Felarya/Negav Calendar

well i agree with aisu.

and no one said that the calendar needed to be made during the magiocrats era. could have been made before. and since theyre bureaucrats and all, they would have just leave it the way it was.

If you were right Cliff, you would be brainstorming with others to reach a concensus. You are not doing this. You are trying to hammer the same point over and over, and how it should be the sole one to adopt. I will leave with this: You do not decide what is wrong and what is right in Felarya. You are not the moderator of the setting. You are the moderator of the forum. If you view that you're idea is being butchered by people having different views, then you are much more closeminded than I believed, and you are only solidifying this image by refusing to work with other to create an idea most or all can agree with.

Jætte_Troll wrote:

I've already proposed this, in my idea thread.

https://felarya.forumotion.com/t2031p105-time-for-one-of-these-the-home-of-jt-s-ideas

That's not a bad start for a calendar system that I'd be willing to use in stories. The problem with most "fantasy" calendars is that people try too hard to make them exotic/different from what we know and are used to in the real world and that inevitably means few authors will ever bother with them.

You've keep the concept of weeks, months, and years - and you've kept them fairly close to what we already know. Naming them is certainly an option. Many cultures on our own world like naming things (as has been pointed out in previous posts). The length of day might be variable, but the day/night cycle would still mark the passing of days - and your system doesn't depend on that any way. At any rate, that'd be an interesting problem for Felaryan clocks to overcome. An accurate, perpetual clock would be a true masterpiece!

Sean Okotami wrote:

If you were right Cliff, you would be brainstorming with others to reach a concensus. You are not doing this. You are trying to hammer the same point over and over, and how it should be the sole one to adopt. I will leave with this: You do not decide what is wrong and what is right in Felarya. You are not the moderator of the setting. You are the moderator of the forum. If you view that you're idea is being butchered by people having different views, then you are much more closeminded than I believed, and you are only solidifying this image by refusing to work with other to create an idea most or all can agree with.

Yep, Im totally the badguy on this one. Yepyep. Nice going trying to turn this into a "Moderator abusing their position" discussion when I have not, and have never brought up my position as a moderator in a discussion on this forum before. That line was easily the most insulting I have read all day.

Like I said, Im more than happy to rip apart their own ideas when they put them up for discussion. Should be a nice, fun discussion.

You can only do so much when days and nights are so irregular

Okay, all of you arguing. All of you.

Calm down.

I know, I've been trying to play it safe, but there's only so much I can take before I have to grab both sides by their collar and rip them apart from each other. Seriously... I've had enough. Calm the fuck down. This is getting nowhere. I've PMed Karbo. I didn't want to bother him, but godammit, I've been trying to disarm this fucking argument for the past hour. Stop. Please.

EDIT: I'd like to take a minute for apologizing about losing my temper, but... fuck, I hate it when people fight over petty shit... I want us to get along, and I want peace on the forum. If we get into a war over whether or not the months have fucking names, then what kind of people are we?

gt500x wrote:

You can only do so much when days and nights are so irregular

You just have to be more creative.

Hey, hey,... hey, hey, hey, now. I think I am pretty creative. I've got my own calender in place in my own little corner of the world.

Its in my idea thread. Scroll down to the bottom. I know it's cheating a bit, but ... well... ok, I can't excuse it. XP

For days and nights being irregular, I don't believe the length of day and night would be. There would have to be a regular pattern.

Why would just the nights have irregular cycles? Personally I see it that both times of day would have irregular cycles, especially because of the star that's being "borrowed"

Not wanting to risk starting up a fire that's just died down, I plan on being a little less confrontational with this, but here goes:

Kris, if you remember, we already discussed this to some extent. I favored the idea that it runs off of a very metric-style system, with a set unit of time being established (like how long it takes an hourglass to run down, or something else) and then going off of derivatives of that standard. If you want to add some culture to it, then the derivatives needn't be factors of ten (since the Babylonians used the number six, which was sacred to them), but ten is considered a universal human standard of measurement due to our amount of fingers. Some sort of standard would be necessary, because you can't go off of days and nights in Felarya due to reasons already stated.

As for naming months and stuff... well, I like the compromise, with number-rooted naming. Years (or cycles) would probably be numerical, based upon some historical landmark. I admit it does come a little too close to looking like our modern calendar, though, so maybe we need to find a way around that.

Archmage_Bael wrote:

Why would just the nights have irregular cycles? Personally I see it that both times of day would have irregular cycles, especially because of the star that's being "borrowed"

I meant that the length of day must be in a consistent pattern in order for (some semblance of) climate stability and biological functions based off time to, well, function.

well i though about having a felaryan cladender based off a system where days were 26 hours long, weeks 8 days long, months 7 weeks long and years 12 months long with a leap yeah once every 14 years. buts that just me.

ZionAtriedes wrote:

As for naming months and stuff... well, I like the compromise, with number-rooted naming. Years (or cycles) would probably be numerical, based upon some historical landmark. I admit it does come a little too close to looking like our modern calendar, though, so maybe we need to find a way around that.

maybe try something unexpexted for the month names like for example would july be change to solemnis tripudium ( its latin for festive joy) and december would be changed to tentatio vicis ( latin for trial times)
Just throwing it out there

I'm not seeing much rhyme or reason to those ideas Luke. Could you explain why you'd think that would bea good idea?
Also, please edit your posts to avoid double posting in the future.

Thank you Aisu. Ok we'rere stopping right there with the angry accusations and finger-pointing. Next one I see I'm going to bite

Krisexy : I'm sorry but regardless if your point is good or not, I must ask you to take your rethoric a notch down.. The thread is essentially for everyone to debate so everyone is free to come and defend their points..

As for that question, well here is how I see the thing personnaly :

So we have day and hour cycle that aren't equal. I think there is no way around that.
Starting on that, I have thought of a relatively advanced system made by the Vishmitals that calculate how the rest of the day is going to be divided, and displaying the result on several places around the city.

Now for the division of days, I tend to agree that it would be something mostly functional, as the system would be , in my mind, made by Vishmitals who are mostly very pragmatic / precise people. BUT in the end, I prefer if we continue to use the old hour system when it comes to naming, simply because it's much more easier...

Days and months are another story though and here I'm clearly going to seach for specific Felaryan names.

Karbo wrote:

Thank you Aisu. Ok we're stopping right there with the angry accusations and finger-pointing. Next one I see I'm going to bite

Hey watch out who you say that around, you might attract unwanted attention X3

Yeah, I think trying to measure day/night cycles is something I'm not too fond of trying to figure out, and its also livable if it's not measured exactly I think...

Searching for Felarya names though might be a bit difficult, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that anyway...

Personally, and this is just my oppinion so don't jump on it with all the gentleness of a jackhammer if you please... I actually find Cliff's idea to have slightly more merrit.

Simplicity in Negav's calendar would be beneficial due to the amount of offworld traffic involved in it's mix 'n' match culture by nature. The numerical system would be much easier to translate to alien cultures than a tiered naming system would be, since most wouldn't know what they mean.

But, Cliff did not allude to this system as being all encompasing throughout Felarya, indeed this kind of simplicity only benefits Negav almost exclusively, and it still leaves room for all the other settlements, tribes and cultures out in the wider world ripe for more ornate timekeeping calenders. The numerical system makes sense for Negav basically speaking, it's easy to translate, easy to record and keep track of, and most importantly, it doesn't impose on the other cultures calendar systems.

So, with this said, I don't understand why people are chewing eachother out over this...

(we are "biting each other on this" because cliff doesnt want to make a compromise, but since im not supposed to say that ill leave it into parenthesis)

its just that, for my part, i dont care how the calendar will work, i just want to put names in it because itll be more beautiful, not only for the negavian, but for all of us writing about felarya -_-

I think this Calendar is just for Negav, not about all of Felarya.

Different cultures, sects, cults, races, species and all that will have their own names for the cycles or whatever we call them.
But the basic calendar will just be numbers so that when different people meet they're not confused because one is saying 'Cycle of the tail" while the other is saying "Cycle of the hammer" but they both mean the same thing. Among themselves they'll call it by their own name for the cycle but when meeting with other peoples or with off-worlders they'll call it by the number.
I think this is a pretty fair compromise.

Krisexy26 wrote:

(we are "biting each other on this" because cliff doesnt want to make a compromise, but since im not supposed to say that ill leave it into parenthesis)

You can have an oppinion, there's no problem with that, but execute it with respect and grace. That said, it's hard to have a compromise bitween Either Numbers or names" because you can't have both... Unless you want it exceedingly complicated like Elder Scrolls level complicated...

Krisexy26 wrote:

its just that, for my part, i dont care how the calendar will work, i just want to put names in it because itll be more beautiful, not only for the negavian, but for all of us writing about felarya -_-

And you can, but the primary calendar would have to be something easily relatable to all of Negav's citizens and Offworlders in total, for this to occur, you need something easily translatable, and Numbers happen to fill that niche, which is what I think Cliff was driving at. You can have individual citizens groups, clans clubs races and all that be more familiar with their own calendars, but the actual calendar thats used publically would be the universal Negavian one, one that everyone can immediately recognize and individuals can relate that to the timescales they are familiar with.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

I think, this Calendar is just for Negav, not about all of Felarya.

Different cultures, sects, cults, races, species and all that will have their own names for the cycles or whatever we call them.
But the basic calendar will just be numbers so that when different people meet they're not confused because one is saying 'Cycle of the tail" while the other is saying "Cycle of the hammer" but they both mean the same thing. Among themselves they'll call it by their own name for the cycle but when meeting with other peoples or with offworlders they'll call it by the number.
I think this is a pretty fair compromise.

This.

This sums up my point entirely.

I thought about the day and night thing, too. Instead of basing anything on something inconsistent, why not have them be based on an AM/PM system, like we use IRL? The time is always whatever it is, no matter what the sky looks like.

Nyaha wrote:

I thought about the day and night thing, too. Instead of basing anything on something inconsistent, why not have them be based on an AM/PM system, like we use IRL? The time is always whatever it is, no matter what the sky looks like.

Ugh, I hate the 12-hour clock. It makes zero sense, if you ask me. Then again, I grew up with "military time", but even without that influence, it should be obvious which system is more practical.

I think that it's too soon to be devising a calendar, if we don't have methods of time (although I imagine that most authors would use real-world measurements for convenience, devising these things could give yet another layer of depth to the cake parfait onion that is Felarya). Plus, even if you use regular measurements while narrating, in-context dialogue really wouldn't include the exact same hours and years as we use on Earth.

ZionAtriedes wrote:

Ugh, I hate the 12-hour clock. It makes zero sense, if you ask me. Then again, I grew up with "military time", but even without that influence, it should be obvious which system is more practical.

The 12 hour clock makes perfect sense if your culture is made up of people with little to no education (nor use for any) and little to no use for mathematics; farmers, pre-industrial society. It makes progressively less sense the more educated the people in your culture are, and the more industrialized your society is. Of course the 24 hour system doesn't make a whole lot of sense either; why just 24 hours in a day? Its not a multiple of 10 so its not very easy to figure out how many hours away next Thursday is; lets not even start on minutes and seconds.

(I would like to point out that in many/most computer programs, time is represented as a number (a far more reasonable measurement of time), the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970 (which will be negative if the date was before 1970). As far as I am aware, they arbitrarily decided on that date, and having all date-times represented in milliseconds means that it does requires some work to translate it to more human readable formats, but boy does it make ordering them easy; it's also quite easy to add or subtract units of time, without any need to worry about leap-years and other such things.)
/Off topic ^^;

Oldman40k2003 wrote:

ZionAtriedes wrote:

Ugh, I hate the 12-hour clock. It makes zero sense, if you ask me. Then again, I grew up with "military time", but even without that influence, it should be obvious which system is more practical.

Of course the 24 hour system doesn't make a whole lot of sense either; why just 24 hours in a day? Its not a multiple of 10 so its not very easy to figure out how many hours away next Thursday is; lets not even start on minutes and seconds.

I think it has something to do with the Babylonians and their love of multiples of six, hence the sixty-second minute and sixty-minute hour. Using those measurements, a full rotation of the Earth is juuuuust under 24 hours (23 hours and 57 minutes, if I'm not mistaken). Of course, it would be so deliciously metric to simply take the duration of a rotation and extrapolate from there, but conversion would be far from easy. Look at how many Americans spurn the metric system, despite its obvious superiority (don't get me wrong, I'm just as accustomed to gauging my car's speed by miles-per-hour as the next American, but my point stands).

The main point of argument is that Felaryans are neither accustomed to a factor-six measurement of time, nor do they have any planetary rotation or orbit to base their measurements on. There have been discussions on seasons, and it's already been shown that Felarya's connections to other worlds is astoundingly regulated (when have you heard of a traveler walking into a portal onto a planet without atmosphere, which is so much more common than Earthlike ones, or into a star or empty space?), so perhaps there's something to that regulation that could allow for some sort of redundancy.