this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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And why don't we fix it already?

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[–] gigastasio@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 days ago (9 children)

The term “quarter note” or “fourth note” applies to the note because there are four of them in a whole note. In other words, the names of the notes apply to their subdivisions respective to each other, not the time signature.

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Yeah. OP should be asking why a whole note only fits 1 bar of 4/4 (or 2/2, 1/1, 8/8, 16/16, etc).

[–] gigastasio@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I had the idea that a way to solve this would be to create a symbol that means, “play this note for the entire duration of the measure, regardless of meter.” As far as I know such a symbol doesn’t exist in standard notation.

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's because it wouldnt help for sight reading the way you might think. Especially where there's multiple voices like in complex piano parts. For example if you want one note to for 8 eighth notes in 4/4, but some to go for 10. Now we have to choose to use current notation or the new fangled "whole measure" or even "rest of measure" notation, and if using new fangled, we still use old notation for edge cases.

It's hard to fight the status quo.

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