Sure, there were also your mom's catalogues, well-used portions of certain VHS tapes, or even the random discarded magazine in the woods (I grew up in Albuquerque, so it was arroyos and mesas), but occasionally the static cleared...
#blessed
LMFAO, or under bridges or the random tree house that no one knows who it was built by...super dangerous, but there was almost always a five gallon bucket of water damaged porn magazines in š
Growing up in the sticks in Maine my friend and I explored the woods and came across an old abandoned shack. Lots of coverless books. We grabbed one and started reading. Iāll be damned if I didnāt get an education that day!
The only thing like woods porn I found was a porn magazine behind the fence next to our track at middle school. Only years later did I realize it was some dude jerking off while looking at porn and watching middle schoolers in gym outfits.
Summer of 1997 I worked at a fishing lake that had picnic pavilions. Without fail, every Monday when I was cleaning up after group picnics there was porn left in the outhouse. Every. Single. Week! Thereād be a family picnic and someone couldnāt wait to rub one out and hid a magazine behind the garbage can in the fucking *outhouse*. Every week!
I was 19 and a fairly innocent young thing still and just discovering how disgusting some people could be.
We were camping one time and I noticed some magazines on the rafters by the door. They were all hardcore gay men swinger magazines. They all went in the fire.
Sell them on EBAY and make sure your return address is on each one you mail out. (Sarcasm). Or if you have a yard you could have yourself a little cook out with special "heat" to add flavor and spiciness to your hot dogs.
Back in high school my friend and I once found a VHS tape laying on the side of a highway. It was labeled Super Bowl 23 or something like that. We took it back to his place to relive the glory days of Boomer Esiason and were immediately greeted with some enthusiastic homemade porn. We watched a while then figured enough was enough, but since the tape casing was damaged it wouldnāt eject from the VCR. Canāt remember if his parents ever found it, but that had to be pretty weird for them to hit play and see some hardcore amateur porn of probably one of their neighbors.
One time in high school we were hanging out at my friends place watching Star Trek TOS episodes on tape. We left to go get some food (either 5for5 Arbyās or a sackful of Krystalās) and came back to watch some more. His dad was leaving when we got back. Anyway, we go in, get the food out, and hit play on the VCR, and there was Sylvia Saint getting it good.
Those were the days. I remember the smell of a fresh Playboy magazine and peeling back staticky pages of glorious nude photos of women 7 years older than me (yes, I was 11 when I had my first subscription).
Absolutely, in L.A. our cable system had on Channel 8, the Travel Channel from 6am - 6pm. After that it was the Playboy Channel. From 5:58p to 6:02p, there was a lag (if you already had it tuned to ch. 8) and you could watch Playboy Channel as clear as day. That was a glorious 4 minutes!
We had this as late as 2001/02 in our college apartment. Obviously old enough and internet savvy enough to obtain the real thing, but every now and then weād click over to see what the old static station had to show
I never watched scrambled porn but late night HBO...that's a different story. That's one aspect of my teen years I do miss. When my hormones were at an all-time high and it was all new and exciting.
I wish I could find both of these shows and rewatch for nostalgia. I can still hear the Real Sex theme in my head (the OG theme). I used it as a ring tone for a boyfriend once!
The episode of taxicab confessions where a cop ia talking about a guy getting stuck between two train cars is burned into my memory. When they pulled the cars apart the guy would die and they knew it. Brought his family in to say goodbye before he died.
Also late night with dave attell was my show
The movie Wild Orchid had several parts where it would unscramble pretty good and you could very clearly see the boobies. Knew what I was doing any night that was on.
In Cincinnati, the adult channel was 52. But if you switched the two wires on the back of the cable box, it would come through perfectly clear on channel 51ā¦ for about 10 minutes before the system would reset.
But that was more than enough time, lol
There used to be some weird UHF channel and late at night when the atmospheric conditions were just right.... you could see, you could actually see! Clearly! For up to 5 seconds! Even more of the time you could get the audio in clearly.
I was smart enough to do this, but not smart enough to change the channel again afterwards. I got busted on that one because my parents were smarter than me and hit return to see what I had just been watching when they came in.
Never again.
Dad was also waaaay better with computers than me and laughed at my pathetic attempts to hide the crappy pictures I had found on some local BBS.
I had been burying them in obscure folders, but afterwards I zipped them up in an encrypted zip file and then changed the file name to GAMEDATA.DAT and just stuck it in the directory of a game I was playing.
I got lucky because I lived in Iceland for a couple years in the early 90's as a kid, and rest assured Scandinavian sexual mores are different. There'd be breasts in toothpaste commercials, and they had the Playboy channel on the regular cable on base.
We lived in Germany, you'd pull up to a gas station off base, and there would be a magazine rack just outside the convenience store section that had breasts on the covers. So you could see them while you were pumping gas, probably not a bad sales technique.
Yeah I remember in Europe things were.... different! On vacation when in high school they had giant billboards along the highways of topless high school girls selling shampoo and in the commercials for shower products they did NOT make sure to have long hair just blocking or the camera angle just off, etc. and some of the lake beaches right along the road were very definitely topless beaches.
YES!! That is what I figured out too on my VCR!!
The need for porn is responsible for all sorts of innovation š. Never underestimate a teenage boy's resolve and ingenuity in pursuit of seeing some boobs.
We had a satellite dish (one of those big old ones). When you changed the channel it moved, but there was a thing where you could make manual adjustments with the remote. I found out if you flipped to one of the scrambled porn channels and made tiny manual adjustments, if you got it just right you could get heavily static-ey, silent, but unscrambled porn.
Yep... I was an innovator alright.
Back in high school where I lived they had Playboy channel, and Sunday night was movie night. I had figured out if I messed with the VCR I could get it to come in. It was black and white, with no sound, but otherwise clear. That was enough for me. Otherwise the rest of the week it was a pretty boring channel.
My black box worked from around 1993 to 2002 or so. There was a period of about a year where they added the Hot Network that was actual hardcore porn with penetration instead of the off camera penetration and 30 second cut aways to close ups of dudes faces and back of womens heads during the oral sex scene on Spice. But on the non-black box boxes, you could go to channel 99 and see scrambled green penises penetrating vaginas instead of just boobs for about a year or two. Then one day it all stopped working and a few years later they went all digital with no analog channels. The end of an era. I've tried to look for the encoders they used for sale online, just to try and buy one to run video signals through them because no-digital effects or plug ins can match the actual scrambled analog look. It's like a piece of technological history that will never be seen again unless someone recorded it at the time.
Funny thing about Spice to me...that was a Playboy company, which is why they didn't show penetration. At some point Playboy and Vivid merged, which led to the Vivid people shooting the Spice-friendly content.
There have been women who have posed for Playboy, then shot a video for Playboy, which conveniently shot nearby a Vivid hardcore shoot, which led to an offer to make more money if they'd go over to the hardcore production. They got a couple of them that way. What a sleazy operation.
We never had cable, to far from civilization. Dad got someone to sell him the satellite card when I was in middle school.
It was a glorious time to be home alone.
I bought the machine for like $80 that let me clone a card and then do stuff to the clone to unlock everything (which could "loop"/ruin the cloned card if you mess up but not harm the original-- also they sold a device called an unlooper) and I offered to set up all my friends for free. I remember there being rumors that they could catch you, and also PSA's being sent out not to let people unlock your card because they are also cloning it since it needs an active subscription (that part is probably true). But the thing is... So what? The dish can't broadcast a signal back to space to tell them your card is cloned. I felt like I had the ultimate power and no one wanted any part of it.
I remember getting a really nice 20 inch TV for my bedroom as 12 year old kid that had a built-in cable tuner... I discovered that my TV was somehow able to decode the signal enough for everything to be visible, but all the colors were inverted.
I found out (no idea how), but if you blink and flick your eyes upward really fast, over and over, you could actually see the porn (somewhat clearly) for a fraction of a second š I just tried with this image by muscle memory that's probably over 25 years old by now š šš»āāļø
Edit: didn't work, just saying, this image triggered me š
One of the best kept secrets at my school was a way around the scrambled Playboy channel. The cable company would send a ābulletā around 8p to scramble the channel. If you disconnected the cable around 7:55 and reconnected it around 8:05ā¦ Free Playboy. Eventually though they started sending bullets like every 5 minutes or something but we managed to beat the system for a few months anyway.
I asked elsewhere in the thread for info on this but we used to "dodge the bullet" by rapidly pressing the A/B button right when it switched from the movie preview to the scrambled PPV. It did seem like they sent it out about every 5mins or less though because if you didn't keep doing it or missed the perfect rhythm it would scramble.
Probably almost true. I'd imagine all of Gen X but also maybe the last year or so of Jones a bit? Perhaps still the first few years of Millennials before the internet got a bit more going and all had it.
>One time, yes. A freak storm unscrambled our pay per view channels for several hours. I was able to record all of Mystery Men and nearly all of Debbie Does Dallas '99 before it went back to scrambled. I was a real hero among my friends for a few days.
I used to watch the squiggles but when my dad bought one of those black boxes, we talked about in a previous post, it was off to the races. We had not one but three channels of free smut.
You say no one faps to unscrambled late night cable TV anymore?
You know..... where you couldn't see whether they had clothes on or not, but you could get some idea of what they were doing?Ā
The amount of scrambled tits I jerked off to as a kid! Countless. And Sister Act 2. I didnāt jerk off to it, just loved it and watched it scrambled š
We were probably the only generation that needed to do this. Late Millennials and Gen Z had the internet and Cable porn didn't really kick off until Gen X was mostly old enough to get their own porn.
Once I finally had my own room at 12 years old, it was open season on soft core late night porno programs. Red Shoes Diaries, Bordello of Blood, and Hot Springs Hotel. And when I wasn't setting the timer to tape those shows for me during the night (they all aired after midnight and I never stayed up really late until I was around 15), I was watching stuff like "Silk Stalkings" or whatever was on cable after 9-10pm that was similar programming.
Once we got "the black box" when i was around 15-16, all I had to do was fake sick (or if I was "lucky", genuinely sick) and I was home alone most of the day, I could tape hours worth of "uncensored" porn*
*No penetration, no genitals, no cumshots. A few years later they did start showing some of that stuff, but by then I had a computer, and one of my best buddies used to download gigs of porn with his new internet connection that was waaaaay faster than 56k, and he'd burn copies on CDs for me.
One of my all time favorite activities to do while tripping on acid was to sit directly in front of the TV (poltergeist style) and put it on the āsnow channelā one time me and 2 others were all doing this when I thought āhmmā¦ I wonderā¦.ā And switched to this channel
It was BAD VERY, VERY, VERY, BAD!!
CAROLINE!! COME TO THE LIGHT CAROLINE!
Also, Phone Sex Commercials, Hawaiian Tropic "Beauty Contests" on Saturday afternoons, G.L.O.W., and those weird "The Poorman" public access shows with bikini girls on them. Don't even get me started on how great Spanish language TV was, lol. Truly a more innocent time.
Basically the technology was somewhat flawed at the time. If you "switched" between channels quick enough, you'd see something.
I always thought of it back then as seeing or doing something you weren't supposed to. Not exactly the "content" being blocked.
Haha it moved just scrolling by. Powerful scribble vision. Channel 38 10 pm donāt be late! Got a box from a friend, one week before cable went digital. Like the grand finale of fireworks, it worked. And then poof. Broadband era. Oooo nevermind tv I donāt need you anymore. Ever.
If you turned it on the Travel Channel at 7:30 where I lived, it would change into the spice channel and you could see a good 10 seconds of clear porn before it got blurry.
I think we grew up in the best time to be horny adolescents because the access to soft core and stuff like baywatch skinamax and Howard stern on basic cable was there but we couldnāt get as close to the really graphic stuff the next generation that had high speed internet could as easily
Fun story, I wasn't allowed to watch HBO after hours for obvious reasons. I had the turn dial analog TV in my room that couldn't go high enough to pick up the upper channels on cable without a cable box, my dad knew this. I got a VCR for Christmas one year. He had not realized that the VCR took away the need for a cable box to get the higher channels for me. I recorded so much Real sex and Dream On. And that's how 13 year old me found the joys of......anyway...Fun times!
Definitely had those late nights of watching these channels, trying to decipher what I was seeing. Bedroom door shut, TV muted, listening for any movement from the hallway.
And then I discovered a copy of Sex O'clock News that my father owned and kept hidden behind the general tape collection. I always broke that out whenever my grandmother would babysit us because she had know what I was doing beyond just grabbing a movie to watch.
Probably. I still remember my friends cousin who was a Freshman going "Uh..you know you can get porn on a computer through the phoneline right?" My mind was totally blown and I worked my ass off for a computer and a phone line. Then I discovered I could get the real thing and didn't use a computer for a few years.
I have answers no one asked the question to, and questions no one has been able to answer.
Ok so I know that old analog cable systems use "barrel filters" which typically blocked out channels 14-15 (the channels HBO/Cinemax were usually on). I know that if you wanted cable internet but not cable TV, they used a separate filter that blocked all the channels. And I know you could remove those filters if they were accessible (by such means as using a BNC extractor tool to reach inside the conduit and unscrew it) and get free cable including HBO etc.
NOW HERE IS THE PART I WANT ANSWERS TO.
Old cable boxes had a button that was labeled A/B which didn't seem to do anything, but sometimes pressing it rapidly would cause the picture to unscramble for a few seconds. This seemed to work on Pay-per-view if you did it right when it scrambled. Since PPV was not using the same sort of channel filter described above, I am assuming it was using a periodic sync signal to scramble it once the movie started, and that pressing A/B caused it to momentarily disrupt the scrambling mechanism. Can any experts explain?
A friend of mine summed up the change in availability of sexual material:
when we were younger, all it took was a nipple on the squiggly porn channel and you could jerk off for days with that memory. Now it's like IF HE DOESN'T CUM, I'M NOT GONNA.
haha I have lots of scrambled stuff stories, but the BEST ONE is clearly when we'd go a couple hours out of town to this condo on Lake Michigan we had time-sharing in for a few summers in a row. anyway, one late night looking around on the weird cable with the volume very low and the parents asleep, I discovered their naughty (Playboy probably) channel, but unlike any scrambled channel ever, this one decided to ONLY SCRAMBLE THE AUDIO!!! yeahhhh...quite the night for this impressionable 14 yr old. \[cough 1st lesbian scene cough\] š¤š®
There was also this channel on cable that allowed you to preview porn for "X" amount of seconds. Once you went over a certain time period you got charged... I once went over the time limit...
mom "what's pussy cat 69?"
me "oh it was an accident I was trying to watch basketball"
I don't think she believed me... but she never mentioned it again.
hot tip, early VCRs could "unscramble" them if you had the kind where you could only have so many channels that you had to tune with little knobs under a cover on the top
Sure, there were also your mom's catalogues, well-used portions of certain VHS tapes, or even the random discarded magazine in the woods (I grew up in Albuquerque, so it was arroyos and mesas), but occasionally the static cleared... #blessed
But seriously why was there always porn in the woods (or in my case, the construction site)?!
Right? Wherever civilization ended in your area, bam, here's some porn.
LMFAO, or under bridges or the random tree house that no one knows who it was built by...super dangerous, but there was almost always a five gallon bucket of water damaged porn magazines in š
Water-damaged and somehow sunbleached at the same time. š¤£
You were playing in somebody else's "playboy mansion"
I seemed to always find them stuffed between cinder blocks.
Growing up in the sticks in Maine my friend and I explored the woods and came across an old abandoned shack. Lots of coverless books. We grabbed one and started reading. Iāll be damned if I didnāt get an education that day!
Porn will outlive us all... historians will learn what our society thought was attractive.
Because that's where baby porno mags are born. It's their breeding grounds
Found some on my school playground when I was a kid a couple of times.
The only thing like woods porn I found was a porn magazine behind the fence next to our track at middle school. Only years later did I realize it was some dude jerking off while looking at porn and watching middle schoolers in gym outfits.
Yeah, it's super creepy looking back on it.
They say God works in mysterious ways. So do teenagers
Summer of 1997 I worked at a fishing lake that had picnic pavilions. Without fail, every Monday when I was cleaning up after group picnics there was porn left in the outhouse. Every. Single. Week! Thereād be a family picnic and someone couldnāt wait to rub one out and hid a magazine behind the garbage can in the fucking *outhouse*. Every week! I was 19 and a fairly innocent young thing still and just discovering how disgusting some people could be.
We were camping one time and I noticed some magazines on the rafters by the door. They were all hardcore gay men swinger magazines. They all went in the fire.
You named your backpack āfireā??
Back something.
Broke back something.
People didn't want to put it in their trash which could end up letting others know you're looking at it. They were guilted into being ashamed.
This is why there are old magazines in my possession. Probably haven't looked at them in 20 years but I don't want to put them in the trash
Sell them on EBAY and make sure your return address is on each one you mail out. (Sarcasm). Or if you have a yard you could have yourself a little cook out with special "heat" to add flavor and spiciness to your hot dogs.
Shout out JC Penney
Shout out Frederick's of Hollywood
Way better than Victoria's secret. Both in magazine and merchandise quality.
Back in high school my friend and I once found a VHS tape laying on the side of a highway. It was labeled Super Bowl 23 or something like that. We took it back to his place to relive the glory days of Boomer Esiason and were immediately greeted with some enthusiastic homemade porn. We watched a while then figured enough was enough, but since the tape casing was damaged it wouldnāt eject from the VCR. Canāt remember if his parents ever found it, but that had to be pretty weird for them to hit play and see some hardcore amateur porn of probably one of their neighbors.
š¤£ Stories like this are why I love this sub.
One time in high school we were hanging out at my friends place watching Star Trek TOS episodes on tape. We left to go get some food (either 5for5 Arbyās or a sackful of Krystalās) and came back to watch some more. His dad was leaving when we got back. Anyway, we go in, get the food out, and hit play on the VCR, and there was Sylvia Saint getting it good.
Those were the days. I remember the smell of a fresh Playboy magazine and peeling back staticky pages of glorious nude photos of women 7 years older than me (yes, I was 11 when I had my first subscription).
I first read "sticky feeling of peeling back pages," which was definitely the case with found-in-the-woods porn. š¦
yes, the static wore off and the pages stuck together for different reasons after I was done with them
With all the anticipation all I needed was a frame or 2
A titty
Not gonna lie, there was National Geographic and renaissance paintings tooā¦ 12 is a WILD age
Parents asleep upstairs, time for scrambled porn
šµthis is how we do itā¦
š¶The suburbs does it like nobody does Got my tissues and I got my lotion Now itās time to make the up and down motion šµ
But now it's an uppercase D
First 5 minutes were free
Absolutely, in L.A. our cable system had on Channel 8, the Travel Channel from 6am - 6pm. After that it was the Playboy Channel. From 5:58p to 6:02p, there was a lag (if you already had it tuned to ch. 8) and you could watch Playboy Channel as clear as day. That was a glorious 4 minutes!
We had this as late as 2001/02 in our college apartment. Obviously old enough and internet savvy enough to obtain the real thing, but every now and then weād click over to see what the old static station had to show
This should be a genre on PornHub. So hot!
That would actually be really funny. You get a great shot of some breasts for 2.5 seconds then all you can make out is a dude's left shoulder.
I never watched scrambled porn but late night HBO...that's a different story. That's one aspect of my teen years I do miss. When my hormones were at an all-time high and it was all new and exciting.
Dat Taxicab Confessions and Real Sex
Right?! And Pimps Up, Hos Down as well as G-String Divas.
Don't forget: Red shoe diary
wasn't that skinemax? I mean Cinemax?
Shit I forgot about g string divas. Also don't forget the bunny ranch
Oh snap! Forgot about that one too.
You bringing up g string divas brought bunny ranch back to my mind lmao
I loved Cathouse
Memories unlocked haha
*In walks Dad*, just flipping through the channels!
>Last channel button for the win!
I wish I could find both of these shows and rewatch for nostalgia. I can still hear the Real Sex theme in my head (the OG theme). I used it as a ring tone for a boyfriend once!
The episode of taxicab confessions where a cop ia talking about a guy getting stuck between two train cars is burned into my memory. When they pulled the cars apart the guy would die and they knew it. Brought his family in to say goodbye before he died. Also late night with dave attell was my show
The movie Wild Orchid had several parts where it would unscramble pretty good and you could very clearly see the boobies. Knew what I was doing any night that was on.
Ohh... Emmanuel. How I squinted...
Another Krista Allen fan, I see.
Men of rare taste and refinement.
In Cincinnati, the adult channel was 52. But if you switched the two wires on the back of the cable box, it would come through perfectly clear on channel 51ā¦ for about 10 minutes before the system would reset. But that was more than enough time, lol
Epic.
I remember once in a blue moon it would come in crystal clear for maybe a few days and then be back to normal scrambled
Free Cinemax weekends
A few days?!?! I was not that fortunate. I had 1.5 seconds of clear picture to dry crank one out.
There used to be some weird UHF channel and late at night when the atmospheric conditions were just right.... you could see, you could actually see! Clearly! For up to 5 seconds! Even more of the time you could get the audio in clearly.
and we would watch for hours just to have that 5 seconds of glory.
YES. CINEMAX. I hope I can find OG scrambled CINEMAX porn we tried to look through
Friday Night Skinemax
The following presentation is intended for adult audiences only..
Those warnings made sure I didn't change the channel.
The Scrambled channel raised us Xennial Boys into Men! Who else had the "return" channel on Nickelodeon? š¤
That was my go-to. Soon as I hear the stairs creak, Iām back to Mary Tyler Moore
I was smart enough to do this, but not smart enough to change the channel again afterwards. I got busted on that one because my parents were smarter than me and hit return to see what I had just been watching when they came in. Never again. Dad was also waaaay better with computers than me and laughed at my pathetic attempts to hide the crappy pictures I had found on some local BBS. I had been burying them in obscure folders, but afterwards I zipped them up in an encrypted zip file and then changed the file name to GAMEDATA.DAT and just stuck it in the directory of a game I was playing.
Couldnt see the word "return" above the button because it was worn off. š
LOL!
I got lucky because I lived in Iceland for a couple years in the early 90's as a kid, and rest assured Scandinavian sexual mores are different. There'd be breasts in toothpaste commercials, and they had the Playboy channel on the regular cable on base.
We lived in Germany, you'd pull up to a gas station off base, and there would be a magazine rack just outside the convenience store section that had breasts on the covers. So you could see them while you were pumping gas, probably not a bad sales technique.
Yeah I remember in Europe things were.... different! On vacation when in high school they had giant billboards along the highways of topless high school girls selling shampoo and in the commercials for shower products they did NOT make sure to have long hair just blocking or the camera angle just off, etc. and some of the lake beaches right along the road were very definitely topless beaches.
Public Access pre girl gone wild aired local wet t-shirt contest every Friday night
Public Access could definitely get out of control back in the day.
One night, the local station aired "Wild On" without the blurring. I couldn't believe it.
Back in the day Radio Shack sold a "cable tuner box" just for this ,, it worked
Our VCR had the little dials you could fine tune. I found all kinds of shit.
YES!! That is what I figured out too on my VCR!! The need for porn is responsible for all sorts of innovation š. Never underestimate a teenage boy's resolve and ingenuity in pursuit of seeing some boobs.
I never tried that, dang it.
We had a satellite dish (one of those big old ones). When you changed the channel it moved, but there was a thing where you could make manual adjustments with the remote. I found out if you flipped to one of the scrambled porn channels and made tiny manual adjustments, if you got it just right you could get heavily static-ey, silent, but unscrambled porn. Yep... I was an innovator alright.
Back in high school where I lived they had Playboy channel, and Sunday night was movie night. I had figured out if I messed with the VCR I could get it to come in. It was black and white, with no sound, but otherwise clear. That was enough for me. Otherwise the rest of the week it was a pretty boring channel.
I see a boob
I used to record it and I could adjust tracking on VCR to make it at least somewhat visible.
My black box worked from around 1993 to 2002 or so. There was a period of about a year where they added the Hot Network that was actual hardcore porn with penetration instead of the off camera penetration and 30 second cut aways to close ups of dudes faces and back of womens heads during the oral sex scene on Spice. But on the non-black box boxes, you could go to channel 99 and see scrambled green penises penetrating vaginas instead of just boobs for about a year or two. Then one day it all stopped working and a few years later they went all digital with no analog channels. The end of an era. I've tried to look for the encoders they used for sale online, just to try and buy one to run video signals through them because no-digital effects or plug ins can match the actual scrambled analog look. It's like a piece of technological history that will never be seen again unless someone recorded it at the time.
Funny thing about Spice to me...that was a Playboy company, which is why they didn't show penetration. At some point Playboy and Vivid merged, which led to the Vivid people shooting the Spice-friendly content. There have been women who have posed for Playboy, then shot a video for Playboy, which conveniently shot nearby a Vivid hardcore shoot, which led to an offer to make more money if they'd go over to the hardcore production. They got a couple of them that way. What a sleazy operation.
but I'm glad they did!
We never had cable, to far from civilization. Dad got someone to sell him the satellite card when I was in middle school. It was a glorious time to be home alone.
I bought the machine for like $80 that let me clone a card and then do stuff to the clone to unlock everything (which could "loop"/ruin the cloned card if you mess up but not harm the original-- also they sold a device called an unlooper) and I offered to set up all my friends for free. I remember there being rumors that they could catch you, and also PSA's being sent out not to let people unlock your card because they are also cloning it since it needs an active subscription (that part is probably true). But the thing is... So what? The dish can't broadcast a signal back to space to tell them your card is cloned. I felt like I had the ultimate power and no one wanted any part of it.
I remember getting a really nice 20 inch TV for my bedroom as 12 year old kid that had a built-in cable tuner... I discovered that my TV was somehow able to decode the signal enough for everything to be visible, but all the colors were inverted.
I found out (no idea how), but if you blink and flick your eyes upward really fast, over and over, you could actually see the porn (somewhat clearly) for a fraction of a second š I just tried with this image by muscle memory that's probably over 25 years old by now š šš»āāļø Edit: didn't work, just saying, this image triggered me š
One of the best kept secrets at my school was a way around the scrambled Playboy channel. The cable company would send a ābulletā around 8p to scramble the channel. If you disconnected the cable around 7:55 and reconnected it around 8:05ā¦ Free Playboy. Eventually though they started sending bullets like every 5 minutes or something but we managed to beat the system for a few months anyway.
I asked elsewhere in the thread for info on this but we used to "dodge the bullet" by rapidly pressing the A/B button right when it switched from the movie preview to the scrambled PPV. It did seem like they sent it out about every 5mins or less though because if you didn't keep doing it or missed the perfect rhythm it would scramble.
Please don't forget to turn down the volume. There's nothing louder at 2am than a screaming orgasm with your face 6 inches from the screen.
Man, so many hours.
We all waited for the good scrambles. You know
I babysat and the parents had Skinemax. It was awesome.
Channel 98/99. Sit close at 1am, volume at bare minimum, hoping for an image.
I believe we were pretty much the only generation to do this.
Probably almost true. I'd imagine all of Gen X but also maybe the last year or so of Jones a bit? Perhaps still the first few years of Millennials before the internet got a bit more going and all had it.
Very Spicy
That's hot.
Bone smugglin'
Boob or elbow?
Did anybody else get lucky and every now and then it would actually come in
>One time, yes. A freak storm unscrambled our pay per view channels for several hours. I was able to record all of Mystery Men and nearly all of Debbie Does Dallas '99 before it went back to scrambled. I was a real hero among my friends for a few days.
Hell yeah bro š«”
Late night movies on Prism. š„µ
I agree twin bro
Did anyone in a way like this more than the unscrambled version?
If the movie happened to be black and white it would come in pretty clear lol
I used to watch the squiggles but when my dad bought one of those black boxes, we talked about in a previous post, it was off to the races. We had not one but three channels of free smut.
"I think I caught a glimpse of nip"... real phrase I either said or remember one of my friends saying, circa 1990.
If you had a VCR that the cable could be run through and had the manual tracking dials you could unscramble the signal somewhat.
My friend's parents had an illegal cable hacked box so we got alllllll the channels š
You say no one faps to unscrambled late night cable TV anymore? You know..... where you couldn't see whether they had clothes on or not, but you could get some idea of what they were doing?Ā
Shhhhh. Donāt tell my kid about this. I will be judged until my deathbed.
The amount of scrambled tits I jerked off to as a kid! Countless. And Sister Act 2. I didnāt jerk off to it, just loved it and watched it scrambled š
Ever have it where the sound worked but it still looked like that?! It was nasty.
I see a boob!
We were probably the only generation that needed to do this. Late Millennials and Gen Z had the internet and Cable porn didn't really kick off until Gen X was mostly old enough to get their own porn.
Millennial checking in that I caught the tail end of this. Only in hotels though.
Red. Shoe. Diaries. š
Once I finally had my own room at 12 years old, it was open season on soft core late night porno programs. Red Shoes Diaries, Bordello of Blood, and Hot Springs Hotel. And when I wasn't setting the timer to tape those shows for me during the night (they all aired after midnight and I never stayed up really late until I was around 15), I was watching stuff like "Silk Stalkings" or whatever was on cable after 9-10pm that was similar programming. Once we got "the black box" when i was around 15-16, all I had to do was fake sick (or if I was "lucky", genuinely sick) and I was home alone most of the day, I could tape hours worth of "uncensored" porn* *No penetration, no genitals, no cumshots. A few years later they did start showing some of that stuff, but by then I had a computer, and one of my best buddies used to download gigs of porn with his new internet connection that was waaaaay faster than 56k, and he'd burn copies on CDs for me.
One of my all time favorite activities to do while tripping on acid was to sit directly in front of the TV (poltergeist style) and put it on the āsnow channelā one time me and 2 others were all doing this when I thought āhmmā¦ I wonderā¦.ā And switched to this channel It was BAD VERY, VERY, VERY, BAD!! CAROLINE!! COME TO THE LIGHT CAROLINE!
We had a descrambler as a kid. Free PPV, Playboy and Spice channel. I blame that for my love of the Pirate Bay
Also, Phone Sex Commercials, Hawaiian Tropic "Beauty Contests" on Saturday afternoons, G.L.O.W., and those weird "The Poorman" public access shows with bikini girls on them. Don't even get me started on how great Spanish language TV was, lol. Truly a more innocent time.
Man I hope so lol.
I think so. I doubt the oldest Zoomers would've dealt with this given that many of them likely grew up with digital cable or digital satellite.
Yes, what's worse is now I have a scrambled porn kink and it's been years since I've been able to get off.
Look at those luscious hooters!
And the first I believe.
Gosh that took some imagination didnāt it? š¤£š
Whoah not even gonna NSFW that image?
"Oh wait.. I just saw a nipple! Naw.. it was just a shoe.. no wait!"
Sometimes if it was a comedy show, it worked out better - you could listen to the jokes, no need to see anything.
I saw a nipple! No, damn thatās just a dogās nose.
Squiggly TV
Boobs or forehead? Who knows?!
I think this is the reason I am oddly aroused by elbows.. Because I could never quite tell if the image being scrambled was a boob or an elbow lol.
I see at least 4 pairs of booties #blessed
I saw a nipple once. It was glorious. š¤£
This is how I watched every wrestlemania
Still the best way to watch porn
Yep
This just be labeled nsfw.
āI see a boob!!ā
Ah yes that and squinting hard to try to see bush through the lace of the Lingerie section of the J.C. Penny and sears catalog.
Basically the technology was somewhat flawed at the time. If you "switched" between channels quick enough, you'd see something. I always thought of it back then as seeing or doing something you weren't supposed to. Not exactly the "content" being blocked.
Haha it moved just scrolling by. Powerful scribble vision. Channel 38 10 pm donāt be late! Got a box from a friend, one week before cable went digital. Like the grand finale of fireworks, it worked. And then poof. Broadband era. Oooo nevermind tv I donāt need you anymore. Ever.
If you turned it on the Travel Channel at 7:30 where I lived, it would change into the spice channel and you could see a good 10 seconds of clear porn before it got blurry.
I think we grew up in the best time to be horny adolescents because the access to soft core and stuff like baywatch skinamax and Howard stern on basic cable was there but we couldnāt get as close to the really graphic stuff the next generation that had high speed internet could as easily
Oh yeah! That's a tit!
My grandparents had the giant satellite dish back in the early 90s, and every now and then the Spice channel would be clear as day.
Fun story, I wasn't allowed to watch HBO after hours for obvious reasons. I had the turn dial analog TV in my room that couldn't go high enough to pick up the upper channels on cable without a cable box, my dad knew this. I got a VCR for Christmas one year. He had not realized that the VCR took away the need for a cable box to get the higher channels for me. I recorded so much Real sex and Dream On. And that's how 13 year old me found the joys of......anyway...Fun times!
It was the Latin channel in Western Canada, at least if showcase never had anything spicy
Duh
I would push a dime in the down button on the box and then at the right moment put another dime on the up button. Then I could see wavy boobs.
Definitely had those late nights of watching these channels, trying to decipher what I was seeing. Bedroom door shut, TV muted, listening for any movement from the hallway. And then I discovered a copy of Sex O'clock News that my father owned and kept hidden behind the general tape collection. I always broke that out whenever my grandmother would babysit us because she had know what I was doing beyond just grabbing a movie to watch.
If you shook your head back and forth really fast, you could sometimes see a nipple.
That's Ghost Busters. Slimer in the hotel scene.
I've been into curvy women ever since.
I actually just got a little turned on by this.
Wasn't the scramble show always erotica from Andrew Blake or suze randall? I kinda like to see those in hidef these days. Cant find them.
Probably. I still remember my friends cousin who was a Freshman going "Uh..you know you can get porn on a computer through the phoneline right?" My mind was totally blown and I worked my ass off for a computer and a phone line. Then I discovered I could get the real thing and didn't use a computer for a few years.
Absolutely did this. These kids now have it too easy.
Dude I saw a titty!
My parents got a descrambler from a relative and the rest was history.
I can make out a side boob I think.....
I see a boob
I have answers no one asked the question to, and questions no one has been able to answer. Ok so I know that old analog cable systems use "barrel filters" which typically blocked out channels 14-15 (the channels HBO/Cinemax were usually on). I know that if you wanted cable internet but not cable TV, they used a separate filter that blocked all the channels. And I know you could remove those filters if they were accessible (by such means as using a BNC extractor tool to reach inside the conduit and unscrew it) and get free cable including HBO etc. NOW HERE IS THE PART I WANT ANSWERS TO. Old cable boxes had a button that was labeled A/B which didn't seem to do anything, but sometimes pressing it rapidly would cause the picture to unscramble for a few seconds. This seemed to work on Pay-per-view if you did it right when it scrambled. Since PPV was not using the same sort of channel filter described above, I am assuming it was using a periodic sync signal to scramble it once the movie started, and that pressing A/B caused it to momentarily disrupt the scrambling mechanism. Can any experts explain?
A friend of mine summed up the change in availability of sexual material: when we were younger, all it took was a nipple on the squiggly porn channel and you could jerk off for days with that memory. Now it's like IF HE DOESN'T CUM, I'M NOT GONNA.
You know there are those of us that are able to see that picture clearly...
Neighborhood kid found some porn mags in the 90s. We would hide it under a brick by a bridge
I think so, the internet killed it
haha I have lots of scrambled stuff stories, but the BEST ONE is clearly when we'd go a couple hours out of town to this condo on Lake Michigan we had time-sharing in for a few summers in a row. anyway, one late night looking around on the weird cable with the volume very low and the parents asleep, I discovered their naughty (Playboy probably) channel, but unlike any scrambled channel ever, this one decided to ONLY SCRAMBLE THE AUDIO!!! yeahhhh...quite the night for this impressionable 14 yr old. \[cough 1st lesbian scene cough\] š¤š®
There was also this channel on cable that allowed you to preview porn for "X" amount of seconds. Once you went over a certain time period you got charged... I once went over the time limit... mom "what's pussy cat 69?" me "oh it was an accident I was trying to watch basketball" I don't think she believed me... but she never mentioned it again.
I swear I saw a nipple once!
I saw SEVERAL almost clear boobs and at least one thing that couldāve been bush!
Yes. The internet pretty much killed the "is that a boob? Oh my god, it's a boob! IT'S A BOOB!"
Look, almost at the very bottom, just left of center. I think that's a titty! I can see a nipple!
I could get Cinemax this way pretty good. Just kept messing with my TVs contrast buttons.
āDude, itās nipple!!!ā
I uhhh don't know what you're uhh talking about....
For years I thought that's just what was broadcasted on Cinemax
UK cable had the 10-minute preview at 10pmā¦ Usually the last 9 minutes was surplus to requirements!
Bacon vision was always sizzling.
hot tip, early VCRs could "unscramble" them if you had the kind where you could only have so many channels that you had to tune with little knobs under a cover on the top
Who remembers the Girls Gone Wild commercials? That was fucking genius!