Sticker-bombing my laptop
Published on .I can never have enough stickers. I love them. But for a long time I would hesitate on actually using them because "what if it was the wrong place for it?". I was afraid of "wasting" my precious stickers on stuff that maybe I would need to replace or get rid of some time later. So I started accumulating them and then doing pretty much nothing with them, just sticking some of them here and there every once in a while.
But of course the point of stickers is to cover stuff with them! Not just collecting them and keeping them hidden away in some drawer, but to actually see them in the stuff you use or in spots you pass by regularly. Once I stopped feeling "sticker anxiety" I started looking everywhere for a nice spot to put stickers on.
First attempt #
Once I decided I wanted to sticker-bomb something, I chose to start with one of the cover plates of my PS5. And I learned an important lesson: do not start with your "nice" stickers—the ones you want to actually display when you're finished. It's obvious in retrospective, but I was excited to start putting my cool stickers on it and then when it was time to cover the spaces in between, I started feeling a bit sad that I'd be covering them with less nice-looking ones. So I only added small generic stickers that wouldn't obstruct the previous ones and it all ended up looking pretty rough and lame. Now I have one PS5 cover plate half-full of nice stickers, less-than-nice ones, and lots of white-space, and I guess it will stay that way!

So yeah, you should start the "base layer" with the big, random, more generic stickers—the ones you don't care too much about because their main purpose is to fill-up the background.
Doing it right ♪ #
Last year, while visiting Seattle I bought a couple of sticker books—the ones that got pages and pages of stickers from different artists and styles—which are precisely designed for sticker-bombing. But even after I got them, I wasn't sure where to use them—definitely not on the PS5 plate! That's when I put my eyes on my laptop.
I've had my laptop (a 13-inch M1 MacBook Air) since pretty much its original release date in 2020. I love its pinkish gold color finish, so back then I had decided to only put one sticker on the corner to, you know, keep it classy (also, the aforementioned sticker anxiety).

Even though I try to use my MacBook less often in favour of my iPad I have recently been going back to it more because it's naturally much more comfortable to code and write on it. I still love this laptop; it's as powerful and feels as snappy as when I first got it. So I figured it's a good time to freshen up its looks. And not just by putting a few stickers on it—I've always put a handful of stickers on my previous laptops—but now I wanted to go all-in on it; to cover the entire lid with sticker art. A proper sticker-bombing.
This time I did start by covering the base with "random" stickers—some are really nice anyway!—and once it was mostly covered, I'd bring in some of the stickers I really liked and wanted to appreciate every time I looked at the back of the laptop.
Doing the base layer was a quick operation. Even faster if you see the time-lapse video I recorded for it: time-lapse video on my mastodon profile.
I then added a handful of my "nice" stickers to fill the bits that seemed empty or weird.
The result #

A messy, beautiful wall of sticker art!
Some of the nice stickers I chose to include initially are:
- The 4-star dragon ball, which I got in a Shōnen Jump pop-up store in Tokyo.
- The Hologram one, which came with the Chroma Console.
- A couple of small Afro Ken ones that I got in Seattle.
- The immigrant butterfly, which I got in Bogotá.
- The space station, which I got from Kurzgesagt , and
- A Traveller's Company one that I got at Narita Airport.
All in all I'm super happy with the result. There's still some space that I can fill with some nice stickers later if I feel like it. But at the moment I love looking at the little rectangle full of art that my laptop lid has become.
Everywhere now #
If you've been saving your big collection of stickers for "just the perfect spot", the "right place" to put them, let go of that and start sticking them wherever they'd spark joy in this moment. In your thermo, water bottle, tablet and phone case, your laptop, e-reader, your luggage, the fridge, your powerbanks, notebooks, your bike. Sticker-bomb all the things!
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