Monday Demotivators: The Mormon Edition
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on April 6, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, April 6th, 2009Our ongoing attempt to make you late for work on Monday. Now with added MORMON GOODNESS.
If you’re here for our traditional Monday Demotivators, be patient while we take time out for a spirtual message. I’m not generally one to make light of other people’s faith, but I’ll occasionally make an exception. Today is the anniversary of the repeated founding of the Mormon church. Yes, repeated; it seems they had some trouble at the beginning, and since they believe Jesus was born on April 6 (betcha didn’t know there’s a Mormon Wikipedia!), they keep starting it on the same date. I’ll let the Mormons do all the footwork. Just read their history (or watch the classic South Park episode, they hit the key facts) and that should occupy enough time to accomplish our objective of making you late on Monday. Once you’ve wasted part of your morning learning the teachings of the prophet Moroni, we’ll still be here with the annoying game links. First up: this isn’t really a game, but it’s kind of fun. Someone has devoted an entire blog to posting the amusing results of Google’s autocomplete function. It is kind of interesting that when you type “is mast” in Google’s search box, it immediately knows you’re wondering “is masturbation bad?” Which is a nice segue into our first game: The Great Sperm Race. Much like life itself, just work hard, focus, and try not to get bogged down in the slime, and at the end, you’ll wonder if the reward was worth it all. Kamikaze Race sounds like it might be exciting, but the only thing it has in common with a real Kamikaze pilot is that your death is inevitable, and the pursuit of it will require more patience and devotion than you think. Hero Hoops is like brain dead basketball for white boys. Just remember two tips: 1.) He moves like the white boy that he is, get used to it, and 2.) You can’t throw a ball if you’re not holding one. Sonny 2 makes you wonder what “Sonny 1″ must’ve been like, if this is the advanced version. You spend a ton of time getting elaborate intructions about the single simple move your guy can make when he finally does get to do something. Ultimately, you’re more likely to attack your computer for tricking you into pastimes like this. Likewise with Crow In Hell. If you have the patience, I bet there’s a game in there somewhere. On the same note, Perfect Balance Playground is a mildly amusing physics-based game, but it’s hard to figure out what the motivation really is. Here’s a whole collection of physics-based games, if you’re into that kind of thing. But we know you all prefer first person shooters, so here we go. Battlefield Heroes shows just how tough provincial Europeans really are. Every time you shoot one, they just say “Ow” in a Minnesota accent. I just want to remind you that as usual, I do this all for you. Give me a game of Pong and I’m good to go.
Monday Motivators – Head Butts, Paper Plates & Poodles
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 23, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, March 23rd, 2009Even the Dalai Lama understands the benefits of a well-executed clean and jerk.
 Even the Dalai Lama understands the benefits of a well-executed clean and jerk. |
If you’ve come here looking for our usual Monday Demotivators, maybe you need to rethink things a bit and pick up a copy of Getting Things Done
Visualizing Your Facebook Network
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 16, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, March 16th, 2009Four cool apps for graphically viewing your Facebook network
I’ve been fascinated with the visual mapping of networks of people ever since I ran across TheyRule.net in 2003. TheyRule is, on the surface, a fun, Flash-based way to see how the powerful and wealthy in America are connected. In their words, TheyRule “aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors“. This kind of information mapping has come a long way since then (we’ve touched on Fleshmaps, Heatmaps, and Tag-clouds here before), to the extent that if you have a Facebook account, with the click of a button you can activate a variety of visual tools for sorting and viewing your network of friends. Visualiser, for instance, allows you to see how your contacts are connected to each other, and do filtering based on things like sex or relationship status. Facebook Mutual Friend Network Visualization seems to offer fewer sorting tools, but has a simple and attractive interface that shows friends as nodes that you can click on to change the focus of the network. FavMapper lets you explore a map of your friends’ favorite music, movies, and books with interactive animation, and lastly, TouchGraph Facebook Browser displays similar connections from your Facebook account, but does it based on the photos that friends have shared in their accounts.
Monday Demotivators: The “Toss A Cat For No Reason” Mystery
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 8, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Sunday, March 8th, 2009Why Do Game Designers Enjoy Torturing Kittens?
Getting up and going to work on Monday morning is extremely over-rated, which is why every Monday, we bring you the Monday Demotivators that are meant to make you late once you do get up. To add insult to injury this week, here are Ten (probably useless) Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning, courtesy Wired.com. The list includes ingenius tips like “Go to bed when you’re tired” and “Pick out clothes the night before“. If those do work, here are 5 Reasons Why Sleeping In Every Day Will Boost your Productivity. Just go back to bed, will ya? Whenever you’ve managed to wake up, sit your butt back down here and enjoy the wonderful hand-picked games we never really try, but then eagerly recommend to you anyway. First up: after trying Don’t Look Back, well, I won’t. Designed with a slightly eerie, pixelated style and a moody synthesized cello soundtrack, at first I was a little intrigued. I gave up after about ten attempts at the first obstacle though. Nothing more demoralizing than getting killed by a pixelated snake ten times in a row. For a little pick-me-up, try the annoyingly loud Atomic Racer. Kind of like that “Easter Egg” Spyhunter game in Excel or something, except you have to get used to driving a car moving horizontally across the screen to blow up a nuclear transport. Not sure why that’s something one would want to do, but I guess these game developers don’t always have a grownup around to troubleshoot their concepts. Which would explain games like Kitty Throw, which although not quite as pointlessly brutal as the classic Kitten Cannon, still involves throwing a cat around for no particularly good reason. And they wonder what’s wrong with kids these days. Finally, if you at last ARE awake, and more amazingly still reading, try Electric Box, which actually requires that you do a little reading and thinking. Which is probably more than you would have accomplished by now if you’d gone to work. And cetainly more than I’ve accomplished by finding this crap for you. Happy Monday!
Scientists Discover Purpose Of Internet
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 27, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Friday, February 27th, 2009As You Suspected, It’s For Wasting Time Between Actually Doing Things
It’s been pretty well-established that the primary purpose of the Internet is to waste time between actually doing things. So today, we’re here to help you out with that. Sort of taking things to new heights of purposelessness, we have the on line Soft Drink Generator, brought to you by the same people that brought you the Church Sign Generator, among other things. With an amazing variety of options, you can easily waste an hour creating the perfect personalized product, which you can then order as a refrigerator magnet or other useless object, and pay an insanely high price for it, with money you don’t have. If you want to waste time for FREE, Facebook is the probably the latest “best of breed” site for time-wasting. If you’re a Facebook user, and like me, prefer to use the status box for entertainment rather than actual personal updates that no-one cares about, telling everyone how crappy you feel today, you may occasionally run into a wall when trying to come up with a clever post. Not to worry! Without looking very hard, I found several “Facebook Status Generators” right away, the best probably being Generatus.com, which lets you customize gender and pre-filter words (it would at least be fun to find out your supposedly upbeat and witty friend is using one of these!). And back to reality: if you actually have a job, and if it happens to involve generating headlines or taglines for real media or products, you might find The Advertising Slogan Generator handy. Where else would I have found useful taglines like “Choosy Mothers Choose Ian” or “Men Can’t Help Acting On Ian” or “Promise Her Anything, But Give Her Dissociated Press“. And if we haven’t helped you waste enough time yet, you really should just follow our Monday De-Motivators. Or suggest a time-waster in the comments, if you know of a good one. Happy time-wasting!