I have no pity to spare for thee...

This is what a hero looks like.

Stories stall when everyone behaves. Real tension appears when someone:

• asks the wrong question • says something they shouldn’t • notices something uncomfortable • refuses to drop the topic • misunderstands something important • interrupts at the worst moment

They want something REALLY REALLY REALLY bad, but for some reason they can't ask for it -- or can't have it even if they did ask.

They don't notice something that the audience HAS noticed (like in a horror movie when the monster is sneaking up behind the protagonist, or if someone drinks a glass of unboiled water during a cholera outbreak because they don't know about germ theory)

Takes a risk (or otherwise does something they "shouldn't" do) which the audience has to sit through for a prolongued period of time (e.g. slips away from the party to go into the host's private office and rifle through their papers before the guards catch them)

The Surgery (1979)

#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.

here's my drawing for the dbda reverse bang (@deadbangdetectives), which is accompanied by @wordsinhaled 's super amazing fic

i had a blast working on this! (despite this being a challenging piece with the background)

by thegirlofthorns

Charles didn’t want to wash his henna off. It was so pretty, and so purposeful. Nothing short of art, really, but it was art that Mariyam insisted had to go. Paul still hadn’t come back – a ‘lucky break,’ she said – and she had plenty of time to wash Charles’s hands off to their original state. As she did, Charles tried to cheer himself up. He’d got to put the pretty pictures on his hands, even if it was just for a few ticks. That was a miracle in itself, wasn’t it. And…

“When I’m all grown,” he told Mariyam, “I’m going to have loads of tattoos, and I’m never going to wash them off.”

Mariyam chuckled. “That is your choice,” she said, “and I think you will make good decisions about what tattoos to get. I cannot wait to see them.“ - Or, story where Charles gets tattoos as a ghost because he died too young (and a story about how Edwin loves them.)

Words: 1387, Chapters: 1/5, Language: English

Fandoms: Dead Boy Detectives (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Charles Rowland (DCU), Edwin Paine | Edwin Payne, Mary Rowland | Charles Rowland’s Mother

Relationships: Edwin Paine | Edwin Payne/Charles Rowland

take up space, read the plaques, get the audioguides. you are just as entitled and right in being there. visit museums, boycott museums, be expressive about your opinions about museums.

a lot of museums are free, or discounted for youth and students. take advantage of that. check your local art museum. check your local history museum. museums are there for you, they are there to educate the public, not to distinguish between class. it isn't a private collection, it's a public exhibit.

We genuinely LOVE first time museum goers and will pretty much bend over backwards to make sure you feel welcome, and like you're part of art and history. If you let someone know it's your first time at a museum, chances are their eyes will light up, and you'll get "These are my favorites" or "Oh, here's a little secret" and most likely a "thank you for choosing US!"

Please explain the three-strip technicolor process!

The three strip technicolor process (and here I am massively oversimplifying because I could write about this for hours and also don’t @ me because I do know what I’m talking about) required a custom camera, which was GIANT and FUCK-ALL HEAVY. The camera processed three strips of standard black and white (monochrome) film when exposing, with a beam-splitter sending the light through a prism and filters to each strip simultaneously.

This, obviously, required a shit-ton of light on the sets in order to get the right exposure for each strip. One strip would go through a green filter, so that only the green part of the spectrum was exposed on the film. The other two reels were sandwiched together and filtered only for red and blue (but not just with filters; there was a chemical process used to treat the raw film for each color in order to make it sensitive to certain parts of the spectrum).

In the printing process, the reels had to be specially processed by imbibition (a suuuuper complicated chemical dye-transfer process) in order to put the three color channels together and make one master color print for duplication.

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.