Crackpots #68: Rate My Vape (Patreon)

This week's edition of Crackpots comes from Daniel Kolitz. Daniel is a writer in Brooklyn, and appeared on TrueAnon episode 499.5. Like one host of this podcast, Daniel likes to vape. He reviewed several popular vape varieties for us.

*****

I love to vape, I find it highly enjoyable and do it constantly! Here are some vape reviews.

GeekBar Pulse

0/5 Stars

I'm aware that most flavored vape companies are based in China but I'm sort of surprised that GeekBar is one of them because in its juvenile aesthetics and in the sheer life-despising rankness of its range of flavors it seems as American as nu-metal, legalized app gambling, and hunting pedophiles for engagement on Kick. (You can't lure Trump or Clinton to the Dollar Store but you can nab a local deviant, cave his blubbering face in, buy a vape and some kratom with the affiliate revenue, etc.) The whole country an assisted-suicide clinic funding mass death abroad with a domestic sales pitch something like you're scum and it's a joke you'd think otherwise, agency is for obese mass killers richer than god, but there is joy in melting your brain and you will find it or suffer. Psychologically torture your AI chatbot girlfriend! Suck foul flavored gas from a plastic lightshow box! Fucking live a little, have some fun! I'm not saying the (for instance) GeekBar Pulse Dual Core Blueberry B-Pop tastes awful, per se, I'd hit it in a pinch. But a conscientious vaper has to draw the line somewhere.

Flonq

4/5 Stars

Agentic AI, employment apocalypse, who gives a shit, things were winding down anyway. It's true that AI took my job and that I've turned to vape criticism at least in part because AI can ghostwrite bullshit business editorials better than I ever could, but I know for a fact that technology's cutting-edge can be found not at Anthropic but in the research labs of Flonq. Where those research labs are located is a different story: their US distribution's run out of Miami but little's out there on their actual HQ. I struggle even to imagine what goes on in there. I suppose while huffing one of their high-end "dessert vapes" (and if I were to offer the barest outlines of the advancements/intrigues within this thriving sub-market we would be here all day) one cannot help but picture an immense white room with a gleaming ten-foot cube at its center—sort of like an immense futuristic windowless oven—into whose "input hatch" assorted hazmatted R&D types insert lavish cookies, cakes, etc., and out of whose "output nozzle" emerges vapor of a richness/treat-fidelity I swear you can barely conceive. There is something hyperreal, holographic, in the typical Flonq experience. This is a company to watch.

Air Bar Nex

5/5 Stars

One time my buddy went to a fancy Italian restaurant with his wife. At some point during the meal he got up to use the bathroom, and when he got back to the table, his cock was hanging out of his pants. Not on purpose; the precise mechanics have never been clear to me but apparently something happened with his fly. Anyway his wife sort of exclaimed his name in alarm, the way you would if your husband was blithely stomping around an Italian restaurant with a big smile on his face and with his cock bobbing at roughly table-level among steaming plates of pasta bolognese, risotto, and cacio e pepe. And let me tell you: when he realized what was going on, he was mortified. He didn't hesitate for a second—just popped it right back in. That's the kind of guy my friend is. But here's something to think about: what if he'd left it out? What if, instead of dutifully tucking the offending member away, he'd flounced it around, danced lewdly and irrepressibly, one hand waving playfully in the air, the other holding off a battery of servers and sommeliers, each pleading with my friend to calm down, to be reasonable, to put that bad boy back in its cage? These questions might seem abstract to you but they spun around my skull with punishing force on a recent weekday morning. The night before I'd attended a dinner party, a gorgeous affair. Even at 35 I can find dinner parties affected, children trying on their parents’ clothes, and I was the oldest person at this one by six or seven years, this was fundamentally a late-twenties dinner party, a prime arena for stiltedness and feigned sophistication, but everything felt so natural. Abundant cheap-ish wine and steak from a farmer's market cooked well, sliced and sprinkled with sea salt. Anecdotes and off-the-cuff observations sparkling in a mutually sustained atmosphere of private glamour and goodwill. So on and so forth. And anyway literally continuously throughout this party I vaped, in fact I kept a kind of flight of vapes in front of me on the table next to the goat cheese and the gluten-free charcuterie crackers, I literally wreathed the proceedings in Blue Razz Ice Air Bar Nex vapor and (more often) Strawberry Ice Air Bar Nex vapor, I fucking stank up the place with the vile effluent of my diseased habit, and further did so without a care in the world, not pausing to notice that I was alone in this behavior, that no one else there was vaping or even seemed to have any interest in sampling one of the many interesting vapes I’d brought to the party. My friend at the Italian restaurant was lucky, he’d tucked his dick away the moment he noticed it hanging out, but I'd stayed exposed all evening. Contemplating all this while suicidally hungover I realized I'd come to a crossroads: I could "tuck it away" so to speak and thus spare myself future dinner-party embarrassment as well as a slow death from a number of yet-to-be-named diseases or I could "leave it all hanging out." And I decided then and there that I'd just have to leave it all hanging out because the Air Bar Strawberry Nex is just that goddamn good! For one thing it's subtle: unlike the GeekBar it doesn't come out and say, I am going to kill you, it merely kills you, quietly pumping (per the research) steady quantities of manganese, aluminum, and lead into your system. For another thing, it tastes great. Two thumbs way up!

EBCreate BC100

3.5/5 Stars

Back in the mid-aughts you'd have needed grenades, vats of thorazine, concrete barriers extending miles into the sky and patrolled at all hours by literal killers—people for whom savagely committing murder was completely meaningless, as routine as pissing—to keep the average music critic from describing the guitar tones of any given Gang of Four-influenced post-punk band as "skinny." Always seemed hacky to me but one day into being a vape critic, I get it: sometimes things really are skinny. Like for instance the typical pull of the EBCreate BC100. Where the Air Bar Nex's mouth/lungfeel is unctuous, coating, the EBCreate BC100 tends to pull sharp, thin. I will tell you this: at night I wake up every three hours and hit my Strawberry Ice Air Bar Nex for fifteen straight minutes like a man huffing oxygen on a fast-crashing plane, or perhaps more precisely an asthmatic suffering a fatal asthma attack and attempting with increasingly frantic gasps and sucks to get anything out of an inhaler he knows to be empty, spent, a mere prop in the spectacle of his dying, and if you'd like to become exactly like me in every way, the EBCreate BC100 is a great place to start. It's less overpowering than the Air Bar Nex, and many of its flavors are just as appealing (their Watermelon Ice is worthy of particular notice but in my experience their Peach Ice and Sakura Grape have a lot to offer as well). Give it a shot!

Juul

4/5 Stars

I'd been hitting the Juul for years, two pods a day, when I learned I'd gone to sleepaway camp with the guy who'd invented it. I'd had a huge crush on his sister when I was twelve and vaguely recalled that this had bothered him. Maybe then and there he resolved to kill me slowly through a wholesale transformation of nicotine-inhalation technology. But no, I won't perpetuate that narrative—the one that would have you believe that vaping's worse for you than smoking. That's only true if, like me, you exclusively use disposable vapes. But I was a fervent Juuler in the summer of 2019 and still recall with great bitterness the mania that overtook the media and political class during the so-called "popcorn lung" epidemic. I took a lot of smug satisfaction back then in explaining to people that actually, the irreversibly singed lungs baffling ICU doctors across the country were the result of shoddily-assembled black market THC vapes, that Juul and its fine products had nothing to do with this ongoing and very serious crisis. It made no difference, the witch hunt continued. In the public imagination the company joined Theranos and Fyre Festival in the fast-growing pantheon of corporate Millennial deceit/hucksterdom. I personally tend to “believe the science” but felt kin to the anti-vaxxers on the day in 2022 that the government announced the ban. That very night I bought and tried a Vuse, at the time Juul's biggest competitor in the cartridge-based non-flavored vape space. On the basis of this experience alone—putting aside his other crimes—I'd condemn Joe Biden to hell. Nothing could match the magic of Juul's flagship flavor, Virginia Tobacco 5%, ideal precisely for its no-taste, its existence as a pure throat-hit. The formal ban of course barely lasted two days but the damage was done. I preemptively switched to flavoreds, applying yet another layer of clown makeup to a face you'd think could take no more of it. To vape at all is to debase oneself beyond hope of redemption but there are shades of self-ruin and I'd argue Juul's the lightest. There is dignity in ordering a non-alcoholic drink at the bar, a suggestion of past debauchery, demons battled and conquered; there is none in asking the bartender if they happen to have your preferred niche gas station energy drink on tap. I don't know what happened to the guy from my sleepaway camp—I think someone told me he cut out of the company early, bought a compound in Montana—but I hope, sincerely, that he's proud of what he’s built.