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Passage of time in QC...

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AprilArcus:
That's hard to make work. Marten's date with Delilah was on a Saturday. We'd need a week of time skip between 2780 and 2781 to make that line up, which would put us definitively into the Fall semester, but we haven't seen any reference to classes being in session yet.

AprilArcus:
Making this a little more explicit:

2613: Delilah's party is "this weekend".
2614-1627: Day 0. Delilah's party. Marten: "TEH" shirt.
2628-2631: Day 1. The next morning. Delilah has work. Marten is still in yesterday's clothes.
2632-2636: Day 0. Time skip backwards to the previous night. Dale: dress shirt & tie.
2637-2640: Day 1. And back to the current day.
2641: Day 1. Dale floats in to CoD. We are now clearly synchronized - Marten in yesterday's "TEH" shirt and Dale in his disheveled dress shirt.
2642-2651: Rest of day 1.
2652-2667: Day 2. Marten: Gray tee shirt.
2668-2673: Day 3, early morning. Marten is really drunk.
2674-2689: Day 3. Marten wakes up late due to his hangover, in day 2's gray shirt. 2689: Veronica and Jim's date is "tomorrow". Angus makes a day trip to New York (2674-2682).
2690-2710: Day 4. Veronica and Jim's date. Marten: "TEH". (2691 is out of continuity).
2711-2717: Day 4, evening. May shows up at Dale's apartment.
2718-2737: Day 5. Veronica shows up at CoD looking refreshed. Marten: Teal shirt until 2734, then "Godspeed" tee shirt. Faye: powder blue camisole. Emily: Khakis
2738-2771: Day 6. Faye: red boat neck. 2752: Steve "just finished with Marten" (off-panel, in re: Emily, referenced again in 2757) 2757: Marten still in the "Godspeed" shirt he changed in to halfway through day 5. Emily has changed into a pencil skirt. 2767: Crisis wine.
2772-2780: Day 7. Crisis wine hangover. Marten: Blue tee shirt.
Jump X days?
2781-2801: Day 7+X. Marten: Green tee shirt. Angus leaves for his audition (2781). Claire scritches.
2802-2820: Day 7+X+1. Marten: Gray tee shirt. Pancakes. Angus returns from his audition (2811).
2821- Day 7+X+2.

So our requirements are:

* Day 0 / 2614 should be on a Friday, Saturday or a Sunday to justify 2613's comment that Delilah's party is on the "weekend".
* Day 1 / 2628 should be on a weekday to justify Delilah dressing for work.
* Day 2 / 2653 should be on a weekday to justify Claire' greeting Marten at work.
* X should be 0 days since we haven't yet seen signs of fall-semester academic life.
* Day 7+X+1+Y / 2821 should be on a Monday to satisfy BenRG's point.We can't satisfy all of them:

* Option 1: Day 0 is on a Friday, X=0. Satisfies 1, 4, 5. Violates 2 (Delilah dresses for work on a Saturday), 3 (Claire greets Marten at work on a Sunday).
* Option 2: Day 0 is on a Saturday, X=0. Satisfies 1, 3, 4. Violates 2 (Delilah dresses for work on a Sunday), 5 (Claire and Marten kiss in front of the library on a Tuesday)
* Option 3: Day 0 is on a Saturday, X=6. Satisfies 1, 3, 5. Violates 2, 4.
* Option 4: Day 0 is on a Sunday, X=0. Satisfies 1, 2, 3, 4. Violates 5 (Claire and Marten kiss in front of the library on a Wednesday)
* Option 5: Day 0 is on a Sunday, X=5. Satisfies 1, 2, 3, 5. Violates 4.Ranking these constraints in order of importance:

* 1 is mandatory, since there is direct evidence from on-panel dialogue.
* 4 is very important, since without it the whole premise of naturalistic time progression through summer and into early autumn is disrupted, and then there is no point in making these timelines.
* 3 is somewhat important, since the IRL Smith libraries are closed on weekends -- but Smif is not Smith, and if the fall Semester has started behind our backs, then it's a non-issue.
* 5 is somewhat important, since it makes reasonable logical sense.
* 2 is unimportant, since we don't know anything about what Delilah's job is.So on that basis, I somewhat arbitrarily picked option 2 as the least bad, since having a drinking party on a Sunday seems a little weird. But disagreement is reasonable.

AprilArcus:
Also, Marten says he had a "weird weekend" in 2653, meaning Day 2 must be a Monday, so only options 2 and 3 are left.

Either the current strips on a Tuesday, or there is a six-day gap between 2780 and 2781 — which means there is also a six-day gap between 2776 ("I finally realized my brother is a toxic person and I'm cutting him out of my life as entirely as I possibly can!") and 2784 ("I was holding in a fart"), which doesn't feel right to me.

MooskiNet:
Is it possible the strip is on a Tuesday, because the Monday was a holiday?

AprilArcus:

--- Quote from: MooskiNet on 06 Nov 2014, 07:35 ---Is it possible the strip is on a Tuesday, because the Monday was a holiday?

--- End quote ---

Very possible! I tried superimposing my summer timeline onto the Smith College 2006 academic calendar, and found that if we set Tai's party (1952-1970) to the Friday of finals week (May 12), the current strips (2821-present) fall on Tuesday, August 28 — about a week earlier than I thought! (It would also place 2201-2227 on July 3rd, which considering 2223 is ~almost perfect~! ).

This means we could insert an extra week in early July to fully rationalize Henry Reed's statement in 2373 that the wedding is "two weeks from now" — the current calendar only puts 11 days between this statement and the ceremony. This is biggest piece of dialogue evidence that my current analysis doesn't fully accommodate, and the place I've been most wanting to stretch out if I found another week of calendar to work with.

That would in turn bump 2802-2820 to Labor Day (Monday), with classes due to start on Thursday.

Or: we could hang on to that 11 days ≈ 2 weeks bit of handwaveyness, and Jeph could write another ~150 strips of summer lovin' before the absence of students from the library or any reference to Claire/Emily/Gabby's academic status becomes completely egregious.

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