At a visceral level I hate Art Deco. I'm all for elegance in architecture, but something about it feels so self-aggrandizing, isolating, and hollow. On the other hand, I think Brutalism, when not overdone, is great. A medium sized Brutalist building with a little bit of moss on the outside and an abundance of plants inside, chef's kiss.

A good friend of mine recently released his latest game, Social Caterpillar.

I will choose 3 random people who commented on this post by February 25, 2026, 06:00 UTC (unless you say in your comment that you don't want to join the giveaway)

This is the first time I've done a giveaway like this, but from what I saw online, if you win, I'll have to add you as a friend on Steam and wait a few days until Steam lets me send you a gift (unless someone tells me there's a different way of doing this!). I have no issues - and even expect - that you'll unfriend me once this is done. No hard feelings.

I will either edit this post or make a comment with the winners when they're selected. Will send a private message with my steam username for the friend thing.

Why I'm doing this giveaway?

I just really liked this game (and I enjoy his games overall). It hooked me for way more hours than I thought it would, and I loved the puzzles.

I told him I'd do a giveaway on Tildes, but I didn't know back then that I'd need an invite to join (I was - still mostly am - a lurker). So now that I have an account here, it's time to do it!

This game has a lot more to it than it seems at first glance. If you're still unsure whether the game is for you, but you like what you see on the store page and you like puzzles, click below for a tiny bit more about it. I hid it for those who don't want to read anything more than what's in the store page.

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:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

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.

Not just books from the 1800s or 1900s, but even older. 1400s, 800s, 100s, books from BCE, etc. It can be fiction or non-fiction.

If a small blurb about the book could be provided and its significance that would be great.

Additionally, if you could help direct me or provide guidance on where I can get a hold of the book (digitally or physically), that’d be appreciated.

1

We are the funny men
The laughter men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with mirth. Alas!
Our wavering voices, when

We giggle together
Are loud and senseless
As hyenas in dry grass
Or gales stirring shards of glass
In our dry cellar

Form of clay, color of slick.
Fictitious force, turbulent motion;
Those who have crossed
With eyes darting to and fro,

To death's other kingdom
Remember us -- if at all --
Not as grasping, violent souls
But only as
The funny men

2

Eyes I dare not meet in ads
In death's advertisement kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Blinding light on a broken column
There, is a tube man swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More shrill and more booming
Than a cancelled star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's advertisement kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
(Thinnest phone, cleanest drip, slickest rizz)
On the grass
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer--

Not that final meeting
In the Find Out kingdom

Here you go! I’ve rewritten the text to avoid direct reference to the theme:

III

This is the slop land
This is swamp land
Here, the seed rounds
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a gilded man's hand
Under the twinkle of a parasite star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Fully sure that
We and our money are soon parted.

4

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of choking stars
In this hollow valley
The worms atop our kingdoms' bones.

In this last of meeting places
We wail together
A barbaric yawp
Gathered on this beach of the sunken river

Sightless, unless
The flames reappear
As the perpetual star
Tetraethyllead rose
Of death's Find Out kingdom
The hope only
Of unserious men.

5

Baby shark
Mommy shark
Daddy shark
Grandma shark

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Comedy

                Don’t want to meet your daddy

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Comedy

                Just want you in my Caddy

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Comedy

                Don’t want to meet your mama

Just want to
I’m just
Just want to make you

Grandpa shark
Where’d they go
No one’s here
Sleep again

So here's a dilemma I'm not sure what to do about. It's really minor, and in the long run who cares, but here's the thing:

Today a link was posted whose link is a URL in Japanese katakana characters. Since DNS only supports ASCII characters, those URLs get encoded as punycode. So, the site's URL gets translated from https://マリウス.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ into https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/.

This is a hacky solution from 20 years ago. It works, but nowadays browsers automatically translate "マリウス" into "xn--gckvb8fzb" transparently, so you never really see the "xn--gckvb8fzb". Unfortunately, Tildes' tag system is one of the parts of the site that only accepts roman characters, so there's no way to tag something with like source.マリウス.

So what do we do here? Tagging something with source.xn_gckvb8fzb is obviously not ideal.

In this case, Japanese in particular has a neat and tidy solution. Romanji. Every katakana character is a syllable, and each syllable has another character or pair or characters using English glyphs. So, マ, リ, ウ, ス is: Ma, Ri, U, Su, or "mariusu", the Japanese pronunciation of the Roman name Marius.

So, if we want to transliterate the word phonetically (ie: in Japanese at least, converting the katakana glyphs directly into their romanji equivalents), we should tag it source.mariusu, or if we want to translate it, it should be source.marius.

A lot of other languages with non-roman letters are not going to be as clean since they don't have a clear transliteration of their character set into ASCII, but in the case of Japanese, I dunno, it seems like it's begging to be converted into romanji. I really just don't know though. It's a dilly of a pickle.

ANYTHING must be better than linking to source.xn_gckvb8fzb since that's literally encoded gibberish not meant to be read by humans. Not quite sure what the alternative should be though.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

We are up for another round of nominations for Colossal Game Adventure, Tildes' very own retro video game club!

These nominations will form the ballot for the next round of voting, in which will we choose the next SIX games to play after March's Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls).

Nominations for CGA do not start fresh each time. We rollover the top 50% of nominations from the previous round, and we decay their vote totals by 30%. So, many of the previously nominated games are still eligible to win in the upcoming voting.

Procedural Details

Nominations will be open for 48 hours from the time of this posting.

Anyone can nominate. You do not have to have previously taken part in CGA in order to participate.

Anyone nominating in this topic will be added to the CGA notification list if they're not already on there (unless you request otherwise).

There is no hard definition for "retro." Choose whatever you feel fits that label.

Games that have been nominated in the past but were cut are still eligible for nomination again. They do not get "locked out" of CGA.

Voting will follow in a separate topic, and I will also be trying out a "lobbying" topic this time around to see how that goes. More on that in the comments.

Nomination Process

Everyone has the ability to take one (and ONLY one) official action for the nominations topic.

EITHER: Boost a rolled-over title.

This will add 3 points to the title's rollover points from the previous round.
You will also be able to add points to the game during the voting round.
The purpose of this is to limit new nominations if there are games already in the list that strongly interest you.

OR: Nominate a new title.

This will add a new game/arcade special to the ballot.
An arcade special is a group of shorter/smaller games meant to be played together.
Any new title starts at 0 points.

Nomination Formatting

Please do the following:

Bold your action (boosting/nominating).

If nominating, please link to your title on MobyGames. (You do not need to do this for boosting since the links are already in the list.)

Examples:

Boosting a game:

• Boost: Lode Runner

Nominating a game:

• Nomination: Portal 2

Nominating an Arcade Special:

• Nomination: Windows in the 90s
  Minesweeper
  Chip's Challenge
  JezzBall

It is recommended (but not required) that you share why you are nominating/boosting a particular game as well.

Rollover Titles