well now i just havee to draw more rocky in my style

PUT YOUR LIMBS BACK AND HOLD THIS INSTEAD

Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.

Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.

You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.

You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.

So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.

Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.

can someone explain what he's talking about i got distracted by his giant jiggling honkers badonkers

a Bn size is the mean between An and An-1

The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.

The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."

The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.

American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."

No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.

tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.

Do you really think America is so isolated that it gets to uniquely ignore the rest of the world?

Explain fucking Australia then?

Who isn't in Europe? Who is actually a continent, with no land borders unlike America. Who, much to my annoyance, has been more economically tied to the US than Europe since WWII (and its own neighbours since long before that). Who suffered a century of using American typewriters with American sized paper. Who also has their own paper industry like quite a lot of the world (though which still uses predominantly American designed and built machines) that creates massive kilometres long rolls of paper, like the America industry, that isn't limited by the length of someone's arm and is chopped down later.

Even with all those similarities we managed to switch to DIN 476 in 1974, the year before ISO 216 was created, along with a whole list of other countries that also aren't in Europe and also have massive ties to US industry (Japan 1951, Israel 1954, NZ 1963). We even have American made home and business printers that normally work with ISO paper seemlessly but get confused when we print a document made by Americans.

Also the UN switched in 1975. You know the big bureaucratic organisation that uses a lot of paper and functionally exists solely in New York. It can somehow get standardized paper while dealing with American industry.

Watercolour paper and most art papers are still sold in subdivisions of the big old arm width standard (called double elephant) in the UK, Japanese printmaking paper has the Hosho sheet and its subdivisions. I'm pretty sure newsprint still comes in its own formats etc. etc.

Check this shit out! Newspapers and Broadsheets are the opposite of universal, even in countries that use the Metric System.

Even in the house it was LOUD.  Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval.  You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off.  It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.

At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks.  People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.

One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit.  It did.  Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that.  People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid, can only infect cells expressing a certain protein called ACE2

ACE2 is expressed widely in nasal cavity epithelial cells but not in olfactory sensory neurons. 

Seo et al. (2021) studied potential nasal targets for SARS-CoV-2 using golden hamsters as a model organism (commonly used as a proxy for humans in virology studies)

They found ACE2 expression in the main olfactory bulb epithelium (MOE, your “normal” nose organ) as well as the vomeronasal organ (VNO)

Several cell types in the VNO were able to be infected and they also found significant inflammatory activity (macrophage activation, apoptotic cells, etc) 

The specifics of how covid actually causes dysosmia are not known for sure but epithelial damage by local inflammatory immune responses likely plays a role, especially because sensory neurons themselves are not affected (Bilinska, & Butowt, 2020). Therefore I would suggest a potential similar effect of VNO dysfunction as we see in the main olfactory bulb

From Seo et al.: “Considering the function of the VNO, infection and subsequent pathologic changes may affect the behavior of Syrian hamsters”

If it stands to reason that omegaverse individuals have functioning VNOs similar to members of the animal kingdom, then it is more than reasonable to conclude that covid may cause them to lose not only their main olfactory function, but also their VNO function as well

 References: (1) (2)