We’re all probably pretty tired of hearing about how radical terrorist Christians in Florida are celebrating September 11, so we thought you might be interested in some alternatives. If you still want to do things “Florida Style”, and ensure that the day is remembered traumatically for at least another generation, all you need is a locked-down grade school full of children and some explosives. Then you can blow up a pony. Because you know, if you don’t, then the ponies have already won. Another way to keep the terror alive – but while feeling gratified that you’ve protected the homeland – is with NY Defender – the Flash game that was widely banned back in 2001 – in which you blow up airliners before they can create a place called ground zero that people can argue about building a mosque on nine years later. Some other interesting alternatives that were suggested by Reddit users include burning a copy of the Patriot Act or burning a newspaper to protest how the media created this whole debacle in the first place with their ratings-driven irresponsibility. One Reddit user couldn’t wait and already burned the Quran on September 10th. Or maybe you could ponder the ironic callousness of the fact that they’re moving the inspiring 9/11 memorial gift from our former enemies to make room for some cargo containers. Or as crazy as it sounds, maybe this would be a good time to learn about who started the last holy wars, or look at a fairly objective comparison of two of the worlds biggest religions and tell me where either one says “kill all the people that don’t believe what we believe”. Because Jesus H Chrysler, face it. You probably don’t know Jack about Muhammad.

C’mon. Admit it. You’ve never even heard of the Kabaa.

…until somebody loses a license or something. For all you poor cusses who have to hold down the office between the holidays, we have a special New Year edition of our Monday Demotivators. With New Year’s Eve just a few days away, many of you are probably thinking more about drinking than working: how much to do, how much to buy, how well you can drive when you’ve done a little. So let’s start with that last bit. You’d think that with the way most game developers drink, there’d be more Flash games devoted to the topic. All we could find were a couple that were devoted to staying vertical, like Sittin’ at a Bar (which was really just a promo for country band Rehab’s Bartender Song), or Mind Me Bloody Beer (which was a promo for British comic Johnny Vegas) and Haleed the Drunk, which was a plug for…I dunno. Haleed the Drunk? Games specifically devoted to drinking AND driving have run into marketing problems in the past, in spite of getting funding from the US Army. But we found a couple anyway. If you happen to be drunk right now, you’re probably in the right frame of mind to enjoy Drunk Driving Championship; hitting the space bar to avoid crashing gets dull pretty quickly on just coffee. Likewise with Drunk Driving Dummy, which gives you odd instructions for a drug run starting at a bar, and then sends you off. Unfortunately it sends you off in a car with a broken radio, no map, and an aerial view that makes you feel like you’re driving a car from a helicopter. I had the most fun just ramming the cop car. In terms of planning how much to drink and how much to buy for your parties, there are lots of handy on line blood alcohol calculators like this one and even an iPhone app. And for a more in-depth look at alcohol consumption that considers your entire life instead of just an evening, Lloyd’s Pharmacy in England has the Alculator. For party planning, eVite has a rather silly drink calculator. I say silly, because if you’ve ever planned a big party, you know that the booze will always run out no matter how much you buy, unless the host has a wine cellar or is a raging alky themselves. So yeah. Drinking and driving is all fun and games. Unless perhaps if you live in Texas, where they’ll be Twittering your name this year if you get busted. That may sound pretty extreme, but Texas has been pretty hard on drunk drivers for a while, starting with the (be warned, this link is pretty upsetting) Jacqueline Saburido Don’t Drink & Drive campaign. You may remember her story; she was the pretty Venezuelan college girl that was forever disfigured by burns in a drunk driving accident. Not to be all preachy about things, but that’s just one of the more dramatic of thousands of drinking and driving tragedies. I’ve personally lost three friends to drunk driving. Maybe the best way to be sure you haven’t had too much to drink if you’re driving this holiday is to not drink at all. Below are some PSA’s to help….

Denis Leary’s “He’s An Asshole” spot. Pardon the earworm:

Canadian insurance firm ICBC‘s  “When Are You Gonna Stop Drinking & Driving?” campaign:

Jacqueline Saburido’s rather disturbing “Don’t drink and drive” spot:

Sadly, for some people the holiday season is a time of frustration, anxiety and resentment. And apparently, this is especially true for Flash game developers, who probably all grew up as misunderstood misanthropes who never got what they wanted at Christmas because their parents didn’t understand their genius. Well, they’re silently eeking out their revenge; we went looking for fun and happy holiday-themed games to keep you amused this week, but were surprised by how many were based instead on violence and vengeance. We could understand Rudolphs Kick n’ Fly, in which Rudolph kicks elves into the air (much like Kitty Cannon), because no one really gets hurt, and Rudolph has every right to be upset after the abuse he received as a child. But Rudolph’s Revenge is downright ruthless, with a scrappy, gun-toting Rudolph that looks like he’s been working at the North Pole meth lab for too long. And why does Santa need a gun? The truth is, both Serious Santa and Santa’s Vegneance tease your inner psycho with sinister Santas who look like they’re out for blood in intense first person shooters, and then the games actually serve up silly little pixelated Santas that only move in two dimensions. Jingle Ballistics is doubly misleading; there are no bullets, and not much jingle, just a choice of a snowman, an elf, or a sullen Santa for one-on-one boxing matches. In the continued mind-numbing search (I say mind-numbing because I for one really am not a gamer) for something a little chippier to keep you amused, we thought maybe we’d find a clever or cute snowball game like Snowcraft, and ran across a little journey into psychosis misleadingly called Snowball Holiday Flash Game. It took a minute to realize that the the weird things hanging in the viewframe weren’t curtains, but an anime girl’s hair, and the little penises that kept popping up were little arrows telling you where to go. Not having much interest in dressing up to pretend to be a little Japanese girl, we didn’t get far enough to see if there actually WAS a snowball game somewhere in there. Weird. If you try it, let us know. Game designers also seem to have a certain fascination with Santa or the elves falling off roofs, so we have games like Elfquilibrium or Sober Santa (again, a misnomer, he’s DRUNK!), and there are also a lot of games where you shoot people, elves, or other things as you collect presents, as in Christmas Attack Game or Wrap Attack. The latter, like the Santa games mentioned, teases with heavy metal and sinister images, and disappoints with crappy country rock guitar and sissy graphics. Inevitably there are also games this time of year developed by tech or media companies (that’s where Snowcraft came from back in 1999) and this year we have Santarider, brought to you by PPC management software company Acquisio. I have a feeling someone over on the development team derives a perverse pleasure from knowing how hard it is to not kill their fellow employees as you try to keep Santa’s sleigh aloft. So anyone know of any nice holiday games we can play? Feel free to share. I’m feeling a bit scrooged.

No, those aren’t window dressings, it’s a girl’s bangs, and that’s an arrow, not a penis. Snowball Holiday Flash Game is more like surreal anime girl version of Being John Malkovich:

No wonder Rudolph wants revenge. I think he’s been spending too much time at the meth lab.
And what is it with gamers and spelling, anyway?

Games like Serious Santa and Santa’s Vegneance promise this…..

…but give you this:

Likewise with Wrap Attack, which promises a bad-ass elf….

…but gives you tinkerbell:

And see how many Acquisio employees you can take out with Santarider:

We quietly discontinued our Monday Demotivators a while back, partly because we figured that with the national unemployment rate hovering around 20%, there was no-one at work to actually avoid it. However, last week we got an e-mail from a regular visitor complaining that now that he’s the only one left in his cubicle farm, he needs time-wasters more than ever. So here are some quick holiday and winter themed time killers for you. Yeah, you could always Elf Yourself, but then you’re just advertising for Office Max without getting paid. Like we just did. Doh! For some reason, I’ve personally always loved Santa Toss. I think maybe it’s the yodeling, but there’s also a strange gratification in throwing Santa around, especially after all the times he’s let me down. And especially after the staff cuts he’s made. Yeah, it seems he fired all the Reindeer and replaced them with a chopper. As revenge, they cut a hole in the floor of it, and now the gifts are all over the arctic. Help him retrieve them with Present Hunter. I didn’t have much luck, but it was kind of fun crashing the helicopter 4 or 5 times. So, moving on…since there’s nobody around the office as a result of that year-end “force reduction”, you probably don’t get as much excitement out of scanning your butt on the copier as you used to. I mean, all the fun is in the excitement of doing it without getting caught, right? Well, bring back the thrills with Butt Scan. Unfortunately all that game does is let you scan your butt ’til you get fired, so it wears thin pretty fast. These holiday Flash games always have something violent or sexist to offer, so if you’re feeling a little cranky about the holidays, don your hockey mask and butcher knife and slaughter some helpless elves with Friday The 24th. And for the inevitable misogeny, touch a woman inappropriately to win imaginary money with Santa Girl. Tip: if you actually want to collect the money, touch her APPROPRIATELY. And if you found that last one especially offensive, don’t piss yourself over it. Pee in the snow instead. Because who doesn’t love peeing in the snow, and now you can even send a Pee-Mail! Here’s our little pee-mail message. We may be back next week with more holiday themed demotivators, so if you have any suggestions, pass them along. I’ll just be playing SnowCraft ’til then.

Send us a pee-mail!

As always, there’s a sexist twist. Tip: touch her appropriately if you want to (ahem) score:

Wanna fight? Just make sure you have the balls:

Much like the US military, Fragger lets you bomb dark people for no apparent reason.

A number of people have asked what happened to our Monday Demotivators. Well, the fact that it seemed that the vast majority of Flash games are based on animal torture, random violence, and general acts of futility finally wore me down. That, and the fact that I hate Flash games (o_O). So we’ll do this one more time, in the interest of pleasing our visitors. Besides. We may have covered animal torture and random violence, but we forgot racist militarism and misogyny. First up, we have Fragger, in which, much like the US military, you bomb unarmed dark people for no apparent reason. That game’s catapult feature will be good practice for Cheerleader Toss, in which you fling a helpless cheerleader around a basketball court. A moment of violence against women brought to you by Nokia and Best Buy*. Apparently there’s a real-world version too. Along the same lines, if you find the idea of a grabbing a woman’s breasts to cause varying degrees of discomfort while a disco soundtrack plays to be an offensive idea, please, for the love of God, don’t try Booby Blast (very NSFW), which appears to benefit no-one, not even a sponsor. Unlike Super Jump, which, while maintaining the misogyny theme, appears to be an ad for a British motorcycle insurance firm. It at least hints at being an equal opportunity abuser; while you try to get women naked by showing them the “length of your jump”, they tell you how small it is. *Sigh*. Only the British. But enough human-on-human violence for for now, let’s explore a little human-on-duck violence. You may have noticed a little duck keeps flying across the page. You also may have noticed that if you click on it, it dies. You may be wondering at this point why we’re letting somebody else’s duck fly across our page. Well, with any luck, you’ll accidently click on one of our freakin’ ads for once. And also because, as its creator says: “every web page should have ducks you can shoot“. Go duck yourself if you don’t believe me.

The further you go, the further they go, as the ad says.

*You may remember Cheerleader Toss as part of a Best Buy/Nokia viral campaign back in 2005 that was accompanied by a fake trailer for theaters that ended up being a cell phone courtesy PSA. We couldn’t find the clip; there was originally a site at pumpupthemovie.com, but there appears to be no trace of it, even on Archive.org. So here, for your amusement, we have a Star Wars cell phone PSA instead:

Due to the recent discovery of the tragic and perhaps incurable First-Person Shooter Disease (see the clip at left), we’re taking a break from the mindless Flash games usually highlighted in our weekly Monday morning time-wasters to take a more serious look at the damaging effects of video games and the Internet. While in the west we’re still debating whether or not there’s some kind of addictive disorder related to surfing and gaming, the Chinese have not only decided there is, they’ve set up boot camps to deal with the problem. After doing a little informal research, it becomes clear that they’re on the right track. The three most noteworthy gaming-related deaths were all Asian*; a Chinese gamer who killed someone over an imaginary sword, a Korean man who died after a marathon gaming session at an Internet cafe, and a Vietnamese kid who killed a woman for video game money. So let’s look at alternatives to sitting at the computer. How about self-induced hallucinations without drugs? Or better yet, with drugs? If, like me, you don’t feel like actually doing drugs, the book The Beyond Within is a fascinating look into LSD. The BBC video version is also available on YouTube, but if you don’t have 90 minutes to waste this morning, maybe check out this insightful two-minute video from the Canadia Wildlife Service that explores the dramatic effects of various drugs on spiders. And remember, it’s not just video games and drugs that are bad for you, Facebook causes brain damage too.

Who needs drugs or video games when you have ping pong balls?

*Yes, I’m profiling. And they’re good at math too.

I’ll probably never have a legitimate reason to say that again in this lifetime, but as a headline for this week’s Monday Demotivators, there’s absolutely nothing gratuitous in the phrase. So let’s get (ahem) rolling. Here’s a game a lot of us fat Americans should try (don’t think you’re fat? Check the NIH Body Mass Calculator first, you might be surprised). Anyway, the object of Sprinster is simply to avoid food. ‘nough said. To help you avoid food, pretty much for the rest of the day, try 5 Fingers Fillet. I think the name is warning enough. Not for the faint-hearted. Who dreams this crap up, anyway, and why, in the name of God, do I link to it? Oh yeah. Revenue. So, moving along. Sperm Rider takes forever to load (did I really just type that?) but there’s something entrancing about piloting a cowboy stick figure who’s riding a huge sperm through an urban landscape to a stripped-down cowpunk soundtrack. I didn’t even care what my score was. Much like in Super Lava Jumper, which tells you “Oops you died. No worries though” when you fail. This, while a boinky late 90′s house soundtrack plays at 120 decibels. If you like pixelated games with crappy soundtracks, you might also want to try Heavy Metal Girl, which is a little less relaxed about your death, and much more intent on providing it. And if love is more your thing, try Romeo, in which (much like life) you round up volumes of Shakespeare that you will never read, while you search for true love. Want my opinion? Go to the cafe. The odds of meeting someone are a lot better there than if you sit here playing dumb Flash games all day. And get some exercise while you’re at it. Maybe start with something easy, like Thumb Wrestling