foone

When you wear a watch, you are always only one second away from knowing the current time. You effectively inherently know the time, at a times. So what else could you put on a smart watch to basically wire directly into your brain, so you always know it?

The obvious idea is to make it similar to what dumb watches do, but differently. You're always wearing a device and you look down at it and it says just "December" Or worse, 2020.

You could have the current date but in a different calendar. Like maybe you're the last hold out for the French Revolutionary Calendar? (we're somewhere in the Month of Frimaire)

But it doesn't have to be date or time. And they're smart, they can talk to your phone and ask the internet for values. Maybe you always need to know the current NYSE stock price of American Eagle? (18.98 right now)

Or the current age of Bob Dole? 97 years, 4 months, 11 days at time of writing.

You could argue that's just a clock with a different epoch, though. It's currently April 11th, 97 AD (After Dole)

One I've shitposted about before is the International Beatles Index, which has been at 2.5 since 2001, when George Harrison died. (the 0.5 is there as a compromise between the two camps regarding the validity of Pete Best)

You could do listing for all kinds of changing facts. Like, what's the top box office movie? (kinda useless this year) the top billboard song? How many videos are there on YouTube about the DOS game "Monuments of Mars"?

How many days until the currently planned launch date for the James Webb Anger Magnet?

How many days until Steamboat Willie enters the public domain?

What's the ratio on the most recent Elon tweet?

Direction and distance in yards to the nearest lake on Google maps

Current world record time for the any% speedrun of the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time. (7m 13s 352ms)

The origin for this thread was the idea that you're at a store and the person in front of you is wearing a big watch, and you happen to see the screen after they check it, and it's just saying, in big letters, "THURSDAY". Nothing else. No date, no time, just Thursday.

also my After Dole date was completely wrong. Converting "97 years, 4 months, 11 days" to April 11th 97 AD makes sense, but is off by one in every single value.

0 months difference is January, so 4 months is May, not April. 11 days? Well, 0 days different isn't the 0th of May, it's the first of May, so 11 days is actually the 12th of May.

and the 97-years one being wrong is probably the most confusing, but "AD"/"CE" style dating systems don't have a year zero. They start at one.

so 1923 wasn't 0 A(fter)D(ole), it was 1 AD. Now that it's 97 years later, it's 98 After Dole, not 97.

so today's correct date is May 12th, 98 After Dole.

also if you want to make it extra correct, the "proper" use of AD (anno Domini) is to put it before the year, not after. So maybe it should be AD 98? But in practice plenty of people put the AD after the year, so you can justifiably do it that way too.

anyway as amusing as "After Dole" is as an abbreviation, it's clearly confusing, so I suggest that anyone intending to seriously use this dating system instead call it the Bob Dole Era, or BDE. It's May 12th, 98 BDE.

amusingly, making chronological mistakes about Bob Dole is something I've already done as a joke. Since before I could drive, I always said I wanted to get a car with a campaign sticker on it for a candidate who had already lost before that car was built.

and one of my first cars was (in 2007/2008) a 2001 Ford Taurus, proudly bearing a Dole/Kemp '96! sticker.

fun fact: this made it technically illegal to park in my job's parking lot (not that I had permission to do that anyway)

You weren't allowed to park cars on federal property bearing campaign stickers*, or wear clothing endorsing candidates*. I arguably violated that by wearing a "Cthulhu/Dagon 2008" shirt a few times, but no one called me on it.

This was a federal government job so it was arguably violating some kind of neutrality to endorse a specific candidate and be seen to be working at the government.

I'm not sure what exactly they expected us to do in the WEATHER DEPARTMENT that would unfairly skew the election. maybe predict that if John McCain won, we'd have 4 years of constant rain and storms?

anyway there was an exception to the "no political stickers/clothing" rule: You weren't allowed to advertise for candidates, but issues and messages were fine.

so "I don't think we should be invading Iraq" was OK, but "I don't think we should be invading Iraq and that's why I'm voting for John Kerry" was not.

which is why my retroactively cringe "Make tea, not war" sticker would have been OK. (As someone on tumblr said, "that slogan makes perfect sense, so long as you know nothing about the history of Tea")