Ten Good Reasons to Stay Home and Play DooM

10. You won't get hit by a bus. Or lightning. Or a pie in the face. Or a golf ball. Or a plague of locusts. Or a falling piano. Or a runaway warthog. Or a riverboat casino. Or a lump of camel turd. Or a .....

9. It'll put hair on your chest. [Any ladies out there reading this may want to skip this paragraph. Unless you're into that sort of thing.] Scientists in Lithuania observed test subjects that were playing DooM while micro-doses of electro-shocks were simultaneously administered to the sub-cutaneous region of the gluteous maximus. Hair follicles were observed to sprout spontaneously in the clavicular (chest) area in 92% of the subjects. (The other 8%, sadly, were using cheat codes, which sometimes has a negative effect on chest-hair growth.)

8. It'll keep you out of mischief. In medieval times, Franciscan monks were shaken from bed well before dawn; made to work like dogs cleaning toilets, scrubbing livestock, and doing laundry; and finally, exhausted and sore, and very pissed off, they went to bed late at night. They called it penance (nowadays they just call it "school"), and lived by the motto "An idle mind is the Devil's Workshop". What worked for a bunch of fat friars 700 years ago still works today. If you're at home, glued to your computer and playing DooM, you're less likely to walk over to the neighborhood convenience store with a plastic gun in your pocket, and demand 14 bags of Snicker Doodles or the pimply-faced clerk gets it in the gonads.

7. An SSG is not likely to embarrass you in public.

6. You won't find cops knocking at your door.

5. You won't get slapped with a lawsuit.

4. An SSG won't leave unsightly brown patches on your lawn. It's eleven-thirty in the morning, and you're rudely awakened by an insistent whining sound and an occasional paw to the face. "Why me?" you moan as you struggle to sit up, scratching your belly and forcing your eyes open. The mutt, meantime, is dancing around the front door with its legs crossed, reminding you of that time in the second grade when you really, really had to go but Mrs. DiFranco simply ignored your frantically waving hand and squeaks of agony. You clip the leash on and open the door, only to have the dog bolt out onto your lawn and, with an audible sigh, relieve itself in the unmowed grass. Fido! you hiss, wishing for the hundredth time that you'd taken your friend's advice and bought that copy of DooM instead of blowing those twenty bucks on a puppy. The neighbor's lawn, dammit, the neighbor's lawn!

3. Elegance. Convenience. Humanity.

2. The Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would be proud of you.

And the number one reason to Stay Home and Play DooM is ...... (drum roll please) .......

1. It could make you the next computer gaming tycoon. Reliable sources from id Software have been coerced into revealing that deep in the bowels of DooM's source code lie the seeds of the next generation of computer games. Using technology code-named "Quasar", this data has been programmed for release via subliminal transmission each time DooM is played. Play it enough times, and Voila! you are transformed into a coding genius just slightly under par with John Carmack. (Either that, or it turns you into a zombie to join Carmack's vast legions in his quest for world domination! MWAHAHAHAHA!)