April 17, 2012

  • Assorted Grumbles

    I have Second Sock Syndrome. It's when you knit one sock, and then you don't quite get around to knitting the other one. I remember being at that knitting store picking out sock yarn months ago, thinking, yipes this dinky yarn is thin as a thread. I asked the lady how long it would take to knit a pair of socks, and she warned me that each sock takes longer than a hat.

    I bought a set of sock-sized knitting needles. They are like toothpicks. I'm knitting with thread on toothpicks. Friends who are real masochists call me a masochist.

    For months I knitted the stupid thing, on and off. All through spring break, as we traveled, as other guild members played the carillon, I'd sit somewhere knitting. Facebook is filled with pictures of me knitting, labeled 正正正正正, the Chinese character I'd use for tallying rows.

    And then the first sock was done, a thing with a cubical heel and a very trapezoidal toe. I thought about starting the other one, and I put it off.

    Apparently this is really common! People chug through the first sock, and then lose steam, and then they don't make the second. It even has its own name.

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    Terraria isn't entertaining to me anymore. I open the silly thing, and I just don't care to keep playing it. I really really wanted to play it for days after my laptop broke, and then the weeks went by, and I gradually forgot about it. And now, now that I actually can play it, I don't want to anymore. First-world problems.

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    I don't feel like doing anything. Not a single thing. But the Internet isn't entertaining either. I want to go do something, and nothing seems like a good thing to do. Maybe I just want to go to bed. Maybe everything will seem more exciting after being asleep for half a day.

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    A good programmer can pick up a new language. But sometimes, the new language is something like Haskell. The thing doesn't have any loops in it! And then I go online and type "how to use loops in Haskell", and of course such a question has been asked before. The answers, however, are horrifying things informing the asker that anything done with loops can be done with recursion in Haskell. Great. Thanks. I just have to try and come up with a weird way of recursively doing things that are normally done with loops.

    Something as simple as determining if a number is prime! Any language has things which can be said better, and things which can only be said poorly. This thing, I fear, in Haskell, can only be said poorly.