She didn’t have kids already, but she wanted to have them in the future. I absolutely do not want kids, I even got a vasectomy in my early 20s.

It’s not really an issue you can compromise on as a couple, so it was better to part amicably than pursue something with no future, for both of our sakes.

You don’t want to use a wiki that makes your battery start to visibly drain away?

I am childfree, she wasn’t. 100% not going to work, but we ended on good terms all things ocnsidered.

Tropical Connect the Dots.

It’s a bit late, but hey I will take it still. I tend to have pretty bad luck with discovery apps as I have narrow musical tastes, but I will give it a shot for a while.

I have had the most luck with the custom Apple Music stations honestly, seems to have the best balance of songs I know and like with newer stuff in the same vein. I am not sure I would spend as much time on a playlist entirely composed of new things.

Give my regards to Winnie.

Shock, the guy who watches racists is a racist.

‘and we aren’t talking about the Chinese people, the Chinese people are good people, we love China, we are opposed to the CCP’?

The white man’s burden bullshit argument. Oh those poor Chinese people can’t possibly really support the CPC, they are just misguided and need us brave foreigners to come save them.

If you want to talk smack about Laowhy then you better provide proof.

Laowhy desecrating remains. His girlfriend (at the time) calls him out on it and he tells her to shut up because it makes good content. Nobody who loves China descreates their dead. You can’t even use the excuse that he was confused or didn’t know what it was, he was told to stop and refuses.

His treatment of his wife. Makes her sit on the floor of the car while he makes racist jokes with his family. Sorry to link to reddit, I don’t keep extensive archives of these guys.

Not expecting you to suddenly change your opinion on the CPC, but these guys in particularly are indefensible and nobody should be encouraged to watch them.

I used it a little bit, not extensively. I watched Diggnation with Kevin and Alex though semi-regularly, as I used to watch TechTV prior to that.

Not many I follow too closely to be honest these days. I just did a big purge of a bunch of my subscriptions so there’s only a handful now.

Gaming/Entertainment:

• Nextlander: General gaming; comprised of three ex-members of Giant Bomb (Vinny, Alex, and Brad).

• Mr. Samuel Streamer: Primarily focused on Rimworld and Crusader Kings, just an extremely witty guy that puts a lot of work into what he does. Often spends 8-9 hours in gameplay and editing to make a 30 minute episode, every day.

• Nilaus: Factory/automation games, like Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program.

• The Jimmy Dore Show: Semi-leftist, has liberal tendancies but is more political comedy than serious commentary, so I categorize him more as entertainment than political. I often don’t agree with all of his takes, but the show can be good sometimes.

• CryptTV: Mini-horror episodes, often with a few recurring monsters. Really well done effects work.

Politics:

• Li Jingjing: China-based journalist, covers China and the global south as a whole. Does both serious stories and cultural/interest pieces. Great for somebody just interested in seeing more China without the anti-China rhetoric.

• George Galloway: Left-leaning talk show host, some reactionary tendancies but he does have a pretty good range of guests from time to time, including the above. He’s been around for ages, very well established.

• The Deprogram: Leftist talk show and podcast.

That’s kind of my entire subscription list at the moment, it has been cut down a lot recenty.

Oh no, not the racist sexpats. Not sure I would necessarily want to be using those guys as your source of news in China. Laowhy is an absolute piece of shit to his wife, and actually made a video of himself desecrating gravesites in Taiwan and laughing about it. Complained that his daughter looked too asian. Just an absolute piece of garbage.

They found out being condescending towards Chinese people sells right now, and that has been their entire brand since they left the country. They’re probably useful in that anything they say, you can assume the exact opposite is the truth.

Living in Japan, this almost didn’t register to me. I have literally never met anybody that didn’t have one. When you move out, you use your family’s old one until you can buy a newer one.

Everyone should have one, absolutely.

Everyone? I have never owned a car, probably wouldn’t come in super useful.

I don’t actually miss much, but I also don’t really use my phone a whole lot. I have a smartphone, but it’s pretty close to factory settings. I don’t really install apps outside Line, I very rarely make calls on it. It probably gets used for transit directions/maps, mail, and Line 90% of the time.

Maybe not a specific feature, but I do dislike the general trend towards large and larger phones/screens. I must prefer the smaller phones we used to have; I know Apple had their smaller phone lines recently but I think they didn’t do particularly well.

Japan, you usually use “Taro Tanaka” as the goto placeholder name. Tanaka is a very common surname here and it’s super easy to write as well (田中). Sato is actually the most common but also a lot harder to write (佐藤). Tanaka is also a very “working class” name, it litearlly means “in the rice field” and most likely comes from families with a background of rice farmers. Taro also a very common given name; there have been quite a few Taro Tanakas throughout history despite being the placeholder name on most forms and the like. Taro, incidentally means “Big/Strong Son”.

I am not sure offhand of a female equilvalent, it’s usually Taro as the placeholder.

My brother had ferrets. I loved them, awesome personalities and adorable, but ferret-proofing your flat seems like more work than child-proofing. Even then they can and would get absolutely anywhere they weren’t supposed to be. They’d always get out again, but not after making you stress for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to extricate them.

The smell was omnipresent too.

I used to keep snakes, they are so misunderstood. The couple times I was bit (non-venomous) over several years of having snakes were honestly both my fault; once I had fed her and didn’t wash my hands properly afterwards, and once I didn’t notice she had started shedding and so was a bit more defensive than usual. They’re not typically aggressive at all and are usually content to just chill with you as much as anything else. Humans are way too large for a snake to ever consider you food, so they’re not really going to be trying to hurt you except as a last resort in self-defense.

I especially hate the slimy stereotypes because I always found my snakes super pleasant to hold, snakeskin feels great. I’d like to get one again, it has been a long time.

Yeah Japan. The argument is that the big souvenir boxes are typically left open and shared among all your coworkers (which to be fair, is usually the case in my office). It still seems excessive though.

What are people doing in the states that they actually have even more?

A base of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with additional additives for nicotine and flavour.

I bought my VG and PG from a local vendor, but those are readily available basically anywhere because they have a lot of uses outside vaping. I ordered pure liquid nicotine (in a PG suspension) online. Flavour additives also ordered online from a fairly reputable vendor that was well known in . I have no idea what policies about sharing vendors are here, but I am happy to give recommendations to anyone if they are looking to make their own juice to save money/be safer.

I mostly made fairly simple flavours, nothing too fancy. I had a friend who actually just vaped VG/PG with nicotine and no flavours at all.

I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.

Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn’t be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!

Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn’t be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.

A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.

When I was vaping I always mixed my own juice, so was very sure of what went in. There’s always the chance of buying from a sketchy vendor and getting something weird in your mixes, but most were fairly benign. Vaping liquid is actually pretty simple in composition.

As somebody who vaped for a long time, I kind of disagree with this one. Of every method for quitting smoking, vaping was the easiest and most effective. It let me titrate down to eventually 0 nicotine juice, which let me stop altogether. I only very rarely vape anymore, I keep my mod around in case I am ever out drinking and get an urge, but it is definitely the reason I was able to quit smoking.

The popcorn lung thing is kind of an urban legend, there is no case of any vaper ever getting it from vaping, but diacetyl (the additive in question) has been discontinued in basically all juice just in case anyway.

The usual mantra in vaping communities was always to tell people that if you weren’t a smoker already, don’t start vaping. Is it better than smoking? Almost assuredly, but it’s still not going to be better than just breathing cleaning air. The recommendation was always as a transition away from smoking. It’s one of the few hobbies we would congratulate each other over leaving.

If you don’t vape or smoke already, don’t start though.