Rebuilding the Spreadsheet From Memory

The laptop didn’t even give me a warning, no slow decline, no ominous fan noise for a week first, it just refused to turn on one Tuesday morning and stayed that way no matter what I tried. I’d copied them back onto an external drive at some point, I was sure I had, except I hadn’t, not since sometime the previous fall. Everything after that point, close to a year of ratings, notes, half-finished thoughts on games I’d meant to write full reviews of eventually, just gone.

I gave myself a week to be annoyed about it and then sat down to rebuild what I could from memory, and that’s when it got genuinely uncomfortable. I could remember playing games I had zero record of rating, remember specific sessions, specific arguments about a rules interpretation, but the actual number I’d assigned at the time, the thing the spreadsheet exists specifically to preserve, was just gone. I’d trust my own memory in the moment, then trust the spreadsheet over my memory later, and now here I was with neither, just a fuzzy sense that I liked something more than a five but less than an eight, whatever that means on a five point scale.

What I ended up doing was more honest than what I’d been doing before, actually. Instead of pretending I remembered a precise number, I started marking reconstructed entries with an asterisk and a rough range instead of false precision. It’s a small thing, an asterisk in a spreadsheet nobody but me reads carefully, but it changed how I think about the whole exercise. The spreadsheet was never really about capturing objective truth, it was about capturing what I thought in a specific moment, and a moment I can’t fully recover deserves an honest question mark instead of a confident number I made up to fill the cell.

I mentioned this to Mara at game night and she asked why I even bother with the spreadsheet at all if my memory is apparently this unreliable anyway. Fair question. The honest answer is that the spreadsheet was never really competing with my memory, it was supplementing it, and I only found that out by losing the supplement and discovering how much I’d quietly been leaning on it without noticing. I used to think I had a decent memory for what I’d read and played. Turns out I have a decent memory for the experience of it, the feeling, the specific moment at a table, but a genuinely bad memory for the number I attached to that feeling three months later. Those are two different kinds of remembering and I’d never had to separate them before.

I’ve got a real backup routine now, obviously, three places instead of one. But I kept the asterisks on the reconstructed rows. Feels dishonest to erase the gap just because I patched around it.