The Big D!

I got to have a bag of 50 empty Doritos locos tacos shells a month before they released because I knew someone who was up in the chain.

J4c3l33t

Alright honestly THIS is some legit stuff. My brother and I were just wondering when they would start selling them in grocery stores.

persephone_cap

The Web. 

The internet. '93

EDIT: I founded one of the first internet access providers in Europe. A stack of modems in my bedroom. Crazy times.

raarts

Email 1978

Emailing FORTRAN homework to our professor.

My father worked for a defense contractor. I remember him bringing home an "ASCII art" picture of Snoopy in the early 70s.

TVLL

Infinity....

I got an infinity tattoo. This was before smart phones and during the early days of Google. I took a piece of paper and made a moebius strip to help explain what infinity was to the tattoo artist. Went to to library and tried to find an image of it online, paid a quarter to print it, and the artist ended up doing a really good job with very little knowledge of the symbol. I still love it, but am bummed at how cliche it has become.

lil_suprises

Lil Dicky. 

I discovered Lil Dicky early on when he released his first video... early enough I even got a DM reply from him after I reached out to tell him how much I enjoyed his work.

thevhspodcast420

This happened with me but with Hopsin. I was playing MW2 and some random guy was playing some of his old stuff. We were pubstomping together and he's like yo you gotta listen to him he's gonna get huge.

Icy9kills

GOT!

Read Game of Thrones in 2000.

(Haven't watched show yet)

(Was on a flight while reading GoT and happened to be sitting in the first coach seat on the aisle. Stephen King was on the flight, flying coach no less, and when he walked past me he checked out what I was reading. I was super psyched it was a good book!)

Theseus44

Avril Forever. 

When I was 19 and going clubbing regularly, I started wearing a tie with a t-shirt. Everyone thought it was cool for some reason (this was in that post-grunge era of 2001), I just was doing it because I thought it was funny.

Then 6 months later Avril Lavigne became a thing and people just thought I was copying her.

HappyTimeHollis

G1...

I had a google G1 on launch day. Google basically dropped support for it within a year and I learnt to never be an early adopter again.

Itxi

I even switched cell phone providers to get a G1. Man, those were the days.

Cookie-muensters

PSY.

My cousin showed me Gangnam Style like two weeks before it exploded. I dismissed it as being "another stupid song with an even stupider music video."

ATotallyRandomGuy

I actually got an email from YouTube congratulating me on being one of the first people to see Gangnam Style. A friend sent it to me, only watched it the once.

albertdunderhead

LEGOS. 

Being a fan of LEGO on social media long before the 2014 movie. I'm in my mid-30s and have been collecting since I was a small child, and I have tattoos on mini-figures on my right forearm that I got almost a decade ago. I've even had my stuff published in actual magazines like Nintendo Power and Official Nintendo Magazine UK a long, long time ago.

Edit: since people asked, this is my YouTube channel for demos and animations, and here's my Flickr for high-res photos.

vonbrunk

2side-1brain.....

2side-1brain, this Okinawan band I became friends with when I was stationed there during my time in the Air Force. Good times and me and my friends got to know them and played with them at the local rock bars on the island and had a great time singing Nirvana and Deftones covers on those small stage, and then after a while, they went on tour in the US and made three more studio albums after that.

64hitcombo

Webkinz.

Webkinz. My mom randomly picked me up one for Christmas before anyone knew what they were.

Two months later and everyone in my class had like 50.

orangecrushh99

Ebay Away. 

Ebay member since Aug 1998.

WilyWalloo

I miss those days -- back when you knew who you were bidding against. I remember times I decided not to snipe someone because I'd already beat her/him out a couple times.

It was, somewhat, more of a community feeling in some categories.

displaced_virginian

Champions. 

Wearing champion clothes. I used to get roasted for that crap in middle school cause they had it in Walmart and it was for broke ppl. Now it's like a designer brand and high quality? Get out of here 😂

Thegib3

​Eat avocado on toast.....

Eat avocado on toast without some idiot commenting on it. My dad ate that for breakfast all the time as an adult so I grew up watching him do it and eventually I liked it to and so now i do. I appreciate I can get it on a menu but really people? It's just avocado on toast calm down.

justhewayouare

Hey hey Coachella....

I was wearing crop top belly shirts as a 5 year-old boy before any of these Coachella fools started wearing them. And yes, looking back I have no idea how my parents didn't suspect that I was gay.

throwawayd4326

Back in the '80s.....

If you bicycle-commute in San Francisco from the Richmond District to downtown, you can go quite a ways east through the park and down the panhandle. Then you face a maze of streets between you and Market Street, to the south. There's a route through those streets called the Wiggle, or the "Duboce Wiggle," that takes you through without going up or down any steep slopes. And then you are a block from Market and, in my day, anyway, could make a speed run downtown -- you had no choice, or the trucks would eat you.

Back in the '80s, a few of us worked it out by trial and error. I maybe saw one other bike on the route during commute hours, usually. Now The Wiggle has its own Wikipedia entry, direction lines painted on the pavement to guide you through, and I'm told is fairly heavily used.

Tall_Mickey

Tuck It. 

About 25 years ago in PE I realized the plain white t-shirt I was wearing (part of the uniform) had a pretty big ketchup stain on the left side over my hip. So I tucked that part into my shorts so nobody saw (since tucking the whole thing in would look lame, right?). 5 minutes later I looked around and saw all the other boys in my class had tucked in their t-shirts in one side.

For that one hour of PE I felt like a fashion god. I've never been cool and have worn odd shoes several times, but this one time, 25 years ago, I got to make something cool.

finzaz

Ooops....

A friend of mine played My Chemical Romance's debut album for me when it first came out. I thought, well these guys sound pretty good, but I'm sure they're just another one of the indie bands he likes that will have some small underground success but no commercial breakthrough or fame.

Oops.

helix274

Mo Bamba?

You know that song Mo Bamba? Well I heard it on SoundCloud about a year before it blew up and I showed it to my friends. They all told me it was trash. A year later one of my friends says "you guys here that new song mo bamba?" And they all told him it was great and it was the most popular song for a good 3 months.

It's not that I loved the song but every time I hear it I'm reminded of how all my friends only liked it once it was cool and popular.

lafleurricky

La Croix....

I started drinking La Croix 15 years ago, back when it only came in glass bottles of lemon or lime.

StanzoBrandFedoras