scone butch

Tobias is the central tragic figure of the animorphs, even if he doesn't get as many books. He's literally so chosen one coded. He's a suicidal trans bird. He's full of hope for humanity. He is deeply alienated from his own humanity. He survived abuse and neglect. His dad's a fucking alien prince. He saved a different alien species from extinction, and became the namesake of their first free leader in like, three generations. God talks to him personally and doesn't do anything that he wants. He's the most character of all time. He's just like me for real. No one is doing it like him.

And Rachel!!!! Girl has the best character arc of the entire book series (outside the Hork Bajir Chronicles but I digress). She's a princess. She's a monster. She's the pretty one. She beat a man to death with her own severed arm. She sacrificed herself for humanity. She self-destructively followed orders to her own demise. She almost gave up her human life and became a cat forever just to comfort a crying friend. She's Satan's most specialist favorite teenager. And she was a Packard Award winning student to boot!

But together, they form the messiest, most dysfunctional situationship that any middle schooler ever read about. They love each other. They flirt with other people (or birds). Rachel cared about Tobias when everyone else thought he was some weirdo who would never amount to anything. She also wants him to stop living as his authentic self because it's inconvenient to her. Tobias thinks that Rachel is the most beautiful creature ever to grace the earth. He also enables her most self-destructive tendencies and romanticizes her for being the monster she doesn't want to become. He knows that she loves him no matter what. He was mortified that she saw him eating roadkill, and fears her judgement like death itself. She celebrates his birthday with him, even though he forgot when his birthday even was. She also, and I cannot stress this enough, thinks that he should leave the fight that gives him his only living purpose and stop living in the body that he's chosen for himself because she doesn't know how to be a bird's girlfriend (and like, fair. Not a normal situation tbh). They are doomed by the narrative. Together ❤️

“Eccentric Jester” © London Workman, accessed at their ArtStation here

[This is one of many iterations of my “goth clown” persona, tailored to a low level game and with more emphasis on the clown. I created her for a freeform game run by @abominationimperatrix​, which we haven’t gone back to yet. I do hope to. The Harley Quinn influence is very much intentional.]

Mad Maddy Maddison CR 3 CG Humanoid (dark folk) Clad in mismatched and brightly colored jester’s motley, this tiny woman is thin, muscular and pretty. At first glance she might appear to be wearing stage makeup, but her gray skin and black lips are their natural color.

Mad Maddy Maddison has had a very complicated and strange life already in her nineteen years, and is excited to see what happens next. She was born to a clan of dark folk living in the Darklands beneath the Brazen Peaks, and the caligni callers selected for her to be a dancer, one of the dark folk who act as intermediaries between settlements. Unfortunately, that meant that her wanderlust started at a very early age, and she managed to get separated from her family. She was found and given a home, but unfortunately it was by Mater Cachinnarum, the Mother of Sneers. This wicked bogeywoman pops up in nightmares throughout eastern Garund, and tried to raise Maddy to do the same. Even though Maddy was raised by Cachinnarum for a solid decade, she held true to her overall sense of kindness and good humor, and escaped by the grace of Cayden Cailean, who has a soft spot for all orphans and runaways.

Maddy made it to the bustling city of Katapesh where she currently works at the Night Circus, an entertainment troupe in the Night Markets. At the Circus, she is a talented juggler, percussionist, clown and occasional pickpocket. Her favored instruments are the zills. Maddy has a fascination with death and the undead, having been surrounded by ghouls and skeletons in Mater Cachinnarum’s care, and she is learning how to affect them with her magical music. She’s also working on making friends, something she’s never had a lot of. Her closest friend is a flumph named Taktii, who has given dire warnings about monsters in space. Maddy currently finds this concept more intriguing than scary.

Maddy stands a whole two and a half feet tall and carries a club as long as she is tall. She has a caffeine addiction, and rarely goes a day without several cups of coffee.

#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.