“Unlike Godzilla, Pacific Rim doesn’t try to be serious even when it’s being serious. Characters have names like Stacker Pentecost and Hercules Hansen. The film requires you to believe that the best way to battle a giant monster is to build an even larger robot to fight that monster. Much of the Act 2 drama derives from inter-pilot tension airlifted from the Val Kilmer scenes in Top Gun. It’s the polar opposite of the Godzilla school of drama, where everyone is a total professional who has absolutely no personal goal besides Saving The World. In Pacific Rim, Idris Elba is Rinko Kikuchi’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, and two of the last Giant Robot-pilots in the world frequently get into sneering fights over who’s the bigger badass, and Charlie Day is a scientist. So, for all these reasons, Pacific Rim is a movie that I’ve heard perfectly smart people describe as “stupid” or “silly.” The problem with this line of thinking is that, really, that every blockbuster is pretty “silly,” in the context of Things Adults Should Care About. Godzilla is not less stupid than Pacific Rim just because people frown more. […] The difference, I think, is that Pacific Rim glories in its own silliness. There’s a flashback scene where Idris Elba rescues a little girl, and when he emerges from his giant robot, the sun shines upon him like he’s the catharsis in a biblical epic. There’s a moment when one giant robot swings an oil tanker like a sword. Then it grows a sword out of its wrist. Then it falls from space to earth. There are real complaints to make about Pacific Rim, I guess, all of them fair and most of them pedantic. I know a lot of people who have issues with the story. (“Why didn’t they use the wrist-sword earlier?” is a popular one.) Conversely, I don’t really know anyone who minds the story in Godzilla, possibly because everything stupid that happens is prefaced by Frowning Watanabe saying “This is why the stupid thing that’s about to happen makes sense.” Godzilla wants so badly to make sense. Pacific Rim wants so badly for Ron Perlman to wear golden shoes.”
— Darren Franich, “Entertainment Geekly: A call for an end to serious blockbusters” (via rahleighs)
EX-FUCKING-ACTLY! Pacific Rim is great because it is goofy and cartoony. If you compare Charlie Hunnam’s accent to other of his american works it’s so over the top it’s hilarious. It is not An Epic Saga it’s an OMG EPIC MONSTER-ROBOT BATTLES IN THE OCEAN. It’s got heart and a fuckton of sense of humour, a Santiago Segura hilarious cameo and a mobster in gold shoes, yeah. Everything looks better with a mobster in gold shoes. AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THE ANTAGONIC BUT PROBABLY GAY FOR EACH OTHER SCIENTISTS OKAY? I don’t know who ever expected something serious about it. It gave me everything it promised me and more.
Here’s some good news for your day: snow leopards have been sighted again in the Khorkh mountains in Mongolia for the first time in nearly 30 years!
The area surveyed is a small, highly biodiverse sanctuary on the border of China. Snow leopard sightings used to be common, but since the 1990s, there hadn’t been any confirmed reports of their presence.
A new study by the Snow Leopard Trust, however, was the first time there’s been rangers and camera traps in Khorkh. According to the Snow Leopard trust, “we don’t have an unlimited number of cameras or trained field staff, so we have to select our study sites carefully. This is the first time we’ve been able to venture east into Small Gobi A Protected Area – thanks to the help of local rangers, whom we had trained in camera trapping techniques before the survey. The fact that we’ve been able to confirm the snow leopard’s presence here this quickly is encouraging.”
What’s even better is that the camera trap caught photos of multiple individuals, including a mother with young cubs.
But why are they… so rotund? I glanced at the picture and thought it was like bad taxidermy or something at first >_>
A combination of body proportions, super floof, and a bad camera angle.
Snow leopards are not super svelte like other big cats. They’re stockier with kind of wide bodies, for the purpose of heat conservation. You can see in this photo that they don’t have the “definition” of warmer-climate cats like tigers.
Add to that the fact that they’ve got the longest and thickest fur of any big cat species, and that they need to put on extra weight to survive the winter… and you get a pretty chunky-looking felid. You can see in the photo below that they can look fairly close to spherical when they’re resting or curled up on themselves.
We’re all fairly used to seeing photos of snow leopards that are either taken in the warmer part of the year, or ones from zoos. Summer coats make cats look less fluffy, and in captive settings, snow leopards don’t need to put on extra weight to prepare for a lean season. But you can see even from photos of snow leopards in human care that they’re still super fluffy animals. Here’s some babies from the LA Zoo - even in a warm climate, they’re still puffy and could easily look rotund if caught at a bad angle.
I think the last part of it is that the camera trap startled them, and you’re getting that cat reaction of ‘arch back and puff up at the scary thing’. Honestly, I’m really happy to see those snow leopards looking so round, because it means they’re healthy and well fed. It just definitely looks a little odd!
I asked on a zoo group for photos of snow leopards known to be in good body condition showing off their floof. This is only a small selection of the incredible photos provided in response. All of these cats are at a perfectly healthy weight for their age and growth stage.
Above is Bataar from Cape May County Zoo on the left, and Raj from Binder Park Zoo on the right. Both at great weights but fairly spherical when at rest. (Photo Credits: J. Berg and Zookeeper Bryan.)
The lovely lady below this text is Misha, from the Sacramento Zoo. You can see how even just sitting, a reproductive-age female snow leopard can look quite round. Directly below her is a group of snow leopards from Assiniboine Park in Manitoba (who I unfortunately don’t have names for) showing how common that aesthetic is for the species. (Photo Credits: M. Owyang and F. Donnelly)
Snow leopard cubs are super fluff when they’re little. The very fresh baby on the right was born at the Welsh Mountain Zoo in the UK, and was probably around two or theee months old when the photo was taken. The older cub on the right is Misha’s son, Coconut, when he was about nine months old. (Photo Credits: M. Rimmer and M. Owyang)
Even though snow leopards are super fluffy, it doesn’t mean their actual body under the coat is chunky. While they’re built a little more stocky than other big cats, they’re still very long when fully stretched out. Here’s Misha and Coconut again to demonstrate: on the left, Misha stands while Coconut sits on a rock; on the right, Misha is standing fully stretched out with her paws on a tree. (Photo Credits: M. Owyang)
And because no photoset of snow leopards would be complete without it, here’s some gratuitous tail from Princess at Tanganyika Wildlife Park. (Photo Credit: K. Randolph)
Oh my; I have just had the world made a better place; thank you @why-animals-do-the-thing the gratuitous tail was the best ending : )
was trying to find something in google images and got side tracked when they said “look at the anime images you have!” and I was like what fucking Anime images do I have. what the hell. and it was just these two
Yknow tumblr was changing the logo monthly for a little while there. Are they just keeping the one that looks like a period tracker now. It’s been there suspiciously long
This older man moved my skirt aside and I absent-mindedly said “oh sorry” for being partially in his seat and he said “dont be sorry, this is new york” and then showed me all his poetry about observing the world and living as a restaurant worker during the pandemic and we talked about how i worked in a grocery store and as a bartender so i resonated with his work and he told me “i may never meet you again but it’s nice to meet someone worth talking to. I might sound like a world class idiot sage, but you can’t be afraid. That’s no way to live. You have to trust your humanity.” Then he shook my hand and got off the stop before me. Hello. Hello . Hello.
“the barbie movie critiques capitalism!” i need y'all to understand and internalize that you can enjoy things even if they’re not ideologically pure
yes insisting that matel’s glorified toy ad movie is anticapitalist is a wild assertion. but it’s also fine to enjoy the dressing-up-in-pink movie without ritualistic self-admonishment and shame. like, you can enjoy a thing and also be aware that the thing is not going to liberate us from the shackles of capitalism. both things can be true.
saw someone refer to not knowing how to keep track of your money as “girl math” ……why are we in this weird era of treating women like idiots but repackaging it to sound cute and quirky. We All Need To Stop
saw an interesting video about how this trend might have begun because a lot of younger millennial and gen z people don’t feel deserving of calling themselves adults because we don’t have the signifiers of adulthood we recognize in previous generations, we don’t have kids, we can’t own a house, we aren’t married, etc. that’s why “"adulting”“ was used too because for many young people, being an adult is something you must act as, it’s an action you must do, and not something that you just are, when you don’t feel like you’ve reached those milestones. "girl____” kind of feels like it started as a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that yes, these people are literally adults, but they don’t have the same freedom and agency as previous generations who own houses and land and have stable jobs. those are “women”, while young people relate closer to “girl”
but yes I think it was also quickly co-opted by people who didn’t get the joke and think it just is an easy way to be misogynistic :/
Did you guys know the “Sickos” artist made a Sicko thats a WGA screenwriter on strike (said comic artist is a The Onion satirist comic artist and his name is Stan Kelly)
We post bullshit here, sir
ALT