Play some interactive fiction
If you're lacking a good book -- or if you're pathologically unable to not sit in front of the computer -- and not up for some full-on Halo first-person shooter action, you might want to try out some text-based gaming. Remember those Infocom interactive fiction (IF) games from your youth -- Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and the like? Well, they're still around, available for free, along with a host of other titles. Eric W. Brown, president of Saugus.net (and author of some interactive fiction himself) extols it as "a higher-tech alternative to regular reading"; while you unfortunately can't play these games on your Kindle (a platform that otherwise seems made for it), you can definitely fire them up on your laptop during the long, lonely hours when you don't have Internet access.
Brown suggests a number of sites you can visit that will get you started. Inform will set you up with the interpreters you need to run IF files -- and create your own. You can find out more about the community from the IF Wiki and IF Database. And the Interactive Fiction Archive has hundreds of titles for you to download.
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