The Hottest Take Of All

“How’s this for a hot take?” were words I almost considered typing before I realized doing so would get me banned from the internet forever.

“Flame has always inspired wonder,” goes James Gorman’s voiceover for this video at the New York Times, and you know, he’s not wrong. Fire has so many practical, day to day uses, whether it’s destroying all evidence of your past life, or lighting candles to be used in a seance to contact the ghost of Zsa Zsa Gabor before realizing that whoops, Zsa Zsa Gabor is actually very much still alive and now you have to try and play it off like you knew that all along.

This video is the result of a trio of researchers from Stanford University filming the two-second long process of a match being lit with a high speed camera, using a lighting process called schlieren imaging (previously seen at the Times here). Slowed down, the result is, well, something mesmerizing.

I am now sitting at my desk in my apartment with a pack of matches, staring at them completely hypnotized as I light them one by one before dropping them into the scented candle jar I have on my desk just for show, forcing my roommates to reconsider why they every moved in with me.