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The World of Georic 1989-Present

Monday, May 17, 2021

The Archaeological Reconstruction of My Gaming Record

One of the big things I did after the dead-stop phase of the pandemic last year was drop off my old hard drive at the local computer place to try to recover whatever they could.  I had them start on my Hackmaster GM Toolkit Folder, and those files were successfully recovered.  

The guy promised to keep working on recovering anything, but the drive was near dead when I got what I got, so I've officially written it off.  

There was a lot of miscellaneous crap that would make me wax nostaglic, but the loss  of the drive saddens me on two accounts. 

#1 - Five Eight seasons of my solitaire Dice Baseball Federal League that were never printed to hardcopy.  My 1995-2008 seasons have a proud spot on my bookshelf.  I guess the storyline ends with Boston finally winning the pennant and before they surmounted the mighty Washington Senators as the next dynasty.  Washington becomes a basement dweller with a move to Brooklyn and Baltimore relocates back to Providence, but Atlantic City never goes to Hartford... plus the league expansion of 2016 might have been the breaking point... if the kids hadn't taken away my free time.  

#2 - My Gaming Record.  Crammed on the right sidebar of this blogs is a lot of crazy data.  Figures painted, games purchased, want lists, but one of the craziest thing is the ten plus years of my gaming data.  

Under each year is each game I've played followed by two number (*/*).  The first number is the number of times I've played the game (sessions when it comes to games like Magic), the second is the number of times I gamemastered, moderated, or was teaching someone how to play.  Playing Settlers of Catan?  That's a 1/0.  Teaching Magic to some kids at the store?  1/1.   Running D&D for the group?  0/1.

Here's the scary fact, the 2009 to present on the blog is miniscule.  I had my entire gaming history recorded...

... since 1990

... on that blasted hard drive. 

It survived years of hand writing, more years of floppy disks holding word processor data, then PC floppies, and finally that old computer.  

With hours of waiting in between training sessions and testing sessions at work, I did a little historical research  and digital archaeological digging to reconstruct my gaming record.  I'm never going to recover the minutiae of how many games of Legions of Steel I ran for people back in, but  I could compile when I ran games.  

Those that know my weird gaming calendar know that this is complicated by the Fall con season, so I've done my best to put things into perspective.  

What's posted below is by no means complete.  Just while writing this out, I realized two glaring omissions:  a TORG game circa 2003, a Midnight Massacre game of Fire and Fury pre-kids,  and my entire 90's run of Talislanta.  

Here's hoping my Google Drive survives until I can finagle a hard copy of this.

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