🌱 Guide to card sleeves
«Why?»
Card protectors, or sleeves, are perhaps the most common accessory for games. There are two main reasons for sleeving your games:
- To protect the cards (kinda says so on the tin)
- To increase the sense of quality, much like component upgrades
The protection part is especially important if the cards are of high value and/or gets shuffled a lot. Both are true with most collectable card games (CCGs), like Magic The Gathering – and this is why the sizes used for these games has the best selection. Shuffling with sleeved cards feels a lot better than unsleeved, so that affects both point 1 and 2. You can also get them with matte finish, to reduce glare.
Here’s a guide to how you should proceed if you want to sleeve:
What makes a good cuff?
Ok, so this is by far the most niche thing I’ve ever written. But after getting a great jacket (that I’ll write about some other time!) that only had one problem, I wanted to gather my thoughts on this tiny subject. The “problem” was: It doesn’t cuff perfectly.
What’s the deal with cuffing anyway??
Cuffing is when you fold the sleeves of a shirt, jacket, sweater etc. It’s also commonly used when you do the same to leg opening of pants or shorts. And I’m an avid cuffer! The three reasons are:
- I’m 1.75 m tall, and my legs and arms aren’t especially long - so clothes are usually too long.
- Related, I like watches, bracelets, shoes and socks - and cuffing shows them off.
- I often think it makes the clothes themselves look better.
Here’s some examples of what I mean by nr. 2 and 3:
🌱 Wallpapers for Home.app
Here’s a remake of backgrounds from this thread that I made since the links were dead. These were inspired by u/rzalexander and made with free illustrations from illustrations.co. I’ve tried to adapt the illustrations to iOS 16’s new home app, so that the text and icons are visible.
I’ve also made companion backgrounds for use with iPad and Mac. Since those windows resize all the time, using two tone and illustrations was a no-go. So they are just one colour backgrounds (I have one using the dark colour and one using the light one. I’ve used the latter).
The World’s Best Sneakers?
Adidas has made their Stan Smiths since the 70s, and you can see them everywhere all summer. They are good-looking shoes, but where the earlier versions were made in France and had high quality, you can’t quite say the same about the newer ones made in India. They can’t be fixed, uses synthetic materials and someone would prefer a bit more modern design.
Common Projects
In later years, Common Projects, with their golden lettering, has taken the sneaker world by storm. With a more modern, minimalistic design, Italian leather and good Margom rubber soles, they aren’t cheap.
But when you pay well over £300 for a pair of Italian designer shoes, you can expect excellent quality, right? Well, it’s superior to the Stan Smiths, but for the price you could do so much better. The YouTube channel Rose Anvil goes into detail in this video, but the short version is that, while the shoes have some premium features, both the material and construction is pretty mediocre. In this article, I’d like to point at a brand that gives you a more premium sneaker, at a (slightly) lower price.
But in the end I will also share why I still understand why someone would opt for the Common Projects!
Great Baseball Cap From Poten
This is my favourite cap (and headgear in general) of all time. And this is also a good example of something I love in general: Simple products, made extremely well.
These caps are made at the same factroy that does caps for the Japanese baseball league. Several brands have tried to get the factory to produce caps from them, but without success. According to Self Edge, Hiro (the man behind Poten, who also has a huge baseball card collection) had to visit the factory several times, over three years, to show them that he cares enough about baseball to have them produce caps for him. Lucky for those of us who don’t play in the NPB! But what’s so good about these caps then?
Machines, AI, and the Most Important Question in the World
Message from 2024: I wrote this post in the spring of 2023, as AI tools were pretty new. I’ve since landed on the principle of not using AI generated images on my blog. This post has two images like this, but as it’s critical of the models (and explains a bit of why I currently don’t want to use them), I’ve let them be.
First, a very simplified history lesson:
For a large portion of the human existence, technology (often in the shape of machines or tools) has replaced manual labour, and led to increased productivity. The printing press replaced monks writing books by hand, looms evolved to include less and less manual laber per unit of fabric, the telegraph reduced the need for mail carriers, and photography really hurt Big Portrait Painting. Usually, the technology doesn’t completely replace the professions it affects. For instance, you can still get a tailored suit – but it’s a minor part of the clothing industry, and mostly reserved for the wealthy. The old turns into niches, hobbies, crafts and/or art.
