It's almost noon and I still haven't finished the newsletter, so first off, lemme tell ya, Long Covid brain fog is real and it has me increasingly agitated. I got pretty much nothing done this week. I get about two hours of focus early in the day, which is taken up primarily by emails and general maintenance stuff. Then I get brief windows of normal cognition in the afternoon when I can write, maybe. The rest of the day just...drifts away and suddenly I'm thinking about going to bed. Lack of accomplishing anything has me getting more and more grouchy. This sucks. Looking forward to getting my normal brain back someday.

Anyway, to celebrate the radio show and the return of a vague interest in videogames (largely absent since 2015 or so), I purchased a copy of Transylvania (1985), the last videogame from my youth that I have nostalgia enough for to warrant owning a (useless) physical box (contrast with Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear, which I have a lot of nostalgia for, but zero desire to own a physical manifestation of). It joins Zork, Venture, Temple of Apshai Trilogy, Lurking Horror, Rise of the Dragon, Shadowgate and a handful of others on a shelf in my office closet.

Transylvania is a pretty small interactive text adventure accompanied by some fairly crude graphical "illustrations." The shadowy werewolf legitimately frightened me when I was seven, and I still feel an echo of that (similar to the hall monsters from Venture, actually, who still pop up in nightmares on occasion). The game came with two "feelies" as well: a letter exhorting you to save the kidnapped princess and a local newspaper filled with jokes. It's pretty great.

Anyway, thanks to the miracles of technology, you can play it in-browser or grab a file for DOS-box and experience it for yourself!