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[Golfhaus]

Single YouTube link ahoy! Happy 20th anniversary, pirate!

The story is explained in the video, NSFW (but not by a whole lot)

[littlefallsmets]

Oh man, that's a good one.

I'm secretly obsessed with pirate television and radio.

It would be one of my great dreams fulfilled to pull something like that off.

If I ever have a film production company, I hope to name it after a pirate radio station that was in Syracuse when I was just a little kid... but that some of my college professors have hinted that they were involved with in hushed-tones and so forth.

[theinevitable]

i have had a similar dream ever since my 10th grade English teacher told us that she had been suspended from High School in her senior year for publishing an underground newspaper.

Also, the radio station I work at started out as just a kid broadcasting from his dorm room, and getting his friends to play records when he was at class.

[Arachno-capitalist]

wow what a waste. the guy hijacks the airwaves so that he can make noises and spank himself? Maybe its some kind of dada art i dont get.

[littlefallsmets]

Slack must be cut, Ennewhy.

Especially back then, the very idea that you COULD hack a television signal with anything was like being able to rewrite reality. This was back when many people still didn't even have cable, man, and back when cable was basically just an antenna at the highest point in an area sending all the signals it could get back down to everyone, even in many places where there was widespread cable.

ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and... one or two independent stations IF you were in a big city. That was it, man, that was the totality of reality beyond your job and your family, six or seven channels.

That... that kind of reality could break down at all, it was like some kind of a magic spell.

It was like anything could happen, if even for a fleeting moment.

There were worlds out there where kids in stupid masks could break down all of the shared reality for a few precious seconds. Proof that anything was possible, really, no matter what the newspapers said. Those worlds might just be next-door, you know.

Anything was possible.

[Golfhaus]

Some friends and I had solid plans to build a pirate radio station, with transmitters mounted in a van so it never broadcast from the same place twice. All we needed was... more money and time and motivation.

A-CAP's "Uh... why?" opinion is what fascinates me about this piece. Why indeed. There was no political motivation, as there was when astronomers plastered Solidarity logos on Polish national television. It wasn't shock art, as when a group of Czechs made it appear that a "panorama" show with shots of the pleasant countryside had captured a nuclear detonation. It wasn't even whiny bitching about the rates HBO charged. Indeed, it seems the reason why was because he COULD. And when it's all said and done, what better reason do you need?

[melack]

Just watching this, I'm really glad I'm not old enough to remember what TV was like in the 80s. Effed up times, man.

[littlefallsmets]

Sometimes just proving that the current imposed shared reality is not impervious is more of a message than any "constructed" message could ever be.

Sometimes the most revolutionary theory you can espouse is to simply say that revolution is possible.

[AlohaDawg]

Just watching this, I'm really glad I'm not old enough to remember what TV was like in the 80s. Effed up times, man.

Cable was around in the 80s. I remember when MTV broadcast it's first music video (something I don't think they even do anymore, do they??)

Now, the 70's....that was some shit. We had 3 network affiliated local stations on VHF channels and 3 local non-affiliated stations on UHF. Tell you what, though, it was IMPOSSIBLE to sit in front of the TV for more than 2 hours at a time. It sucked that bad. And watching a movie meant 5 minutes of commercials for every 25 minutes of movie or so, unless it was a really good one, in which case: more commercials!

[smick]

Slack must be cut, Ennewhy.

Especially back then, the very idea that you COULD hack a television signal with anything was like being able to rewrite reality.

"Right now" is a very fleeting moment.   Right now, you can still duplicate this fellows work towards a television station.   

In a very very short amount of time, you will not be able to do what this guy did.

[AugustWest]

Cable was around in the 80s. I remember when MTV broadcast it's first music video (something I don't think they even do anymore, do they??)

Now, the 70's....that was some shit. We had 3 network affiliated local stations on VHF channels and 3 local non-affiliated stations on UHF. Tell you what, though, it was IMPOSSIBLE to sit in front of the TV for more than 2 hours at a time. It sucked that bad. And watching a movie meant 5 minutes of commercials for every 25 minutes of movie or so, unless it was a really good one, in which case: more commercials!

3 Networks + PBS on VHF, one independent UHF station.

And We LIKED it!

[littlefallsmets]

Oh man, did I hate it.

When I was a little kid and "television" was eleven channels of cable... I would devote whole weekends to building makeshift antennae so that I could get the over-the-air Syracuse and Albany broadcast channels and get all those shows that the Utica stations didn't pick up.

We had Utica's NBC and ABC, Albany's ABC and proto-Fox, Syracuse's CBS and PBS, the three NYC super-independents and then... like... CNN and the Weather Channel.

It was fuck*ng unbearable. I would hoard out-of-market TV Guides just so I could know about the shows that I was missing.

I... I was a weird kid.

[Golfhaus]

To this day, I'm bothered by the fact that I have never had a problem with getting TBS, but could never get WWOR. More Braves baseball than I could ever fuck*ng stand, and precious little Mets ball. I know the contracts don't line up that way now, but still... bothered.

My DX experience was never with television... always radio. The day I realized I could attach a long-ass wire to my radio and pick up radio stations in Georgia from Virginia, I was fascinated. When I realized I could pick up The Ross Report... it was all over. I can still remember picking my jaw up off the floor when I heard JIM F'IN ROSS talking about WWF wrestling - this was still a few years before the two orgs would even acknowledge each other's existence, and long before the Monday Night Wars.

Then, the Christmas I was stricken with the flu, I got a shortwave radio. The family left me alone that night to go have dinner with my stepdad's family, and I spent the evening with the BBC and a bunch of stations I could identify as Spanish, but nothing more. I've said it somewhere before... probably on this forum... but my fascination with shortwave was grand.

Edit: lots of broadcast signal intrusion on radio, too. The warble jammers are my favorite.

[AugustWest]

When I was a little kid and "television" was eleven channels of cable...

3 Networks + PBS on VHF, one independent UHF station.

Now, the 70's....that was some shit. We had 3 network affiliated local stations on VHF channels and 3 local non-affiliated stations on UHF.

Cry us a fuck*ng river, junior.

[theinevitable]

it reminds me of that recent (HORRIBLE) movie where a guy's younger self comes to the future to visit him. He is ecstatic that there are finally more channels-- only to declare after a montage of all the horrible shit that he watches that "there are 200 channels, and there's still nothing on."