Welcome to BruceWatch, your one reliable and completely, ridiculously, impossibly unbiased source of all things Bruce! We’ve got a busy week ahead of us, and it is crucial that you, the voters, vote for the person that is best suited for this important job. We here at BruceWatch will do our best to bring you the inside scoop on each of the five candidates so that YOU can make the choice that is best for YOUR favorite guild. Let’s get to it!

Greatlich

Greatlich may seem like a perfectly good choice. This is understandable. He’s active on the guild forums, and seems like a nice enough chap – But we here at BruceWatch have got the inside scoop!

Reliable sources have informed us that the dapper Dutchman not only engages in orgies on a regular basis, but blocks emergency exits while doing so. If a fire breaks out at Bruce headquarters, could you trust this man to let you out safely? I think not.

Athuos/Georgie

Georgina has the face of an angel, and would not hurt a fly. Despite our infinite mass of sources, we had tremendous trouble digging up a single piece of dirt on this girl. She is sickeningly sweet, the epitome of the English rose. Or is she? A picture says more than a thousand words..

Of course she wouldn’t hurt a fly – she likes to dress up as them! That’s right. After dark, Georgie likes to don a bumblebee outfit and hit the underground furry scene. Scandalous photos have been seen.

Also, the grapevine has informed us that her boyfriend, already an officer, prefers male companionship - their relationship is a SHAM! Yes, we said it, SHAM!

It’s all a carefully planned ploy, where the ultimate goal is to have both halves of this deceitful couple in positions of power within the guild. I fear for the future of our guild if this becomes reality.

Icarus

Enough said. Do you want an officer who is known for flapping about with wax and feathers on his body? Do you?

Stratos

As already reported, Stratos recently suffered a very public mental breakdown. He ran rampant in a hair salon late at night and demanded to have his head shaved, only to do it himself when the employees of said salon refused to help him.

Today his breakdown resulted in him shaving his own head. Tomorrow, he might shave Riqz. Are you willing to take that risk?

Maremiel

Dedicated gamer. Enthusiastic raider. Obsessed pet collector. This girl is dedicated. Wait, we already used that word. Well, we don’t care. We love her! She joined The Bruces right after rolling horde, and only *cough* left for a teeny tiny bit in order to pursue a raiding career *cough*  but then she came back! And has never even thought about leaving for a single second ever again! And her boyfriend is straight! And she doesn’t dress up as animals! Or wear wax wings and fly too close to the sun!

Maremiel: The obvious choice.

This article has been sponsored by the “Vote for Maremiel campaign”. Thanks for the cupcakes. They were delicious.

24 Comments

‘Sup.

I said ‘SUP fools!

The nominations (”noms”) are in, and a selection of candidates (”cans”) will now be paraded before you like cheap, filthy slaves (”slaves”) in an attempt to secure your vote. Voting will be by secret ballot (”sallot”) and will be done by sending me a PM on the forums (”frumz”). Please just vote for one person. If you vote for more than one person (”merson”) your home will be located and burned to the ground (”home burned to ground”).

n.b. I haven’t checked with these people if they actually want to be officers, but if any of em don’t, they can denominate themselves and people who voted for them can vote for someone else. How fair is that? Amazingly fair, is the answer. So fair it makes me sick.

SICK!

Your nominees are, in alphabetical order:

Athuos aka Georgie
Greatlich
Icarus
Maremiel
Nalgok aka Stratos

When all the votes are in, we’ll count them up and make ourselves two brand spanking new officers. Unless the first person wins by a great big massive margin and there’s no clear second place, in which case we’ll just make one brand spanking new officer and then have some more elections in a few months.

You have one week. Get to it. All this democracy is giving me indigestion.

17 Comments

Bzzz. Bzzzzz. Ugh, get off. It’s a Monday night, I’m answering emails and there’s a fly flitting around my head. They love computers, flies, hover around the screen like it’s some kind of fly version of catnip. It’s the heat, or the light, or I don’t know what it is. Perhaps they love people at computers. Whatever it is that’s so enthralling, I wish it wasn’t, because I’m trying to answer my emails and I don’t want to be hanging around with a fly while I’m doing it.

It disappears. Maybe it’s dead. Good. I finish typing and shut down the PC.

Tuesday night, and I’m mucking around on the internet. Not quite sure where the last hour and a half has gone. That seems to be the way with the internet.

Bzzz. Bzzzzz. Bah. It didn’t die after all. The fly was just resting, taking a break from its busy schedule of eating things, sicking them back up, eating the result and then having a nice little fly around to see who it can irritate. There’s only one person in my house, so that’s who it picks. Great.

I head downstairs and grab a glass and a piece of cardboard. Let’s see who’s boss, huh? Back up I go in search of the creature. It’s on the corner of my monitor. I approach, card in one hand, glass in the other, moving my body with as much stealth as I can muster. I pounce. It escapes. I give chase.

The fly heads into my bedroom with me in pursuit. I follow it round the room, clapping the glass and card together in a fruitless attempt to snatch it in mid air. I leap onto my bed, off the other side, scamper round the edges and then leap back on, and back off. All the scene lacks is Yakkety Sax.
Gotcha! Too slow, fly. I open the window and release it into the night. Perhaps, I think, that’s where it wanted to be all along. Free.

Wednesday, and I’m sat at my computer.

Bzz. Bzzzz. Three guesses.

I don’t know how it got back in. It seems pointless to try and catch it again. Instead, I head to wikipedia and type in “fly”. For the unfamiliar, wikipedia is an internet encyclopaedia. Edited by volunteers, its authority has been called into question, but I wager it knows a lot more about flies than I do. I scroll down the page in search of details of the insect’s life expectancy. Bingo - two weeks, it says. Four weeks if it’s a female in a warm environment. There are details of how to tell a male from a female, but my eyesight isn’t that good.

So I decide to accept the fly. In three-and-a-half weeks, maximum, it will no longer be a problem. Live and let live, I think. I look at it, scuttling around the corner of my keyboard. Maybe I should name it. I do. I call it Steve.

I close down the computer, clean my teeth and head to bed. I leave the lamp on and sit up with a book.

Bzzz. There’s a fly on my bedside table.

“Oh,” I think. “There’s Steve.” It would be wrong to say I felt any affection towards it, now I had given it a name. But I wasn’t annoyed any more.

It doesn’t take much for human beings to recognise facial features. Draw two dots and a line and we’ll see a face, where a computer would see nothing more than two dots and a line. We humanise things. It helps us to understand them, to process the world in a way we can relate to, compartmentalise, care for. In our minds, we make them like us.

The same thing happens when we give them a name.

I look at Steve. You’ve not got long to live, I think. I guess you can’t help wanting company.

Be my guest, buddy. Be my guest.

6 Comments

Freedom! You may think you have it, but do you? Do you really? For too long this guild has laboured under the crushing weight of tyranny. For too long the people have gone without a voice. This year, for the first time in the history of the Bruces, we will break the mould, and bring you - DEMOCRACY!

In a severely truncated and closely monitored form.

This week, I ask you to nominate the people who you would like to see as Bruce officers. Those nominees will then be narrowed down to a select group of the willing and able (using our traditional methods of tyranny) and these candidates will be put forward to a guild vote.

Two posts are open. Feel free to nominate a person for each of them. Please send your nominations to me by PM on the forums.

P.S Tickets now available for the next round of bingo. Mail gold in-game to Bruceybingo. Will run the draw when the prize fund reaches 2,000g.

23 Comments

Reports of our birthday party taking place on Sunday have been greatly exaggerated.

It is, in actual fact, taking place on Monday night. Meet at Grom’Gol from 19:30pm server time. Deeprun Tram action, Bruceybingo and associated mucking about. Romping. Chomping, Rioting. Carries on all night.

Bring fireworks.

4 Comments

Being a Bruce I love a bit of creepy stalking, and if I do say so myself it doesn’t get much better than this.

As of right now, this note is sat on Redstripe’s desk where he works in Leeds:

WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU REDSTRIPE

19 Comments

Three years is pretty fucking impressive.

Party on Sunday.

Be there.

Details to follow.

13 Comments

It’s only taken four months! Turns out that making a website when you know literally zero things about websites takes four months. If I’d have known that at the start, I’d have broken a couple of my fingers so I couldn’t even begin. Plus I’d have got time off work. Bonus.

So, what is RollZero? Well, it’s a place for things I’ve written and am going to write. Bit self-indulgent, but then again fuck it, I made the damn thing. It includes the following lovely stuff:

World of Warcraft
The highlights of all the Brucey site updates from the last two-and-a-half years (I’ve not nicked the ones by anyone other than me). Almost all of them spruced up a bit, with pics and captions and so on.

The Shed
There have been a few of these on omgbruces. It’s a gadgets column I write for a magazine based near me. Don’t let that put you off though. It’s not really about gadgets. It’s a great big collection of rants. Seriously, go and read some of these if you’re bored. Some of them are awesome. Then again, I would think that.

Chad Bradley
A few years back I started sending out ridiculous letters to companies. Contents along the lines of “There’s a shark in my mineral water” or “Your cereal smells like wee.” Lots of them replied. Xynthia scanned them all in for me, and I’m going to be uploading them fairly regularly. Four are up so far as a taster, in the Chad’s Letters section.

Yes
Yes. I’m calling this open beta, I think. There are bits to fiddle around with here and there, “read more like this” links to put in various places, articles to polish, some free space to fill, and the forums - well, I’m happy enough with them right now but they could use a tidy.

Go take a look! Please, in fact, go take a really good look, and let me know what you think. Start populating the comments boards, stick some nonsense in the forums and tell me what I should fix. You lot are the reason I made this thing in the first place - I’d never have got so into it all if I hadn’t enjoyed writing on this guild site so much. I’m a journalist for a living, but ten of your digi-friends saying they like a Brucey news post beats writing for a paper every time. 30,000 homes, they say? How come none of the bastards ever write in except to complain, eh?

Once this baby’s up and running, I can start levelling my flippin character.

15 Comments

Mankind is stupid.  Don’t take that personally, I’m just saying.  We have a system of education that allows us to learn and to think yet some questions we cannot answer.  Is there a God?  What is the soul?  Should I receive sexual gratification from shaving a cat?  These are simple questions we answer at school (for reference:  probably not but you might want to worship just in case; soul is the stuff inside you that isn’t like guts and that; if you like).  More complex questions such as “who is map?”, “when is tree?” and “why is table?” we may never be able to answer.  But one question rises above all others:

“Given the choice, would you rather be given a real Light Sabre, or the ability to web-sling?”

This is the question that has flummoxed scholars throughout the ages.  Sure you may think “well, Light Sabre, duh!”  as you make swishing noises in your bedroom.  But think about it… REALLY think about it, it’s a damn tough question.  I am not offering you the chance to be a Jedi or to have any of Spiderman’s other abilities.  Just what is stated.  So what is owning a Light Sabre without Jedi reflexes?  Could you control it, learn to use it?  Someone could steal it, or you could be arrested in the street for possession of an offensive weapon. That said, bloody hell… a light sabre! 

Then you come to web slinging.  You would truly be a superhero with such powers… but you can’t climb walls, and I am not offering super strength, so could you actually swing from place to place?  Maybe you could work out and get strong but who knows.  What if you were taken away for medical research?

Give this some thought and come back with your answer.  There is no correct answer; however bonus gold stars will be given to those who really further the debate rationally rather than just stating which they’d prefer.

14 Comments

Yo peasents!

I took some time out from grindin ma g to put dis up 4 u all.  Hope it help u be less poor.

Peace!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hxTFvreBA_k

10 Comments