What do you do when you’re waiting for a game to release? Go back and visit some old classics? Distract yourself by picking up a new hobby? Or do you draw the world’s teeniest-tiniest Hornet that can only be observed under a microscope? Because that’s what this one Silksong hopeful did.
In ritualistic preparation for a Nintendo Direct that did not produce fruit, user rous6 on the game’s subreddit weaponised state-of-the-art technology to draw an itsy-bisty hornet on a piece of “positive tone resist” called ZEP520A.
I used state-of-the-art electron-beam lithography to draw the ACTUAL world’s smallest hornet (roughly 4 microns long) from r/Silksong
They achieved this via a process called “Electron Beam Lithography, which allows extremely high resolution by firing a narrow beam of electrons at a resist material, causing it to harden.” Given r/Silksong’s charming propensity to meme itself into the occult, I looked it up and—yep, turns out you can absolutely draw with electrons.
This is all a few thousand nanometers above my scientific knowledge, but best I can tell, if you fire electrons at a specific material, you can change how soluble (dissolvable) it is. Dunk it in some solvent, removing either the stuff you fired electrons at (or the stuff you didn’t) and boom, you’ve got a drawing.
The documentation for ZEP520A itself is also kinda funny. I’m sure these are the proper scientific terms, but I find it very amusing that an instruction manual for a state-of-the-art material has the step “bake for 3 minutes at 180C” in it. All it’s missing is salt and pepper to taste.
The result? “Hornet here is about 1/5 the width of a strand of silk, or about 2 bacteria long.” The drawing is, rous6 claims, about four microns wide (a micron is 1,000 nanometers). Or, as they put it, “about 8000 times smaller than a true scale hornet”.
It’s a genuinely impressive use of some genuinely impressive technology, and a sure sign of further madness from the r/Silksong subreddit, which is currently doing, uh, whatever this is via an admittedly very cool Deltarune “prophecy” generator, and hounding after further SteamDB changes. Hey, at least they haven’t sacrificed anyone else yet.
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