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On Rincewind
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<h1 id="on-rincewind">On Rincewind</h1>
<p><a href="http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Rincewind">Rincewind</a>, we are
told, is a wizard. On the Disc, wizarding is a profession; Pratchett based
them on the English academic system, with colleges and bursars and tenure. A
wizard is a man of some academic distinction, or a student of such a man;
career wizards are uniformly well-fed, of sound body (if not necessarily of
sound mind) reasonably dressed, opinionated, crankish, and - importantly -
capable of magic.</p>
<p>Rincewind is a wizard: he is not well fed, having spent his life being thrust
from one adventure to the next; his body is more attuned for running away
from things than it is for meandering the halls or sitting by a fire; his
opinions largely revolve around “is this new thing going to eat me,” rather
than more abstract matters; importantly, he is completely incapable of magic,
in spite of years of study.</p>
<p>Rincewind is a wizard, and the interesting thing about that is that the
reader is expected (and I certainly did) take both his and the narrator's
insistence on it at face value. Why shouldn't we?</p>
<hr>
<p>I had a conversation with <a href="https://twitter.com/aeleitch">@aeletich</a> a while
back, while she was teaching herself to program. I don't recall exactly what
prompted it, but at one point I told her to stop worrying about all the
better programmers out there: from everyone else's point of view, she was
already a wizard. There might be better wizards, and worse wizards, but she'd
already passed any sort of bright line delimiting “not a programmer” from
“programmer.”</p>
<p>I think self-identification is important, and overlooked.</p>
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