Overview

Days Since Clint Conceived of a New Project is a recurring informal measurement of the number of elapsed days since Clint most recently conceived a new creative or technical project. It is designed as a simple counter and behaves, in practice, more like an alarm indicating that the count has returned to zero.

On November 1, 2026, a discussion concerning Zwikipedia articles, project terminology, and formal methods for measuring project proliferation ended with the counter enthusiastically presented as 0. This is a recorded illustrative reset, not an assertion about the site's current live counter or subsequent activity.

Operating rules

The counter should record the date of the latest qualifying project conception. It should not reset automatically for every new task, bug fix, or improvement to an established project; otherwise the measurement becomes too broad to be meaningful. At the same time, renaming a project as a “minor enhancement” does not guarantee an exemption. See Clint’s Ninth Principle of Destruction and Creative Rationalization.

A new concept may qualify before work begins. Conversely, a step in an already approved project may not qualify merely because it involves a separate ticket or document. When the distinction is uncertain, it should be noted rather than silently resolved in favor of a more flattering counter value.

The three-day anomaly

A value above three days calls for special investigation. Proposed explanations include:

  • Sleeping.
  • Internet outage.
  • Snowpocalypse.
  • Currently working on seventeen existing projects.
  • New projects have been conceived but not yet formally named.

These are humorous hypotheses, not medical or operational diagnoses. No explanation should be presumed merely from the counter value.

Measurement and the observer effect

By the Sixth Principle of Destruction, building a system to measure project proliferation can become another project. By the Eighth Principle, counting projects can alter the total being counted. Designing the counter, implementing its database, creating alerts, and documenting its exceptions can each threaten the measurement.

The counter is therefore best treated as an editorially maintained observation with an explicit as-of date, rather than an infallible automatically updated statistic. An accessible display should present the value in ordinary text; a continuously flashing number is unnecessary, even if the traditional notation uses a mock <blink>0</blink> tag.

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