So, I’m going over to Fabian’s place tomorrow, and he’s insisting that I bring my still-in-development Firefly card game, Plyin’ the Black (apparently people like it – I’m as surprised as anyone). So I fire up Open Office to print out a new copy of the rules. It tries to open the rules document as an ASCII file.
“That’s weird” I think, but I figure that if the .odt file is corrupt, I always have the .pdf version I saved. So I go to open that. No dice, Adobe won’t recognise it as a valid pdf.
Suspecting that something is up, I check out some of the other files in the directory. Then all the files in the directory. They’re all corrupt!
There’s only one explanation. I’ve been got at by the Hands of Blue!
Now normally I’d be in complete despair at this point – months of work down the drain. But I’m actually quite blase about it. All of the core mechanics of the game are in my head, and this gives me the opportunity to start over again without the baggage of all the arbitary rules I made up to get the game working in the first place. So Plyin’ the Black will rise from the ashes! (insert obligatory comments about big damn heroes, doing the impossible and being mighty. Oh and she’s our witch.)
(The only downside is I’ll have to type out all the rules again in an authentic Firefly accent. Last time I was talking like a cowboy for a week!)
In other news I have a new monitor. A 22″ HD LCD, which takes up a lot less room and has a much sharper and brighter image than the decrepit old CRT I was using. I’ve still got to get the resolution and colours completely calibrated, but it’s a major improvement. I’ve finally joined the 21st century! (in terms of monitors at any rate 🙂
