Merry Christmas, GTPlanet!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Daniel
  • 52 comments
  • 2,754 views
How-The-Grinch-Stole-Christmas-how-the-grinch-stole-christmas-3452438-1024-576.jpg
 
GTP Merry Christmas Text Trspt.png

Thanks for yet another great year as a GTP member.​

What games are you getting over Christmas?

I put my Amazon Wishlist together several weeks ago so there should be no excuses! I will be enjoying:

JUST CAUSE 3 I love the scale and scope of the world Avalanche creates and the freedom that gives. The grapple in JC3 turns that upto 11.

TEARAWAY UNFOLDED I am 32 and I don't care what people say when I tell then I love the series. The previous Vita version was so beautiful and was brilliantly creative with the Vita camera and trackpad tech. Love it!

COD BLACK OPS III I hadn't planned on getting this but with Hit-man delayed I had very little choice. I'll enjoy it despite the OTT technology angle not doing it for me.

I also dropped a hint for WRC5 or Rainbow Six Siege so hopefully something comes from that.
 
Happy Pre-Tree Day!

Now give me snow. And cold weather. And tell @Daniel to stop harassing my non-existent social media page.
 
Merry Christmas from the northland :cheers:
 
Merry Christmas to all! May your stomachs be filled with food, your hearts full of joy and your ears full of Wham!


(sent from the future where it's already the 25th)

Same to you, future man :cheers:
 
Merry Christmas to everyone out there in GTP land. Hope you all have a great day. :cheers:
 
The Christmas Story

The was a guy a long time ago - according to the story - a very smart guy who was born in a period where invaders roamed the countryside and looted, pillaged, orgied and stuff like that everywhere they could roam. These roamers were not very popular with the people and there were always all sorts of uprisings and quite often insurgents were caught rebelling against the king roamer and were put to death.

Some people don't believe any of this happened.

Anyway, according to all the accounts handed down, word of mouth, written, embellished and so on, this guy was so smart that he even challenged the high priests of the people he belonged to.
Not a big thing, because he was a Jew and Jewish people argue a lot when it comes to what is said in the holy books. The synagogues were usually noisy with a lot of this stuff going back and forth, but the roaming invaders didn't mind anyway, as long as they didn't start any problems with the routines the invaders had (orgies and suchlike.)

Then this smart guy disappears off the radar.

Kind of strange, because if the story is made up, there should be no gap - but there is - from around the age of 12 he vaporises and never appears in any records, verbally passed down or otherwise till he suddenly appears again when he's around thirty.

Some people don't believe any of this happened.
Others say he went off to exotic places like India and Tibet and Sri Lanka and China and learned to levitate, and fast for ages, and do all sorts of magic.
When he came back again at thirty to where he was having all these arguments with the high priests the sparks really flew.

The high preists said there was no life after death.
An opposing bunch said humans were reincarnated.
This new guy on the scene said that all that was poppycock and that we were really progeny of an infinitely wise and powerful creator - in effect that creator's creations.
Some people didn't believe this. A few did and started to follow him around.

To make it more complicated, this smart guy, alleged to be one 'Yeshua' said that the world was an illusion, that we were infinite souls trapped in mortal bodies, and that once the light show was over all souls would be together in a really super place - peaceful, no war, sickness, grubbing for money and other stressful activities.
A whole bunch of people didn't believe any of this. But even more people started to follow him around.

Then he started doing all sorts of tricks, things that shouldn't happen in the physical world, healing people (without pharmaceuticals) getting his buds to haul fish by the netful where there were no fish, getting people drunk on water, opening the eyes of guys who couldn't see, making cripples leap off their pallets and start break-dancing - things that the local Uni profs and other wandering scientists just shook their head at.
Now the mob really started to gather and when he spoke it was mesmerising - great lessons fell from his lips.

Of course this pissed off all the different high priests that had been running the show - and in fact his teachings were now going counter to what they taught.
They valued money and prestige and all those classy sort of things, while he was telling everybody to just dump whatever they were doing and follow him.
Many did - even one of the tax collector bods who was collecting money for the roamers (to build roads and have orgies, and bread and circuses) also followed this guy. Some rebel-types who were mad with the conquering roamers also joined, hoping he would help their cause and topple the roamers.

This went on for a couple of years and he had gathered a staunch band of trustworthy friends around him - in fact they all pretty much looked alike in those days - same beard, same cloaks, you couldn't tell one from the other. This smart new guy who had come to challenge the status quo went around with his pals preaching this new message, basically 'Love each other- nothing else matters' and saying rather odd things that had everybody puzzled like: 'If you do nor drink of the water of life you shall surely die.' (Scary stuff.)

Obviously not everybody believed him, but the crowd that did became bigger and bigger, and the priests started to really fear for their coffers. The only thing to do was get rid of him, but how?
According to the religious laws of that time it was forbidden for them to off anyone. Only thing to do was get him in trouble with the roamers and get them to put a contract on him - like he was wanted for insurgency, or trying to make people rebel and so on.

The truth was he was making people rebel, but against their own priests and all the laws they had set down. Plus he had challenged them and said that if they got him killed he would return - because that was his primal message - that a part of us is immortal.
Of course they didn't believe him.
But some did, even some of the priests (you got to remember these were Jewish priests and quite a few of them were good sorts, searching for the ultimate truth and other important things like that.)

This new guy spoke strangely 'destroy the temple and I will rebuild it in three days' he said.
They thought he was talking about their sacred site of operations but he was actually talking about his body.
Now his friends started getting paranoid (except for one who was planning to do the dirty on him.)
'WTF? Deathwish or what?' they asked him (in the patois of the time.)
But he shrugged off their worries.
'Look' he was supposed to have said.'I told you there was an afterlife, now let me prove it. I'll sacrifice my body. I'll get myself killed in front of everybody and then resurrect myself to prove it. It's my body - but we can use it for this purpose. I know how to do it. I learned some tricks. Now you guys die - that's it - kaput - you won't have the skills to come back, but I got the goods on how to do it. Try me.'

The others wouldn't hear of it - they already believed all the stuff they told him, so he didn't have to sacrifice his body and blood and guts and other stuff at all to prove it.
But he insisted. He said that the message of a guy returning from the dead would only prove that this whole death thing was a fiasco, that another part was the real part, and that part was eternal, nothing to do with money, or sickness or fame.

This guy was smart enough to manipulate the whole situation to get himself killed; because of the large crowds gathering around him he was beginning to worry the roamers a bit - but they had no ID on him.
He was always just another person in the crowd and if anybody tried to capture him he'd melt away and couldn't be caught.
There are tons of people who don't believe any of this - there wasn't a wikipedia around, so they couldn't check the facts anyway.

Came the day of a big feast in an important town where a lot of these roaming types were roaming around on their horses and trampling people underfoot in a hurry to get to their baths and telling the locals to behave or else it would be the sword.
His traitor pal sneaked off and had a meeting with some of the high priests there and they hatched a plan of their own - they would tell the fierce sword-carrying invaders that this new troublemaker was trying to rouse the people against the invaders, that he was a bad rebel, and even though he was one of their own they couldn't kill him because it was forbidden, so could they please do it for them.

People today say that it was all sorts of fairy-tales put together, and this didn't happen at all. Other people believe that something like this really happened. (Hopefully these gangs don't start killing each other.)

The high priest agreed to talk to the invaders, get a couple of their goons to follow, and told the traitor to go to where this smartass was hooling around praying and do something - bro-fist, kiss him on the cheek, whatever, give them a sign that he was the real McCoy - since all his buddies loved him so much they would have gladly pretended they were him instead and sacrificed their own lives.

Yeshua was praying, as was assumed by the roamer's SWAT team, and this judas went up and kissed Yeshua on the cheek, pandemonium, swords out, someone got their ear sliced, Yeshua fixed the ear (with his magic), told everybody to calm down and not have a cow and went peacefully with the special weapons and tactics guys.

Story goes that there was quite a hub-bub raised over all this, and people passing these stories down is how we got to hear about it.
Some smart people today say none of this happened, that none of it was possible. Others have faith that it actually happened and that there wouldn't be all this smoke drifting around for so long after the fire.

Anyway to cut a long (and very old) story short - the guy was scourged, mocked, tortured, interrogated - the works, and then they finally nailed his hide to a pole as an example of people who rebel against invaders.
Some stories say that actually the invaders were kind of taken up with him (they believed in an afterlife, too, but a different sort to what he was saying) and didn't want to eighty-six the guy, but the crowd had really turned nasty and wanted him offed.
Maybe they wanted to see whether he was right.

Guess what? Story goes that he did rise after the third day, came back and hung out with his buds, ate, drank, showed off his wounds, told them that he couldn't take being in an earthly body any longer, instructed them how to spread the message, and basically rose like a balloon to heaven and puffed off like a cloud to that special place of consciousness he spoke about.

Loads of people didn't believe this happened - especially people attached to life, because it makes all their endeavors foolish - a temporary struggle that makes a mockery of who we really are - eternal beings.

Others believed he sacrificed his life to prove this - and actually rose again to teach the world that in essence we are placed within earthen bodies to learn some lesson, maybe the personal lesson of patience if not actually universal love that would work quite comfortably in that 'other' place.

The people who believe celebrate the birth of this man every year.
They call it Christmas.
In his name they also lay down their arms - if only for a day - to observe the phenomenon of Peace on Earth.
 
Last edited:
Back