Way back in 1997, a then 13-year-old girl stumbled onto the Internet. She called herself “Pikestaff” after a character she’d invented based on the “Redwall” series of books; a hare with a penchant for causing mayhem.

Over ten years later, Pike still lives…

“Pike” has been the longtime Internet moniker (heck, offline moniker too sometimes) of a twentysomething geekish girl who lives in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. (Specifically, she lives in the town where Vulcans and Humans will make First Contact, according to Star Trek lore.)

She’s been playing video games basically before she could talk, thanks to the cutting-edge Commodore 64 computer her family owned. A quick perusal of the “Favorite Games” section of her Baby Book would not reveal Pat-a-Cake or Peek-a-Boo, but rather Dig-Dug, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man.

Then one year they got a Super Nintendo, and other than a very passionate love affair with Starcraft, she was exclusively a console gamer for many years. Until one day her boyfriend said “Hey I’m installing WoW, do you want to play too?” She thought hunters sounded fun, created her first WoW toon, and that’s when the madness began.

Today you can see Pike creating and playing hunter after hunter after hunter because it’s not just a class, it’s a lifestyle. And an obsession, admittedly.

Pike’s other big passion is the Linux operating system. She leveled her first character to 70 exclusively on Kubuntu Linux and the only reason she pops onto a lesser OS sometimes these days is for Ventrilo (by the way, she appreciates all the “Linux/Wine/Ventrilo” how-to links people send her, but trust her when she says she has tried everything and it’s a bug that’s out of her control at the moment).

You can find Pike online most places as “Pikestaff” and chances are if you see a “Pikestaff” on some internet site, it is her (DeviantArt is a notable exception– somebody else took her beloved internet name first and that is perhaps the big reason why she can’t bring herself to create a DeviantArt account).

Other than that, her Pikachu plushie collection, and the Periodic Table of the Elements she carries in her wallet, Pike is just your normal chick who holds a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking which she does not use and who currently works in the Pet Care Department of a popular pet store chain. That means she is a master cricket counter and fish catcher and is bitten by snakes on a regular basis. She can also warn you to never, ever touch a pooping hamster.

…no, seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Can I link to you? Yep! =D

Will you link to me? If you are an active commenter and your name links to your blog, chances are I will pick up on it at some point and add you to my blogroll. If I do not, feel free to send me an e-mail and if your site seems to have some decent content and is regularly updated, I will link to you.

Would you like to hook up for some advertising/moneymaking? No thank you.

I saw a “Tawyn” on [insert non-Silver Hand server here], is that you? Nope. I tend to view my characters as all having distinct personalities and so as such I generally do not share character names across servers, though I have made exceptions. Tawyn is not one of those exceptions. (At one point, though, I did have a “Tawyne” on Dark Iron, but that character is now retired.)

How do you pronounce Tawyn? Say the two words “Saw Win”. Now blend them together and replace the “S” in Saw with a “T”. And emphasize the first syllable. ^^

What is the cool add-on that makes you and your party’s name plates appear in 3-D? X-Perl Unit Frames.

“For the Horde” or “Glory to the Alliance”? Both! No really, I rather enjoy playing both factions. Alliance if pressed, though these days I am more prone to be found Horde-side due to circumstance.

PvE or PvP Server? RP and RP-PvP! =P

Is your guild on Silver Hand recruiting? Entelechy is always accepting of new members of any class, level, and activity level (i.e. we won’t kick you even if you only log on twice a year). We are a fun group of people of varying backgrounds and ages (I’ll take a stab here and say our average member age is early-20s) who enjoy goofing off and hanging out in Ventrilo. You do not have to be a roleplayer but keep in mind that our guild’s roots lie in roleplaying so you should at least be respectful to those that participate in RP even if you do not yourself. If you are interested in raiding with us keep in mind that at this point we really only run Karazhan (we aim for once a week, though it doesn’t always happen) but many of our members raid higher-content with other guilds and you would be free to do so as well.

And if you want to get really nitpicky, we could use mages. Desperately. (And healers and tanks, but mostly mages.)

Anyways, if you see me on as Tawyn or Tamaryn send me a poke and I’ll toss you an invite. You can also randomly whisper someone in the guild if I am not on to see who has invite rights, usually at least one person who can invite is online.

Is your guild on The Venture Co. recruiting? No, because that guild is a small personal guild for me, my alts, and my friends and family. That may change in the future, but for the time being, no, Lunapike’s guild is not recruiting, and no, I’m not interested in leaving my mini-guild for a bigger one.

Hunter-Related Blogs:

Other Classes/Multi-Class/General WoW/Gaming:

If you do not see your blog here and know that you have been here in the past, it means one of two things: either your blog has moved/disappeared and I don’t know where your new one (if you have a new one) is, or you haven’t updated in a couple months. I still keep tabs on you inactive guys (<3 you all!) and if you start regularly updating again, I will re-add you to the blogroll as soon as I can! Similarly, if you have simply moved your blog, pop me off an e-mail and I will get right to it.

Questions or comments? Got a new blog you think I’d like to know about? Feel free to drop me a line: pikestaff21 [at] gmail [dot] com. I can’t guarantee that I will link to everything you suggest but I will consider each link I am sent.

When it comes to the categories, please note that if you talk about hunters but you also talk about a lot of other stuff you will be added to the “General” blogroll. If you think you have a hunter slant and I haven’t noticed or something (or vise versa), please let me know and I’ll be happy to move you to the appropriate blogroll.

So this morning I woke up, feeling horribly sick with (yet another) flu-type-thing, and stumbled over to my computer and hit the “Next” button on my Firefox toolbar, which brings me to my unread blog entries.

BRK pops up with some of my pictures on it.

Now you’ve gotta understand, it was about 5 AM and I was sick and it took a while for me to register what I was seeing. “Oh look, BRK… oh look my pics… yawn… snore… WAITAMINUTE.”

So aside from the fact that BRK is like the WoW version of Slashdot and caused a mass flood of newcomers to my humble abode, he requested some of my UberCute WoW Character Portraits (TM).

Telling BRK that you’re not going to make him some pictures is like telling Linus Torvalds that you aren’t going to build him a Linux distribution. Not to mention, I’ve been itching to draw the BRK duo for a while. So of course I accepted the challenge:

Big Red Kitty: Bringing You Massive Quantities of Sustained Ranged Pewpew Since 2006

Turned out pretty good I think. Entirely mouse-drawn in the GIMP because I currently don’t have a working scanner or one of those fancy-tablet things, so it all had to be done by mouse.

Anyways, BRK suggested to me that some other people might be interested in having their WoW characters UberCute-ified as well, and that I could possibly take commissions on them… afterall, as much as I would love to do these for free, the fact of the matter is that each one takes a good few hours to do. (BRK’s admittedly took a bit longer because I made a few different versions.)

So what I’m asking here is… if I were to charge something small like $5 or $10 to make you an UberCute version of your favorite WoW toon, would you be interested? If I get enough interest, I’ll definitely set up a PayPal button or something, and we can get the proverbial ball rolling! (And if I only get a few takers, we’ll figure something out too!)

And of course, all opinions on whether this would be a good or bad idea are welcome too.

…my family got me this shirt:

It even has Tux on the top!

I am in love.

Every so often I check my Sitemeter referrals to see how people are finding my blog. I do this mostly to see if anyone is linking to me that I don’t know about yet, so I can go check out their site and perhaps reciprocate the link =D But a lot of people find my site through Google, too. There are a few search terms that people consistently seem to be finding my site from; I wanted to address some of those here. So without further ado…

If you have found my site through Google and are searching for information on one of the following things, here is any help I can offer:

Pike World: This is probably the one that I get the most hits from. I have no idea what Pike World is but it sure is popular. I’ve Google’d it myself and the closest thing I can find to a “Pike World” is “Pike’s World: Exploration and Empire in the Greater Southwest”, a museum exhibit in Colorado that I don’t think is around anymore. If this sounds like what you were searching for, then here’s a link to it.

Leveling a low-level pet in WoW: Unfortunately I know of no easy way to do this. Once, quite some time ago, I wrote a post on my own attempts at doing this and my own little strategy. You can find that post here. However, keep in mind that I wrote that post a few months ago when I was still in my 50s, level-wise. Also keep in mind that I think this mostly comes down to finding your own little strategy. The next patch should make pets level up faster, though, so that’s always a plus. For more general pet-related information I direct you to Petopia and Mania’s Arcania. A quick search of my own also turned up this guide.

Linux and WoW: I wrote up a basic Q&A about this which you can find here. You might want to try searching for information regarding your specific distro. If you use a ‘buntu then I can’t recommend Ubuntu Forums enough.

Linux and Ventrilo: Unfortunately I have yet to get Ventrilo working entirely on Linux, although I plan on making a more concerted effort sometime soon. The best advice I can give to you is to check out this thread on Ubuntu Forums, and also this great guide over at Synarch (the blog formerly known as /dev/random).

Funny WoW Huntard Stories: /chuckle Well, I’m sure you can find a few of ’em if you look around my site long enough… though I try to focus more on being a “good huntard”…

Hunters in Battlegrounds: I wrote up a few basic information posts on being a hunter in battlegrounds, the series starts here. They are more aimed for PvP-newbies, though, so if you have some experience already they might be too “basic” for you.

Guides on How To Be a Good Hunter: While I am immensely flattered that my blog somehow shows up when you search for this… I cannot in good conscience keep anyone away from BigRedKitty. Read the articles he has posted on his sidebar under “Hunter Training List”. Read the comments. Read more articles. Visit his forums and ask questions.

If for some reason you come back to my blog after feasting on the wisdom of BRK, then glance at the blogs I have in my blogrolls on my sidebar. Click on some links and explore them. There are a lot of blogs out there that provide very valuable information.

…if after that you still come back to my blog for some reason, well make yourself at home and feel free to leave me a comment or question or two. ^^

Alrighty, there you have it, Google-searchers! Have fun.

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

I got a lot of great comments in my previous post about this subject, and I’ve seen some more articles too. What’s great is that it’s shown me there are a lot of valid reasons to play the opposite gender in WoW– more reasons than I’d even thought of before.

Maebius says that he plays the opposite gender in order to specifically avoid making just an “avatar of himself”.

Matticus says female characters let you see more of the screen.

Mirsh just recently wrote up a great article about how he’s been able to discover and express new aspects of himself through playing the opposite gender in WoW.

Anyways, I just wanted to thank everybody for their comments and responses; I’ve really discovered a new appreciation for playing the opposite gender… like I said before, it was never that I had a problem with it, so much as I was a bit mystified by how widespread it was. But it turns out there are a lot of very good reasons for it that hadn’t occurred to me.

And now I’m inspired; I want to go make a male gnome rogue, I’ve got some great character ideas floating around in my head for him… and yes, I know I’ve said before that I can’t stand playing melee classes, especially rogues, but I dunno, it seems like I’ve had an unusually high number of people recently telling me how fun rogues are, I think maybe something’s trying to tell me to give it another shot. It’s so hard for me to play other classes, because to me… WoW = hunter, for the most part. But sometimes, it’s nice to wander off and do something completely different. Hence why my mage will randomly get sudden spurts of playtime.

I have way too many blog post ideas, I should really start writing them down…

I got a couple positive responses to my Linux guide (thank you for the shout-outs, Lassirra and Kestrel!) as well as a couple questions that I would like to address:

Think it’s possible to dual boot a Linux distro onto a macbook? Although I haven’t had experience with this, a google of “dual boot linux macbook” brought up some promising looking links and Pelides mentioned this: “With Paralells installed on an Intel Mac, you could run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and any other X86 operating system within the Mac OS X environment. You could theoretically run WoW under WINE in Linux through Paralells on your Mac. You’d be working about 2 virtualizations deep at that point, but it should work.” So I’d say the answer is a yes!

Just for fun, I’m going to say the screenshot used in your wallpaper is a character overflying Mulgore, north side somewhere. Hehe, that particular wallpaper is available here and yes, I’m going to say it’s Mulgore too. (I actually find myself wanting to say they’re headed southwest through Mulgore from the direction of the Barrens, but that’s probably just me being a geek, as usual.)

Did you use the RPM based Wine or did you get Cedega? Because I use a Debian-based distro I do not use RPM files which are for Red Hat based distros. To install Wine I would either use a Deb file, compile the thing from source, or do it in the terminal via a sudo aptitude install wine. As for Cedega… a lot of people swear by it and say it works a lot better than Wine. I prefer to use Wine for two reasons: one is that it simply works for me, so why fix it if it ain’t broken ;P and secondly because it is one of the few Linux programs I have run into that you have to pay for, and I would rather keep my stuff as “free” as I can. But if you are having issues getting Wine to work and you really want to play games on Linux, then Cedega might be worth a shot, and your money.

“World of Warcraft is unable to start 3D acceleration.” *sad panda* Sucks, because other than that, it feels like I’m SO. CLOSE. I got that same message when I tried to install WoW (via Wine) on my laptop. Now I didn’t spend too long trying to figure this one out because firstly I don’t know if my laptop can even adequately run WoW =P And secondly because I’ve got it working fine on my desktop. But from my quick research I was able to determine that it is possibly a driver problem. You may want to try seeing if you need to update your video drivers at all. (This would also be a good place to mention that as far as Linux is concerned, Nvidia is the clear winner over ATI.) Otherwise I would recommend asking around for help on the many Linux forums out there; if you use a ‘buntu then Ubuntu Forums is an invaluable resource.

Alrighty, that does it for now, as far as Linux is concerned. Please let me know if you have any more questions or comments, I love getting them! Also, I want to mention something. I seem to have inspired some people to try installing Linux or even just consider it. I think it’s great that a lot of people want to try it out and that I have inspired some people that way, but I also want to remind the adventurous reader that WoW and Wine are not a foolproof combination and that while there are a lot of people like me who have managed to get it working with little problems, there are also a lot of people who haven’t got it working at all, for whatever reasons. There is truly a lot of luck involved in what kind of hardware you’ve got and how Wine reacts to it, and things like that. But don’t let that deter you from giving it a try if you want! You will gain a deep satisfaction for “getting it working” if you are successful, and of course you will be using a very fun new operating system 😉 But I wanted to lay the cautionary note out there too. Back up your stuff, and be prepared to revert back to your previous operating system if it doesn’t work out right.

Lastly, I got this question in my previous post…

“More information on BG’s would be cool, it sounds like you enjoy them and spend quite a bit of time there. I have not found or read much information about them but they sound interesting. Any guidance you can provide would be appreciated.”

Firstly thank you very much, TazButane, for your faith in my PvP abilities, which are in my opinion still rather meager. Your question is a rather “large” and open-ended one as opposed to a more specific one, and as such I will probably have to think on it for a bit and see if I can come up with a good satisfying post for you. So stay tuned =)

Patch 2.3 next week! My alts are quivering with excitement.