Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@NintendoByNature Ah, that's a shame. Every dime wasted, is still throwing away money, no matter how rich you are, in my opinion. I personally only buy games I want or like, discount or not. And sometimes, games just either stay too expensive for too long, or for some reason or other, I didn't get around to buying them, so a discount period is more or less a double bonus for me, seeing as these games were already on my list, but now I only have to pay a fraction of what I would have had to pay for them.

For example: Steam World Heist and Steam World Dig. They were on my to buy list for the Wii U, because there's a physical version with both these games on it, but that costs €29.99/$33.53, while I now only paid €9/$10.06 in total for both games. That's an offer I simply couldn't refuse, even though I normally do prefer physical games.

I nearly always buy a Worms game as well. Except for the N64, I don't have any console or handheld that I don't have a Worms game for, so that's kind of an all-time favorite of mine. And with ratings as high as it got on just about any site, I really couldn't pass up Valkyria Chronicles, being a fan of nearly all type of strategy games.

And as a former Commodore Amiga fan, I've truly found a spiritual successor to Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge in Horizon Chase Turbo. That game is even better than I expected it to be, and a must buy for every classic racer fan.

@HobbitGamer. Ah... someone who understands the difference...
Thank you, kind sir.

@ThanosReXXX yep a shame indeed. I bought Celeste on a sale and I made it to the 5th stage or whatever. So I got far enough but I've yet to finish it. Eventually I'll go back but I have a ton to play right now.

@Tyranexx Yeah, malls are sadly not expected to last in general which is insane. They survive everywhere else in the world. They build strip centers with big boxes completely encasing the malls and then can't figure out why the mall can't survive. The 90's messed up the malls so badly here though. Back in the 70's and 80s when the malls were new they were almost bazaars. They had all kinds of weird stores and kiosks of all weird varieties. Something for everyone. Then in the 90's the remodeled all the malls into sanitarium-white and filled them entirely with women's clothing stores and little else, most of which were all owned by the same 4 companies. So when it appealed to less people, and then those 4 companies faltered and closed stores it was like 6 stores at a time in every mall in the country. The's the retail equivalent of the Irish potato famine. So now we have sprawling big-boxes on every street corner. And they still have the same 10 stores in every center.

@ThanosReXXX Fry bacon with no ventilation and see what happens. But not just that, just stick a whole chicken breast in a pan with a little oil. Smoke is smoke. Haze is haze. If you have to scrub a constant film of grease off your walls weekly you're doing it wrong. So much for Europe doing things smarter....

Still your ventilation is better than you indicate. If I cook something that does leave that "haze" it's going to be 3+ days that when you walk in from outside you smell food. That's not a normal house (here) If I cook a pan of has browns (potatoes...that need to be browned....with some onions...in oil.... you're going to smell it a few days.) And that's with the recirculating/charcoal filtration hood.

Yeah, the "diet" sodas always confused me....nothing about that seemed wise. Though I know plenty of people that chug them and are bean-pole thin. I've never tolerated that stuff. I didn't even like corn syrup soda (New Coke! All these things these kids missed....imagine life without remembering the New Coke travesty! )

As for Nutella...yeah...everything here is sweeter. Even Coke is made with a different sweeter recipe for US distribution than the rest of the world. And it's all corn syrup. or worse. Nutella here isn't like the european one. Cadbury eggs aren't like the British ones. I remember the British ones before Hershey got the contract....it was like a whole other food. Everything that's mass manufactured sweets is too sweet here. I go for dark chocolate, bakery cakes and the like. People that know to temper the sweetener. Supermarket cakes....eeewwwww.....the icing is like eating a Jolly Rancher (which people seem to love here, and the scent alone nauseates me.) I miss European Nutella and Cadbury. It's pretty much impossible to find here anymore since it got popular. All you can find is the nasty American one even in little importer stores. I think Amazon has it for like a million dollars a jar from scalpers in Europe.

Phones: I don't do contract phones, I just do prepaid and buy the phone outright. Why "finance" things in payments. If I can't buy it now I don't want to gamble that I can "buy it" over 2 years. I still don't understand the value of a phone contract other than "interest free financing for qualified buyers." A 2 year commitment because I can't actually afford the thing I want to buy doesn't sound appealing.

Public transit: I dream of an all public transit future. Self driving cars can't come fast enough. Eff cars. It's not 1925 anymore. That was fine when there was one car per family and only men drove to work every day and there was half the population here and less than half in Europe. BUT public transit here......is different. Busses are ghetto mobiles where everyone else is someone you don't really want to be in a confined space with. Taxis are....well...taxis, and trains are imaginary things that we thought existed, and that show about Thomas tells us they may have, but we're pretty sure they went extinct when the Triceratops did. In major major metros they exist. Outside of them, they don't. And the light rail was destroyed in the 1950s by Goodyear, Firestone, and GM to force people to buy more cars and parts. What's left is very regional. Some locales have quality but sparse rails. I bet in Seattle or San Fran busses are actually nice. Try it in Manhattan or DC sometime and you will SWIM back to Europe

I've heard even Chicago is dreamy compared to the East Cost cities! That's like saying "I'm going to upgrade and move to Cambodia!"

@HobbitGamer I call it smoke if it reduces visibility. A visible haze is still a visible haze.

Seconded on the living paycheck to paycheck assessment. Cost of living makes no sense in America. You should not have to spend half of your paycheck to not live in a shoebox in a unsafe part of town (or have to commute 2 hours to avoid that). I'm a country girl and I swear I'm starting to understand my father so much more now (he has lived in the same town his entire life, he travels some but rarely, yet his house was paid off by his late twenties while I'm in my early 30s and even a crack shack is a pipe dream right now). The bad thing is short of being in section 8/affordable housing (which should be a standard and not a qualification but ok) most of us spend most of our money on just keeping a roof over our heads and the lights on...and if you have student loans still like most of my age group...you are just watching your life go down the drain with a retirement that you won't be able to survive looming. People like to state it's just living outside your means, but it really isn't feasible in today's economy at least if you want to be safe where you live. The middle class is being priced out of existence and there is really no room for us among the poor.

Agreed with NES's assessment about how Americans eat. We eat fast food because our jobs/lives don't allow for cooking and when we do go grocery shopping the dollar doesn't go anywhere if you eat fresh food (I really really miss my garden), that is one of your biggest monthly expenses even if you go to a cheapo grocery store. Also agreed on the restaurant habits. I don't eat meals consistently, currently (I don't have the time or budget to do meal prep currently) so half of the time if I eat out its because you essentially can get 2 sometimes 3 meals for less than it would cost for you to buy ingredients. Except fast food joints, they cost way too much for what you get unless they have a dollar menu, but that is like eating out of a trash can (imo) so I try to avoid that unless I'm really broke and haven't eaten all day.

I didn't realize that American Nutella is different from European Nutella, but its been several decades since I'd eaten the European version.

The funny part is that I would be considered gainfully employed if I just listed my salary (I make more than both of parents combined did at the same age...), but between rent (and I live in a undesirable place right now...it is the cheapest and smallest place I could find that dosn't involve me moving to the absolute ghetto) and student loans. My effective income is about 40 percent of what I earn, before bills and required expenses like gas/vehicle upkeep and food. The "American Dream" (I am a minority so I've never really taken that concept at face value and without a truck load of salt) is not sustainable in today's economy; not that it ever was, a great deal of the house, car and a dog people were subsidized by government programs, many that were not available to minorities.

@NEStalgia But that's just the thing, my friend: I've already been trying to tell you for the last couple of pages, that I experience no such thing: no visible phenomena, other than the ones I described (steam, and translucent, fatty clouds when adding water to a pan of meat to make gravy).

As for the ventilation: might be better than any of us think, but it's side-on ventilation, built into the wall, connected to a system of pipes/tubes, that runs through all floors of the building.

In my kitchen, I have two of them:

And they work perfectly. Them sucking up all the "smoke" as well as any dust in the air does make for a rather nasty mix of fatty dust clumps, so you do need to keep them clean, but then again: even if I would have had a hood, then I'd also need to keep that clean, because even with disposable filters, you'd still need to clean the hood itself as well, once you replace them.

Anyway, enough of that. Concerning those bone-thin, diet Coke chugging people you know: that's a simple one: it's all the bad stuff eating away at their insides, and decalcifying their bones. Before long, you will only be able to see them from the front, because they'll either be paper thin or dead in a decade or so...

Good to know about the Nutella thing. I'll now make a picture of the copious amounts available in my local super market, and post that every time you're trying to bug me, just to annoy you right back...

As for public transport: I kinda figured it was like that, although the being in a confined space with people that you don't want to be around, is basically the same thing in public transport everywhere, but it's a mindset, and you can either constantly focus on that, or just put in some earplugs and play music, and be in your own world, like I do. It's just a means to an end, not an experience in and of itself, that you should necessarily enjoy.

I do now envision you living in Japan, and becoming hopelessly stressed, because if you think public transport in Europe or the US is bad and/or crowded, then you've got another thing coming...

And finally, the whole contract phone thing: I understand and respect the people that don't want to be tied to any provider, much less being tied to a subscription for a fixed period of time, but for me personally, that's the lesser of the two evils, when having to choose to either cough up several hundreds of euros all at once, or simply to pay a bit extra on top of the monthly sim card costs, which I'll have anyway.

I'm currently paying €20 a month, all inclusive, 1GB data, 270 call minutes, based on a two year subscription with Vodafone. And yes, in total, it's more expensive than just paying €300 for the phone itself and then taking a sim-only subscription, although not by much. Most sim-only subscriptions here, with the same bundle as I have, cost about €7 a month, so the difference in total cost is €12.

And I'll gladly pay that, in exchange for the convenience of only having to pay a small amount of money, by automatic monthly transfer, and not having to worry about having to sell an arm and a leg to buy a phone first, and then having to look for a decent sim-only alternative...

@ThanosReXXX They don't look like they should be effective but they sound remarkably effective indeed if they actually accumulate gunk to clean and suck up the fat clouds. That's a marked difference to my situation: Zero external exhaust of any sort whatsoever. Any fat cloud that goes in the air will be there coating something until I die. Cleaning counters is one thing, but it embeds in the carpeting, upholstry, everything. The recirculator supposedly traps some, but it doesn't, it blows most of it back out. Aluminum mesh only catches so much without proper exhaust.

I agree with the diet soda though!

I shall weep every time I see the real Nutella I used to know so well.......

As for transport, yeah...I don't mean just people you don't want to be around. I mean mostly derelicts, junkies, and general "undesirables"/social outcasts, trash EVERYWHERE. It's more of a prison transport with random pickups. Obviously if you're in a downtown during lunch rush it's much more respectable. But that's the outside cases.

Actually I had to laugh, I mentioned I was playing Train Sim World on XBox. They really modeled it accurately. On the LIRR and Amtrack NEC they show the stations and trackage as they really are. Cracked, crumbling, dirty, garbage everywhere. Everything looks unsanitary. (the trains are rendered a lot nicer than reality though...but the stations are accurate.) Then they render German trains and everything is relatively clean, orderly, and shiny. British train stations are somewhere between, not quite as unnaturally clean as the German stuff, but not looking like a a screenshot of an Arkham game quite like LIRR and NEC.

Oh, I know what the Japanese transit system looks like . Crowded is an understatement, people volunteer to be stuffed in by force just to make the train. But the weird thing is it's clean and orderly, and is filled with relatively "normal" people (the groping issues aside.) Here, you generally have a good idea the people on the other end are going to mug you, you just don't know at which station. (Not joking, the one route I did used to take was fairly famous for random muggings and murders aboard.....and you do NOT want to step off in most areas it travels....) that wasn't the area with the Cayennes, that's the area the Cayenne owners bypass and park under their law firm's building. Despite the crowds, I truly envy Japan's transit system. That thing is a work of art.

That's interesting pricing. They don't really have many plans like that here anymore. Mostly they sell "unlimited" calling only, with different big buckets for data. 1GB plans are defintiely the very budget end of things here. I actually do have one with limited minutes, but it's an ancient grandfathered plan from a promotion, they don't sell them anymore ,and I'll probably ditch it soon since the promos sometimes end up the same price to get more with unlimited calling. If only they fix their broken website. But, man, even prepaid $25/mo is probably the cheapest you'll get away with here....and honestly most plans are $35-50.

That makes a little more sense. Most people still do the contract payments thing. I've just never understood it. But then I don't understand credit and financing like rjejr and I talked about. I either have the cash or I don't and shouldn't buy it....just the way I view the world (land/houses being the exception since it takes a lifetime to raise the money for it...)

@NEStalgia They may not look like much, but if you see the installation behind it, in the cupboard (or more precisely: boiler closet) right behind that wall, you'll understand. And you can turn the middle part, making the opening either smaller or bigger, resulting in more air inlet. Basically, it's just a cover for an open, circular hole in the wall, that connects to a giant, automatic and building-wide air outlet/exhaust system:

Funny thing about my smart phone bundle: I hardly ever finish or even touch any of it. When at home,
I exclusively use wifi for data/internet, and I use WhatsApp for calling and texting, so most of that 1GB data and 270 call minutes remain untouched, so it's more than enough for me.

Bus trips over there sound a lot less appealing than movies and series make them seem...
Over here, things like the old Greyhound bus lines are often romanticized, traveling cross-country coach style,
and such. But obviously, intercity travel is an entirely different beast.

But even over here, we do have certain stops, especially in the outskirts of the city, and the industrial areas, that you wouldn't really want to either be waiting on a bus for, or getting out of a bus at, so in that respect, I can relate to some extent.

Well I feel like a chump. About 5 hours into re 0 I quit. Too damn hard. So I just started remake instead which i beat a looooong time ago. Doing it on easy though. Don't feel like stressing lol

@NintendoByNature That reminds me of when I played Metroid Prime 3 in Veteran (normal) difficulty. Since I have beaten both Prime 1 and Prime 2 in that same difficulty, I thought I could also handle it in Prime 3. Though I do cleared the game, I had an unexpected hard time with one of the last bosses 😅 Still a great game, though I have only played Prime 3 in Normal difficulty since then 😂 (here normal is the easy mode, veteran is the normal mode and hyper mode is hard mode).

@SamusLv7 feel like crap about it lol. I play alot of games in hard or normal mode. In Fact I think I played the original re In normal years ago. Just can't hack it anymore in my old age I guess 😂. Still wana play the game though so easy for both re and re0 it is for me now

@NintendoByNature Hey don't feel bad. Perhaps you need to rest a bit of playing games in normal/hard mode. Maybe you should try it next year to see if you can beat it.

@SamusLv7 thanks man. It's more tedious than hard i guess. No ammo or herbs and running around trying not to get bit isn't fun. Rather have tons of ammo and herbs to take down all the zombies. I'll at least try to finish remake before I hop to something else. Still playing thru castlevania collection games too

Man, I would LOVE to get home before 6 PM (often later) at some point this week. X_X ... Maybe tomorrow.

@ThanosReXXX The thing with me and phones (electronics in general) is that I try to be REALLY careful with them. I invest in cases and screen protectors when needed. Despite all my caution, I'm still pretty clumsy at times; I've been known to trip on air. Some of it is admittedly how I walk; I've had my fair share of rolled ankles.

I can agree with wanting something up to date, which is why I did upgrade my phone last year. It was still receiving the occasional security update from MS, but they were few and far between. I was still running Windows Phone 8.1 and refuses to upgrade to WP 10 since I had read it could be quite buggy. Shortly after I decided to jump off that failing wagon, they announced that Windows Phone was essentially dead. 😛 It's a shame because I loved that phone, but the lack of essential apps and the failing support were starting to kill me.

I know that my phone is still supported. I'll likely upgrade again in a couple of years, but for now I'm still pleased with it. It accomplishes everything I need it to.

Honestly, my main issues with public transportation stem from sanitation and overcrowding. Public areas = germ central. Being packed in with people like a sardine doesn't help with my anxiety level either. As for taxis...those are expensive.

I could adapt to public transportation in the right environments I suppose. I'm not expecting the Taj Mahal, but some basic cleanliness would be nice. I think a certain Weird Al song summarizes my feelings well.

Also...Yes. A good part of the reason some of our food is so sweet is because it's full of corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup. They're cheaper AND sweeter than using normal sugar, but they're definitely higher processed ingredients.

Edit: I sympathize on the sales. On the one hand, sales are when I pick up a lot of games. On the other, if a lot of games on my wishlist get discounts....

@NEStalgia From how u understand it, indoor malls are slowly failing due to the very high rent. Another factor here is that a lot of the shopping moved towards the north end of town where a lot of the through traffic is funneled. It's clogged with strip malls, hotels, and restaurants.

The part of town the old mall is in is getting a little rough too. Not only did someone bust into the locked mall with a vehicle they lifted to rob a jewelry store, but the dollar amount of how much they stole wouldn't have been worth all that hassle IMO. That part of town is still fairly safe during the day, but it's best to avoid it at night. Plenty of vandalism and car break-ins (Mostly attempts, thankfully).

Other than a small handful of chain stores, the rest of the units are either empty or house local small-time businesses.

Do anyone have eshop 3ds redeem money codes to giveaway if you do my friend code is 5172-6620-7878 username natsu'neko add me and tell me when you add me give me your friend code so i can add you back then, use swapdoodle to send it to me.

Anyone have $100 burning a hole in their pocket?

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/pdi-check-3ds/

That can't be right...

After clicking on your link @klingki everything looked so fake that i was afraid to click on anything. But after a little research i can confirm that it is indeed correct.

@BacklogBlues I’m sure I was just as surprised as you! I do a daily check of the game store on Nintendo’s website as it’s the only way I can really keep up with everything as it comes out. I think I hit three stages of shock when I saw this one. First when I saw the price, then when I saw it was a 3DS game, and then again when I saw the screenshots and the description. I feel like it has to be a pricing error, unless there’s something I’m missing.

My only guess @klingki is that since it's a game to check your eyesight they might figure that a Dr.'s office, School, nursing home ect. might buy it. Therefore they think they can charge more for it. But really just like you i don't know.

Well it's official. Today I recieved the largest purchase order in company history. Now all i need is my boss to say, " how do you want to celebrate ?" To that I'd say, " take me to a Brazilian steakhouse and let me feast on pounds of meat and expensive red wine

@Ryu_Niiyama I missed your excellent post yesterday!

".you are just watching your life go down the drain with a retirement that you won't be able to survive looming. "

And then they can't figure out why birth rates are down and seem generally confused by this, and the solution is to import more and more young people from elsewhere and making said in-debted native population pay for them by taking more money from them.

" The middle class is being priced out of existence and there is really no room for us among the poor."

That's probably the best put, most simple version I've heard. That's really it. You can't move up, there's no actual stability in the "middle", and you're not poor enough to be "poor", so you're trapped forever in a nowhere place. At times I wonder if absolute poverty is an upgrade. They give you things taken from other people. Plenty of people in that bracket know how to "work the system" to get the handouts, then work minimum wage tax free under the table (illegally but "it's only wrong if you get caught"), and end up with more actual discretionary income than I do.

"The funny part is that I would be considered gainfully employed if I just listed my salary (I make more than both of parents combined did at the same age...), "

Yeah that's the thing. I'm making what 20 years ago I'd considered a dream - endgame. I'm set if I make that in my life. And now it's the "new minimum wage", especially around here, where the average is almost double that now. But I have to keep up in spending with those people because that's what's around me now.

"house, car and a dog people were subsidized by government programs, many that were not available to minorities."

Not really. there was some of that, but that's not the bulk of it. The reality was EVERYONE could work a middle class income. "Middle class" now means "professional class" for only the most skilled and specially trained. Back then "working class" was "middle class" and "professional class" wasn't that far above it. Now it's stratified, where "middle class" consists of "professional" and is more closer to what wealthy used to be before wealthy became more akin to medieval feudal lords, and "working class" is still called "middle class" for political purposes but is actually closer to "poverty." Back then anybody with an able body could work at any factory or physical labor job, and make true middle class money, pension, retirement, and only ONE person in the household needed to do it, the other took care of the household (No offense, but I still loathe the whole movement of women in the workforce, not because it needed to stay "men work, women raise the kids" but because it was a scorched earth program that played into the hands of the bankers and industrialists that doubled the workforce and halved the pay each....rather than changing the standard from men work, women raise the family to "it can be either" it changed it to what we currently have... nobody raises the family unless you can afford to import a nanny, everyone else gets to pay for it, and without two incomes you can't get by. That's one of the root causes. The other is that now to be anything but minimum wage, you need to be "professional", there's no working class middle class.

The longer root of that however, is simply overpopulation. Supply and demand (I've mentioned this in other threads you weren't participating in, but.) The European and American golden ages in the 50's and 60's were largely due to massive population reduction from the wars. The Renaissance was largely due to population reduction of the Great Pestilence. Too much labor supply, and gains in efficiency means less demands, means much of the human race is simply excess that's unneeded and each has little to no value unless possessing a significantly above average ability. To fix the economy, a purge is required. War, famine, plague, one or the other or all three. Mass extinction is the only real proven solution to the conundrum. China's working on it though. Please look forward to that.

@ThanosReXXX By the way, speaking of American food, I noticed like you mentioned, all the chicken packages state "contains up to 15% solution." A.K.A. yes, they inject it with fluid here. I"m assuming it's a brine, mostly meant to preserve shelf life. So our produce is filled with waterproof pesticides designed to annihilate organic matter, our water is filled with heavy metals, and our meat is filled with brine (and who knows what else.) Why not just eat fast food? That's the other thing. Produce starts losing it's nutrients the moment it's cut from the plant. In a few days it's pretty much dead no matter how "green" it looks. Most of our produce is 1-3 weeks old by the time we get it, especially in the East. The overwhelming majority comes from what @Morpheel would consider the extreme south. Chile, Peru, Guatemala. Then it sits in customs quarantine for a week or so in CA. Then it's shipped ground for another week across the US, typically unrefrigerated (and might get frozen in winter in a truck/boxcar), then it sits in a distribution warehouse for some period of days, then it goes in another truck to stores where it sits in a stockroom for a day or more, before going out on the shelf where it sits for unknown periods of time. It may look fresh, but the produce has roughly zero nutritional value by the time you eat it. Odds are the potato chips have more actual nutrients. The grain has all the nutrients burned out of it by the high speed processing rollers, though that's likely true in Europe too (and same for polished rice in Asia.) And meat is typically frozen even if it's served "fresh" in the store. Same for fast food, lots of stores from the low end to the high end advertize "fresh, never frozen!" That's a lie and a technicality that is "true according to the letter of the law". Meat, and most other fresh food products except produce, are required by USDoT law to be frozen during transport over the road over state lines. That means unless it was grown locally (usually it wasn't, and if it was it's the extremely expensive stuff, or you live in one of the big supplier states for a product, like Texas for beef etc) it was certainly frozen before you got it. It would be illegal not to have been. So then how can they advertise both in chains and supermarkets "fresh, never frozen?" when the entire meat department was frozen? Legal verbiage. The FDA required measurement for commercially frozen food is below 0F. The USDoT required measurement is below 32F, the freezing point of water. So the food is transported below 32F, which doesn't qualify for being considered frozen by the FDA. Therefore the food was never frozen. Even though it was frozen for weeks.

Similarly a can of Crisco, which is, quite literally, a can of transfat...that's what Crisco is, a can of hydrogenated oil which is what transfat is, proudly advertises NO TRANSFAT! And TRANSFAT FREE! How? By adjusting the portion sizes. Government requirement for the Nutrition Facts sheet says that less than 1% of daily total can be rounded down to 0%. So they adjusted the printed serving size down to half a teaspoon. Half a teaspoon of pure transfat is less than 1% of your daily recommended total transfat. Therefore it can be printed as 0%. Therefore the 2lb can of transfat contains no transfat. And you wonder why we're stressed, confused, and unhealthy? Of course in CA, a lot of your produce was fresh. We tore down all our farms and build Porche dealers, corporate campuses, Home Depots, and 250 luxury carriage homes atop them. So we just get our "really fresh" produce from CA where we still get it a week and a half or so after you would have eaten it and it has no more nutrients left. And the rest comes from Chile and El Salvador. The meat probably came from China, and may or may not contain fluorocarbons, but we're not allowed to know because they removed the law that had to tell us, but it was definitely "fresh, never frozen!"

I.E. there's no discernible difference between freshly made food and McDonalds. They're both about as nutritious and poisonous.

NOW, as for your range hood, that makes a lot more sense. It doesn't look like much on the outside, but on the inside it's clear that it's what we'd call a "downdraft." That's a normal active ventilation system that many people used to get instead of hoods. They were popular in the 80's and 90's....now they're recognized as sucking (or more to the point, not sucking....) and not being nearly as efficient as a hood, but they're overall pretty decent, and I'm betting your building-wide system is significantly more effective than the consumer Whirlpool downdrafts of the 1980s here. For all practical purposes you have an external exhausting hood, even if it's not a hood. And that explains it. For me. No ventilation. Nothing. Not of any sort. All air in the room stays in he room forever. There's an aluminum mesh (or for more premium a stainless baffle) that separates the larger grease droplets so the air coming out isn't heavily grease laiden (the baffles work better than the meshes), and a charcoal filter to absorb some percentage of odor. But where your system DOES pull out whatever minor smoke emerges from the pan, the aluminum/baffles do not, the smoke just goes right through into the room. (Yes, you have smoke, you don't see it, and it's exhausted with your system.) Mine stays in the house and spreads. Additionally exhausting food odors externally is effective. Charcoal only can do so much, most of the food odor is just blown through the house.

These silly systems are common in the US where electric stoves are used. (Plus if you have an electric coil stove, you're going to burn stuff....the uneven heat guarantees that. I don't use the coil anymore I just have the one induction hob, but the exhaust issue remains.

If you want to experience the fun, block up your fan pipes. Put a desktop oscilating fan on your counter, and put an aluminum mesh and charcoal pad filter in front of it. Happy cooking. Welcome to my kitchen and that of may Americans. (Actually don't do that since you have gas and that could be very dangerous.....even here with gas, external ventilation is mandatory.) But you get the idea!

EDIT: Caveat for Ryu, when I said things like "everyone" could work factory etc, I realize there's the minority issue, and for the large concept I'm blithely ignoring that, because that was another disastrous scorched earth issue where the problem back then was that the American way of life was denied to specific groups systematically. And when Civil Rights became a thing, instead of the effort going into changing it so that it was no longer denied to said groups and was truly available to all, the effort went into destroying it so it was available to none instead.....and a good chunk of that was funded/provoked by the USSR...... We truly did lose the cold war.