy every time we mention them, by the way—is now all about the fetus and the newly post-fetal. It began with their new site Babble, "the magazine and community for the new urban parent," which I'm sure would make my mom, the old urban parent, stab someone if she saw it. But now it seems there's money in them thar baby bumps! Their celebrity baby blog FameCrawler is up and live. Nerve: They are New York. They went from screwing to breeding but like totally kept that edgy 'tude. Just like Amy Sohn! Also Drool.icio.us is their blog for "the top million baby products," if you were in need of a $390 crib in environmentally-safe fabrics or whatever. Not a good site for bitter childless fags to visit, apparently. For them, I hear, it can be a real downer.

The only reason to attend last night's premiere of the new Showtime series "The Tudors" at the W Hotel was because word on the street was that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers was going to be there. Seriously, never has creepiness and beauty so closely aligned in one human being. Those eyes: pale dreadful spotlights. Those nostrils, lupine and flared. Those lips, churlishly curled and plump. But he never showed up.

It's nearly St. Patrick's day, and you know what that means: Nerve will try to foist the sex tips of freckled redheads upon you. At least one lassie is clearly out to undo that dirty bugger soap-dodging stereotype. Colleen (pictured) recommends that, when you're letting someone stick it in your back hole, you "make sure you wash really, really well before. And after, obviously." Admirable! But we're not so sure about her other bits of wisdom: on boning a man who's "not legal to drink," she says, "It's absolutely not a recipe for disaster, and I say, you go, girl." Ahh, child molestation: a tradition as Irish as green beer.

Sex Advice From Irish Americans [Nerve]

More in the "a generation of self-consumed male hipsters have suddenly discovered parenthood, and we'll be forced to listen to them for years on end" department: did you know that author Steve Almond, formerly content merely to sit back and vindictively sling mud at bloggers, now has a pro blog of his very own? It's on new Nerve spinoff site Babble, and it's exactly as self-conscious and caught up in the tired 'bragging about how cool I used to be and now I'm not, but it's ok because parenthood is a Higher Calling than coolness' thing as you'd expect it to be. Witness this scintillating tidbit: "So I guess that's what we're doing: we're enjoying this time. Not doing much work. Not going out at all. Just sitting around worshipping our kid. It rules."

We're excited to start reading Nerve publisher Rufus Griscom (center)'s offshoot parenting web magazine, Babble, because it is obviously going to be sooo awesome. Just like Nerve, it aims to appeal to that elusive "urban hipster" readership. ("It's a very valuable psychographic in that the urban hipster lifestyle is something that a lot of people aspire to, even if they don't technically live it," says a marketing exec quoted in the article) and to shatter taboos. Like, for instance, the taboo around being a decent fucking human being:

We have to hand it to MisShapes mastermind Leigh Lezark—she's quite the little entrepreneur! Fashion line here, sex book there ... wait, did someone say sex book?

• Time Inc. budget cuts knock off two of the mag company's best reporters: Prize-winning investigative duo Barlett and Steele. [CJR Daily]
• Nerve for parents? Jeez, talk about grups. [WWD (second item)]
• Wired gives awards; big winners don't show up. [AP via Yahoo]
• Bob Schieffer thinks CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan is the next Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer. But not the next Katie Couric, Bob? [WP]

Nerve co-founder Rufus Griscom succumbs to the throes of conjugal bliss.
At Nerve.com's offices last night, sex fiends and internerds came together to celebrate the launch of Nerve Video, their new service designed to help you understand your body that much better (or at least make you laugh, like this NSFW cartoon). Ourselves being big supporters of the sex lives of internerds, we sent Gawker staff voyeur Nikola Tamindzic to the party. After the jump, his NSFW porny yearbook.

• Teen lit packaging expert Lizzie "Old Hag" Skurnick talks about the realities of 17th Street's "packaging" of Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel: Packagers are writers and editors who get the job done quickly for larger publishing houses, and make a lot of money doing so. If that meant pulling out some stock passages for Viswanathan to get her manuscript in on time, that would explain the suspected plagiarism. Related: Why aren't we in the packaging business? [Harvard Independent]
• How do you calculate New York's nightlife apocalypse? Take a bill to freeze liquor licenses and multiply it by Axl Rose at Misshapes. [VV]
• Good news for anyone who likes to touch themselves: Nerve.com launches its video site. [Nerve]
• The FBI launches an investigation of Pellicano case leaks to the Times. PlameGate for Hollywood, yay. [Fishbowl LA]
• Fox News' Shep Smith doesn't appreciate being mistaken for Steve Kmetko. But who does? [You Tube]
• Donald Trump has paid the $5 registration fee necessary to become a Rhode Island state lobbyist, so now he can schmooze his way towards — what else? — yet another casino. [ProJo]
• For the record, we've no fucking clue who made a Gawker MySpace profile — but we're thrilled to have 541 friends! [Got Detroit]

A reader points out that Spring Street Networks, which produces personal ads for Nerve, The Onion, the Observer, and the New York Times (among others) is taking the system offline today for an upgrade, temporarily eliminating the social lives of a frightening portion of the New York singles population.

Nerve explores the burning question, "Is Details gay?" after Stuff and Radar suggest that it might beor at the very least, that if it's not gay, it's still gay. Michael Martin's take: "In an attempt to answer this question, I conducted some field research. I polled some friends, trying to locate another regular Details reader. I found none. Along the way, I realized something: as scintillating as Stuff and Radar's analysis was, it overlooked a crucial fact: the fact that Details is bad. Not to put too fine a point on things, but to make Details the target of an ironic joke is to grant the publication a level of complexity that it does not possess. To say that Details is covertly gay would be to say that it is overtly anything, and, well, it isn't."
Details' high-class hustle [Nerve]

Nerve helpfully explains to the boors and downtrodden why their personal ads don't work with a handy little quiz that points out what they're doing wrong: "[Question Number] 9. Last great book read.
If you have read this book in its entirety: +2
If this is actually the "last" (i.e., most recent), "great" (i.e., not just "high in the spectrum of mediocrity") book you read (i.e., not just a list of Pynchon and Nabokov novels you got off on in college): +10
If you listed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: -10
If you listed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, deleted it for fear of being judged unkindly, then relisted it: +5"
Quiz: your dry spell explained! [Nerve]

Variation on a theme: An English friend accompanies gay pals to Beige and begins chatting with a lovely female dancer, cleverly exploiting his near-monopoly on the supply of straight guys in the bar. She mentions recently breaking up with her boyfriend and he moves in the for the kill, inviting her to Milano's with the boys. Mistaking his routine for hey-girl Will-and-Grace banter, she says "Sure! Maybe there will be some straight guys there!" The friend is so shocked he forgets to proclaim his loyalty for the ladies. The key word here is "English." As Nerve's Grant Stoddard recently wrote, "I have an outrageous British accent, which my colonial friends tend to associate with an innate lust for cock."