Days without a specified day of the week

Feature Requests
#1

I recently discovered Auguste Comte’s proposal for a ‘perfect 13-month calendar’, in which each month would have exactly 28 days, allowing, among other things, each month to start on the same day of the week, last the same number of days, and align much better with the phases of the moon.

I tried to replicate this in Aeon Timeline, but there is one thing it won’t let me do. To match the Earth’s rotation, Comte proposed that there be an ‘extra day’ at the end of the year, the 365th day, which would not belong to any month or week and could be used for a celebration.

I haven’t found a way to add this in Aeon, because if I add one more day, the days of the year would no longer be a multiple of 7 and the days of the week would be out of sync.

That’s why I propose that there be an option for ‘extra days’ that don’t belong to any month or have an assigned day of the week, something similar to a leap year every year, but with the addition that it wouldn’t count towards the weekday count and wouldn’t technically belong to any month.

#2

Your suggestion prompted me to read up on the “positivist calendar.” It looks quite interesting, but I can also understand why the idea didn’t catch on.

Just for fun, I set up the calendar with AT 2, which is the version I use. The leap day issue can already be elegantly solved by introducing an additional month of zero or one day’s length, which is then named after the leap day, for instance.

positivist_calendar
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Just ckick on the sceenshot to enlarge.

However, I don’t think it’s possible to have a discontinuous weekday count, so the software would need to be adapted. This does not seem exactly trivial to me. I would be interested to know how you would use the positivist calendar in practice if Aeon Timeline offered this feature.

Update

For those who urgently need a positivist calendar, I have a working solution here.
I have set up my calendar with only one weekday, which has only an unobtrusive character as its name, so that it is almost invisible in the date display.

positivist_calendar
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Since one advantage of the positivist calendar is that every weekday falls on the same days in the month, you can easily deduce the days of the week from the date. If you’re not good at mental arithmetic, you can make a table to look up.

1 Like
#5

Thank you for your suggestion! The idea of using just one weekday actually works much better than simply ignoring weekdays altogether.

It’s a bit complicated to explain how I would use it, but I’ll try.

I want to use it for my fictional stories, not so much my real life. My stories have long timelines and three different calendars that run in parallel, and the Gregorian system has caused me quite a few problems due to its irregularities.

One of the biggest difficulties is leap years. When converting dates between calendars, leap years don’t align (the year 2000 in one calendar coincides with the year 300 in another, which causes problems because, although both are multiples of 100, 2000 is a multiple of 400, but 300 is not), which means there is often a one-day desynchronization.

What’s more, the days of the week don’t line up either (e.g. 300-01-01 is Monday, while 2000-01-01 is Saturday, not to mention that leap years change it). This makes organizing events in both places at the same time a pain.

A regular calendar would eliminate conversion problems between calendars, and it would allow me to manage events much more easily.

I hope I have explained myself clearly.

#6

So you have three different calendars in one timeline project? Such cases have been discussed here in the forum on several occasions (search for “lunar calendar,” “zodiac calendar,” or “multiple calendars”). My approach here would be to set up the AT calendar as Gregorian and model the fictional calendar dates as properties of the events. Then, from time to time, export the events, have a script calculate and enter the alternative dates, and reimport them.

If you set up the positivist calendar as I suggested, AT will set the leap years most likely differently than in a parallel Gregorian calendar, since the “positivist” count starts elsewhere, e.g., 1789 according to the Gregorian date, which would actually be a Thursday. As far as I know, however, AT begins the last era on a Monday.

This is not really a problem, since leap years are purely a matter of definition, but it does, of course, make it more difficult to handle different calendars. The most predictable result is probably obtained by letting AT use the Gregorian calendar and deriving the alternative calendars from it using your own algorithm.

1 Like
#7

I think there might be a small misunderstanding. My goal isn’t to synchronize a positivist calendar with a Gregorian calendar. The idea is to have all three calendars use the same structure (based on the positivist model), so conversions won’t be a problem, just fixed offsets in days. I want to avoid using a Gregorian calendar altogether, because its irregularities are what create most of the errors.

I don’t know if this is version-specific, but my version of AT lets me disable leap years entirely. I was planning on just doing that.

That said, this is actually a great idea, regardless of what calendar I use. With many events, it can get out of control if I calculate it manually.

#8

Yes, it seems I didn’t quite grasp your use case. But that’s okay if you can move forward now.
In my AT version, leap years can also be disabled per era, but then the additional holidays would be omitted from the positivist calendar, wouldn’t they?

#9

True, I will have to look into it. I will probably implement it partially, so that it better suits my needs. For example, I don’t need to change the names of the months exactly as Comte proposed. Leap years would be more regular than with the Gregorian calendar, in any case.

In any case, I would need to remove one day from the week, although your alternative idea seems to be working quite well for now.

#10

Thanks for the feedback @Ainoa and thanks for those great suggestions @Peter_T It’s great to hear that you’ve got a workable solution for now.

As noted above, there has been a lot of interest in being able to work with multiple calendars on the same timeline, so I’ve shared this additional feedback with the development team.