KateYagi

@KateYagi

I dunno what the headline is for

College student ⭐ I'm about to start drawing (hopefully) quite frequently
⭐ Born 1999 ⭐ UTC-7

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KateYagi
@KateYagi
fwankie
@fwankie
irina
@irina

hot take: internet time *sucks*

  • its not the best option for an internet standard time
  • it's not a good option for a replacement for hours and minutes
  • it is however, a good dumb feature for cohost plus to have

like, it works okay for syncing up across the internet, but, UTC works so much better. if someone told me an event was to occur at 500.beats, i have to look that up. i have to use a calculator. it's cool that there's a time thats 'the same everywhere,' but its not like the current UTC changes depending on where you are. it's way easier as a human to remember that i need to subtract 10 hours from the current time to get utc, and most people (americans excluded, who seem to never know when asked) know or their local utc time offset

okay, what about swatch internet time as an entirely new system to replace hours and minutes? internet time is 1000 beats. which like. isn't a good number for it? imagine trying to cover a day with 3 shifts on a swatch clock. each shift, rather than being 8 hours long, would be 333.33. its just not convenient to use 1000 for splitting something up

i would like to propose an alternative: boop time

i, in collaboration with my unwilling partner, have devised a system i call boop time, which is comprised of 10 080 (ten thousand and eighty) "beeps". each of these beeps is 8 seconds. a useful unit of time!

10 beep are equal to about a minute twenty. since that's also a useful unit, it gets a name too: a boop.

and because 10 080 is a highly composite number, it can also be split into 24 chunks of 420 beeps (or 42 boops if you're keeping track) called an hour. 420 is also a really useful number, because it's the smallest number divisible by all the numbers from 1-7!

for example, 12:00 would be 50'40, 12:45 would be 53'55.

but you can also do things that normal time doesn't let you, like say, one 7th past midday, which is 51'00. if one wanted to, you could 51'00 write as 12:60, but i prefer r a w b o o p s personally.

swatch time's one advantage is that n beats is n% of the day. i chose 10 080 because it's close enough to 10 000 that, for human purposes, it works much the same! and if its written with a separator, it's really easy to see that 25'20 is about 25% through the day. i like to think were anyone to ever use this system, we'd treat the last 8 boops of the day as a sort of "nowhere time" between days. a 'maybe you should sleep if you see a 5 digit time on the clock' like 10'075.

so yeah. that's Boop Time. 10 080 beeps to a day, 24 (not written, but convertable) hours of 420 beeps. 8 seconds to a beep, 10 beeps to a boop. this system is dumb but swatch time is dumber. thankyou for reading Making a Timekeeping System as Shitposting

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in reply to @irina's post:

pili
@pili

most people (americans excluded, who seem to never know when asked) know of their local utc time offset

there's nothing i hate more than countries that use funky timezone names instead of utc. tf is eastern standard time bitch i'll kill you

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pigeonradio
@pigeonradio

story time. or anecdote time? maybe if it's interesting it's a story! anyway

in the ancient, forgotten past, i worked in the logistics industry, and there was a brief, doomed experiment with using internet time, or something like internet time. (it's been nearly two decades, so the details are fuzzy. "fingerprints on an abandoned handrail", as bob mortimer said.)

"why would the industry do that", you ask; "that doesn't make any sense", you say. and you're right. but you have to understand that logistics (specifically interstate freight) makes the timekeeping of DST (not all of the US observes it!) and time zones much more complicated.

thousands of trucks driving millions of combined millions through every time zone, through DST and non-DST cities/regions, and you need to know where all of them are, what time they got there, what time they'll get where they're going, etc. and you need to know all of that in the local time of their departure, in your local time, and in the local time of their destination, etc. if the origin, current location, and destination are each in different time zones, you need three different times for one moment in time—maybe more if you're not in any of those time zones or if someone outside of those time zones needs an update. for 10 or 100 trucks, it's not too bad; for 1000s of trucks, human and computer errors create cascading timekeeping accuracies.

so there was the aforementioned brief, doomed experiment to "standardize" time to internet time (or, as i said, something like internet time). a few companies' tracking systems implemented it. so, why was the experiment brief and doomed? because it's like that classic* joke** about a chain of translations. "that's just what we need, Niles—a fourth language!" all the experiment did was add "a fourth language" to the system, which confused most people and annoyed everyone. i think it lasted a week.

*I Love Lucy does the joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xle3I-5nfpI
**Frasier does the joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe_IIyjiBJg

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TangoBunny
@TangoBunny

I've got an idea for worldwide time that makes sense to me

Keep the 24 hour clock, but replace the hours with 24 stupid words

"fumbo hour" "dumdum hour" "gerk hour" "plom hour" "plinkey hour"

and then everyone in their respective timezones will start to know what the stupid word is for each hour where they live

London: "It's 8pm? lmao that's gerk hour on the internet" Paris: "It's 9pm? lmao that's gerk hour on the internet" New York: "It's 3pm? lmao that's gerk hour on the internet"

Then you can say "let's do an internet thing at half past plom" and people will immediately interpret it as

London: "got it, that's 9:30pm here" Paris: "got it, that's 10:30pm here" New York: "got it, that's 4:30pm here"

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irina
@irina

that could functionally work by just picking a mildly-obscure-to-westerners language and using whatever the time is there in their language. so like just say oh it's chín sáng or hey we're gonna do a dungeon at half past một giờ trưa

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CandyCorvid
@CandyCorvid

(context: i don't use swatch, I use tenpo pi nasin ko aka Elementary Time)

imo the one benefit that swatch has over beeps (and to some degree, over UTC) is that swatch time has a notation that (I think?) can't be mistaken for any other time system I know of.

To explain:

  • if I say something happens at 3:20, 15:20, 3:20pm, 1520, etc, you don't know if I mean UTC, my local timezone, your local timezone, or potentially even boops, beats, or some other system.
  • if I say the time is @1520.34, I think swatch is the only system that uses that notation?
  • I can have the same certainty for UTC, I just have to specify 15:20 UTC, or 15:20z

though i could imagine folks leaving off the @ in swatch time just like folks leave off the time zone in UTC.

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