I'm happy to have the bonus but when I read "These bonuses start at midnight tomorrow, December 27" I thought that would be midnight tonight on the 27th, not midnight last night the 26th. Of course I'm not sure if "midnight" means the end of the current day or the start of the next day. Let the opinions rain free!
I was writing a whole post on the inadvisability of using 'Midnight', including text from the Wikipedia article on Midnight. That 00:00 PT should be used instead. Then I just decided not to bother.
Aha, I looked it up. It's more complex than I thought. In "military time" midnight is 00, so it's tomorrow. For the rest of us it's somewhat undefined. Who says games aren't educational? https://earthsky.org/space/edit-time/ In German class I learned that Europe uses 24 hour time, but I'm still not sure if that's the same as military, or Zulu, time. Any Europeans care to chime in?
Military time and 24 hour time are the same with just minor differences in how it is displayed. Military time has a leading zero and doesn't user a colon separator while 24 hour time doesn't have a leading zero and uses a colon separator. As an example 0800 and 8:00 would be an example of 8 AM in military/24 hour time. As a note midnight or 0000/00:00 would be the start of a new day.
Apparently the authors at earthsky.org are US centric since they say "But as for the rest of us – there’s no official answer." ...but for Europeans it's apparently the same as military time/astronomers time.
I could have sworn we had a dev commented post within the last year or so about starting these events at 12:01 for clarity.
I would say that means tomorrow morning or the end of today. Since midnight is the start of the day but how it is taken/meant could also change depending on the time of day it is said.
12:01 in either clock would be one minute after noon, so they couldn't use that. Now that I think about it, isn't Zulu/military time both a 24 hour clock AND 00 is at GMT? This is so confusing. [added] Further factoids. Military time always starts at 00, but is only referenced to GMT/UTC if it has a Z suffix, ie. 1100Z. Apparently all the time zones have letter suffixes. https://militarytimechart.com/
Most analogue clocks are "12-hour time". Anything with am/pm and only 12 hours is "12-hour time". Most people in the US only understand/use 12-hour time and are often confused by 24-hour time. Zulu is an OLD term (WWII vintage and mostly only heard in movies now) referring to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which has changed to UTC (Universal Time something). The 0 Longitude goes through, or very close to, a lighthouse in Greenwich, UK which is where time used to be set for maritime use (due to the relationship of time and location) leading to the GMT designation. UTC is not as specific to a single country and is set by an atomic clock (or rather a collection of them, I believe). In Europe trains or other time official time situations use 24-hour time because there is no need for an am/pm designation. The US military also uses 24-hour time for a similar reason (and is why many in the US call 24-hour time "military" time). 20:00 is 8pm. 15:00 is 3pm which is impossible to confuse with 3am even if you leave off the am/pm. With 24-hour time it is also easy to see that 19:00 is 9 hours after 10am. 19:00 is 7pm. 05:30 is 5:30am (or sometimes called oh-dark-30, especially in military-ish movies). I have been using 24-hour time since I was in high school in the US and starting to learn German from a European as well as while I was a member of a military auxiliary. I find it easy to switch back and forth between 12 and 24-hour time with barely a thought (I'm still not as comfortable switching between metric and imperial for weights and measures and C to F for temps). I currently live in Canada but was born in Washington and lived most of my life in California with a short stint in Germany as well. Each time zone has an offset from UTC. Daylight Saving time messes that up slightly, adjusting the offset during the duration of DS vs Standard time because UTC is -always- in standard. Pacific coast of North America is UTC -8 for Standard Time meaning it is 8 hours behind UTC and -7 during Daylight Saving (effectively shifting 1 time zone to the east). Kaiserslautern, Germany (where I lived for 4 years) and the rest of central Europe is +1 UTC meaning it is 1 hour ahead. This is a difference of 9 hours between them. When it is 10am in California, it is 7pm in Germany, and 6pm in London. UTC is also called GPS or GNSS time since location tracking relies heavily on time and, in simpliest terms, the position is derived from the time it takes for signals to reach a receiver. Location coordinates are time. Latitude and Longitude are also both expressed in hours:minutes:seconds:etc with + or - indicating the direction or offest from the 0. I work with devices that feature location tracking and use encryption (another thing that uses a time stamp to coordinate and validate). Time is my constant and I think about it waaaaay too much as an occupational hazzard. Oh... and there is also a certain amount of drift in the time that's adjusted for every year or so with atomic seconds. For real time geekiness, you also have time kept my computers with their own designations using UTC but a specific starting year (for older PCs, it was 1970) and weeks and days counted from the start of the year or the epoch or some other designated time (the software I test uses the birth day of one of the developers to set the clock on reboot before it gets time from another source). And then you get into the time keeping of various cultures which set their years, days, week, months, etc. according to their own designations. I find them fascinating but don't consciously keep track of them
Putting AM or PM after would clarify it, which is what they normally do. Whoever decided to write the copy for annoucements using "midnight" needs to be flogged. In any case, I've noticed that on a lot of annoucements in recent months, they've listed things as having a start/stop either a couple of hours before or after actual midnight (PST), so it was much less confusing.
Midnight is 12:00 AM, that "AM" bit should have clued you into the fact that "midnight" is the start of a new calendar day. I don't see how this was so hard, but GD, EQ nerds will argue about anything.
It's oargued about outside of EQ forums, so not just "EQ nerds" related. Those who use a 12-hour clock are often confused by noon being "pm" and midnight being "am". It's in a part because of the light and dark of the day. Dark is night, therefore midnight must be "pm" and if midnight is "pm" then noon should be "am". A 24-hour clock solves that by midnight being 00:00, start of the day. But it is clearer, none-the-less, to say 00:01 or 12:01am for those who see darkness at midnight and, by the name as well, think it is "pm" (even when it has "am" attached). 24-hour time, like the metric system, really is a lot easier but if you've been using 12-hour time all the time (or imperial measurements vs metric), it can be tough to get your head around it.
When Piestro was CR he always made sure times were posted as 11:59 or 12:01 if we were talking midnight
We have only ourselves to blame since this has been hotly debated over and over in these forums. So in an effort to please the players it was changed.
Midnight means 00:00 hours. The difference between using 12:00 and 00:00 for this same time of day simply comes from the choice to use a 12 or a 00. But they are the same thing, thus 12 midnight/12:00am is the same as 00:00. 12:00am is definitely the start of the next day. Saying something starts at midnight is implying the same thing as saying it starts at 12:01am. Both of those times fall officially on the new day. Therefore, "midnight, December 27th" is 12:00am on Dec. 27.
