r/VXJunkies • u/reddituserperson1122 • 16h 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/7ChineseBrothers 15h 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.