I, like so many other Swedes, have “afternoon disease” where we mess up afternoon times all the time. All odd hours are the same as each other and all even hours are the same as each other. Because 2 is 14 which gets brainfritzed to 4 which is 16 which gets brainfritzed to 6 which is 18 which gets brainfritzed to 8 which is 20 and maybe in the late evening it’s not as bad which is why it’s called afternoon disease and not late-evening–disease.

And yes, it is recursive this way. It’s not enough that 4 PM gets misread as 2 PM (because the four gets misread as 14 which is 2 PM) and as 6 PM (because the four is 16 which gets misread as 6 PM). That’s bad enough, that one time is the same as two completely different times two hours apart in the opposite directions. But it goes all the way. 2 can become 8 this way through multiple instances of brainfritzing. And it’s not a slow drift over a long conversation; the recursive brainfritzing can happen multiple times between two breaths. I see 2 and write down 8. Or any other even hour for any other even hour, and any other odd hour for any other odd hour. I’m sure a lot of Swedes can relate and are pumping their fists in celebratory commiseration right now while those who can’t are like “what the heck are you talking about, I’ve never done that mistake in my entire life” to which I say boo and hiss!

I even went as far to set my phone to 12h AM/PM time instead of the 24h typical for our locale. But then I got noon/midnight disease instead. I tried my best to remember that the numbers roll over between 12:59 and 1:00, but the AM/PM flag toggles at an hour earlier at 12:00 inclusive so 12:00 PM through 12:59 PM is noon and 12:00 AM through 12:59 is night time. And most of the alarms I set are around noonish because they are for laundry purposes. But toggling it back to 24h has reminded me how bad afternoon disease is especially with my wristwatch which is… analog! So it only has 12. I’m gonna switch it back and set all my clocks to 12 AM/PM. I’ll see if I can set my oven clock that way too and on my game consoles. I finally found the option on iPad at least.

A lot of Swedes panic at the mere mention of AM/PM (and I don’t blame them, noon/midnight disease is a hell of a drug) and are super fanatic about always using 24h format on their digital clocks but have no qualms also using analog 12h clocks and calling 16:00 “klockan fyra”. Or “klockan sex” if they get a li’l bout of afternoon disease.

Beat time when?!

Okay tip number one is going to be use a time calculation app instead of relying on hacks like this. This is only for when apps aren’t available and you have to rely on your own “skill” and “knowledge”.

But sometimes that’s all you’ve got so here we go.

This is also not for when you are programming a time library. (Where instead you should convert to seconds, subtract, then convert back.) This is for back-of-the-envelope human calculation.

I am assuming both times are within 24 hours of each other. If not, we’re gonna need further hacks. That’s gonna have to wait to lesson two.

Then, if one of the times is AM and the other is PM, or vice versa, add 1200 to the first time. We’re going to use the running example of 6:49 PM as the start time and 4:20 AM as the ending time. So erase those colons (we’ll put them back in last step) and add 1200 to the later time. So in our example that gives us 649 to 1620.

Now, some countries use a “24 hour clock” where the afternoon always has 1200 added and the morning never has. If the times cross noon that system is gonna be great here but if it’s midnight they’re crossing, it’s not applicable. Here, we’re always adding 1200 to the latter time for each time it crossed midnight or noon. So 1 pm to 2 pm? Don’t add anything. 1 pm to 2 am? Add 1200 (so we’re comparing 100 to 1400; with this hack, it’s 1400 even though it’s 2 am). 2pm to 1pm the following day, crossing both midnight and noon? Add the 1200 twice, so we’re comparing 200 to 2500.

Now if the minutes hand are the same or lower on the earlier time stamp, you can skip a step. 2500 is 2300 later than 200, i.e. it’s 23h and 0 minutes later.

But if it’s not, like in our 649 to 1620 example where the earlier time has a longer minute hand? Subtract forty from it, in this case turning 1620 to 1580. (We’re adding sixty and subtracting a hundred, if that’s easier do that, if subtracting 40 in one step is easier do that instead.)

So now we have 649 to 1580. Just subtract. In this example that makes 931. Now, that is not 931 minutes. Instead, it’s time to add the colon back in (or keep it in all along). It’s 9h31m. That’s how long it is between 6:49 pm to 4:20 the next morning.

Alternative less hacky but much slower method: adding 11 minutes makes 7 pm, adding five hours makes midnight, adding four more hours makes 4 am, adding twenty more minutes makes 4:20 am. So we’ve got 11m + 5h + 4h + 20m = 9h31m. Sometimes looking at an analog watch helps with this alternative method.

By the way, when subtracting, be clear about what kind of span you’re looking for. If you have volume one of a book series all the way up to volume ten, that’s not 10−1 = 9 books. It’s ten books. But the distance between a city one mile away to a city ten miles away in the exact same linear direction, that is nine miles. And with times and dates, sometimes you want one, sometimes the other. We were there on January 1st and we were there on January 10th and all the days in between, but then we weren’t there anymore. That’s ten days, not nine. Tricky stuff.

Speaking of dates, the lesson two of this hack for when the timestamps are more than 24h apart, that would involve equivalents to the “subtract 40” rule. “Day 23, 6:40 to day 49, 7:45” is easy to figure out (it’s 26d1h5m) but “Day 23, 7:45 to day 49, 6:40” not so much. If that’s formatted as 230745 to 490640, subtract 10000 and add 2400, (a.k.a. subtracting 7600 in one go if that’s easier. Which it’s usually not). So we’ve got 230745 to 483040. Then if the minutes hack is needed, which it is in this case (and we can tell it is since 40 is less than 45), subtract 40 as earlier, leaving us with 230745 to 483000, and then subtract and put the d h m markers back in and it’s 25d22h55m in this example.

Again, programmers, do not do this. This is only for, I dunno, scouts or something.

I actually do use some of these hacks, like in the laundry room I like mentally checking that the next date is seven days later which is easy if day one is 7 and day two is 14, but not so much if day one is 26 and day two is the next month’s 2. Here, I add the number of days in the first month (31, say) to that second date so I can compare 26 to 33 and be happy with that being seven days ahead. This is in addition to the calendar GUI in the laundry room wall app, it’s just me being too neurotic and scared of misclicks to entirely trust that but too lazy to whip out an actual calendar.

Similarly the “24h clock but crossing midnight instead of noon” hacks is great for figuring out how long I slept. And that subtract 40 is probably the useleast and controversiallest one of them all but it can be great for tricky times when my brain is on the fritz. “4:49 to 6:07 is… Uh…” While thinking of it as 4:49 to “5:67” is way easier, it’s 1h18m. (A normal person would’ve just added 11 + 7 and then remembered to “carry the one” in some way that makes it one hour not two and okay good for you! I’m glad there are many methods.)

Out of the six ways for me to store a QR code (in this case a yearly entry pass for a local museum), the one I chose today was the worst, most unreliable, least efficient, but way coolest method: I drew it by hand in the back of my Techo Weeks paper planner. It took one hour but that includes starting over because I messed up the first attempt.

It was a 21 × 21 module grid and I used 1.5 mm modules, using a 0.5 mm pen for the corners and single-module areas and a 0.8 mm pen to fill in bigger areas. The Weeks has 3mm grid paper so I made modules one quarter the actual grid size, freehanding that half of them while following the grid lines where they did align. Maybe a ruler would’ve been good, I didn’t think of that.

I tested it, it works!

The second coolest method, I couldn’t do. That would’ve been printing it out and using a transfer pen to transfer a copy. My printer is laser and I wonder if printing it out, mirror flipped, on normal printer paper works with transfer pens? Edit: tested that method, it doesn’t work for hi rez QR codes, the rubbing process blurs everything and just transfer without rubbing is too faint.

Third coolest I could’ve done: printing it out, cutting it out, and pasting it in.

Fourth would’ve been printing it out and keeping it folded in the calendar’s back pocket, and fifth would’ve been printing out and keeping it at home and just trying to remember to bring it. (That’s what I did with my concert pass last summer, downside is that it got pretty banged up in my bag.)

Sixth would probably have been the best and smartest, although it (like the first method, admittedly) only works for 21 × 21 QR codes: crop the image out tightly and use an USB cable to put it in the “gallery” section on my Nokia 8210 4g dumb phone. Higher rez QR codes don’t work on this stamp-sized screen, but I’ve tried this QR resolution on the Doro 5517 which had pretty much the same screen and that worked. That’s what I used to do for movie tickets. Once movie theaters stopped requiring Macromedia Flash to buy tickets. That was a dark time where I never bought any tickets for years.

Least cool because it’s still flashing my phone like a dork but least work and also best for the environment. Once Light Phone III arrives that’s probably what I’m gonna do, put the file in the gallery section or just take a photo of the tablet screen. Or get a transfer pen and go with method two.

1. My specific IP, idiomdrottning.org, is green because it doesn’t send spam email.
2. Even nearby IPs happen to be green which yay awesome but that’s not something I can affect either way.
3. But since Akamai bought Linode and on the Akamai network as a whole there are spammers, I’ve been blocklisted on the “level three” list which has lead to some emails not getting through.

And on that page, they write:

Your IP 74.207.231.133 was NOT part of abusive action, but you are the one that has freely chosen your provider.
By tolerating or ignoring that your provider doesn’t care about abusers you are indirectly also supporting the global spam with your money.
Seen from this point of view, you really shouldn’t wonder about the consequences.

Even setting aside that I didn’t exactly freely choose for Linode to get bought by Akamai, this UCEPROTECTL3 list is contributing to ESP oligarchy, pushing us towards the gmail-only hellscape by blocking independent (fully DMARC’d up) postfix servers.

Not sure how me “tolerating” being on Linode is more immoral than cutting off contact ties between friends and fam.

“you really shouldn’t wonder about the consequences.” 🤬

While in fact UCEPROTECT-Level 3 is nothing than pure mathematics based on the Impacts from Level 1, one could best describe UCEPROTECT-Level 3 as a boycottlist.

Probably better known as an extortion scam cash cow because they coax people to pay to be exempted from this boycott:

We never make exceptions. Requests are futile. Only your provider can fix this problem.
Anyway our system respects IP’s which are registered at ips.whitelisted.org, these are excluded from Level 3.

Don’t use this blocklist in your spam filters.

Mx Tool Box is part of why there are so many freakouts around this online, because people go there to troubleshoot and one of the things they see is this scam blacklist. Even though there might be some other issue like reverse DNS. In reality most people don’t use the fake UCEPROTECT block list anyway. So do not pay; it’s more likely there’s something else wrong with the email.

Alex said that since clowns are cool, we shouldn’t use that word as an insult.

While I’ve always loved clowns, never had coulrophobia, had a Pierrot doll when I was a li’l girl, met great clowns when the circus came to town, had my life saved by a clown, have worked with clowns and clowning… I still feel like “clown” or “clowning” in the polysemic meaning “to do foolish things” is, well, it’s part of the intent of many (not all) clown acts. The character is behaving foolishly, often for satirical purposes. Calling a politician a “clown” might be a li’l bit “Your joke, but worse” but it’s not intended as an insult to clowns. It’s a testament to the efficacy of their satire.

It’s like saying “wow my boss is a real Mr Burns” isn’t meant as an insult to Harry Shearer or to his performance as Montgomery Burns on the Simpsons. It’s a li’l too on the nose, a little “well, duh, since Mr Burns is intended to caricature that kind of behavior” but it’s not implying that Harry Shearer is as bad as your boss is. That’s an imperfect analogy since “clown” and “clowning” can also be used to refer to the act of performing itself (no one is saying “My boss is behaving like a damned voice actor”) but it hopefully gets the gist across.

It’d be like saying that the expression “You’ve got to be kidding” would be an insult to comedians.

All that said, be aware that the fash have tried to appropriate “clown world” like they did the OK sign and frogs. Which sucks because it was useful, it was less ableist than many other insults.

Jealous of everyone who missed out on the endless stream of utterly boring April Fools jokes on IRC which were boring me to tears. I was crying bone. 🩻

Good Friday used to be the boringest day of the year but now it’s April’s Fools Day. A day that’s an insult against comedy and taste. Every yawn-inducing bore-fest trite done-to-death over-templated clumsy cruel prank can go die in a sawmill.

“Yawn-inducing” is too charitable a word for these soul-grinding, suffocating, self-owning, sulphur-whiffed stunts, these pain-by-numbers pitiful parroted pratfalls.

• “Lol [thing] is now about [opposite thing]”
• “Lol we are gonna switch to discord”
• “Lol I’m gonna quit my show”
• “Lol I’m gonna kms”

Thank God for inventing time so it finally became April second in UTC. Every day, 364 days a year, when I wake up I thank the Lord the highest and the vinegar tasters and the imams and rabbis and the pebbles and trees that it’s not April first. And then once a year I wake up and I cry and cry and cry, because it’s the day when creativity gives way to cruelty, wit gives way to waste, taste gives way to testing my god-damned-patience with every lying little word that comes out of your mouths and keyboards.

I want to dedicate my life to poetry so I can, in the future, better express the full width of my unending hatred of not only this “holiday” but every single joker individually. For it burns with the temperature of four-hundred and ninety-three thousand, two-hundred and eighty suns.

My heartfelt thanks to all y’all who did not participate.