y’all remember that vcr trick that you could unscramble all the PPV channels… golden times… golden times.
Wait. what black magic is this? 12 year old me desperately wants to know.
I have no idea. If you recorded something on vhs it didn’t play it back unscrambled did it?
so what you did was set your vcr to the ppv channel you wanted. and then kept flipping between channel 3 and 4 on the TV until it just unscrambled it. It apparently had to do with the vcr’s ability to like fix when old vhs tapes would get wonky and like have mess and like lines. the color wasn’t always right… but for free WWF (i’m that old) ppv and… well pron… it was great.
Make sure to hit last, channel up, last. Foolish proof. I’ll never get caught.
Had C-band satellite as a teen. All the good channels locked. But if the satellite Spacenet 1 transponder 18 was locked, you could “fine tune” the reception from say, Galaxy 3 transponder 18 by holding the step up or down button, and manually swing the dish halfway across the sky to the same position where Spacenet 1 is. As the descrambler thinks you are watching a different satellite altogether, there is no more lock. And since you never actually visited a bad channel, no way to tell with history or last buttons.
Respect.
How did you even find this out?
We knew that if you pressed the satellite button and channel up/down, it let you manually move the dish, and it didn’t care how long you did it. There were also numbers to indicate the position of the dish. The rest was just sheer determination.
Incredible.
My dad was a film historian, so we had HBO, Cinemax and Showtime in case anything came on that he needed to tape to show to a class.
This was quite helpful to teenage me in the era before internet porn.
And here I just had Blue Nuit
You fool, mother could also just hit “last” and catch you in both deceit AND boobin
Not if Nickelodeon is right next to Cartoon Network. You hit “last” and then change the channel. That also gives you cover for why you’re holding the remote and changing channels.
I remember having to crack the PIN code to access the locked channels (which would just give me access to things like skinemax late at night). I faked sick one day to stay home and set to work. I think there was a short timeout after a few failed attempts, so you could only go so fast. It only took 852 tries but I got it! It was 0852, which was just a straight line up the keypad 😑
That’s way more dedication to a nut then I’ve ever had
Hearing this let’s me realize how lucky I was in this regard. I got a PSP when I was young and either my parents didn’t know it had an internet browser or they didn’t know it was a fully fleshed out browser.
I grew up on AOL, and the day I figured out internet explorer allowed me to access the Internet outside of their locked down kids mode was glorious.
This makes me realize if I pick a code it had to start with a 9
My dad got these black market cable boxes from one of his less than reputable friends way back when. We got literally everything, including full porn channels that weren’t scrambled. They were technically blocked by my parents, but the family pincode was well known.
I used to watch the porn channels and never could figure out why they were so… Meh for me. Turns out, very gay. Lol
Once my parents split up we didn’t have those boxes anymore, and I used to watch Cat House and went through the same “why is this so frustratingly close to being good” experience lol
Quick question…was straight porn like ew gross or just not interesting? I find your porn story really funny and hope I don’t offend by saying so.
No, not gross. Before I knew I was gay it more frustrating than anything. Like, I knew this was sexual, I knew I wanted to enjoy it, and I knew it made me horny. But it wasn’t enough to cross than line into, like, getting me there and being enjoyable. It wasn’t until I found my brother’s porn magazines that I really enjoyed porn, and that was because of the guys in it, and a few erotic stories in them written from women’s POV. I still didn’t realize I was gay or that it was the guys getting me there until one day, when I was like 13/14 and I had a blackberry. I found a site that had nude pictures of celebrities (some blog, not like a dedicated site), and there were (I’m assuming fake) nudes or Kirk Cameron on a boat. OMG, I got off so hard, and then went into full panic when I realized what that meant. Spent the next few years trying to figure out how to undo it. Lol.
That’s a really interesting story but …
Kirk Cameron?
Mike Seaver from Growing Pains?
The famous right wing Christian extremist? Nude?
Yeah that sounds about right
