They wouldn’t be work boots, but I love the Minnesota rep. Red Wing Claras are my favorite boots ever.

So aesthetics, mainly. This would mostly be for wearing to concerts, or otherwise just in my rotation of urban going-around boots.

Is this just the Docs that are hard to resole, or also Solovair too?

Wow, okay, Martens are officially out of the running. Thank you for sharing your experience!

Yeah, it’s a shame how that specific style seems to be inextricably linked to zippers.

I actually have Thursday’s Explorer boots and have been really impressed with the fit and quality after a year, considering the price point. It actually occurs to me that I could get another of those in black and get similar aesthetic to a platform combat boot without the zipper 🤔

I know generally that Goodyear Welts can usually be resoled and often have longer lifespans, but I’m less knowledgeable about the craft itself, so your Chelsea boot recommendation from Thursday as an alternative is intriguing. In what situations would you prioritize a good leather upper that doesn’t have a resoleable welt, over a boot that has a Goodyear Welt with design flaws in the upper?

Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it’s not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.

Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn’t have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.

I’m part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it’s a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.

And I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I’ve done that, it’s a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.