as somebody who is both a furry therian and extremely stressed out by
earthly geopolitics and the existence of senescence and mortality, i think
i'm entitled to a bit of space transhumanist escapism. i deserve it. and
fortunately my boyfriend is more than willing to indulge me in it, so it's
gradually coming into being with his help! which is exciting. here's some
bits and pieces of it, provisionally collected on a single page
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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