Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with making a Chinese zodiac calendar, specifically focusing on the Dragon. You know, since it’s the Year of the Dragon and all. I’ve always been fascinated by the zodiac, so I thought, why not try to code something up?
First, I needed to figure out the basics. I dug around online and found the order of the animals and some info about how the years cycle. It’s not just about the animal, but also the element – Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water – that rotates too.
I started by creating a simple list in Python. I just wanted to get the order right first:
- Rat
- Ox
- Tiger
- Rabbit
- Dragon
- Snake
- Horse
- Goat
- Monkey
- Rooster
- Dog
- Pig
That was the easy part.
The Dragon’s Turn
Then, I wanted to focus on the Dragon years. I found a starting point – 1904 was a Wood Dragon year, apparently. So, I wrote a little loop to calculate other Dragon years, keeping in mind the 12-year animal cycle and the 5-element cycle (which means a full cycle takes 60 years!).
I decided to make it show, the element of the current year’s Dragon.
It took some tweaking and a bit of head-scratching to get the element calculation right, it works! It’s not the prettiest thing ever, but it spits out the Dragon years and their elements.
This was a fun little project! I might expand on it later to include all the zodiac signs, or maybe even make a little web page out of it. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my little Dragon calendar generator.
