Meet The Chemiballs: The Metagaming Metalloids!

Meet the Chemiballs: The Metagaming Metalloids!

So you know metals? They’re metallic, conductive, and usually form positively charged ions? And you know nonmetals? They’re not metallic, insulators, and make negatively charged ions. So yeah, what do you call stuff that’s like, not one of those two things? Y’know, semiconductors and shit.

Metals are only metallic because they’re bad at holding on to their valence electrons, and elements tend to get worse at that the closer they are to the bottom left of the periodic table. Because physics.

But there’s a stair-shaped boundary line between the two where it’s really hard to decide if they’re one or the other so we sort of just gave up and called them metalloids.  

Ravings of a Mad Scientist

Meet the Chemiballs: The Metagaming Metalloids!

Metalloids! They're like metals, but loids! We've got all of 'em; boron, silicon, arsenic, some other ones. Yeah!

READ MY OLD BLOG IT HAS JOKES AND FUN FACTS ABOUT ELEMENTS AAAAHHH

Meet the Chemiballs; the Noble Noble Gases

The noble gases were all (mostly) discovered by a Scottish man named Sir William Ramsay (Though, back in his day, it was more common to call them “rare gases”). He made the convention of ending all their names with -on, so you always know when something is a noble gas. (Unless it’s helium which is a noble gas but follows the metal naming convention, [or iron which ends in -on but is a metal. {Also, scientists seem to really like giving things -on names, like prion, codon, electron, etc. I will admit, it does sound cool. }]) So it’s not a perfect system.

The name “noble gasses” is a bit of an early 1900s joke. See, the noble gasses are too lazy to do anything and don’t like bonding with lesser peasant elements. The nobility is also lazy and don’t like associating with peasants. Of course, we live in an enlightened post-WWI world and no longer recognize barbaric concepts such as hieratical rule and rigid class structures. Also, the Queen is dead. But this is basically the equivalent of naming them “trust fund gasses”. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ravings of a Mad Scientist

Meet the Chemiballs; the Noble Noble Gases

Are you procrastinating right now? What better way to do that than to read about the laziest elements, the Noble Gases!

Meet the Chemiballs; The Particularly Spooky Subatomic Particles!

Ravings of a Mad Scientist

Meet the Chemiballs; The Particularly Spooky Subatomic Particles!

Everything's made of atoms, right? WRONG! Well, they are, but the atoms are made of subatomic particles drawn as cute ball comics.

Read this old blog post of mine where I, a biomajor, tried and failed miserably to understand quantum physics :3

Meet the Chemiballs: Some* of the Transition Metals

More Chemiballs! This time we’re looking at the Transition Metals. The Transition Metals are that flat bit in the middle of the periodic table. It’s defined as being all the elements that have a “d” orbital as their valence shell, which I’m sure there’s a very immature joke to be made of. But I’m far too mature and adult to stoop that low. (hehe, Transition metals)

* bruh look, im not gonna draw all the transition metals. have you SEEN a periodic table recently? do you have any idea how many transition metals there are? like, 34 or something. and 90% of them would just be varying shades of gray. i just drew a few cool ones

here's an article I wrote years ago about the transition metals (where the art is from)

Meet the Chemiballs: the Nuclear Nucleic Acids

You probably remember from highschool biology that Nucleic acids are the chemicals that make up DNA, that mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, and exactly nothing else.

So here’s a quick refresher: DNA is made of a chain of nucleotides that come in four(ish) flavors: Adanineball, Thymineball, Guanineball, and Cytocineball. Also Uracilball. They each connect with their loved one in the opposing strand, as DNA is made of a double helix.

Adanineball is a fuckboy who cheats on his girlfriend Thymineball with her quirky chemically unstable twin sister Uracilball, and Guanineball and Cytocineball have a healthy relationship.

Yes, that's exactly how it was in school. They should make a sitcom out of this.

Ravings of a Mad Scientist

Meet the Chemiballs: the Nuclear Nucleic Acids

A romantic comedy about nucleic acids. The love triangle between Adenine, Thymine, and Uracil. Don't get that in your normal chemistry class

here's an article I wrote a while ago about how they were all named after weird cow bits by weird Germans.

Meet the Chemiballs; the Explosive Alkali Metals!

The alkali metals are the first group on the periodic table. Their whole thing is; they have some valence electrons, but would rather that not be the case. So they really like to pair up with electronegative elements, like oxygenball, who can take their electrons. Thus allowing the alkali metals to dissolve into solution as cute cation cats (deadbead dads).

Ravings of a Mad Scientist

Meet the Chemiballs; the Explosive Alkali Metals!

Get ready for some s p i c y e l e m e n t s. The fun stuff, that EXPLODES. Sodium, POTASSIUM. Want to know how a BANANA can KILL YOU?

A old funny blog article with more EDUTAINING POWER regarding alkalimetalballs.