First of all, my name is Mike, but I've been posting online as BruteForce for about six years now. I'm 23 years old; I grew up in Carson City, Nevada, and now I live in San Diego with my wonderful wife, Sara, and our beautiful daughter, Rhiannon. I'm currently serving as an Electronics Technician in the United States Navy.

I've been reading comics since I was about 12; mostly, I'm what you might call a "Marvel Zombie" -- X-Men, Spider-Man, that kind of thing, though I got into Image/Wildstorm fairly heavily in high school. Recently, I've been very impressed with the Ultimate universe, as well as The Authority and Rising Stars.

I've been gaming since my freshman year of high school. Like most people, I started with Dungeons & Dragons. Later, I got into Rifts (along with a lot of other games) for a while, which led to my first true gaming obsession -- Heroes Unlimited. Good stuff, but eventually, the flaws in the Palladium system took their toll on me. Luckily, D&D's third edition was released at about that time. Since then, I've been playing D20 games almost exclusively, and was pretty quick to pick up Mutants & Masterminds when it was released. So far, it's the best supers game I've encountered, and it's been my game of choice ever since.