This has been exactly my fantasy for years. The Achilles's heel of this superpower is aging faster. You can take a decades long sabbatical in a second, but you'll be unrecognizable when you come out.
That has occurred to me, but I've found an ingenious loophole where I pretend that doesn't happen.
Well, sure, but then it's totally unbalanced and you're sure to be nerfed in the next update.
Hermione literally ages an extra year in book 3. It's incomprehensible that she'd put up with those little morons afterward.
That's why the fanfic has her dating teachers.
I've always been irritated with that plot device. "This is the most sacred and dangerous magical do-hickey. Take it, young 12 year old, so that you can resolve this class schedule conflict in middle school."
"But don't use it to give yourself extra study time. Just attend extra lectures."
I interpreted her as using it for study time too. Being Hermione.
I bet she was shitting on the floor in front of the Slytherin common room.
But remember she was in such a tizzy, not being able to keep up with the workload?
The insanity of time turner multiple-lifing is one of several good things about the fanfic Amends which I think I learned of here.
Has anybody read The Fermata by Nicholson Baker? The protagonist has this power -- and being a man of course he uses it to have non-consensual sexual experiences. I've only read the first few pages.
She clearly had an unhealthy work-life balance from the beginning, and was doing it all three times a day, plus all the triple-life opsec to keep the secret, at age 13.
12: I read it long ago, and forgot everything about it, except that I disliked it.
I'll be sure to look that up, peep. You've really sold me on it.
Furthermore, to 1, if that's the consequence, then you're not really getting shmoo-time. You're just borrowing from your retirement years.
John D. MacDonald (the Travis McGee) guy, wrote a novel-length version of this called The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything. Almost certainly not worth reading unless mid-twentieth-century sex romp is a genre you're feeling underexposed to.
You're thinking of The Lion, The Witch, and the Hot Tub.
Didn't the Shmoo thing have some very squicky racial overtones?
If I got to wish for a frivolous superpower like this one, it would be flight. Time-stopping sounds nice but I'm too pessimistic about my ability to use it productively, and if I had unlimited free time I'd want to spend a lot of it on World of Warcraft, which won't work if everyone else is frozen. Flight, though? My commute would be awesome, with reasonable assumptions about speed and wind chill, and there are a lot of places that would be nice to see from the air, and needing a ladder to get on the roof is a hassle.
I'd need to either start exercising regularly or handwave the flying burns calories, though, because my commute is most of the exercise I get.
In fact, if you have a task you hate and you're on a tight deadline, this could really be deadly because it would enable infinite procrastination.
And the problem is?
16: Yeah. it's very depressing--how much time am I willing to give away in the future to achieve some measure of success now? Light that burns twice as bright, etc.
Missing the point further, it's amusing how this breaks at a physical level. Presumably you still have to breathe. So in some sense entropy's still occurring for you, and you and at least air near you and surfaces you contact have non-zero temperature. Does your bubble of entropy fill up with CO2? Does your presence warm things up? Many things will lose structural integrity if they go from absolute to zero to room temperature quickly.
Why, yes, I am a fun date to take to the movies.
22: And now I'm remembering an Arthur C. Clarke story -- time traveller hires art thief and gives thief time-stopping device to steal a list of works of art. Leaves the device with the thief. And as they leave says something indicating that it's a poor idea to ever turn the device back off, because the heist was scheduled for the last seconds before the nuclear bombs started dropping.
23 I think the usual way to handle that ("usual": the show Heroes, and Discworld) is that time doesn't completely stop, just slows down by something like 1000x. This still has problems with friction and impacts because you're effectively moving at superspeed, and it means you can't spend literally years with time stopped for everyone but you, but those problems are still a lot more manageable than "oops, everything around me is absolute zero now".
Didn't the Shmoo thing have some very squicky racial overtones?
Probably. We'll have to use robotic shmoos.
Carbon chauvinist.
Now that I read about the Shmoos I'm not as sure. I think I got that from some cultural critic. And Al Capp seems to have made over a dozen fictional creatures coming to Dogpatch for various allegories, so maybe it was another of these.
According to Wikipedia the Shmoos were ultimately "systematically hunted down and slaughtered, because they were deemed 'bad for business'".
I think I may have got this from Isaac Asimov! His autobiography has a story of him publicly calling Capp out for anti-civil-rights allegory in 1964, Capp threatening to sue him, but (purportedly) backing down. I can't find the meat of the accusation, though it seems quite plausible. That was in Capp's latter, more right-wing days.
According to Wikipedia the Shmoos were ultimately "systematically hunted down and slaughtered, because they were deemed 'bad for business'".
Well that took a realistic turn.
Capp was still quite progressive in the '40s, so the Shmoos were probably intended as a straightforward economic parable rather than anything race-related. (According to Wikipedia it was broadly interpreted as such at the time, though in very different ways by different people, and criticized from both the left and the right.) Even when he turned to the right later on I'm not sure how bad he was on racial issues specifically as opposed to general hippie-punching.
Ooh, just saw this in the middle of grading a stack of exams. Think I'll tap out for a bit and read the comment thread. :-)
16: totally would rather get the retirement when I'm young(er). Squander your twenties, youngsters. By 70 you could be living in a late capitalist dystopia and in in adult diapers.
What's the point of a government if it can't make Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper get married and have babies?
I also read The Fermata ages ago and didn't need to have.
Anyone ever read Singularity by William Sleator? I read it ~4500 times in elementary school; the idea is that time stops just in this one bomb-shelter-like structure on a farm, creepily called "the playhouse," and the teenage protagonist uses it to lock himself away for a year without anyone knowing he's gone. The actions you can take inside a locked bomb shelter are of course limited, but he brought lots of books with him, and in a way it adds to the ingenuity of the fantasy. It's probably bad for my psych profile that I loved this book so much.
Sounds healthier than Narnia, which is much the same thing.
Windchill is -10F. Nobody stop time as I go get something from the car.
You all are talking about Arthur C. Clarke when this is clearly an Out of This World situation. Shameful.
39 Went deep into the desert near the KSA border yesterday with a very cool ecologist and a natural history group and got caught in a massive sandstorm so we couldn't visit the last and largest sand dune but this was more than made up for by watching the herd of camels move through our caravan being herded by a camel herder on camel back. Just awesome.
The ecologist lied. There are still lots of sand dunes in other places. I've seen some myself.
By 70 you could be living in a late capitalist dystopia and in in adult diapers.
people who are in their 20s today are already living in a late capitalist dystopia. The only comfort for us oldies is that we're more likely to die before we reach the adult diaper stage, which is some comfort.
(Not much more likely yet, but we can hope.)
40: I almost mentioned that in the OP but I'm glad I didn't, because I would have mistakenly said "Small Wonder".
Also, I remember William Sleator, although not that book. Mostly Interstellar Pig, which left a big impression on me.
On the subject of fiction that explores this topic, Sex Criminals is comic series where the main premise is that there are some people in the world for whom time stops when they orgasm. Two of these people happen to meet and get into a relationship. They then go about doing noble things like robbing banks. Highly recommended.
Interstellar Pig scared me so much I had to leave my bed and camp out on the hallway floor outside my parents' door for a few nights running. Didn't stop me from rereading though.
A socially awkward robot that can stop time is a good tv series premise.
Personally I think Out of this World went downhill when she hit puberty and suddenly had all kinds of powers besides just the stopping time. But I may be misremembering some of the plot.
It's hard to understand why a robot would hit puberty.
That's why they have health classes for them.
I WAS/AM AN ALIEN YOU INATTENTIVE DOPES
AND I CAN TALK THTOUGH A CUBE AND SOMEHOW HAD INTERSPECIES EX WITH YOUR TAKE AWAY YOUR POWERS THROUGH TIME AND SPACE SO STOP BEING RUDE AND SHOWING 'TUDE TO THESE NICE PEOPLE YOUNG LADY
I seriously hadn't realized that Burt Reynolds was dead. I never liked his mustache, much less his good ol' boy swagger, but maybe that's just me?
FUCKIN' A, LADY. FUCKIN' A.
I think she's saying you're only hot now that you're dead.
Every month things get a little rusty.
For some reason the one episode (or scene) I clearly remember is her driving test where she cheated and stopped time and magically parallel parked the car. I think that's when she was punished for misusing her powers? That seemed ridiculous to me- totally harmless use of alien magic, if you have the power why not use it to avoid scratching other people's cars?
I SWEAR TO GOD THE NEXT GUY IN THIS BAR WHO THINKS I AM THAT HOBAG VICKI FROM SMALL WONDER GETS A SPORK TO THE FACE
CALM DOWn, BABY DOLL
Every month things get a little rusty.
gross!!
46 Fucking and stealing just like Bonnie and Clyde. Sounds awesome.
54: He's from my hometown. I met him towards the end of his life, and he was very nice (though, sadly, very frail).
lk mentioned Sleator, so I'm left with just mentioning the wonderful short story "That Hell-Bound Train", by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame), in which a man sells his soul for a pocket watch that can stop time for him and everyone around him to save one perfect moment.
(Best Sleator is Interstellar Pig; most fundamentally upsetting probably The Green Futures of Tycho; the one that scared me worst was probably House of Stairs although props also to Into the Dream.)
My son is listening to Youtube history videos. On the one hand, he's learning all about the Gracchus family. On the other hand, the narrator has a voice that annoys me.
Will Belisarius reconquer the West? Will Constantinople be rebuilt? I'm guessing "Not for very long" and "Yes."
The guy doing the Potato Famine has a better voice.
I think the guy giving the talk is one of the few who hates economists more than the British.
I met him towards the end of his life, and he was very nice (though, sadly, very frail).
Ah jeez, now I feel bad about my comment. I was referring to his public, movie-star persona, of course, but I don't like to be too snarky about an actual human being in a state of frailty.
My son is listening to Youtube history videos. On the one hand, he's learning all about the Gracchus family. On the other hand, the narrator has a voice that annoys me.
Make sure the crazy Japanese momo sculpture doesn't try to make him self-harm.
Heebieville is freaking the fuck out about this stupid thing. The elementary school emailed parents saying to monitor your child's youtube presence due to it, but since not all parents have email, they also sent a note home, and so according to the FB groups, a bunch of kids found out about the whole thing for the first time by reading the note being sent home to their parents, and are now scared shitless. Well done, everyone.
We haven't had a notice from the school about the internet since "Shrek is Love."
Tell everyone that Momo only hurts unvaccinated children
Also if you throw cheese on your baby Momo will get them
Now I can't help but picture Momofuku restaurant as a rude response to the whole thing.
I think we just learned in the other thread that all the voters in the 1980 election were taking the Momo challenge.
When I first saw the "Wormy" Spongebob episode, I found it to be painfully stupid and at best somewhat amusing.
Now I'm thinking it may be remembered (if there is anyone still around to think about these kind of things) as the artwork that best encapsulates the spirit of our time.
https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/Wormy
There's a R A Lafferty story that I don't have to hand about time-stoppery involving Babylonian 6-fingered men with the smell of the pit about them.