Time passes slowly up here in the mountain
We sit beside the bridges and walk beside the fountains
Catch the wild fishes that float though the stream
Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream.

-Bob Dylan

Just weeks ago I booked my flights to Las Vegas for FanFaire, and bemoaned the fact that I’ll have to spent around 3.5 hours in the air flying from Minneapolis.  Seriously - three whole hours!!

Well, a flight that long demands some new reading material, so it’s off to the bookstore with me.  I’m a bit of history buff, so I head right over to that section and start poring through the titles.   Though a lot of the books I  read might seem pretty dry to most people, I find myself completely engrossed in the titles.

One fact I find myself continually fascinated by is the amount of time spent travelling throughout history.  When Julias Ceasar took his command in the provice of Baetica in  “Farther Spain” in 61 BC, it took him 3 weeks by litter from Rome.  In 1820, it took nearly 4 months time for the whaler Essex to travel from Nantucket to the whaling grounds of the central Pacific.  Even at the turn of the 20th century, it could take weeks for a steamboat to travel less than a thousand miles up the Congo river.

Compared to all that, my meager 3 hour flight seems fairly meaningless.  And yet, players still complain today that it can take 20 whole minutes to travel from one end of an MMO’s online world to the other.  Seriously - 20 whole minutes!!

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