CNN: Man's "nice millennial vaping session" ruined when device exploded

As someone who uses public transit I just assumed that people smoke because they’re sociopaths and enjoy smoking in bus shelters - especially when it’s raining or there’s a high wind chill - or upwind of anyone waiting for the bus. Or taking one last inhale before getting on the bus, and exhaling it once aboard.

Vaping merely adds a modern high tech spin. Vapers like to fill a bus shelter with their fumes and then explain how the No Smoking sign doesn’t apply to them because it’s not technically smoke. Presumably while listening to “I Am the Very Image of a Modern Major Asshole” on their iPhone.

In the years when I’m driving a car, smokers and vapers seem almost normal. In the years when I’m taking transit, “Christ, what a bunch of assholes.”

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Sadly it actually is. I think it’s stupid as hell, but at this point you might as well give me a cane so i can yell at people my age to get off my lawn.

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When I was a kid I ate a whole bag of warheads once. My mouth was not bleeding, but it screwed up my taste buds somehow. Everything tasted like butter for a couple weeks. Even water. Super weird.

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I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it is what I thought when I combined “millenial” and “vape”. Most of the young people I work with own “vapes”, very few of them are for ingesting nicotine.

I was literally in our work site smoking area and saw one of them vaping, assumed it was nicotine liquid (because it was at. fucking. work.) and asked to see his battery, I asked him what flavor it was and if I could try it and because I was quite a novice at the time and didn’t know that TCH oil makers give food sounding names to their stuff sometimes I ended up coughing, red faced, and pretty fucking high for the next couple of hours.

/I also told the kid that while we do work with a LOT of stoners it was not a good idea to actually use on the job site. He was not 16, this is a human who is old enough to buy alcohol in all 50 states.

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Depends on the jobsite. At least two of my co-workers on the helldesk smoke weed and/or vape hashoil at work.

Although this is internal helldesk for a “lifestyle brand”. It’s not like we operate heavy machinery or do anything actually important.

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I work around literal children and families. For the government.

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Yeah. Significantly different situations. My company sells overpriced clothing and rum to rich, older white men who think possessions are the mark of success.

Really Trump-types are our main demographic, except he has his name on brands that compete with ours.

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I eat those things like candy!

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Jeff McJefferson?

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Aren’t they?

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Possibly they needed a nice snappy pull quote to encourage sites like this one to repost.

I’ve occasionally seen aftermarket e-cig batteries as big as, say, half a pack of cigarettes, with, indeed, brushed aluminum housings. And the article mentions that accidents like this generally involve with aftermarket batteries that aren’t quite as compatible as advertised. So I’d guess that’s it.

Wait… this is a thing? Really, for reals? Competitive vaping? And glad to know I wasn’t the only one confused by it (@aasmith64)…

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Yes, though mind you my knowledge only goes as far as just knowing it’s a thing and that someone i sort of met from work does it and is sponsored by a vape shop. It’s all dumb and it makes me feel like a cranky old man :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m sure one could go down a Google rabbit hole checking out the absurdity of competitive vaping but i’d rather save my brain cells. I have seen articles talking about the scene but i’ve thus far opted to ignore them

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I bought my vaporizer (for my herbs) from BoingBoing, so when it blows up in my face, I’ll take the empire down with me. :joy:

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People make their own hash oil with butane. I wonder what happens when you heat that in an enclosed space and haven’t evaporated off all the butane yet? Or if you use some other solvent, and the residual has a low flashpoint?

HOLY FCUK  

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There isn’t a human activity that I’ve come across that can’t be ruined by some douchebags turning it in to a “competition”.

There are contests to put stereos so loud in cars that you can’t go within ten feet of them without literal deafness and permanent hearing loss, let alone sit in them.

There are contests for just ruining the tires on your car.

I imagine that these vaping contests are basically who can produce the biggest cloud. Which involves a little bit of electrical engineering knowledge, some chemistry, and probably big lungs. In some ways I can respect what goes in to it, but I don’t get the passion for it that someone must have had to think of this.

To be clear, I’m not anti-vape. I use one and have done so for probably five years or more to get off real cigarettes. I use it to put drugs (nicotine) in to my body and to save money (smokes would cost me around 2k a year, nicotine liquid and replaceable coils for my vape cost me literally less than $100 a year plus a little electricity). I buy unscented mentholated “juice” and I use a fairly high resistance coil (1.2/4ohm) on a fairly low wattage setting (12.5w). This produces a modest “cloud” which is invisible if I hold it in for two seconds and has no aroma. I use a high concentration of nicotine (36mg) as well. Because of this I use very little juice. The people you see blowing big clouds are using either coils or just regular wire resisting below 1ohm, usually .5 or less and using wattage starting at 30w but most are using between 75-100w (much more on custom built devices) and using low nicotine, if any, juice. They end up spending a lot on juice and such compared to me. It really is like doing burnouts.

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Butane evaporates very quickly.

Every butane and hash oil explosion / fire I’ve heard about happened during extraction either from an equipment failure or inadequate ventilation. It just doesn’t stick around long.

And, at least where I shop most hashoil is made using supercritical CO2 as the solvent. Because the industry knows stoners tilt chemophobic. Seriously, half the scCO2 packages proclaim “MADE WITHOUT CRAZY CHEMICALS”

As if carbon dioxide pressurized to a megapascal and kept at 70C isn’t crazy in itself. Or that carbon dioxide isn’t a chemical.

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yeah. i find this so interesting.

it’s like how people consider flying dangerous, and will probably feel the same for self-driving cars, because when an accident happens: there’s nothing you can do.

even if the overall actual risk is lower, people think if they are in control they can somehow beat the odds.