this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"early morning of the 3rd" and "before dawn of the 3rd" definitely would not become 00:00—8:00 of the 2nd, and that's all that matters imo for the practical utility of delineating borders between days in the first place. i also like organizing things but i see absolutely no way to define "organized" for this lol
I don't understand what you mean here, why would "before dawn of the 3rd" become 00:00-08:00 of the 2nd?
I'm saying to shift what 00:00 is, to align with dawn(ish), so that a calendar day is comprised of a contiguous day followed by a contiguous night, which is how we typically intuit about days anyways when we aren't talking about time.
I know there are practical modern issues with this, but this is a silly post about how unsatisfying it is for the day to start at midnight
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!
The night of the 5th would be sometime after 4pm on the 5th.
What is confusing about this?
Right, but then how do you refer to before 5am on the 5th?
That's not morning, and it's not the night of the 4th. It's awkward.
But more importantly, it's ugly. It's not how we intuit about days. It's unsatisfying.
5 am is the morning. This isn't negotiable. You're wrong.
00:01 isn't the morning. This isn't negotiable. You're wrong.
I think you're perhaps like... Misunderstood or poorly educated here.
A.M. doesn't meant "morning".
It means "ante meridian" which is Latin for "before noon".
It's not up for debate. You're very thoroughly wrong.
The definition of "AM" didn't factor into anything I said, though.
You said "5am is morning", but i said "before 5am" as in the entire time from midnight to 5am. I reminded you that "before 5am includes 00:01" which very much isn't what people would consider to be morning.
This is a silly post about timekeeping, I'm not sure why you're being rude about it.
5 am is morning. Because the sun is up like 40 percent of places 40 percent of the time. But that's not your argument.
Your argument is that midnight makes no sense.
You're wrong. 12 noon is noon. 12 midnight is MIDDLE of the night.
Noon is when the sun is on average the highest.
Midnight is on average when the sun is the lowest.
None of this is inconsistent. It makes perfect sense. Your inability to grasp this is a personal issue.
Before you even:
"but middle of the night means that 1 am is still night but am means morning"
No, you're an idiot and wrong.
AM doesn't mean morning. It means before noon.
Again. It is perfectly consistent.
Why do you keep bringing "am" into this.
again none of what I said has anything to do with the definition of "am"
And why are you being so rude on what is clearly a silly thread?
My "argument" isn't that "midnight itself makes no sense"
My argument is that having the day start at midnight isn't how people intuitively conceptualize a day, and wouldn't it be nice if the calendar day more closely resembled our intuition about days (a contiguous daytime period followed by a contiguous nighttime period).
I've heard people say "the wee hours of the night" to refer to time between midnight and dawn.
I think one of the reasons that there's not a good word for that in English is because it's the time anyone is least likely to be awake, so there's not much reason to talk about it. And then by the time humans built enough lights to do something worthwhile at 02:00, we also had clocks and started to describe that period in reference to clock readings.