#regionalassemblyoftext

Letter writing night every 1st Thursday of the month at The Regional Assembly of Text, if you're native to Vancouver and can get down with the clickity clack of new people using old technology. I have no idea what people were writing about: if they were writing to friends across the pond, to their moms, to themselves, or just trying to put words to a page so the people waiting for a typewriter to open up wouldn't start creepin' on their inactivity. There were also a few people hand-writing letters in the store's tiny zine & mini-book room, where nothing is for sale and where you could truly spend several days at a time, speechless.

The scene is nostalgic, yes, and maybe hipster in the way that Tavi says  she was starting to feel pretentious for her interest in analog tools and cultural references that a person of her age could not know about unless their parents' were into it. 

Hipsterdom itself seems to be built on the fact that people are apologetic and hyper-aware of the way people have come to regard their strange, quirky, and unconventional tastes. They don't want people to think they're trying to be unusual, they just want them to think they're unusual. See: Humblebrag. Used in a sentence: "Oh this room? Yeah... it's just my dark room where I develop all my own photos".

Ultimately, the difference between hipsterdom and nerddom is that nerds are unapologetic about their fascinations and interests--fascinations and interests which may indeed seem unusual to the average person. (Who is this shitty "The Average Person" we're trying to appease, anyway?)

True nerds are not even capable of uttering a humblebrag! Because their fascination with these cultural tools, products and references is direct and without consideration for what those things might be classified as by someone else.