
Small Seasons - mrzool
https://smallseasons.guide/
======
soneca
kind of off-topic:

Being raised in Brazil, on a urban environment there are basically two
seasons: Summer and Winter, the rest is just transition between them.

Now, having just moved to the USA I am constantly incredibly confused by
season references. Not only because the seasons are inverted, but because we
do not use season references for anything in Brazil. We say the months name or
things like _" end/middle/start of the year"_ or _" first/second semester"_

So when I see that a movie will come to the theaters _" next fall"_ I have no
idea when it is.

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foobar1962
In Australia, the two seasons are “football” and “cricket”.

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flukus
But now we have the cricket world cup in the middle of footy season and soccer
football in the middle of cricket season. I blame climate Change /s.

More seriously, the CSIRO has attempted to define Australia's seasons better
(in line with plants) with the addition of Sprinter on Sprummer:
[http://www.publish.csiro.au/book/7221](http://www.publish.csiro.au/book/7221)
. The BOM has a page on various indigenous seasons too:
[http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/index.shtml](http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/index.shtml)
. I'm enjoying an unseasonably warm Chunnup day today.

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ehnto
We could have called them anything, and they chose sprinter and sprummer?

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mjlee
This is Australia we're talking about. Seven Mile Beach, Great Barrier Reef,
Great Sandy Desert, Granite Island... Calling things exactly what they are
seems like a tradition.

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foobar1962
On the Central Coast of NSW (an hour or so north of Sydney) there is a salt
water lake, and a town has grown near the lake's entrance to the sea. It's
called The Entrance. Parts of the lake are shallow and muddy, and a long jetty
(pier) has been built. That town is Long Jetty. Shelly Beach is close by too.

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lxe
Months of the year are named in the similar spirit in Polish, Belarusian,
Ukrainian and probably other Slavic languages.

Edit: I couldn't find a good definitive source of etymology/roots etc, so
here's a rough sheet of what was able to scrape from the web as well as my own
knowledge/interpretation:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT8PGYX8c46N...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT8PGYX8c46NyR3NEyRUH
--PnKzCoKNtRFPVSWkbdn_tZUMuYsg7idAiLJv4nYysyhy9Htec2bQgF_C/pubhtml)

~~~
mci
FYI чэрвень comes from the Slavic name of Polish cochineal, an insect
harvested in June and used to produce red dye until Mexican cochineal pushed
it out of the market.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_cochineal#Linguistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_cochineal#Linguistics)

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Xcelerate
I moved from the southeast US to the Bay Area, and the difference in seasons
is striking. It went from a clearly defined spring, summer, fall, and winter
to what appears to be "brown/dry" season and "green/wet" season. I certainly
don't miss winter or the hottest parts of summer, but I do miss spring and
fall (particularly autumn colors). The almost nonstop sunshine is a nice
replacement though.

I wonder what other parts of the world have "weird" seasons?

~~~
BonesJustice
Where in the southeast? I grew up around Knoxville, which had reasonably well
defined seasons. Then I moved to Atlanta, which basically has “summer” and
“not summer”.

~~~
madcaptenor
I live in Atlanta (formerly: Philadelphia, Boston, Bay Area). I would say that
Atlanta "winter" is cold enough to be a season - although it's more defined by
the threat of possible snow than by actual snow.

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jamesrcole
I was trying to find out the Chinese names for these seasons and came across a
Wikipedia page on these seasons, if anyone else is interested

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_term)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Looks like the Chinese names are identical to the Japanese ones. (Or really,
the other way around.)

Chinese 节气 are certainly not defined or tracked by natural phenomena such as
fish becoming visible under the ice or plants blooming, though. As Wikipedia
notes, they are defined astronomically and are used to calculate when an extra
month needs to be inserted into the calendar.

(Each 节气 is assigned a polarity, yin or yang. A month is supposed to include
one yin point and one yang point. Since lunar months are too short, eventually
there will be a month with only one point instead of the correct two; that
month is immediately repeated. I think this system is very cool because just a
little thought will show that it is guaranteed to stay within one month of the
"true" position of the earth wrt the sun, using just the dead simple method of
"Oh, were we too slow this month? We'll put in some overtime.")

~~~
bctnry
From the wikipedia page:

> Solar terms _originated in China_ , then spread to Korea, Vietnam, and
> Japan, countries in the East Asian cultural sphere.

~~~
thaumasiotes
...yes? Why mention it again?

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goodJobWalrus
For some reason I find this really beautiful.

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esilver
I agree. The typography and page layout are gorgeous.

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echelon
I wrote a small Swift screensaver to display the current Japanese microseason
:

[https://github.com/echelon/microseasons](https://github.com/echelon/microseasons)

It's just a toy project I used to learn Swift. The code isn't particularly
great.

~~~
swanson
Neat, you should add a screenshot to the README so I can see what it looks
like without having to install :)

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cardamomo
This is fascinating. I love the names of these seasons, and this guide does a
great job offering a pithy and easily grokable description.

By the same token, I am curious how else we can come to understand seasons and
yearly cycles. The climate stability that led to this sequence of small
seasons and their associations with agriculture has begun to vanish. With the
worsening climate emergency, where there is no "new normal," what yearly
cycles can we still hold onto?

~~~
tcmb
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Spring Sale, Back-To-School Promotions, Christmas
Sale, Pre-Season Clearance, ...

~~~
ajmurmann
It's unfortunate that your description already feels like it has more of an
impact on my life than most details in the sekki descriptions, with or without
climate change. Just reading the sekki descriptions initially made me kinda
sad because I realized how far removed I am from all that. That was at least
different as a kid who played outside a lot in a small village.

~~~
saalweachter
One of the weirdest things about existence, besides that we're all made of
meat or that the entire universe will one day crumble into cold nothingness
forever, is that we can only be one person.

You can be the one who stayed in the village or the one who left the village
for the big city, but you can't be both. You can be one who left the village
but came back, or the one who goes back and forth between the city and the
village, but those are different, a third and forth person, and whichever one
you pick, you still only get to be one.

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graup
A nice and simple website. I like the responsive design here. Text size scales
with window size, and the table loses its first column on smaller screens.

~~~
mrzool
I noticed that too, it's really well done.

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tcmb
I like it, thanks for making this and bringing my attention to this concept.
The descriptions remind me of Japanese Zen poems ("Rice has ripened, the heat
of summer, forgotten.")

Reading it, I wondered how much the 'little seasons' are identical between
various regions on the northern hemisphere?

I subscribed to the iCal calendar, and the descriptions have HTML tags in
them. Any chance of avoiding this?

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Pamar
There is an extremely nice app (IOS only, I am afraid:
[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/72-seasons/id1059622777](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/72-seasons/id1059622777)
) called "72 Seasons" which collects charming pictures, poems and interesting
factoids for each of the 72 seasons.

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dkarp
Would make a great addition on a magic mirror

