In Memory of Willis Reed

 Yesterday Knicks icon Willis Reed passed away at the age of 80. He had been in bad health but it's still very sad...since I've got some more experiences than just cards of his I felt I needed to craft a post. 

First off...the Knicks are one of the original NBA teams, and they have only won two Championships...he was the starting center for both title teams, and his moment at the 1970 Finals is one of the most iconic moments in basketball history, let alone for the Knicks. I just needed to mention that. 

Of course my closest connection to any athlete is the cards, and I've been lucky enough to pull some exceptional cards of Willis Reed....

This card, which is the Luxury Box parallel of 2004-05 Luxury Box, is a 1/1 and came from a single pack purchase from my local comic book store in 2005 when the set was new. 

This card is from 2005-06 SP Game Used and SN 02/10, which makes it tied for the second lowest SN'd autograph I've ever pulled from a pack. 

However, it wasn't my first autograph of him. I have his autograph from the 1996-97 Topps Stars Rookie Reprint, and I also have the original card as well. 

He also has the record for the most fragile card in my collection, the poster insert from 1970-71 Topps. 

When my brother and I took a tour of Madison Square Garden back in 2019, they had some of his memorabilia on display:

This quote is on the outside of the building, which is reserved for only the most important athletes and musicians to play at MSG

On the tour

THE moment

I don't remember what these were but I know they were his. 

And then when we went to the Basketball Hall of Fame he is a member there also.

I didn't have time to click on every name- nor could my back handle standing there that long- but I did photodocument the screens showing all the inductees. 

Rest in Peace Mr. Reed. 

14 years into the project but still finding a better way to do it

 I started scanning my collection all the way back in 2009. That's 14 years ago (somehow!) but just last week I found a way to improve on it. 

For the past 10 years or so, I've scanned three pages, then edited them, then scanned 3 more, repeat repeatedly. 

It worked well for me for years, but it turns out there was a better way. 

Doing 5 pages of 9 cards works out much better for me. As I've stated in previous posts, I get tired of doing lots of consecutive pages of the same set, it will burn me out, and my mind will start to wander, I'll go check Facebook or Twitter or just look out the window instead of working on scanning/cropping. 

Doing it this way prevents that. I have figured out the best way for me is to do one full page of something, then one mixed page, then 1 full page, then another mixed page, and finish with another full page. This keeps my interest and I don't find my mind wandering. It's much more fun for me, and I find I'm actually scanning faster, likely because I'm enjoying it more and spending more time actually working on it instead of doing other things. 

These three screenshots are of the PhotoScape working area. It shows the progress I've described here. Eventually these scans will get labeled and uploaded to the Cardboard History Gallery. 

You may wonder why I changed what I've been doing for the past 10ish years? It actually was sort of a fluke. One night last week (I don't even remember which one) I was getting tired but I wasn't able to go to bed yet. (due to medical stuff I have to stay awake a certain point). I was too tired to crop any more scans- that requires being at least mostly mentally "with it" but scanning requires less mental effort. You can be half asleep and scan, believe me. So that's what I did- I scanned a bunch of pages. More than 5 but I'm not sure exactly how many. Probably closer to 20. I liked having a larger batch available and ready to crop, so I did some experiments and determined 5 pages and staggered like I explained actually works pretty much perfectly for me. Since I figured that out I've scanned and cropped almost the entire contents of a 550 count box...in roughly 3 days.

I do believe I will be doing this format going forward, because as I mentioned, it's a lot more fun for me. I wish I had thought to do it sooner, but I'm glad I stumbled across it eventually. 

How to be my favorite parallel and insert

 

Be neon green. That's it, that's all a set has to do to become my favorite parallels or inserts. 

Today seemed like a good day to finally make this post...this shows my entire collection of the 2021-22 O-Pee-Chee Neon Green parallel, the 2020-21 Upper Deck Dazzlers Green insert, 2022 Donruss Lime Green parallel and all but two of the 2021-22 Upper Deck Dazzlers Green insert, I just got Jason Robertson and David Perron and haven't gotten them scanned yet, but I really wanted to get this posted on St. Patrick's Day. 

A little disappointed

 I really love the Topps Now stickers. They have become my favorite set of the season, because they actually document the season. This year, I was really excited to see they were producing a special set for the All-Stars...I love All-Star cards! 

Then they showed up...

Kucherov is #1 in the insert...when I opened the package and saw this I was very disappointed, but maybe it's just him? 

Nope. Not a single All-Star photo in the 48 sticker/card set. 

That was a real big disappointment indeed, the images were all just generic photos of the players in their regular uniforms, or in some cases, the Reverse Retro uniforms.

and how is it Sidney Crosby has only been an All-Star 5 times? He's been in the NHL since 2005-06, and he's a generational talent. That seems crazy to me. 

At least there are three Rangers in the set...

I was lucky enough to get one of the Rangers for my Ice Blue parallel, so that's a great thing. (I actually got a blue from each of the 4 divisions)

There are very, very few promo insert parallels in my collection, almost all of them from the 2019-20 Topps Now set, which numbered the Stanley Cup Playoffs as an insert instead of part of the regular set. So I am happy for being able to add these four. 

When the regular Topps Now shipment for that week showed up, there were cards for each of the winners of the Skills Night competitions, and one card for the winner of the MVP Award, and that's it...

I at least do count the Skills cards as All-Star cards so there will be at least some representation of All-Star Weekend in my collection. 

New people scanned in February

 So much of my interaction with the hobby is the scanning process, and the uploading to my Cardboard History Gallery. Over a year ago now, I decided to start taking screencaps of the folder of everybody I had scanned for the first time in that month before I moved them into the albums for each subject. I had been doing this purely for my own enjoyment but as I've struggled with the motivation to write posts over the past year or so, I decided that I would start sharing the screencaps here, giving me a quick, easy post that requires little to no effort on the writing end (but significant effort on the scanning and uploading end)

I scanned 85 people for the first* time in February 2023, and 42 of those people came from the Hero Cards which I've spoken about previously. This should be the largest influx of people from hero cards because this batch I did, a gift from a friend, had a lot of drag racing people in it. The collection I previously had DOES have people who don't have traditional cards, but with the collection being predominantly NASCAR, the numbers will not be that high at all. 

* = Mark Cronquist had been previously scanned, but I decided to not use my older scans and redo the majority of my NASCAR collection, so this is the first time he got a scan to my current standards. There are more people from NASCAR, other forms of auto racing and some non-sports people who had been previously scanned but the scans are not usable to they are essentially being scanned for the first time. 

The screencap is fairly small so I suggest clicking on it to see it larger. 

One thing I've found with the screencaps that I enjoy is seeing the date/time that I finish processing the people, and seeing the weather and temp conditions in the bottom bar. That's actually why I didn't crop that down to make the image slightly larger. This is always the last thing I do every month when I do my updates on the first of the month...or at least start on the first.