Stupid games you invent when you're bored

[Kinoko]

Do you ever play any silly games by yourself (I mean the clean kind) when you're bored at the computer? Or anywhere?

For example, sometimes without even realising it, I'll place my cursor somewhere between the lines on the AGS forum page (or any forum page), and see how many times I can move the mouse wheel and still have the cursor stay out of the lines.

'Course, that's cause I spend all day and night at the computer, I'm sure you guys cancome up with something more interesting ^_^

[TheYak]

All the damned time, especially when I've already surfed my usual trails for the evening and am killing time (T1 at work + wifi broadcast all over makes for lots of unproductive time). 

I end up doing stupid maintenance more often than note, deleting all the .Trashes and .DS_Store files Macs seem so fond of placing everywhere, or deleting all the Windows temp files, sorting through old applications, and other tedium.  I'll have to give the between-the-lines-nutty-Kinoko game a try.

[Kinoko]

I do it ALL the time. Not just with lines, but with text too. I just did it with your post. Just finding the best position so I can go up a few turns of the wheel without getting the cursor on any text or lines.

[magintz]

Yup.... I'll name a few.

Playing world of warcraft - waiting for a group etc...
   - I'll repeatedly jump on the same spot or in circles, or try to jump onto a wall and balance myself somewhere.
back at schhol we had "THE GAME" (damn it)
   - The whole idea of "THE GAME" is to not think about "THE GAME". If you are thinking about it you lose, so you mention "THE GAME" to everyone else so that they are thinking of "THE GAME" and also lose.
CS:S
   - If I'm bored i'll either knife the wall or ground to make a smilie face or just shoot the scenery to see the different surface effects.
Web-Browsing
  - Try to count the pixels on screen (J/K)
  - Do random google image searches for the most errenuous items and see what page number displays the first porn image. Like "ketchup".... sometimes if you choose something abscure enough you get some funny images anyway.

[hedgefield]

I end up doing stupid maintenance

I do that a lot too. But usually I conclude everything on my computer is important so I end up deleting 3 pictures or something.

I also like to make up games in actual games too. Like in Hitman Contracts I pretend I'm a guest in the hotel. And when I'm bored with that I see how many people I can shoot and get away with it. Chasing people around town (Thief 3) is fun too.

Or collecting guards...

[Ubel]

For example, sometimes without even realising it, I'll place my cursor somewhere between the lines on the AGS forum page (or any forum page), and see how many times I can move the mouse wheel and still have the cursor stay out of the lines.

I do exactly like that all the time O_o

Because I'm bored all the time... -_-

[Pesty]

I like to put my cursor up to pictures and lines, pretty much whatever I can, and try to get one of the angles on the arrow to line up so that it looks like the edge of the arrow is part of the line. It brings me some strange satisfaction when I achieve this, and will sit and look at my discovery with pride for longer than I probably should, and if I'm unable to find any lines that match up, I get really sort of dissapointed.

Typing it all out, I've just realized for the first time how weird that is.

[TheYak]

It's satisfying, but not nearly as much as when you've got an icon on your desktop that enables the roughly 30-degree arrow of the cursor to fit snugly against two of its lines.  That is ultimate satisfaction.  Of course, being a mature adult and delighting in more developed pursuits, I prefer to use the hand cursor to pick the noses of the AGS banner egos.

[Ghormak]

The mouse cursor fits perfectly in the opening formed under the letter k in this font used on these forums. It's quite amazing.

[Babar]

Gaah! Not fair! How can you tell if it does that, Ghormak, as the cursor keeps changing to the text editing "I" thing when you put it near text?

[Pesty]

It's satisfying, but not nearly as much as when you've got an icon on your desktop that enables the roughly 30-degree arrow of the cursor to fit snugly against two of its lines.Ã,  That is ultimate satisfaction.Ã,  Of course, being a mature adult and delighting in more developed pursuits, I prefer to use the hand cursor to pick the noses of the AGS banner egos.

That reminds me that I do that with the cursors in Sierra games. And, for example, I get joy from putting the dragon face waiting cursor over the hero's head in QFG1 to make it look like he has a big ol' dragon head! And then I try it out on all the npcs to see who looks best with which cursors. And I'll put the talk cursor over the characters' mouths to make them look like they're wearing big wax lips.

[Tuomas]

All that is mentioned above fits my behaviour as well. Then I have this habit of reloading the forums page like every second minute. And when there's nothing new, I often try painting some paragraph with a click. I noticed that clicking once paints the selected word, clicking twice paints the sentence and clicking three times paints the whole paragraph or something like that. Then I  always try to get a bigger area painted.

[Ghormak]

Gaah! Not fair! How can you tell if it does that, Ghormak, as the cursor keeps changing to the text editing "I" thing when you put it near text?

Not for me it does! Check out the perfect harmony you're missing out on:

[MrColossal]

The mouse cursor is my soul source of fun sometimes... All the mouse related activities mentioned in this thread fit me well...

When I'm ever on IRC I like scrolling up and down to see how many times I can scroll and have the last line be my name. I think I got it up to 4 scrolls once... PMs don't count...

And just now I put the mouse cursor tip in the exact center of the 'o' in Post and usually leave the cursor on the edge of the blue reply box or butted up against the post button's black outline.

We're like little mini-Rainmen, if we combined we'd form a huge mentally handicapped giga-bot!

edit:  Oh, and it annoys me greatly that the text cursor doesn't fit in between double lower-case L's!

[DoorKnobHandle]

I am so obsessed with the Firefox zoom plugin, that I do stuff with it when I'm bored.

It works like this: You right-click on any image on a website. While holding the right-mouse button and turning the mousewheel either up and down, you can zoom in or out. It will basically resize the image. So I either make all images super-small, so that they are almost gone on a page (once you reload its all back to normal) or I'll turn the mousewheel in rhythm with the music I am listening, so that the image gets bigger and then smaller again in rhythm with whatever I am currently listening to. That's quite hilarious at times (depending on music and image)...

[Andail]

Why not just...do...anything except for that?
That's a rather depressing and not very constructive way to waste your time.

[TheYak]

To wax pseudo-philosophic: In an age of nearly-instant gratification when education, entertainment, and communication can be had nearly any time one desires, perhaps there's become a newly neglected portion of the psyche.  It used to take phenomenal amounts of time devoted to ones interests in order to net any result.  Maybe these little activities are filling a need in people to simply waste time for waste's sake.  Once it's constructive, it's somehow less relaxing and more closely resembles work.  Some of us hone our sleep schedule to a razor's edge to fit as much as possible into a day, maybe the brain just needs some down time with activities that would keep even an obtuse orangutan content.

[Mr Flibble]

Waste of time?
Pfft, go write a dissertation, Efficiency Boy.

If that is your real name.

[Paper Carnival]

I do play with the cursor, but I also play with the windows.

For example, I might have a lot of windows and I resize them all and move them in a way so that they'll perfectly touch the other.
Or I might resize two windows so that they have the same dimensions and location, and then I hit alt+tab and behold the magnitude of my success.
Also, I might play with one window to resize it to match the edges of the screen or resize+move it in such a way so that when I maximize it it will stay on the exact same place.

[Evil]

I like to highlight things on my desktop. Make perfect ant-trail highlights around icons, move my icons into shapes, those sorts of things. But I do play the cursor in between the lines of text game a lot too. Sometimes I scroll fast over parts I know won't work.