I could be totally wrong, but my plants are three weeks old and are developing weird looking things around the nodes that I thought looked pistol-ish, and I think they will just turn out to be branches/foliage that looks weird at first.

I just asked recently when you can first start flowering and the answer was "as soon as there are alternating nodes". Your plant will eventually stop growing its new branches symmetricaly (two at a time opposite of each other). instead of it looking like this -> Y it looks like this -> y

like i said though, I could be totally wrong I'm on my first grow so I'm by no means speaking definitively.