Not hipster. Just old.

Well hey there.  I'm Doug.

This is my blog.  It's a personal blog, with no aspirations of greatness.  Like many personal blogs with no aspirations of greatness, it's about whatever I feel like writing about and I'll post whenever I feel like it.

It's probably best to start with a short write-up on the subject of the title.

I've been told many times by nearly as many people that I'm "such a hipster."  Usually this comes just after someone finds out that I collect and/or play old video games, or that I have a collection of vinyl records or VHS tapes.  It's probably going to get worse when I buy new glasses, because I have my sights set (no pun intended) on the Akronite frames from Mothersbaugh Eyewear.  Oh yeah, being a Devo fan also doesn't help my case when I point out just how non-hipster I am.

I've got nothing against countercultures or subcultures.  What I have a problem with is snobbery.  And, let's face it, one of the defining characteristics people associate with hipsters--justified or not--is snobbery.  "You watch your movies on Blu-Ray?  Pshh.  CED gets you so much better audio."

Oh yeah, I have a collection of CED movies as well.  Most of you probably don't even know what that means.  Maybe I'll do a post on it later.

But the difference is that I don't enjoy these things because other people don't know about them, nor do I like them ironically because they're outdated and sometimes flat-out inferior to their modern equivalents.  I enjoy them because I genuinely like them.

And part of that is just that I'm old.  Well, I'm not really old.  I'm 33 as of this writing.  But people who use the term "hipster" are generally my age or younger, and people who apply the term to me are invariably at least several years younger.

Thirty-three-year-olds in 2015 sit on an odd cusp.  We're old enough to remember (sometimes fondly, as in my case) certain styles, technologies, TV shows, etc., from a largely bygone era; but young enough to hang out regularly with people who only know many of these things as stuff their parents remember.  I had an Atari 2600 back in the day (I'm not quite old enough to remember it as an Atari VCS).  I had a typewriter, a record player, a cassette player... hell, even an 8-track player.  We taped things from TV with a VCR and rented VHS tapes weekly at the local video store.  I pumped quarters (or tokens) into many an arcade game and pinball machine.

Nowadays I still have some of these items.  Some, like a chunk of my LP collection and a few VHS tapes, are holdovers from my original collections when those were socially relevant media.  Some, like the pinball machine in my living room and my CED player and discs, are new acquisitions made relatively recently because I'm still interested in that kind of stuff.  I have them because I genuinely like them, and in many cases because I had them when I was younger and they evoke feelings of nostalgia.  It's not because they're no longer "mainstream"--sometimes it's just the opposite:  I fondly remember when they were.

I'm not a hipster.  I'm just old.