mars, sometime when i can live there

notes on nomenclature

i could go on and on about how i think clinging to names sourced from earthly mythology for every last semi-major celestial body in existence sucks. because it totally does!!

the martian calendar

i happen to be of the exceptionally insightful opinion that most martian calendars that have been created are kind of dogshit. by "most calendars" i mean like, all and only the ones that are listed on the wikipedia article for timekeeping on mars, but you know, i'm sure somebody else has made a half-decent one. reflecting that state of affairs i figured i'd make my own for this setting.

principles of this calendar design include:

• i don't care about perenniality. i don't think anybody should particularly care about perenniality. despite the strenuous objections of calendar reform nerds (whom, for the record, i love and respect despite this), most of earth gets along just fine with the current gregorian calendar and its sisters, none of which are perennial in the slightest. i don't think that efficiency on such a low level as the calendar should be striven for, and the necessity of buying new paper calendars for everybody who doesn't just use their phone is a complete nonissue. and holidays that are mobile due to being tied to weekdays are really fun actually
• similarly, like, this is a post-capitalist world. this calendar should not and does not contort itself to make things easy for scheduling workdays, or for evenly divvying up the fiscal year. if you are that concerned with having even fractions of a year, you can go and use fractions of days.
• i am not actively hostile to religion, unlike some martian calendar creators i could name, but also i think that the fact that the martian day is nearly an hour longer than the earthly one means that trying to accomodate for a seven-marsday week is an exercise in futility. the precedent of earth's lunar hijri calendar happily drifting wildly out of sync with the solar year, and ramadan (as a particularly impactful example) being observed without incident by nearly a quarter of earth's population despite that desync, leads me to believe that more observant abrahamic religionists will likely continue to follow a seven-earthday cycle for determining the sabbath (and will obviously continue to put their holidays on the same days as their earthly coreligionists, rather than stretching everything out to match mars's significantly longer year). this is some good juicy worldbuilding content and also means i'm happy having a secular week that is not seven marsdays long.
• leap weeks are annoying and disruptive, and since this isn't a perennial calendar, i see no use for them. and like, actually, since the fractional portion of the length of the martian year is greater than one half, there are going to be more long years than short years, and a skip week sounds even more disruptive. there'll be skip days, then.
• as i expressed in the nomenclature section, i have kind of a personal distaste for rooting through bits of earthly mythology for names, especially when there's a phonaesthetic mismatch (looking at you, darian calendar). i'll make exceptions when it's to go with an existing naming convention, as with mars's moons, but i really don't want to pick a bunch of random grecoroman shit for month names and pretend it's meaningful, you know?
• twenty-four is simply too high of a number of months, and the fact that that's commonly chosen specifically just to pander to the earthweek and earthly calendar reformers' fetish for 28-day months is no good. and i hate the darian calendar's occasional six-day weeks, though funny enough the seven-earthday religious week will sometimes end up rounding to six marsdays

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