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: A Season of Mists

Long Nights

I keep incurring long nights with this woman. Which is wonderful! And slightly tiring in the cumulative. But wonderful!

Looking back, it's been a busy week with her. A small misstep of mine on Monday night, a short Skype on Tuesday, hanging out in-game every night, some extremely late nights on the weekend (4am, 5am and 3:30am for Fri., Sat. and Sun., respectively), and a 1-hour Skype late last night. It's really a lot of fun! I am just enjoying the Hell out of her, and us, right now. Lamentably, it's going to ease up a bit in the coming weeks due to RL events on both our sides, so it's probably good we did this when we could.

I am infinitely more comfortable with it now than I was last week. As anticipated, time, experience and talk temper my discomfort. In particular, I think the Skype talking is good. It pokes holes in the veil of game interactions. There's all sorts more I could relate about her and/or our interactions, but it's not necessary. All there really is to say is that we're both enjoying each other's company. What more need be said right now?

One concept I pondered this past week, and which is still whirling through my head, is the nature of time dilation and Second Life (or any virtual world, I suppose). As of knowing her for 9 days (I think that means I did this calculation on Wed. morning?), I guesstimated that we had spent about 45 hours together. For just this weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), I guesstimate that we spent 35 hours together. Now be aware that these estimates do not factor in afk time or events where we're there together but, for the most part, not interacting with one another very much or the fact that conversations via IM are usually slower and more stop-start or that some of this time is spent in groups, with her friends. These are merely estimates of how much time we've spent together in-game, approximately co-locationally, for certain periods.

Nonetheless, even if you cut those numbers in half that's a lot of time! I mean, to wrack up 20-22 hours you're talking about 3-5 real-world (or real life, RL) dates. For such short RL timespans, the amount of time spent together is almost mind-boggling (e.g., 3-5 dates in the first 9 days).

It does make more sense in the context of a virtual world, however. It's easy to just sign on, meet up with someone and go. There's no cost or toll except for time. Time is the currency. And if you have the time, which clearly we do, as well as the inclination and interest, then it becomes easy.

This is just an observation I made that helps explain how we've become so close in such a relatively short (RL) timespan. I find it rather interesting. I'm often interested in the passage of time and the notion that perception of time passage is variable. Seems like an interesting concept to me, potentially even one with some sort of RL applicability or relevance at least.

I've got New York ComicCon coming up this week. Aaaaaaand that's it for now. Cheers!

Full post as published by A Season of Mists on October 10, 2011 (boomark / email).