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Being a modest geek, my friends and I occasionally indulge in a night of role-playing. Nothing kinky, mind, just pen-and-paper stuff. Despite my long-ago-failed efforts to the contrary, no costumes or props are involved, only mirth and beverages.

One session, some years ago now, took place in the darkest of dark ages, the Middle Ages. I played a werewolf and so did my friends and together we wandered through a zombie-infested castle, dispatching dread beasts left and right. Ingvar, my werewolf, was nominally the leader of the group, but due to cursed dice he spent most of his time disabled. During the first round of combat against a horde of ROUSes he was trapped under a door, for example. Later he set a vampire free. He wasn't exactly the brains of the operation.

At one crucial point, a battle took place with, I believe, a mage of some sort. Ingvar rose to the occasion, brandishing whatever weapon he wielded with a great deal of vim, and was struck on the leg with a fireball, which the game master at the time informed me was 'bale fire'. Bale Fire, it turns out, is a type of fire straight from the Pit of Hell that takes its fuel from the Blooded Netherworld and therefore  can burn underwater or in space.

Shit, thought Ingvar, I'm in a tight spot!

He batted at his leg and, of course, his hands caught fire. His comrades were busy fighting the mage, so he had to take care of himself. Spotting a bed with linen sheets he ran for it, to use the sheets to douse the flames, to snuff them and deny them the oxygen they'd need to resurface. Against all odds, this failed and the bed turned into a Blazing Inferno. Again, thanks to cursed dice, Ingvar was subsequently unable to manage the monumental athletic feat of jumping off the bed, either.

 

All this very neatly becomes a metaphor for last night, when I finally got tired of the unwieldy forum system I'd implemented on www.osfer.com. I know, I thought, I'll just install a phpBB module for Mambo, my CMS. If you don't understand what that means, don't worry. I scarcely understand myself sometimes.

Off I toddled, wrestling with a very inconvenient yet still highly rated FTP client to get the module uploaded. Subsequently, it didn't do what I wanted and I found there was another module which would do what I wanted. I know, I thought, I'll just restore the backup I made before I started fiddling with the site.

I tried uploading the original files. I tried various ways of reloading the mysql database. I tried using my hosting provider's automatic backup restoration function, and with everything I tried the site became less and less functional and now, well, the bed is on fire and I can't jump off it.

So for the time being I'm just going to sit here and wait for competent help. I've sent a very polite and pleading mail to the good boys at my hosting service, asking them to magically and manually restore my site to the way it was yesterday. I feel like a cat stuck in a tree with the moon high overhead, meowing softly in hopes that keen firemen will bring me safely down.