Empires is a bunch of people talking together using voice chat with gaming on the side. Gaia Online is a bunch of naive god damn weaboos that post on a forum about their shitty tastes in all thing Japan.
Empires is just the latest build of teamspeak 3 with added particles. Or eth0's computer science lecture theater.
Nice link there.... This was related and freaked me out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCFE6jcnSHg&feature=related
Its on the 24,25,26 because of an ancient celtic/germanic festive. Its easer to rename a party than to cancel it.
Makes you wonder how would christmas look like, if they actually bothered to correct it and move it to april (I believe thats the one).
Christmas is best when you are a kid and between 25 and 30 (when you don't care about presents, don't need to organise shit because you know someone else will) because you can concentrate on the important things, like eating, drinking heavily and sleeping.