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jam mechanics - the year of confusion (demo) lyrics

in 46 bc, (although they didn’t call it 46 bc, of course,) the roman empire experienced what came to be known as the year of confusion. up until then, people understood a year to be 12 months long, like we do. and honestly, their calendar looked a lot like ours. months had either 29 or 31 days except february, which, in order to keep the calendar aligned with the natural lunar year, could have anywhere between 23 or 28 days. but that flexibility alone was not еnough to keep the calendar aligned with thе earth’s seasons

and, so every few years, to make sure things didn’t get too out of whack, the romans would have not a leap day, but an entire leap month called mercedinus, or intercalaris, which generally fell at the end of february. and to be decided by a religious leader. the keeper of god’s time

this wasn’t why they called 46 bc the year of confusion

the problem with having these leap months and having them be inserted at the will of religious leaders, is that they would often decide a year would be 22 days longer when a supporter (or they themselves) were in political office. giving them another 3 weeks of rule, or at the very least, political influence. or, he would decide against including a leap month when one was desperately needed in order for the calendar to make any kind of sense when an opponent was in office, because that would get them out the door quicker. and thus, the years, time itself, was beholden to political whim and corruption

but even this is not the reason why 46 bc was called the year of confusion

no, the reason 46 bc was known as the year of confusion is because that was the year that julius caesar said “enough is enough.” no more bending the calendar to your will++ from now on the calendar will align with the lunar year naturally, without human intervention. and so the julian calendar, effectively the calendar that we use today, was introduced

except, not quite. because in order for the julian calendar to align with the start of the lunar year, 46 bc was 445 days long. one last blast of nonsense powerful enough to, they hoped, wash the old away with the new. and then from 45 bc, the years progressed much as we recognize, with the occasional leap day to make up for minute slippage

all this effort, to align the calendar of man with the mysterious lunar mechanism, which seemed at the time to hold everything together with a level of perfection that mankind was incapable of recreating on earth. which our attempts to capture had led only to the already powerful h++rding evermore unfathomable power

that’s the strange thing about time, it’s not real

not how we experience it anyway, our scientific knowledge today makes even the smartest of those in ancient rome look like children. and yet our years are still built around how fast this little ball is flung around its closest star. i guess it’s difficult to remember that when a day isn’t a collection of hours anymore, but of minutes and seconds. our lives are being broken down into ever smaller increments. so small that we have lost sight of when a day truly begins and ends

yeah, maybe we don’t gain or lose an entire month anymore due to the political machine, but there are huge swathes of the world’s population who barely see sunlight for 3 months out of the year, rising as it does before they clock in and setting before they clock out

is this natural?

it feels natural
but i think it’s difficult to truly understand a system when you are inside it

46 bc, the year of confusion, must have felt for some like a year of realization. that the relationship between our time and god’s time is not 1 to 1. that there are 93 million miles between the human race and the sun. and that our moments are best measured by the turning of the leaves, by the freezes and the thaws. by the people who come into our lives too late and fall out of our lives too soon

everything moving, always

but as a rule, as a kindness, too slow for us to notice

- jam mechanics lyrics

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