Dozens and Dragons

Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer

a game about intuition and instinct

2022-10-15

CONTENTS

  1. DEDICATION
  2. PREFACE
  3. BACKGROUND
  4. HOW TO PLAY
  5. PROMPTS
  6. AFTERWARD
  7. RESOURCES

DEDICATION

i wanna learn to sex chickens. i’d really love for that to be on my resume

katie

PREFACE

I wrote this on a whim because of an offhand comment in an internet chat room, in isolation while suffering from COVID-19. It’s part fever dream, and if parts of it don’t make sense, that’s why.

BACKGROUND

There is no technique or theory that even the most advanced chicken sexer can ever teach you on the topic of sexing chickens. Indeed, the only way to learn chicken sexing is to sex chickens.

The best chicken sexers in the world hail from Japan. When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing the two genders is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, who will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, who are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike.

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which expert chicken sexers could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The students would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained up to masterful—albeit unconscious—levels.

Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, David Eagleman

Interpreting the metaphorical meaning of this is an exercise left up to the reader.

HOW TO PLAY

The point of this game is to—via the CHICKEN SEX INTUITION MAP—progress from a novice chicken sexer to an expert chicken sexer so that you can begin your career as a world-renowned, globe-trotting, highly sought after Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer.

CHICKEN SEX INTUITION MAP
CHICKEN SEX INTUITION MAP

Start at A. Read the appropriate PROMPT below for this and every subsequent hex you land on. Roll 2d6, sum the two results, and move according to the legend shown at J. You can leap off the edge of the map to the hex on the opposite side, but you cannot cross over the red lines.

If you get to S you become an Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer and win the game.

When told by the PROMPT to roll dice, roll 2d6, plus an additional d6 for each current rank above novice:

  1. Novice (2d6 total)
  2. Beginner (3d6 total)
  3. Competent (4d6 total)
  4. Proficient (5d6 todal)
  5. Expert (6d6 total)

Note: J is rankless. Treat it as a Novice hex in that you only roll 2d6.

If your highest single roll is 5 - 6, you SUCCEED. Otherwise you FAIL. The stakes for success and failure are determined by the PROMPT.

PROMPTS

There’s no wrong way to respond to the prompts. You can just read one and then continue playing. Or you can get out a pen and a journal and write out a response to each prompt. You can read 3 - 5 prompts and then respond to them in bulk. It’s all up to you.

  1. Today is your first day as a novice Chicken Sexer. You journey begins here, now, peering into the rear of a one day old chick. Roll to make a first impression. If you succeed, the Master Chicken Sexer sees promise and potential in you. If you fail, they single you out as an example to the others.
  2. One your fellow novice chicken sexers flames out on the very first day. How embarrassing! Do you comfort them and encourage them to try again? Or are you happy to have less competition?
  3. You hear a rumor that the Master Chicken Sexer lost their left pinky finger in a horrible chicken sexing accident when they themself was a novice, and that’s why they’re so hard on new novices each year. That said, the master sexer is really riding your ass. This is harder than you thought.
  4. These long days of sexing are killing you! Such long hours on your feet. Even a stupid baby knows that chicken sexing is important because the chicks have different health and dietary needs based on their sex. The male chicks should never be exposed to light—especially sunlight, which will kill them—must never come into contact with water, and above all should never be fed after midnight. The female chicks. The female are taken away to be secretly schooled through years of physical and mental conditioning to obtain superhuman powers and abilities that seem magical to outsiders. The intersex chicks are exposed to the spores of the fruiting Sulfur Shelf plant, becoming psionic symbiotic superchick myconids. The outersex chicks have no viable use that can be exploited, but are considered holy and enjoy a life of leisure being pampered during their early retirement on Vacation Island.
  5. These chicks all look alike. You start to doubt that you’ll ever become an expert freelance chicken sexer. Your overworked brain feverishly tries to force chicken sex patterns everywhere you look: peering into a drawer or a cabinet, peering between the pages of a book, pulling back the bedsheets before crawling into bed. You unconsciously and automatically assign them all a chicken sex.
  6. You feel like you didn’t sex even 50% of your chicks correctly today. Frustration. Maybe you picked the wrong career. Your RIVAL smugly informs you that they sexed with 90% accuracy today. Later you find the master chicken sexer left today’s performance reviews unguarded and are tempted to swap yours and your RIVAL’s. If you do so, roll to determine the outcome.
  7. Hell Week. Your skin crawls and your nerves are frayed as you endure one grueling all day shift after another. You sex a deluge of chickens in a daze, your conscious mind retreating from the overwhelming assault. Your subconscious takes over and you proceed on autopilot, in a chicken sexing fugue. Roll to determine whether you succeed.
  8. You feel a tingling in your belly: the feeling of your intuition growing stronger. You are learning to listen to it. You hear its voice more clearly. It is growing inside you, the expert chicken sexer you will one day become.
  9. You are an advanced beginner. You smugly look back at where you were when you started and scoff at your former self with your smooth, unwrinkled brain. So incapable of thinking the advanced thoughts that your many-wrinkled brain now thinks. You were a baby then.
  10. You are teetering dangerously on the edge of a precipice, a breakthrough of great magnitude before you. Understanding is within your reach if you are willing to take the plunge.
  11. Your competence is established fact. You no longer require constant supervision, and routinely sex chickens on your own with only occasional check-ins from the master sexer.
  12. Your RIVAL challenges you to a sex off! Roll to determine the outcome. The loser is humiliated, and the winner rises in the esteem of the master sexer.
  13. In addition to perfecting your own chicken sexing, you are also tasked with mentoring one of the crop of novices. They look like stupid little babies. You can’t believe you were ever that young and inexperienced.
  14. You catch your RIVAL making a mistake. Do you find compassion and help them, or take vengeance and delight in their failure?
  15. There is a big difference between knowledge and awareness. For the chicken sexer, knowledge is attainable through hard work and dedication. But awareness is beyond even the master’s grasp. It is a known and well-documented unknown.
  16. You hear news that the Black Turtle chicken sexing school was wholly consumed in a freak blue lava incident. Of the five great and ancient schools of chicken sexing, only yours and the Moon Rabbit schools remain. Gone are former glory days of chicken sexing.
  17. You are recognized for your contributions to the advancement of chicken sexing. You perfect an experimental procedure for double sexing, a technique which is named after you and widely adopted in the chicken sexing community.
  18. You ascend to a mythic level of chicken sexing, layering instinct on top of intuition: with reasonable certainty, you can intuit the sex of a chicken before even looking.
  19. The student becomes the teacher. You have completed your training. But this is only the beginning for you. You slowly write Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer at the top of your resume and buy a plane ticket. To where? Why, into the bright, bright future.

AFTERWARD

All modern livestock farming practices are inhumane, unethical, and immoral.

Biological sex is more complicated than many of us realize. The intersex community is largely overlooked and deserves a stronger voice and more representation.

RESOURCES