I tend to say it as RAV (with a short a, as in cat) - ner (as in nerve) - vuhn (schwa between the v and n as opposed to a defined vowel). The ner+vuhn flow together, like a weird verb. We're nerv'n.
Technically, I'm actually saying my own URL "wrong", because it's actually ravne + rvn, both of which I also use as handles as well. Despite both being derived from "raven", I pronounce those constituent parts as "RAV (as before) - nuh (schwa)" and, uh, exactly what it sounds like trying to pronounce the consonants "rvn" as a word (stress on the R, unvoiced vowels). Saying it as RAV-nuh-RR(uh)-v(uh)n has a fun flow, I just don't default to it.
TL:DR "RAV - ner - vuhn" or "RAV - nuh - RR - vn" are both accurate!
what causes ball lightning? what about regular lightning? are there any interesting things about lightning that i might not already know?
ok heres the thing: lightning and static electricity, like getting shocked after shuffling on carpet, are exactly the same thing
lets start by talking about water: h2o. the thing about water is that the hydrogen atoms are attached to the oxygen atom at kind of an angle. if you cast your mind back to high school chem, you’ll remember that molecules want all their electron holes filled so theyre electrically neutral, and water does that. BUT the angle of the hydrogen means that the hydrogen side of a water molecule is slightly more positive and the oxygen side is slightly more negative.
zoom out. a water molecule is one of approximately a jillion water vapor molecules, hanging out in a cloud. well, there’s a lot of them, and the wind is blowing them in such a way that they rub up against each other, and they’re starting to accumulate static electricity without anywhere to discharge it. normally it leaks out into air or air moisture but if conditions are wrong for that... then they don’t!
so when you rub a balloon on your hair or whatever you rip some electrons off and theyre stuck on you, but electrons hate each other and wanna get away from each other. hey there’s a metal doorknob! it would take a lot of energy to jump across this bit of air, which might hurt whatever dumbass we’re on, but it’s worth it!
lightning is that but the metal is the ground and the dumbass is the sky, and the air is half a mile of atmosphere in between.
also fun fact that’s wrong because lightning doesnt actually strike from sky to ground. usually electrons surge from ground to sky first, and then that creates an ionized path where they’ve shoved all resistance out of the way, so a secondary bolt flows back down that path. there’s also a lot of cloud-to-cloud lightning and stuff like that. one lightning bolt is approximately enough energy to launch a car into space
now for ball lightning! heres a fun fact about ball lightning: we don’t know what the fuck it is!
that is to say, ball lightning is this thing where people in swamps or on ships during storms will report seeing balls of light that float around weirdly, that sometimes pass through things and either leave them unharmed or zap them. scientists have produced various kinds of plasma discharges that mimic these behaviours but rarely one that covers all of them that would be plausible to find in the wild outside a lab. the main thing is that, like i said, electrons hate each other and want to get away from each other, and the best way to do that is explode outwards. so if ball lightning is a ball, something has to be keeping it (vaguely) ball shaped.
people have proposed all kinds of explanations for ball lightning ranging from “natural neon leaking from the ground gets electrified like a neon light” to “complex wave interference phenomenon” to “its not really there the electric fields just make you hallucinate in this exact way”. theres overlap with ufo spotters and stuff. i gotta say i have sympathy with the wave phenomena guys because i spent like two and a half years just doing excruciatingly detailed configurations of electric charges and how they might behave. most likely is that not all the stories are 100% accurate, not all of them describe the same thing, and that a lot of them are extremely unlikely coincidences that get ruled out as “itd never happen in nature”.
fun fact ball lightning is a proposed explanation of the will o wisp phenomenon, where people in swamps see glowing lights that look like far off lanterns. this kind of thing gets reported all over the world and often believed to be the souls of the recently dead or of the living astral projecting. others point to the mekong river where purportedly a naga casts fireballs into the air every so often
i had the calling to make another “fuck the epilogues” tweet about an hour ago because i remembered the way it was foreshadowed using detective pony in the comic and how it called it “cathartic, in all the wrong ways” and it got under my skin because like. how on earth are the epilogues cathartic, in any way, let alone the wrong ones. the only payoff for an ending is deferred to hs2 which is not only still going but will likely run until it stops being profitable
and i got about 2/3s of the way into writing the tweet and just stopped. and deleted it. because at this point the only emotion about the homestuck epilogues and the way they are is “fuck that and fuck you if you like them”
