Why is everybody knitting chickens?

Haven't seen stitch-maps, that is useful.

I've also been thinking about what constitutes a "good" encoding, and it definitely comes down to individual preferences, even preferences in a given moment. Today you're reading off a sticky-note and want to optimize for size, tomorrow you're laying out 3 notebooks for a huge project and want clarity.

I like the idea of a creator making the base pattern, and then sharing a link that lets the user customize the output encoding.

That customization could be visual (I want a different random seed that is used to parameterize different aspects of this pattern, so it's totally unique to me) or in the notation.

I think it'd be awesome to have a recursive notation editor. So you'd click on a variable and it expands to the verbose representation, which might include other nested variables that you can further expand (or not).

(side note, I hope you don't mind: Game Programming Patterns made a huge difference for me early in my career, thank you for bringing that into the world.)

This feels like a weird take.

Factually it feels a bit off - with two chickens you very much will get a dozen eggs a week for the bulk of the year (there'll be some variation depending your distance from the equator, your choice of breed, etc). As noted elsewhere here, two chickens is probably insufficient to keep them as happy as they could or should be - and practically keeping four chickens is not significantly more effort or cost than keeping two.

Finding someone local who'll happily pay for some fresh eggs from happy birds is easy.

The implications around your use of the word 'safe' there feels misplaced, also. I'm guessing you're based in the USA? I'd argue egg-handling in other western nations is probably safer (here in AU we don't wash eggs, so we don't need to keep them refrigerated - removing their natural protective film seems to be contraindicated, f.e.).

Also keeping chickens can be fun. And economical. They process your kitchen scraps, kids love them, they definitely fit into the pet category.

It's weird to imply we should out-source the keeping of cats and dogs and goldfish to specialised cat-and-dog-and-goldfish farmers who can raise them much more cheaply than you could at home.

As far as I know, no major airlines have any special treatment for "emotional support animals." Most U.S. airlines allow pets on domestic flights to fly if they stay inside carriers within approved size limits. Emotional support animals and therapy animals fly as pets regardless of any certifications. So I'm pretty sure there's no service that makes it easy to fly with your Great Dane as an emotional support animal. You might be thinking of other animal-related exceptions, like having a pet in your apartment where the lease normally doesn't allow pets.

Service dogs on commercial flights are a separate USDOT category. The dog needs to be trained for a specific task for a disabled passenger, and the passenger must provide an attestation form. Airlines must allow service dogs, but they can still deny transport if the dog poses a safety risk or causes significant disruption before or after boarding. I'm not sure how enforcement works in practice, but I certainly wouldn't try to fly with a dog using a false attestation.

My understanding that those services that classify your animal are all unnecessary and sort of a scam.

Something can be causal or even predictable but still strange and difficult to reconcile.

I do think that there is a component of fashion or social currency that has piggybacked on medical awareness, or perhaps as a byproduct of its mixing with moral credentialism of disadvantage.

Yesterday newspaper hoarder was just replaced with 90's videogames, mangas or hifi / computer manuals.

Not physically, but digital hoarding is in full swing.

isn't it mostly about childhood nostalgia? "I'm more stressed then when I was a kid" seems pretty basic

There was an opinion piece in The Guardian a few years ago expounding the idea that 'awareness' and particularly the medicalisation of minor cases of things like anxiety and depression may be counterproductive, may lead more people to sink into these conditions rather than battle through and pull themselves out of them - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/medica...

And it's interesting to me that we now have the UK government talking about providing mental health support to try to foster grit and self-reliance - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/16/much-needed-...

I think you're pretty clearly experiencing a false positive on your "major cultural problem" detector. The chickens are cute and comforting, no doubt, and people are referring to them as "emotional support chickens" and "emergency chickens" as a tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. Note how the chickens are given names like "Hennifer Lopez" and "Lindsey LoHEN." You even say that it reads like a joking exaggeration, but apparently your confirmation bias is strong enough to override that observation?

There's lots of research showing stuffed animals can reduce stress even in adults. There is no joke here.

I would say that it is 99% joke, but the 1% is important in validating, justifying, and elevating the concept in the current culture.

Your comment is seething with confirmation bias. You're seeing things only because you're looking for them.

You conflate "health" with the word "palliative," when the latter specifically refers specifically to serious health problems. I go to the gym for my physical health and my mental health, but that doesn't imply that skipping one gym session would lead to a serious physical or mental health problem. Same goes for "mental health days." There's nothing sensational about referring to one's health.

And yes, we always refer to people who survive natural disasters as "survivors." Google "survivors of hurricane helene" and you'll find countless articles with headlines like "Survivors Describe Their Frightening Experiences," "4 Ways to Help Hurricane Helene Survivors," "Federal Assistance for Hurricane Helene Survivors Surpasses $137 Million," etc.

You've hit the nail on the head, and it points to what's actually driving it.

> It is medicalized... A day off work to rest, relax, and enjoy isn't just vacation (which also implies these concepts), but a mental health day.

The destruction of individual agency, in favor of top-down systems of control. The culture is a self-reinforcing thing, but what's pushing the culture is individuals having to express their own needs in terms of what the system will allow them. The "day off" isn't allowed - paid ones are not required to be provided by law, and the wealth-centralizing economic treadmill has made it so most people do not have the finances to lose a day of pay.

Similarly with emotional support animals. Airlines have policies that certain types of pets need to travel in the cold cargo hold, getting left waiting on a hot tarmac, with horror stories abounding. Landlords outright prohibit pets or put you over the barrel for "pet rent" (it's not like paying pet rent gets you extra space or amenities, or makes it so that chewing on the woodwork then becomes "normal wear and tear".

So enter people skirting their systems by any means possible, in this case the federal laws that created the legal concept of emotional support animals. And then comes the crab bucket mentality of rolling our eyes at people who we deem to be inappropriately using the escape hatch.

To avoid the euphemism/abstraction treadmill, we would need to be having these conversations maturely. But politics always seems to just end up going sideways (/me loosely gestures at the current ongoing destructionist catastrophe)