This poor fella was playing WoW, as you do, when his neighbour let off a .44 Magnum, shooting through the wall, ricocheting off our WoW'ers gaming desk and missing him by a mere 3 inches. I mean, I know this guy was playing Alliance and all, but there's no need for that.

Apparently the neighbour's landlord is 'beginning eviction procedures'.

Come on America. Please remove certifiable lunatics who keeps guns [in bathrooms] from the premises pronto, pls, thx, gg. A person's WoW time should be sacrosanct. Alice Taylor

So I Nearly Got Killed Today... [via Aeropause]

What happens when you get 4500 Scandinavians to a giant LAN party? Why, you have a giant dance-off, of course! Via Watching World of Warcraft comes this shakycam gem: 11-odd gamers on stage, dancing their versions of the WoW character dances, in front of all their peers.

Now that's bravery.

Unfortunately the video is crapola, jogging about and full of enthusiastic zoomage which makes it hard to make out the dancers. Also, most of them are rubbish. However, the chap in at number 2 does a very sharp rendition of the male Night Elf dance (complete with groin-grab, high kick and toe-balance), and then the masterpiece: man at 9:32 in, complete with plastic pointy ears and glow-sticks, does the female Night Elf dance, which isn't far off straight up pole-dancing. Without the pole.

Dude - you pwn.

Dancing Night-Elves At The Gathering [Watching WoW]

> Shout "Where are the Kobolds?"

You hear a voice in the distance. "NE of stream, near lake." You hear another voice in the distance. "Right near lake." You hear another voice in the distance. "LF1M! Need priest!"

> Go NE

World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure [Wired News]

Is World of Warcraft about to get the server enhancements it so desperately needs? Players have been suffering queues, lag and general performance issues for months now, with the complaints sometimes nearing hysterical levels.

Good news just in: Blizzard has apparently put in an order for 1500 Opterons, claims the chap in charge of Voodoo PC: question is, farm expansion, or replacement?

Either way, this can only be good news for residents of Azeroth..

Blizzard Upgrades Its Servers [DailyTech]

There's some funny business going on over at Allakhazam...

Chuck Norris' Hat [thanks Stephanie!]

Blizzard are looking for player-written class guides for the World of Warcraft official website.

If you've written a top notch class guide, and if you fit the requirements...

• Page must be focused entirely on how to play one of the nine classes:
  
• You must host the guide on your own web site
  
• Site must be capable of getting traffic from our web site (estimated 1,000-20,000 hits a day)
  

... et cetera, then lots of lovely Blizzard kudos and traffic could be yours. Get writing.

Ah I kid - some of these World of Warcraft player portraits are amazingly good.

If you happen to be a member of the Forte guild, you can get yours in the queue for 80 gold. If you're not, they're 200 gold. It's also possible that the queue is closed for a while, but who can say...

I'm fond of this note of his:

4.) If your character is an Elf or Human Female you have a chance on hit that I will choose a random clothing, cup size, and position.

You have been warned.

Greg Hoglund has written a program (called Governor) to monitor the program (called Warden) that Blizzard wrote to monitor their users.

He's also written a short open letter: "Blizzard, it is within your right to attempt to make your computer game that way you wish it to be, and to attempt to catch cheaters.", he says, "But, reading the memory of other processes and windows that are not part of the World of Warcraft game client is a violation of privacy."

It's a nice, polite piece of work, and he's offering up his code and source for all to use.