To The O'Sheamobile

Yes it's only the richest people with money to burn having a great time, yes our administration is still doing awful police state immigration shit to the visiting teams let alone the fans, yes this place is still a nightmare for everyone else

but there is still joy to be had and while that doesn't erase the bad, the bad does not erase the joy

A lot of the most dedicated football/soccer national team fans, aka the ones you see following their teams to other countries for a world cup, aren't Jeff Bezos rich or even old money rich. They simply dedicate what funds and PTO they have to this one specific purpose. And then you have the more casual fans, who "always wanted to go see [country X], and this is as good an occasion as any".

I understand this reads as rich, and to a degree it certainly is. But it's absolutely not "only the richest." Far from it. These are people who'll take flights with 3 layovers to save a couple bucks. These are people who saved up the last four years (since the last world cup) or longer to realize their dream. These are people who haven't gone to vacations for a decade but are grabbing this opportunity.

Learning about flyovers and pyrotechnics at American games being a thing

Non-americans discovering the size of American football stadiums....for high schools in texas. Also the size of our stadiums in general.

Going to baseball games as a side treat! Lmao.

Non-americans losing their minds over "like, 100 petrol pumps," at buc-ees.

Related: Americans often forget how huge target and Walmart is.

People discovering American BBQ

Non-americans being obsessed with mid American restaurant chains like Golden Corral and Taco Bell

A lot of them really did feel god in this chile's apparently

The rightful obsession with waffle house

New understanding of American Big Drink With Ice supremacy as summer creeps in

Begrudging acceptance of mandatory water breaks during games

Americans realizing we have a Team USA and we are not, in fact, just "hosting our friends" from around the world — mostly because we won our first match and our team is decent??? Not amazing but not the worst.

Side rant: us women's football team is legendary good and we should care about that more like. Hello???

Admitting Americans are right about air conditioning

Related: the english team did warm ups in Florida RIP, and also the there's a video of the French team just being like fuck the heat, fuck the sun, this is so hot...

Americans who do not normally care about international football but fucking love a sport and cheering so we're just hyping whatever team is nearby, like we see a party and just show up and learn the chant. Like sorry many of us don't know shit about soccer but if we see a bunch of people in viking helmets or kilts or holding a bunch of flags and cheering we're game.

TAILGATING!!!!

I already said this but American yellow school bus is an international celebrity

The Scottish drank Boston dry of beer apparently, like they quadrupled what Boston normally sells for fourth of July weekend. SAM ADAMS HAD TO GET AN EMERGENCY BEER DELIVERY.

Also the English team fans got kicked out of The Londoner pub in Dallas after drinking 5,000 beers and going over max capacity lmao

Free refill drinks, tortilla chips & salsa.

So many non-americans are going to be here for the 4th of July for our 250th anniversary which is going to be great and hilarious

Non-americans discovering ranch as a beloved condiment

Non-americans understanding American obsession with hamburger now

Japan's homebase is in Texas and the cultural differences are frankly great and also the Japanese fans are SO NICE and helped clean up the stadium after a match???

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.

#you could use the same reasons to justify the us still using standard instead of metric #which is stupid and counterproductive as hell #I don't think anyone seriously believes the us just does things their own special way for it's own sake

#however they do double down on doing it their way even when there are other (arguably better) ways

#out of weird american exceptionalism #so I think that people getting frustrated and saying that America just insists on doing things in dumb ways #is a shorthand for all of that

THOSE ARE THE SAME! FUCKING!! REASONS!!! WE DON'T (FULLY, MANDATORILY) USE METRIC

Holy fucking shit. People could literally spend 30 seconds looking this up instead of repeating "bluh bluh bluh America dumb"

The US has actually used a hybrid of metric and Imperial for decades, with changeover occurring where it's both necessary and economically viable, and has not fully switched over because of the prohibitive cost and ingrained habits. Literally trillions of dollars worth of equipment, road signs, documentation, like... I genuinely think y'all don't have any concept of how fucking big this country is, or how much this shit costs to change.

Let's take one single easy thing. Ready? Speed limit signs. How much would it cost just to change the speed limit signs, very very approximately?

Okay. So. To keep ourselves from going fully insane, let's limit this question only to interstates. This is the network of federally-managed roads which, you know, goes from state to state. There are 48,890 miles (sorry! 78,680 km, but I'm still mostly calculating in miles, because it's easier to find numbers this way) of interstate roadway in the US.

There are between 1 and 4 speed limit signs per mile, depending on traffic density. For simplicity, let's say 2 per mile.

It costs about $400 per sign to replace a speed limit sign. This is just speed limit signs. We'll get to other signs in a minute.

So that's $39.11 million dollars just for the speed limit signs. But hold on! You can't even get to replacing exit signs until you replace mile marker signs! Those are approximately every 1/10th to 2/10 of a mile, again on average, bc you don't want someone to have to walk very far to look for a mile marker if they've been in an accident. Let's go with every 2/10 of a mile. It costs $200 to remove a sign and $550 to place a new one, bc you have to get surveyors out to measure them and place them properly.

So let's see, that's 244,450 signs removed... $48.89 million... and then let's say we're placing kilometer markers every half kilometer just to make it nice and even, okay? 157,360 new half-kilometer markers at $550 each. $86.5 million.

So we're already spending about $174.5 million dollars, about $15 million more — on just replacing those two kinds of road signs just on interstates, which are a tiny fraction of the actual number of miles of state or federally-managed roads — than it costs the Federal Housing Authority to oversee the processing of every mortgage in the US for a year, just to pull a random line item out of the 2026 budget. We haven't touched any of the other signs on those or any other roads, let alone literally anything else.

And for what, exactly? Why? Because it fucking bugs people who don't live here? What is the purpose of spending a bunch of fucking money to change our shit up and just confuse people who think in miles?

Also: from a Canadian, fuck you all very much. Stop pissing on the USA because when you do that you also piss on Canada AND Mexico.

« What?? But I thought Canada and Mexico uses metric???? » we trade so much fucking industrial stuff with the USA that we have to use a mix, okay?!

They thought it was a sci-fi game but they also thought the monsters were going to be zombies.

Over a period of 2 hours they then proceeded to make EVERY Aliens movie cliche "mistake" known to man. Because at the time they all made sense.

The characters in a story don't know they're in a story or what kind of story it is.

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.