His name is Mal-Mal-Malcador! The greatest Sigillite! No treasure too old, no psyker too bold, Who’s that!? Malcador the Sigillite!
Well hello there! I’m Malcador, the last surviving member of the Ancient Order of the Sigillites. My friends call me ‘Mal’ but you can call me First Lord of Terra and second in command of the Imperium of Man. I make sure the Emperor’s will is done – when the big E says ‘jump’ we don’t even bother asking how high! (If we get it wrong he’ll let us know!) But it’s not all work, work, work in the Emperor’s service, no siree! We know how to have a good time too – isn’t that right Horus?
Mal… M-Mal… al…
Oh don’t mind him! He’s just trying to pronounce the name of one of the Lost Primarchs. Keep at it Horus, you’ll get it one day! Yes, we inhabitants of the Imperial Palace work hard, but we also play hard! As my good friend Constatin Valdor will agree! Get over here Constantin!…
Well, the hell-year of 2021 is over and done with and we can celebrate the start of hell-year 2022. Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished.
I did have big plans to get up super early this morning, get an Uber to the Camfield and enjoy the year’s first sunrise while walking along the river to Mends Street Jetty. But when it got to 1:00am and I still hadn’t fallen asleep I decided “screw it” and turned off my alarm. I’d rather start the year at least somewhat rested rather than try to get by on only three hours, no matter how good it might be get some healthy exercise and set an example to live up to for the next twelve months.
One thing I have done today is get my votes in for the Hottest 100. Rather embarrassingly it turns out that one of my favorite tracks of the year, MØ’s Nights With You, wasn’t in fact a track of the year at all. being released all the way back in 2017, so Cloudy Day by Tones and I got promoted up to my number 10 instead of 11. I also voted for Montaigne’s MBMBaM theme song My Life is Better With You which isn’t on the official list, BUT I DON’T CARE! My track of the year is Ziggy Ramo’s Little Things, and if that makes anyone uncomfortable then (to quote Phil Jupitus) Well fucking good!
Anyway, here’s the full list, alphabetically by artist…
(What? You don’t consider how stupid our calendar is on January 1st each year? What’s wrong with you?)
It is a truth universally acknowledged by all right thinking people that the Gregorian Calendar is a hodge-podge of terrible ideas smothered in a layer of well meaning but equally as bad hacks intended to force it into some semblance of functionality. The majority of the problems stem from the irrational belief of the Ancients that the universe is (or should be) some kind of clockwork mechanism where the movements of the celestial bodies all mesh together into a grand yet simple pattern – as opposed to the reality that they’re big lumps of rock and gas that whiz around doing their own thing with no obligation to match the neat mathematical models we humans prefer.
I make everything worse!
As such, the period of rotation of our planet (a day) does not fit evenly into the rotation of our moon around our planet (a month) and neither the day nor month fit evenly into the rotation of our planet around the sun (a year). Building a calendar on the assumption that they do causes horrible problems and results in said calendar drifting away from reality until people are planting their crops in the middle of winter and starving to death.
(We correct for this kind of thing with tricks like leap days, which is where we save up all the left over bits of days at the end of a solar orbit and then shove them back into the calendar once they add up to a full day. This is actually a pretty good solution, although sticking them at the end of the second month is the kind of thing only a lunatic would consider sensible.)
The mismatch between the solar year (365.2425 days) and lunar month (29.53 days) is responsible for the horrible mess of our calendar months. Four of them are 30 days long, seven of them are 31 days and one is 28 days (or 29 when we need to shove in one of those leap days). This is stupid.
And to add to these problems we went and invented the week – a period of seven days that doesn’t match up with the month or the year. The result is sheer insanity, requiring complex calculations to figure out what day of the week a given date falls on, and making vast sums of money for the calendar printing industry.
Enough! I cry! A new calendar is desperately needed, and I – in my supreme intelligence (not to say arrogance) – am the one to create it!
As such I am pleased to here present the Wyrmworld Calendar!
The Wyrmworld Calendar (WYC) consists of 13 months – the twelve we currently use plus Hektober – each of exactly four weeks long (28 days). The first day of each month – and the first day of each year is a Monday, so you never need to buy a new calendar.
This comes to 364 days, which leaves 1.2425 days over a year. The one full day is Yearsend – a special day inserted between Sunday Hektober 28th and Monday January 1st that isn’t part of any month and doesn’t have a day of the week. The remaining 0.2425 days are saved up as per the current leap year system, and when a leap day is required it’s added as Leapday between Yearsend and January 1st.
So, that takes care of the years, days and weeks, but how do the 13 months of the Wyrmworld Calendar line up with the moon? Well, they don’t. The moon makes everything way too complicated and can go frunk itself. We are human beings, not fish!
The Battle of Thermopylae was (2022+480)-1 years ago!
With the cycle of days figured out we now need to set an epoch. The Gregorian Calendar Epoch – BC/AD or BCE/CE – is just terrible, You have to count backwards for anything interesting in ancient history and then you have to account for there being no year 0. How old would Cato the Elder be if he were still alive today? He was born in 234 BCE so we need to take the current year of 2022 and add 234 and then take away 1, so he’d be 2,255. What year would he have had his 724th birthday? So we take 234 away from 724, but then we need to add 1, so 491 CE? THIS IS CONFUSING!
The sensible answer is to push the epoch back beyond recorded history so all the numbers that matter are in the positive. Cesare Emiliani’s Holocene Calendar does this with the neat trick of setting the epoch to 10,001 BCE, meaning we just add 10,000 to the current CE/AD year. The Wyrmworld Calendar is not afraid to steal good ideas, so we will do the same! So the current year is 12,022 WYC and Cato the Elder was born in 9,767 WYC. Easy!
(The battle of Thermopylae was 9,521 WYC in case you were wondering…)
Finally, exactly when is the new year? We currently celebrate new year at an arbitrary point in the Earth’s orbit and this offends me. The new year should be tied to something meaningful. The logical choice is a solstice or equinox. To minimise confusion we’ll use the (Gregorian) December solstice, and for reasons of convenience reference the Gregorian 2021 solstice of December 21st. The solstice shall mark the last day of the year, with the next day January (WYC) 1st.
So, adding it all together today is Thursday January 11th 12,022 WYC. I expect the world to start using this far superior calendar immediately!
