It should work like Animal Crossing.
The new day doesn't start until 6am.
Home ownership should also work like Animal Crossing and you are just given a home by a shady raccoon who says you're in debt to him but never asks for you to repay the loan.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Exactly, but except 6am should be 00:00
Then it wouldn't be 6am
Never age with this one weird trick!
Can't argue with that!
I would say it isn't that stupid. The old humans picked one of the extremes, in this case the most complete absence of the sun (which includes the lowest point in the sky for some of the Vikings etc.) to mark this change. I think if they had picked midday we would have the same argument just about the daytime. And if they had picked any other time there would have to have been a "good" reason, like a religious one. It's the time of day Mohammed went to Medina or the Buddha looked at nirvana. Otherwise the old humans wouldn't have been onboard with that decision for centuries.
Time keeping is like the imperial system of measurements. It works but it doesn't make a lot of fucking sense.
I hate it, because each calendar day has two half-nights.
Like... So if you say "the night of the 5th" is that before dawn or after dusk?
If you say night of the 5th, that will mean the time from sunset to midnight on the fifth.
After that it's morning/pre-dawn of the 6th.
This isn't new or controversial.
Morning and predawn are typically the times immediately surrounding dawn, not the time immediately after midnight.
If you told me "were going out to take photos at predawn" I'd assume you meant blue hour photos, not moonlit photos.
It's night from sunset until dawn. And if someone said "in the morning" I would never interpret that as meaning before dawn.
It is controversial, because one definition of "morning" is dawn to noon and another is midnight to noon. And saying "night" is "sunset to midnight" is also new because you just came up with that.
i've never seen someone who takes that as "before dawn". night is after dusk, midnight's before dawn
Right.
But 00:01 is clearly still night. Night is typically considered from dusk til dawn.
So if we say "the night of the 2nd" then that's from dusk til 23:59:59 of the 2nd.
Which is then followed by night that isn't the night of the 2nd nor night of the 3rd.
And I'd say "before dawn" or "early morning" of the 3rd would be problematically ambiguous.
The night of the 5th would be sometime after 4pm on the 5th.
What is confusing about this?
You have a choice in life. You can accept certain things you cannot change. This one, you won't change. Even if you spearheaded a popular movement I doubt you'll get it changed. Everybody hates DLST and we still can't get rid of it.
So I suggest you adapt your language. You don't talk about the night of the fifth but the night from the fifth to the sixth. Three additional syllables in this case and the confusion evaporates quickly. You're focusing on the perceived problem and not on the solution. If you do resolutions for the new year, maybe add that point to your list.
I mean, I'm having fun arguing pedantics, but this is a pretty silly post. There is no room here for real practical solutions!
Back in college, we had "Random Standard Time" where midnight was midnight, but it wasn't "tomorrow" until 5am.
The TV broadcast day typically starts at 5 AM in the US. On the schedule, times between midnight and 5 AM might have XM listed instead of AM if it continued to carry the previous day’s name. For example, at a CBS station the Monday schedule would list The Late Show as starting at Monday 11:35:00 PM and The Late Late Show as starting at Monday 12:35:00 XM instead of Tuesday 12:35:00 AM.
It works in Animal Crossing…
Noon is when the sun is highest in the sky. That's the midpoint of the day. Midnight would be when the sun is on the other side of the world* and is now coming closer.
*yes, I am aware of the actual facts. I am giving the historical view point.
I know what they are, I just think they're stupid, because what day does the night belong to?
It feels like a day should be one daylight period and one night period, but it's currently a daylight period and two half nights.
Like... If you say "night of January 1st" is that from midnight to dawn or from dusk to midnight? And then what day owns the other part, and why isn't it in that calendar day?
I forget which exact midnight represents, but the immediate second after midnight would be the 'morning' of the next day. If you're born at 12:00:01am or 00:00:01 in military time, then you'd be born the next day.
Right, but midnight is the mid of the night, so it's still night 1 second after midnight, it's not morning of the following day.
People call it early morning. I dunno what to say dude. You're fighting against how long? of established nomenclature
People don't typically call immedi after midnight "early morning".
But also this is a silly post.
maybe I should have said "unsatisfying" instead of "sucks". The way the calendar works doesn't match how we typically intuit a day.
I feel like we could fix this problem with new terminology. We have words for many various events and stretches of the diurnal cycle: Dawn, sunrise, morning/forenoon, afternoon, sunset, and dusk, but nothing quite so definite for the night hours. I would certainly understand what it would mean if somebody said, "the evening of the 3rd into the wee hours of the 4th," but those terms lack precision. Both foremidnight and aftermidnight would convey the meaning, but sound awkward.
Historically, I think it makes sense that we base the reckoning of a day on our natural photoperiod. Until the advent of artificial lighting, the night was a liminal period of time, and hardly anybody was awake and active to make dividing it up useful. I suppose we could change the rollover time to noon, but that divides up the sunlit period across different days. At least we already have words to use, and "the morning of January 1st" would be unambiguous, as would "the night of January 1st," but counterintuitively, the morning of January 1st would occur after the afternoon. Making it some other time would just be just as arbitrary, and much more awkward. Sunrise, for instance, varies quite a bit throughout the year. (By about half an hour even at the equator, and by almost 5 1/2 hours in Oslo.) So, now does the sunrise on January 1st occur just after or just before the new day begins? What about places where the sun stays in the sky for longer than a clock-day during parts of the year?
Better to just agree on some new words, I think.
Maybe new words would fix it.
But even from the historical perspective it doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they pick dawn as the natural starting point of the photoperiod? As you said, nobody was awake at night, so why did they choose a time when nobody was awake to make the differentiation on the date?
When you say "sunrise varies quite a bit", that's only from the perspective of a midnight-centric time measurement; sunrise wouldn't vary, it'd be the start of the day by definition.
There are some issues with using dawn, but they wouldn't be a concern historically and we have modern solutions;
Like days wouldn't be exactly 24 hours, and dawn is affected not just by latitude but also geography.
But fundamentally it's more satisfying if a calendar day is compromised of one single contiguous day and one contiguous night 😌
feels like a day should be one daylight period and one night period, but it's currently a daylight period and two half nights.
Only to you.
In day to day conversation, when someone says "I slept like shit last night", we all know what that means.
I mean, look at my name.
And also this is a silly post where I complain about how it feels bad that a calendar day doesn't consist of a single contiguous day and single contiguous night, even though that's kind of how we intuit about it.
Noon is when the sun is highest in the sky.
Solar noon is, yes. But in most places, solar noon and 12 PM are at different times.
Regardless of time every day should start with a little jingle.
Every weekday starts with the Arkanoid jingle.
Every weekend starts with a full performance of Fairy Reflection.
Some cultures considered sunset to be the end of the day and beginning of the next one. That seems good to me in a sense but very unwieldy for modern 24-hour time. The year also started when life began to return and planting could start.
It’s only stupid in 12 hour time.
It's stupid in 24 hour time too.
Because what do you mean a day has 2 nights?
00:00-06:00 is night, and 20:00-23:59 is night.
So the "night of the 5th" refers to which one, and how do you refer to the other one?