I’m 40 and grew up gaming. Your mom is probably younger and also grew up around games. Online gaming has been a thing since the 90’s. Your parents aren’t like my parents were. They won’t call your Playstation a Nintendo.
“During the great tribulation, Gog of Magog’s forces may try to assault us in our homes. But we can take comfort in knowing that Jesus and his angels are aware of what is happening and will defend us”
Ex JW here. This is depicting one of the steps in their equivalent to the Rapture. It goes something like this:
The UN activates as a full world government, and decides to destroy all religion (if you know the slightest bit about the UN, you can see how absurd this is before we get to anything else)
After clearing out everything else, the UN suddenly realizes that Jehovah’s Witnesses are still around
They attack JWs (what OP’s picture depicts), but God intervenes to protect them supernaturally
Jehovah wins and tosses Satan in a deep pit
Earth is transformed over 1000 years into a paradise. Nobody dies, and previous righteous people are resurrected.
At the end of that, Satan is let out again for a final judgment of humanity
Satan is killed off for good. Any human survivors live forever on a paradise Earth.
Gog of Magog comes from Ezekiel 38. From the New World Translation: "The word of Jehovah again came to me, saying: 2 “Son of man, set your face against Gog of the land of Maʹgog, the head chieftain of Meʹshech and Tuʹbal, and prophesy against him. 3 Say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah says: “Here I am against you, O Gog, head chieftain of Meʹshech and Tuʹbal. "
Then, the term pops up again in Revelation 20: “7 Now as soon as the 1,000 years have ended, Satan will be released from his prison, 8 and he will go out to mislead those nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Maʹgog, to gather them together for the war. The number of these is as the sand of the sea.”
So Gog is basically another term for Satan in this reading. Though Ezekiel seems to be talking about a people from a specific place.
As a side note, “But we can take comfort in knowing…” is a common phrase in their writing, and I get a little twitch every time I read it.
Yes 100%. Born and raised. You grow up your entire life thinking the world is going to end in a few years. Why goto college if the world will end and it won’t serve you in the new system? We grow up in terror, see a storm out the window… Is it Armageddon? Constant fear.
Not to mention the fear of being exiled from your friends and family if you “sin”. My childhood was lost because I didn’t get to celebrate Christmas or Halloween, or goto my friends house from school, or watch Harry Potter or play Pokemon. Instead we went to church twice a week, went knocking door to door at least once a week in the heat and humidity, and did book study once a week where we read their literature and answer simple minded questions about it. Sundays were non-existent because we spent the entire day partaking in those activities.
Shit, I had no idea. That sounds like a fairly anxiety-inducing way to live.
Around the Cretaceous period when I was in elementary school, I had a classmate who was in the JW and their life did sort of seem pretty drab compared to the rest of us, at least based on what they talked about, but I guess it’s no surprise that they didn’t much venture into the whole Armageddon thing for example, being 7–9yo at the time.
It is anxiety inducing, it’s hard to even realize it because they always keep you busy. And they discourage you from having friends outside the religion and teach you that people outside have miserable lives, they only do drugs, drink alcohol and have sex. Anyone outside is only nice to you because they want to take advantage of you.
Youre taught to be scared of the outside world so you never explore it and realize that normal people really are just normal and most people are actually very friendly and want to help each other, and are a million times less judgemental than other JWs.
It’s like the “anti drug education” a lot of us had to sit through as a kid. WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE FREE DRUGS I WAS PROMISED DEALERS WERE HANDING OUT???
Yup, that’s their whole outline of the end days. Supposed to happen in the lifetime of people alive in 1914, and there’s a whole thing about how they’ve managed to extend that deadline.
The people inside the house look like they all have dark hair. Maybe in the original it’s angels guiding and protecting righteous immigration cops while they’re arresting dangerous illegal immigrants (ie flashbanging toddlers)?
edit: nope lol it’s jehova’s witnesses: “During the great tribulation, Gog of Magog’s forces may try to assault us in our homes. But we can take comfort in knowing that Jesus and his angels are aware of what is happening and will defend us”
Some religious folks believe that at the “end of days” everyone who doesn’t follow the NWO religion or doesn’t have the mark of the beast will be persecuted. If you look very closely you can see the family in the house if praying with their heads down…. meanwhile these are the same people attempting to self fulfill their own prophecy by integrating religion into government
Also these people, who are so adamant in their beliefs that the State is out to get them (or will be in the near future) are almost always in favor of militarizing police and giving them more power in general, if not straight up pushing for it.
Some religious folks believe that at the “end of days”
I’ve legit heard arguments along the lines of “you shouldn’t care about climate change because the rapture’s going to be any day now. The fact that scientists are still advocating for bullshit like eliminating fossil fuels instead of repenting shows that they’re working for the devil trying to drag you to hell with them.”
As someone who dabbled a bit with it about two years ago:
It is extremely detailed. It goes to the level that you can manage the construction of new buildings by allocating the right ressources and machines to the construction site in the correct order. Of course you also have to plan your bus lines, train signal controls, electrical grid and so on in detail.
With that much detail it is also quite ressource hungry, so i had to stop as my towns started to lag at about 5.000 inhabitants.
Bonus points if you have some cultural connection to the eastern block. I recognized many things, from prefab buildings, over cars and trains even up to the lamp posts from my country.
Ah nice, thanks. Might not be a good game for my poor Steam Deck then, it’s a terrific system but a CPU & GPU powerhouse it ain’t.
I have a weird “mixed” connection to the eastern block. I’m Finnish but in my 40’s, so my childhood’s Finland was in some ways a hybrid between a “fully capitalist” market economy and some more socialist features (and not just social democracy) thanks to us having to walk a bit of a tightrope with the Soviets so we could stay independent.
But eg. a surprising amount of the “Socialist cube” concrete houses you see especially in the former East Germany, but also in some other parts of the Eastern Bloc, were actully made from Finnish concrete elements. We also built a zillion of them with the same ideology behind it: functional / brutalist rather than anything fancy, which means they were affordable for everyone and cheap to build. I’ve lived a huge chunk of my life in some Socialist cube or another
Oh no. They gave the task of remastering 3 big games running on old ass software full of hacked together code, within like 2-3 years, to a tiny studio of like 20 people that only ever made mobile games before. It was set up to fail. It’s like asking your crackhead cousin to redo your bathroom and you come home to find he’s ripped out all the copper pipes for beer money.
At least they’ve seen to have learned their lesson. The much smaller task of doing a basic port for RDR1 for Playstation and Switch was given to an actually decent sized development studio (Double Eleven). Lot of people got mad it wasn’t a remaster or something, but it is a perfectly fine port and you get the full RDR1 experience on a Switch
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