While this particular sheet isn't fully finished & public yet, I did wanna post these publicly while I was thinking about it - My headcanon calendar, approximate dates for when IWATEX takes place, and characters indivudual birthdays on both the Vertumnan Calendar and the traditional Gregorian Calendar! I get a bit rambly with this so the explaination behind my reasonings for things is below the cut:
The Vertumnan calendar is simple: 12 months of 30 days between the four normal seasons (Quiet, Pollen, Dust, and Wet), followed by a slightly shorter 28 day month for the already uniquely short Glow season, for a total of 388 days on an average year. Leap years with a single extra day would still occur just much less often than on Earth, only needed once every 17 years (aka 16 average years followed by 1 leap year), with that final extra day being added onto the end of Glow. This also matches with the years on Earth "laping" the years on Vertumna every 16/17 years; A character's 16th birthday on Vertumna would've been their 17th on Earth, their 32nd Vertumnan birthday would've been their 34th Earthern one, ect ect.
This also goes by several key things that aren't against canon information but contridictory to what was in early forms of the design document; the first is that days on Vertumna are nearly identical in length to days on Earth, still following a day divided into 24 hours of 60 minutes with each minute being composed of 60 seconds; the second is that weeks are assembled into batches of 7 days and (currently) follow the modern naming scheme for Sunday through Saturday.
The reason for keeping the day such a near identical length is that in practice it is actually incredibly hard to permanantly readjust the average humans sleep cycle to something longer (or shorter!) than their natural circadian rhythm. Even just an hour longer would have a cumulative effect on people's sleep cycles, getting more and more tired an hour "earlier" than the day before. This only stop becoming a problem if the days were almost perfectly twice as long as one on Earth, but having days that long - especially on a planet with two suns - would likely cook the planet to deadly temperatures during the day, while leaving the far side to drop insanely low each night. And yeah, sure, this one could be waved away by having each of the characters genetically modified to have a circadian rhythem that matches the length of their new day, but that requires both reader/writer and all characters to start adapting to a whole new lingustic system for describing units of time, which is also my entire reasoning for keeping the modern week setup. In theory, building up a whole new system of hours and names for week days is a lot of fun! And it can be, I've done it before, I'm halfway doing it again!
Which is how I learned that actually using said system casually and naturally is a WHOLE different beast, and not one I particularly want to explore in this fandom worldbuilding exercise. I think that in-universe the days of the week would be renamed over time, the same way that I think each given month would eventually have a more unique (and easier to use/identify) name than "Early Pollen" or "Mid Wet". Another headcanon of mine is that the founders actually did attempt to rename them before launch Onesday Twosday Threesday ect ect... But that between the adults deeply ingrained existing habit of calling things by their current names & the younger Earthborn colonists + spaceborn kids having secondhand exposure to the concept through media brought from Earth, it never actually caught on (except for Twosday taking over Tuesday, despite it being the third day of the week).
On another point entirely; The Gregorian calendar dates seen here are all founded on the age 11/year 2 Valentines day event. I ended up settling on that day being February 14th, 2204. Theres a few reasons for picking that year in particular; when I first started toying with the idea, it would've put their landing date during 2203, and I thought that it was a nice pun on the then-current-year 2023 (and, now having hammered it out further, having the landing year be 2202 is a nice nod to the game being released in 2022); One of the early humanties class events has a reference to space travel being "a passtime of billionaires in a previous century", and the standard english usage where I'm from would have this imply that more than a century had passed since that point, but it doesn't automatically mean it that either (think about using that phrasing to talk about something today; if you were talking about things that happend between 1900 and 1999, would you say that they happened in the previous century or a previous century?); the third reason is that its a shout out to one of my other favorite games, Stellaris (a space exploration/empire management sim), which always has the starting year of 2200.
Again, a lot of this is conjecture & opinions, just headcanoning pure and simple, but I've put a lot of thought into this over the past year. I'll eventually have a public copy of a calendar covering all 10 years of the canon game & update the npc sheet to have their local and Earth birthdays (as yes, I have gone and given them all specific birthdates, though I haven't finished calculating the Gregorian dates for the unimportant characters yet), but I'm in the middle of a frustrating medication adjustment & dealing with other personal issues that make it fall lower on my priority list rn.
If you have any questions or thoughts on any of this I absolutely wanna hear them, and as always all of this stuff is free for people to use-as-is or remix or takes part of to incorperate into their own headcanon system freely, and if you ever make anything based on or inspired by or referencing any of this stuff I very much would like to see it.
11 notes
·
View notes
i like jealous dennis but honestly what im hoping for is dennis who wants to see mac succeed and when he does just gets sad about it. like what we saw in gets romantic, when dennis supported mac trying to have his lovestory with the guy and just lingered in the background looking kind of upset. he played the music for mac. he tried to help him. he wasnt happy about it, but he tried to help. because he wants to convince himself he doesnt want and doesnt need mac and is willing to let him go.
and idk but i kinda feel like when he does see mac succeed and win the guy over it doesnt suddenly flip over into anger but into sadness instead. maybe this is just me being delusional and wanting to see dennis be a sopping wet loser but idk. i think dennis does want mac to succeed (if only to prove to himself he doesnt need him) and i dont think hes willing yet to show he cares enough to throw a tantrum. he might quietly seethe a bit, but i dont think he’ll actually get angry.
i think that when mac actually chooses someone other than dennis, he wont be mad because theres nothing to be angry at. it just means he wasnt good enough
51 notes
·
View notes