Because crack is still illegal

The law is keeping me from picking up an addiction to crack or heroin. But the police are strangely silent on the subject of flash-based in-browser games, even though they're possibly more addictive than hard drugs. You can only shoot so much smack in a day, but you can easily sink 24 consecutive hours into a game.

So, in the interest of doing y'all a huge, huge disservice, here are links to a few highly addictive games. First, Learn to Fly, a game in which you get a penguin airborne. My deep advice: those little dots for air resistance and ramp height are skills you can buy, not score markers. Second,Crush the Castle, in which you use a trebuchet to demolish medieval structures. Much fun, and fun to re-play earlier castles once you acquire heavy armaments. These two games are nice and simple; you can replay them, but you can also finish either one in an hour or so. The third game,Gemcraft, is much, much more addictive, and also takes a lot longer to play. It's possible to sink days into it, I suspect, though I put it down before I got too hooked. For a writer, one of the real perks of a netbook might be that the in-browser game window for all these is too large to fit the screen of my wife's HP Mini, and you've therefore got one less possible distraction. I don't have any games installed on my old writing laptop, both because it's too old and underpowered, and because I know that the games are distracting, but it'll run any in-browser game without a problem....