pets, Uncategorized

Gotta Catch 'em All – Part Two

11 Comments

Well, I went over the stories of Tawyn’s pets, so let’s go over the pets of my first alt hunter… Lunapike:

alyoshasquareAlyosha has a bit of a story behind him: once upon a time Tawyn was Marksman-spec’d, because she was new to the game and that’s what everyone told her to do. Pike secretly really wanted to be Beast Mastery, but she was sort of afraid to completely respec and try, at first. So she went and rolled her second hunter, Lunapike, to be a Beast Master. And at level ten she ran Lunapike to the blood elf starting zone and tamed a Little Red Kitty. It was a symbolic choice.

I absolutely adore the red lynx skin and I’m quite attached to Alyosha, who is named after one of the three brothers in The Brothers Karamazov. From a roleplaying standpoint he also has strong ties to Lunapike through their respective backstories– I was actually writing a story about this but never finished. I’ll have to do that sometime >.>

Although Lunapike is not currently max-level anymore, Alyosha is sort of the de-facto instancing pet, although he now alternates with a certain bug who we shall touch on later…

ivansquareIvan is the second in my trio of Brothers Karamazov names. I tamed him in Thousand Needles, one of my favorite zones. Oh, and when I summon him, he bamfs in with a poof and a cloud of smoke. No, really. Once I found this out, I had to tame him, so I did. Oh, he’s actually a “she” according to lore, but meh. People turn their Loque’nahaks into girls all the time, so I turned my Arikara into a boy >.> I have this weird thing where all my pets are of the male persuasion for some reason. No idea why.

Now that he is a cunning pet more than a DPS pet, he spends a lot of time in the stable until I pull him out for PvP. Sad, but true.

dmitrisquareDmitri rounds out the Brothers Karamazov. Remember how I said I always wanted to make Tux a rainbow owl but could never bring myself to actually do it? Dmitri is the compromise. He’s not Tux, but he is the rainbow owl. Unfortunately I fear he will fall into the same quandary as Ivan, sitting around without a niche, but we’ll see. It is a PvP server, after all. And owls really are a very good choice for a battlegrounds pet I think– what with Snatch and having those big wings that get in peoples’ faces.

He is a beautiful pet and I bring him out to play during quests sometimes. Roar of Recovery is great for solo stuff.

serenitysquareI fell in love with Serenity almost immediately– this is probably another one of my overall favorite pet “looks” in the game. Now Rilgon likes to point out that everybody names their wasp Serenity, and that’s probably true, but ya know what, I don’t care. And I’ve actually yet to see another Serenity in-game myself, although I know most of the blog comments I get when I talk about him are “Great name, I’m gonna use it myself!” …not on my servers yet, it would appear!

Have I mentioned I love how this pet looks? I love how this pet looks. Lunapike gets all the awesome pets, it seems.

coultonsquareCoulton is the newest member of Lunapike’s pet family. Now originally, I didn’t want to get a gorilla. I was never really a gorilla fan, mostly because they are so large– and I prefer my pets small and unassuming. Able to rip your face off, yes, but also small and unassuming. Gorillas were big and they encouraged AoE spam which I in my stubbornness am not a big fan of. I like to shoot my targets one by one thank-ya-very-much.

But then when I was busy working on grinding Timbermaw rep for my Diplomat title I realized it might actually come in handy. So off I went to Feralas to tame myself a gorilla. I was right– it worked beautifully. And by the time I got my title and then after that when Thunderstomp became a family-wide ability, I was too attached to the big guy to swap him out. So, that’s the story on him: he’s the token tenacity pet and he’s probably here to stay.

The name? Take a guess…

Alright. I have more, really, but I dunno, it would be crazy to keep going…

…right? /cough

respec, specs

More 3.1 Beast Mastery Dee Pee Ess Musings

20 Comments

I have really been trying to get in a lot of “DPS testing” so I can get a feel for how Beast Mastery is doing these days. The training dummies and I have become good friends, and I’ve even sometimes just sic’d Wash on the training dummies and sat there for minutes at a time watching him go (this is actually what inspired me to take a point out of Improved Mend Pet and stick it in Frenzy, pushing me back up to 4/5. It just wasn’t proc’ing enough to satisfy me as 3/5. Granted, that doesn’t take raid buffs and Cobra Strikes and the like into account, but it was bothering me.)

PuG’d a 10man VoA; the other hunter was a Marksman hunter who seemed to know what he was doing, and had a wolf (the hot new pet in town!) I am pleased to report that we were one-two on the meters, neck-and-neck, both of us doing somewhere in the ballpark of 3800 DPS on the new boss. On the trash pulls Wash and I were consistently well over 4000. In mostly Naxx10/heroics/rep gear. This rather satisfied my own curiosity regarding the viability of 3.1 Beast Master in your average raid situation.

Then something interesting happened. I was invited to a late night Naxx10 which I chose to attend (yes I know, this was my “break week”… yeeeah). There was another hunter there who was better geared than I and clearly knew what he was doing, and ya know what?

He was spec’d 53/11/7.

That’s right. I was in raid with another Beast Master. An Elitist Jerks approved spec, too, and one that I’d tried before but didn’t really like.

I might have to try it again, however, since he and his wolf roflstomped me on the meters… okay, mostly only on Loatheb. Oh my goodness did he roflstomp me on Loatheb. I blame his 3/3 Cobra Strikes when he had the spore buff, while I’m currently sitting at 1/3. We were pretty close on the other bosses though, and I was ahead a time or two. We didn’t hit Patchwerk, unfortunately (too many people decided to mysteriously disconnect about halfway through the raid)… I would have been curious to see those numbers.

Oh, another interesting thing about that hunter, he didn’t use Multishot. At all. Whereas I weave it into my rotation whenever it’s up. It might be a mana conservation thing because I’ve always had good luck with using Multishot, and I like using it because it gives us more to do. Still, I may have to look into that.

It’s still “Wash and me” by the way, although I’ve tamed a wolf to try it out, but since the wolf lacks a focus dump move I wonder if the new Furious Howl would be worth it for us Beast Masters. Reports in the aforementioned Elitist Jerks thread (which is a very good thread by the way) are putting wolves second to Devilsaurs, with raptors in third. So, we’ll have to see. I still maintain that you should strike a balance between finding a pet that is good to use in your situation, and finding a pet that you like and are attached to. In my humble opinion, that is just a part of reaching the Grand Pinnacle of Hunteriness.

Okay! I apologize for potentially boring my lovely non-raiding readers with babbles about numbers. However, there is a lot of curiosity for this type of thing right now if my site’s Google hits are to be believed, so I figured I’d share my musings with the hungry masses. You will be redirected shortly to typical Pike stories and guides. For now, for lack of anything else to say, have a picture I made for my guild a year or so back:

Medieval Curator

If you guess what it is without looking at the alt text, you get a cookie =P

(Thank you, Historic Tale Construction Kit!)

specs

Beast Mastery in Patch 3.1

13 Comments

…hasn’t changed a lot in terms of a spec. I am currently spec’d 51/15/5 because I maintain that the value from Improved Tracking is worth tossing five points in SV. After much experimentation I finally decided to give up two points in Cobra Strikes for it (along with the three points I gave up in Improved Arcane Shot) and it seems to be working out okay.

To be honest I haven’t done anything since 3.1 that would really test my DPS, outside of an attempt at the new VoA boss that lasted about ten seconds before we all wiped and then the instance reset– but things are looking good on the training dummies. I sort of think it might be because everyone is using the training dummies right now so I’m getting the benefit of all the debuffs on the target and I get to use Kill Shots… but seriously, I used to get 2100-2200 on the training dummy and now I’m getting 2600-2800, using the aforementioned spec, the typical shot priority of Serpent Sting > Kill Shot > Arcane Shot > Multishot > Steady Shot, and a raptor pet. And keep in mind that the training dummies don’t count towards your 5% extra Improved Tracking damage.

Hopefully I can get into a heroic at some point soon (Ulduar I’m not going to see for a while, and I’ve opted out of my typical Naxx run this week because I wanted a break), and I can get a good look at how the patch has effected us Beast Masters.

No I haven’t bought dual-spec yet. It’s pricey and to be honest I think I’d rather have it on my druid first, although on the other hand I don’t know what I’d dual spec her to, anyway.

And yes, a post on pet specs regarding the new talents is coming.

The boyfriend has a post up at his blog about his background with the game and guilds, and I rather enjoyed it because, well, for the most part, it’s my background too. Check it out if you’re looking for something else to read and are curious in a brief guild history de Pike.

alts, amusing anecdotes, screenshots, specs, Uncategorized

Don't Panic

22 Comments

I spec’d Survival. For Replenishment. Because I was in a ten-man without any and it was making things annoying.

I liked it better this time than I did in the past (the fact that I remembered to train the higher ranks of Explosive Shot possibly had something to do with it. /nonchalant cough) My DPS was rather variable. For the most part I seemed to be floating a few hundred above what I do as BM, although sometimes I was higher, and sometimes the gap was much closer. (I somehow manage to pull off fairly equal DPS with all the hunter specs right now. I call shenanigans.) My mana issues, however, were nearly non-existent, especially because a ret pally decided to show up too (so much for me thinking we needed replenishment so badly!) and when I did go OOM a few times on Sapphiron tonight, I only had to be in Viper for about six seconds to fill up again.

I had a hard time getting used to the shot rotation because it didn’t really feel like there was any rhythm to it. I tried to set up my SCT-D to flash “ZOMG LOCK AND LOAD OHNOES” or something similar at me when L&L proc’d, and I got it about half working but then I couldn’t get a sound set to it. Still, I tried, though!

I am remaining Survival-spec’d tonight because the patch is tomorrow and we’ll all get a free respec anyway so don’t have a heart attack if you go to my Armory right now. >.> Honestly playing around with all the specs is something I would like to continue to do in the future– I sort of enjoy spec’ing for what the raid needs (I recently also spent a raid night as Marksman, for Trueshot Aura), and I’m making a mother-lode off of herbs lately so I can afford it. /nods

I actually felt like I had a really productive day in WoW today. I healed a Nexus on my druid. One of the group members was a hunter who intrigued me because his spec was almost the exact same as Lunapike’s— a very Pike-approved leveling spec. I complimented him on this. His response?

brkdisciple

Well, that explains that!

Then the boyfriend got on his Baby Holy Paladin, I got on my Baby Prot Paladin, and our friend got on his Baby Priest, and we proceeded to take Deadmines. For the record, this is what happens when we do Deadmines:
deadminesraid1

Yes, and did you know that in our little world, VanCleef possesses the following: void zones, fire that you should not stand in, fire that you should stand in, a stun, Mutating Injection, infernals that can be avoided by being tanked along a certain side of the boat, and a tail swipe?

True story.

pets, Uncategorized

Gotta Catch 'em All

19 Comments

pokemon3I recently had an e-mail from somebody who wanted to hear more stories about my pets… where I got them, how they got their names, when I use them, how they fit in to my character roleplayingwise, etc. Now on the one hand, I was a little worried about fulfilling this request, because I feel like I’ve already talked about most of this at some point. But on the other hand, it was probably a while ago and I’ve gained a lot of new readers since then, and like most hunters I turn into a proud gushing grandma when asked about my pets, especially seeing as I am a self-professed Pokemon hunter who freaks out over pets.

So let’s talk. And if you’ve heard this all already, feel free to skip it. >.>

tuxsquareTux was the first. The first pet ever. He was level eight and I was level ten and for some reason he didn’t leave me when I didn’t feed him for such a long time– since back then pets ran away when they were unhappy. My adventuring companion throughout most of Vanilla WoW, he has never been my first pet to hit the level cap of the day, but he has always hit it eventually.

Sometimes I get this urge to swap Tux for one of those crazy rainbow owls. Because he’s a special pet and it feels like it would somehow be a weird way of “evolving” him to a form more befitting of him. I could still name him Tux, and it would still “be” Tux. But then I look at the big gray featherhead, the same ball of pixels I’ve had since my first week of World of Warcraft ever, and I can’t do it.

To sate my longing for the rainbow owl though, I tamed one on another character. >.>

Tux spends most of his time in the stable these days, which is sort of sad, but unfortunately he is not a very PvE-viable pet and I haven’t done any serious PvP in a loooong time. He’s pretty dang good at doing dailies and stuff though. *nods* He also tends to be the pet I pick for screenshots and posing, because it’s supposed to be Tawyn & Tux, dang it!

Named for the mascot of the main operating system I game on… heck, the only operating system I played WoW on, period, for the first 69 levels of Tawyn’s existence..

lockesquare Locke was the rare spawn I tamed at 4am server time. There were two reasons: one, he was teal. My favorite color. ’twas a given. Two, I was reading hunter blogs regularly by now (heck, I was writing one) and I had come to the sad realization that a lot of people disliked hunters who instanced with flying pets because they had big flappy wings that got in the way. I wanted a backup pet to be able to take into instances who wouldn’t annoy anyone, and the kitty was the winner.

Locke was the Big Bad Raiding Pet through most of Burning Crusade until towards the end when he was replaced by… the next pet I shall be talking about. It actually got to the point where most of my guildies saw me as Tawyn & Locke instead of Tawyn & Tux, which I sort of had mixed feelings about. I mean, I loved Locke, but it seemed odd. Locke also became the butt of a solid handful of inside jokes that still exist among my friends’ circle, the best being that he was going to leave me, don a monocle, top hat, and dastardly mustache, and become the new endboss of Heroic Mech. Long story.

These days he has been largely stabled in favor of Wash, although he comes out sometimes for nostalgia’s sake. The last time I brought him to a raid, though, there were five hunters there all told and every single one had a cat and one of them was the exact same skin as Locke. It bugged me enough that halfway through during a break I went and swapped him out for my raptor. >.> Sorry, Locke. It was really confusing though… all those kitties… /twitch. My Locke was the only one going Big Red though. <3 He is named either after John Locke or Locke Cole… take your pick!

eltaninsquareEltanin is the Windserpent who became the Burning Crusade raiding pet after Locke. Lightning Breath for the win! I love this guy– beautiful skin and I just adore windserpents. I went into ZG solo to tame him, the story of which I chronicled in this blog!

Sadly with the advent of 3.0 he no longer was a good raid/instancing pet so while he alternated with my other pets during my leveling, he has been stuck at level 79 for a while. I love to pull him out of the stable sometimes and strut around with him, just because I think he’s gorgeous. I wish I could use him more often.

He was named after the brightest star in the constellation Draco.

washsquareWash has a long story to him. As I’m sure most of you lovely folks have gathered, he’s rather near and dear to my heart, even though I’d released him for some time and didn’t re-tame him until recently. He is my current raiding/instancing pet, partially because I am so attached to him, partially because I simply got tired of having a cat like everyone else (again– sorry Locke!), and partially because his DPS is phenominal– I maintain that he performs better than my cat does in my experience, largely I think because of Savage Rend. When it crits, it increases the damage he deals by 10% for 30 seconds. When you are a Beast Master hunter as I am, this crits a lot, and the cooldown is down to something like 46 seconds, so it’s up– a LOT of the time.

Mostly I just think Wash is adorable. I’ve always liked dinosaurs. Protoceratops are my favorite, but for the lack of them in the game, a raptor will do.

…and, come on, you mean the story behind his name isn’t obvious enough? =P

nachisquareMy fifth stable slot is currently in a state of flux. Usually it’s occupied by a tenacity pet to make up for my lack of one, but over the past several months a bear, a rhino, an eagle, a wolf, a turtle, and now currently a teal worm (named Nachi) have all resided there. Who will get the fifth stable slot permanently? I dunno. A part of me really wants Loque’nahak, not so much because I like the look, so much as it seems to be the ultimate badge of Beast Master hunter pride. (Although, I do like the look, but not to the point that I would get him otherwise, if it wasn’t such a symbol of my favorite spec.) Still, I’ve circled the Basin a bazillion times over the past few months while herbing– yes, following “the route” and keeping a casual eye out– and I’ve never seen hide nor hair, not to mention then I wouldn’t have any room for my token tenacity pet, so… I’m really not sure!

From a roleplaying standpoint, Tawyn considers all her pets to be very important to her, and her closest friends. She only keeps them with stable masters that she trusts (she’s good friends with the dwarven hunters in Stormwind) and the stories I write about her often involve multiple pets all out at once… hey, I can dream, right?

Next up, if enough people are interested… the stories behind the pets of my other hunters!

…don’t give me that look. We’ve already established that I’m a Crazy Pet Lady.

art, fun

Tawyn and Wash do the Safety Dance

28 Comments

tawynandwashdothesafetydancefinal1

It all started when The Safety Dance came on my playlist and it got me thinking about the Heigan part of my “Eyes of the Beast” post… and then a light bulb went off in my head and I went dashing for the nearest pencil and paper. This was my first “real” try using a computer to ink and color a hand-drawn sketch (thanks once again to GIMP!) and it turned out a lot better than I thought it would. In fact, the hardest part was finding a good background of Heigan’s room that didn’t have a bunch of, well, people in it.

Next time I do Heigan I’m going to see if I can get a nice screenshot of the floor with the green fire on either side and I’ll set it to that, then I might try tossing it to the Blizz fanart folks just for the heck of it.

Anyways, I hope it made you smile. ^_^

guides, Uncategorized

So You Want To Be a WoW Blogger?

31 Comments

I get a ton of e-mails every week (which is why it sometimes takes me a few days or more to respond to them /sheepish) and one of the most frequent e-mails I get is “I’m thinking of starting a blog… any tips?”

So because it seems to be so common I figured I’d lay out my advice here in a post! =P

For starters the technical stuff. The two most commonly used free blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress. Of those two, I actually much prefer Blogger. WordPress.com is rather limited in terms of what you can do in designing your blog– yes, more limiting than Blogger– and various types of Javascript such as WoWHead links will not work for you, whereas they will on Blogger. I see a lot of people switching from Blogger.com to WordPress.com, and I gotta admit, I don’t see the appeal, beyond the fact that you get an “about” page =P I tried it a while back when I was on Blogger and was thoroughly unimpressed. However, it’s all personal opinion really, so my advice would be to try out both platforms and see what you like. They are both good, solid blogging platforms and each has their pros and cons. I do also want to add, if you have any intention of switching to a self-hosted site later… then WordPress from the start is probably the better option. (Although I did the Blogger->self-hosted WordPress switch myself… it wasn’t that bad!)

You want the name of your blog to be catchy, have a ring to it, and easy to type out in the address box. I don’t recommend using acronyms or abbreviations in your address unless they are very easy to remember. aspectofthehare.blogspot.com is sorta long, but it is easier to remember than aothare.blogspot.com or something similar. You can click this link to improve your google ranking, this is essential when starting out. Also remember that your blog name is going to define what your blog is. Want in on a little secret? Aspect of the Hare was not originally a hunter blog. *gasp* I know, right? I mean, yes, I played hunters and only hunters, but originally it was “World of Warcraft thoughts in general” that I was going for, and my early blog posts even reflect this. However, it was a huntery name, so the blog wound up becoming, well, huntery. That means if you have a serious case of alt-itis you may not want to go with a class-specific name, and if you like to mess around with different specs you don’t want to name your blog “[InsertSpecHere]4Life”, unless, well, you really are. =P

When I was starting out two years ago, it was all the rage to name your WoW blog after various in-game abilities. There were all these blogs named The Hunter’s Mark, Blessing of Kings, Mark of The Wild, Trueshot Aura (which I’ve seen used more than once)… etc. I think pretty soon blogs snatched up all the available abilities and you started seeing other titles. =P I rather like the name of my own blog, even if the “hare” part is often confusing to people that don’t know me well. I combined the “name your blog after a WoW ability” meme with an animal that I like– I personalized WoW, so to speak. It worked out well.

You want your blog design to be uncluttered and have basics like a search box, a way to contact you, and of course, a link to your RSS feed! You don’t want to go overboard right away. I see a lot of new blogs that have a ton of “stuff” on their blog, but no real content yet. It’s okay to wait to add that “stuff” later, what most people want to see is your writing!

Visual identity is always a bonus. I’m not sure, but I often think that the cutesy picture of Tawyn and pets on my banner is a large part of what initially draws people to this blog. Even if you aren’t much of an artist, try getting a strong screenshot-based banner going, like at LessQQMorePewPew for example. Of course, you don’t need big flashy pictures or anything. Sometimes understatement works better. Try things out!

Content, oh, your content. I hear it all, from people saying “don’t go looking for a niche!” to others saying “you have to find a niche!” and everything in between. Lemme tell you about Aspect of the Hare. Nobody was ever supposed to read it. I was writing for me. Apparently people liked it. This is what I tell almost everybody who e-mails me wanting blog advice:

1.) Write what you love.
2.) Love what you write.
3.) Comment often.

Commenting on other peoples’ blogs is the easiest way to get traffic to yours, and if they see that you are passionate about what you are writing, and it is written well, they will stay.

Have you all seen the movie Mrs. Doubtfire with Robin Williams? They have this whole scene about a guy who has a TV show where he drones on and on about dinosaurs with little models and it’s really boring. Then Robin Williams shows up and starts having the dinosaurs sing songs and he makes it all funny and entertaining. That’s what you want to be. You want to be having fun with this. You want to be writing to make yourself happy. You want to be writing because you enjoy what you are writing about and because you’re excited to share your ideas with people. People will pick up on that enthusiasm.

Lastly, I sometimes get questions from people wanting to maximize their traffic. I have always seen traffic as something you don’t want to get buried too deep in, partially because I don’t think it matters as much as your content and secondly because the number of readers you have does not necessarily equal blog quality. However, I will say that in my experience, I have found that John Q. WoWBlogReader works a boring Mon-Fri job and reads you Mon-Fri mornings. So use that to your advantage. ;P

Aspect of the Hare is what it is today largely via word of mouth. Winding up on BRK’s sidebar was also a pretty big boost, but even without that, I was doing okay. I think it’s because I managed to corner a market of sheer enthusiasm for the hunter class, regardless of spec or playstyle. In short, I think I was in the right place at the right time. Regardless of whether you can hit that sweet spot or not, I find blogging to be a very rewarding (if time-consuming!) venue and anyone who wants to try it… please, jump into the pool! We don’t bite! =P

Questions or comments, leave ’em for me!

Uncategorized

The Prodigal Son

10 Comments

Something super awesome happened over the weekend: a really good friend of mine, our beloved main-tank from back-in-the-day, decided to start playing WoW again.

He’d sort of unofficially retired a while back while our little group was all still in a “raiding guild”, then he came back for Wrath of the Lich King for a couple of weeks before disappearing again. He had his reasons and we never pushed him back to the game, in fact, many of us in our group have taken breaks from the game for various stretches of time and we all still keep in touch via AIM and Ventrilo. However, his most recent declaration that he missed playing with us and was going to try to keep things in more balance this time was superawesome news.

He was sitting at level 74 when he came back so we went joyriding through Azjol-Nerub and Ahn’kahet, with yours truly on her level 70 (now 71) treedruid. I was scared at first because I felt a little under-level for the instances, but amazingly things went very well (I think this is largely because my druid is decked out in things like Karazhan epics and Badge of Justice duds– I’ve been shoving her into Kara almost every week because I love the place so much).

You know that boss in Ahn’kahet where if you don’t kill the adds fast enough, the boss goes absolutely insane and one-shots everyone?

…ever had to heal through that when all the adds live? Oh my gosh. That was probably the craziest (and most ulcer-inducing) non-hunter thing I’ve ever done.

The weekend culminated in a Kel’Thuzad kill where everybody started dying when he was at about 5%. Those huge bug adds were running all over the place and people were freaking out and healers were dying and tanks were dying and then KT died. It was great. I love crazy moments like that.

Still, the successful Naxx run was nothing compared to instancing with an returned friend. <3

memes, Uncategorized

The Honest Scrap Award

16 Comments

honest_scrap1The Rules are thus!

1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

1. I was tagged by a lot of people for this. I’m going to name nine that I can think of off the top of my head but I know there were more (and if you tagged me and I didn’t notice and/or forgot, please mention it in the comments so I can edit you in here!): SlowWolf, The Alliance Guy, All My Mains, Master’s Call, Eye for an Eye, Stabilized Effort Scope, The Angry Butterfly, SpicyTunas, and A Little WoW For Me all tagged me, but again, please tell me if I forgot you!

2. I’m not tagging anyone because a.) most people were already tagged, and b.) I don’t like tagging people for these kinds of things. I don’t want anyone to feel left out, or poke someone to do it if they don’t want to. So as always… if you want to do it, consider yourself tagged!

3. Ten honest things about myself, huh? Hmm. Okay.

  • 1.) I was born with Ventricular Septal Defect— a hole in my heart, among other issues, such as the aorta being backwards and other fun stuff like that. Because all the blood was leaking out, my heart had to work overtime to keep me alive, and since the heart is a muscle, it grew with all that exercise, so by the time I was a few months old I had a heart the size of a full grown man’s in my body. I don’t know exactly what they did to fix it (I was, ya know, a baby at the time!) but last I heard the hole had mostly closed up on its own, via a bloodclot, although there is still a small leak. And the tubing is still backwards. Now my heart was still too big for me, and the doctors said I’d grow into it, but what they didn’t know was that I would eventually stop growing at 5-foot-2 and about 110 pounds. So, I am a very small person. With a very big heart. Literally. =P
  • 2.) I’m a horse racing geek. Actually I’ve sort of fallen out of “practice” and I haven’t followed it in a while, but I can still rattle off more stats regarding thoroughbred racing than most people can, and I can’t watch Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont win without tearing up.

    …dangit, where’s my Kleenex… yes, I just watched it again… /sniff

  • 3.) I have weird habits when it comes to listening to music. Aside from my bizarre musical taste, I have this tendency to latch on to some random song and listen to it several times a day for months, never tiring of it, until a new song comes and dethrones it.
  • 4.) I’m a child of Science Fiction. I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, to such an extent that I can say that the heroes of those two respective universes were basically a second set of parents to me, which is probably why I quote them all the time in this blog, because they’re largely who taught me about life, love, and everything in between.. The ending of Star Wars Episode Three, where Luke’s aunt and uncle overlook Tatooine, makes me cry, and the teaser trailer to the new Star Trek movie gives me chills.
  • 5.) I know how to clip a bird’s wings. Yes, in real life.
  • 6.) I’ve written (though not published) two full-length novels. I wrote them when I was a young teenager and they are about my toys coming to life, a la Toy Story, except a heckuva lot darker. They have wars and territorial conflicts and stuff. The second book, which I finished up when I was taking AP English in school, is actually pretty good, if a little heavy on the allegory and references to obscure poems >.>
  • 7.) My three favorite books, in order, are The Brothers Karamazov, Watership Down, and The Golden Compass. If I had a daemon, I am convinced it would be a bilby.
  • 8.) I have long considered myself to be too sciencey to be an artist, but too artsy to be a scientist. Those “Are you right- or left- brained?” tests usually put me smack in the middle, and I went into college quite torn about whether I wanted to major in filmmaking or chemistry. I finally opted for filmmaking and I sort of think it was the wrong choice, but ah wells. I still think that an animated short featuring cute cuddly animals dressed up as the Karamazov brothers, performing a serious music video set to Losing my Religion, would be brilliant. As would a film about anthropomorphic chemical elements (you can see why I felt uncomfortable bringing up my ideas in classes full of indie artsy kids).
  • 9.) I am a tropical fish geek. If you are too, let’s sit down and talk about cichlids. I’m serious! >.>
  • 10.) I am the oldest of six kids. My youngest sister turns ten this year. True to the stereotype, we’re a pretty tight-knit bunch and I grew up eating stuff like Jell-O Popcorn on family night. Which, by the way, you are missing out on if you’ve never tried it.

Well, hopefully you all found that at least marginally interesting. I figured that since I was tagged for this by so many people, I’d have to get it out. We’ll return you to your regular WoWness momentarily, worry not!

Everyday I'm Huntering