How many days are in an Achaean week?

Amunet

I was refreshing myself on some canon history earlier, and while re-reading the bit about the Ashtan-Shallam wars, I came across the word "week". It got me to wondering, just how long is an Achaean week? The seven-day week utilized in real life doesn't translate very well to Achaean time, which seems to divide into the other units of time - days, months years - much more smoothly than real time ever will. It stands to be argued, then, that an Achaean week has but five days, and an Achaean month has five weeks. Can anyone clarify this for me? @Sarapis, or @Tecton, perhaps? And furthermore, what are the days of the Achaean week called?

Lorielan

The handwave answer is that this refers to the old Church calendar, which was hugely different to the calendar that we use today. We have not recognised weeks since the fall of Seleucar.

Amunet

The Old Church Calendar, itself inspiring a myriad of unanswered questions, remains the bane of my existence. 

Jinsun

Oi was someone prepping to lecture on the burning times again?

Sarapis

@Jinsun Nobody wants to hear about anybody's rash.

Jinsun

Sarapis said:

@Jinsun Nobody wants to hear about anybody's rash.

Like that one you got after you got burned by @Lorielan and the boys?

Sarapis

Jinsun said:

Sarapis said:

@Jinsun Nobody wants to hear about anybody's rash.

Like that one you got after you got burned by @Lorielan and the boys?

That was more of a genocidal urge, really, that I barely restrained myself from indulging.

Jinsun

Sarapis said:

Jinsun said:

Sarapis said:

@Jinsun Nobody wants to hear about anybody's rash.

Like that one you got after you got burned by @Lorielan and the boys?

I barely restrained my indulging.

FTFY

Aerek

I've never bothered differentiating between "IC" time and "OOC" time beyond Achaean years, months, and days. For me, "minutes" are identical both OOC and IC, because I'm not going to deal with that "1/6th of an Achaean day" garbage. Since I've never really found a situation where I needed to measure Achaean time in 7-hour or 2.5 minute spans of real time, I've never bothered using "weeks" or "hours" in IC conversation.

When you effectively live forever, and months pass as quickly as they do, I doubt weeks would really matter enough to us to justify measuring them. Besides, the establishment of an Achaean 7 or 5-day week can only lead to the establishment of the Achaean 40-hour workweek, and I would chokeslam the first bastard that asked me to cancel my weekend hunting trip to do another novice exam.

Silas

I do like using Achaean hours sometimes, but I can't imagine when a week would be a necessary measure of time to use in conversation, and anything planned ahead is best referenced to the Orphean serenade. If we did need something between day and month, though, I'd propose using tendays from Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series.

Mathonwy

I enjoy using things like 'eight hours' instead of 'fifteen minutes' (or twelve instead of thirty, which are really the only two that come up with any degree of frequency) because I think it's more immediately appealing and helps to retain immersion (and also you get style points). Compare those to 'quarter of a day,' 'half a day,' 'twelve hours (OOC: 30 minutes),' etc.

If there had to be a week, I'd think five days over ten would be better just because it's a cleaner fit for the 25-day Achaean month, and it largely seems to me like most people who log in do so for about that long at most.

Halos

Amunet said:

The Old Church Calendar, itself inspiring a myriad of unanswered questions, remains the bane of my existence. 

Old Church/Good anything is pretty dry and barebones as far as historical canon goes, yeah. Handwave handwave handwave

Tael

For shorter amounts of time, I don't think there's much point in trying to avoid real-world time increments. "Eight hours" for fifteen minutes is confusing (I would have to stop and think about how long that actually is if someone said it to me in-game).

I'm not sure there's any way to avoid the immersion-breaking of small-scale time unless you want to start suggesting that people in Achaea really do speak and act about 24-times slower than in real-life and there really are several-minute pauses between every sentence in a fluid conversation (or even very regular hour-long pauses).

I think the difference between the game's calendar-time and the real-time we actually interact in is just something you have to suspend disbelief about. At least for me, using calendar-time increments to describe action happening at a real-time resolution calls attention to the difference if anything.

Although, to be fair, I guess thinking of travel time in terms of calendar-time actually makes at least slightly more sense than walking across the continent in a few seconds.

Ahmet

Tael said:

For shorter amounts of time, I don't think there's much point in trying to avoid real-world time increments. "Eight hours" for fifteen minutes is confusing (I would have to stop and think about how long that actually is if someone said it to me in-game).

Erm

Tael said:

"Eight hours" for fifteen minutes is confusing (I would have to stop and think about how long that actually is if someone said it to me in-game).

Hold on a second. Hrm...

Tael said:

"Eight hours" for fifteen minutes

Somethings not quite right here...

Tael said:

"Eight hours"

Math... quarter...

Tael said:

fifteen minutes

Does not compute...

@Mathonwy

Silas

I'm glad I'm not the only one who paused at that.

Mathonwy

Meh, mathematics aren't my forte. You know what I meant.

Tael

Case in point about it being confusing I guess?

Mathonwy

No, just case in point that I suck at math. The difference between six and eight hours in Achaea is, what, five minutes IRL? It usually takes that long just to get everyone to quiet down at any sort of event anyway, so it's not so big a deal.