We interrupt this blog post to bring you this important news: Young and Fearless: A Day at the Park is playing at Bryant-Lake Bowl TONIGHT at 10pm, co-produced by YoungNotions and Fearless Comedy Productions. There will be sketch and stand up comedy. If you like to laugh, you should be there. Tonight, 10pm, Bryant-Lake Bowl. We now return you to your regularly scheduled YoungNotions post.

Last year for Christmas, Jared and I made dry fruit jars for my family. Layers of dried fruit in a jar. I had thought about doing those Cookie Ingredients in a Jar, where you layer flour, brown sugar, chocolate chips, etc into a jar in a visually pleasing manner.

It’s like sand art for adults, only with the excuse of being “productive.”

But here at YoungNotions, we’re all about not being productive. Especially on Fuck Off Friday, where you’re supposed to get past those last few hours of work until your precious weekend as painlessly as possible.

Lucky for you, the internet has a solution. Falling sand games. All of them are the same principle, with little pixels of color falling from the top of a box, and you’re provided some tools and options for interacting with those pixels. Let’s take a look:

This is what I think of as the original falling sand game. Three types of “sand,” no extra tools- just the ability to draw lines for walls with your pointer, and a spinny disk to randomly destroy said walls. Like a katamari, it get’s bigger the more sand it rolls up. This is beginner level sand play.

This is the next level: you get 4 streams of sand, all with different properties, a little spinny disk, and more tools. I’m a huge fan of the plant tool to create, and the fire tool to destroy.

This one, from bored.com, is another basic game, only without the spinny disk. You can also change fall speeds and grain sizes.

Do you know what this game’s been missing? Little people to torment.

This one has to be my favorite. Dan Ball put together an applet that just does it all. You can add little guys, balls, bubbles, plants, wheels, and all sorts of explody stuff.

I really like the explody stuff.