Ipods, Audiobooks, and lectures on tape(not literally tape, you know what I mean) have banished boredom from my life for quite some time now.
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Oh man, that’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while, and I was just reading the thread about the blogger who took the Onion seriously…
But yeah, bring a book, a couple of magazines, a walkman with some music to listen to (or iPod, if that’s your thing), maybe some sort of laptop or portable DVD player. Oh, and always bring a set of headphones with you, I think most planes use the regular headphone jacks now, otherwise if you want to watch a TV show or whatever on the plane, you’ll need to buy headphones for $5. If you bring movies to watch, make sure to bring such timeless classics as Airplane, Redeye, Executive Decision, Air Force One, and Lost.
It’s been said before to get a good pair of earplugs, to cut down on background noise, and there is also a special brand of them that is supposed to help with ear pressure too.
Oh, and try and get the other passengers to join you in a rousing sing-along of “Woo-ooo” by the 5-6-7-8’s. 
Bring the soundtrack from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, rummage through the overhead bins for costume nessesities and makeup, be creative. Attempt to recruit your fellow passengers into your “cast” and put on an inpromptu “performance piece”.
Organize a game of shirts vs. skins nerf football/soccer/basketball.
Ask the flight attendant if she would tell you precisely why she/he would never give you her/his phone number.
I know that I would be entertained by such behavior.
A friend of mine was eager to play with his new GPS, and asked the flight attendant if it was okay for him to use it in flight, and he was told no. YMMV.
The portable DVD player has saved us several times! Love it! Some airlines only have the power ports in business & first class on older planes (American, I’m looking at you…).
Books, knitting, DVDs… watch the content if you’re in coach though- very easy for the folks next to you to browse. We actually turned off Rome because a kid was catching a bit too much of it.
I actually prefer the Games World of Puzzles magazine - more time consuming puzzles, fewer articles. I also bring enough books to last me just in case the plane goes through a time warp like in that Twilight Zone episode. I use my lapttop sometimes, but it is reasonably big, and kind of a pain.
At some airports you can rent a DVD player and movies, and turn it in when you get to the other end. (At least you could at one time.) I’d think a Hawaii flight would be a good candidate in case you don’t want to buy a DVD player.
Airline movies are often free if you have the headphones - but the quality is usually awful, and the movies are the ones I wouldn’t waste time getting from Netflix anyhow.
Other games similar to Nethack and higher in complexity, but just as low in system requirements, include the fantastic Angband and Dungeon Crawl, plus many others available for Windows, Pocket PC and Palm OS. (One Palm OS favorite of mine is iLarn.)
If you own some of the old LucasArts adventure games that used the SCUMM engine, you can set up a laptop or a palm pilot, pocketPC, etc. to play games such as Day of the Tentacle in SCUMMVM
Though this can backfire, as witness the lady who fell asleep on Air Canada’s Halifax/St. John’s flight and woke up halfway to Heathrow… :eek:
I flew from LA to Sydney a couple months ago, and after not sleeping for about 36 hrs before, I slept like a rock almost the entire flight. It wasn’t intentional, but from now on that’s my plan for any long haul flight.
Sleep is gooood.