Character Development: Lalli

[wavewright62]

Even better: it took Tuuri insisting three times before he finally blurted out, "I'm tired", but he freely and easily expressed his fears and confusion to Kuutar in the Moon Spell. Or during the radio episode: he had no troubles switching from politely asking the bothering spirits to move further away, to threatening to come after them if they kept pissing him off - but when it comes to expressing his emotions to other human beings, he's still stuck with using onomatopeias and the little body language he knows to express.

Ah yes, excellent examples!
My husband has a somewhat different problem, in that he is very outgoing and loves to talk to people, and talk, and talk, and keeps going out and out and out and never quite realises that nobody is following the thread anymore.  He can't stand it when people change the subject. (He gets along quite well with me because I can follow him most of the way. We're lucky that way.) He also cannot understand viscerally what makes an introvert such as myself tick.
My husband can refute your facts because he has studied that in some depth.  Yes, that one, too. Every blimmin' endeavour, he has studied it and often practiced it, in depth, since he was very small. He's a walking encyclopedia that has no restraint about correcting you where you're wrong, and can't understand why everybody assumes he's an arrogant braggart for doing so.  But turn that around as a gift, in his job in a firm that works with inventors to capitalise and market their new technologies, he can talk to *every* inventor knowledgeably about their technology, and often point out unexpected uses and market avenues for it, and then write up the business case.  When it comes to the more delicate part of negotiation with venture capitalists, he has to hand off to his business partner.  No, he can't make bloke talk about the rugby, she does a far better job of that.

[urbicande]

Wow, excellent work by your son, hearty congratulations.  Does this perhaps illustrate my point that his challenge was made into a gift?  May I ask what his service project was?

He actually took up a cause that was near and dear to his heart, and trained groups of scouts to do presentations on autism awareness and bullying to local PTA groups, including explaining the relevant New York laws and providing resources to them.  It was kind of interesting to watch, but caused some trouble at his Eagle Board -- he wasn't building anything so they weren't sure how to evaluate his project and leadership skills!

[wavewright62]

He actually took up a cause that was near and dear to his heart, and trained groups of scouts to do presentations on autism awareness and bullying to local PTA groups, including explaining the relevant New York laws and providing resources to them.  It was kind of interesting to watch, but caused some trouble at his Eagle Board -- he wasn't building anything so they weren't sure how to evaluate his project and leadership skills!

Perfect! Thank goodness his Board made the right choice, for that project deftly illustrates the values required!

[Aliax]

My husband has a somewhat different problem, in that he is very outgoing and loves to talk to people, and talk, and talk, and keeps going out and out and out and never quite realises that nobody is following the thread anymore.

Ouch, yeah =_= I learned not to do that the hard way (my family telling me in no uncertain terms to shut up because nobody cared what I was talking about, when I was a kid). Now I'm constantly checking myself and being unsure whether I'm doing it again or not. "Oh gods, I've been talking for more than 3 sentences! They must be getting bored! But they look interested! But maybe they are just pretending to be interested because they are polite, and they'll never want to talk to me again because they'll remember me as the person who bored them out of their skull? Aaaaah, panic, panic, panic D: !!!"

My husband can refute your facts because he has studied that in some depth.  Yes, that one, too. Every blimmin' endeavour, he has studied it and often practiced it, in depth, since he was very small. He's a walking encyclopedia that has no restraint about correcting you where you're wrong, and can't understand why everybody assumes he's an arrogant braggart for doing so.

Oh yeah, I know this one too =_=
People: No, you can't possibly know that much about this, *and* this, AND this! You're just making it up to make yourself look interesting, aren't you?
Me: ... No? I just read about it in some magazine/encyclopedia/on the internet?
People: Yeah, right. Look, just shut up for once and stop being a know-it-all. Nobody likes know-it-alls.
Me: *enters Reynir Mode* I'm sorry  I just wanted to help  :'(

I don't even know that much D: ! There are LOADS and LOADS of stuff I know *nothing* about!

When it comes to the more delicate part of negotiation with venture capitalists, he has to hand off to his business partner.  No, he can't make bloke talk about the rugby, she does a far better job of that.

I could do it if I really had to, but it would be a serious drain on my energy, *and* I'd probably look like an idiot/ignoramus to the guy, *and* the guy would get bored very quickly trying to have a social time with someone whose idea of "social time" is geeking out about ideas, concepts and possibilities. (Also, I want your husband's job )

[wavewright62]

I don't even know that much D: ! There are LOADS and LOADS of stuff I know *nothing* about!

(Also, I want your husband's job )

That's just it, investigating all those avenues just gets us to the point where we can see what we *don't* know. 
And, my husband is sort of making this job for himself, because it doesn't exist.  It's been a hard slog and a huge learning curve for us; setting up a consultancy has not been easy or lucrative.  This new partnership is showing promise, though, of actually becoming a steady paying gig at some point. We've been keeping going through my jobs and his sideline in lapidary work. 
And that illustrates another facet of this personality - the obsessive collection of skill and experience.  My daughter picked up a pretty rock one day and demanded to know what it was.  They got a book from the library and my daughter (then 4yo) spent 8 hours a day for a few days finding and referencing rocks around a campsite.  Fast-forward 10 years and while my daughter has moved on to other interests, my husband has assembled a full lapidary workshop (mostly broken equipment given to him, which he repaired for use) and enough knowledge and skill to be a NZ expert in making of cabochons, specialising in "pffft that's impossible to polish."  His obsessive personality comes in handy for the commissions requiring precisely calibrated cabochons, sometimes in bulk, with local materials.  This he does as a hobby to unwind in the evenings.  Energy and obsession - I'm just glad he can harness this as a gift.

[Róisín]

I dunno, maybe I'm the weird one, but I think both you (Aliax) and Wavewright's husband sound like fascinating people. Then, I'm an obsessive geek about my own fields of interest, and live among several others who are obsessive geeks about their fields, and we all talk to each other, and enjoy it. And yeah, I get that thing of 'how can you possibly know so much about so many things?'. I've made a career of it.

When I was a really little kid I solemnly set out to learn everything in the world. I toiled away at this for several years. Then (I would still have been under five) one day I worked out that because of how fast new things were happening, and because so many of the old people I wanted to learn things from would die before I got to talk to them, this was an impossible task. I was devastated. I cried for a week. Then I picked myself up and decided to learn everything that it was possible to learn. I'm still at it.

So yeah, I understand what you are saying!

[Noodles]

I dunno, maybe I'm the weird one, but I think both you (Aliax) and Wavewright's husband sound like fascinating people. Then, I'm an obsessive geek about my own fields of interest, and live among several others who are obsessive geeks about their fields, and we all talk to each other, and enjoy it. And yeah, I get that thing of 'how can you possibly know so much about so many things?'. I've made a career of it.

^^^^This. So much this.

[LooNEY_DAC]

My husband has a somewhat different problem, in that he is very outgoing and loves to talk to people, and talk, and talk, and keeps going out and out and out and never quite realises that nobody is following the thread anymore.

Ouch, yeah =_= I learned not to do that the hard way (my family telling me in no uncertain terms to shut up because nobody cared what I was talking about, when I was a kid). Now I'm constantly checking myself and being unsure whether I'm doing it again or not. "Oh gods, I've been talking for more than 3 sentences! They must be getting bored! But they look interested! But maybe they are just pretending to be interested because they are polite, and they'll never want to talk to me again because they'll remember me as the person who bored them out of their skull? Aaaaah, panic, panic, panic D: !!!"

My husband can refute your facts because he has studied that in some depth.  Yes, that one, too. Every blimmin' endeavour, he has studied it and often practiced it, in depth, since he was very small. He's a walking encyclopedia that has no restraint about correcting you where you're wrong, and can't understand why everybody assumes he's an arrogant braggart for doing so.

Oh yeah, I know this one too =_=
People: No, you can't possibly know that much about this, *and* this, AND this! You're just making it up to make yourself look interesting, aren't you?
Me: ... No? I just read about it in some magazine/encyclopedia/on the internet?
People: Yeah, right. Look, just shut up for once and stop being a know-it-all. Nobody likes know-it-alls.
Me: *enters Reynir Mode* I'm sorry  I just wanted to help  :'(

I don't even know that much D: ! There are LOADS and LOADS of stuff I know *nothing* about!

STOP TALKING ABOUT ME LIKE THAT!!!!!

…I mean, "what an interesting set of problems to have. I can't imagine what it might be like to live with them".

Actually, my mom's side of the family has this tendency to ensnare people by their ears. Once so ensnared, the victim(s) willingly remain until they die from starvation are brought to their senses by an external force, and usually evince intense disappointment at the necessity of leaving.

[Juniper]

Sorry guys, thought this might be a worth while thread to necro to comment on the character development we're seeing in Lalli in this chapter considering he's actually learning another language. I'm really excited to see where his character development is going to continue to go, I mean we're not even half way through the story yet, a lot more is going to happen with him ! What if we get to see when he's proficient enough to actually have meaningful conversations with other crew members besides just Tuuri ?!? We probably will eventually, if not by the end of SSSS then in the other stories after SSSS that Minna has alluded to because I'm hoping his character development and language proficiency will have developed enough by then.

[Antillanka]

I'm glad you resurrected the thread, Juniper!

I'm starting to fear that my suspicion on scout's education consisting in basically being taught to write ten different words (all related to levels of danger) and maybe count to twelve will become canon sooner or later.

Edit: of course, I mean the education outside scout training...

[Juniper]

Yeah poor guy, it says right in his bio that he knows very little about the outside world. I'm starting to think based on that and the fact that Reynir thought Denmark was the southern most place in the whole world it's not uncommon to find quite a few individuals in y90 who are pretty skimpy on their education, especially 'peasants' aka those working in agriculture and probably a lot of people in the military, especially Finland and Norway. Working as a night scout for the military since you were at least 13, potentially younger, is going to have plenty of drawbacks, missing out on education being one of them.

[Minutia_R]

I'm starting to think based on that and the fact that Reynir thought Denmark was the southern most place in the whole world

Not arguing with your main point, but I always understood that Reynir was using "the world" to mean "the known world," which seems like a normal idiomatic usage, and also means that he was completely factually right (well, not about the palm trees.)

[Krisse Kovacs]

Not arguing with your main point, but I always understood that Reynir was using "the world" to mean "the known world," which seems like a normal idiomatic usage, and also means that he was completely factually right (well, not about the palm trees.)

I always thought that "world" actually mean those places that we know about (real or fictional and so on). Saying World for the Known World seemed okay to me.
if they mean the whole globe, they should have say earth maybe?


Lalli is a bit low educated as I notice, For example when he made a tiny mistake in his report back then, the younger scouts got an extra lesson to improve their describing skill, but Lalli skipped it, he might skipped more lessons in his life that he felt he might not need. He does not really know some things, like horse, train and such, because he has never seen them in his life.
but he is actually really easily learn things, he managed to learn a tiny swedish already, He actually know (or feel) that the earth is actually not flat, he can learn a map in few second of looking at it (he never carries a map with him) and easily can point out where he was and what he has seen when he returns and give the record (really good skill to be a scout)

[Athena]

I always thought that "world" actually mean those places that we know about (real or fictional and so on). Saying World for the Known World seemed okay to me.
if they mean the whole globe, they should have say earth maybe?


Lalli is a bit low educated as I notice, For example when he made a tiny mistake in his report back then, the younger scouts got an extra lesson to improve their describing skill, but Lalli skipped it, he might skipped more lessons in his life that he felt he might not need. He does not really know some things, like horse, train and such, because he has never seen them in his life.
but he is actually really easily learn things, he managed to learn a tiny swedish already, He actually know (or feel) that the earth is actually not flat, he can learn a map in few second of looking at it (he never carries a map with him) and easily can point out where he was and what he has seen when he returns and give the record (really good skill to be a scout)

Yeah, he certainly has a very good memory and capacity for learning, but it's all about whether he wants/needs to learn or not. Kinda reminds me of Sherlock and how he only remembers things important to the situation so he can save on brain space.

[Minutia_R]

Yeah, he certainly has a very good memory and capacity for learning, but it's all about whether he wants/needs to learn or not. Kinda reminds me of Sherlock and how he only remembers things important to the situation so he can save on brain space.

Which is why it was nice to see him showing curiosity about something in today's update rather than just being like "Is it my job?  If not who cares."