off you fuck

I’m I missing something?

the door, asshole

I like this a lot! the idea of buying a new (and usually quite expensive) device that intentionally does less has never really sat right with me, but repurposing old or secondhand devices with purpose-built software has always made quite a bit more sense.

to expand on the idea in hopefully not too much of a tangential direction, one very nice thing about repurposed hardware over new bespoke hardware is that if the repurposed device is running an open source software stack with resources to spare (which is often the case), you can extend the functionality of the device in ways that are specifically useful to you personally.

as a real-world example, when I set up a new computer for myself these days I usually start with Linux that boots straight into emacs, which is a very competent typewriter running on a kernel that supports most of the hardware I’ll throw at it and comes with a wide compatibility base and fairly minimal hardware requirements. next if I need to work with more complicated documents, I pull in X11 and go graphical. if I need applications, I pull in EXWM and now I have everything I need for a generalized computing environment. but there’s no need to go that far — and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.

I usually do all of the above on NixOS, but it feels like the general idea has possibly outgrown Nix, and it might do even better as a dedicated Linux distro targeting repurposed devices.

it’s even worse on mastodon: it goes from plain text to markdown back to plain text, so both posts are just “1.”

18 minutes isn’t even long

Jinteki is pretty much purpose-built for online play in the browser — it predates tabletop simulator by a fair bit and has a janky UI, but it works so well that a bunch of tournaments use it, and it has a gigantic card database with special rule implementations that’d be hard to implement elsewhere. it’s also open source which is very cool — you can monitor their progress adding the rules for new cards, or dig into the source to see the exact game logic that’s executing for a given game state. of course you can also host your own, which I haven’t seen anyone do but could have value for in-person tournaments that need to do visualizations or quick rule checks

the Green Level Clearance discord is generally considered the best place to start — tagging @Mentor in #find-online-games will usually net you someone willing to run a tutorial game or two in Jinteki, and you can also tag your own account with which sets and tournaments you’d like to participate in once you’re more comfortable playing