Star Wars Galaxies: A Retrospective

So the other day I hooked up a hard drive that had been sitting in a drawer for years. It was from my old gaming computer, and on it I found a bunch of screenshots from the old MMO Star Wars Galaxies. That brought back a lot of memories. I played that game almost daily for round about eight years. So I thought I might try and do a post about it, and I beg your indulgence for my shocking display of geek-ness. Yes, I know what the TIE in TIE fighter stands for.

SWG stood out with its complexity. It was huge open-world sandbox where the entire economy was player-driven, and anything worth buying (apart from quest reward decorations and such) had to be made by crafters. If you wanted custom clothes, the best armor, houses and furniture, a new hair style, or a new spaceship engine or anything else, you had to buy it from another player. There were twelve planets and you could place a house almost anywhere on most of them. Organize enough houses together around a city hall and you'd get a player-constructed city which, as it grew based on population (outpost, town, city, metropolis, etc), could have its own shuttleport, cantina, gardens and so on. In the original game there something like 24 professions that you could mix and match to make your character pretty much however you wanted, though maxed out you could only master about two and a half at one time. About seven of those were crafting professions, and crafting wasn't a simple affair. Three professions were dedicated entertainers like dancers and musicians. It was this sort of customization and diversity that caught my attention, along with the setting.

I should also add that I have a soft spot for Star Wars. I remember lying on a blanket on the hood of the car, leaned back against the windshield with my cousins, watching the first Star Wars at the drive-in theater. I was probably around four at the time. I remember my dad taking me to see Darth Vader signing photographs at a bookstore when I was six. It was just a guy in a costume, but it was a really good costume. When I got to the front of the line I recall staring up with such total awe that I couldn't speak or even remember my name when he asked me for it. My dad had to lean in and give him my name. I remember lining up around the old Cinema City theater waiting to go in to see Return of the Jedi when I was eight. And, for all its shortcomings, I remember being so happy to go see Episode I with my dad back in '99. It was all a big part of my personal cultural heritage.

I wanted to give the game a shot. I first signed up for SWG a few months after it launched in 2003. This was after Everquest but before World of Warcraft. I had never played an MMO before, so it was a bit of a steep learning curve. I started out on the Ahazi server, on Tatooine, as a newbie Zabrak in pink hot pants with an ambition to become a master dancer. I would end up becoming a dancer and more. Caliope: Beast Master Extraordinaire! Also a master entertainer, a legendary hunter, an Imperial commando, and not too shabby of a pilot.

Cue Star Wars theme. Disco version, if you please.

All that was to come later, though. My character back story was that I was fresh off the farm, a beetle farm to be precise (there was a variety of large beetles on Tat), and moved to the big city to become a dancer. When I started out I spent most of my time in the crowded Mos Eisley cantina working on my dancing experience. You slowly unlocked new dances/songs/instruments as you went along. People would watch entertainers to cure mind wounds and battle fatigue, and would pay decent money for the buffs we could provide. There was much socializing. Early on I learned about the busy cantina at Anchorhead, an NPC city which was a popular pvp spot at the time. I had no money for a shuttle, and this was before animal mounts and vehicles were added, so I had to jog half-way across the planet to get there. On the way I aggro'd something mean and it killed me instantly. I never did see what it was.

Anyhow, I eventually got there and started leveling up in earnest. I also started experimenting with combat. I remember my first combat death... swarmed by death kreetles while trying to clear a kreetle lair for money. At this point in the game there was a hefty death penalty and your armor and weapons would decay rapidly. Around this time, animal mounts were implemented. Creature Handlers would tame and mature mountable animals and sell them. They made quite a profit, since people were sick of jogging everywhere. I was so happy to be able to afford my first carrion spat... sort of a vulture-ostrich... with a saddle. I'd also seen a lot of people coming into the cantina with their pets behind them, and I became interested in being a creature handler myself. After learning the basics of scouting and camp building, you could find baby versions of animals in the wild and train them to fight for you as they grew. I started out taming baby rills (a kind of lizard) and dwarf nunas (a kind of nuna). I was very proud when I tamed first rock beetle (a cow-sized beetle), which were popular pets at the time since they had heavy armor. I named him Crunchy.

Practicing music on stage.

Shortly after I mastered dancing (hooray!) I was approached by the mayor of a nearby town called Twin Suns. It was located due west of Mos Eisley. They had just grown large enough to have a cantina, and only the master entertainer profs could place one. They offered me ownership of the cantina if I'd move into the city and place it. My own cantina! Hooray! I named it The Boozy Bantha. Twin Suns, along with the city guild SUNS, became my home for the remainder of the life of the game.

Boozy Bantha exterior.

Outside the city hall.

I spent many an in-game evening sitting on that porch, watching people pass by, and occasionally leading guildies inside for a quick buff.

I continued to improve my fighting and creature handling skills. Vehicles also came out, and I began to explore the planets and looking for interesting pets to tame, all the while making decent money by hunting meat and hides to sell to crafters. I was easily identified by my pink ensemble.

I got myself into trouble sometimes. Even while fleeing combat, your swoop bike could be shot out from under you. I died a lot.

You learned to buy your speeders by the pack.

Doing group stuff was fun, but I was at my happiest when hunting solo, wandering the wilds, just me and my pets camping on a remote mountaintop.

Watching the suns set with my gurreck, Puddinpaws.

And wherever I went, well...

Dance!

Nothin' left for me to do but dance!

Off these bad times I'm going through just dance!

Got canned heat in my heels tonight, baby!

One of my greatest Creature Handling achievements was the finding and taming of a baby bull rancor. They were larger and more aggressive than your regular rancor, and possibly the toughest pet to acquire at the time. Just finding one was hard, but ever-so-slowly crawling prone towards a bull rancor nest next to the Dathomir Sarlacc to lure a baby right out from under its parents without your mask scent breaking was maddening. I can't recall the number of attempts I made before I was successful. I remember when it happened, I got up and ran away from its suddenly enraged parents shouting, "I got 'im! I got 'im!" I named him Cromwell. Not sure why.

It's hard to not feel a little bit bad-ass with a rancor backing you up.

I started to find my niche as a long range damage dealer while my pets went in to tank and do crowd control. Though I had initially mastered pistols, found I favored rifles (/dump; /headshot3; /scattershot2; /headshot3;). I was never good at pvp, it made me stressed out and I never lasted long since I was built for pve. In pve, I could hold my own pretty well. I had joined the Rebel faction when I started the game, but switched to Imperial before too long. Why? Because the stormtrooper outfits were awesome. And I always had a thing for Darth Vader.

Cue Imperial March. Oh, yeah, that's the stuff.

In 2004 the space expansion was released, adding spaceships and a space zone to each planet. It was pretty cool, with free-roaming space travel and full-on three axis dog fights. There were lots of ships and a whole lot of customizing them to your personal needs. You could even make like a houseboat and live in space if you wanted. I actually got really good at the space combat, gravitating towards small nimble ships like the Jedi Starfighter.

I fear nothing!  Yaaaaaa! ...Okay, I changed my mind.

At the same time I had started up a second account so I could have an alt. You could only have one character per account at the time, something kinda unheard of these days. I made a Mon Calamari bio-engineer/mad scientist/chef named Portabella. I wanted a bio-engineer to compliment my creature handling, since bio-engineers were crafters that sampled dna from animals, blended them together, and created pets with custom stats (and colors!). It was a bit random, so getting exactly what you wanted took a lot of time and luck. Her profile simply read "Back off. I'm a scientist."

I also made her a chef, because cooking is cool. And also extremely profitable if you do it well. She did it well. She was frikkin rich.

Sometimes cooking is sit-down kinda work.

Later on, when they allowed two characters per account, I also made Sugarplum, a Twilek entertainer who changed her skin color to match her outfits, and Chantarelles, an Ithorian droid engineer.

It's Life Day! Open your gifts! Heavily influenced by the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Life Day snow on Tat.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, I had been appointed guild leader after the first one retired to leave the game. I didn't want that responsibility, but the welfare of the guild was entrusted to me, so I tried to do my best. I can't say I was ever a great guild leader, since I was never good at organizing guild hunts and the like, preferring to leave that up to others. I was more of a pink mascot, I think. But I did try to maintain SUNS as a trustworthy guild with integrity and a good reputation. At our peak we had one of the largest memberships on the server. I don't care to recount all the shit sandwiches I had to eat writing diplomatic messages to strangers and other guilds when one of my guildies purportedly behaved badly and I got complaints in my inbox, in order to keep up good relations. I don't think my guildies ever knew how much of that I had to do, because I never complained publicly. It was stressful. Sometimes I had to kick people out. Very rarely, though. I was quite proud of my guildies, though. Good people.

Twin Suns also became one of the largest cities on the server. It was one of the first cities, and so became one of the oldest surviving original cities. You'd head out of the Mos Eisley, hop in your vehicle, drive past the Eisley cantina and head out the western exit. First you'd pass through the no-build zone populated with low-level yard trash mobs and then through the wall of player houses encircling Eisley. Winding through those, down a slight slope and over some ditches, you'd find yourself in a broad, flat plain with mesas rising up on both sides. A long central boulevard made of gardens lead straight up to city hall. The boulevard was lined with houses, businesses, and merchant tents, along with my cantina and my diner. Home!

Hanging out with my rhoa kwi pack leader.

The wookiee planet Kashyyyk became available in 2005. You couldn't build on it and it wasn't as free-roaming as the other planets, it was more maze like. But Kash did provide some challenging content, some pretty places, and interesting loot! Unfortunately, some of the cooler new animals I wanted weren't available to tame, such as the walluga.

Then came the Combat Upgrade. In 2005, Sony decided to make a big combat re-balancing pass, resulting in some pretty big changes to combat mechanics. It reduced a lot of the complexity and strategy of combat. A lot of people didn't like that, being happy with the way it was. A lot of people left the game. But the rest of us simply adapted and got used to it.

Also, at some point along there, our third mayor retired and I was elected the new mayor of Twin Suns. It was a big honor, but it was even more responsibility than being a guild leader. Keeping the city treasury full, worrying about maintaining the population so that the city borders didn't shrink, granting zoning rights to let people build houses in the city in some kind of orderly fashion, organizing the city militia. I did my best.

City hall decorated for Halloween! That's my stuffed rancor doll in the big seat.

Patrolling the city outskirts - "Excuse me, sir, do you have a license for that bantha?"

Then came the expansion for the lava and volcano planet Mustafar in late 2005. It was pretty cool. Lots of places to explore and some really neat creatures I looked forward to taming. Tons of quests and loot, and a max level increase (up from 70 to 90, I think). Pre-orders got your a regular lava flea mount... but I was one of the first and only creature handlers on my server to level up fast enough to tame a giant lava flea mount!

I named him Fleabane.  Tee hee.

But there was a storm a-brewing. Developed in total secrecy, a complete game overhaul was in the works. It was the New Game Experience.

That about sums it up.

SWG had been competing for players with WOW since that came out in 2004. Well, they were very different games and appealed to a different audience, but a lot of disgruntled players left SWG for WOW after the whole combat upgrade thing. No big shakes. But I guess the Sony suits decided they wanted to try and broaden the audience and attempted to make SWG more like WOW, and had the entire game overhauled in secret... simplified. Shortly after the Mustafar expansion was released, Sony announced the New Game Experience that would be coming in a couple of weeks. Ever after, stories of SWG would be divided between pre-NGE and post-NGE.

In addition to an interface update, no big deal, they re-worked the professions and combat mechanics completely. They were taking out the mix-and-match skill trees and replacing them strictly profession-only skill sets that were all over-balanced. And they were reducing the number of professions from 24 to 10. Creature Handler didn't make the cut. As soon as the update took place, I would lose my pets, along with my entire play style.

I was upset.

Real upset.

I spent that last day with my pets, taking pictures with some of them.

My wee war gronda.

Cromwell at the Dune Sea

My rare kinad Baz Nitch. How he loved to jump!

Fleabane's last ride.

Click your heels with a dancing gaping sider!

It was depressing. Lots more people left the game in droves. To this day the game has overall unfavorable reviews on Amazon as disgruntled players gave it bad reviews as a form of protest, since they weren't being heard by Sony. It was clear that many of the devs knew this was a bad mistake, but Sony stuck with the NGE, refusing to acknowledge any community uproar.

But I pressed on, hoping to adjust. I was used to being a rifleman, a long-distance damage dealer, but that was gone, too. So I went with the Commando class and learned to use area effect heavy weapons. I had an armorsmith make me some good Assault trooper armor to go with it. Wish I had some good pictures of that, I looked pretty cool. I also wish I had pictures of my carefully and meticulously decorated home and shops. Alas! They exist only my memory.

Anyhow, things eventually settled down, though the game population never really recovered. Some time later, they even brought creature handling back as Beast Mastery. Except it was a sub-class now and was never as strong as it used to be. It wasn't quite the same, with no more taming of babies in the wild and pets being made so generic they were almost identical, just with different skins. But at least I was able to have pets again. And I was able to get some previously unattainable pets with some rare dna given as achievement rewards, like this little baby xandank and a kubazza beetle.

There was still fun to be had, after all I stuck with it for five or six more years. Unfortunately I don't have many pictures left from that time. There were loads of events, a really fun trading card game, and I even got into pvp a little. There was Life Day for christmas, the Galactic Moon Festival for Halloween, and even Ewok Love Day for Valentines (Allay loo ta nuv, allay loo ta nuv!).

There were also tons of collections and badges that were introduced. My proudest achievement during that time, or at least the one that took the most effort, was the accumulation of all the beast hunting badges. There were something like over 40 of them, each of which requiring the finding and slaying of hundreds of specific critters, many of them very rare and some of them very hard to beat. Like the one requiring the hunting of 650 krayt dragons, including 75 ancients.

Hanging out with Lubuu, my best pal in the game in the latter years.

I know it's silly to work so hard at such a trivial thing, but this was what I was best at in the game. It was my expertise. I had spent years exploring and hunting by myself in the wilderness, and I knew where to where to look for all the mobs, and how to get the rares to appear. If you were the first person to achieve a badge you'd be registered in game for all to see. It took months, but I got about twelve server firsts for hunting to my name, and was the first one to complete them all. And the reward for completing them all? A vial of dna for the engineering of my long-coveted walluga.

I dyed him pink and named him Precious, because he was. Wish I could show him fully grown. He was cool! And I'm pretty sure he was the first, and one of only a few ever made. I never saw any others.

I played the game for nearly eight years. By 2011 I was burned out a little, most of my old friends had moved on, the game population was shrinking, and it was getting kinda lonely. I didn't log in as often that last year. Sony announced they'd be shutting down all the servers by the end of that year. I didn't log in for the big game ending party. It was just too sad.

The game was pretty buggy at times, and fraught with bad decision making at the top. Still, it was a pretty unique experience, with its complexity and sandboxiness. I've yet to find an MMO that satisfies. I tried the Old Republic MMO that came out right after SWG shut down. It was pretty and had voice acting, but it was a themepark MMO... complete one planet and move on to the next. No socialization, no true crafting, just level up and finish the game, basically. I also played Guild Wars 2 for a while, and it was beautiful, but again, it didn't satisfy for long. It had no place to call home.

I know that there are some SWG emulators that have sprung up, using the old software, and I may try them out some day just to see. I dunno, some things just can't be recaptured. I've also been eyeballing an upcoming sandbox game called The Repopulation that has some promise. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, I think I'll just wait here a spell and watch the twin suns set.

Cue Yoda's Theme.

* Twin Ion Engine  : P

Reminiscing 'bout lips

So out of the blue I today I recalled a silly thing from my youth.  I guess this was back when I was six or seven?  Early '80s, anyway.  At that age I had to accompany my mom on endless, boring shopping trips... this store, that store, this mall, that mall.  Mostly clothes.  I hated it, yet I spent so much time in '80s malls and department stores that I'm oddly nostalgic for it all now.  Sometimes you'd get lucky and there would be a play area, but lots didn't.  I recall entertaining myself by hiding under clothing racks and exploring architectural curiosities like carpeted walls.  That wasn't uncommon at the time.  Anyhow, there was this one clothing store - I wanna say it was called Pinky Punky - that had one of those sofas that are in the shape of a giant set of red lips.  This style, if you don't know what I'm talking about:

I was fascinated by that sofa.  I distinctly remember discovering that I, being quite small and skinny, could wedge myself pretty far between the top and bottom plush lip cushions.  At first it was just horsing around, but on later visits I developed the fantasy that I was being sucked into these giant red lips, and when they finally let me go, I'd be a girl.  I had lots of transformation and bondage fantasies starting around that age that made me feel funny. 

What's been going on?  Well, not a lot, really.  It's been a very mild summer, and unusually wet.  No complaints there.  I've been getting back into some writing after being in a creative rut for a long time, so that's good!  I hope I have something to show sometime soon.

The Wonderful World of . . . Vaping?

Let me start by saying I love smoking.  It's fair to say I have a smoking fetish.  I started smoking way back when I was in college, and not for social reasons but because I liked it.  For twenty years smoking has been a constant part of my life.  I never wanted to quit, but all these years I've been worried about there maybe coming a time when I'd have to quit, because I knew that addiction + habit + love of the thing would all make it very difficult.  Which is why it came as such a surprise to me when I unexpectedly quit smoking a few weeks ago.

Last month I looked into e-cigarettes, purely out of curiosity.  I can't remember what exactly prompted the googling.  I had no desire to quit, but I've been smoking for twenty years now and cigarettes aren't getting any cheaper (about $70 a carton, with all the taxes, and that'd last me about a week), so I thought maybe I'd explore alternatives. I'd never really heard of vaping and all I had seen of e-cigs were rather unsatisfying-looking smoking cessation devices.  I didn't even know it came in different flavors!

What really caught my eye as I was looking through links was a brand called Vapor Couture, which has been around a year or so and markets specifically to women, treating the e-cigs as something like a fashion accessory.

I saw the slim, colored batteries with their sparkly gem tips and they pushed my girly 'Ooo, pretty!' buttons right away.  The marketing worked. . .

I did do research, of course.  I looked into different brands, looked at reviews on Youtube, learned all I could about e-cigarettes and personal vaporizers.  After a couple days of this, I went ahead and ordered a VC starter kit, which included a couple batteries in different colors, some sample cartridges in different flavors (you can mix and match battery and cartridge colors along with flavors and nicotine strengths), and a charger. The packaging, by the way, was sumptuously over the top . . . high marks for quality.  I don't want to throw the box away!

So, my first vaping experience?  It was weird.  Familiar in some ways, but much different in others.  The vapor is not smoke - that's why it's called vaping and not smoking.  Nothing is burning, no leaves or paper, it's liquid being atomized by a hot coil in the cartridge, or cartomizer.  What's the liquid?  We'll get into that later.  It does feel a little different in the throat and chest than smoke.  There was some coughing at first, but I adjusted within hours.  The battery and cartridge are certainly heavier than a cigarette, so it took a while to learn to hold it gracefully (and dangling from the lips is right out of the question).  Having flavored 'smoke' was interesting and new;  my first experiences were with Fresh Mint and Passion Fruit.

It wasn't as instantaneously as satisfying as a cigarette, which gets nicotine from your lungs to your brain in seconds.  With vapor, the nicotine is mostly absorbed by the membranes of the mouth and nose - technically you don't even need to inhale it, just puff it, but what's the fun in that? - and it takes half a minute or so before it starts to take effect.  Some patience was required.  Also, smoking a cigarette is a finite thing:  you smoke for eight or so minutes until it's gone and then you're good.  A self-contained little ritual, more or less, once or twice an hour.  It's also a good timer, an "I'll head to bed after this last cigarette" sorta thing.  With an e-cig there's no defined end point.  You can easily overdo it and give yourself the nicotine queasies.  You have to adjust to a new method by puffing on it for a minute or two, or even just a couple of puffs, then setting it aside, repeat as necessary.  On the plus side you don't have to worry about juggling a cigarette or dangling it and trying to keep the smoke out of your eyes when you need two hands, you can just stick the thing in your pocket.

I was unsure if it would be able to replace the pleasures and familiarity of smoking, if maybe I'd use it as a novelty but still smoke regular cigarettes.  But, I kept at it.  On the second day I had one cigarette, and after... well, I haven't had one since.  I have half a carton sitting here and I haven't even been seriously tempted to have one.  I miss it, sometimes I even still automatically reach for the place where I kept my pack and momentarily get confused why there isn't one there, before remembering I have something else.  But I don't miss it that much, and I certainly don't have any actual cravings since I'm still getting nicotine along with puffy clouds of vapor, plus flavors.  But wait, there's more!  My smokers cough stopped entirely, my chest feels lighter and I can take deep breaths without wanting to cough, I feel better, and my sense of taste and smell are purportedly due to return.  I noticed this morning when I went for a walk, ascending the steep hill I live on, I didn't feel out of breath at the top.  I was breathing heavier, yeah, it's a hill, but I wasn't feeling starved for oxygen.  I forgot what that feels like.  Also, no more ashes or cigarette smell or embers burning little craters in the fuzz of my velour pants.  It's like having the benefits of quitting smoking while still smoking!  Still addicted, of course, but that never bothered me before, and there's the option of stepping down the nicotine amount in the liquid to zero if I ever choose to.

Alas, although I'm happy with the Vapor Couture e-cigs, and I've already stocked up on cartridges, have three batteries, and an awesome little pink portable charging case, they have their downside.  The batteries only last three to five hours of regular use, so you need to have at least two to keep switching them out to recharge.  The VC brand cartridges (the replaceable part that contains the liquid in an absorbent batting and the heating coil) are expensive, about $13 for a 5 pack, and a pack and a half a day smoker like me can easily go through two cartridges a day.  Not much cheaper than smoking regular cigarettes, or analogs.  You're definitely paying extra for the look and the name brand with them.  Also they only come in half a dozen flavors, two of those are tobacco flavors - I was always a menthol lady, myself - leaving me with only several to choose from.  They don't yet offer blanks (empty cartridges you fill yourself) like most other companies do, so you have to refill used ones yourself which can get messy and make a strange combination of flavors.  I found a site that sells blanks that fit the VC batteries, though, so that's good.  I don't know why VC doesn't sell blanks, it could only improve their sales.

But wait, there's even more. . .there's a whole world of vaping beyond the small cigarette replicas.  Personal vaporizers with mods and tanks, providing cleaner flavors and bigger clouds along with longer lasting batteries and larger liquid capacity.  You puff on 'em, kinda like a hookah.  Unbeknownst to many, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around vaping in the past six years.  Small companies tinkering with and improving their parts, people selling custom devices and liquids, in addition to the hobby side of it where people rebuild their heating elements.  Wanting to branch out from the small, if elegant, VC e-cigs and enjoy more flavors with greater ease (and also save money in the long run), I started ordering parts to assemble my own personal vaper.  Here's the nice bit o' kit I ended up with:

Looks kinda like a weird lightsaber hilt.

What we have here is a Provari mod with a purple butterfly J-Wrap cover.  It's topped with an Aspire Nautilus clearomizer tank (I want the pink glass for it but I can't find it anywhere), and a matching aluminum tip.  Altogether it's about seven inches tall.  In the tank at the time of the photo was a pina colada flavored juice, num num num.  While I'm writing this I'm using a lightly fruity, almost floral liquid which I bought at my local vape shop.

Sooo, if you're new to all of this and are even slightly interested, you might be wondering what the heck you're looking at.  Well, the mod (at the base) is the part that holds the battery and contains the circuitry, if there is any.  You push the button and that heats the coil in the tank that's screwed onto the top.  There are tons of mods made by hundreds of companies, each with different features and looks and price ranges.  I opted for one of the more expensive ones because of their reputation for reliability, but you can find perfectly good mods in any price range.  It's easy to get a small eGo battery for $30 or less.

eGo style batteries

The tank is what holds the liquid and contains the atomizer which turns it into vapor.  There's all kinds of configurations.  You can get cartomizers that function like larger versions of little e-cig cartridges, or tanks like the ones shown, or ones where you drip the liquid down directly onto the coils.  I won't go into all the stuff about volts and ohms and coils and all that jazz.  It's mostly over my head anyway.  The atomizer head will eventually burn out and need to be replaced after a week or two, so you either have to buy replacement heads or rebuild them yourself.  I'm lazy and clumsy.  I'll buy replacements.  For this model, the replacements currently run about four bucks apiece, and most models are cheaper than that. 

The tip, well, that's just the part you suck on.  Yep.  Not gonna make a joke.

So right now I'm using my mod for regular vaping and the VC e-cigs for convenience or when I want to feel fancy (or want the feeling of a cigarette in my fingers).  But what about the e-liquid, or e-juice, or just plain juice?  I still have trouble calling it juice because it makes me think of nicotine juice which just sounds horrible.  Regardless, juice has only a few ingredients, and it's highly customizable.

One ingredient is nicotine, which typically comes in strengths of 2.4 mg, 1.8, 1.2, .6, or 0.  As pack and a half a day smoker of light cigarettes, 1.8 mg worked for me pretty well.  The next ingredient is the flavor mix, whichever it may be.  The rest of the liquid is made up of propylene glycol (PG) and/or vegetable glycerine (VG).  Both are non-toxic and used in food and medicines - PG is used in asthma inhalers.  PG gives a stronger throat hit (the sensation of cigarette smoke) and carries more flavor, but doesn't produce much vapor and, as it absorbs moisture, can dry the bejeezus out of your mouth.  Drink a lot of water.  A few people report an allergic sort of reaction to PG, but then there's VG as an option.  VG is sweeter and makes thicker clouds, and it's smoother and easier on the throat.  It's also thicker and can clog up some devices a little.  Most juices come in a ratio of PG to VG, such as 20/80, 50/50, etc.  Or you can get them purely one or the other.  Apart from sometimes distilled water, that's it.  Quite different from the 4000 or so chemicals in cigarette smoke.

The best part of the juice is the flavors.  Pretty much anything!  Fruits, desserts, flowers, candies, nuts, etc. There are hundreds of sites that sell them, in addition to brick and mortar stores.  I'd only recommend getting them from a reputable domestic makers who use proper and sterile equipment because, after all, you're breathing the stuff.  Just as a small sampling of possible flavors, here are the offerings from a couple popular places:  Mount Baker Vapor and Virgin Vapor.  So many flavors.  I want to sample them all!  Mind you, I haven't yet tried any liquids from either of those places, but they seem to have a positive reputation.

But is vaping healthy?  Well, no one's certain of the long term effects, but it's unquestionably healthier than smoking.  Non of the ingredients are carcinogens - not even nicotine by itself.  Surprise!  Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor and raises the heart rate, but not much more than caffeine does, and you can always get juice with zero nicotine.  As for the vapor, it can irritate the nose and throat if you overdo it or are not used to it, but otherwise doesn't seem to be harmful.  There's lots of misinformation out there concerning vaping (like it being made of antifreeze), even from reputable news sources who don't seem interested in fact checking the rumors.  It's only been around for six years or so, but in that time no one's gotten sick from it, and everyone in the community boasts of great health improvement after switching from smoking.  I'm feeling great, myself.  So, we'll see!

So I say, if you're a smoker and you're looking for a change, go ahead and try vaping.  If you've tried a cheapie tobacco flavored e-cig from a gas station and didn't care for it, I suggest trying again with different equipment and a flavor of your choosing.  You could try one from Vapor Couture or their parent company, V2 Cigs, which offers larger batteries and a wider variety of flavor cartridges, including blanks (the aren't cross-compatible with VC).  I'm suggesting these simply because they're ones I've had positive experience with.  Or search around, there's lots of popular options out there right now.  If you're interested in jumping right into a personal vaporizer mod, you can look online or find your local vape store and see what they have.  You're sure to find a setup that works for you.  Whichever way you go, it's going to be far, far more cost-effective than cigarettes.  After the initial equipment investment, keeping up with replacements and liquids can run less than a dollar a day.  So maybe give it a shot, why not?

Spring cookies

Spring is here!  The redbuds are budulating, the pollen tassels are ... tasseling.  I went to the store today and noticed they were selling Girl Scout cookies outside, so I got some.  I got thin mints, samoas, and a shortbread.  I was never a girl scout, of course (though now I understand they allow transgender girls in, so that's cool).  My older sister was one, though, so we always had cookies of each type every year.  One year, when I was 6 or 7, we volunteered our carport to be the distribution point for the local troop.  The carport was filled with hundreds of boxes, each packed with dozens of color-coded cookie boxes.  Rainbow stacks of different colored boxes.  Cookies everywhere!  Many a samoa and peanut butter patty fell that year.