Wow, this got momentum pretty quickly. Thank you everyone for your advice, kind words, and encouragement! This is the first custom thing I've had and I can't be more proud. Absolutely beaming. I've wanted a table and a custom set with denominations on them since I was 12, and today I got it. I'm sure I'll get more but I'm on top of the mountain today.
A few months ago I was sipping Laphroaig and remembering the first time I tasted that smokey goodness, my time on "the ice"; I usually drink scotch/bourbon neat but it was served with 50,000 year old glacier ice. Too cool to pass up. I wax poetic in the below thread about my two deployments to Palmer Station, but would love to answer any further questions people have. Oceanography and Antarctica are definitely two of my passions.
https://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/antarctic-deployments-excuse-for-a-custom-set.96281/
I went with Tina's 43mm textured no-mold. They sent me a few that were non textured and they feel a bit too slippery. I've heard that over time these ceramics become more and more slippery so I'm glad I went with textured, you can barely tell the difference when looking but the feel is better for me.
The set!!!!!!
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Denominations, I needed a microstakes set but wanted to handle higher stakes for occasional bigger games. The $100s, I'll probably never use, but they're beautiful and for how cheap they are, I might as well add them on.
$0.05: Stark white glacier and snow. Most of the land was white and its blinding. This represents the plentiful ice and snow, with a little purple magic thrown in.
$0.25: This is safety orange. We'd suit up in full body suits of near this color, our ship was this color; when working at sea in dangerous environments the last thing you want is camouflage. I've saved people in these waters, and I was shown in HBO Vice's "Our Rising Oceans" episode in my getup deploying some of our robots. Fantastic camera crew, they'd just come from North Korea with Dennis Rodman, inSANE stories from that crew. These represent the science and teamwork the workhorses in several different meanings, with the ever present ocean represented in the dark blue accents.
$1: That light blue is 1. my wife's favorite color, so couldn't escape that one being included, but 2. dense glacial ice. Ice has this fascinating trait: the denser and older it is, the clearer it is. So we can see some ice that's fairly new being bright white because of light bouncing around, but occasionally you can see straight through an iceberg a few meters thick; that ice has been around longer than the United States. This chip represents the noble icebergs and the age of where we were; cores through these glaciers and icebergs are more valuable than the gold accents, telling us exactly what the earth and climate were like during periods of history.
$5: The reason for my field season, dark blue represents the ocean. Few times a week we would go out and sample this beast and it could decide how our day went. Our instruments drop into inky blackness and sometimes the surface is glass while other days have us holding on and debating retreat. This chip represents the Southern Ocean, deep and dark and light and shallow, and with it, the global conveyor belt.
$20s: I was lucky enough to be at Palmer Station where we have many sunrises and sunsets. If you're at the South Pole you have one sunrise and one sunset a year! Otherwise it spins above you. During the peak of Palmer's summers, we'll have nights that are 2 or 3 hours along, never truly getting dark. Its surreal, being in a hottub and its bright light out after a full sampling period. Blackout curtains are a must for morale. The winters are the opposite...days of mostly darkness. On the bright side, its easier to drink all day when its only 90 minutes long! This chip represents the bright pink sunsets we'd get, breathtaking...and if you looked closely, on certain days in certain conditions, you can see the mythical green flash as the sun passes the horizon.
$100s: I said I wasn't going to do a green chip! No grass or trees or cash, we leave all of that behind. But the reason for me being there was primary productivity: phytoplankton and algae give us half the oxygen on Earth and get no credit. I study this amazing process and wanted to immortalize it in the greens and blacks I was so fond of. Spending hours collecting, filtering, and analyzing this data makes me fond of the bottom of the foodchain. These chips represent phytoplankton, and therefore life as we know it.
Dealer button: The Ice itself on one side, and the other is the international Antarctic flag. On the side scroll is DEALER along with the GPS coordinates for one of the most magical places on Earth: The United States Antarctic Program's Palmer Station.
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You get what you pay for: these were cheap and I knew that, I'm 100% in love with the product. There's some bleeding edges on the 5c and 25c but overall I'm over the moon about these. I know cards mold/Tina chips can be divisive, but they allowed me to get exactly what I needed and then some without going into debt to do it. Feel free to ask about the process or anything.
Huge thanks to
@mattross1313 the rockstar for designing, made it look easy, can't thank them enough. I'll give
@Irish credit for the name, I call it The Ice and hadn't thought to use that in the name, appreciated.
@justincarothers the racks are fantastic, very happy with them. Plus everyone else who was rooting for it and gave me advice. I'll be offering about 20 sample sets, I'm in love with this set, so pumped to introduce it to my players!
