12:21 passed my time between those posts. It was years on your side. I don't know how long this window will last, so here's a few copy/pastes just because:
Perhaps the most common assumption is that the history embargo allows everything before the Great Expansion. It's not unreasonable, and calling it Old Earth lends to that illusion, but one of the foundational arguments behind the Naturalist Wars was regarding how to acknowledge pre-"Old Earth" history, because all that jazz about God and gods gets really complicated.
Our obsession with Old Earth culture, and by our I mean our current collective culture, is not as trivial as it may seem. It's easy to downplay the importance of art, Old Earthlings certainly did, but human creativity is no little thing, and it's never been better evidenced than the quality gap in AI music. In paintings it's hard to tell because you can bring so much into it as an observer, and movies are typically so re-rendered and edited that they're indistinguishable, but I dare you to find me someone who genuinely thinks post-expansion music is better than the Old Earth equivalent. And I stand absolutely firm in my belief that aside from thematic or cultural ones, there are no new music genres, and the harder AI tries to do so deliberately the more rutted its style gets. Just riffing, which, I think, is why jazz is one of its stronger outputs.
I agree that it's funny, but I swear to Mother Nature I'm going to kill him. It took me GENERATIONS to establish that kind of foothold in their economy, I can't be expected just to let it go because regimes changed again.
