A Holiday Appears!

[Esperath]

MERI KURISIMASU

feliz navicat

[nosimpleway]

Daughter told me that since I don't want any presents for Christmas, I am not just able but obligated to be as naughty as possible.

"I'll tell you more about it when you're a little older."
"Oh so I can understand"
"No, so the statute of limitations is passed."

[Mongrel]

[Friday]

Ramona remains the most photogenic cat I have ever known

[nosimpleway]

Aunt: "It's a Bluey set, with the whole family! Even mom, since the other sets come with the kids, or dad, but we couldn't get one with the mom."
me: :| ......................

[KingRoyal]

There's a Comedy Bang! Bang! Christmas episode from a few years back where someone plays Bjork and spends most of their time talking about how horrible the drummer boy was for offering blast beats to a woman who just gave birth

[Esperath]

HAPPY NEW YEAR from the Catship Falcon

(feat. cat hat @1:30 and 2:40 for Silversong)

[Thad]

This is a damn-near perfect minute and a half of television.

("Damn-near" because on my latest rewatch I realized there's a small detail that could have improved it: when Gordon bundles up against the cold, he should be wearing the scarf Barbara picked out as his Christmas gift in act 2.)

[Friday]

Catship Falcon

had a huge grin on my face, just like you, the whole time

[Mongrel]

So this new years had me wondering: Why the fuck is New Years NOW? Why is the first of January the first day of the year and why does that day fall on some midwinter day that seemingly has no clear connection to any historical Christian or even Pagan observance? Why not on a far more sensible date, like an equinox or solstice, which many non-western world cultures do in fact use to celebrate a new year? Was this a Julian Calendar thing? A pre-Julian thing? A Lunar thing?

Turns out the answer is kind of wild and also kind of absurd.

So, the oldest Roman calendar we have records of was purportedly lunar. But they had holidays and civil functions which were supposed to be fixed to solar astronomical events, so they needed a solar calendar. The "Roman Calendar" (as the pre-Julian calendar was called) was ten months. That fits with the normal Roman use of base-10 math and is why the later months still bear latin numeric names (September, October, November, December). Notably that calendar did still have the new year come in with spring, with March, named for Mars. However, it also treated winter as a sort of blob of days which was not assigned to any month and almost didn't really count as part of the year. It was just... Winter. This calendar ended up shifting around a lot and was at times suspended or had a bunch of extra rando days added in to shift things back into alignment. Months were often abrogated or extended and could be very informal. The eight day market-cycle week was the much more important datekeeping period.

After a while, the Romans figured they needed something a bit more practical. During the reign of Numa Pompilius, who was Romulus successor as the second king of Rome, the Romans decided to make two more proper months out of the winterblob and did so by adding two months to the previous beginning of the year. January was named for Janus, the two-faced god who was often the deity of beginnings and endings and cycles.

I have no idea why they were added to the beginning and not the end, though one theory states that they originally were added to the end (as winterblob had been), but Numa decided to move them so that Janus (a peaceful god) would be preeminent over Mars in the calendar. Whatever the reason, records of the era of the seven kings of Rome (and before it) are fanciful legends or speculation as often as not, but we can reliably date the twelve-month calendar introduction to that time, however it actually came about. Maybe they stole it from the Etruscans like they did a bunch of other shit.

So yeah that's why we still celebrate new year's on an essentially random-ass midwinter day.

Does this feel dumb to you? Cos it feels dumb as fuck to me, but at least it's in a silly mostly-harmless way.

Oh, and that was also still pre-Julian reform, which is its own funny story. The Roman Calendar of the Republic still had a handful of random intercalary days to even things out, partially because leap years and partially because the Romans were really superstitious about even numbers being bad, so they didn't have the months line up quite perfectly. It was the job of the Primate (Chief priest of the Roman state religion), to announce intercalary days and for most of the Republic's history this was done more or less properly. Critically, if he did not announce such days personally, they didn't happen.

Sometimes the Primate was away or being replaced. Later there were the late Republican civil wars which got in the way. More importantly, by the late Republic, the position was increasingly politicized (though it was never apolitical) and was often a post simultaneously held by a Consul. Because they had the freedom to remove - or add - intercalary days, nominally to even out dating, they increasingly did so to lengthen they and their allies' terms of office or curtail their political enemies' terms of office. Some years saw the calendar off by as much as an entire season. So ole Caesar asked some brains of the time for a solution. They offered the stable Egyptian calendar as an example and it was agreed to put an end to all the time-traveling shenanigans with a fully-fixed calendar of 365.25 days (which eventually needed adjustment with the Gregorian reform, by which time the calendar was again several weeks off date). Conveniently, ol' Julie's repair job meant that 45BC, his third year as Consul, was 445 days long. How about that.

Oh and don't even ask how the Romans numbered and counted the days of the month, geez.

[Upthorn]

After a while, the Romans figured they needed something a bit more practical. During the reign of Numa Pompilius, who was Romulus successor as the second king of Rome, the Romans decided to make two more proper months out of the winterblob and did so by adding two months to the previous beginning of the year.

I always thought the added months were July and August, added because their namesake emperors demanded new months in their own honor?

[nosimpleway]

Nah they just appropriated and renamed Quintember and Sextember

probably for the best, can you imagine if the modern English-speaking world had a month called Sextember

[Thad]

Nah they just appropriated and renamed Quintember and Sextember

And then each stole a day from February to make their months longer.

[Mongrel]

What's funny is that many subsequent Roman Emperors had months renamed for them during their reign, but not once did it ever stick after Augustus.

[Silversong]

Catship Falcon

had a huge grin on my face, just like you, the whole time

Me too. <3

[Friday]

Does this feel dumb to you? Cos it feels dumb as fuck to me, but at least it's in a silly mostly-harmless way.

and over here on our left is lake lake, and now coming up on our right is hill hill, and here's river river

remember that for the next 1,000 years there's going to be an entire genre of games called "metroidvania" because our collective dad was drunk and mashing words together.

like, in 250 years someone will go "i wonder who first coined the term "metroidvania" and they will use their internet wayback machine and in addition to sharkey's article written for 1up they will find this post

hey assholes

frankly I'm shocked you're not dead, this was a real bad time

[Mongrel]

One Thousand Years of Brontoforumus?

I don't think even I can post THAT much.

Yes I know you said wayback machine, but like, how can I pass this one up?

remember that for the next 1,000 years there's going to be an entire genre of games called "metroidvania" because our collective dad was drunk and mashing words together.

One of the older examples of this (also Roman!) is the fact that the rails laid by railways are typically too narrow by "best practices" engineering standards, but are that way because the earliest railcars were made by carriagemakers, who were in turn constrained by the ruts in old Roman roads still in use, which were spaced that way because in Roman towns "crosswalks" were all raised stones, with gaps for cartwheels, which lead to standardized cart wheel sizes (I forget if that last bit was intentional or not).

Bullet trains and shit usually have proper track but that's because they're a different, closed system that usually isn't expected to directly interface with conventional 250-year old rail tech. Also some places just had weird rail gauges anyway (Russian and former Iron-Curtain countries have a sensibly wide gauge, since Roman roads were nonexistent out there).

[Thad]

and over here on our left is lake lake, and now coming up on our right is hill hill, and here's river river

There's a local street called Alma School.

[nosimpleway]

and over here on our left is lake lake, and now coming up on our right is hill hill, and here's river river

“The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.

The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.”

[JD]

remember that for the next 1,000 years there's going to be an entire genre of games called "metroidvania" because our collective dad was drunk and mashing words together.

A lot of words probably have their root in a thing one guy said once. It's just rare that you happen to know the exact guy. When you do, nobody believes you know the guy, because what are the odds of that? But somebody had to be the first guy to say a word, even if it was some gradual evolution, like the first guy to say "sword" because you meant to say "swerd" but your local dialect was undergoing vowel shift.