Saved from the Abyss

 Perhaps an overly dramatic title, but it sure feels apt. You may recall that back in 2016, I had a remote hard drive crash and take some scans with it. I don't know how many, but...a lot. Well into the four digits. I thought I had recovered all I was going to be able to recover already, but as it turns out, I was wrong. 

I had a file that was labeled as "Check these", so I obviously knew there was something that needed to be done with them, but I wasn't confident of their being as useful as they turned out to be. When I was getting everything ready for my 5th Anniversary of  the Cardboard History Gallery I rediscovered this file, by which I mean looked at it for the first time in who knows how long? I don't even remember where I found it. After I took care of the album of stuff that I knew needed to be worked on, I decided to jump into this file and I'm sure glad I did! 

In total I was able to recover 1055 card scans and 14 packaging scans. That's a big deal, as it's both a month's worth of rescanning I don't have to do, and the packaging scans I can't recreate at all because I've since opened the packs! 

I was able to recover all these scans in 3 days time, so 3 days definitely beats rescanning them over the course of a month or more, since I don't always do that many scans in a month. And also, they are not all together (probably) and I have no idea which boxes they are in so I don't have to worry about digging through dozens of boxes looking for them right now- I can now stick to my original plan of pulling the missing ones and rescanning them after I finish everything and get the sets back together like they belong. 

The recovered scans weren't all back scans either, which is the majority of what I lost. In fact, I recovered front scans and back scans together of cards I didn't realize I had already scanned! In total I recovered 197 front scans, with most of them coming from the 2003-04 NBA season for some reason. 89 of them, and 115 of them if you include 2002-03 NBA and 2004-05 NBA season, which were the second and third most common recovery. I don't know why they are concentrated so much in this three year section of time, but I'm not going to complain, I'm thrilled to get these scans back. 

All of the scans were made with Scanner #3, which isn't anywhere near as good as Scanner #4, which I am currently using. I may very well end up rescanning some of them when I finish scanning everything and put the sets back together...but for now I am thrilled to have any scan for them, even if lower quality than what I can make currently. 

Some of the sets, I was only missing one known back scan, or multiple back scans, which have now been found, meaning as far as I know they are now fully uploaded of what I've scanned. I don't know if there are others that I did that were totally lost or this is truly everything I've ever scanned of them. Time will tell, but it's not going to be soon. And that's OK. I love the scanning process so I will continue to scan as much as I can, eventually I will break even and be able to get my sets back together. It's taken me 35 years to build the collection, so it's naturally going to take quite a while to scan it all. 

5 Years of the Cardboard History Gallery

 Today marks the 5 Year Anniversary of the launching of the Cardboard History Gallery, my "magnum opus" where my card collection is documented in full. Where each person, each team, each set, each year, each subject for non-sports, all get an album. But it's more than just that. There's the Alphabetical Directory which has one image for each person scanned in my collection, there's the Set Archive which has one image from each major set, there's the Peripheral folder in each of the major sections which has an album for box, pack, set, publications and more. There's the Encyclopedia where the people in the Alphabetical Directory are also copy and pasted into subject folders. 

My ultimate goal is to open a museum and Hall of Fame for trading cards. When (if) that ever actually happens, the Cardboard History Gallery will serve as the main interactive experience for visitors. A full documentation of the museum collection. (That's also why I will take literally any card, for the eventual museum)

Although I launched the Cardboard History Gallery 5 years ago today, the process behind it was much more intense. I didn't finish creating every album until March 27th of this year. It took me two years of sorting scans on my hard drive before I was ready to launch in the first place. And of course, the scanning process has been going on since 2009, and the collecting of cards since 1988, so there are a couple of different start dates I could go with here...lol. 

Here are some statistics from 5 years of the Cardboard History Gallery:

Of course photos really means scans for the most part. There are some cards and packaging that are too big to fit on the scanner tray, and the Card Show albums are all photos, but the rest is all scans.

Using the math skills of Excel I copied down how many people and how many sets have been scanned, and let it do the math for me.

I have the sets broken out very much, but I also copied and pasted to get a total of how many sets make up the overall Non-Sports category, Other sports, and my favorite, Auto Racing.

Of course this is just what has been scanned...all numbers have the potential to go up, most of the numbers absolutely will go up. The people numbers will likely go up much more than the set numbers, but since I have no intention of stopping to collect, both numbers are not complete. And I still have thousands of cards awaiting scans, years worth of scanning. Thankfully, I really enjoy it and consider the whole process my favorite part of the hobby.

How do I remember the date I launched it so well? Well, for one, it tells me on the Statistics page. For 2, it tells me how long ago each album was created and some of them were at 4 years 11 months ago. But most of all...I launched it as a birthday present to myself. Yes, today is my birthday and I have to say...this is the best present I've ever given myself. 

 

I hit a milestone in September and didn't realize it until now

 I hit a pretty big milestone last month, although I didn't realize it until just now.

You might not be able to guess what it is, so here's a "hint"...

When I updated the Encyclopedias on my Cardboard History Gallery, I discovered that I had reached the 4000 people scanned threshold for basketball! That's a pretty big deal, really. I was only 24 people away when I trailed off scanning in the spring, and I completely forgot how close I was. I ended up scanning 49 new people last month, so the milestone was hit at some point in the month. 

I don't know exactly who the 4000th person get scanned was, but I DO know the 4000th to be uploaded. That was Kai Jones. 

In the time between when I started writing this post and when I finished it, he essentially got fired by the Hornets, placed on waivers because the team didn't want him around anymore. I started writing it right after I finished the last post I published. 

It's taken me 27 years to get to 4000 people. I wonder how long it will take me to get to 5000? 

New People Scanned in September 2023

 After not doing much scanning at all during the summer, I certainly made up for it in September! With injuries to both feet I couldn't do much else, certainly not modeling which requires 4 trips up and down the stairs each time I work on models, not even counting the trips outside to paint which adds even more trips. One foot is now healed but the other is still very problematic- so I scanned. Oh did I scan! I ended up scanning exactly 1234 cards in the month of September, and 252 of them were people getting scans for the first time! 

There's a good reason why there are so many. My best friend, the one who sent me that huge box I posted about back in 2015 where I saw my hockey collection grow from 28 to 2800 cards in a single day-is a big fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He wanted to see them take over the lead in all my football categories, so he sent me basically all of his duplicates, bringing my Buccaneers supply from "normal" to "ample"...according to the Database I now have 493 Buccaneers cards, and the next closest team has 122. So yeah...ample. 

So, since these were easy to access, about half of everything I scanned this month was football, which is definitely unusual for me. When you see the screenshots, you'll see other football too...it wasn't just the Buccaneers he sent me, and he also sent me some baseball and hockey as well, both of which led to new people getting scanned. 

But wait, there's more! Since the last time I did any scanning, I was able to find some NBA blasters at my local Wal-Mart, which is the first time in a long while. I found one for 2021-22 Illusions and 2022-23 Hoops and Donruss. So not only are there rookies in there, there's also players who debuted in the 2/3 years where cards were scarce at retail and I have only a scant few. For instance, Anthony Edwards- the #1 pick in the draft now 3 years ago, is appearing for the first time this month. Interestingly enough, the first pick of the draft from last season and the first pick from this season also appear for the first time this month, thanks to Topps Now producing an NBA set for the first time. Unfortunately I didn't pull any Cade Cunningham cards in those three blasters, or else I could have had 4 straight #1 draft picks appear for the first time in the same month-something that has not happened since I began collecting the NBA in 1996. Oh well. 

Even so, with them, Football still has the largest influx of new people, with 145 of the 252 being football players. 

It took me 8 days to get them all sorted and uploaded, which ensures that I won't accomplish nearly as much scanning in October. That's ok...don't want to get burned out. 

As always, click the image to see them larger and actually make them large enough to read the names. Thanks for reading. 

THIS was the best photo they had?

 I find that hard to believe! 

Let's check the back and see if that's any better...

Hrm, slightly better. 

This may well be my favorite football card now. I don't collect football, but my best friend sends me his duplicates because he knows I'll take them. This one came in his latest box and I've been laughing about it since I saw it. 

Even more fun, this is the only card from this set in my collection, so it will be the official representative of 1992 Pro Set Power in my Set Archive, which contains one scan from each major set for each subject. 

A major milestone as a consolation

 This past weekend was my favorite day of the year, the Adirondack Nationals....and I wasn't there. I had a setback with my foot injury that I mentioned in the previous post, and knew I couldn't do the walking, even though it's my favorite day of the year, as noted. 

That hurt, both figuratively and literally, and I decided I needed a pick me up...so I went through the boxes of cards that I had been getting but stashing away for the winter, when it was too cold to work on models. I didn't even want to stress my foot out so I didn't even go down and work on the stuff indoors. 

One of the boxes that I had set aside was a purchase of NASCAR cards. It was advertised as about 800 cards, but I'm not sure it was that many...unfortunately there were a lot of duplicates, up to 4 or 5 copies of some of the cards. I ended up with 279 new cards, which is more than I expected when I was first going through them. 

This card, an insert from 2017 Donruss, was the milestone, however...it is NASCAR card #40,000. I began collecting NASCAR cards on Christmas Day 1992, and have been celebrating my 30th anniversary of watching the sport for the last year and a half, lol. So it's fitting that I hit a major milestone in an anniversary year. 

Interesting that it's David Pearson as well. Card #1 was Richard Petty, the only two drivers to reach 100 career wins. 

I have started scanning again but a photo will do for now...I have not scanned the card yet but I expect to by the end of the night. 

Since I keep track of my Milestone cards, I know that it takes me on average 7 years to reach the major milestones in NASCAR, so there will still be a while before I hit 50 thousand. By that point, I fully expect NHL to overtake NASCAR in the collection size. The largest NASCAR set of the year is only 200 cards, and the NHL has 4 or more sets a year with that number, several sets with more than double that number. There are simply more cards that exist so it's pretty much inevitable.

Of course, all this is presuming I counted correctly, which is probably not true...but I treat it light it is. 

Thanks for reading.

This card post brought to you by...baby birds?

 As you know from previous posts, I'm mostly in a modeling mood right now. In fact, I completed 60 builds in the month of August, making it one of my very best months ever. However, I had to take a break from that for a few days. A family of cardinals built a nest right next to the door I go in and out for painting, and I didn't want to scare them into falling out, or have the parents peck my eyes out as a perceived threat. (I also dropped a full large can of paint on my toe and smashed it all up, but I'm able to hobble around). 

I decided I would let the birds do their thing and I would work on getting back up to date on my card listing. I hadn't written or typed anything since the first week of June, so that's several months worth. I didn't do a lot of card stuff in that time-I even got some blasters I didn't open specifically so I wouldn't get even further behind. I did get some stuff...but first, the bird's the word.

I did actually get them fly away on film, but it's a timelapse at 32x normal speed so hard to see. If I had known they were going to fly off so quickly I would have shot at a slower rate. They sat in the branches for more than 2 hours so I figured it would be a while. I was wrong.

Now, the cards:

I did a blaster of Upper Deck Series 3, aka Extended series, which I am still so glad they produce. My favorite card is the Dazzlers card- green has long been my favorite color, and it's blaster exclusive. Bonus, I pulled Arber Xhekaj, my second NHL card and third overall of him, making him the Letter Leader for X in my entire collection. The Brandt Clarke card is pretty cool too...it's plastic and semi-translucent. 

Then I did a hobby box of 2023 Donruss. This is my favorite set of the year, because it's the only real NASCAR set. 

What's that relic on the Suarez card? 

It's Race Used Air! No, really, Panini forgot to actually put a relic into the card. I wish I could say that surprises me, but it's Panini. I have a new entry for my Error Gallery at least.

I took in two trades on the Trading Card Database. I have had my trading turned off for a while as I just didn't want to deal with all that for a bit, but I'll be turning it back on soon. 

I got three PIFs, and I'm so deep into modeling that I have no idea when the Craftsman cards arrived. I actually opened the team bag on the 27th of August so I am counting them as new for that day. They are actually a big deal- this mailer completes not only the base set but BOTH insert sets! I believe that I now have every possible card for the 1995-96 Craftsman release, aka a Master Set. 

My mom gave me a blaster of 2023-24 MVP, the first NHL set of the regular season! Interestingly enough, a Canadiens player was my first card of the season two years in a row. 

Finally, I bought a lot of NASCAR Hero Cards, which was mostly Bubba, William Byron and Daniel Suarez, but there were a couple of other random drivers in there too. 
I have almost nothing from the Gen6 era, and while I haven't checked yet, this purchase may very well have included my first Hero Card from 2015 through 2018, or at least a couple of those years. It's a gaping hole in my collection, and one of my favorite eras of cars too. Cards in the lot ranged from 1995 through 2022. 

I have no idea when I will get these all scanned, but photos will have to do for now. 

One last thing- I had a mishap with one of the photos, the camera flash reacted with the holofoil on some of the cards. It looks cool so here it is.