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Sep. 10th, 2014 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckIt's time to sign up to run a game at UCon. The hitch is that Scott has lost access to the hard drive on which he was working with our LARPs. He was updating the files, taking them from AppleWorks into other formats that work with our current system. This has been complicated to do because, for each game, we have upwards of thirty documents that combine graphics and text. We can recreate those documents in Pages, but we can't open them with Pages to do the conversion, and AppleWorks is gone. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cherydactyl found a program that can convert those documents into its own proprietary format, but we don't consider that a good long term solution.
Scott installed a second hard drive in his laptop (in place of his CD/DVD drive) and kept that working under a system wherein AppleWorks would still function. He'd converted about half of the games when the drive stopped working. We don't know if the drive failed or if the connections to the drive failed. I don't know what sort of backups he kept. We have a TimeCapsule, but I don't know if he was backing up that drive. Surely he wouldn't have been foolish enough not to?
If Scott can't retrieve the data from the drive, I will have to do a lot of work to get a LARP ready in time for UCon. Those documents are all of the possessions and special abilities for all of the characters (we used to use index cards that I wrote up by hand. This is infinitely easier, even with the troubles around format). The hitch is that, if I have to recreate the files from scratch, I will have to immerse myself really deeply in the game. I wrote it so long ago that I don't remember who should have what abilities or possessions. With the files available, I can review the game on a more superficial level. Without the files, I have to dig deep and try to balance out who has what so that nobody's too powerful or too weak.
A more minor thing about signing up for UCon-- I want to rerun a LARP set in ancient Egypt, but I can't remember what I called it way back when. I didn't save the title anywhere. I merely called the folder for the game 'Egypt' even though I usually use the name of the game to label the folder. All of my LARPs have names that incorporate the word 'plot' because my system is called PlotLuck. I've used things like Family Plot, Plot in the Dark, and License to Plot. Any suggestions for an appropriate plot name for a game set in Egypt's 4th Dynasty?
cherydactyl found a program that can convert those documents into its own proprietary format, but we don't consider that a good long term solution.Scott installed a second hard drive in his laptop (in place of his CD/DVD drive) and kept that working under a system wherein AppleWorks would still function. He'd converted about half of the games when the drive stopped working. We don't know if the drive failed or if the connections to the drive failed. I don't know what sort of backups he kept. We have a TimeCapsule, but I don't know if he was backing up that drive. Surely he wouldn't have been foolish enough not to?
If Scott can't retrieve the data from the drive, I will have to do a lot of work to get a LARP ready in time for UCon. Those documents are all of the possessions and special abilities for all of the characters (we used to use index cards that I wrote up by hand. This is infinitely easier, even with the troubles around format). The hitch is that, if I have to recreate the files from scratch, I will have to immerse myself really deeply in the game. I wrote it so long ago that I don't remember who should have what abilities or possessions. With the files available, I can review the game on a more superficial level. Without the files, I have to dig deep and try to balance out who has what so that nobody's too powerful or too weak.
A more minor thing about signing up for UCon-- I want to rerun a LARP set in ancient Egypt, but I can't remember what I called it way back when. I didn't save the title anywhere. I merely called the folder for the game 'Egypt' even though I usually use the name of the game to label the folder. All of my LARPs have names that incorporate the word 'plot' because my system is called PlotLuck. I've used things like Family Plot, Plot in the Dark, and License to Plot. Any suggestions for an appropriate plot name for a game set in Egypt's 4th Dynasty?
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Date: 2014-09-10 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 09:14 pm (UTC)The last I knew, we could still open AppleWorks word processing documents using Pages. It just doesn't work on graphics documents even though Pages has the capability to make such documents. I think we already converted all of word processing documents that we care about, so they're less pressing than these other things.
So thank you for the offer.
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Date: 2014-09-10 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 06:53 pm (UTC)Somewhere, we have an archive of convention books, so I know the data exists.
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Date: 2014-09-10 09:52 pm (UTC)I do remember the game as being one of the last few that we did.
By the way-- The e-mail asking me to sign up to run an event was missing a key bit of information. It would help to know when UCon is this year. As this is the first I've heard about the convention this year, that's not a bit of data I have already at my fingertips.
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Date: 2014-09-11 01:19 pm (UTC)Ack. The dates are Nov 14-16. I have played that game and I know who I played, not by her name, but by her, um, office.
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Date: 2014-09-15 01:58 pm (UTC)I think the names for that game are particularly hard to remember because they're not names that our 21st century, American ears are used to hearing.
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Date: 2014-09-10 07:56 pm (UTC)Plot of the Pharaohs? Pyramid Plot? Mummy's Plot?
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Date: 2014-09-15 01:59 pm (UTC)