Cinemax taught me how to work a VCR

This, and the really long late night Girls Gone Wild commercials on Comedy Central. I think the first thing I ever pirated was a GGW video, lmao.

…and the mirror on the bedroom door set so that I could see who’s coming down the hall.

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 😑

In Canada, we had “Bleu Nuit”. It was on at 2am, Saturday night, and played racy French movies. The only problem was the movies ran the gamut from 1.5 hour long naked lesbian makeout to a single scene with boobies somewhere in the middle. You took your chances. I swear there was one that didn’t even show anything (but probably talked about sex. Dunno, I don’t speak much French.)

I always set the last button to the TV guide channel. It made it less suspicious if they saw the channel change. Or at least that’s what I reasoned.

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

This is what I was trying to get off too. A few years later, I found out the art channel would sometimes play dirty movies on Saturday late at night but they usually involved incest(?). Then I switched to music channels when they started showing provocative music video so that was nice. I had one of those little tvs with the vcr integrated. Good times.

Told my mom we should keep Cinemax because they had good movies coming up.

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.

Make sure to hit last, channel up, last. Foolish proof. I’ll never get caught.

Real Sex always seemed so not sexy. I mean, I’d watch it for boobs as a kid, but I was always kind of turned off by the whole show, idk.

I feel seen

y’all remember that vcr trick that you could unscramble all the PPV channels… golden times… golden times.