A core conversation that I've been having lately starts like this:

What are computers for?

And I have a decent set of answers for that.

Computers are for:

- Creation
- Consumption
- Communication

The specifics vary, and there's also a "meta" category for the things that we do to manage computers, but most of what I do on a computer boils down to one of those things.

I write, I record music, I make videos, I write code.

I watch TV, I listen to music, I play games.

I post on the fediverse, I publish my blog, I send emails, I use an instant messenger.

Creation (and editing and remixing)
Consumption (and cataloguing and organizing and sorting)
Communication (and publication)

There are certain kinds of creation, consumption, and communication that are wholly modern, that only work in a fully graphical environment with low latency, high bandwidth broadband.

I can't really edit photos on my #zinestation because it's a 386 (or occasionally a 486) with a monochrome screen and 4MB or 8MB of RAM.

Video production is right out! The thing doesn't even have a sound card, for me to attempt working with audio.

On the other hand, I use it to write nearly every episode of Expedition Sasquatch. I send most of my personal emails from that box, and I have (through various tricks) gotten it on the fediverse. I don't post much from the zinestation anymore, but I used to read and post from it and my palm pilots often enough (with tricks! It's all tricks! We'll get there.)

(I mean, yeas. I can actually edit photos. It's slow, but I can convert a jpg or a png down to an appropriate resolution bitmap and edit it in MS-Paint.

If I *need* to produce a graphic on my zinestation, I can totally do it! I do desktop publishing on it, with clipart, all the time.

But I'm not going to take a picture, load it in to a photo editor, and make adjustments to it, or even really have a good way to view it. That would be absurd right?

(I have a sony Mavica. I have a floppy drive for my zinestation. I can take a photo on the mavica and open it in a dedicated photo editor on the zinestation 486 and edit it just fine, and it works very well and is a pleasant experience aside from the fact that it's a monochrome screen and it's a little on the slow side. I can totally edit photos on this thing, as long as I adjust my definition of photo down to something that it can handle. And that's the point. It's all tricks.)

But still, video editing is right out, right? No one was Producing videos on a 486?

This is actually not true! The #zinestation486 will run Theatrix hollywood, which is a silly animation program. It's not a great experience, but I can Produce video on this hardware. This is also a trick!

Theatrix hollywood is actually a really neat little piece of fake animation software. There were others too! Most of the rest of them were mostly used for GIFs, but you could do something bigger if you really wanted! You just have to adjust your expectations to the limitations of the hardware and software with which you are working. It's all tricks.

But computers are tricks, and I think that will become more apparent as I continue this thread.)

(And yes, okay, I can totally make music on the zinestation.

No! It doesn't have a soundcard, but I was one of the nerds who really *wanted* a soundcard on my laptops that didn't have one, and I was wildly depressed and being overpaid to work in tech (basically all of these things aren't true now, especially the parts about being paid or working!) so I got an OPL2LPT.

This is a sound card (adlib) that sits on the parallel port of an old DOS computer.

I can load up a tracker and I can make music with it.

Simon Stalenhag (of Tales from the loop fame) released a beautiful album that he produced in a tracker on a pentium: https://simonstalenhag.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-dos

the c64 sid chip was highly sought after as a music making doodad. It doesn't take much computer to make music, as long as you're willing to adjust your expectations ...

You get the idea. It's a trick. It's all tricks.)

But, in spite of the many examples I just gave counterclaiming my point, there are a lot of things that I do on a regular basis that are just a pain in the ass to do on an old computer.

I edit 4k video, and my Beefy modern computers struggle with that.

I run television networks! I live stream! I live produce video and audio in shared video chat rooms with other folks around the country.

These things would be basically impossible to do on old computers without fundamentally changing the way that I'm doing them (but, with enough Money to throw at the problem, they were doable. The Amiga was a serviceable video editor after all.)

Lots of the Creation tasks that I want to do are a real pain in the ass in text mode or on an old computer or with a shoddy internet connection.

Lots of the Consumption (listening to music, watching videos, playing games) also a real pain in the ass when you're working in a text console or on a shoddy internet connection or on an old computer. Hell, even just *reading text on the web* is a pain in the ass today.

There are workarounds for nearly all of the things that I've described here.

I routinely do major edits to video in FFMPEG directly from a text console.

Nearly every computer I own can play back video of some format, as long as I transcode it ahead of time. If I'm starting with 1080 and I'm knocking it down to a 320k realmedia file for playback on an old windows/dos box, or an h264 mp4 for playback on my palm tx or palm e2, I can do it faster than real time.

I can SSH/telnet/serial connect in to one of my more powerful computers, issue the commands, and have a file downloaded in less time than it would have taken to just download a worse looking file in the dialup era.

I can't video chat from an old computer, but I don't want to do that anyway. That's why I have a cellphone. If I really want to hear a specific song, I have an MP3 player or a tape deck or whatever.

I can't really browse the web on an old computer, but I can request web pages to be downloaded from a newer computer, strip out all the bits I don't care about and save them as HTML files on a network drive that my old computer can access.

There's a way around it all.

So, I wrote a document in November of 2016 called "What are computers used for"

(Yes, November. I'm cyclical. Let's go.)

That thread was me musing about building my own operating system from bare metal, or just building a highly customized linux environment. I was trying to decide which route I wanted to go down.

Instead I started a tilde server.

See, I thought about what I use computers for, the way I use computers, what I want out of computers, etc. etc. etc.

And everything I thought about kept circling me back to one basic idea:

I use computers to connect with other people.

If I want to listen to music, I'll use a music listening device. A radio, a tape deck, an mp3 player.

If I want to play a game, I'll use a device for playing games. I have an atari 2600 I don't play nearly as often as I would like, and I have a steam deck which I play slightly more often than I would like.

But I write, I write a lot. I enjoy writing. I enjoy the affordance of time to consider my thoughts that I gain when I am communicating through text.

I write to connect with other people.

So I started a tilde.

I could create:
- Blog Posts
- ANSI art
- Small pieces of software
- Social media

I could consume:
- The web
- ebooks (we had a huge library)
- Music (we ran an icecast server)
- movies (over gopher?? We had a gopher server and one of the folders it served was a directory of mp4 files downloaded from the internet archive)
- posts on the local BBS, our door games, the library of text adventure games that existed on the server

I could communicate:
- We had on server only email, which was frankly fucking amazing.
- We had on server only IRC, which I didn't really use
- We had wall and ytalk, which I used constantly
- We had a home grown BBS which was just a series of hacky hacky bash scripts with dialog
- We had a home grown social network that was just a series of hack bash scripts with dialog
- We had a blog publishing engine and a gopherhole manager which were both hacky bash scripts made with dialog (I like bash. I like dialog.)

What I learned was this: What I wanted out of my computer when I really *thought about it* was wildly different from what I used my computer for most days.

The things I enjoyed doing on the computer were pretty different from what I *did* with my computer.

I really loved running that little tilde server. We had ten or fifteen users at peak, and it was a blast.

But I fucked it up one day because I was trying to fix a different thing that I had previously fucked up, and I got upset about it and put it all on a shelf for a few months.

And then, when I came back to try and fix it, I trusted my own notes, rather than double checking them, and copied the hard drive from a fresh debian install over the top of the harddrive that contained our backups.

And then I got a job that demanded a lot more of my attention, and was a lot closer to managing a tilde server, I just didn't want to do it all again from scratch.

I just never brought the thing back.

I put a lot more energy in to the fediverse, which I think was ultimately a good thing.

I became a much better sysadmin, which I *know* was a good thing.

I tried joining other people's tildes. I made an SDF account.

But all of these places that I tried to go had customs and cultures and histories.

and I was just a user on those systems! And the tools that they provided were not the tools I had provided, you know? Their needs and wants were different than mine.

Anyway, Swords of Freeport is a game designed to exist on a tilde server.

It's a social game, in the style of Legends of the Red Dragon. You get a certain number of actions each day, you get a score board, message boards, etc.

It looks the part.

I've been poking at it, and it really does seem to be exactly the kind of game I was looking for when I ran our tilde.

https://swordsoffreeport.com/

Enough so that I'm considering making setting up a new tilde server a project that I undertake over the next few days.

Intergalactic computer should be a tilde.

Jupiter's Ghost planning should happen in recieve-from-anywhere, send-on-server non-federated email.