I just looked at the birth dates of my adopted pets, and my pet Twixy has a birth date of December 31, 1969! Reminds me of the way iPods always reset the date to January 01, 1970 (and I'd imagine it's related to the reason, given that's only a day apart!).

I wonder what the reason for this is. I think it's neat, even if it is a glitch, and I'll probably work it into his profile once it gets going. :D

Anyone else have really early pet birth dates?

That was because of a glitch that happened back in 2009, where some pets created on a certain day actually ended up genderless and with a birthday of December 31, 1969. My pet Cuprum was one such pet, though her profile hides her birthdate. I created her and Argentum at the same time, but Argent escaped the glitch.

Oh cool, thanks for the background info! I guess at some point the Zapper gave him a gender--I adopted him just like he is, a Scribble Experiment c:

Were people aware of it while it was happening, or did it get realized afterwards? I wonder how many pets were created on that day! And since you said Argentum escaped the glitch, I guess that must have been Jan. 9 2009, like it says on his profile?

There was some confusion at first about it, but I remember the SB discussing it happening at the time. I didn't notice it until I was poking around at Cuprum's profile after creating her (and it actually took me longer to realize that she was genderless, not female like she was supposed to be; I just never fixed it) but yes, it would have been on Jan. 9th, 2009. Not sure how long the glitch existed, or how many pets were affected.

It's a glitch that gave pets a birthdate of the Unix epoch, or 00:00 UTC January 01, 1970 (and then accounting for timezones probably), and the current Unix time is the number of seconds which have passed since that date. That's also why your iPod would have reset to this date!

In 2038, the Unix time value will overflow and anything that stores this as a signed 32-bit integer will misinterpret the date and all hell will break loose P:

Although if you're quite happily running 64-bit system and don't intend to be going back on that in the next 22 years, it's not til December 292,277,026,596 (or several times greater than the current estimated age of the universe) that systems that use signed 64-bit integers to store the time are set to overflow c:

Just if you wanted some more info around the importance of that date!

Ah, I'll set a reminder for 2038! haha. Hell probably will break, too, because of all the businesses who don't update their systems (I'm thinking of French airport Paris Orly right now--their systems crashed this year and it turns out they were using Windows 3 which is from like 1990). Or maybe planned obsolescence will take care of that (and perhaps end?).

I looked up the Unix epoch, and I'm not sure why they chose 1970. But I know Unix is an OS, does it have anything to do with that?

Thanks for sharing! So Twixy must have been created by someone ahead of Subeta time...mm yes I see his life building haha. It'll be fun to use this info in his eventual story...

Unix time and the Epoch date itself were redefined several times before settling on the current one, but I'm not sure why they chose that date either P: The system clock of early Unix systems had a rate of 60Hz and that was originally also the rate that Unix time incremented, but it was so fast that the range was tiny (only a couple of years). It was changed to 1Hz, or one per second, which is its current rate.

I have one of these pets too! I adopted "Ne"