Six days ago, someone offered a quest on E2 for a comic book script about ‘GammaGirl.’ I only found out about it three days ago and recorded some thoughts yesterday at work. With her name and the demand that she have powers as the only constraints, there are an enormous combination of elements possible even if I keep within superhero tropes. (I idly thought I could make gammagirl a screen name unrelated to anything about her.)

Her name and the quest title, The Great Gamma Ray Comic Book Script Quest, connote gamma ray powers or origin, but that is no certainty. For example, gamma could signify the third letter of the greek alphabet, if she is third in some sense. Beyond that, Wikipedia doesn’t give anything else interesting for gamma. The flashiest scientific use is as the Lorentz Factor in special relativistic equations. These describe time dilation, foreshortening, and subjective mass for objects traveling at high fractions of light’s speed. But while nice, her power has less priority than the setting where she operates.

A hero’s setting exists in the intersection of its particular location, timeframe, and level of influence by the fantastic. As I don’t live in ‘the big city,’ there is little point in aping Metropolis and other uninspired sandboxes. Plus, if she can’t fly, I don’t need skyscrapers. Modern stories are nice but utopian futures with less need of heroes (as though we need superheroes) make exotic locales more justifiable. Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen strives to seal up our past by treating all fiction as documentaries. As of the latest publication, that even includes 1984 and Metropolis (the film).

The intersection with the mundane divine and our history distinguishes X-men from Watchmen. Marvel has legislative reactions to Mutants but it is a decidedly modern phenomenon. Moore’s acolytes admire his deep understanding of the cultural (and subjective psychological) impacts of exemplarhood on our world. Ellis’ Planetary series purports to explain the great similarity between his modern world and our own by involving suppressant conspiratorial factions and self-exile of the greater peoples. Mignola treats the fantastic from a more traditional angle. Nevertheless, one of my favorite scenes came from Conqueror Worm, wherein someone describes the Nazi project to bring back one of the Dragons by launching (ritually deconsecrated) dead bodies into space.

This isn’t meant to instruct as much as do justice to thoughts I abandoned at work. As I have short breaks and lots of distractions otherwise, I had to focus. Better than exploring how many elements are possible and then testing their permutations for ripe material (x-ray vision, Edwardian Era (pre WWI), and ‘civilized’ cultures confront the consequences of killing their supernal members (Joan of Arc) while savage nations have not).

Instead, I set myself the task of reporting the matured stories of intuitive combinations since those already passed through the filter of my interest. I only succeeded in noting two and record them here as well as others. Normally I would abstain from revealing my options but the impending deadline means that you can’t really type it faster than I and I need to write about it any way I can. Strictly speaking, writing on paper is much faster (and I wouldn’t have repeated that introduction for the third time) but I also need to keep my computer on.

Perhaps I’ll write about it at length later, but must beg off due to impending departure. I am legally downloading an ISO image of Visual Studio for the programming classes I am taking. However, I didn’t realize it is 4.4 gigabytes big. Microsoft provided a download manager, but it is still taking forever.

The only story template I finished writing about took a page from “society should cut Lex Luthor a check.” The  author notes that scientist Luthor (not businessman Luthor) invented sleeping rays and synthetic kryptonite but constantly imperiled the great city. It would be saner to coopt him and share a cut of his patented weapons. That makes sense for him as well as the penurious Spiderman. But, what would bureaucrats pay to (Superman’s) Parasite or Matter Eater Lad? Frankly, it suggests a story about qualifying for her super subsidy. But, is it like getting a hunting license? Marvel’s Civil War most recently hashed the trope of holocaust registration/Patriot profiling/ect.

That pessimism bores me. Yes, it makes for an exciting story (maybe) but it isn’t realistic. You’ve gone to the DMV at least once, the employees may act harried or lackadistically, but they aren’t avaricious for control. But Nicholas, the elites are the power trippers, not the furloughed wage slaves. Sure, and I have heard – edited – reports about their behavior to support that. Still, even Congress must follow the mean curve to a large degree. Reportage selection largely falls into this. Whenever I hear someone give blanket statements like, “politicians are liars,” I respond “only the ones you notice.”

I agree with a simplification used to describe three attitudes. The optimist thinks (the future, people, his life) is good and will improve. The pessimist sees a downward trend. The insurance salesman thinks the future will be more of the same with few enough outliers that shhe can afford them.

So if I were to subsidize capes & black hats, it would be with an eye to how we presently qualify for subsidies. This suggests an experience like Kafka’s Trial, but others are possible. If payouts are high enough (and what won’t you pay Bruce Banner?) third parties might get involved to earn a cut for connecting supers with grants. Then it might evolve into an Uberlympics’ sponsorship.

The other story I noted at work takes gamma as the third element. I know of two works that Alan Moore failed to complete: Big Numbers and Twilight of the Superheroes. The latter depicts his projected epilogue to the DC mythos where groups of heroes have created a declining feudal system over America. His version spins the tale of the rebellion following the disappearance of Captain Marvel.

I would link to his proposal, but the site I noted is gone. When geocities’ closure was announced, I regarded it ambivalently. I didn’t have one; no one I knew had one. Hur hur duhr. In retrospect, I should have gone through my link list and saved all the pages hosted there. I seem to have lost a gallery of Garbage Pail Kids cards, the List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés, a big list of varied links, and the novella inspired The Thing. God damn.

I agree with Moore that most powers lend themselves to Defensive political structures. Before I found Graeme Snooks’ interpretation of historical relations, I agreed with James Dale Davidson’s. He and a columnist called Lord Rees-Mogg described a Logic of Violence derived from relations among power-holders. These relations reflect incentives held and projectable via the technology, climate, and lay of the land. Basically, where a group of individuals are better able to rebuff others, they form Defensive political structures like the Feudal relations of Europe. Where a group of individuals holds the power to injure others or their property effectively, they will form Offensive political structures. These are historical empires and modern nations, but also typify the relations of a feudal lord to his local subjects. Sue Storm is generally defensive, whereas Cyclops’ far reaching lasers are offensive. Mind, this paradigm doesn’t describe history with the consistency demanded but is an inspiring series of concepts:

Inequality of Power and the Form of Government

When farming multiplied the incentives to employ violence, it not only created government, it created a new dilemma about how to control government. The occupational specialization necessitated by farming created for the first time, significant gaps in the megapolitical power of individuals. Unlike the primeval hunting society, in which all men were armed with weapons for felling large animals, and were well trained to use them, the majority in most agricultural societies lived behind the plow. The plow is not an effective weapon. Neither is the artist’s brush or the potter’s wheel. The development of metal weapons gave a soldier a major military advantage over an unarmed farmer. As a consquence, power in an ancient grain-farming state like Egypt became highly centralized. Whoever had a preponderance of expensive weaponry could control the irrigation system and thus hold a life and death control over the peasants. Indeed, there was a strong tendency for the system to become more closed and stratified as time passed.

Middle-Class Topography

Why were the greek city-states not as despotic as ancient Egypt? We believe that the answer lies with the differences in megapolitical conditions. It was not so much more compelling to Greek ears than elsewhere. Nor was it because they were the first to think of democracy and equality. As we have seen, democracy and equality really were primitive ideas – because equality of power was a feature of primitive life. The uniqueness of Greece was that local conditions of climate and topography made it easier for Greek citizens to arm themselves and retain real military power. Because of this, more people were able to retain a voice in the political process in a more economically advanced society.

Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, Lord William. The Great Reckoning: Protect Yourself in the Coming Depression. Simon & Schuster, NY: 1993. (page) 64.

Most empowered individuals then can form Defensive arrangements in an area, but can’t generally unseat one another. (This is why Batman versus Captain America debates can’t reach a conclusion.) Superman-level heroes may demand some tribute from his inferiors but not enough to rule America effectively. Think of all the local law enforcement officers, and the legal courts. He may form a competing IRS, but not a department of agriculture. Human governments are terribly vulnerable and, as noted above, will very likely pay not to have Mount Rushmore dropped in Boston Harbor.

However, a dynasty depends upon stable relations. Charlemagne led Europe to ‘unity’ under the Christian banner. But, not only did his sons decide to divide it into personal realms, they lacked the charisma to compel their subordinates to the same extent that their father did. (That demands qualifiers, but not for the scope of this post.) Gamma girl will then be the granddaughter of Alex the Great, whose child(ren?) will bicker after his death to our heroine’s chagrin. Very probably, I will construct a tragedy. She is foolish and terrifying but happened to be around when America sloughed off a more manageable liability. Or, I could descend into stereotype and have her confront the paucity of her parent’s virtue and agree to aid the rebels. That is so trite I can’t say it without hoping she acts as a double agent to stab at the rival that fronted the rebellion. It’s an option.

The third environ I see avoids the organic fantastic for technological marvel. Several have considered the unemployment of vigilantes in a utopian society. The First World’s wealthy members would save themselves from age and then let the technology trickle down enough that criminals would focus on illegal activities that can’t be stopped by hyperspeed or what have you. Perhaps gamma girl ventures to Ethiopia to set up shop there. That enables either the Man Who would be King or Superman’s Peace on Earth plots. Or, she could stay within Jetsonville and peddle her power, provided it has a useful application. Consider a child who can exclusively see in the gamma spectrum. We would consider her permanently blind, but more aware future people might sense the correlation. She then helps decommission the aging uranium reactors, or hunts down the Libyan nuclear program. That sounds like a mushy story though.

If I had written this in my journal I may have thought of more options since I can write faster and less self-consciously than I type. Nevertheless, with such a tight deadline, there isn’t time for more brainstorming. I will probably choose one of those three to develop and dialog out.

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As with most posts, I wrote this in stages so there are temporal anachronisms all over. That excuse feels a little like the fools who take “I don tpye engrish too nice so dot complane,” as license to type whatever pidgin 1337speak they want. However, there aren’t ubiquitous context-checkers available to correct it and I can’t plan to not finish it until an indefinite future effectively, so I will leave them be. In fact, I wrote the next paragraph in November, but it is true yet again; funny how that works out, eh?

I have broken out of a cycle of interest with Zynga’s games in general. Hungry for more opportunities to waste my time, I made the unwise move back to Myspace rather than make a dummy account on Facebook. The expansion showed me that not all platforms are treated equal. In the end though, the uniform experience and demand overwhelmed me and I just stopped for a while. This became a shuffle with ennui as my dance partner until I could understand my ambivalence. Just what was so fun and what sort of fun was missing?

Yesterday, I figured it out by comparing it to what I liked about Newground’s games. Newgrounds is cousin to youtube and flickr, but archives user-donated Flash media. Some create games and some movies, which other users vote on to determine whether they survive. Directing my own flash movies remains on a marching horizon, so I opted to ‘level’ up via voting. A user’s vote weight is a product of hiser level and rank. Vote on any five submissions daily for level points. Vote on any number of submissions that haven’t been accepted yet for rank points. To be efficient, I voted on five or so new submissions to get the points for both before looking at the day’s headliners.

This and a couple other factors soured the experience. Specifically, I only accrued points if I had approved the candidate if it succeeded or ‘blammed’ it, if the community rejected it. This gave some pressure, not to vote about whether I felt a file was below average, but how other users would vote on it. This became pretty annoying if the people judging in the (generally) ten minute window are more permissive than I. On Youtube, no one cares if you submit a thirty second clip of your thumb. Here, it seemed like the point was to have better work and let people document their first tries on sites without voting systems (deviantart). I even penned a couple of reviews to castigate the very worst submissions. As an example, I dismissed die die fuckers die by saying “this is a ‘music video’ in that an asian song plays in the background while it scrolls a single image of a tikiesque skull at a snail’s pace. // Turn back any who read reviews before watching. // the preloader didn’t suck.” Eleven months later, I got a note that informed me that my review had been deleted because I hadn’t followed the guidelines. It was the sinning third message, because appearantly some ‘helpful’ moderator noticed a pattern in my reviews and deleted every sinning one. The only seemingly prohibited element is that I encouraged other people to blam the submission or not play it. The deletion swarm came at a convergence when I felt tired of trying to gamely predict whether ten year olds like crappy flash movies or not. I stopped visiting the site, which is foolish because its best submissions are top-notch.

So, in puzzling my ambivalence to Zynga’s games, I recalled a curious entry called “Upgrade Complete!” It came as a sequel in spirit to another called “Achievement Unlocked,” a metagame of maneuvering a small elephant around a static level trying to perform 100 admittedly arbitrary states. Upgrade complete has two elements. One is a simple starfighter game to earn money for the store. The store is the second and coequal element of the metagame. The author accomplished this by beginning with virtually nothing and forcing the user to buy and upgrade every element, from the title screen and menu buttons, to the game graphics and weapons. All of Zynga’s games utilize the passive elements of each to make pale clickstorm copies of ‘upgrade unlocked.’

Farmville commits this crime most obviously. Zynga’s other offerings – Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars, Dragon Wars, and Youville – hide the truth with various pairings but never surmount that core. Perhaps Facebook’s structure or market factors incentivize these forms. Others I tried, Tiny Adventures and Starfleet, support this idea. The point isn’t to belabor some perceived short-sightedness on the part of game designers. Their forums are full of whiners who ask for game-changing perks despite the injurious effect they would have on Zynga’s business model. I intend, with the preceding analysis and subsequent reviews, to warn potential players about the type of experience offered. For the longest time, I felt a varying ambivalence about the endeavor. Until I realized the superficial nature rationally rather than intuitively, I couldn’t decide whether I was wasting my time or having fun. Hopefully, I can save you some grief.

Youville

I did accuse Farmville, but Youville – on Myspace – tempts via a shorter review. I used to watch my sister play The Sims before my parents gave me my first laptop and we no longer had to share our family computer. She used it as a simple home designing program and rarely ventured into the mollycoddling proper. I recall trying that aspect but found the level of micromanagement beyond my patience. Youville attempts a substitute by cutting the biological foolishness and emphasizing more emotional activities: work, shopping, and pretending to interact with other people. The work consists of baking sweets at a ‘factory.’ Here, the clickstorm and scheduled return is a minigame to enable shopping and avatar abilities (like ‘the Egyptian’ or ‘anger). But, it makes the whole of Farmville’s world, so I’ll describe it in more depth below. Suffice that baking is a sequence of prep, choose your return time and profit margin, harvest and clean.

Zynga offers two types of interfaces: primarily graphic and primarily textual. Some artists are sitting pretty because – despite cartoony character design, for self-identification and cheaper scripting – the backgrounds are very nicely rendered. Mind, Youville sits with point and click adventure games rather than any sort of dynamically rendered environment. The furniture fails to stimulate me, but it isn’t too far from the quality on Maxim’s (original) offering. While Youville compares favorably, given the platform, besides working and buying stuff, I couldn’t find anything else of note. Sure, I can make some flippant gesture in front of some ten year-old’s avatar and gain xp, but why bother? Perhaps if I had more Myspace friends playing it, we could make a flashmob in the 50’s diner, but then what? Fifteen turns at the wheel left me cold. If you like buying clothes and furniture for yet another avatar in your army, go right on ahead. (I bet the Facebook version is even nicer?)

Myspace

Zynga obviously showers most of its attention on its Facebook franchises. Myspace doesn’t get short shrift, but has missed out on most of this year’s events. I suspect users on Tumblr and the iPhone can relate similar stories. Very likely, Facebook’s fan advertising prominence (status updates) created the difference. Sure, Myspace has announcements that perform similarly; but, this is a liminal feature. It is a small panel on the left side of the homepage and only to friends. Barring self-censors, Facebook shows updates center stage. Further, Myspace’s messaging system is individual oriented. Gifting on Facebook uses a CC system, so I can easily send sweet meat to twenty people at once. Myspace lets me queue the recipients, but requires I reaffirm the message twenty sinning times. They are less obvious on the latter because Myspace doesn’t offer a filter for just friends who play that game. I added a few ‘friends’ for both Mafia and Vampire Wars, so it’s annoying to click another ‘yes, really send a gift’ prompt, only to receive another informing me that soandso blocked messages from this app.

Zynga does offer some incentives to stave complaints from the limited attention, but these are not compelling enough to encourage me to log in. I tried these games on Myspace because I felt like I was running through Mafia Wars too quickly. Plus, it seemed like a chance to start over better, with full understanding of its incentive structure and the strategy I wanted to pursue. Unfortunately, these clickstorms have the replayability of a one day dvd.

Dragon Wars

That is true of all of them but Dragon Wars had pretenses that ‘should’ have elevated it. The frame work is a resprite of the other Wars’ interface. But, some quests distinguish themselves by actual rendered play. You control a (quake level) avatar that fights enemies hiding in the corners of the room. Unfortunately, the room is always the same. Buying weapons doesn’t improve performance. Levelling up skills doesn’t improve performance. Frankly, the only thing that changes is the number of enemies. We can just see a second room to the left that, when clicked, promises it will be released in the future. Strictly speaking, I could be wrong about the 3D subgame’s operation for the later levels. I could only access the first two because Dragon Wars needs more players. Of the sixteen quests I can see, only five don’t have a friend requirement. Sure, they are modest, the highest only required five friends. At this point though, I am not going to ‘make more friends’ just to unlock some pretty thumbnail sized pictures. Nevertheless, a review I read beforehand warned of no progression in the rendered section as well. Not worth it.

Farmville

I have kvetched enough about the clickstorm quality to describe its exemplar edition. Your avatar scurries about a diagonally oriented grid of your arrangement plowing, planting, and harvesting. My farm – deepened three times with a bare two tile widths each time – measures 12 x 12 because I utilize the most efficient grid anchored to the bottom corner. As that leaves a wasted gutter around the upper two corners, I have plenty of space for all the fauna accrued. If I laid a single crop across the whole grid (insanity), that would be three bouts of 144 clicks. Then my animals or trees mature on various schedules and require two bouts of clicks. One opens the menu to move, sell, rotate, or harvest which is the second click. Perhaps you may visit your ‘neighbor’s farms and fertilize five of their crops or plowed fields for more xp. (That is a misrepresentation, but close enough.) That is the whole game. There are achievement embellishments, but those come pretty easily if you just reconcile yourself with repetitive stress syndrome of clicking ninety quintillion times. I have, obviously, tired of the game. I can’t say I have stopped, because I want to test one last feature: mastery.

Mastery is the third most important sliding bar to fill that sources promise me will eventually feed into experience. Planting and plowing cost money but reap experience. Harvesting earns the profit and mastery. Supposedly, when I have harvested through three tiers of mastery, the mastery will become experience for harvesting. I have no clue why I still log on for that subzero gruel (mainly to see if it is true). Unfortunately, the mastery curve is so steep, it works against the leveling – which could be the goal of a nut busting company, but they could just be wildly incompetent.

Crops, flowers and foodstuffs alike, mature at one of ten rates: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, & 16 hours or 1, 2, 3, & 4 days. At each level a new crop unlocks, so after roughly ten levels, you may receive a crop with a reproduced maturation date, but a slightly higher profit margin. If mastery was at all fair, I would be two tiers into, say, strawberries (4 hours) when blueberries unlock. That way, I must decide whether money or future experience is more important. The highest mastered crop – rice – is just short of the third tier. It became available at level seven. I am level twenty-nine. The ridiculous disparity is not from crop rotation. Only four our other crops have the next most mastery: just over one tier. If this incentive is taken seriously, I can play the game with the first few crops exclusively (not really, those are multidayers which are for dummies). That is rather ass-backward since the goal of accruing levels – by earning mastery xp – is to get different crops that should be significantly better. I don’t think I have ever encountered a game that set its players the conundrum of ignoring the upgrades unlocked or leveling ineffectively.

Of course, there is a faction that epitomizes the ‘casual gamer’ demographic. Appearantly, some of the youville gamers see all this farming as a minigame to unlock simfarm furniture. They don’t play the game as much as arrange their clutter into pretty designs. I’m not just referring to players who order hundreds of trees to simulate Central Park. I mean people who order hundreds of blue hay bales to simulate a river. Farming is a pain in the a-scaphoid, but arranging a simulated skyline blows my mind. On Mafia Wars, I can understand paying Zynga for skill points to buy energy and be able to do more missions, as those are the ‘fun’ part of the game. Spending money to buy lawn ornaments that I spend ten minutes lassoing into the right niche of my hay bale Christmas tree speaks of wasted talent. (Even if it goes to crooks, spiriting away fools’ money always helps the economy at large.) If you have the ‘ocd’ to meticulously clear away droopy flowers and replace them with new ones, I have some dusting for you to do. (The flower setting prompt warned that flowers only last 14 days. I thought, cool: I set them out, earn my achievement button and then they disappear in two weeks. No. They become droopy but never die, so I had to click all forty sinning pots twice to delete them.)

While I’m not on the subject, forget about that profit margin, it is only better by a tenth of a gold piece per hour. If you want to delve in despite my warnings, I highly recommend reading through that blog’s advice. The author wrangled a good table for seed profit per hour and experience per hour but not much else. His table for trees is a waste of time to study. He gave the harvest time and reward, but trees – unlike crops – offer a fraction of the price paid for the tree at each harvest. The correct focus is time until the tree is profitable. Obviously, any gifted tree is immediately profitable. Here follows my table of breakeven dates for purchasable trees:

ornamt	20 days
cherry	25 days
apples	34.8 days
oranges	42.5 days
plums	35 days
peaches	42.5 days
lemons	34.8 days
limes	50 days

With the exception of the Ornament tree, a limited Christmas offer, the more expensive and longer duration trees have a much slower profit margin. This stands as more evidence that zynga has a solid art department and their daycared children are in charge of deciding the difficulty curve.

Animals compound still slower profit times with double the wasted space. I didn’t bother to make a table because we can only buy three for coins. The rest demand legal tender or a perceptive friend. Recently, zynga did some remodeling so the above trees are being phased out as gifts and weird fruit takes the stage (cashews, starfruit). In fact, zynga must have realized their grind lost meaning at level 10 because they concurrently introduced a collectibles aspect. Various knick-knacks are paired with certain actions; so only shears are gifted, only a rusty faucet comes from plowing, and only a hoe comes from planting (or whatever). I paid little attention because in the time since I kvetched about the droopy flowers, I mastered rice. It indeed returns experience to harvest them and I do not care.

Perhaps you think, “Nicholas, you complain this whole time, but you are still playing, right?” No. I am sinning done with this one-trick pony. I have not accepted nor given gifts in three weeks, and that was out of weakness. I have not planted anything since early January. Fool that I am, I returned to harvest trees (because they involve fewer clicks) and broke the habit. I steadfastly do not recommend Farmville. I played it, essentially to write this post. I played it because I hoped that it would get better somehow. No, the game is just click ninety times to decide when you have to click ninety times to remove the pretty flowers, earn achievements and collections by grinding even harder. If you tire of that click one thousand times to make a picture from giant, hay pixels. Take hammer, apply directly to forehead.

If you ignore my suggestion, at least block off your avatar with four hay bales. It wastes a tremendous amount of time poorly pathfinding. It is so bad that zynga gifted everyone a ‘biscuit’ that sped the avatar up for a while. I imagine they offer more for cash. If you are one of the ten friends who still play this, don’t send me any gifts any more.

Rather than keep this hidden for several more weeks as I begin to displace lazy vacation weekdays with homework hours, I published this rogues gallery of shitty zynga games. I will publish my thoughts about the two I still play, Mafia and Vampire Wars, forthwith.

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I buy lots of foolish crap. It is a popular habit. Perhaps that is too harsh. I plan to buy foolish crap and sticking to a luxury budget generally saves me from sealing the deal. Plus, waiting for my budget to build up to an appreciable amount allows me to forget about buying stuff in general for long stretches.

However, that means that when I look at my lists of desired stuff, it looks pretty weird in retrospect. For example, I listed surgical paper masks. Those, annoyingly, only come in packs of fifty (for six dollars), so I didn’t buy any. Have I become overly asthmatic? No, but it was winter and sinning cold. I felt it deepest in the dark during the earliest hours I work, on my lips and face. A scarf is the traditional answer, but why go overkill with something that doesn’t fit comfortably in my pocket? Surgical masks satisfy that exact need perfectly. However, Orange County’s winter is almost over and they would sit unused until December or so.

Further, in one month and one week, Daylight Savings Time stomps on our biological clocks yet again. If I recall correctly, this one introduces more light into my morning so the temperature will seem to have risen. I could be wrong though. I remember ‘spring forward, fall back’ but spring isn’t a numerical operation, fool rhymer. In one week, I can give the dubious advice to start adding two minutes to each day so that when everyone else claws at their alarms with government mandated jetlag, you are totally ready. Sure, it requires increasing mental gymnastics but I already keep my watch five minutes ahead of most clocks, so it shouldn’t be too different.

Obviously, I have no intention of tricking myself so badly, but it reminds me of a pet idea to eliminate leap days entirely. Yes, leap days and Daylight Savings aren’t the same but both deal with trying to constantly adjust to the Earth’s varying daylight. Daylight savings supposedly matches our mornings to sunrise better. Leap days account for the accumulation of seconds outside the 24 hours on our watches. There are tons of calendar reforms, tons.

I admire most radical variants but recognize that I could never privately transition to Symmetry454 or the French Revolutionary calendar any more than I could learn Esperanto: for lack of partners. Most diverge from our (revised) Gregorian system to trumpet the import of the week. Presently, despite the boozy celebrations, New Years is just a day. It could be Friday, with a nice hangover Saturday. Or, it could be Tuesday and screw your hangover, the economy isn’t going to recover without hard work. Calender reforms usually have ‘intercalendar’ days. That means they exist, not only outside of every month (to keep them uniform) but aren’t any Day of the week either.

I think the best answer would adopt the same solution for the light itself. The buildup of ‘twenty four’ hours difference over four years is miniscule over any given day, but even that is out of step enough that – every seventy years or so – we need a double leap year. Prior to the invention of atomic clocks and digital clocks in general, rounding up was the best option. Frankly, it was the only option. As I noted, a ‘day’ is ever so slightly more than 24 sixty minute periods. An analog watchmaker would have a terrible time creating some mechanism for pocket and wrist watches that skipped enough second’s hand gear teeth to represent the particular day’s extra tenths of a second.

A digital watch hasn’t that problem. Despite all the Millenialist cowering over Y2K, digital clocks can easily adopt whatever time you like. With a little programming experience under my belt, I know it isn’t quite that easy. Nevertheless, you could have the clock program sense 24:00 and then pause (or not count the quartz crystal’s vibration or whatever). That duration is a const variable that we can update accurately. Has Greenland’s ice sheet melted? (That would shorten days by dispersing the mass and increase Earth’s angular velocity.) We decrease the leap microsecond. Are we importing minerals from the Apollo asteroids? We increase the break.

Of course, as with all communist fantasies, it requires a supermajority of the planet agree to switch to all digital clocks or see the buildup of a chronological differential. It would be annoying to fly to Tokyo and not only change the hour but the minutes too. Error creeps in.

Time zone differences remind me of another youthful daydream: an absolute GPS watch. Time zones are a useful fiction that timepiece would take to its ultimate implication. Imagine a watch that not only adjusted when you travelled across the country, it adjusted as you drove around. Time zones would be divided into 60 smaller slices each (or six at higher latitudes). That way, if you imitate the car commercial where the man drives forward to see the sun set again, the watch would adjust its minutes backwards automatically. Time travel for the proles.

Obviously, both are just nice thought experiments and terribly impractical. The latter makes coordination confusing unless in a future environment where even phone conversations can go through filters that alter the time I say into one that makes sense to my compatriot in San Fransisco.

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