strixcattus

[strixcattus]

Today's aesthetic: When you've just finished making the body of a stuffed animal without any of the defining features and it just looks like a bowling pin with safety eyes

[strixcattus]

I'm trying to figure out a good way to tell the story but my first D&D character had her familiar stolen by a miniature Velma (from Scooby-Doo, yes) made out of a vegan meatball, and I'm still a little salty the game ended up petering out not long after that and I never got revenge

[strixcattus]

I think either I'm missing something obvious or there's actually something wrong with the current Fallen London event on my end? I made it to Tuesday a while ago but it says I need 25 London, Askance to meet with the messenger, and I only have 20 and I don't see any way of changing that. Is there something I was supposed to do that I didn't, or is this actually concerning?

[strixcattus]

My sleep schedule has deteriorated to the point where I don't even care if I end up having a little caffeine in the evening. What's it going to do? Make my sleep even worse? At this point the only way that could possibly happen is if it somehow rolls over and becomes decent again.

[strixcattus]

Artfight Retrospective 2025

Wanted to do something like this last year but I forgor to do it at a time it'd make sense.

Total attacks: 8 (down one from last year)

Defenses: 3 (same as last year)

Total points: 472 (up from last year's 445.25!)

(A few of my favourite attacks below the cut. General warnings: Potential eyestrain [bright colors] on the fourth piece.)

Most characters in one attack: 2

(Link)

This one also happened to be my first attack of the month... on the 15th. Somehow I started drawing several days later than I did last year despite already having been signed up...

Highest-scoring attack:

(Link)

Other favourites of mine:

If I put every attack I'd done that I was particularly fond of my entire artfight portfolio would be in this post. And I kind of want to keep at least some of it where it is! But there are a couple (one of which I've already posted a timelapse of, so I'll just leave the link here... do heed the warnings on that post though!) that turned out particularly well, so here they are:

(Link)

I'm fond of the shading job I did on this one. It's been a while since I put a lot of effort into shading, especially in this style where everything has to be a bit more intentional, so it was nice to really go all out. Her hair especially was a fun test of what was within my skills.

(Dog made of CDs)

The mission: Draw a character based on the owner's username. The username in question: Dog Made of CDs. This creature essentially sprung into my head fully formed upon encountering the prompt and refused to leave me alone until I had brought it into reality. And oh was it a worthwhile pursuit...

That's going to be all for this year's Artfight Retrospective—if you want to see the rest of my attacks from this year you can always go to my actual Artfight profile. And while you're there maybe check out the owners of the characters above; they're all cool people and definitely worth your time!

[strixcattus]

I was thinking about that barber paradox: "There is a barber who shaves only and all men who do not shave themselves; then who shaves the barber?"

And of course if you write it the way I just did, you can easily say that the barber is a woman or some other gender that doesn't fall into the net of "men," and thus no one needs to shave the barber, or if she does (or if they do) want to be shaved then someone else can shave her (or them) with no problem.

Which is why the original paradox threw in a he/him pronoun to make it clear that the barber was a man. Now, throwing aside the possibility of the barber being a he/him woman or nonbinary person, or using all pronouns while still not being a man (or maybe you want to do this the long way. The next step is to say "male barber," to which we say, maybe he's a teenager. Then we say "there is a man, a barber," and aren't you happy we've wasted our time here?), we still have a couple things we can try.

Maybe no one shaves the barber. There are reasons a man might not shave at all. Maybe he wants to keep his beard. Maybe he has a hormone imbalance, or is trans, or has alopecia, and doesn't have a beard to shave in the first place.

But—but—! You said he shaves all men! You can't stop being part of all men just because you don't have a beard!

Well, yeah. So what about men that don't have beards? What about men who do have beards and don't want to shave them? What is this barber shaving in the former case? Is he hunting bearded men down in the latter?

And. I mean. All men? Do you know how many men there are?

No, seriously. World population we can round down to eight billion to make the math easier on us. Let's say half of that is male, again to make things easier, and then we run into a slight issue because I had some trouble figuring out what amount of the world's population is over eighteen. There were stats for fifteen and under, and for twenty and under, but not eighteen.

So at this point, okay, let's just make some estimates, and maybe say that a boy becomes a shaveable man at fifteen, and I don't really want to linger in the details too long here so let's just say the world has roughly three billion men in it.

Next we need to know how long it takes to shave a beard. A Reddit post I looked at gives a variety of responses that seem to range from five minutes (if you're trying to hurry) to up to half an hour (if you're taking your time or have a particularly demanding beard.) Let's be somewhat nice to our theoretical barber, because we're about to be really, really mean to him, and say it takes about ten minutes on average.

Thirty billion minutes. At 525,600 minutes to a year, that's over fifty-seven thousand years. For contrast, global life expectancy is around seventy years. For men specifically, of course.

I'd say the paradox is the least of his problems.

[strixcattus]

Heyyyyy mate it's past you giving you a friendly :) reminder :) that you were planning to do this :)

Look! It's August! I even gave you a whole extra day for a break because I'm a Nice Person!

Now get your act together future me. You promised.

There's something I want to try drawing but it's too complicated a piece to waste time seeing if I can manage it while artfight is going on. Posting this so I can't forget about it by the time I can spare time on drawing random overcomplicated stuff

[strixcattus]

I'm new here; this is generally considered bad, right?

[strixcattus]

Kinda forcing myself to do one last artfight attack (I do want to do it; it's just I don't want to do it right now but there isn't really a different time to do it than right now) and I seem to have been rewarded for my efforts by receiving near-godly artistic skill relative to how I normally am

[strixcattus]

I gotta say, this game knows its audience

[strixcattus]

Timelapse of the artfight piece I just finished (warnings: bugs, death, moderate gore, and flickering of the video)

[strixcattus]

Nnnhhhh I wanted to try getting three final pieces in for the last two days of artfight but I've been working on this since last night and I'm only about 70% through the shading on the character

[strixcattus]

Jesus fried chicken it's been back and forth like this all month

The artfight scores this year are really neck and neck aren't they

[strixcattus]

Trying to check out some alternatives to Google Docs for writing; anyone have any recs? I'm taking Ellipsus for a trial run right now but the limited amount of fonts available is kind of a deal-breaker. I'd much rather something I can use in my browser over something I need to download; what's good within that constraint?

[strixcattus]

A magical girl concept I was thinking about a few days ago and just now remembered:

Why teenage girls?

Each human is born with a given amount of magic. There's no reliable way to predict or gauge how much—some people swear it's genetic, others try to come up with some sort of test, and they all invariably do no better than psychics under rigorous scientific testing. So each human being is born with a given amount of magic, and—and this is important—only that much magic.

See, magic is not a limited resource as far as anyone can tell, but a single person's magic? That one is. The magic you're born with is all the magic you'll ever have, and humans leak magic like helium from a dollar-store balloon. The day you're born is the most magical you'll ever be (see, there is some truth to calling childbirth "magical!"), and it's all downhill from there. 90% of the population is fully out of magic by their eighteenth birthday. Nearly all the rest run out before twenty-two. Sometimes you find an individual who can still naturally see magical creatures into their thirties or even forties, but they're vanishingly rare.

That's without interference. There are ways to alter the process, to allow people to keep their magic stable or to actually use it for something besides "seeing things others can't," they just aren't available to humans.

It's a little unclear where the creatures come from. There are Theories, and they're all probably partial truths at best. But there is a race of magical creatures that in some capacity lives beside us, invisible to anyone who doesn't still have magic within them. Some might say there's more than one, but the one success modern research has brought us is that we now know beyond a reasonable doubt that the only meaningful difference between the small, cute creatures that assert their intentions to keep humanity safe and would probably lose a fistfight to an eight-year-old, and the large, horrifying ones that rip apart and eat people alive, is that the scary ones only got where they were by eating people alive, and the cute ones are as they are because they categorically refuse to do that.

Now, the small ones—let's call them, say, "magical girl companions"—on their own, they would be overrun by the other creatures, leaving humanity to become scared, helpless food for creatures only a small portion of the population, most of them children, can actually see, let alone fight off. And these companions would rather not see another intelligent species suffer. Fortunately, while they can't do much on their own, they can do one thing.

If a human has enough magic left—okay, technically this can be done to any human with magic, but it's not useful unless they still have enough to make use of it more than a few times—they can be put into a state which, to bring back the helium analogy, is less like a party balloon and more like the tanks we use for long-term storage. No leaks. In this state, the magic a human has will never decrease, and they'll always be able to see what others can't—and, once a human has been put into it, it's permanent.

Of course, seeing something does not mean having a defense against it. Which is why this state comes with a release valve of sorts. By using a small amount of magic, a human in this state can activate a transformation into a version of themselves that's a little less like a human and a little more like the companions. This version has total control over their magic, and can actually apply it in an active capacity to fight off the creatures that would otherwise be unstoppable by human science.

And a single human's magic is still a finite resource. Anyone who actually takes up the offer to help will end up burning through their magic at an accelerated rate, needing so much of it to fight, and even those with the most potential can only get a handful of years before they burn themselves out and one day find they can no longer transform. And then they're stuck, forever, able to see the magical battles happening around them but unable to help.

So, yeah. Teenagers.

Okay, but why teenage *girls?*

Okay. So. It's not just teenage girls. There are other genders conscripted into the eternal fight against the forces of humanity's nightmares! They're just—especially when it comes to boys—not as common. You remember that "transformation" I mentioned?

You don't get to control what you look like after you transform. And neither does anyone else. It's sorta a manifestation of your soul. Usually your face and body look the same—at least mostly—but the big difference is what you wear.

Turns out most people's souls manifest as big frilly dresses and skirts. Which is, to be clear, something that is made very clear when the companions offer you the choice to wield magical power in the defense of humanity. It's like the most upfront part of the contract.

How many teenage boys do you know who would be normal about that?

[strixcattus]

drinking cold water with a shot of hot water

[strixcattus]

Alright, buckle in, because here is Strix Cattus's Superlatively Correct Personal Bookshelf Organization Scheme:

Beloved Authors: Any author who deserves it gets set aside somewhere visible. Maybe just the top shelf, maybe somewhere special. Which authors specifically is not a question I can answer for anyone but myself.

Childhood books: On their own bookshelf if you can swing it. Sorted by genre, theme, series/author, and possibly outside of them all age, if the collection you've kept makes sense for it.

Graphic Novels: By genre, then author, if you have enough for a shelf. Same deal with most other comics you may have about. Manga's its own thing because of series length; we'll get to that later

Realistic Fiction: Separated into "mystery," "romance" (if you go there; I don't) (actually let's put all the romance in its own section regardless of setting) (look if you read romance you probably know how to sort it. I don't go here.), and all else. Sorted within by author.

Fantasy: Sorted by author on a sort of genre gradient. From "high" to "low" fantasy if you will, though it's entirely possible I'm not thinking of those terms the same way you are since I don't use them much. Leads into:

Science fiction: Same deal, sorted from "softer" to "harder." Allows for a bit of space in the middle of the genres for those books that don't want to be labelled as either fantasy or sci-fi.

Nonfiction: Sorted by subject. Room for your own decisions here based on what distributions you've got.

Classics: I don't have an opinion on how best to sort these as I've not read many books yet that fit into this category.

Manga: Sorted by series, in chronological order of when you started reading them. Can do the same for other graphic novel series if you have enough of enough length to justify it and make it workable; I don't so I wouldn't.

Notebooks: Sorted first by whether or not you've actually started writing in them. If you have, then sort by purpose; if not, then sort by appearance.

I feel like I'm forgetting something here but that's what I've got so I'm just going to leave this here and dip before things start getting thrown around~