u/learhpa

The National Weather Service is now projecting the possibility of lightning as the storm passes over the Coachella valley. I'm gonna go out on a limb and speculate that most of the people camping at the festival have never camped in lightning before, so here are some thoughts :)

Being outdoors during a lightning storm is inherently risky. Festivals and outdoor music events regularly shut down during lightning. While everyone's vision of lightning strikes is that they hit the tallest electrically charged attractor, it is also true that lightning can fork out again once it's hit the initial point, and it can fork horizontally, meaning that even if you aren't standing under a palm tree when it's hit, the forking can hit you if you're outdoors anywhere nearby.

Tents and canopies provide no protection whatsoever. The only protection comes from being indoors or, when car camping, inside your car. The car acts as a faraday cage, routing electricity around the passenger cabin.

So if lightning actually starts striking the valley, and you're in the campgrounds, bail into your cars for the duration of the lightning strikes.

Greetings!

Next Tuesday, September 15, starting at 10AM, Janci Patterson - Brandon's coauthor on Blightfall, as well as Skyward Flight and Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians, will be dropping by for an AMA.

Please drop your questions here, and starting at 10AM on Tuesday, Janci will answer them!

Note: This is a spoiler-free post so that everyone can participate. If you have a spoilery question, please spoiler guard it:

[Book]>!your spoilery text here!<

renders as:

[Book]>!your spoilery text here!<

Grumble.

Why do they do this?

I'm a big guy. Not big enough that I need two seats, but big enough that I have to work to squeeze into one, and need extra leg room.

I pick a window seat because there's just a little more space against the fuselage. If there are no window seats, I pick aisle, because I can stretch out a little bit into the aisle when service isn't happening.

I have a flight tomorrow, and I just got moved into the middle seat. An arrangement which will be physically uncomfortable for every person in the row. And the other two people will blame me and be hostile towards me.

grumble

We (/r/cosmere) are getting a bunch of reports that wiki pages randomly generate unknown errors

The users reporting this think it's a problem with our wiki, but (a) the pages load fine from windows and mac desktop in both old and sh.reddit, and (b) on discussion with the users, it turns out they are seeing the problem in other subreddits' wikis, too.

Is this a known issue?

click here