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.

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 😑

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

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

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.

I feel seen

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.

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.

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.)

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

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