I have been posting about this for years. It is the greatest threat to the fucking species and no one listens to me. For me it is a breaking point between my love of freedom, and my desire not to see everything I love infected with airborne rabies.
I know about them. I lurk on a lot of chemistry websites. Explosive chemistry is what got me into the field as a kid, but I never ended up making anything more powerful than flash powder really. Picric acid was only interesting because of the color. Hexamine perchlorate is really cool. If I could go back I would have also tried my hand at small amounts of NG.
I think that explosives are a great way to get people interested in chemistry as a profession. In fact, I know of multiple Nobel prize winners who liked to make drugs and explosives as teens. That is what got them into it. It is what gets lots of people into it.