Asklemmy

Unfucking your email. Find all the newsletters from worthless sites and block / unsubscribe. Sightly productive, and brainlessly easy.

Tell TSA your username. They'll find something for you to do for 20 hours.

Not trying to be a contrarian (it just happens!) but boredom will not kill you. In fact, I challenge you to sit and be bored for a good few minutes. It's good for you. I'm terrible at it myself, but that's what being a dopamine crack addict will do, I guess.

If you're out of ideas for things to do, try mindfulness meditation (Waking Up is an app with a bunch of free lessons to get you started) - very little woowoo, just pay cursory attention to something, then when your mind inevitably wanders off, just "notice" and be, well, mindful. It's like an antidote for boredom, in a weird way, and studies have shown that for whatever reason, it's good for you.

Myself, I read books for any "random short term downtime".

Read a book?

Like, how desperate are you for stimulation that you're making this sound like an emergency?

I'd recommend reading Wikipedia

More content than you could possibly read, short reads typically, you learn stuff, and you can make games out of it

A game I like to play is to come up with 2 completely unrelated things, start on thing 1, and see if you can get to thing 2 on Wikipedia in 6 tabs or less, using Wikipedia links only

1. Go to the tech store in the airport. Buy a cheap chromebook. Open an account on Opalstack. Build a webpage from scratch. Learn a backend language like php or python. Learn git. Maybe set up your own Lemmy instance.

2. Install Keyboard Designer from the android play store and take a stab at customizing your own keyboard.

3. Leave the airport and go to a museum or swimming pool or poolhall. Be back in time to go through security.

Invent a language, then teach it to a stranger against their will.

I am not very helpful, but don't kill these hours, befriend them!

Good lord I WISH I could get 20 straight hours where no one bothered me. That's a fucking dream right there.

Slay the Spire is a great game that works well on mobile and has no microtransactions. I’ve played it for 400 hours (on PC) and I’m still not tired of it.

https://movie-web.app/

A free and open source online web app for streaming content. They’re committed to no ads, pop ups, or other weird malicious stuff you’d see on other streaming sites. Binge a series or two!

Wait— this was posted 24 hours ago. Oh well.

Play Shattered Pixel Dungeon, it's free and open source.

I've been hooked on Sudoku on my phone recently. LibreSudoku is a good Android app.

Maybe it there's a bookstore close by you can get a book? I've been really enjoying I am robot by Isaac Asimov. It's sci-fi. It basically tells stories from a future where robots are more capable than humans will ever be. And to stop the robots from rioting there are 3 rules.

1. Robots can never hurt people, or let them get hurt by doing nothing. (I'm translating from my first language if there's any mistakes I'm sorry)
2. Unless it interferes with the first rule robots will always obey humans.
3. Unless it interferes with first and the second rule robots will always protect themselves.

Don't kill your time. When you're in the final moments of your life you'll most likely wish you had more, so make the effort to be thankful for every second you have now.

Streetcomplete to contribute to osm?

Play Civilization

Try Vampire Survivors! It's a free mobile game that has no right being as fun as it is. You run around trying to kill monsters and level up your weapons without dying, but you can focus on dodging because all the weapons auto-attack. I'm not sure I'm explaining it super well, but it's worth trying!

Man I would love 20hrs to kill by myself. With 7 hours at the airport is leaving the airport an option? Like others have said. Read a book. Get your steps up. Try and do 10,000 steps walking the entire airport. Buy a notepad and draw the people our sights around you

There is a Webcomic called Romantically Apocalyptic. It is a visual novel that has been going on for years. The creator just keeps adding. 300 pages.of highly detailed visuals in an eccentric story.

If you end up vibing with the story that'll definitely kill a lot of time.

Name is misleading, as I haven't seen much in the way of romance lol.

Start writing your memoirs. Or begin writing a semi-erotic fantasy novel. If you're lucky, the two may be the same thing.

Is starting a conversation with someone an option?

If you haven't already you can usually ger compensation for delayed flight. Check out the compensation page for the airline your using.

3 hours have passed since you posted this and I read it. Time flies!

Go outside and sit with the smokers.

Smokers talk. Everyone's equal in the smoke pit. You can meet some really interesting people that way.

A few hours of secondhand smoke won't kill you. Otherwise humanity would have gone extinct in the 70s.

I’ve bookmarked all the game suggestions in this thread myself, but haven’t tried any of them yet other than Sudoku. I have the Sudoku.com app.

Badland is a good time-killing game. Having headphones and playing with sound adds to the experience. Not sure if I paid for that one or not.

Minesweeper is a classic one that I don’t think requires internet connection.

Slither.io requires internet but is also a decent time killer.

Airline Commander is one that I’ve downloaded but haven’t tried yet. Airplane simulator that looks interesting.

This is just going through my Games folder on my Home Screen and thinking of which ones I’d play in your situation.

Where is LOTR when you need it?

I probably sound very traditional but… talk to someone? Make some friends? Call someone?

Ketamine

Brotato, if you are using an android device.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brotato.shooting.survivors.action.roguelike