Why is everybody knitting chickens?
ironicsans.ghost.io
ironicsans.ghost.io
I'm well aware of the Emotional Support Chicken, though I haven't made one myself.
I think what we're witnessing here is simply another example of power laws[1] in effect. Say you have a set of objects that vary in desirability. Then you have a forum where people can talk about which objects they like. People will end up talking about the objects they like more, which will make them more visible to other people, who then end up also talking about them more. Meanwhile, slightly less desirable objects get talked about slightly less, which means fewer people discover them and talk about them.
Turn the crank on that iterative process many times and what was originally a linear distribution in object popularity will quickly become a huge spike on the few things at the top with a long tail of forgotten stuff.
In this case, Ravely is the center of the knitting world and has incredible impact on the fiber arts community. I'd guess that it's literally where most knitters across the world go to find patterns.
Emotional Support Chicken is currently the 3rd most popular knitting pattern on the site. It got there, I think by being cute and hitting the mental health zeitgeist at just the right time during COVID and then having the power law math work its magic.
Another pattern that hit the zeitgeist at just the right time and rocketed to popularity is the Non Cooperation Brick, released just after Trump was inaugurated.
For those who are curious, the top pattern is YSolda Teague's Musselburge hat. It's extremely common but also sort of generic looking so you probably don't realize how often people make and wear it. It's a good, simple start project, and Teague is a knitting celebrity.
Number two is PetiteKnit's Sophie scarf which is, honestly, not a very good article of clothing, but it is a very good tutorial project on how to knit. I suspect there are thousands of unworn Sophie scarves sitting in closets, having already completed their purpose of turning its owner into a knitter.
If one were to want to absorb knitting culture and be able to come across as "in the know" as quickly as possible, skimming the top patterns page on Ravelry is an excellent shortcut to get there.
Interested to know if you've ever tried something like that? I also get that knitting is a hobby many people do to escape computers for a minute.
Anyways, that got me into approaching the problem from a different angle (https://madhatter.app). A visual editor for hat patterns with layering, repeats, shapes, overstitching markers.
Some stuff is broken right now and it doesn't look great on mobile, but I'm building it in real time whenever my partner expresses frustration in some aspect of existing paid software ;-)
I haven't tried writing a knitting interpreter, even though that it extremely within the Venn diagram intersection of my interests. I have spent some time thinking about trying to formalizing knitting pattern notation. Right now, it's, like mostly there, but every pattern tweaks things in ways that are often arbitrary and confusing.
Knitting patterns are an interesting programming language. Ignoring the resulting fabric for a moment, one way to think of them is that they are an encoding of a linear series of steps the knitter is supposed to perform.
As any programmer knows, there are a whole bunch of possible programs that produce the same output:
print(1)
print(2)
print(3)
print(4)
print(5)
for (i from 1 to 5):
print(i)
A knitting pattern that, say, has deeply nested loops, can require the knitter to hold multiple indexes in their head (or using external counters) and increases the odds of making a mistake. Unrolled some of those loops manually might be more verbose but less error prone. Or not! Maybe the extra verbosity of the long list of stitches makes it easier to lose your place.
Even things like choosing where to place stitch markers can have an effect on how user-friendly the pattern is.
It's an interesting design problem. You're trying to design a set of instructions to produce a good object, but you're also trying to design a set of instructions that yield a good experience producing that object.
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.)
* Which has really cool construction, and I thoroughly recommend
I'm interested in your why. It's something I've considered for a while but haven't actually started on yet.
- Knitting is very technical. Similar to programming, you have a relatively small set of tools (stitches) that you can combine into virtually anything.
- It has a fairly satisfying learning curve. Continually challenging, but with achievable next steps.
- It’s an excellent way to keep busy without totally disengaging during slower paced social events. In other words it keeps me from constantly checking my phone while hanging out at my in-laws during holidays.
This is a really good point. I like knitting when I'm with family because it gives me something to do instead of just, you know, staring off into space, while still making me available for conversation.
I find that if you have your face in a phone, it send sends a "don't interrupt me" signal. Even if you're just playing a dumb game, people don't know that you aren't reading or otherwise absorbed, so tend not to engage with you. But you can easily talk and knit, so I think it works well as an idle-but-available activity.
https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/30/consider-knitt...
I agree with what gibspaulding says too.
I can attest to this. I’m still very much an amateur, but have really enjoyed getting to the point where I can start to picture a shape I want and mold it with a combination of k2tog and kfb.
That said do you have any suggestions on knitting resources for the more programming/engineering minded? Picking a pattern and the exact matching yarn and following along stitch by stitch is not terribly interesting to me. I’ve much more enjoyed figuring out how to design/size things from scratch, but that approach is not how most knitting resources I’ve come across are written. I would love to find some tutorials that focus more generically on things like various approaches to making an elbow or splitting one cylinder into multiple, etc.
I carved an OPEN LOOK scrollbar out of soap once.
https://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/16/open_look_scrollba...
An X-Windows Root Weave Boot Stipple Sweater would be cozy, with a nice big "X_cursor" on the front.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936808
https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipp...
https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipp...
My wife is part of some backyard chicken community, and said it's absolutely exploded with new members. Luckily I didn't need any chicks this year, but everyone I know who did was shocked that every single hatchery was out of stock for females. Even TSC didn't have any around until a week or two ago. Never seen anything like it.
Spoiler: it is not.
About two years later, they don't want the things anymore because they're expensive in small flocks with no forage, and they're messy, so they try to get rid of them. Our local Facebook is full of people trying to sell their chickens for way more than they're worth, and their particleboard coops for crazy amounts.
It's kind of sad. The local farm store has changed their policy to not sell less than 4 chickens, because people were buying one or two and chickens need more than that to be happy.
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.
The joke is that the first egg costs $X,000. But these have been weird times.
On low-end feed it costs about $0.55/week to keep a Golden Comet alive and I can buy them at 18 weeks old for $20. If one is extremely frugal in sheltering and containing them, doesn't experience any losses to predators, illness, or wandering off, and retail eggs hold above $0.20/ea, a small flock can conceivably break-even during its second year.
That pile of assumptions is unlikely to hold up but everything I've spent on chickens the whole time we've had them is less than the carrying costs of our two dogs over that time. And the dogs have never provided us food.
> The local farm store has changed their policy to not sell less than 4 chickens
The first year we raised chicks the minimums were 6. Best advice to anyone starting out is to buy 18 week pullets or mature hens cycling out from a pastured egg producer at 18-24 months. Raising chicks is much more challenging and attention-demanding than keeping mature chickens and if you manage to keep them all alive you'll still be $20+ into them before they start laying.
They are great layers until their molt after a year at which point they just stop for a few months. Then, even after they resume, it's never quite as productive.
Add to that the fact they don't live long(3 years is good), it's definitely not something to look at with a ROI eye.
But I'm about due for some layer replenishment. What do you think is a better choice?
So I think you already found the best. I didn't mean to refute anything you wrote, just adding some context for passer-bys.
I think it's awesome people are getting into raising chickens - if they do it for the right reasons. Egg prices aren't one of them! But they're rewarding, generally really easy to care for, and depending on your land can eat for free.
Treat them as a pet that just happens to provide. Not as a resource to use.
They happen to give me eggs but not enough to not buy more.
You want to start with a scarf and move onto a beanie.
#1: Musselburgh (a beanie)
#2: Sophie Scarf
#3: Emotional Support Chicken
Having been around backyard chickens a bit, including those with funny names, they do have individual "personality". When they die of old age, or because a hawk gets into the chicken coop, it's a sad day.
There are lots of bird-obsessions that rotate through that follow that recipe.
They could knit some pink flamingos.
I've never, ever been as stressed out as during school, grades 7-12. If the rest of life had been that stressful or worse, I'd have checked out a long time ago.
Also, all that, plus you're not getting paid for it.
I'm sure experiences differ, but mine was that school was trivially easy and inconsequential, but sometimes time intensive.
I wouldn't consider a job where I have to go and listen to a boring presentation for 8 hours a day stressful. What is stressful is the rat race and making sure I can afford mortgage payments
Every single time without fail (except maybe the jump from kindergarten to school) what actually happened was that the adults around me breathed down my neck a little bit less and I got access to a little more freedom to do fun stuff.
Being a kid in school is horrible. You're entirely reliant on your parents to buy you everything and enable you to experience things, nobody trusts you, everything is full of arbitrary rules.
The jump from school to university was especially stark - I kept being told it was going to be really hard, I'd need to work way harder than in highschool etc etc. Turns out what actually happened was I went from 6 straight hours of unavoidable class a day to maybe 2 or 3 much more interesting ones that were recorded and posted online and could be skipped when needed with no consequence, roughly the same amount of homework and I got to live with people my age 5 minutes walk from a 24 hour McDonalds.
And working... they pay you quite a lot of money to be there (seriously even a minimum wage job is unfathomable to a kid, do you know how many gameboys you could buy with that?), there's no homework and you get to do something you're really good at.
Before that period? I don't remember much. After that period? Everything gets downhill. Being an adult in a society sucks and I hate it. Normal people lifestyle, with its routines and "work/life balance", with everyone around you having expectations around random customs, with having to do everything in tiny bite-sized chunks, because there's not enough time left after work, chores and family - that's just not compatible with my mind.
Yeah, I guess, this could be a mental health issue.
Some health care professionals are becoming hesitant to talk about diagnoses because it hurts the patient when they start identifying with the diagnosis it makes the condition worse when the patient starts to act more like the diagnosed condition because that's how they're supposed to act
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 used to be dismissed as lazy, and I simply had to live with my apparent moral failure. Man, I tried so much self-improvement advice, and none of it worked.
Now I know that this is not the case, that there’s nothing wrong with me, and I found a huge community of like-minded people. Turns out there are quite a lot of self-improvement tools for autistic people, and they actually work.
(I believe many ADHDers feel the same way about their diagnosis.)
I am likely to have ADHD. Was never diagnosed as a youth because I never allowed it. Seriously! Growing up during the late 70's and 80's was a weird time for these things.
My mistrust in all of that came from watching friends get diagnosed then medicated. Then most of those people kind of shut down. Some presented very differently, generally not in a good way, as far as I was concerned.
A few personas I loved just got medicated away.
So... nope. Not gonna happen. I threw up a barrier that took well into maybe my late 30's to come down.
I had decided very young that I was in charge of who I was, nobody else and was fairly aware of all that during formative years. My trust was literally zero on that front, unless knowing someone would, in my eyes, be good for me.
From there, I identified with who I thought were pretty great people and the rest got the Okie Dokie, next treatment.
These days seem different for sure.
I knew damn well I was not neurotypical, a word that did not appear for many years ahead of my own struggles, and frankly that had to be OK, because I needed to be OK to exist as me. Who were others to say otherwise?
Today, seems like we live in a more permissive society than we did before. I do know my own perception is keen for having managed my own struggles. I can reach others and help. No meds needed, just real trust and the right experiences.
Sometimes meds are needed too. I feel they are used in lazy ways too often. Other means should be first.
And my beef with the meds boils down to how effective the right experiences can be.
Kid has anger management issues?
Medicate!
Or.. maybe put then into a wrestling club and see them mello right out and become a great, fairly tolerant person.
Both can work well, and both can go badly too.
It mostly boils down to how the humans in charge of debugging and empowering the young humans handle problems and the tools they use.
IMHO people reached for the meds far too often back then.
Maybe we are now too permissive, not doing enough to tease out the best in people, coping instead.
What I like most in your take is you are self aware and have others like you to build on.
I did not. Or, I did, but finding them and experiencing what you are was a lot harder, due to how less connected everyone was back then.
What I did was seek good mentors. Found them and came up OK, and capable. You appear to be getting after the same thing.
Good!
It all starts with self acceptance and awareness. From there, many who achieve those things can build on that and live a fine life.
I bet you do. Thanks for sharing a little perspective. It is high value.
I'd argue it isn't. The first edition of the DSM was published in 1952 [1]. This is right after "the routine annual comprehensive physical examination (PE) became a fixture in American medical practice" [2].
Add 25 years for a generation to be educated, another 25 for the old guard to retire, and you'd expect the paradigm shift around mental health to land around the millenium. Unless you have evidence we had a nonlinear jump between then and now, I'd argue the trend is analagous to folks becoming aware of and culturally assimilating the concept of blood type.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...
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.
People have been stigmatized and isolated for generations for being “different” in some way. Emotional and psychological reasons included. People are all different. We all have different issues. We all have different experiences. No one should be shunned for seeking out others with similarities to get advice and support. And how can you do that without making people aware?
Do we have more mental health issues than in the past? I don’t think so. I think we’re more aware and more accepting than past generations.
It is a joke, yeah, but it can also be a mood booster. So it's both.
I am a total fan of emotional support chickens, real or knitted. I am also a fan of rotisserie chickens.
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.
Perhaps we all could benefit from some knitted Coding Support Chickens?
If you can do it without a duck/rock/colleague/whatever, that's great! But for some, it is easier if they have someone to talk to.
This article does use words related to mental states, like "comforting" and "relaxing." But that's pretty difficult to avoid in most writing of non-trivial length.
My point is exactly that that kind of thing reads like a joking exaggeration, but this sort of approach to things is really common now and I truly have trouble telling when people are joking or being serious about it. Most of it reads like joking to me, but I don't know. It's also been going on long enough that it's making me wonder even more, since, judged as a joke, it was played out and over-done years ago.
Maybe you need a chicken. [EDIT] But perhaps we all need chickens?
But thank you for helping me understand this. The framing is 100% serious, I guess.
One of the leading stories in the article is about delivering them to survivors of Hurricane Helene - an interesting linguistic choice in its own right (Helene impacted roughly 2 million people, killing about 200. It had a 99.995% survival rate).
I suspect most people make these chickens simply for fun and decoration.
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.
Yes, I agree, which is why I used it as an example. You are confirming that the observation is not bias! Im not claiming that the article is exceptional in this regard.
I think it is precisely the framing and focus on health and safety which is interesting!
I disagree with all of it. Using the term "survivor" in its most basic and widespread sense is not at all interesting in the context of your false argument about "cultural currency."
> 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)
As a result a recreational hobby gets dressed up as self care or pro-social action. There can be an element of truth to this of course, but I do think it introduces a lot of exaggeration and conflation.
Putting my biases on the table, the whole thing strikes me as childish and dishonest. Kind of of like a kid rationalizing to a parent how they will use some new toy to get their homework done faster.
> Individuals feel the need to frame or justify and defend their individual actions and desires.
This, exactly this. I only recently realized this has been a huge factor for almost my entire life. There was always something more important to do than what I wanted. Parents wanted me to do things. School wanted me to do things. Religion wanted me to do things (courtesy of growing up in a proselytising Christianity-adjacent cult, 1/10 would not recommend). Later, in adulthood, it's family expectations again, then relationships, and then of course, work. The sum total of things I'm supposed to be doing, and that reflect good on me when I'm seen busy doing them, is effectively unbounded, leaving no place for any "selfish desire" such as... IDK, relaxing, taking a walk, clearing my head, watching stupid shit on the Internet.
Of course, those desires don't go away just because there's always something more important to do. But I can't just satisfy them without feeling like having to justify to myself and others, why I'm doing the "me thing" instead of the "important thing". Might be why I've struggled with procrastination all my adulthood - "I'm working" gets others off my back, and then it's only me I have to justify my choices to.
(As a kid, I didn't do "new toy to get my homework done faster", but I sure did the other thing - a computer to help me learn. It was a great argument, because it was partially true and my parents also heard it from adult sources (e.g. news programs).)
I'm not really sure why I do it, and why many others seem to. Some kind of insecurity? Like, I want to escape the neverending demands of other people without hurting my relationships with them, so I justify it in a way that makes fulfilling my own needs sound like either a) a critical, unavoidable maintenance work, something that's not really a choice, or b) it's actually doing them a favor, or c) it's capital-I Important. It's preemptively denying others the ability to counter "hey, what about me and my needs". A form of conflict avoidance, I guess.
I envy people who can just take vacations, or do hobbies, or whatever, without guilt or the need to justify it to others.
Not everything that brings people joy is an emotional support xxx.
Similar to saying you have OCD because you double checked if you switched your iron off. It's not obsessive compulsive you just double checked something.
I'm going to send this article to all the knitters I know (quite a few), in case any of them get the hint and decide to knit me one.
"Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification." - William Gibson, Neuromancer
He continues to be the most prophetic science fiction writer, nailing the zeitgeist of the early 21st century in the 1980s.
But there’s definitely less creative work produced without the direct or indirect influence of outside forces. As an artist you simply can’t unsee things. So we may end up at some local maxima of creativity.
These trends would spread slowly enough that other trends in other communities would have time and room to grow and develop. The result is you get a bunch of localized cultures, all unique in some way.
The best analogy I can think of is a plant mono-crop. Instead of different species of plant gradually finding their niche, we plant 50,000 acres with corn or soy.
I have to say, even over the last 20+ years or so, it really does feel like you can go anywhere in the world and get a very similar experience. You can go to the local 7-11, buy a coca-cola, hit up your local costco, listen to people arguing about American politics. It just feels like different countries have gradually been losing their unique culture, and we just have this global homogenized version with slight regional differences.
If you think of the ravelry community as valid as an in person community this will be nicer I think.
I think both things can be simultaneously true. There are a million sub-cultures that can now exist, that are no longer tied to a geographic location. This is both good and bad. Good, insofar as if you're in the middle of Ohio in a 2000 person town, and really-really into model trains or whatever, you can find an online community that shares this. But I also think it's bad insofar as we've lost some sense of culture or commonality with our (geographic) neighbors.
But to the homogenization point; I still think within a specific sub-culture (sewing circles), you can have global homogenization. The sewing circle might new be global, on facebook and tiktok, instead of 10,000 insular hamlets. Is this bad/good? I'm not sure. There's nothing from stopping you creating a local facebook group. And in theory, good ideas can spread rather than be confined to a specific geographic group. But I can't help feeling that some independent thought and ways of thinking are lost through this globalization.
It has its ups and downs. It does mean that it's harder to mesh with any given stranger out there (unless you watch Sports, pretty much the last bastion of cable monoculture). But it also means anyone who does mesh with you probably is very easy to form a strong bond with.
But if you never find that person, the world can feel depressingly small. Hence the retreat to online communities and all its benfits and downsides.
I'm a pretty cynical guy, especially with regards to social media, but this seems like totally harmless fun.
My grandmother bought a bunch of knitted chickens in the 60’s-80’s, as did a family dinner I used to go to etc. It’s a relatively simple shape to get right, there’s many options, and they end up looking fairly cute.
It doesn't necessarily signal the end of days, but ideally we participate in communities and societies while understanding why we do what we do. Not because "This person did it".
It's absolutely crazy to me how quickly people have forgotten the monoculture that, by my estimate, ended only 10 years ago.
There's unique content and then there's trending content
I feel this is what trends are for a lot of people. Narrowing down the almost unlimited number of choices you have to something simple. But eventually the novelty wears off and people move on.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_chocolate
1: https://www.lidl.co.uk/p/della-sante-dubai-chocolate-cream/p...