Sweet Vintage Diablo

I have a new (used) laptop--a very nice G4 Powerbook, a hand-me-down from my stepfather who needed something more powerful for his work. It's sweeeet. This is the first laptop I've ever had, and I am enjoying it very much.

Of course, I should be using it to go sit in coffeeshops and work on my novel. And I will, I'm sure, as soon as I figure out what the heck I need to be doing with the current chapter. (Scraping it and starting over comes to mind, but I digress.)

In the meantime, I've been taking advantage of the laptop's OS9 shell (something my desktop Mac lacks) to play Diablo--the classic, 1996 vintage. Blizzard ported the more popular Diablo II to OSX, but not the original. There's something delicious about revisiting an old favorite game, especially one you haven't had the proper operating system to play for a long time. It's like reminiscing with an old friend.

Besides, every time I went through the ruins of Tristram in Diablo II, I found myself struggling to remember exactly what the town and people were like before. So it's nice to see them again.

From late Saturday night when I re-acquired an original Diablo disc through this evening, I ran through the entire game from start to finish with a single player rogue. Of course, there were quite a few breaks for work, sleep, laundry, cooking, a nice walk in the spectacular weather, a couple episodes of Monk on DVD, phone calls to friends and family, and in general various periods of putting the laptop to sleep to let the hot little battery cool off. So it really wasn't all that long of a game. But it's still grand fun. Every bit as fun, I think, as its more massive and complex successor.

I think I'll start over with a warrior and do it all again.

Or am I just avoiding writing?