Preface: So with the oncoming of Otoku I wanted to bring something different to the site. Something that could stand apart from The Archives and could serve as a more casual look into who I am, or I should say who I was. Consider this series outside the realm of Aresol, before Aresol if you will. I’m R.S.L. and this is my odd little life.

Everyone needs a little break now and again. For myself having a break from things from is an absolute necessity. When I get all worked up and when I’m done with complaining and ranting about things I just go out for a walk and think about all sorts of things in my life. Most often than not these things are incredibly ridiculous and sometimes I think they’re pretty entertaining. So this is what Time Stop is going to be about. It’s just going to be my break from the world. A series where I can talk about whatever stupid nonsense that has happened in my life and hopefully I can entertain you in the process.

To start things off, though, I thought it would be good to tell you where the naming for this series came from. I mean after all Time Stop isn’t exactly a normal name for a blog post right? Well, this is the story of where the whole Time Stop thing came from and why I decided to use it as a title.

During my college days, which are not as far behind me as I’d like them to be, I had a group of friends that were very much into Magic the Gathering. It was during these years that I talked them into teaching me the game and I actually grew rather attached to it. I ended up primarily using a devour deck and in multiple person battles I’ll admit that I was pretty formidable. We loved the game so much that we ended up even downloading that Magic card creator and customizing decks with created cards.

Now this group of friends that I had were a very humorous bunch. One of these guys, Alex, would often resort to meme based jokes. Another, Aaron, would find humor through insults and the last one, Dave, loved to make things as awkward as possible and would do so often. Combined with my general cynicism towards the world we tended to be a group of people that not many others chose to put up with. Not so much because we were dicks, though we most certainly were, but because we tended to take things too far or even isolate people who didn’t quite catch on to our brand of humor. We were oppressive nerds in a sense. Taking our geekery to such extents that other people had trouble connecting at times. Get used to these three guys cause I guarantee I’ll be bringing them up again some day.

Needless to say we took notice of how awkward we made people feel and while we weren’t exactly broken up about it we decided to use a way to remedy this and at the same time entertain ourselves by doing so. From there on we instituted the Time Stop rule. If you don’t know, Time Stop is a card within Magic that forces a player to end their turn immediately. So what we decided was that once per day each of us would have the opportunity to declare Time Stop. If we did so then whoever the Time Stop was directed towards would immediately have to stop and change what they were talking about or doing. We tended to use this as a way to keep each other from going too far with a joke that would make us or others uncomfortable.

That being said, we’re still kind of a bunch of dicks so we would often use it to just mess with each other. There’d be times when one of us got really excited to share news or whatever and someone else would inevitably use a Time Stop and that person would have to wait till the next day to give their news. This also made plenty of awkward conversations as well as moments where we would end up having to drop whatever we were doing just because someone used their Time Stop. Hell, I remember a time when my friends had no idea that I was in a relationship because they would always Time Stop me as I was mentioning it. The biggest fun of this though was waiting for someone else to declare Time Stop so you could make sure that they couldn’t get out of an even worse joke or prank that you had planned.

Still, we usually did it for fun and tried to make sure we didn’t go too far with the very rule we designed solely for keeping ourselves from going too far in the first place. That being said, it’s always fun to Time Stop someone that’s just bugging the hell out of you. So I definitely suggest using it among a group of friends just for the fun of it. I’m sure you can come up with some interesting ways to use it.

The reason I use the term as a title for my series is because the whole idea of Time Stop is to take a time out. Like I said this is largely a series to relieve stress with and to get away from all of the frustrating or awkward aspects of my life. In a sense I guess you could say that I’m playing a Time Stop on life for a little while with each of these posts.

Obviously all of these stories aren’t going to be about Magic and most will be more interesting than this I assure you. Still, I wanted to share with you where I was coming from on the whole Time Stop thing and I thought it served as a decently entertaining introduction to this new series. So here’s until the next bit of craziness from my life.

-R.S.L.-