fandom with math

[scarfman]

Recently someone on doctorwho asked the community what we do Who-related to help pass the time at work. I replied that I like to divide my shift into ten eleven segments, one for each of the Doctor's incarnations; where at the start of my shift is the departure of the TARDIS from Gallifrey, the end of the second segment is the Doctor's exile to Earth, about halfway through the fourth segment is the Key to Time quest, at the end of the eighth segment is the Time War, etc. And I said, if I can do my shift at a desk with a computer with Excel on it, I even divide the shift into eleven perfectly equal lengths of time.

What I didn't mention is that I also track all my time this way, ever since I began creating spreadsheets to track my crossovers' chronology paradigm(s). (The difference between the two paradigms I use is described here. Nowadays I use the prorated chronology for The Hero of Three Faces and the realtime chronology for prose fanfiction; not that my prose fanfiction has much crossing over these days). Since 2005 I've mentally cycled through the Doctor's history every nine or ten days.

From 1997-2004 I rather used a twenty-nine day cycle: one segment for each of the twenty-six air seasons of Doctor Who, a zeroth segment for the time between the Doctor and Susan's departure from Gallifrey and their departure from the junkyard, and a segment each for between Season 1989 and Season 1996, and for between Season 1996 and the then-present. I switched from counting days by seasons to counting days by Doctor incarnations in 2005 in perceived fairness to those incarnations with markedly less screen hours than average.

Then I perceived unfairness in that, because a given companion might be restricted to only part of a day. The time of Sarah Jane or Peri, their having traveled with two incarnations, would start in the evening of the day of the first incarnation she traveled with and then would extend into the morning and perhaps afternoon of the next day. But Susan's time only came in mornings and Romana's time only came in evenings. So sometime this year I starting counting time by three or four incarnations a day (Some number not evenly divisible into the number of incarnations. When Matt Smith leaves, it'd have to be five a day.).

About a week ago I decided to go back to counting by seasons for awhile and see what I think of it. Thirty-four segments now: segment zero, twenty-six segments for Seasons 1963 through 1989, one for Season 1996, one each for Seasons 2005-2008, a separate segment for Season 2009 (most people seem rather to lump this year's "specials" in as part of Season 2008, but I don't), and a segment for Season 2010 (any season I know cast and costumes for [i.e., can draw cartoons set during] is fair game).

And counting by seasons not four a day - since one of the things I'd liked about counting more than one incarnation a day was that the cycle goes faster - but one an hour. That gets me through the cycle in just under a day and a half, as opposed to just under three days when counting eleven incarnations four a day; but if thirty-four hours seemed to be too fast for the cycle I could always bump it back up to almost three days by counting one season every two hours.

Well, so far I haven't felt the need to make the cycle last longer, but I have found that counting by season accentuates the reasons I do this in the first place, by focussing me on narrower detail (when I don't have something in front of me to be paying attention to of course). Counting by incarnation, I'd only really think to myself, "Between noon and six pm today the Doctor's in his tenth incarnation"; and unless I was sitting at a spreadsheet I wouldn't/couldn't really consider precisely what point in the tenth incarnation's history was concurrent. Under the present counting, in an idle moment I can say to myself, e.g., "Today season count comes to military hour plus four, so it's 12:30 pm and the Doctor and Romana are just landing on Tara." And that's what makes it fun, being able to track that closely when I'm not at my desk.

If you should want to follow along, this is the Excel formula you need:

=MOD(NOW()*24,34)