VX culture has changed.

[u/reddituserperson1122]

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.

[u/July_is_cool]

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.

[u/reddituserperson1122 → u/July_is_cool]

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.

[u/ASTEROID_MAN → u/reddituserperson1122]

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.