cattun

[cattun]

ʀᴇᴀᴄʜ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛᴏᴜᴄʜ ᴘᴇᴛ

[cattun]

when you see it coming from a mile away and you do it anyway

[cattun]

While Hssken are generally not great at regulating their core temperature, cooling down is often more difficult for them than warming up, largely thanks to their particular lack of sweat glands. Swimming is one of the few activities coming with built-in cooldown support.

Apart from the recreational aspect, regular dives in the cave river are required for maintenance on waterworks and the fishery. Diving comes easy thanks to their different gas exchange chemistry, but it can also be significantly more dangerous.

[cattun]

Good morning!

[cattun]

Shark ppupy

[cattun]

Dancing leopard

[cattun]

The sparkling dust from the caustic wastes will quickly react with exposed tissue. Superficial skin burns are squamous, taut and clearly delineated, with a greasy sheen and blue to violet pallor. Prolonged exposure can easily lead to a runaway reaction which burns through tissue, leaches into the blood stream or eats away at organs.

Deeper burns are particularly difficult to treat, especially since the end of the world destroyed most of the civilisation's capacities for high-level health care. The immediately life-saving treatment still somewhat available involves introducing a complex medicinal compound to the reaction which, if successful, causes the harmful substance to expand and crystalise, rendering it largely inert in contact with tissue.

These crystals have a similar hardness to Hssken teeth or quartz, and can be carefully filed down or drilled into with similar (although rarely available) techniques. They do not shed if embedded subdermally, and generally prevent organic tissue from growing in place or healing up the affected area. However, having crystals hold the patient's digestive tract in place is often still preferrable to multiple organ destruction.

Crystallising caustic wounds is a tremendously painful process which requires a skilled practitioner to ensure that at least a modicum of flexibility is either still available or can be restored (e.g. by ensuring gaps for muscle expansion or future growth). So of course there is an entire cult around deliberately exposing yourself to the dust and turning the embedded crystallisation into part exoskeleton, part in-group status symbol and proof of the amount of pain you can endure.

[cattun]

Dunes upon dunes of sparkling blue dust in the caustic wastes. Churned into foamy clouds by the slightest breeze, it clings to cloth, burns exposed skin and easily fills nose and mouth with sour rot.

[cattun]

I've been getting into making sketch books from the random junk I've got laying around. I lovingly call them... crap books.

Here's #6 and #7.

Both books are stitch-bound (coptic-ish) and lie flat when opened. Front covers are made from cardboard stock, holographic effect foil and insulation tape.

The A4 one is #6 featuring 16 double-sided pages of rose-tinted 300 gsm watercolour paper (one side rough, one side smooth) and a back cover of paper-laminated polystyrene board.

#7 is the A5 one with 72 double-sided pages of 80 gsm pastel tinted printer paper in 6 different shades and a back cover of painted & varnished carton.

[cattun]

The pit swallowed a piece of the oily ocean like an enormous well. At the bottom of it, encircled by falling water walls, stood a rig of salt-licked concrete and corroded sheet metal. Solemnly bowing columns balanced rust-eaten walls and frayed floor grilles slick with wet over choking depth; and atop it all, the community - a family, hardly a lineage - held on.

[cattun]

I had been asked to paint a lämp

[cattun]

Variations in the quartz in their diet will cause colour banding in quartz-reinforced Hssken body parts, such as horns, tail, claws and teeth. Since these parts grow and regenerate at different speeds, the patterns tend to be very much non-uniform.

The scales they develop depend on genetics. Hands, feet and ears are to be expected, but mosaic scaling across other body parts is also reasonably common. Sun exposure will trigger scale development in most, too.

[cattun]

When the world ended, entire forests were petrified.

Heheh. Petreefied.

[cattun]

Phryngen eggs contain enough energy to power a small settlement for years, even with a mediocre reactor like this one. Of course hooking it up to a machine prevents it from hatching, and getting your hands on a Phrynx egg involves them dying, so...

[cattun]

shit that wouldve been easier to do digitally, episode 17 feat. sparkly paper, patterned paper, origami paper.

[cattun]

[cattun]

Oh wow I guess I never posted this garish thing back in 22. Like I have any shame left??? lmao