all stories are love stories

Saturday Night, Ollie Jones

#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.

Thanks for reaching out, I'm glad you can relate. I do want more people to understand that describing someone as "low empathy" is not a moral judgement, and that there are many many average people with low empathy, rather than the term describing some sort of Hollywood movie evil psychopath. It can be a major personal struggle for social rules not to come naturally when it seems like everyone else knows them but you. Either you become alienated for not following them, or people treat you like you're secretly evil for having to learn social mechanics rather than intuit them. It's by no means my intention to slap a diagnostic label on Matt or anything, but I'm glad talking about the ways I feel like I can relate to him and his work also resonates with others.

I've taken a step back a while ago from actively looking at fandom stuff beyond what my oomfs put on my dash cuz it was kinda disappointing to me to see people engaging with Matt's work and process in a way that felt like they weren't really interested in what he's trying to say... In more ways than one, but definitely including what you mention about people treating his public persona as proof he's a twisted fucking psychopath or whatever. It's one thing to be critical of what he says and how he says it (the post you're referencing was spurred by criticizing an interview where he's talking his way out of including women in his work), but it's another to treat him like he's inherently untrustworthy at all times because he admits to lying easily and using his learned social skills to direct his work. I think he's actually pretty earnest a lot of the time, when not in character, and yes being earnest benefits him in those times, but being earnest benefits people who aren't low empathy too. It's kind of a weird situation for people to act like his learned social behaviors are proof of duplicity, when 20 years of his social development are available to the public to be picked apart by people who are complete strangers to him, whose intentions he can't know. Sounds like some other folks could stand to learn some empathy to me lol

oooh I love this lol I can always say more about jay mccarrol cptsd. okay so like imagine the situation where Jay obviously remembers all the events of the film and obviously he's completely tortured over it. it all compounds with a lot of his other memories too, the memory of matt hanging himself, the time he thought matt got gunned down in a bank robbery, even just having to go through with the cn tower stunt immediately afterwards. I think on one level it's really enjoyable to think about a situation where this makes Jay very soft, it makes him very tender towards Matt, it helps him not take for granted the things that he has, he knows that when push comes to shove he would choose this life with Matt over and over again. However....i think there's something kind of juicy about the idea that somewhere in the back of Jay's mind he kind of still thinks about a life without Matt, almost like muscle memory since it's something he has been thinking about on and off for most of his adult life. And it makes him feel incredibly guilty when it comes up, it makes him think that maybe he's secretly wishing that Matt really had died, that he could permanently be free. But of course that's not what he really wishes! He should never even let the thought into his mind! It makes him feel sick inside and guilty and like he doesn't deserve the life Matt gives him. But the things that were painful and hard before are still upsetting to him. Some nasty egotistical part of him still whispers to him that he was destined for more than this even though he knows this is the only life he would ever choose. He vividly remembers Matt willingly dying, electrocuting himself in the street. Maybe he gets horrible headaches, maybe his timelines are all jumbled, maybe in his darkest moments he feels like this isn't even his Matt. Would this Matt even make that sacrifice for him? Would this Matt make the same choices as his original Matt? It gives him nosebleeds, it makes him so tired that Matt has to ask him if he's okay, if he's getting sick again.