|
|
Switch Swatch
2025年9月13日土曜日Tags [ - Wired - ]
During my recent explorings of the wired, I found a site named melonland. One of the features that stuck with me the most is how this site handled timestamps.
Instead of regular date and time posts were marked with the date and a three digit and two decimal number prefaced by an @ (i.e. @254.32).
So what is it?
On their wiki, they explain how this system works better than any explanation I could really give. But in short, instead of dividing a day in 24 hours, it does so in 1000 parts named “beats”. For example at the time of writing this, it’s @956, almost a full day done.
Here’s the kicker, swatch time is based around UTC+1, so it’s universal for everyone everywhere, it’s always the same beat time. @956 for me, is still @956 for anyone elsewere.
This gives a semblance of united time to the wired and releasing ourselves from timezones.
The main benefit of this system is being able to speak, register and organize events in a time system that doesn’t need to account for TZ difference.
Applying Swatch time to my daily life
I’m tryin to apply swatch time to my daily life too as this system seems to tingle my autism the right ways. I’m always trying to liberate myself from normative concepts.
This is mainly helped through a KDE plugin, some javascript and a rust cheatsheet I made.
Switching to this system has also improved my time awareness skills as I’m still getting used to it.
You also may have noticed lavenderfield does now have a real time beat clock and timestamps are in beats too (although you can hover over to see them in human readable time).
Now, the obvious questions.
Isn’t it impractical?
Yes. For a normal regular human, it is! Think of it as how a robot would use epoch.
You still need to hold into account your timezone and convert it to UTC+1 for it to be useful
True! But you only need to do that once, really. For example I just know @000 equals 1AM for me and I don’t need to think further than that.
Why? Just. Why?
Look I’m autistic, I like it, makes my brain sizzle in a comfy way.
Besides that, it just feels cool to use.