In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
in VX circles there’s been a debate for at least 20 years whether it’s better to use copper or aluminium foil to isolate duractance attenuators. obviously aluminium is more of a nuisance because you have to add ridges to the foil, but it’s a lot cheaper. where it gets annoying is when the copper purists start talking about “ripple current” and “second laplacian instabilities” and “metallic saponification”. like bitch, you are not running anywhere close to that kind of linearity on your shitty little taped-together Gravitias-5. or 4.9, i guess. pfft. just get a hobby knife and crease that aluminium.
anyway i recently started a VX community at !deltahunters@feddit.nu, swing by.
What is VX?
oh boy what isn’t it
jokes aside it stands for Volt-Xoccula, one of the major manufacturers of encabulators and related peripherals up until the mid 60’s when they were integrated into Dynac (then Dymec). their brand recognition meant that the logo was on basically every device sold up until the 90’s. it’s become sort of a pet name for the entire field for hobbyists, but of course the original VX-branded machines are still highly sought after.
Basically the purpose is stabilise phase variations in local crepuscular radiation patterns by using an electromechanical-chemical process known as encabulation, ramping up a plasmatic field by exciting a transfer medium such as argon into a toroidal state. the closer you can get to the tangent of the pattern, (which means the phase variance approaches zero) the higher the inverse rate of change, or “delta”. Since many of the big manufacturers have gone out of business, it’s became more of a niche field mostly kept alive by hobbyists strapping together whatever equipment they can scavenge. Shed science, basically.
If you want to be mean you can liken the community to audiophiles; like obviously the cleaner your ramp-up the higher you can get your delta before the pattern dissipates, but there are people who go nuts about these sorts of things, building weird-ass contraptions that they swear “filters the gaseous flux to upper-bound the side-fumbling problem” or whatever but don’t really do anything. It’s gone so far as to become a bit of an in-joke in the community, throwing in random nonsense with the jargon to see who catches on. it’s a force of habit really, we can’t help it.
but anyway, i’ve mostly been uploading older but relevant stuff from The Bad Site and photos i’ve taken. i’m not much of a VXer (i live in an apartment) but i still want a place to discuss it because i find fascinating to work with.
Man visiting that community definitely raised more questions than answers
This video might clear it up for you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
Or the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
wikipedia’s editors are notorious sticklers for details, all credit to them. they never allow primary sources, and when your community is so small, decentralised, and old as VX, primary sources is all you get. so any attempt to correct that page is just reverted immediately based on the ground rules.
it’s like if one guy made a working free energy device that powered his house but he couldn’t even get anyone to come and look at it because “free energy devices don’t exist”.
The wiki page is pretty notoriously full of inaccuracies, especially for small-scale personal VX setups - not really worth reading imo.
What I find both interesting and amusing is that I couldn’t even vaguely guess what that was all about, which means it’s either a very specific niche or a masterpiece of creative writing.
i pinned a video in the comm that should serve as an introduction. it’s from rockwell, so it’s specific to their products, but the principles are in there.
I was not aware. really entertained me 😆.
but why did you have to bash on people trying to obfuscate their ripple current. do you know how much of an issue it is especially with cheaper builds? so yes, copper any day
ferrules are cheap, my dude.
I’m impressed with how far you took this. I saw the YT video linked further down several months ago and I was well into it before I realized it was a joke.
took what