Actually both are fine. For personal use, I have two /23, one routed globally by my Data Center provider, and one not. Both are from the block assigned geographically to my home state.
I also manage a /20 for IRLP.net, which would fall under the “club” rule. Since these addresses might pop up anywhere in the world, they are in 44.127, the so called “multinational” block. (Thanks Chris!)
One suggestion I have though is you might want to come up with an actual use for the address space. I would argue “Education and tinkering” is not really a “use.” Education and tinkering is something we all have to go through, when starting out. What are you going to use it for, once it all works?
Unless you own or manage a commercial data center with multiple connections to the Internet and have your own ASN (Autonomous System Number), you are not going to be able to set this up yourself. It can only be set up by your serving provider. So you should ask your provider if you, as a customer, can bring your own addresses and have them advertise your allocation, and route it to your host(s). Some might, others will not.
IRLP uses Vultr.com for some of our hosting. Vultr is fairly stingy with their own addresses, but they will advertise your own address space from any of their locations, for FREE, as long as you are a customer. You do have to be running a routing daemon on your VM, but setting that up is fairly straightforward and is well documented on their site.
Vultr.com (AS20473) is advertising hundreds of Net-44 blocks. IRLP today, is running from Chicago and Sydney, providing public IPs via OpenVPN tunnels to a few hundred IRLP repeaters. There are even a few repeaters in .NZ getting public addresses from Sydney.
Follow Chris’s (G1FEF) direction, he knows how to interact with many of the providers, and will work with you and them to get you going.