Mansionverse Calendar and Time (sorta spoilers)

[Geoduck]

This is the topic that's come up in reader feedback, so this month's semi-official forum post is, appropriately, my current thoughts/plans on how the calendar and time are set up the in world of the Mansion. As always, not all of this is 100% set in stone, and subject to last minute change if a better idea occurs to me. Even so, I suppose these qualify as SPOILERS

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Because I'm rather lazy and bad with math, I decided not to press my luck and just made a Mansion-year the same as ours, 365 days. However, it's exactly 365 days, so there is no need for leap years. (How convenient!) I thought about renaming the months and/or the days of the week, a la Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, but again decided to keep it relatively simple. What you see in the strip is technically translated from another language, but dialogue will still use January and Monday and such.

Changes:
As detailed here, Mansion-days only have twenty hours, but I probably didn't/couldn't make it clear that, despite the current endless day in-strip, the actual amount of daylight/darkness is basically the same as ours; each hour is the equivalent of.. (er) 72 RealLife-minutes? I've gone back and forth on how many Mansion-minutes there are in a Manson-hour; If I ever have to get specific, I may go with 80, because those Mansion-folk with hands have eight digits instead of ten. (I seriously considered making all the numbering base-8, but again chickened out; as penance, I do try to never use the number 9 in-strip. It all may become a plot-point eventually.)

There are 12 months of 30 days each. So, yes, the dates listed on the background poster in this strip were intentional. The last five days of the year are set especially aside for a Christmas surrogate/New Year's celebration. The exact details of this Festival of the Brush are still a little hazy, but each of the five days is dedicated to a different activity, and there is the construction, wearing and destruction of ceremonial masks. (Inspired in part by a line in this guest strip by Ian Jay.) Some in the racy younger set now refer to this as the "Brushtival", which annoys their elders.

Speaking of which.. the rest of the holidays are different as well. The only two I believe I've mentioned so far in-strip are Unification Day, which is in August and replaces the American "Independence Day", and Wintergate, which is the local version of Halloween. I think Canada has the right idea here, so in Mansionland the harvest festival also comes first, before the symbolic death-of-the-world celebration. There's also an Easter-like spring-rebirth festival, and a summer solstice party. If I really feel like torturing my characters, there may be Maypole dancing.

All this means, yes, the Mansion's planet is round, tilted on its axis and follows an elliptical orbit. If I was starting over, I'd probably change at least one of those facts..

The previously-mentioned endless day is in mid-April.

Anything I need to reconsider or address?
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[Bo Lindbergh]

You could make the orbit circular without changing anything in the archive.