• Yeah, get accu cells. More environmentally friendly and they break without running out.

  • You know, at first glance these looked like 2 dollar bills rolled up to do coke with and these were after a couple of hours of use and the coke was getting gummed up around the snorting side. My first thought was “Yeah, I’m familiar with that.”

  • Yes.

    Basically if you leave Alkaline batteries in the device for a long time (years) without using them they will loose all charge and there is a chance of them leaking.

    Leakage is significantly more common with the Zinc-Carbon batteries (the tech in use for most batteries in that format before Alkaline) though those leak something that forms blueish crystals.

    • I once saw old D cells inside the toy train my father had as a kid. They basically looked like they liquefied and then re-solidified in the basic shape of a D cell.

  • If the words on the batteries read the same way, it will cause acidic fuzz like this.

    * They may have been correctly inserted, and then left a long time, which can also cause fuzz.

  • No. I had an OG gameboy and my parents wouldn’t buy more batteries so every remote in the house had its batteries liberated for the glory of super Mario land 2 6 golden coins. They didn’t get the safety and security of rotting in a tv remote. They were fed to the Tetris vampire.

    • Wow, until you mentioned it, I had somehow completely forgotten about this gem of a game and mostly thought of mario land 1 or wario world when thinking of the gameboy era, even though wario was introduced in Mario Land 2 iirc. Thanks for that hit of nostalgia.

  • Yes? It was extremely common as a child because all our toys were battery powered (but not included)

  • As a millennial: all the time

    What I did only experience once, was a leaking alkaline battery while in use

    Mouse stopped working. Opened it up, only to be greeted with freshly squeezed battery juice dripping out of the battery

    Mouse worked fine with new batteries, so no short in there.

    Was even high end Duracell

      • I hate to be counted as a gen z because my mind is less there and more inbetween.
        Anyway, I think people forgot how genz starts at 1997. People. Some were 10 years old in the 2000s and al we had were battery toys and outside to play with…

    • high end Duracell

      This has become an oxymoron in the last few decades.

      • Bought out by berkshire hathaway in 2016 and they’ve been absolute garbage since then. I haven’t bought them for years, they aren’t worth anything.

        • That explains a lot. The last package of Duracell batteries I bought all died before their expiration date. Store-brand is better than that.

        • Now that I think about it, that’s about when I switched to energizer. Were they owned by berk?

        • Yeah I just threw out half of a 30 pack of procells because they look like this. Expiry date is next year.