How To Understand Resonance Structures Using Cute Balls

How To Understand Resonance Structures using Cute Balls

There comes a time in every man’s (or woman/nonbinary/other/etc)'s life that they have to learn about resonance structures and delocalized electrons.

Or probably not. I don’t think most people know what it is. But you’re going to!

Right now.

No, you don’t have a choice in the matter.

Get all that? Understand now? Of course not, no one does. READ THIS!

Ravings of a Mad Scientist

How To Understand Resonance Structures using Cute Balls

Taking an Organic Chemistry Class and don't understand anything? Just curious? Just plain masochistic? Read here for all your confusing elec

ARTICLE I MADE YEARS AGO FOR MORE IN-DEPTH AND FUNNY EXPLANATION!

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

7: info dumps about the author's obscure special interest

8: contrivances to make the author's obscure special interest be deeply relevant in the world somehow

3 components of worldbuilding:

1. The author’s kinks

2. The author’s power fantasy

3. The author’s political agenda

Plot and logic optional

so i return, fresh from the booping fields

what have i done

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!

Sodium Hydroxide + Hydrochloric Acid

The Hydrogenball ships them.