One of my friends must have seen the slashdot article in February. I dismissed it for a week because he didn't describe it thoroughly (I'm pretty sure I was under the impression that it was centralized and that mining was a way of cheating the system, based on his initial description). Eventually, he posted a blog post that was much more descriptive and piqued my interest. I spent an entire day reading about it and decided to get into it. Started mining a bit. Got lucky and bought 40 of them at nearly their lowest price since I was introduced to it (about 70 cents each). Holding most of it because of ridiculous deflation but trying to use it where convenient.

tl;dr: irl friend in February.