"It's Giving Me The Death Giggles"

It happened in a train, near noon in the middle of July in the south of France. Which for those familiar should tell you something about how hot it was. For those unfamiliar it's pretty damn hot particularly for people like yours truly who do not take heat well.

The train was packed, which did not help the heat. I had eaten but a handful of nuts in the morning, which was a bad decision. I didn't have a seat, which isn't necessarily an issue. Usually.

But the heat and the lack of food (mostly the heat) made a bad combination. The lightheadedness fell on me like an anvil. Sudden. Heavy. I felt nauseous which was truly the worst part because is there a worse place to puke than in a packed train? I didn't think so and I still don't.

People noticed. I don't know if it was the swaying or maybe I had gone visibly pale but three different people got up to give me their seat. Or four. I don't know, but it was a lot. The rules of politeness and manners don't apply when you're afraid you're gonna puke so I very gratefully took a seat.

A woman gave me a chocolate biscuit, she said she kept this sort of thing in her bag always because her son has diabetes. Two people offered me water but I had my own which I did drink. Two other people offered me more food. A man offered me vitamins. I hesitated and he gave me the package so I could check for myself it wasn't, like, drugs. I am mildly ashamed to say that I did not hesitate for reasons of a stranger giving me medicine but because I thought the orange-flavored vitamins might not mix super well with the chocolate biscuit I was eating. For my defense, sensory issues can be bad and I already wasn't feeling well. But I did learn my lesson about trusting strangers with medicine. This one was trustworthy, but still. Man who gave me vitamins, kudos to you for making sure I knew it wasn't drugs.

People asked me if I knew what was wrong. Two older people gently chastised me for not eating enough in this weather. Several asked where I as getting off and were visibly relieved when I said my stop was soon. They kept subtly checking on me trough the train ride and several people waved goodbye when I got off.

All those strangers coming together without a second's hesitation when I felt unwell. When you think about it, that's, like, a low bar. Obviously if someone visibly wasn't feeling well I would try to help. But the way they all moved together and didn't wait for someone else to offer a seat or food or water. The way they kept checking on me. That's what I want to be like.

Rainbow-bearded Thornbill (Chalcostigma herrani), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, found in the Andes of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia

Eel eel eel https://www.palaeoplushies.com/shop/ribboneel

Made a big guy

Due to where it is typically grown, coffee farms are particularly vulnerable to damage from erosion when rain comes either too intensely or too sparsely. A coalition assembled by the Global Environment Facility set up test farms to help provide local coffee farmers in Uganda with the resources to apply regenerative agricultural techniques to their local farming conditions.

The results have led to better yields, healthier soil that is less prone to erosion, and more stable income for farmers.

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.

"You hold more leverage than a cancellation could ever give you, and it works in the opposite direction. A donation that disappears is invisible. It shows up as one anonymous line in a spreadsheet, gets blamed on the economy or a bad fundraising email, and teaches the institution nothing.

"A donor who speaks up is much harder to wave off, because donors are handed a door that the Foundation’s own staff and volunteers aren’t. You should walk through that door instead of slipping out the back.

"In practice, that means writing to the Board of Trustees, whose job is to hold leadership to account, and telling them in your own words that your support has always been a matter of trust, and that trust depends on how an institution treats the people who build it.

^ embroidered a net onto the front pocket of these overalls

And when you include blatant falsehoods in your messaging, now nobody believes you when you talk statistics on gun use in domestic violence or other serious issues.

Maybe I'm an outlier in the pro gun control group, because I'm a MechE and I love machines that perform a precise function with clever bits of steel, and i went to a summer camp when i was 11 or 12 where they had a shooting range with dinky little .22 rifles, but like

By which I mean, the kind of toy where if your angry dad said, "You need to respect this, it's not a toy!" he probably had a pretty good reason.

We've never had anybody accidentally discharge a pack of magic cards or a set of golf clubs in front of the valet station, to my knowledge.

I don't have weapons in the house so I put on some steel toed boots for kicking and I put a utility knife in my jacket pocket and kept my hand on it.

Ultimately nothing even remotely dangerous happened.

And you know, the odds of me hospitalizing myself with my behavior there were awfully, awfully low. The odds of my hospitalizing a neighbor or bystander was zero.

If you treat a gun the same way, if you throw a gun in your pocket and keep a hand on it, you are at a far higher risk of killing or injuring not only yourself, but anybody in the vicinity at well.

It's so fucking easy to kill somebody with a gun purely by accident.

We didn't ban guns in the restaurant to prevent assaults or armed robbery, we did it because there's a class of people who are law abiding enough to leave their guns at home if you ask while simultaneously being stupid enough not to secure their firearms properly, and that behavior can get someone injured or killed, particularly once you get alcohol involved.

I feel like right-wingers in the US really tend to minimize this aspect of firearms, and treat it as though it wasn't a big deal.

I think that's why OP kind of rubs me the wrong way even though I agree that guns are both fascinating and cool, and am fairly neutral about how gun control should work.

Also I think this is related to why I find the concern about knives in the UK a little bit off.