Internet Janitor

Now I wish this was a standard in meatspace.

I genuinely like this idea and I hope this is implemented. It's even possible to do fuzzy time in a meaningful way like "3 boops ago" which swatch time doesn't appear to attempt at all, at least how Cohost implemented it

boop time supremacy

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

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

Can I interest you in some https://dotti.me/

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"

(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.