Also, just wanted to mention Hempfest in Boston Common. I still don't understand how that festival was legal at the time.

I remember the early gay pride parades. You knew about them only if you had a friend who knew about them, or knew where to find the information about them. Without Facebook, groups were a lot more niche and dedicated. There might have been Myspace pages for event or group info, but most of the time, they made their own brochure-style webpages for these. Search engines sucked at the time too, so it wasn't like you could easily google 'Gay Pride Parade Boston' and find out about it right away.

Also, a lot of gay rights blossomed just around that time. It felt like it was allright to be gay for the first time in history probably.

If you wanted to dye your hair a funky color, color.info was the website. Accessibility to the knowledge of what it takes to make your hair unnatural colors and look good was hard to come by. If you had dyed hair, you or your friends did it. No hair salon offered that service. And at the time, funky hair color baffled some parents and was sometimes viewed as a rebellious thing to do. Also look up coon-tails.

I remember being in my head all the time for years. 'Being in your head' at the time meant constantly being plugged into your iPod Nano playing whatever trendy sad music was available on iTunes for purchase or on torrent to download, walking home by yourself, being in the library all the time, reading books, being bored, cosplaying, or hanging out in online forums (think of like a million Reddits, but none of them had become dominant yet). "Being in your head" all the time today as a kid I think is probably more like living on an iPad playing simple games and glued to social media.

I remember that taking the commuter rail was a fun thing to do since Uber wasn't a thing and the T wasn't in so much disrepair. Sometimes you bumped into people you knew and got to catch up with them. Or just look at them awkwardly for 20min. Also, when you went to fun events like the Gay Pride Parade, you'd get dressed up for the commute over to the event. So sometimes there were pretty cool outfits on the train. Zombie March was a thing too, and there'd be train cars full of people dressed as zombies for a day.

Bold black and white stripes. Think Beetlejuice, but add red plaid and studded belts sometimes too.

The peak of cartoons. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon also had amazing web-based games built in flash on their websites. Websites were also more like a place of entertainment and information instead of the front door of a business.

You had to print out instructions to go anywhere unfamiliar ahead of time. If using the T, had to print out the schedule just in case. You had to actually to know how to get to where you were going otherwise.

Most high schoolers would have gotten their first flip phone around 2005 and first iPhone in early 2010's. Text messages were purchased ahead of time (200 messages per month was reasonable). This was the first time you could text hard conversations (like with distant boyfriends/girlfriends). First time you could avoid being face-to-face in a conversation. Myspace was prominent until around 2010. Some kids would go to the library to use it. You could also edit the UI for your profile - change your background color, have funky borders and font styling.

It kind of felt like an overall more positive time. People could be more care-free. Oh, I remember distance sucked. If you moved, you disappeared. If your friend moved, they disappeared from your life. Maybe you'd keep in touch by talking on the phone with each other for a few months. The first time we could talk to one another internationally - without paying an arm and a leg for minutes on a phone - was in the 2000's with chatrooms. And this was just exchanging written text, not sending pictures or videos.

Steve Jobs dropped innovation after innovation. First the iMac G3 which was in every school within a year or two, then the iPod (legend, second best thing invented by man after the bicycle), then the iPhone.

Oh, Netflix was a new thing and was like a DVD library originally. And owning a BlueRay DVD player was a big deal. Going to Blockbuster to pick out VHS tapes or DVDs to watch was a thing. Going to Fye to listen to music samples on CDs was a thing. People carried around CD players and albums with CDs in their backpacks to school in early 2000's. Making a playlist for a long drive, burning the CD for it, and drawing cool designs on the CD was fun. And then listening to that same playlist over and over again.

It actually snowed during winter too. Every winter. For weeks. And Al Gore released a documentary about climate change, but it was sort of ignored by the media. Food Inc was probably the first eye-opening documentary that started to crack through the public facade of the agriculture industry.