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.
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.