This post is going to sound like I’m being a braggart dick in the first part. Hold on, it’ll get better.

I just recently started picking up doing sudokus. After having figured out some of the patterns, I moved on to expert and giant levels. I find them easy, and boring. I find them such because all a sudoku is, is a giant chain of logic, and the key to solving one is to set up the chain (or chains) of logic, and then find the thread that you can pull to make those chains fall. With the right mindset, it’s really pretty easy, it’s just time consuming. I’ve solved quite a few expert level sudokus over the past week or two, and I got bored.

I really feel this way about any logic-based challenge I take on. I’m a computer engineer, and I’m bored with it. I thought “wouldn’t it be cool to create a sudoku solver”, I thought a bit about what language to write it in. It took me about two minutes to figure out how to structure all the code and figure out how I wanted it all to interact, and then I got bored. I got bored because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’d be able to write an effective sudoku solver, and that it’s just a matter of sitting down and writing it out. It’s the same problem as doing sudokus myself. I already know I can do it, I already know I won’t fail at it, so I kinda don’t even want to start.

This is, honestly, one of several reasons why I stopped contributing to open source. There’s no challenge to it anymore. You just write code, it does something, probably what you expect it to do, and big whoop. Unless it’s a problem that isn’t really solvable or requires trailblazing in a computational or mathematical sense, it’s not even interesting anymore.

I think this is one reason I wanted to learn Japanese. It was a challenge I wasn’t quite as guaranteed to be able to solve, as I’d never learned a new language, and this one seemed like enough of a challenge that it might hold my interest for more than a little while. Also, it kind of intersects with things I’m not good at, which are people. I suck at people. Scientifically, mathematically, computationally, whatever, I have absolutely no doubt that I could quickly learn and master pretty much anything that’s put in front of me. People-wise, not so much.

I think this is also why I started setting up the website I did. The code that I have not cracked is how to become popular. I don’t want to become popular for the sake of being popular, I want to become popular because I don’t know how to do it. It’s a challenge that requires other people, illogical, emotionally driven people, and it’s a problem I can’t solve mathematically or scientifically. Well, mostly. Turns out there are some codes to crack. But mostly not.

As of this writing, this blog has broken the 150 follower mark, and to be quite frank, I’m not entirely sure how that happened. I am absolutely clueless as to what I’m doing here. But, paradoxically, I think that’s why I haven’t become bored with it. Succeeding here, or somewhere else, is not a foregone conclusion. It’s not simply a matter of following some logical pattern and out comes relevancy. And so I keep writing, and keep writing, knowing that at any day I could just as easily lose everything as gain everything.

And that’s the only thing that keeps it interesting.

I sure am an odd duck.