Your Spare Batteries Are Dying In The Drawer

The Skills Pack — Ten bucks, thirty-four skills, and I’ll be straight with you, most of what’s in my shop I built for somebody else. This one I built for me and then sold it. Written to the open Agent Skills standard, which is a boring string of words that means one useful thing: the same files load into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Codex, whatever you’re driving this month. And none of them evaporate the second you close the chat window. Buy it once and it’s yours. No subscription, no seat fee, no email in March explaining why it’s nineteen bucks a month now. I’m not doing that to you, fam.

Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man In The World — Higgypop went digging for where the wickedest man in the world tag on Aleister Crowley actually came from, and turns out nobody’s real sure. It’s a pile of 1920s tabloid panic about a guy doing sex magic and heroin. Meanwhile the same decade was cooking up actual genocidal maniacs running actual countries. The wickedest man in the WORLD! Sure. Crowley did drugs and had weird sex. Stalin did the numbers. One of them got the tabloid nickname and it wasn’t the one with the fucking body count. Crowley was a weirdo and a mess of a human being, no argument there, but stacked next to that he’s small potatoes, and the piece says so. Worth the read if you’ve ever had do what thou wilt repeated at you by someone who never read a page past the phrase.

THE TIP. Here’s one that’ll piss you off once you know it: every spare battery you’ve got sitting in a drawer ‘topped off and ready’ is dying faster because you charged it to 100 percent and then did nothing with it for six damn months.

Lithium cells don’t like being full and they don’t like being empty. Both ends stress the chemistry and eat capacity you don’t get back. The sweet spot for long-term storage is somewhere around 40 to 60 percent charge, cool and dry, nowhere near a hot garage or a car trunk in July. Manufacturers have known this forever, it’s why laptop and phone batteries ship partially charged instead of full, but nobody tells preppers or radio guys, so we all do the wrong damn thing with total confidence.

So go pull the box out. The 18650s for the flashlight, the spare packs for the handheld, the jump-starter, whatever’s in there. Check the charge on each one. Anything sitting full, run it down to about half before it goes back in the drawer. Check them again every few months. A cheap USB battery tester runs you ten bucks and tells you the actual voltage instead of a guess.

None of this matters if you never need the gear. It matters the one time you do. Power’s out, you reach for the handheld, and there’s barely anything in it because it sat full in a drawer for two years. Twenty minutes, ya’ll. Go look.

Hit reply and tell me what the drawer said. Bet it’s worse than you think. Everything you haven’t checked in two years is lying to you. Ask Crowley. ~ J.D.