What time zones are you guys in?

[red-night]

Hey everyone! Hope we're all doing well at whatever time we're reading this (hopefully not too late ), but i have just always wondered what time zones people are in on this forum.
Whenever I log on, I'm usually the only person I see who's online, and I was wondering if that's just cause I'm relearning how to not be chronically online or because people are just online at different times?
Also, we should keep some privacy on the internet, so just your time zone would be great! I'm not some malicious hacker trying to steal all your location data, I swear
I'll start with saying I'm in Mountain Standard Time (MST)!

[Dan Q]

I'm in the UK, so GMT/BST (UTC+0/+1).


Living so close to the Prime Meridian has its benefits. Back in 2022 I was looking at a map of the locations of my coworkers and thought to myself how fortunate I was to be in about the longitudinal midpoint! Because the mutually-convenient time for whole-team meetings meant that my teammate in Indonesia would be getting ready for bed while my colleague in Costa Rica would be having breakfast, and for me it would be a nice, convenient midday:

And then I realised that, wait: that's an illusion. The world's not flat. You could define the midpoint between this distributed cloud of points as being... pretty much anywhere! It's only being defined near me because we, as humans, prefer to have meetings where it's the same date for everybody (even if it's different times). To achieve that, we define the Pacific Ocean as the point at which one day ends and the next begins (the antimeridian or "international date line"). But that's a moderately arbitrary decision.

So I started looking into it and it turns out that my "timezone privilege" is a result of, you guessed it... colonialism. When the nations of the world (read: Europeans) decided that we needed a Prime Meridian, the United Kingdom basically said "yes, and it should go through London". France disagreed and said that it should go through as few "important" countries as possible, and suggested running it down the Atlantic. So the UK basically said "let's vote on it", and the rest of Europe said "okay", and then the UK added "but all our colonies get a vote too and oh my look I happen to have the most colonies so I win". And so to this day the Prime Meridian goes right through the middle of the Greenwich Observatory in London and whenever I arrange a meeting with international folks on "both sides" of me we tend to choose a time that suits me rather than one that spans the international date line. Timezone privilege in action.


Anyway, my location's not a secret; my timezone even less so, and incidentally I think people's profiles show their current time if they've set their timezone in the forum?

[ceejaytwoyoshi]

I'm from the Philippines so, that'd be UTC+8.

[Cele]

That would be EET and EEST (or UTC+2 and UTC+3 for anyone who wants to actually understand what it means).

[jjanzen]

I'm in UTC-5 in the Summer and UTC-6 in the Winter (time zones are so confusing with daylight saving time, I wish it were consistent year round). Anyway, my time zone is CDT today at least.

[KrazyKoen]

I use Eastern Standard Time year round because Daylight Savings Time is a shitty system that does nothing in the modern age but mildly inconvenience people twice a year.

[sunnyp4rk]

I live in a state with EST, so that's my time zone. UTC-4 majority of the year, since it's a state that has daylight savings. I assume it'd be UTC -5 the rest of the year before daylight savings starts back up.

[Khirazekh]

I live in the western part of Indonesia, so my time zone is UTC+7.