The earth will be fine. It’s been through way worse than us.

People say this a lot, but what are we calling ‘fine’?

Supporting life is what makes Earth special; if that’s snuffed out and Earth becomes just another dead rock floating through space, I’d argue it isn’t fine at all, in the same sense that you or I wouldn’t be fine if we suddenly died, even though our physical corpse would remain for much longer.

And we’re WAY far away from life being completely extinguished, but even in its current state with life relatively abundant, Earth is running a high fever, so I’d say it’s already crossed the ‘not fine’ line.

We’ve discovered hundreds of billions of planets, and so far we’re only aware of life existing on a single one of them: life is an incredibly rare, incredibly fragile, statistically insignificant fluke in our universe. It may literally be the single best example of “it’s the exception, not the rule”.

So, why are people always so certain that it’ll persist? Life in general will certainly persist well beyond humans, but even the most resilient of extremophiles have their limits. The whole “Life, uh, finds a way” is great and all, until it doesn’t.

The damage we’re doing to our planet directly is pretty small on a universal scale, but we’re playing with forces we don’t understand - some of those forces are feedback loops, so our involvement may be the first tiny domino that sets off a cascade of increasingly large dominos until our planet is molten all the way to its core.

Or, we die off and feedback loops stop, the environment stabalizes, and Earth lives on happily ever after. Or anything in between: the point is we have no idea, and no basis to make and real predictions good or bad.

Hopefully Earth will be fine.

…sorry that was so wordy. I ramble when I’m tired.

I took a concealed carry course ages ago, and it helped to instill a healthy level of paranoia about unintentional discharge.

My takeaways were:

• fuck semi-auto pistols. Many working parts means many points of failure; carrying with a round in the chamber is dangerous as fuck, especially combined with a hair trigger; even if you don’t think there’s one in the chamber, there’s no good way to verify visually without opening the chamber, and even then people tend to give themselves a false negative and carry hot thinking they’re carrying safely; if you don’t carry hot, you have an extra step to perform under panic-levels of anxiety, aka you fumble with a gun-shaped brick for a couple seconds while your assistant proceeds to murder you; and blocky shape = blocky imprint = you’ve made yourself a target before a potential altercation even begins.

• Revolvers are the way cuz ^that. And the imprint is more varied, making it conform better to your pudge and not stand out through your clothing. But even among revolvers, fuck any that have an external hammer, which can get snagged on clothing or something, pulled back partially, released, and strike a round causing it to fire without even touching the trigger.

• Internal hammer, double-action-only is the way, cuz ^that.

• Load one round fewer than the cylinder’s capacity, then close the cylinder with the empty chamber on top / in line with the barrel. Your gun is now only physically capable of firing by fully engaging the trigger. You can drop that fucker out of an airplane, and when it hits the ground it goes thud, not bang. Also, since the back of the casing seats further back than the back of the cylinder, there’s a gap that you can look into to visually assess whether or not there are any rounds loaded; and where or not the individual chamber in line with the barrel is loaded (hot).

Absolute safest way to carry. Only downside is you only have 4 shots to work with, but if you need more than that, you’re probably dead anyway.