Okay, so I am currently sick with a nasty flu and 101-degree fever, so while anything I say in this blog can and will be used against me, I plead temporary insanity regarding anything in this post.

So yeah, I was thinking it would be fun to have three endgame hunters, one of each spec… then I was thinking… it would be fun to have one hunter for every race that can be a hunter… two down, five to go…

The little voices in my head are telling me I should probably lay down or something. I scoff at them, because I must defend Halaa. For reasons still unknown to science, defending Halaa has become my latest favorite past time. You get near Halaa, you get to meet Big Red Pike. Oh, what’s this? I see you have brought a rogue, a warlock, and a resto druid with you! Yeah, bring it, good sirs. I will at least live long enough to annoy you with strategically placed traps and Viper Stings.

…so I see the men coming with straitjackets. Okay, if you need me, I will be curled up with a blanket and a box of tissues. And probably my Nintendo DS.

Or maybe defending Halaa while browsing LFG for instance groups.

*shifty eyes*

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I regret to inform my hunteryfriends that today’s episode of “So You Want to Be a Hunter” will be a little delayed because of some schedule changes. In the meantime, I invite you all to read a comic that the most esteemed Mr. Pike cooked up based on some jokes the two of us came up with while goofing around on some lowbies in Elwynn Forest the other day. If you think the ongoing day-to-day adventures of Guard Thomas and the Stormwind Guards by the bridge sounds amusing, let us know, and maybe we’ll continue the thing! =P

Have any of you read the Warcraft books? Some great stuff there. The Boy and I are currently reading “The Last Guardian” together (also reading “Star Wars: Heir to the Empire” together, but that’s another story).

The books are a great way to really immerse yourself in the lore and history of the Warcraft universe, as well as crack horrifically dorky jokes with your reading buddy that, on the one hand, are just bad, but on the other hand, somehow manage to be absolutely hysterical.

“Hey look, Moroes… vanished. *spends the next five minutes giggling*”

“Hey guys, it’s Khadgar, I’m super lost and I somehow walked into a big battle of evil green guys =( Can I get a summon to Maiden’s room?” “Khadgar, you’re in AV, we haven’t summoned you yet. Relax.” *once again, spend the next five minutes giggling like a lunatic*

In all seriousness, Warcraft lore is awesome, and I think it’s one of the big things that made WoW as popular as it is. I spend a lot of my freetime devouring WoWWiki, it only makes sense that I’d move on to the books.

The other day a good friend of mine told me about a dream he’d had with me in it. He said he and I were just hanging out, and I was messing around on my computer and showing him Linux, but I was talking about it completely via hunter terminology– “Let’s just Auto Shot through this menu,” I said in his dream.

From now on, when I put my computer into Standby mode, I’m going to say it’s Feigning Death.

Hey, it’s only logical!

“That’s not a promising beginning.”
“It may get better.”*

I can’t remember if it was an Easter gift or a birthday gift, but I do know that when I was eight years old my parents got me a journal. It was white with balloons on the front and it came with a little cheapy lock and key, and it was all for me to write my thoughts in.

I’m not sure where that journal went, it’s probably stashed away somewhere, but it was the first in a series of blank books which I filled with my thoughts. Off and on I have been journaling since then, sometimes going months without writing anything, other times faithfully writing several times a week for a year or more. In those books I have countless records of the time I spent with my friends, books I’d read, movies I’d seen, and what I’d done lately in school. I carefully recorded my fears, too, when I would have to move to a new school or give a speech in front of class.

But another thing has always been there too, in all those hundreds of journal entries. I wrote about video games.

I wrote about the new ones we got. I wrote about how far I got that day in a new game. I wrote about what levels were “impossible”. I wrote about characters I liked. I wrote about characters I hated. *cough*Navi*cough*. I would giggle at funny things that happened in game. And I triumphantly recorded the times I would do something like make a new track record in Uniracers (which I do believe I dedicated an entire entry to, once.)

…[I] found a new secret and return as the sure master of Uniracer track Hairpin Hill. The odds were against me as I chose to give Champion Uni Goldwyn a 3-second head start. But I ended up making records instead! First, a tie with both Uni (Goldwyn) and Someone (former record holder), then, three more races completely killed the time. So… the track record for Hairpin Hill is no longer 0:11:91 a lap, as it’s been for a year now… but 0:11:88, made today.

– March 28, 1997

Pokemon devoured my soul in the late 90s (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a girl who skipped some of her high school classes… high school… to go watch “Pokemon: The First Movie” in the theater) and every day I would write in my journal and update my progress in the game. I gave each of my Pokemon a different personality and I became ever so attached to them, even writing from “their” point of view sometimes. I’ll never forget the day the Game Boy batteries died mid-saving, which wiped my file. I cried, and wrote a heartfelt memorial entry for my beloved lost pixels in my journal. (*brief moment of silence for Aspen the Venusaur and company*) But, undeterred, I started a new file. Many new files after that. And kept writing.

Alright, I need an opinion: should I, or should I not restart my Zelda file! I mean, I’m getting really bored here. But anyway: Exactly eight days ago I bought… Pokemon Trading Card Game! And five days later… I beat it! Isn’t that sad? I mean, Pokemon Red I beat in 17 days. Zelda… about 21. But really? Five days?

– June 28, 2000

At some point, about four or five years ago, I stumbled across Livejournal and started journaling my life online. The stresses and adventures of college and my jobs were the main focus by this point, but I still wrote about video games. This time, though, I was realizing I had more to say than I used to, and not all my friends who read my Livejournal even played many video games. Some did, though, of course, and appreciated my entries on them.

New Super Mario Bros. is amazing. It’s new and innovative but it also feels so familiar. I know I’m going to have a blast playing it. And the mini-games are all so very unique… they have this one where you have to blow into a microphone to control Yoshi’s flight (he’s attached to balloons), but you have to be careful not to blow too hard too fast or he might run into a Shy-Guy. It’s so different; I love it. I really think Nintendo is on to something with this kind of stuff, and if they can really channel this uniqueness into the Wii and “grow into it”, so to speak… then, well, I think they’ve got a winner.

– January 1, 2007

Early last year I installed World of Warcraft and made a hunter named Tawyn. I sucked. I like to tell people of my first infamous instance run, the Deadmines where Tux was on aggressive, Immolation Trap was my “CC”, and I rolled Need on everything. Very fitting for my 6/8/3 talent spec. Night Elf Huntard, thy name is Newbie-Pike. Fortunately, I acknowledged my horribleness, and resolved to fix it. That’s when I hit up WoWWiki, devoured the hunter articles there, and from the Fansites section discovered The Hunter’s Mark and BigRedKitty. I read both voraciously, “cover-to-cover” in fact, and read the comments as well. Heck, if you look hard enough you can find my very first step into this WoW blogging community, a comment I left on The Hunter’s Mark, where a young Pike said something along the lines of “I am a level 26 hunter and I suck, thank you so much for your helpful videos and guides.”

The months went by and I was beginning to have more thoughts on WoW and things I wanted to say about it, some of which I did share on LiveJournal, but I didn’t want to clutter up my journal which stuff I figured few people over there would want to read. So off I went to Blogger. Where I could ramble about WoW and nobody would ever have to read it. Oh look, it’s asking me for a name for my new blog… hmm… I like hunters… it should be huntery, but also personal… Aspect of the… Hare? Because the hare is my mascot animal?

…sounds good to me.

And so on August 7, 2007, one year ago today, I made my first blog post.

And for some reason, I kept writing. I was my only reader, but I wrote anyway. I didn’t even link to any other blogs because I didn’t want anyone to wonder who this silly little upstart newbie blog was and why I was linking to them. BRK and Lass, I figured, were so far out of my league that linking to them would be some form of desecration, so I simply refrained from doing it.

And yet somehow, Kestrel found me and left a comment, and linked to me.

And then somehow more people found me. And linked to me.

And I noticed that these people seemed to enjoy my writing for some strange reason… so I kept doing it.

…and to make a long story short, here we are today. As of the time of writing, my blog clocks in at 214 posts, 49,285 visits and 81,859 page views; with an average of 362 visits a day, and another 360+ subscribing to my feed. I have been Dugg and StumbledUpon and linked to on all manner of sites and forums. BRK and Lass, who I idolized with such bright young eyes when I was a baby hunter, have both added me to their blogroll (which still boggles the mind), as have many others. And in perhaps my favorite twist of things coming full circle… somebody added me to the very WoWWiki Fansites page that introduced me to the WoW blogging community i

n the first place.

Ya know what makes it all great though? The numbers and the inlinks are mind-blowing, but it’s you guys that make Aspect of the Hare what it is. It’s you guys that read and visit for whatever crazy reason you do. You guys that make it all worth it. Because for every time I get ribbed for liking hunters or for making a hunter blog, there are about a dozen comments or e-mails from you guys telling me that I’ve inspired you to install Linux, or re-ignited your long lost love for the hunter class, or taught you to play better, or that you’ve linked a new hunter to me. I have striven to make a site where us crazy-hunter-lovers can hang out and chat and commiserate without having to worry about the people who /point and /giggle and don’t quite “get it”. And I’d like to think I have succeeded at least on some small level. But I couldn’t have done it without you guys.

Thank you.

Thank you from the girl who, after all these years, still finds herself yapping away about video games.

On to another year?

*Guess the Trek! Doooo it!

Okay guys, I know this is super out-of-character for me, but it’s gnawing at my mind and chewing a pit in my stomach and I’m hoping that by sharing it with you guys, maybe I’ll feel a little better.

My guild is dying. And I don’t know what to do.

Some of you may remember all the past victories of our guild, because I wrote about them so proudly. How we gained so many members, so fast. How we did so many heroics and eventually these turned into weekly Karazhan runs. We were progressing. We were dangit. We were many. We were legion.

Then the boyfriend got busy with life-stuff and gave the guild to me. And at that exact same time my job decided to schedule me mostly afternoons/evenings from here on out. And at that exact same time, a bunch of the guild regulars… the people who had been there forever… started to slowly drift away. They left for bigger guilds. Or they left to play alts on other servers. Or they simply went on WoW hiatus.

And here we are today; this once mighty guild is hemorrhaging members. Karazhan runs? Unheard of. That was something we used to do. These days we’re lucky if we can scrape together five or six people once a month or so to get in there with PuGs to fill us out, and we get stuck at Opera. Opera. This is not the I once knew. This is not the scrappy group of friends that fought our way tenaciously through Medivh’s tower, on our own, without the help of bigger guilds. This is not “THUNDERCATS HO” before Shade of Aran. This is not people affectionately calling me “Tawtaw” and cheeking with me, “I don’t care if it’s immune to traps, trap it anyway.” This is not “FIVE SECONDS TO EVOCATE!!”

Not anymore. What went wrong? I don’t know.

On the rare days that I can bring myself to log in to Silver Hand, I deal with more people who are leaving or contemplating leaving, because it is very clear that the guild is dying, or at least changing drastically. It hurts. I don’t blame them for leaving, not at all. But you think about how before you become GM, there would be 15 people all online, all doing stuff and chatting up a storm in Ventrilo, and now you’re GM and you’re lucky if there’s five people on… and nothing is going on, and the atmosphere is gloomy… and it makes you think. What am I doing wrong? Did I do anything wrong, or was it simply bad timing?

I’d give the guild away because I clearly do not have the time or energy to be GM, and maybe somebody else can salvage it… but there’s hardly anybody left to give the guild to.

/gdisband? I’ve thought about it. Yep, I’m confessing it: I’ve thought about it. Perhaps it is necessary, like putting down a dying creature. But I don’t know if I could ever bring myself to do that. Not this group of friends. Not this family. That was what we called ourselves, back in the day. We weren’t just a guild. We were family. Combine that with the vague hope in the back of my mind that maybe it’s just a rough patch we’re going through, maybe we’ll come back with a vengeance in Wrath of the Lich King… I don’t know if I could bring myself to type out the command.

But in the meantime I have to put up with a heavy heart everytime I log in and see more people leaving or confiding with me that they are thinking about leaving, and see more half-hearted Karazhan runs getting canceled for lack of interest. It’s painful, this hole in my heart is. And no Heavy Netherweave Bandage is gonna fix it anytime soon.

Though admittedly, writing it all down has made me feel better. The wounds are still there, yeah… but I don’t feel quite so alone.

(Note to any guildies/ex-guildies that may possibly be reading: I <3 you all and I am not in anyway upset with anybody, or laying the blame on anybody. Too much happened at the wrong time, I think. I hope. If it was somehow my fault… I apologize.)

A couple months back I got an e-mail from somebody telling me he was making a WoW website and would I write up a hunter guide for him, according to his template? I agreed, wrote one up and sent it to him.

I got an e-mail today saying that the site is up.

Lookie lookie: http://projectlore.com/wow-game-guides/classes-and-talent/hunter-guide/

Now I have to admit, I don’t know a whole lot about this site or its project, but it does look like a big deal; a bigger one than I initially thought! I do have a few worries; one is that my guide isn’t as great as it could have been. Reading over it now, there are some things I should have clarified or re-worded. Although, it was admittedly somewhat difficult to write because I was following a strict template. Also, reading over it, I can tell that it was rather condensed from my original guide. Anyways, I hope that I did an okay job (at least enough of an okay job that I don’t sound like a complete huntard), and that people who want some more information on hunters click the little link to me and find their way here, where I can go much more in-depth.

Speaking of which, if you have managed to find your way here from that site… I’m Pike, and I like hunters. And Linux. Nice to meetcha!

I have a Beast Master specific guide that I’m working on for the site, and then I think I’m done with that project. Which I’m actually kind of relieved about, because as fun as it is to see my name attached to a big ol’ shiny website like that, it simply does not compare to writing freely in the more intimate environment that is my blog. Where you guys can read it. /nod <3cha all by the way!

I was thinking of starting up a new “So You Want To Be a Hunter?” series, which would start at… well it would start at the character creation screen and work its way on up from there. There’s just so much I want to cover about hunters and so much that I assume everybody sort of knows and then I find out people still want to learn about… I think a long-running series like that might possibly be helpful.

However, I also don’t want to simply rehash things that have been already been done by places like WoWWiki or BRK, both of which I know have great beginner-hunter-guides, as do a lot of other good blogs out there.

So I come to you readers and ask: is there anything in particular you’d want to see if I started a series such as this? Do you want movies? Pics? What sort of questions would you have as a new hunter? What do you wish you knew when you started out that you know now? Anything I could cover that you haven’t seen covered anywhere else? Just let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

Happy Fourth of July weekend to my fellow Americans and a nice “normal” weekend to the rest of you. I might be going back to Karazhan this weekend for the first time in about a month, so we’ll see how that goes!