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In which our protagonist gets owned by a piece of hardware.
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Mmmyeah.

Sunday night, November 26th. I was typing something up at my computer when the monitor suddenly blanked. A few minutes later, I realized that this problem was beyond my limited ability with computers.

Iepiat: Huh.
Iepiat: No problem.
Iepiat: I’ll just fire up… my trusty old Windows 3.1!

Not really. I used a different computer for the following week. That Saturday, the broken computer was dropped off at a local computer store. A mumbled phone call left on the answering machine the next day informed me that something or other needed replacing. When I got the computer back today, I started it up to find that they erased the hard disk drive. Without asking or backing it up or anything. That is hard disk, with an “H” and a “D” and a what-the-hey what-the-heck-did-you-do. So yeah, I was a bit angry: six years of documents and pictures basically lost. More than a thousand Maple Story screenshots, by the way. The best part about this situation is that I can’t find my early backup CDs.

And that’s why I’ve been absent from MMO Tales for about ten days.

About the computer place: they’ll certainly be receiving a nice call when their shop opens up in the morning. I’m hoping that I’m so computer-illiterate that I missed a simple procedure that’ll restore my files.

…

Hah!

So, since I don’t have any available MMORPGs to actually talk about, I’ll just discuss a past experience.

This happened some months ago. Signing on, I landed in an all-too-familiar map, the Forest of Dead Trees II, commonly known as z2. I said my customary greetings and began to train, pausing every now and then to say something random to the guild or answer a question in buddy chat. Thirty minutes had flown by without anyone trying to steal my map, which set me in quite a good mood. All of a sudden, I saw a Fighter walk quickly from the portal on the right, pass me silently, and move to the left region of the map.

That’s okay, then; I thought to myself, He was just passing through.

I continued to shoot at Coolies, hopping about to avoid their magical attacks. A higher power must have decided that these creatures had spent long enough on the freezing hills of heck, for they were forgiven. I witnessed a miraculous sight as enormous wings erupted from their cursed (that’s cursed with two syllables, I’ll thank ye kindly) backs and they rose, I swear it they rose into the clouds and were lost from sight and I was like oh.em.gee. (omigawsh more italicers).

Now gimme monies so I can build a great, huge, useless building.

Iepiat: Hmm.
Iepiat: I didn’t see anything in the new patch about Coolies now being able to fly.

Did I mention that his character name was a random configuration of letters and numbers? Really now. A blind cat on catnip doing the waltz across my keyboard would be hard pressed to match the random-ness.

YesIthinkwithsemicolons.

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Hah! I just learned from a friend that one of my old buddies, BIackNazguI, started playing again during my two week “break” from Maple. This is excellent news.

This six years of work thing, pshh, it’s just a setback. That which does not kill me makes me older. Erm. Expect more silence while I continue to assess the damage…

Edit: ‘Twas the motherboard. Just remembered now.