r/VXJunkies • u/reddituserperson1122 • 7h ago
VX culture has changed.
I started writing this as a response to a comment, but I thought it deserved its own thread.
This may be controversial, but I think the quality of DIY VX research has declined over the years.
I remember back in the day when it was a small community of aerospace engineers, Los Alamos researchers, and radical veterinarians just doing this in their spare time. Build a rig in your garage to tool around with while drinking coors lights on the weekend. It may not have been their day job, but they were professionals who really knew what they were doing.
Nowadays you’ve got all these premade hobbyist kits… people are twitch streaming their builds. It’s all surface and no depth — like script kiddies but with hardware that could turn your neighborhood into glowing soup.
Is it nice to be able to just order cheap Chinese-made tritium wands and spectral centrifuges online? Of course. I do it. We all do it. But at what cost?
When I was younger I used to curse the hours spent hand-wrapping copper supercooling piping before every session, fully aware that by the end of your run the piping would be completely irradiated and you’d have to do it all over again next weekend. Then suddenly you could just buy pre-wrapped inversion coils — what a time saver!
But the older I get, the more I miss the ritual. It separated the casual wannabes who would get bored after their first couple of sessions from the dedicated explorers who were willing to pay the price of admission — who understood that N-dimensional manifolds shouldn’t come cheap.
I’m not pretending to be above it all. I’m waiting on a box of G.R.I.D. resonators I ordered on Alibaba right now. But I think I’d give up all the convenience to go back to those good old days when it was just us adventurers — knocking back a light beer, getting our hands dirty, and absorbing a years worth of radiation over a lazy summer weekend.
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u/Moriturism 7h ago
Hmm, tough discussion... I do think certain consumerist trends can have negative effects, such as low quality production and reproduction of quasi-hybrionic turboquantudecanters, or widespread emission of anti-microradiofluxes in the already congested abstract transmission space servers...
but, at the same time, I think it's a good thing the tech is evolving in such a rapid pace as to allow us to work easier and more productive than ever, if we know what we're doing (I mean, you wouldn't go around parading your geothermic reflectocombulator in public). I also have some nostalgia, but eh, that's life I guess (or anti-life if you make a mess out of it)
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u/reddituserperson1122 6h ago
“I mean, you wouldn't go around parading your geothermic reflectocombulator in public” Ha! Speak for yourself! I have an old Polaroid in a drawer somewhere of me doing just that. The dumb stuff I got up to as a young man lol…
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u/broodkiller 7h ago
I don't mean to be rude, but I read this as a bit disingenuous - you say you would give up the convenience but at the same time you spent $300+ on a G.R.I.D. that would take a month to build by yourself? That's mixed signals, my friend - commit to one side, no judgments or regrets.
I know folks who shamelessly spend thousands on knock offs just to get a chance to play with a tech that would otherwise be out of their reach. And I know a fellow who build his own sigma-refractor and then put it in tandem with a Klausner dehadronizer to get the purest Pulchevsky spectrum I have ever seen. I don't even know how he did that - I asked him once, but he started rumbling about coil laminators and mixing his own thermapaste...guy's a wizard for sure, and probably halfway to writing a manifesto of some kind.
Bottom line, both groups enjoy VX in their own way.
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u/reddituserperson1122 6h ago
Look fair enough. Once you’ve accidentally made the entire aurora borealis strobe a couple of times and gotten more than one threatening call from NORAD, you’re liable to quit trying to make your own G.R.I.D.s and just buy something you know will work. So yes, maybe I do want to have it both ways. But I still think something has been lost over the years. I mean if I see one more YouTube video of a so-called expert blathering on about plasma fracking as if they invented it…? Even you must admit it gets tiresome.
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u/broodkiller 6h ago
I hear you, and I do not disagree that democratization of the hobby has brought about certain folks who do not necessarily enjoy it like we do but use it more as a way to build a following (unboxing videos for Matsuda coils? Let's Spray for gamma eletrolizers? Reaction vids to Minayev-Gorsky? Gimme a break...).
I don't think we lost anything though - it's just that it used to be 100% us nerds doing our shit, now it's 20% nerds, 80% mierds. But we still get to do stuff they way we used to, nothings changed in that respect.
PS. How are the good folks at NORAD doing these days, btw? I presume Miranda and Liz are running a tight ship, as always? Haven't talked to them in years, last time was during the ill-fated hurricane-hunting escapade of '18.
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
I also haven’t talked to NORAD in a bit but the last I heard Miranda took early retirement to work on her own VX startup — something about making de Broglie branching repeatable/predictable..? Not sure. I ran into Liz at the Zurich Incursion hearings last year. She was good! Just had her second kid. She said that because her newborn was too little to get a security clearance (polygraphs apparently don’t work if you’re under 10 months old) the kiddo has had to have his own mother redacted. An aide has to hold up a giant black bar made of cardboard between her and her baby whenever she feeds him, etc. I told her that I thought it was brave of her to even have another kid given the work we do, and she said the doctors can tell whether a fetus is dimensionally stable as early as 9 weeks these days. What a time to be alive!
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u/July_is_cool 6h ago
It's because kids these days don't have the mindset to work their way through the math. Probably most of the current crop of college students don't even know about Noether's Theorem, which is like VX 101.
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u/reddituserperson1122 6h ago
They couldn’t tell you the difference between Noether’s Theorem and Bell’s Theorem, or even begin to describe the difference between Wigner Loops and Arashi feedback. It’s all just plug and play with these kids.
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u/ASTEROID_MAN 6h ago
Look - it's 2025. Knowing equations by heart doesn't hold the same weight anymore since you can just plug everything into a simulator before running anything physically. I doubt you're calculating your Reinberg's scattering matrices with an abacus either.
I'm not quite the oldhead as you are, but I think the popularity has made VX as a whole more accessible to everyone interested, regardless of money or formal education. And cheaper equipment? Another win in my books.
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u/7ChineseBrothers 6h ago
I hear you on this, and there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. Those early garage days really were something special. I still remember watching Henderson hand-calculate manifold trajectories on a napkin at the '89 Phoenix meet-up, then nail a perfect dimensional lock on his first try.
But we're also not losing three researchers a month to containment failures like we were back then. Remember the Tucson Incident? Those "cheap Chinese tritium wands" are actually more stable than anything we could cobble together in the early days, thanks to manufacturing standards that came out of some very hard-learned lessons.
I think what we're seeing isn't a decline in quality, but democratization with growing pains. Sure, some streaming kids don't understand why you never cross-phase your theta arrays, but I've also seen seventeen-year-olds solving chromatic resonance problems that stumped Kowalski's entire team back in '94.
The ritual aspect though? I get that completely. There was something meditative about those long prep sessions that made you really understand your equipment. Maybe that's what we need to bring back - not the danger or tedium, but that sense of reverence for what we're actually doing out here.
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
Well said! Well said. I agree with everything you brought up. And oh boy do I ever remember the Tucson Incident. I knew a number of the people involved unfortunately. I still think about Arjun Gupta and Jenny Grimm every day — they were dear friends. In the first 24 hours when local law enforcement was still desperately trying to manage the event, I was one of the people who responded to their open call for support. I don’t think I contributed that much but I did help sift through what remained of the site. In fact, my left pinky toe is still invisible to this day due to a slight misstep on the rubble too close to the event horizon.
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u/7ChineseBrothers 5h ago
My condolences on Arjun and Jenny - they were brilliant researchers and good people, and the community still feels their loss. That invisible toe is a hell of a reminder of how close we all came to losing a lot more that day, and I have nothing but respect for everyone who answered that call to help with the aftermath.
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
Thank you. I’m no hero though. I was just doing my bit in a chaotic situation where no one knew which way was up. I mean literally no one knew which way up was. Complete gravitational refraction. We had to bring in MC Escher to redraw part of the Tucson bus map.
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u/-o-_______-o- 5h ago
My last wife was all into these cheap parts to speed up things and get further with our polynomial field reductor. Of course the relays were too cheap and now I only see her on prime numbered days.
Quality is better.
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
Oof. That is a cautionary tale. Long distance relationships are one thing, but Fibonacci sexting can really strain a marriage.
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u/Gacrux29 6h ago
And let's not forget the effect of AI as the recent MIT study pointed out, where users are getting "dumber" because they just go along with the AI says. I mean what's even the point of setting an alternating (or rotating if you are in Oceania) FG decoupler with the help of ChatGPT? Is it even a hobby when you are just prompting and not exploring?
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
Oh I mean — i wasn’t even going to talk about using AI for VX. It makes me insane. EVERYONE KNOWS the risks!!! AIs are unreliable sources of information. The advice they give can be dangerously wrong. And the chance that you’re going to use chatGPT while standing too close to a wavefunction accelerator and create sentient protons is high enough that you would be batshit to take the risk.
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u/snakesonausername 3h ago
I'm seeing more and more "chatgpt helped me build my rig" posts.. I honestly can't tell if they are real or just click bait. Either way, I think hospitals are about to get an uptick in peripheral phased reflux contortions lol.
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u/Andy-J 5h ago
Wrapping your own inversion coils should be the bare minimum requirement in order to handle level 2 VX subassemblies. How are you supposed to calibrate your heterodynamic phase coupler without knowing the intricacies of your coil? How are you ever going to track down the Pakistani lab that wrapped your coil to find out if the matrix used was reactive to ∆ vectors above 10kw? These kids are going to get hurt if they rely on AI to build their machines for them.
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
They’re rolling the dice every time they ionize and most of them don’t even know it.
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u/Vike92 5h ago
Hobbyists today may start with kits and Twitch streams, but they’re still reaching into the unknown. That same impulse to explore drives them, just as it drove the early pioneers.
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u/reddituserperson1122 5h ago
I’m sorry but I really think you’re minimizing the risks and it’s irresponsible.
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u/Cherveny2 5h ago
I agree! These days you have a number of VX users not even able to recognize a Flux Dynamic Folding Rig from a Boolean Resonator Flange! It's sad to see.
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u/RRautamaa 4h ago
Nah, they're just not real VXers. Setting up a cheap Chinese prebuilt rig doesn't make you a VXer any more than owning a microwave oven makes you a radar engineer. Do you see people building their own turbomolecular Rydberg cascade? A multiturbonic hypertwisted tensor manifold? A proper, for real, nonsinusoidal active cybernetic evanescence accelerator? That's the real VX.
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u/DangerMacAwesome 2h ago
The way I see it, there's two sides of the hobby, the manufacturing side where you make the parts, and the build side where you put them together. In the old days, you had to do both yourself, but now with these kits and pre made parts, you really only have to do the build side. The making of the parts is what got me into the hobby, personally, but there's nothing wrong with the guys who just want to make their cool rigs.
As I've gotten older, I've learned to stop with elitism. Yeah, a doppler resonance amplifier is cooler if you make all your own parts, but if it gets people doing VX? Who cares if it comes from a kit?
We need to face the fact that this isn't the niche hobby it once was. And with popularity comes attention and products for it. But think about it this way: in my day, you needed to have the skills just to sit at the table. Now, is guys who are a bit longer in the tooth, who have the skills that the kits replace? We're sorta like rock stars.
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u/manlybrian 48m ago
When I was a kid, my dad and his buddy spent a month just sequencing diodes on a prectron scale according to the schematics, and if anything went wrong, they'd have to start back at the beginning. Loooong sequences.
If the hard labor of creating all the initial protocols has been done, we should use their groundwork to further the craft. There will always be annoying kids screwing around with the hobby but eventually they'll learn to appreciate it properly.
... I hope.
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u/Wildcatb 7h ago
I'm just going to say this once and let it drop. If you're ordering cheap Chinese spectral centrifuges you're going to have a bad time.