Anno Fabriâthe year of the Maker, or Fabrice's time if, like me, you conflate everything amidst grammatical mistakes and other confusionsâis a five-character (6 for timezones out of Europe) tag which uniquely identifies something that I tag, e.g., an equation in a LaTeX document, a comment in some code, an anchor in a webpageâwhatever needs a label for some reasonâbased on the time at which it took place.
I designed it on 00Yps (af), i.e., 18 August (2026) at 11:11:01, as successor to uniqname, after over two decades of service. That makes this day the Epoch of Anno Fabri. You can see that hovering the date tag too.
The first digit is the Fabriad of the calendar, a period of 62⎠seconds, which is 171 d 0 h 32 m 16 s or about half-a-year of the regular calendar.
The second digit is the Triduum of the calendar, a period of 62Âł seconds = 2d 18h 12m or about three days of the regular calendar.
The last three digit are the tag, which is random within each triduum of each fabriad, and the 6th is the timezone or finer time resolution.
You can generate an AF tag with af invocation, e.g.,
laussy@azag:~$ af
00w9N
Or you can just generate it here:
and decode it here:
On the wiki itself a tag is written {{af}}, which shows the tag and keeps the moment in a tooltipâ00Yps (af)âor {{afh}}, which does the opposite and writes the moment out, its date through {{thisday}} and so linked to the day, the month and the year it fell on: Tuesday 18 August (2026), 11:11:01 CEST. Both read the tag on the spot through Module:AF, so neither can drift from what the tag actually says.
So if I tell you let's meet Café de la Luz on 0Boom (af), then you'll know I'll be there at this time on a Friday afternoon, waiting with one (or two) coffees already [I always take two when meeting someone, if I know what they usually have, but often end up drinking them both because people are never on time and I don't like them having a cold coffee, and I'm also trying to kill myself of a natural cause anyway]. I'd give you the real, normal-human form too, of course, but I'd also have the unforgettable version precise to the second in my long-term memory, also justifying the odd time, because 16:25 makes Bm1K while 16:26 makes BnT5 and 16:30 Bz1g and isn't all that ugly for a coffee? Isn't 16:30 equally ugly, after all? The good time for a coffee at the Café de la Luz, which is also the good place, is obviously 16:25:54. I think I'll have a lot of fun with my apophenia and megalomania playing with this new toy... which is little less than a prettification of something I've been doing for the last two decades.
Since a tag that names a rendez-vous may as well be the rendez-vous, af2cal hands it over to Google Calendar: af2cal 0Boom coffee at the CafĂ© de la Luz opens the new-event form with the Friday, the 16:25:54 and the tag itself already in place, and one click on Save puts it in the diaryâwhere af 0Boom will read it back long after I have forgotten what I meant by it.
The case of letters of course is also a problem: boom â Sunday 29 November 2026, 12:21:19 and BOOM â Friday 18 September 2026, 20:24:44âthe same Friday, four hours after the coffee. Maybe one leading to the other. So there is some fragility and possible ambiguity. But it's not the biggest problem when trying to arrange such a meeting anyway.
And you know what? I actually went there, at the Café de la Luz, on 0Boom (af). I did order my two coffees, for myself! You could have had one, if you came. If it'd had been more than two people, we would have discussed the prisoner's dilemma, but of course it was only me.