As a vaper I'm pretty boring. My greatest passion is DIY, which I'm heavily into. Most of my vape budget goes to supplies for that. No mechs, and I rarely use RDAs anymore. My main interest is maxing/refining what I have on hand, which in my case is a fleet of SMOK Tfv8's and IPV 5s bought in bulk during the big FDA scare of 2016. I've yet to have a glitch (flaking anodizing on a couple of the tanks excepted) from the 5s or 8s, so I'll stay with them till I've used up my supply. I do buy occasional new stuff, but it mostly just sits in reserve. My hands and mouth are so accustomed to the 5/8 that anything else feels "off". I'm sure I could rewick a Cloud Beast blindfolded. My ascent up the atty ladder has been from the old CE5 plastic things, to 1st gen Kayfuns, to Kanger subtanks, then on to Griffins and Aromamizers, with a lot of quirky RDAs sprinkled in between, but my first TFV8 put everything else into the retirement bin. I like the Cloud Beast. It has the perfect sized deck for the way I like to build, various SS dual Clapton configs in the .15 to .30 range, 3.5 - 4 mm that couldn't be jammed into the Griffin/Aromamizer. My sweet spot is 80 watts, but I occasionally venture higher. I tried my hand at spinning wire but did not find it enjoyable, not to mention I suck at it, so I use AVS wire now.
As a gamer, I go way back to the Atari 2600 days, and spent a fair amount of my youth in arcades. My son was 10 years old when the PS1 came out in Dec. 1994, and that was his Christmas gift. The first time I held a PS controller in my hand and played Twisted Metal was pure bliss. At one time we had over 100 PS games in our library. I can't even remember all of them, but the highlights were definitely the Resident Evil series, Twisted Metal 2, X-COM UFO Defense, and Final Fantasy 7. We were heavily into console gaming as it was the Golden Age of consoles. We had several PS1 (the first gen PS1 had overheating issues, we went through 5 of them), Sega Saturn, and N64 so I'm well-versed in games from that era. I moved on to PC gaming in 1998, but my son has always preferred consoles and is still a rabid gamer.
Our first online gaming experience was Descent. We played the living shit out of that series. I was hugely into Halo Combat Evolved as well. I was a member of the most prolific Halo racing clan, BFM, and played online for many years. My most cherished online gaming memories are of tourneys on our clan's Halo race servers. The comradre on those servers was just awesome. I was still playing when GameSpy shut down the servers, which basically imposed a death sentence on Halo 1. Sad to see it go, but I think it was Time. Double Kill! TRIPLE KILL! KILL-TACKULAR! will be with me till the day I die.
I play a variety of genres. I've spent a lot of time with the Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, more recently Planet Coaster, the Sim City games, Panzer General and its spinoffs, and anything remotely resembling X-COM. I also dig FPS and have played way more than I can recall, DOOM, Thief, Bioshock, or course Counter Strike and Unreal But open world RPGs are my main interest. I have every Elder Scrolls and Fallout game. Maybe I've devoted a year of my life just to Skyrim? My absolute number one favorite RPG (and possibly game) of all time is the STALKER series. If you've never heard of STALKER you're with 98% of the gaming population. STALKER is a 3 game series by Russian developers that came out in 2007 with Shadow of Chernobyl. The first two games were pretty buggy/glitchy, but the final game Call of Pripyat was a vast improvement. STALKER is the most immersive, dark, creepy, atmospheric game I've ever played. The series still has a sizable hardcore cult following, especially in Russia, and there are still mods being developed for it. I have tried every mod I can get my hands on. I've even played untranslated mods entirely in Russian and sat translating on my laptop to figure out what to do. It's that great of a game. The final game, Call of Pripyat, can be had on Steam for 20 bucks. If you like open world RPGs, try it.
Lately I've been playing a lot of Minecraft online, but I've never really clicked with the Minecraft community. Even on servers with thousands of other players, I always feel like I'm alone, so I generally stick to Skyblock and Survival modes. I like the Day Z mod, but everyone on that server seems to just want to PVP and not team. Minecraft as a game is awesome, but the online community lacks the comradre I'm used to. On Halo we put our clan tag after our name, were proud to bear it, and maintained respect for it through fair play and helpfulness to new players. There seems to be very little of that on Minecraft. The main issue I see with Minecraft is it's basically a Pay to Win architecture on most servers. I'm from the online era when skills were earned through tenacity, devotion and practice. You bought the game and made the most of what it had to offer. On Minecraft being good is simply a matter of buying a "Legendary Kit" for 30 bucks from the server owner. This is not what gaming is to me. I refuse to buy additional shit, thus I will always suck at PVP. Skyblock occupies me, but it's really no different than playing offline, except I get to see all the awesome shit other players that bought "VIP Crate Keys" built with the extra stuff they bought.
This was a fun trip down memory lane for me. Sorry so long.