The Leap

How to unlock The Leap in Cheevos, open your browser on February 29th, a day that exists once every four years. Worth 50 XP.

The story

Partner. Today does not usually happen.

February has 28 days. Everyone knows this, the way everyone knows the sky is up. Except every four years, the calendar admits it was wrong by a quarter of a day and quietly adds one back. February 29th appears, does its job, and disappears again for four more years.

Cache has strong feelings about days that only sort of exist. He has spent a long time thinking about calendars, about the small corrections humans built into their systems to keep the seasons from drifting out from under them. A leap day is a patch. A fix. A bit of maintenance code that only runs once every four years, and somehow it still works, every time, right on schedule.

You opened your browser on one of those days. Not February 28th. Not March 1st. The actual leap day itself, the one that most calendars, most planners, and most people forget exists until it is suddenly upon them.

Cache built a dedicated shelf for this. He labeled it THE DAY THAT ISN'T, because that is exactly how it feels to him: real, and also faintly imaginary, and also completely undeniable once you check the date.

The catalog entry

LEAP DAY (FEBRUARY 29) Acquired: Opened the browser on February 29th. Condition: Rare. Next occurrence in four years. Rarity: GENUINELY RARE. By calendar definition. Cache's Notes: February 29 exists as an exception. The calendar needed fixing. Someone did the math and added a day every four years. You were browsing on this day. This specific day that does not usually happen. Cache gave this a dedicated shelf. It is labeled THE DAY THAT ISN'T. He is very pleased to add your visit to it.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

There is no trick here, just timing that only works once every four years.

  1. Wait for a leap year (2028, 2032, and so on, in years divisible by four, with a small exception at the turn of most centuries).
  2. Open your browser and visit any page on February 29th.
  3. The achievement unlocks on that single page visit.

Cheevos checks the browser's local calendar date, looking specifically for month index 1 (February) and day 29, which by definition can only occur in a leap year. The Gregorian calendar adds this extra day roughly every four years to correct for the fact that a full orbit around the sun takes about 365.2425 days, not an even 365. Without leap years, the calendar would slowly drift out of sync with the actual seasons over centuries. It is one of the oldest pieces of "maintenance code" still running in everyday life.

Where it fits in the Stash

THE DAY THAT ISN'T gets a shelf all to itself, reserved for the rarest calendar entries Cache keeps. It sits apart from the daily and weekly records, because it only comes around once every four years. For the story of the raccoon who keeps this shelf dusted anyway, read the story.