I don't imagine that everyone has an Art skill, though. Although, if you have a cyberbrain, you can always grab an appropriate Art: [Hard Vacuum Basket Weaving] skillware, but given the nature of art and skillware, I expect it would be pretty obvious. Though they are still taking the time to make it themselves, which is something.

Oooooh, that's a good one. I can see a lot of Scrooges who don't want to be reminded that it's Christmas because Christmas reminds them of the family who are all dead and assimilated by the TITANs.

UnitOmega... Um. Lots of stuff, lots of good points, but one thing I want to bring up: Calendars. Specifically, literally approximately everybody has a computer in their head that is almost certainly capable of converting the present time and date to any system of time and date you wish to use, whether the (still almost certain to be the standard) calendar we use today, or in dates A.F./B.F., adjusted one way or another whether you're still using the standard calendar or that godawful Martian calendar, or in, I dunno, Mayan dates or whatever you feel like using. But really, no matter what calendar you're using, Christmas is probably only gonna come once a year. Unless you're using that retarded Martian calendar, in which case Christmas comes twice a year. (And it's also only 5 AF.) And your muse will be able to tell you, when upon whichever arbitrary time-keeping standard you use, it commences, and has past.

UnitOmega wrote:

Well, I'll fight you on "literally approximately everybody". Just because we like to ignore zeroes and other Flats doesn't mean they don't exist.

That was why I used the fudge-factor that is "approximately." Also, Flats can have mesh inserts, and I'd imagine that most remaining ones outside of Jovian space or awful Zero slave-habs do.

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However, just because you can have whatever calendars you want up and running (or have your muse manage them) doesn't mean you actually do that. I have multiple computer devices, and my mother still buys me wall calendars to use because I'm really bad at performing what constitutes going out of my way to set up digital calendar tracking of events and so on.

That's what a muse is for. You don't have to even remember to set up your calendar, your muse does it automatically, and reminds you of upcoming events you may be interested in. I'm also sure it has access to a [i]wide[/i] variety of dates you have no interest in, which it won't show you or remind you of, unless you ask it to. So, for instance, on December 20th, by Universal Time, if you're particularly forgetful, or you're using the Martian calendar and it's currently Rishaba 26th, your muse will tell you that Christmas is in ~5 days, and probably apply some snowflake themes to your UI. If you're coming up on your birthday, or a friend's birthday, or the anniversary of your wedding, your muse will remind you. But probably won't remind you of the anniversary of a friend's wedding, unless you choose to look at the low-priority upcoming events.

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My point was that, unless you're in the LLA, the standard Terran calendar (while a great benchmark for Transhumanity) doesn't necessarily hold a lot of direct context to you. Especially when transhumans have a different sleep cycle requirements thanks to basic biomods. As such, counting and handling days based on an earth date may or may not be normal or typical for transhumans out on the Rim. You could cross reference any time you like, thanks Mesh, but if you don't take the time to do so, I could easily see people loosing track of of the distance from the Earth day on which they were born out in the black somewhere, where things aren't in context as much. Especially if you don't choose to share that date with lots of people and it's optional information on your social networking profile. But time since you last resleeved is just static time counting up, and you never have to worry about "well, I was in cold storage for 2 standard years, and now I'm in a pod that's only 5 years old, technically...".

Timekeeping is a very, very complex thing. That's why humanity invented a standard for it a long, long time ago. It only gets [i]more[/i] complex when distance comes into effect, but fortunately that can be mathematically compensated for. Folks will still be using the Universal Time clock - it even says so on Sunward pg. 103. They may have local adjustments to it, but even then, the standard that everybody's muses are going to be built on is Universal Time, based on the time of day and day of month in Greenwich, England, nevermind that Greenwich itself is ass-deep in TITAN refuse. Standards are like that, and frankly the current calendar and clock have too much momentum. They're going to stick around precisely [i]because[/i] of that momentum, meaning that they're the only standard everybody can agree on. If the LLA, Consortium, Morningstar, Junta, Commonwealth, Locus and Extropia all have different standards for calendars, even basic diplomatic communications are going to be a nightmare. So they're going to fall back on the old standard to talk to one another, and do any conversions necessary in-house. Same goes for all those independent and corporate habitats. No new standard is going to get enough "market share" to overcome the inertia of UT being the calendar and clock everybody knows, and most people are going to take the path of least resistance.

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Basically, Eclipse Phase makes the standard measure of the birthday a little weird, which given the neoculturalism in plenty of outer system places, probably means Transhumans have made their lives easier by doing some stuff different.

Oh, undoubtedly, there will be many who are going to choose to celebrate entirely different milestones, or celebrate new milestones in conjunction with the old. But even that said, the anniversary of the date when you went from being a potential form of life to an actual form of life, is probably going to hold relevance for most. For those who were born as biomorphs, it's going to be their birthday. For AGIs, it's probably going to be Runday or Compiling Day. But most folks will probably adjust their age downward to account for time they can't account for - time spent in cold storage, time spent dead, etc, but that won't change their birthday. [e]Something I've just recalled: On the topic of the importance standardizing calendars, allow me to use an example. Waaay back in ancient times, pre-Roman Empire times, when Greece was a land of city-states who could barely stand to look at one another without running each other through (unless Persians were invading, in which case it was all Grecian Unity up in this hizz-house,) every city-state had its own calendar. [i]Every[/i] one of the bastards. They had their own dates for observances, even in cases where you nominally had the same religions in different cities, they had their own dates for everything. It was, in short, a nightmare for historians. But fortunately, there was one event whose date everyone could agree on, even if they wrote it down differently. So, historians started to write of events as having taken place X years after the Yth Olympiad. Because everybody knew about the Olympic games. So, folks will probably still cleave to the old standard, because it's the only one everybody knows. Even the silly A.F./B.F denomination is using the same calendar, it's just changing the marker-post from the alleged birth of Christ in 0 A.D., which later was de-religionized into BCE and CE, to the year when the Titans rose up and wrecked Earth... Though even that's having a hard time taking hold. Whether or not the A.F./B.F. nomenclature will supplant Common Era/Anno Domini nomenclature or not, it's still going to be the same calendar, just with a different 0 point.