I Once Wrote Code to Make Endless Chickens
Then, my laptop got stolen.
When my husband drives me into the north Georgia mountains where he grew up, he insists that the scenery is unremarkable, but as this has basically my only meaningful exposure to pastoral life outside of video games, I find myself bewitched even by beef cattle.
Once, we stumbled upon a vending machine dispensing free copies of a local magazine, and the cover (black, overgrown with large, stylized flowers, and a pink-faced white chicken standing starkly against it) set off fireworks in my brain. I don’t know if it was the chicken’s heavenly expression or the fact that it looked pulled out of an old cartoon, but I not only liked it, I really liked it, and I wanted to look at it forever.
I placed the magazine in the glove compartment before transferring it into the clear plastic briefcase which protected the most inspirational paper-things I owned: clippings, illustrations, a doodle of a twenty-eyed monster I discovered in the lost-and-found in eighth grade.
At first, I wanted to learn how to draw this type of chicken by hand. I learned from a children’s drawing tutorial that most birds begin with a circle. Then, you lift your pencil, move it down and to the right (or left), and draw a bigger circle. Two sweeping arcs encase these circles, and you can get creative as you want with the tail. This reliably forms the basis of a folk art chicken.
I knew a thing or two about procedural generation, and, at this point I considered myself an expert on cartoon bird anatomy, so it wasn’t hard to plan out schematics of a computer program that could produce for me endless folk art chickens to look at.
For about two years I worked on it in coffee shops, airports, bars on hotel rooftops. I worked on it front of the TV in my grandparents’ small house in Hyderabad as I watched women slap each other across the face in soaps while my grandma laughed. Mostly, I worked on it at odd hours in my home office.
I got quite far, in fact, producing geometric birds standing against quilt-like backdrops en masse.
One night, after coming home late, I left my backpack in the back seat of my husband’s car while we stopped at a restaurant for a snack. When we returned, the windows were shattered. My backpack was gone, along with my infinite chickens-in-progress. The next morning, my laptop’s location services came online and I tracked it to a construction dumpster 6 miles from where I drank hot orange juice the night before.
The whole ordeal was obviously deflating, but also begged a question: what is the value of indulging oneself in something so painstaking, when the guarantee of payoff is virtually zero? Was writing a software so esoteric – which was ultimately stolen and thrown in the trash – just a waste of precious time? Or, are the moments I spent transfixed, tinkering, and accumulating artifacts of experimentation valuable just because they make my brain light up?
Whether the answer is a resounding “yes” changes depending on how the day goes, but what I know with certainty is that in every medium I’ve explored since then, my “hello world” is a chicken.
