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We are heading into that particular buying season, and as such I like to put together some thoughts on gifts and other things (affiliate links on some, but not all of these). But this year with all the craziness around and weird shipping times from places like Amazon, I thought I would put up a guide from some places I like that live outside that realm, and from there pick some of the cheaper options you can get from these places which provide excellent value considering the place you are buying from.

So, here we go.

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My first Reylight was the Pineapple AA light in brass. It’s a great light, I have two of them, but I always stayed away from the Mini because the larger version brass feels nice, but sucks to carry (too heavy) and the long standing Titanium version of the Pineapple Mini never spoke to me. I feared I was getting a net negative trade off, so I stayed clear.

Recently though, Reylight came out with the happy middle ground for me: the Pineapple Mini Aluminum, with a battery it is $32. It weighs nothing, and has that 219b goodness which makes it a near instant purchase.

This light is great.

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During a recent sale, I grabbed the Mystery Ranch Scree 32 bag to use as my emergency bag I keep in my house. I’ve been looking for something in the 30L range, that would be comfortable to wear, not very tactical looking, and was inexpensive to buy. This checked all those boxes, and while I have not used it a ton (emergency bag after all) I thought it was interesting enough to touch base on quickly.

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There’s nothing about this light, on the surface of it, that is compelling. It’s big and kind of ugly looking. But, then you take a closer look and realize that for about $40 you get a light, with a battery and a built in charger.

Oh, and actually it’s three lights in one.

It’s still kind of silly, but the value proposition is getting better and better. The WK30 is a UV/Deep Red/White light all in one package, and it’s actually not that tricky to use it. For the price, this is one hell of a gateway into the flashlight world for a lot of people.

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I like to keep flashlights in handy spots, it’s makes them, handy. But the times you need a flashlight tend to be when things are already very dark, which can present issues finding the flashlight. There’s various methods you can take to avoid this: auxiliary LEDs on a light for a low-drain option to find it; glow in the dark materials to help locate; or something like tritium.

Tritium, is awesome for this use, and I snagged a Glow Rhino Tritium Fob (which they are still selling even given the Tritium shortages right now), and have been keeping it on my emergency-by-the-door-light. I love it.

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When I started to settle on wanting to take the Mystery Ranch ASAP to the office everyday, I also started looking at laptop sleeves I could use to house my iPad Pros safely inside the bag. The Aer Tech Folio was one I kept looking at, but passing on because of the price and what I perceived as redundant nature of the storage didn’t seem like a good fit.

But I picked one up from the buy/sell/trade of my Member Discord and have quickly taken to this folio. It’s really smartly put together, and although it can be quite bulky, it does its job very well.

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When you start carrying more than just a knife on a daily basis, you find that you will need some method for organizing — so adding a pen and flashlight to my daily carry meant that things were becoming overloaded in my pocket. I need an organizer because this is Houston and there’s not many days of ‘jacket weather’ here where I can easily add pockets to my wardrobe.

I already talked about the Ripcord and Ripcord Mini — both of which are excellent, so today I want to talk about Yellow Birch Outfitter’s PocKit Modern Carry (shown in black on this article) and PocKit PICO Custom (shown below in coyote).

These are both very well made carry organizers, but their bulk works against them for me.

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I thought I cracked it — finally a fantastic everyday bag for the office. Something that blended in, organized well, carried what I needed, didn’t feel too bulky on my body, and most importantly was comfortable to wear. These bars are not high, as I park in a parking garage and simply take two elevators up to my office, but as it turns out — the little things always blow up many of the bags I tested.

That’s the story here: so very close to good, but at the end of the day the DSPTCH Daypack failed itself.

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The Micro Soft Shell is the second smallest of the wallets Slimfold offers, with the Nano being the smallest. If this wallet sounds familiar, I reviewed the original Tyvek version here where I ended up switching away. Recently some members of the Discord got this wallet and it looked good in the soft shell material so I figured I’d give it a go.

I’m a big fan of it, and despite my worries about the added bulk from the soft shell material, I actually find it to be really nice overall and much better than the Tyvek variant.

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Before getting this sling, I felt pretty confident that my sling setup was really comfortable and maybe even ‘set’. But this sling changed that, after what was an instant buy. The Forager line is not new for Mystery Ranch, but they previously were Asian-market-only, and you could find these slings on eBay and places like that for about $130 or so. Not cheap, not worth it. (The US market got the Forager pocket, which attaches to a hip belt and while nice looking, not that cool for those of us who loathe a hip belt.)

Now Mystery Ranch sells them to the US market for $32. What a deal!

And it is stellar, my favorite sling yet.

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Hyperlite Mountain Gear’s Versa is one of those sling bags you don’t expect to be any good, and you question because it seems much cheaper than you would expect for a bag made of Dyneema. At $70, it always seemed like a head scratcher: must not be good type of pricing.

I bought mine second hand for a heck of a deal and after using it for some time now, it has proven that it is a value even at the $70 full retail price tag. It is very light, and yet, incredibly versatile.

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I have now spent a lot of time testing out various models of Mystery Ranch backpacks (mostly the tri-zip models) and so I thought I would do a quick comparison of how you might think about which is right for you. Here you go, hope it helps someone:

UA21, ASAP, 2 Day Assault, 3 Day Assault CL

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