ok.

this is what i'm looking for - and it seems to be obscure.

it's actually a good link because it both explains how to do it and has a response from somebody pointing out that the card will eventually die from write access. while this is true, it is also rather alarmist - the hard drive will eventually die from access, anyways. on top of that, if you have something like 1 gb of ram and 8 gb of internal storage, you can split the swap partition off repeatedly as the drive slowly dies, moving more and more of your internal storage to sd. in the end, you should even be able to boot entirely from sd. but, you'll probably just get a new phone, as it will be five years later and the phone you would have spent $500 on is now $100.

plus, i'd be hacking a $100 phone and not a $500 one.

hrmmmn.

i'm really just trying to budget.

and, i need to be clear: i'm going to wipe this thing down anyways.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/65781/repartitioning-internal-memory-of-android-device