Lunaire

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.

Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.

It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.

You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.

However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.

If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.

Congratulations card

made by me!

Pierre-Jules Boulanger

Paris fell on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, German officers were already walking the factory floor at Citroën. Their orders were simple: France's greatest automobile manufacturer would now build trucks for the Wehrmacht. Supply vehicles. Military transports. The mechanical backbone of Nazi occupation. Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the 55-year-old chairman who had spent his career building cars for French families, now faced a choice that would define everything. Refuse — and the Germans would shoot him, install someone cooperative, and build the trucks anyway. Comply fully — and he would be personally responsible for vehicles carrying soldiers to kill Allied forces, supplies sustaining the occupation, machinery enabling conquest. He refused both options. Instead, he gathered his engineers late one evening and said something they would never forget: "Production must appear respectable to the eye. But never to the heart."

The vehicle the Germans wanted was the Citroën T45 — a powerful, heavy-duty truck perfectly suited for military logistics. Reliable engine. Solid construction. Exactly what the Wehrmacht needed to keep its war machine rolling across Europe. Boulanger's engineers studied every component, looking for a vulnerability so small it would be invisible at inspection, yet catastrophic enough to matter in the field. They found it in the most ordinary place imaginable. The dipstick. That thin metal rod you pull from an engine to check the oil level — the one with a simple notch marking "full." Every German mechanic, following standard maintenance protocol, would pull it out, check the level, add oil if needed, and move on. Boulanger's engineers made one quiet adjustment. They moved the "full" notch. Not dramatically — that would be caught immediately. Just enough. A small filing. A modest repositioning. When a German mechanic checked the oil and the dipstick read full, the engine would actually be running low. Not catastrophically empty. Not enough to trigger an immediate warning. Just enough to create chronic, invisible stress on the engine's most critical components. Under normal use, nothing obvious would happen. But under sustained military operation — long supply runs, heavy loads, demanding terrain — the engine would begin destroying itself from the inside. Heat. Friction. Accelerating wear on parts designed to float in a film of oil that was never quite there. And then, eventually, on some road far from any factory inspector, the engine would seize. Every truck that left the Citroën facility passed German quality inspection perfectly. Test drives were smooth. Oil levels appeared correct. Vehicles were approved, signed off, shipped to Wehrmacht units across occupied Europe. The German mechanics who serviced them were doing everything right. They checked the oil. They topped it off when the dipstick said to. They followed every protocol. The dipstick told them everything was fine. The dipstick was lying.

Weeks later, reports began filtering back through Wehrmacht supply chains. Citroën trucks were developing unusual engine problems. Vehicles were seizing during operations. Supply convoys were breaking down at inexplicable rates. Commanders blamed driver error, poor roads, excessive loads. No one suspected the dipstick, because every truck from that factory had the same dipstick. There was no correctly calibrated reference to compare it against. The sabotage was, in the most elegant sense, self-concealing. Meanwhile, Boulanger ran a parallel campaign of productive-looking paralysis. Workers were instructed to maintain schedules — but never exceed them. No urgency. No efficiency gains. If a German officer demanded faster output, Boulanger would nod thoughtfully and cite material shortages, equipment maintenance, worker fatigue. Always polite. Always documented. Always just plausible enough. The frustration in German command was visible. Why was Citroën slower than other factories? Why were their trucks underperforming in the field? They suspected resistance. They could never prove it.

In 1944, French Resistance fighters raided Gestapo headquarters in Paris and discovered something chilling — a detailed blacklist of French civilians to be arrested and executed upon Allied invasion. Pierre-Jules Boulanger's name was on it. The Nazis had never found the tampered dipstick. They had never proved deliberate sabotage. But they knew something was wrong at Citroën, and they knew who was responsible. They were right. They were just too late. When Allied forces liberated France that same year, Boulanger didn't seek recognition or medals. He went back to his drafting table. His first post-war project became one of the most beloved vehicles in automotive history — the Citroën 2CV. A simple, honest car for ordinary French families. Cheap to run, impossible to break, designed to carry four people and fifty kilograms of potatoes across rural France on almost no fuel at all. Nearly seven million were built over four decades. The same engineers who had quietly dismantled a military machine with a filed notch on a piece of metal were now building the car that helped rebuild a nation.

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.

Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.

Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).

Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.

Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)

“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.

The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.

They do a lot of harm. Yes, I would want to be able to look up a prospective partner’s records, especially if I had children. But I don’t want shit like public urination or 17-year-olds texting nudes to each other or someone doing gay shit to be something that follows them for years, or forever. I WANT to know if my date raped someone or molested his child.

And they are absolutely weaponized against queer people. Using the wrong toilet could get you on there, if your state outlaws trans people using the bathroom. Wearing the wrong clothes. Being near kids while crossdressing.

Some states are pushing for the death penalty for sex crimes against kids.

Some states are pushing for crossdressing/drag to be labeled as a sex crime against kids.