ca-caw!

I added black crows to my site today. I am endlessly inspired by the crows in Seattle, as I watch them commute back and forth each day between Redmond and Seattle, flying over my neighborhood with the sunset and sunrise.

I envision them eventually carrying contents of my blog across the screen for my readers to catch and read… but I’m just starting to build it. I spent most of the day finessing the animation of the wings. It turned out mediocre, but gets the vibe across that I want to hit, more or less… elegant goth? Robo animal?

Sidebar: I joined Poshmark recently and learned about new style mashups that have me tickled. Much like all the new music mashups featuring favorite 90’s tunes, new style mashups consist of things like “Poly & Ester,” “Rodeo Maximalism,” and my personal favorite, “Whimsygoth.” 🫶🏿 But I digress.

I built the crows initially with Cursor (it sucked), then with Claude Code (better, until I ran out of computing power), then back to Cursor. We got there, in the end, but like most stories about using AI it was a tango in fixing bugs and regressions brought about by the AI agent, more than it was about new design work.

Below you can find a few videos showing the progression of the animation as I worked on it with my agents. But first, the real crows:

Real crows, commuting home from Seattle to Redmond

An early iteration that looked like bugs or butterflies (a Rorsach test):

Another, with better bodies, but broken wings:

A later one in debug mode so we could look more closely at the wing connections, and now remarkably reminiscent of the fish in my aquarium:

Getting closer, still!

The final product is on my homepage.

I can’t stop thinking how thin the line was between bird-flying-in-sky and fish-swimming-in-water. When I toggled on transparencies and colors to see the layers better, it was like peering into the sea. Suddenly the crows were not the elegant black birds crossing the skyline, but the colorful minnows and guppies in my freshwater tank.

Is this how God itself created all species, evolving bit by bit, turning on transparent skin in order to learn and try again?

Or is it a hubris of humanity to think a Greater Being still controls it at that macro level?

Perhaps evolution is the chance hallucination of nature’s own LLM — playing, trying, and sometimes getting lucky.

♥ megan