A relaxing weekend of gaming – one way to take your mind off things

Recovery 2 Minutes

After struggling with temptation the other day, I found an excellent way to take my mind off it: playing my now favourite game.

To put it into perspective, I am not a gamer. The only computer games I ever played were Diablo and Diablo II. (And more recently, Despicable Me Minion Rush; which I installed for my son to play – then played to somewhere past level 200 myself.) The other day when my son was here, I loaded Torchlight II, which I’d installed a while back but never played. Now it is my new addiction… It’s very similar to Diablo II, only better. Plus I found by accident that I can replay some of the more difficult levels to gain extra experience points and items. I’m currently a level 43 “embermage”, playing a female character as usual, named Iris Colt – my usual female name (that happens to be an anagram for a certain bit of female anatomy).

I’ve spent almost the whole long weekend (Friday was a holiday here) playing this game, and while playing it I totally lost track of time. Thus I didn’t have to spend any time thinking about my temptation. (Being busy is another of the best techniques to avoid going back to active addiction, in my experience.)

Today I wanted to take my son to see the new Avengers movie, but they wouldn’t let him in. I had no idea there was a 10 years old age restriction… for a superhero movie based on a comic! I don’t get it. Seriously, I wonder what age group the target audience is? For a group of superheroes fighting against an evil fucking robot? I think I’ll give this movie a miss anyway. I hated the second and third Ironman movies… Too many iron men; I thought the first movie was OK, the second one was stupid, and the third was absolute shit. (The first Avengers movie wasn’t bad, but only because Tom Hiddleston stole the show as Loki.)

So after lunch, my son spent the afternoon playing Torchlight II as well. With my help of course. At 7 years old, he tends to walk his character too far into unmapped areas, getting surrounded by monsters. Otherwise he is pretty good, and it was a fun day.

Published by Jerome

I am a senior C# developer in Johannesburg, South Africa. I am also a recovering addict, who spent nearly eight years using methamphetamine. I write on my recovery blog about my lessons learned and sometimes give advice to others who have made similar mistakes, often from my viewpoint as an atheist, and I also write some C# programming articles on my programming blog.

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One thought on “A relaxing weekend of gaming – one way to take your mind off things”

  1. Judging by the reviews of Avengers: Age of Ultron at rotten tomatoes, especially this one, I think my gut feel about the inevitable quality of the movie is spot on. It’s a movie to be missed. Come on… a movie where the antagonist is an evil robot was always going to be shit. I don’t always agree with reviewers… they all loved The Dark Knight Rises, which I hated and found an endurance to watch to the end (after predicting everything that would follow in the first 5 minutes), but this time I think they probably got it right.

    Of course, before checking out rotten tomatoes, I looked for reviews alone, and didn’t find much of value. For example this one tells you nothing you couldn’t have figured out yourself from the trailer. I should be a movie critic. If only someone would pay me to watch movies every day…

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