What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
I am looking for a Buy-It-For-Life pen. I've had the Parker Jotters for years and love them, but I am in need of something with a little longer life expectancy on the barrel.
My first thought was James Brand The Burwell, however I am just now really diving into the BIFL Pen world and curious on what you guys suggestion / use.
Assume the money cap of $100 for now, unless you have some out of this world amazing option over that cap.
Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 26.1.2)
Verification site: https://tildes.nore.gg
BlueMap: https://tildes.nore.gg/map/
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Plugins:
/co inspect)The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.
We recommend you install our mod web-chat so that you can chat while in your web browser. It turns the server into an old-school chat room.
The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:
| Question | Survey opens | Survey closes |
|---|---|---|
| Vote for the next 4 surveys | ||
| What is your gender identity? | 2026-05-31 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-07 10:00 UTC |
| What's your favorite video game? | 2026-06-07 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-14 10:00 UTC |
| How optimistic are you about the future? | 2026-06-14 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-21 10:00 UTC |
| How often do you visit/read Tildes? | 2026-06-21 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-28 10:00 UTC |
Another week, another survey! Now that the next four weeks have been voted on and we know what's on the docket, we start off with the top voted question: What is your gender identity?
Special thanks to @TaylorSwiftsPickles and @DefinitelyNotAFae for helping with figuring out the survey! I could not have done it without them! <3
Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.
Thank you all for participating!
Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!
Quick links:
11 participants played 9 bingo cards and moved 43 games out of their backlogs!
There were three bingo wins. Congratulations to u/CannibalisticApple, u/kfwyre, and u/Wes! 🎉
There was one ✨⭐️ HONORARY BINGO ⭐️✨ for u/aphoenix.
There was one betrayal. u/Wes will go on trial following the conclusion of this event
Y'all are going to have to wait on the game list. I got my allergy shots today and they wreck me, so I don't have the energy to link up everything right now. I'll get to it tomorrow. Sorry!
Game list:
11 participants played 10 bingo cards and moved 37 games out of their backlogs!
There was one bingo win. Congratulations to u/ShroudedScribe! 🎉
Game list:
11 participants played 9 bingo cards and moved 28 games out of their backlogs!
All but one are listed above.
Is he still Mellow? Or did he join the Motivateds?
He played three different games, which seems very motivated...
...but Mellow is also a state of mind, a pace, a vibe.
With whom will he stand?
Game list:
⚔️🛡️ Battle lines have been drawn. 🛡️⚔️
Calm, easygoing, relaxed (<3 games played this week)
Driven, energized, results-oriented (≥3 games played this week, or, like, only one game played but for a LONG time)
Who will come out on top? Which team will reign supreme? What metric will we even use to determine what counts as a win? STAY TUNED.
11 participants played 10 bingo cards and moved 24 games out of their backlogs!
Game list:
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
About every six weeks, I go on a "stock the pantry" shopping trip to buy long-keeping items and non-perishables in quantity - cat food and litter, Costco, etc. After two hours of shopping yesterday, I was a little shocked to realize I'd spent half of my take-home pay on a trip that previously was about 25% less expensive. No one item had drastically increased in price - everything had just gone up that much.
[I'm also smarting because my primary care physician announced she was switching to a concierge care model, and I just made the first quarterly payment. U.S. healthcare sucks so badly that I can't take a chance on the two-year waitlists for in-network primary care M.D.s who provide 10-minute "annual exam" visits in my area.]
I'm dropping subscription services, buying cheaper conventional food instead of organic, getting generic personal care products instead of brand names and using less of them, cooking even more at home, thinking about making my own cat food, skipping buying pretty flowers for outdoors this year... and still feeling like the budget isn't going to keep stretching.
I know a great many aspects of Western lifestyles aren't sustainable, and I've tried to do my part to minimize material consumption. But there are so many expectations that you'll pay for perhaps excessive shelter (we didn't need a house the size we have, but it was what was available and affordable), have a car for work, be able to pay for services for things you don't have time, skill, or physical capacity to do yourself, and other monetary drains. I'm losing some sleep.
What are you doing to cope with exorbitant rents/mortgages, skyrocketing utility and grocery bills, extravagant medical costs, unaffordable childcare and services?
Do you feel like your quality of life has declined, due to missing luxuries, anxiety, fewer opportunities to connect with friends and family, or anything else?
Open rant here.
I was talking with a friend about recent events that seemed eerily suspicious to me, and was wondering if all of you might have any similar experiences.
(Preemptively tagging this as politics. If anything in this thread is deemed malicious or inflammatory, let me know and I'll delete the thread)
With Google search going AI-first, I'm really interested in trying it out. But I don't know anyone IRL who's used it.
Kagites of Tildes, what do you think of the search subscription product? Do you find the privacy satisfactory? And for bonus points, how do you find the anti-AI ("slop-stop") features?
This is a monthly thread for those who need it. Vent, share your experiences, ask for advice, talk about how you are doing. Let's make this a compassionate space for all who may need one.
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
I've made an effort to read some more poems this year and always enjoy finding out any more when I can. In the UK you can find anthologies of "The Nation's Favourite Poems" and "The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems" et alia by the BBC, which is where I've learnt most of my new ones this year. It'd be great to see what poems have left an impression on you this year.
For brevity, I'll put a short one here and then two longer ones I discovered this year down in the comments.
Two Cures for Love - Wendy Cope
Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.
The easy way: get to know him better.
Hello Tildes.
I feel like i have movie fatigue, i don’t feel like i manage to get hyped for new movies.
Do anyone of you have any recommendations for older movies, lets say 2010 and older. It can be any genre.
Can go really old as well, i really enjoyed 12 Angry Men.
Thank you very much in advance!
Yarrr! Now it be me... [ahem] Sorry, we're out of Pirates!. Now it's ACTUALLY my time to post! Let's set the scene. Looking for a nice summary last month, I found this one from TCRF:
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is a Castlevania game that, shock, isn't about one of the Belmonts! Instead, we get some white-haired emo kid that happens to have the ability to absorb souls.
... Thanks, TCRF. I'll spoiler the writeup for the sake of scrolling through twice.
Unfortunately, as a slap in the face to my thirties, the GBA is a decidedly proper "retro" console. That shouldn't really be a surprise, though, as it's a distinctly 16-bit console with many parallels to SNES hardware. Sampled audio, mode 7 graphics... But only a little 240x160 screen. Despite that, a few companies managed to pack in some very robust experiences on the hardware.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is the third GBA Castlevania entry; before it came Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance. At the time, these were pretty well-received - Circle was nominated for a few awards and sold ~500k copies. Harmony wasn't quite as universally acclaimed, but sold a respectable 120k in America. It flopped in Japan.
That said, nowadays the first two titles aren't esteemed quite as well. Circle is a very polarizing title. Some appreciate the mechanics and exploration, while others detest it for some awful control scheme decisions. The GBA display did not suit its dark color palate well, and playing it on original hardware without a backlight is asking for eye strain. Since it was made by a different team than the contemporary Castlevania devs headed by Koji Igarashi, he swept Circle under the rug when it came to establishing a Castlevania timeline. (I have not played it myself yet, though I suspect my wrists are not ready for the impending RSI of a double-tap dpad run command.)
Where Circle's experimental bits get love, Harmony of Dissonance has really not aged well for many. Igarashi was looking to get a Symphony of the Night experience in a mobile form factor by design, but this meant a pretty conservative approach. He unfortunately left the comparison open - at a time when you can play both games on the same device - to call Harmony "SotN at home". The aesthetics are kind of nutty as well; the team flew in the opposite direction of Circle by making things - especially Juste Belmont - glow with a very garish set of vibrant blues, reds, and greens, on top of purple and sky blue backgrounds. This was to REALLY stand out without a backlight. Boy do they. The soundtrack was also compressed to save room on the cartridge, leading to a reputation as one of the worst Castlevania soundtracks in a pretty musically-storied franchise. (With some proper sampling, I love it! Played back on the little high-pass GBA speaker, though, stuff like this really grates.)
Igarashi and his team had another shot on the platform. This time, they nailed something special in the coffin.
Aria takes place in the year 2035, quite farther ahead than anything else in the series. Japanese transfer student and fashionista boy band dreamboat Soma Cruz is hanging out with his friend and shrine maiden Mina Hakuba to observe a solar eclipse. In doing so, he finds himself warped to the eclipse itself, where Dracula's Castle has been imprisoned. There, an enigmatic man introduces him to his unknown power - the dominion over monsters' souls to use for himself. Trying to find his way out of the castle, he meets a few other mysterious figures who are there for various reasons and agendas... I'll leave the rest of the plot to you to discover.
Now, we're not quite at 2035. (I think bell bottoms are back? I don't see the fur coats and flame boots yet.) However, it is 2026 now, and much like the cycle of Dracula's castle, last year's most hyped release was a 2D Metroidvania! Konami just announced the first 2D Metroidvania in a very long time, and they and the Dead Cells dev team will be fighting a forest which they all themselves planted. But looking backwards, despite over two decades of iterative work on this genre, Aria has plenty that stands out - not just against Castlevania's run of six games over about seven or eight years, but arguably still today in a very crowded genre.
First off, this game is eight megabytes small. It's nipping at its big brother Symphony's heels in scope, despite it being a little over one percent of SotN's CD file size, and some crazies like me still prefer it. The team made damn good use of that space after learning their mistakes from Harmony.
Despite that little size, it's a memorable adventure! I hope you enjoy it. I find Aria's main strength is setting a pace and size which it meets and rarely over- or under-stays. It's also an aesthetic crown jewel for the GBA platform; the colors still accommodate the hardware, but there's much more mastery of the system. Flowing water, the flickering moon, bats flying off in the distance... It captures the gothic feel of the castle in a more subtle way. And while I'm fond of Harmony's, uh. Dissonance, the sound design is much tighter here. Some little bits of lore and character interactions help color the adventure, and it creates plenty of space for your head to fill in the gaps, too. (Konami! J prequel when??)
The game has a number of neat secrets that I'll let you discover. So - I'll leave you to it!
...Or, if you'd like, I won't! Since Aria isn't the most obscure game, some of you may have played it. With that - or, to kick off some discussion of the game's flaws - I'd like to pivot into a new topic here!
Aria of Sorrow is great, but there are a few rough edges. Notably, the stats are a little fucky - Wit barely influences item or soul drop rate. Int is also a little weak, not influencing your bullet souls much. The colors still acquiesce to the mix of GBA and GBA SP screens, a bit too washed on modern displays. Weapon balance is a bit off, due to one particularly dominating choice.
Of course, with that 8 MB filesize, numerical problems are just a hex edit away! Bump some values around and you maybe can "solve" these problems. But is that better? Worse? In line with the developers, or a bastardization of their vision? The most powerful tool in the hands of modern video game players? Does it ruin a shared conversation of art, or does it stoke it?
For what it's worth, I personally fell off Super Metroid about three times until I applied a patch that gave Samus movement closer to the GBA games. Modding sometimes just opens up options or tastes to us - and I think when it comes to pure enjoyment, go buck wild. So I invite people to try it and see what you think!
As always, I'm a slut for randomizers and Aria rando seems fairly robust. But since I suspect I will eventually play that in Archipelago many times, I think instead I'm going to try a slew of new hacks and throw them together to see what happens. Weapons modifications! Color palate changes! Vegan items? Sure, why not! I'll post what I go with in the end.
As always, mark ya spoilers as such with the following text block:
<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>
Spoiler text goes here.
</details>
A couple years ago, Konami released the Castlevania Advanced Collection with Circle, Harmony, the SNES version of Dracula X, and Aria. This is pretty much the only way to legally obtain Aria nowadays - and if I'm not mistaken, it includes the .gba ROM in case you'd like to play it in a way other than the official emulator. (Someone fact check me on that...)
The main purpose of this topic is to get people up and running with the game. As such, it's recommended that you:
Another purpose of this topic is to revisit the game and its time period:
Do you have any memories or associations with this game itself?
What about its system or era?
What aspects of retro gaming were common at the time?
What other games from the same time period are you familiar with?
What are you expecting from this game in particular?
Which Castlevania game has the best Death fight?
Colossal Game Adventure (CGA) is Tildes' retro video game club.
Each month we will play a different retro game/games, discuss our thoughts, and bask in the glorious digital experiences of yesteryear!
Colossal Game Adventure is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure. It's one of the most influential games of all time, one of the first text-based interactive games, and one of the first games to be shared online.
What do we want to do with this group? Play influential games; interact with each other through text; and share the love for retro games online!
It also abbreviates to CGA (because we love chunky pixel art), and its name communicates the Colossal amount of fun and excitement that we have with retro video Games in our shared Adventure of playing them together.
No. Participation is open to all.
There is a Notification List that will get pinged each time a new topic goes up. If you would like to join that list, please PM u/kfwyre.
Each month will have a focus game or games that will guide our discussions. Beyond that, there are no restrictions. The philosophy of CGA is to play in a way that works for you!
This means:
If you have already played a game and want a different experience:
There is no wrong way to participate in CGA, and every different way someone participates will make for more interesting discussions.
Each month the Insert Cartidge topic will be posted on the 1st, while the Remove Cartridge topic will be posted on the 28th.
Nomination and voting topics will happen in March and September (every 6 months).
Schedules are also posted then.
All CGA topics are available using the colossal game adventure tag.
Inserting and removing cartridges are our retro metaphor for starting and stopping a given game or games.
The Insert Cartridge topic happens at the beginning of the month and is primarily about getting the game up and running.
The Remove Cartridge topic happens toward the end of the month and is primarily about people reflecting on the game now that they've played it.
There are no hard restrictions on what has to go in either topic, and each can be used to discuss the game, post updates, ask questions, etc.
The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:
| Question | Survey opens | Survey closes |
|---|---|---|
| How old are you? | ||
| What country do you live in? | ||
| What country were you born in? | ||
| What languages can you speak? | ||
| Pineapple on pizza? | ||
| Vote for the next 4 surveys | 2026-05-24 18:00 UTC | 2026-05-31 10:00 UTC |
For this week's survey I went over the list of questions you submitted and picked a number of them that would be interesting (and easy to visualize). Now you get to choose which 4 you'd like to see next!
You may also notice this week's survey doesn't look quite like the others from the past. That's because I've reworked the frontend of the surveys so I can make it look and work however I want. :P No longer bound by what n8n's Form funtionality provides!
For now I've chosen to get "close enough" to the look of the past surveys however in the coming weeks I will likely start changing it to look and feel more like how Tildes itself does.
This change also makes it so there's 0 JavaScript involved in the form page, woo! Hopefully that will help those who've had issues submitting their responses (like the submit button infinitely spinning). If anyone encounters issues do let me know! I'll try to fix them. :)
Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.
Thank you all for participating!
Thank you to all the 115 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results! And the next four surveys we will do are:
Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)
Question for those interested, what would be a good way to pose the next question "What is your gender identity?"
I have some ideas but I'd like to hear other people's thoughts too since I think historically this has been one of the more debated questions in the demographics surveys. And I think this one's an important one not to mess up. Let me know!
Hey all!
I'm currently cleaning out the basement and rearranging some things after my brother in law has moved out. He spent the better part of every afternoon down here working out and (I'm assuming) sweating (figuratively) gallons. I pulled the mats up to move em around and was hit with a deep earthy smell which made me IMMEDIATELY panic. There was only one super dark spot which was immediately washed off with warm soapy water and steel wool. There are other places that don't look too bad, but I am seeing markings on the floor elsewhere that match the pattern of the interlocking mat.
I'd like to keep working out down here, but I'd also like to not cause mold problems in my own house. Can anyone think of a way to essentially insulate the mat from the cement floor without creating a different problem where the plastic bottom ALSO creates an environment for the mold to grow? It's also possible that I'm WAY blowing this out of proportion...
I'll include pics on a follow up post
Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!
If you did not participate in Week 1 but want to start this week, that's fine!
Reminder: playing bingo is OPTIONAL.
Quick links:
11 participants played 10 bingo cards and moved 37 games out of their backlogs!
There was one bingo win. Congratulations to u/ShroudedScribe! 🎉
Game list:
11 participants played 9 bingo cards and moved 28 games out of their backlogs!
All but one are listed above.
Is he still Mellow? Or did he join the Motivateds?
He played three different games, which seems very motivated...
...but Mellow is also a state of mind, a pace, a vibe.
With whom will he stand?
Game list:
⚔️🛡️ Battle lines have been drawn. 🛡️⚔️
Calm, easygoing, relaxed (<3 games played this week)
Driven, energized, results-oriented (≥3 games played this week, or, like, only one game played but for a LONG time)
Who will come out on top? Which team will reign supreme? What metric will we even use to determine what counts as a win? STAY TUNED.
11 participants played 10 bingo cards and moved 24 games out of their backlogs!
Game list:
I showed you my internal server error plz respnd Jokes aside, @Deimos I actually am interested in a postmortem if you've got the time and energy.
Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).
Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.
But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.
So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?
(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)
Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!
Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”
Rules:
If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.
All previous Save Point topics
If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.
This is the place for casual discussion about our pets. Photos are welcome, show us your pet(s) and tell us about them!
Once more I come to you with this eternal annoyance of mine, that just won’t go away, with regard to 100%ing games:
I own a Switch 2. It’s my one and only entertainment device (I don’t watch shows, movies, or do anything else).
I already limit myself to only buying Switch 2 games (meaning, no Switch 1 or classics on NSO), so I don’t get overwhelmed with all the options, but good new games come out so quickly now, and there’s so many that I am dying to play, that I’m still feeling like I can barely keep up.
I never buy a new game (even if on discount) before I roll the credits on the one that I am currently playing. That would kill me, to just have them sitting there, on my digital shelf, collecting dust.
For me, anywhere between 20 to 40 hours with one game is ideal, but many of the kinds of games that I enjoy and buy take more than 50 or even 100 or more hours to 100%. I don’t buy them because they’re huge. I buy them because I like their worlds, their stories, and/or their mechanics. If I chose my games based on how long it takes to roll the credits or 100% them, then I’d probably not play almost any modern games.
By the time I roll the credits, I usually feel ready to move on, I feel satisfied with how much I got to experience that world, story, and/or mechanic, but if I do move on, then I also feel bad for not 100%ing the game. It’s some kind of OCD or “all-or-nothing” mental issue that I have. I don’t know.
I guess there’s nothing that I can do about it, because I’m even less interested in grinding for hundreds of hours to 100% a game. The magic and newness of whatever world, story, and/or mechanics a game has to offer have usually worn off by the time I roll the credits, so I would just be forcing myself to check off a list of chores and that’s not fun at all for me.
By that time, there’s also usually a new game that I am dying to play anyway.
So, the choice is between leaving games behind without 100%ing them, or playing two or three games a year, slowly and tediously chipping away at them. The new experiences tip the scale for me.
How about you?
I just wish that I could make this nagging feeling in the back of my head go away and accept that moving on from a game that I didn’t 100%, is OK.
That being said, on occasion, I play a game that is designed to be 100%able on the first playthrough, and those are by far my favorites. Very few games are like that anymore though, which I find sad.
Edit: A short poem I made (with some inspiration from ChatGPT) to help me get over my desire to 100% games. I entitle it, “An OCD Gamer’s Mantra”.
Credits rolled, story told.
New adventures shall unfold.
Rolled the credits, closed the quest.
Move on and discard the rest.
Credits rolled, I’ve seen the end.
Loose threads I need not to mend.
Rolled the credits, let it be.
The next great game is calling me.