Story Time is commonly thought of as a phrase meaning "time for stories". However, it can also be used to make an important distinction between the time flow of a story's contents and the story itself.

Story Time is the time that flows in what is called the "Content Plane". In other words, "real life". It is the plane where events are limited to the flow of real time and real space. Story Time is one-way, and measurable by units such as seconds or hours.

The differences between Story Time and Discourse Time are often manipulated in Narrative Time: anachrony in movies, for example.

Example:
You are riding the bus from your house to that of a friend. When you arrive at your friend's house, the trip can be measured as a set period of time. Maybe 45 minutes. This is the "Story Time". To tell someone else of these events in "Story Time", you would have to include every meticulous event in the exact time frame in which it occurred. The "story" would take exactly 45 minutes to tell, and describe everything from the moment you left to the moment you arrived; clearly an impossible task.
In the "time for stories" sense of the word, we would have what we eventually referred to as story time in our high school Computer Science class. On a personal note, I didn't particularly like it, because I was one of the only people there who just wanted to go to the computers and get some tube time. Even if we didn't have any assignments I would just hack away at some little toy I was coding. But anyways...

Most of the jocks in the class knew how to stall the teacher by getting her to recite to us one of the many stories of how fiendishly unlucky she is. Most of these stories took place in either Canada (London, Ontario, to be exact. That's her former place of residence) or in some godawful place in Middle America that was supposed to be part of a vacation.

I didn't pay entirely too much attetion, but the stories in the former category usually dealt with either how $*@#$!ing cold it gets there in winter or about her ravenous little 'cats' who were actually part bobcat. The stories in the latter category usually dealt with some terrible stroke of luck that she and her family experienced, like when her husband sunbathed after coating himself in baby oil, which is a very bad thing to do. She then described how her husband then tried to take a shower, which in this case is to say that he took a salt water shower, and how he failed miserably in the attempt largely due to the gratuitous amounts of pain he experienced. She also had to buy all of this ointment that came in these tiny little jars, requiring her to buy a few quadrillion of them.

There were also a few unique stories that she told. Unique in the sense that she was promised riches and fame if she agreed to marry the prince of some Middle Eastern country, who just happened to be in love with her. She did get this really expensive-looking turtle pin with real gemstones embedded into it that she got to keep as part of the proposition.

At the end of the year, we had two major projects, both of which were group projects (which meant I had to clean up everyone's code and get the whole thing to work in the end). One of them was a game. My group did a Spacewar clone, but that's not important. The other one was a 'commercial', though it was more accurate to call it a 'story' or somesuch drivel. This year's theme was 'Computer Science : Before, During, and After'. Lots of people capitalized on the 'During' part by putting in jokes about 'Story Time'. They usually went along the lines of "STORY TIME" flashing on the screen in big letters and cutting to a scene of a row of students in desks, their heads falling one by one and "zzz" appearing over them. The 'commercials' were laden with inside jokes like this. Another example of such a joke was the demonstration of J. Random CS Student's amorous sentiments towards the teacher's daughter, who was a senior at the school.

Well, that's enough of that drivel...

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