One thing about modern crypto is that in practice, nobody is really using the blockchain for direct peer-to-peer transactions. I don't quite understand why, but I get the impression it sucks. Everyone uses these "exchange" things instead, which are kind of like an unregulated bank with no deposit insurance that is probably run by fraudsters, to keep their crypto "money" in and do transactions. And those are totally unprotected; people's investments can be and have been totally stolen, both when an exchange goes bust and the owners skip with everyone's dough, and just when hackers break the exchange's crappy security and steal it. Governments would have exactly zero difficulty doing anything they wanted with crypto "money" that's in a crypto exchange. So for most holders of crypto, the few theoretical advantages of crypto are completely negated by the actual way it's now used.

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I saw the Waterworld movie back in the day. It was kind of a crap movie, but the sailing ship the hero used was awesome.

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Hmmm . . . I've always been good at making a mess. A game that uses my talents!

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A game where you win against The Company Store? The chain reactions is one thing, but that part's pretty implausible.

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I must say that one fellow sure looks like he's swinging a cricket bat.

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I only use Paypal for one thing--selling my Magic cards. The outfit I sell to wants Paypal. For everything else I just use a credit card. Mind you, the credit cards skim off the top too, it's just less visible because they charge the store.

(Oh, and no, Stablecoins are not the solution to anything unless maybe the question is "How do I sidestep lethal US sanctions on my country?" and even there, probably not)

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Something weird happened to me though . . . I had this card that was supposed to buff defence cards it was adjacent to, but that didn't seem to be happening.

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I tried it. Quite interesting. Only did one run so far. The whole deal with the shapes of cards being positioned on the field works quite well as a substitute for things like power costs. Powerful cards tend to require a good deal of area, and so there's that question--are they worth it or would you be better off filling that space with a couple of smaller cards? And there are analogous card improvements--there's a thing where you can remove one tile from a card, so it will take up less space when you cast it, and maybe be a less awkward shape.

Another thing that's interesting is that the moon surface you're playing the cards onto is not quite simply uniform. You can be under attack by one or multiple enemies, and they are attacking zones of the surface, not the whole thing. If it's just one enemy, it's attacking about two thirds of the surface. But if it's like four, each one is only targeting like a quarter. This matters, because a defensive card will have a rune on one of its tiles, and for the defence to work, that tile has to be in the area being attacked. So that complicates your card positioning.

So far when I got new cards I was only really thinking about their overall size and about what they did. I suspect if I get better at the game I will start thinking in terms of how the shapes interlock.

Another thing I'll say about this is it feels quite atmospheric.

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I would have recommended starting with the MATE edition until you were comfortable with Linux and all its quirks

I myself use the MATE version; I've found it very stable and comfortable. I first started using it because back at the time, there was a particular customization I like to do that MATE did and Cinnamon didn't, or later sort of did but really badly. It probably does it now, I'll probably check again sometime. (Specifically, I like one toolbar on the bottom and one up the right side to stick launchers on; at first Cinnamon really balked at that)

As Stella's comment on inability to view which apps are installed in the application manager . . . that's probably true, never occurred to me. Normally if I want to see if an app is installed, I look at the menus; only once I know it's not there do I fire up the software manager thingie. So it hasn't come up. But if your flow is different I guess that could be something you'd want. (To be clear, once you find a piece of software in the software manager, it DOES tell you whether it's currently installed--you just, I presume from what Stella says, can't get a list of currently installed stuff there)

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My wife had one for quite a while. Her computer needs are pretty simple so it was actually fine almost all the time (except when we wanted to move files anywhere other than Google's cloud; it hated that), but then Google decided to end-of-life it. It stopped updating and eventually started acting weird, and I persuaded her to get a cheap real computer instead when we replaced it, so now she has a basic little laptop running Linux. Even for her, though, there were times she wanted to do something the Chromebook didn't have as its basic repertoire, and there are probably ways we could have made it do them but for practical purposes it was like it just couldn't do it.

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