[OOC][PLOT] The Fourth Thread of Planning for Arc 1 - Arrivals

[Labster]

You can't shoehorn me or my character into a scenario just because "It's a good story."

I don't understand your thought process at all.  This seems like an overreaction to something you haven't even seen, and we're talking about vaguely because it hasn't been written.  You would of course get veto power once it's written if it does get written, because that's how we roll.  But let's say for the sake of argument that I am definitely shoehorning your character.  How could that possibly shoehorn you?

People make mistakes.  It's how we are.  I have to live with the fact that my friend's father was having a medical emergency, I was too stupid to realize it, and he died that night.  I still owe tens of thousands of dollars on a postgraduate degree I never earned, which was a mistake on a lot of levels, not the least of which was being afraid of industry.  I've broken up with a girlfriend the wrong way, another it was a mistake to break up at all.  But most mistakes are simpler, common ones.  The kindness that isn't given, the thoughtless word that sours relationships, the hurtful joke I can't take back.  My programming work is a constant series of mistakes, some of which have to be fixed by my colleagues.

But mistakes are how we learn.  We fall, we get up, and do better.  Or at least we make different mistakes.  That's kind of the unofficial motto of the Perl 6 project: we make different mistakes than Perl 5.  If you ask Larry Wall, Perl 6 is a gift from God, to him -- a rare chance to fully fix his own mistakes.  You still get the humility from him that he knows he will fall short of perfection… but that's okay.  But for common mistakes, the difference between a mistake and a second chance is a mere million miles.  It's worth the risk to try.

One can be born with wisdom, but the only way to acquire more wisdom is by making mistakes.  Look at Washuu's character -- she left the Choushin and deleted her knowledge so that she could make mistakes, to gain deeper knowledge.  That's exactly what mistakes are worth.  So if you're really like you describe, that you never make mistakes unless people or circumstance forces it, then I feel sorry for you.

That last sentence is probably a mistake too.  It's just that some things I've learned are so hard to teach that it just gets frustrating.  I like teaching.  I'm pretty good at it, but teaching true knowledge is so so much harder than teaching calculus or physics.  I mean seriously, look at what a jumble this post it.  And okay, maybe I lied, there's one other way to teach wisdom, and that's through storytelling, because it allows you to experience mistakes vicariously.  But writing stories to convey wisdom is at least a couple orders of magnitude harder than teaching hard facts, and it doesn't work the same on everyone.  But at least we can make copies.