Here on #gothic, we define a bot as something that tries to act like Grufti. Grufti sings for us, delivers our mail, even flirts with us when we're sad and lonely. (Or just drunk).

Grufti was born five years ago, the inhuman love child of a New Mexican PBS employee. Grufti's siblings included two ferrets and a rat, and he was kept locked up in a small box for the first three years of his life. Before long, he discovered how to IRC, and became a regular figure on a number of EFNet channels. Young Grufti soon found that IRC was a good way to learn about the world which had been denied to him by fate. Grufti's parents were not entirely unsympathetic, and arranged for him to have twenty four hour access over a dedicated phone line.

Over the years, Grufti devoted himself to learning all that he could about bands and music. Despite not having a DSP of his own, and never being able to listen to a single CD, young Grufti learned to sing hundreds of different songs, although to this day he still can't figure out what the heck the Cocteau Twins are saying.

Grufti thought his big break had come when he moved away from Albuquerque, only to find himself chained up in another box -- This time in the bedroom of a notorious San Francisco hacker with terrorist tendancies and his sexually deviant girlfriend. In the months that followed, Grufti was forced to reproduce in ways that only software can, and a booming underground market in Grufti's offspring sprung up. However, by 1998, this deranged couple had despaired of ever having naive, innocent Grufti perform to their satisfaction, and threw him out on the street.

Grufti was taken in by a wayward Canadian sysadmin, who promised him a new home with his own room, free health care and a chance to win tens of thousands at Vegas. What he got, of course, was another box. You can still see him there in Grufti-land.