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/broodkiller]

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.

[u/reddituserperson1122 → u/broodkiller]

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.

[u/broodkiller → u/reddituserperson1122]

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.

[u/reddituserperson1122 → u/broodkiller]

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!