tortoises

The author does reference the 10,000 hour rule here...

> These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” in his book Outliers, which in turn was the inspiration for the song “Ten Thousand Hours” by the hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the opening track on their Grammy-award winning album The Heist.

The structure of this short story / personal essay is a series of chained vignettes. They are linked together only loosely or suggestively. That is probably deliberate. The story is about searching for an antidote to boredom, and finding that antidote in a surreal, arbitrary game where you get to meet unusual people. Therefore the structure of the short story, while initially a little opaque, actually helps you get more simpatico with her state of mind as she was going on this personal journey. I suppose it's not for everyone, but I think the structure is actually quite clever.

I like to grab 100s of pieces of unattended plywood & two-by-fours from a junkyard or not-too-dilapidated forest horror cabin or something and drag them back to my house. Then I assemble them using hammer & nails, or I climb up a tree and nail them across some branches. You will need a hotspot for wifi & a tarp to protect u & ur laptop in case of rain while u are sitting up there.

Some hip ppl might try to use a makerbot or w/e but to get any kind of height on the platform u will need a LOT of plastic.

Here's the developer's blog post on it: http://spikepadley.com/post/45594876182/hexadecimal-time

Have the start-up write down all the attributes they want their product to have. If you were selling magnificent trained wolves, for instance, you would want the customer to think, upon seeing the wolves: "What proud, mysterious, noble, cunning, ruthless, snow-dappled, and primeval creatures." You would neither want nor expect the customer to generate such adjectives if you were selling, for instance, hamsters.

At that juncture I would repair to a high mountain top, away from the start-up client, one hand lazily petting the head of my fearsome trained wolf, as I mused to myself on the adjectives I had just collected. What colors would they inspire? What noises, what textures, what tastes? I would write all these down in a second list.

Then I would descend back to the company of my human friends and ask people not in the start-up what the second list made them think of, as a cross-check against the first. If you start off with "petwolfco: proud, mysterious, ruthless, loyal", and come back from the mountain with "petwolfco: confetti colors, Comic Sans, merry polka music, Shirley Temples", you had better go back to the top of the mountain to reflect some more.

When my impulses and my third party's impulses at last concurred ("petwolfco: grey, ragged, minimalistic, narrow sans-serif, stunning small highlights in stunning blood red"), I would craft my new logo, working all through the night into the early dawn. As the sun rose pink and gold over the sleeping world, I would deliver that logo into the hands of my start-up client in the form of an extremely high resolution image they could shrink down later if needed. The start-up would gasp in marveling wonder, and clutch the SVG file gratefully to its chest. My pet wolf would nod gravely, and we would stalk wordlessly back into the mountains.

Not the OP, but I, too, love cold rainy weather. I love to snuggle up in my home with a wool blanket, a roaring fire, a mug of hot cocoa, and my lover. I love to listen to the rain-drops go pitter-patter and plunk all over the roof of my house. I love to roll down my windows and feel the cool mist rush past my car. I love to have a rich, variated flotilla of sweaters to swaddle myself in every day of the week. I love to walk amongst the evergreen trees in a drizzle, finding shelter beneath their boughs, breathing in the wholesome smell of newly-washed forest. I love to wade waist-deep in the pounding surf, scream at the storm, and chase after frightened tourists in sea-kayaks. I love to befriend the killer whales by cackling convincingly at them, and, convinced, they carry me on their backs to tour their icy sea-realms.