Intergalactic Social

Oh wow! It's New Year's Day on earth.

I've never been to earth. I hear it's nice, or at least it used to be before climate change destroyed it.

Birmingham, the chief engineer and self proclaimed King of the Earth Nerds (he's a Verbenubi, they're really proud of their Old Earth knowledge) had a "Movie" marathon, where him and me and a couple of other crewpeople gathered around a Holoscreen to watch these kind of ... Flat? Low fidelity projections.

Last night we watched something called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, followed by something called Ground Hogday

It was An Experience.

I was confused. It was confusing.

The other Verbenubi kept shouting the words to the film as they were being said.

The humans, myself included, were generally mystified.

Ey’bal Gowjr, the security officer, was the only Randross present. He cried a lot during the Santa Claus film. I've never seen a Randross cry, but Birmingham said it was "Normal" and "Healthy" and "We should all weep at the majesty of Santy Klaus."

Frequency 650 was there too, for a few minutes. I don't think he was there on purpose.

At one point, during the presentation of Ground Hogday he said something like "This unit has experienced that exact phenomenon. This unit will study this Ground Hogday further" and then sauntered away.

Anyway, Happy New Earth Year to all who observe it.

We've still got a little while before the galactic standard year rolls over. We measure that from Sola, the man made planet city that houses the central government.

It used to be in an almost identical orbit to Earth, but ... It isn't anymore, and none of the currently living planetary engineers have been successful in rectifying that, so the rest of the federation has been Encouraged to adapt.

"Encouraged" as in, all official government timekeeping is now based around the real time rotations of an unstable artificial planet, and they keep inserting and removing Leap Hours and occasionally Negative Leap Days to compensate.

I can't imagine this is sustainable, but it's been like that for a few years (for some value of year!)