Channelling Your Inner Hipster

I liked Volbeat 5 1/2 years ago. Call me a "hipster" because I like a band you haven't heard of, and I'll flatten your testicles.

 

When I was in high school, I saw some kid doing a Rubik's cube at a debate tournament. (This is the nerdiest sentence ever written.) I was immediately fascinated, and bought one and carried it around for the next week or so. I looked up a method to solve it online, and quickly got down to around a minute. Gradually, guys (and girls) from other lunch tables would come over, wondering how I was solving the thing. I think you can see where this is going. I started a three-to-five-month Rubik's revival at my school, completely accidentally. Teachers were banning them in their classes, because kids would just whip them out and start trying to solve them. It was ridiculous.

I think that's probably the most "I liked it before it was cool" story I've got.

 

Not sure if this counts because it was only a within school hipster achievement but I was the first kid in school to start downloading music off napster and burning my own cd's. I even made it into a business for a while by having people give me lists of songs that I would make mix cd's out of for $5 a pop. Since it was middle school, most of the cd's were redundant anyway (mmmbop and baby one more time made many appearances).

Oh I was also the first person I know to use mini-discs, but those never really caught on. Ah well.

 

In my backwards part of the world:

Online gaming. Yeah, you best believe we had two phone lines so I could play Warcraft 2 against my brother in the other room. Yes m'lord indeed.

UFC. It took me about 6 months to convince my local video shop (remember those?) to order in UFC vhs tapes (and those?) from the U.S. I was devastated when it looked like getting banned. Now my local sports bar shows them to a packed house every Sunday morning at 9am. I sort of enjoy the change because I can have better informed conversations now, but every time I hear someone in a tap-out shirt try and sagely spout some Rogan-ism I die a little inside.

 

Well... I took a lot of shit for watching shit like "gangland" and the inside prisons shows. Then I saw ads for Sons of Anarchy. Got shit for that too. Now I cant go to a fucking concert without at least 50 people wearing offshoot SOA gear. (And my frat bros are addicted to the show too. I have to answer all their fucking questions)

I also had a 1st Gen iPod... no one even had a clue!

Oh yeah, boat shoes. that was me. Cheers!

 

I might be a bit of a comedy hipster. I watch endless stand-up videos and see people live when I can, so I wind up knowing about a lot of people before they get really huge. Examples: saw Kristen Schaal before the Daily Show and FOTC (she was terrible), Daniel Tosh before Completely Serious, Wyatt Cenac before the Daily Show/Medicine for Melancholy etc., etc.

In a way, it sort of makes me happy when I can talk with people about Kumail Nanjiani or Anthony Jeselnik and they know whom I'm talking about, but it also makes me feel less special. It's a worthwhile tradeoff until they REALLY get big and random people start spewing catch phrases. And not even the funny ones ("I didn't know I couldn't do that" > "I'm Rick James, bitch")

 

I went to one of the first 15-20 schools that got Facebook, and was one of the first dozen people at my school to get an account (one of my friends at a school that had had it before BC talked it up to me).

In other words, I remember when Facebook could best be described as Myspace for literate people. Sadly, that "literate people" qualification no longer really applies.

 

I started watching Walker, Texas Ranger when I was in middle school. This was about 8 years before the Chuck Norris jokes started.

I was a fan of Blink 182 before Enema of the State came out. I am not ashamed to admit that I am still a Blink fan.

 

I was playing MMORPG's when they were text-based and called MUD's. We'd go to the school library, use a telnet client to connect to the rio grande freenet and kill some mobs. I hit my nerd peak early and now I rarely play any computer games.

I also had a Diamond Rio PMP300, the first commercially successful mp3 player. If you compressed your songs you could get 20 on that bad boy. After about a week the battery door would break and you had to hold it together with aluminum foil and a rubber band.

 

Holy shit, I was just about to say the exact same thing except I played on a mud called "after hours." Oh, and I was lucky enough to have a 56k dial up modem at my house. It was nice be able to be a geek in the privacy of your own house.

 

This kind of hat.

I think this is a very good picture, because it has the hat and because it captures both how cool I thought I was and how giant a douche-bag I was.

 

Unless you were selling newspapers in the 19th century, I'm guessing you weren't first in on that trend...

 

Shit. Are we not counting cyclical trends? Now I don't have any use for these jodhpurs.

 

If you are familiar with Magic The Gathering. I started playing at the tale end of beta and beginning of unlimited. Very very early in the life of this card game if you don't know about it. At the beginning of every game after the shuffle and cut, you flipped over the top card and put in a pile. The winner now owned both cards. Won and lost many a card that is now worth too much to think about. Played until revised came out and it started to become huge. It was cardboard crack and I needed to break free. I sold all my cards for about $1500 mid-high school and haven't looked back. Wish I had a lot of the cards today and didn't beat the shit out of them like we did.

Very geeky but who cares, it was a fun game for awhile. Was very fun early on when there weren't restrictions on cards, etc. At least one of each of the power 9 in both beta and unlimited passed through my hands. Looking at prices now it's scary to think about some of the decks that friends I knew played with. One deck would be worth a few grand today easily.

 

I saw the first episode of "LOST" when it originally aired on TV.

I used to be on a number of Hipster pre-cursors to Facebook, Myspace and even Friendster. One was called Makeoutclub though it wasn't for the purpose of dating. It was for indie kids, primarily around Boston, to meet and converse with each other. Another was Lipstick and Cigarettes where the existing users had to actually vote on whether you could create an account. Hipster elitism, but there was some fun stuff on the message boards.

I started watching Adult Swim when it very first began (with the old bumps of people swimming in the pool). There used to be such great shows on there: Space Ghost/Brak, Home Movies, Harvey Birdman, and Sealab.

 

I saw the pilot for Heroes. All I could think was "Man, this show fucking sucks." Many, many people turned out to disagree with me on that. Well, for two or three years anyway.

I also the the pilot for Glee. How? How has this show not triggered mass murder-suicides across North America? It makes me want to roll around nude on broken glass just so the pain will drown out the CONSTANT FUCKING BOMBARDMENT this show has on every aspect of pop culture. Go play with dog shit, you squeegee kids.

 

I posted this thread idea years ago.

 

I had adhd long before it was the "in" thing. This was back in 1980 when it was still diagnosed as hyperactivity. I have adult adhd as well as two children who are adhd. We don't tell anyone though because most people who say they have adhd now are just wanting speed and all three of us hate taking medicine and only take it when absolutely necessary. (Also sidenote- when you truly have adhd stimulants calm you down and if you take too much it puts you to sleep. I can take adderall and nap like nobody's business.)

I also have been shopping yard sales and thrift stores since long before "vintage" clothing was all the rage. I am mostly just frugal with spending and believe in reusing items since way before it was cool to be green.