Uncategorized – Page 26 – Land of Sweetness and Light

New footage of the elusive Chinese Mountain Cat!

(Image Credits: Shan Shui Conservation Center)

This documentation of a barely-known species of small wild felid is incredible – it’s potentially the first active Chinese mountain cat den ever found! As documented in a recent blog post, a researcher working on a crane conservation project took photos of what he thought was a Tibetan fox, only to discover later that he’d actually photographed a cat so rare it was only discovered as a species in 2007! Researchers returned to the site later and were ecstatic to find that the cat was a mother with two young kittens. The placed a camera trap close to one of the den entrances and was able to record multiple days worth of footage before the family moved on.

Chinese mountain cats (Felis bieti) live in a very small, high-altitude range in remote northern China. They’re well-adapted to the harsh weather at those heights, with a stocky build and thick fur in the winter, and are often called “grass cats” by locals because they blend into the the dry grass of the alpine meadow habitats where they’re most often observed. What little information we have about these elusive felids comes mostly from observations by herders whose livestock graze in the meadows they inhabit. The IUCN lists that no substantive knowledge has been gained about Chinese mountain cats since 2010, so this new footage from Shan Shui Conservation Center is a major contribution to the scientific understanding of the species.

Click through here to watch the footage of the Chinese mountain cat family!

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railroadsoftware:

did anyone actually ever read those animorph books

just stared at the covers for a concerningly long amount of time before putting it back where i found it

me too

Same

Here are some of the spoilers you missed out on by not reading Animorphs:

Five children are forced to engage in guerilla warfare, espionage and repeated murder to protect their loved ones from alien parasites as they wait for the other, heroic aliens to finally arrive. When they do, the “good” aliens turn out to not give a shit about humans, caused the whole intergalactic war through their own shittiness and are willing to exterminate whole planets themselves to get at their hated enemies.

A child repeatedly experiences his intestines hanging out of his body while in various animal forms

A child is mentally tortured until broken and never gets better

A child in the form of a fly experiences getting splattered and smeared against a ceiling until his friends who are also flies at the time can peel his body off and take him somewhere he can transform back into a whole human before his insect mind fades completely

A child is shrunken and experiences having her eyeballs digested out of her head inside her friend’s stomach while she’s in the form of a tiny elephant

The heroes are forced to permanently imprison another child in the body of a rat because he knows too much and they abandon him on a tiny island with only other rats and garbage for company. Rumors circulate that the island is haunted but it’s actually his psychic screams reaching distant boaters.

A race of devastatingly powerful, violent aliens turn out to be mental toddlers who don’t know what they’re doing and are just bred to think they’re playing one big game before they’re killed at age three so they don’t learn the truth

An alien spends a few centuries hanging from the parasitic tentacle of a much bigger alien, surrounded by millions of rotting corpses attached to its other moon-spanning tendrils. They engage in mental warfare until one finally absorbs the other completely.

It turns out another seemingly “evil” alien race is simply driven to kill and eat everything in sight because it was separated from its original world where food was continuous and the entire specie’s life is the torture of perpetual starvation

A peaceful robot willingly removes its inhibition against violence to help in the war, only to slaughter a huge number of alien-controlled humans so gruesomely that nobody dares think about or speak of it again and it is the only thing left undescribed in a book series that already describes entrails getting torn out and skulls getting smashed

A child stays too long in the form of a flea and instead of turning back into a human, accidentally turns momentarily into one big, giant flea that can only writhe and moan because it shouldn’t exist and can’t live at that scale.

The kids discover Atlantis, then discover that Atlanteans are inbred mutants who paralyze any humans they find, dissect them alive to figure out how their organs work, then stuff the corpses as kitschy museum displays for their children.

An ordinary ant gets transformed into a human child. It has no idea what’s happening and is so overwhelmed by its huge new brain and sensory input that it can only scream until it dies

I went to a hard core Christian elementary school and they had animorphs. I highly doubt this is what they were about.

OKAY, I thought that same exact thing, but I WANTED TO BELIEVE.

I just spent the last 3 hours fact-checking all of these and THEYRE ALL ACTUALLY REAL THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THE SERIES!??

http://animorphs.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page <the pages here are bleak and not much information is written on most of them, but you can find each and every one of these there, like search “stomach” on the site and you can find the part about the tiny elephant getting burned with stomach acid, for example.

ITS ALL TRUE

If you didn’t read Animorphs as a kid you missed out, sorry buds.

All of these things are part of the series, and there’s a LOT more not on the list. This is just a brief snapshot, it doesn’t even go into the parts about the repeated and graphic important character death, the complicated ethics of chemical warfare and sacrificing noncombatants, the PTSD, suicide attempts and creeping paranoia, the multiple instances in which children are forced to try (and sometimes succeed) to kill family members, the multiple instances of genocide (2-3 of which are committed by our protagonists, depending on how strictly you define ‘genocide’), or that time one of the Animorphs beat someone to death with her own severed arm.

And let’s not even get into that thing at the mall with all those knives.

quick question what the fuck

Quick answer if Animorphs were published today it would have been squarely in the YA fiction category because they make stuff like the Hunger Games or the Maze Runner and all those ‘edgy’ YA apocalpyse books look tame but it was the 90s and the censors were asleep or something and thought 8-12 year olds would be fine with graphic realistic war violence

Exactly that.

Fun covers and PG language misled The Powers That Be into thinking the books were themselves PG. And apparently some kids also.

Fun fact, I stopped reading the series long before much of that stuff because kid me thought they were spending too much time on a gross romance between two of the leads. (Also the TV show sucked and my parents wouldn’t let me play the videogame.) Can’t decide if I missed out or dodged a serious bullet.

Animorphs was my fucking life

I’m currently re-reading Animorphs, since I absolutely loved the 12 or so books that were translated into Swedish when I was a kid. I’m currently on book 15. So far I take multiple breaks every book to stare blankly into space and softly whisper “hey. Hey what the actual fuck.” before moving on.