Hello everyone!

In this post, I’d like to address a recurring issue with the time displayed on Night Stand’s icon. We’ve been getting many comments and support e-mails with either praise or hate. Some people ask to remove it, some accuse us of being drug addicts…boy, 4:20 certainly stirred things up!

I must admit it’s rather amusing for me to watch what’s happening. Being perfectly honest with you, 4:20 on the icon is a pure coincidence. When designing the application, I typed in digits almost randomly, paying attention to visual aspect only: I wanted them to look good and make a nice composition. That’s it. Seriously. I cross my heart, I’m not lying here.

It boils down to cultural differences. As defined by Urban Dictionary:

4:20 was the designated time for a small group of smokers at San Rafael High School in California to meet at a specific location and light up. The number originates some time around 1971. It has since been adopted by smokers the world over as the “universal time to get high.”

The thing is: this association does not exist where I live. Statement that this notion has been adopted as the “universal time to get high” is not true. I am Polish, I live in Poland and 4:20 doesn’t mean anything here. I learned about it from Night Stand comments in App Store. Now I realize that it’s popular in United States, not sure about the rest of the world though. I did ask friends from Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic and Netherlands — and none of them was familiar with 4:20. One guy from UK heard about it from an American movie. In India this number is correlated with theft and cheating. So 4:20 certainly is a symbol, but: it’s meaning is geography-dependant. I  realize this survey was amateur and incomplete to say the least, but my goal was to hint our American users that what they perceive as universal might not be in other parts of our lovely planet

So…it turns out to be an issue which doesn’t quite transfer to global culture, hence our decision is to not change it. Simple as that. We’ve been getting lots of positive feedback about it too and actually — most of our users ignore it altogether.

Summing it up, I’d like to add another 4:20 reference, this time from literature. Maybe it will shed a different, more interesting light on this matter. On the same page of Urban Dictionary, there’s a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “In the Walls of Eryx”:

I had encountered at least one of those curious mirage-plants about which so many of our men told stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described their appearance very closely—the shaggy stalk, the spiky leaves, and the mottled blossoms whose gaseous dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every existing make of mask…Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant’s pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20. Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole experience could have consumed little more than a half-hour.

Full story is available here. Big recommendation actually: H.P. Lovecraft is a classic, you really should know his works.

ps. To clear it up: we are not pot smokers