Discordian date with ddate
New Calendar
The Discordian calendar straightens outs the remaining irregularities in our present calendar with a wink of the eye. Using ddate, you can convert the current time into the "new system."
For many years, humans have been living according to the Gregorian calendar, which was pontifically decreed centuries ago. The journey of days through the seasons that Julius Caesar's calendar had created was thus deactivated for a time. This had, in turn, straightened out the previous lunar calendar, which went through a year in 354 days and therefore had to be adjusted continuously and manually to the actual state of affairs.
Twelve-month years with seven-day weeks may be quite a usable compromise for counting time, but it's also a rotten one in many ways. The six-plus-one rule might seem practical, but four weeks only fill up a whole month once a year – the others have 30 or 31 days. This irregularity leads, for example, to the fact that you celebrate your birthday on a different day of the week each year.
Calendar of Discord
The Discordian calendar [1] (from the Latin discordia) thoroughly tidies up these difficulties and takes a completely different approach: It divides the year into five months, each of which has 73 days. A year still has 365 days, with a leap day every four years. However, the weeks shrink to five days. Take a look at the output from the ddate command invoked without any arguments (Figure 1).
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