MMO Archives - Page 360 of 437 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Happy 10th Anniversary

November 23, 2014 by Belghast

My WoW Story

Ten years ago today I started playing World of Warcraft. In truth that is a bit of a misnomer since I technically started as of ten years ago 11 pm last night. When World of Warcraft launched there was so much excitement surrounding it. This was not my first MMO by any means and I had already played significant amounts of time of both Everquest (roughly 3 years), Dark Age of Camelot (roughly 2 years), Horizon (6 months) and City of Heroes (6 months). Between those four games I had already amassed a large group of friends that all intended to play Warcraft at the launch. That is the hard thing to explain these days, but World of Warcraft was this one game that every single player that played it… wanted to play more of. I remember getting into one of the stress test betas, and that one weekend of playing the game completely destroyed my enjoyment of City of Heroes. Just a few hours of play showed me that these games I already loved could be so much more.

When it came time for the game to launch, the GameStop in town was having a launch party. I originally intended to get in line with the rest of the folks and wait it out. This was in the days before I actually preordered games. To some extent I liked the thrill of the chase, of having to go out and forage for whatever new game release was the new hotness. So World of Warcraft was no different, and I had intended on just picking up a copy like always. When I go there that night… the line wrapped around from Gamestop and all the way down the shopping center to Panera Bread and around the corner… so half a shopping center for the sleepy little hamlet I lived in. I was showing up moments before the game was set to go on sale… so I would have been waiting behind hundreds of other players waiting for the game.

Wal-Mart to the Rescue

On a wild hunch I decided to pop into the Wal-mart just down the shopping center instead. Sure enough when I got back to electronics I saw a pristine display full of copies of World of Warcraft. I noticed that a handful of players were doing exactly the same thing as me. So there I had my game in hand ready to head out, and by the time I got to the parking lot I noticed that not even a quarter of the line had been served at GameStop yet. I found out later that they sold out, and did not have enough copies to serve the demand. That in itself become a running theme, as you quite literally could not find copies of the game anywhere after those first days. I remember spending my lunch hours going out to stores that I had not checked to see if I could scrounge up a copy for this or that guild member who had yet been able to get in. It was probably a good three months before copies actually became obtainable, and unfortunately a good month before the game was really playable.

I remember spending the next day with my friend and co-worker Vernie leveling a night elf character that I had no intent of ever playing. We sold every item that dropped all of the purpose of getting that single gold needed to buy a guild charter. At that time it seemed like an insurmountable amount of money. By mid-day on the first day we managed to get the money and got all of our friends to create level 1 Gnomes or Dwarves and collected signatures in Coldridge Valley. By noon House Stalwart was born on Argent Dawn and at launch we had around fifty people that we knew from a combination of the other games we had played in it. Shortly thereafter we got a charter started on Silverhand and the Burning Scar was born there as well. Our original plan was to Alliance on Argent Dawn and Horde on Silverhand… the two role-playing servers that were available at launch. Over time and the inability to get logged into the game… folks self sorted into playing the faction they liked the most, and the vast majority of us ended up in House Stalwart and the Alliance faction.

The Hunter Phase

My intent was to play a tanky paladin, because I had so much fun playing one with my friend in beta. I would debuff the target against holy damage, and then he would come in and smite the hell out of them. It made an amazing synergy and was absolutely fun to level together. The problem being when I installed the game and created Exeter for the first time… that was the moment I realized they played a last minute bait and switch. While I was not on voice chat at the time… this predates those days… I quite literally said a verbal “What the eff” when I wandered around Coldridge Valley I could not figure out what the hell the seal system was doing. This was strike one against the class. Strike two was that not long after the launch of the game I had a pretty traumatic death in the family that ended up with me being completely gone for a long period of time. When I got back everyone had shot ahead of me in level, and quite frankly the paladin just could not solo easily at that point in the game.

As a result I ended up rolling a Dwarven Hunter, Lodin because they could solo phenomenally well and it would allow me to catch up to my friends. I am just not by nature a hunter, and there is a whole series of time I attempted to play a melee hunter through the use of the survival tree. Yes I was one of those guys, but it worked well enough to level my way to 60. Which for reference took me about six months to get there finally. During Cataclysm I leveled a Worgen Druid from 1 to 85 in less than seven days of actual time, so a lot has changed in both the game and proclivity for grinding up alts. One of my friends who started in House Stalwart went on to found one of the most prosperous non-guild raids on the server… the Late Night Raiders. He happened to be in need of a hunter to replace one, and I happened to be interested in raiding having done some of it in Everquest. As I started getting geared, I felt obligated to play Lodin as my main and keep it in tip top shape for the sake of the raid. The problem is I never really felt like a hunter, in spite of just how amazing the LNR hunter crew was. Many of those folks I still talk to on a weekly basis, and even the ones I don’t… it is always a happy occasion when I see them.

Birth of Belghast

The problem is that the hunter just didn’t fit my personality, and I had intended on playing a tank when I started World of Warcraft. Originally the intent was to play Exeter my paladin as defensive, but there were just too many problems at that time with the whole “Seal of Rage” debacle as a way of holding aggro. A good friend of mine had expressed interest in leveling a priests, and I had wanted to level a warrior… so we decided to go for it and Belghast was born. The character Belghast originally came form when we were playing Dark Age of Camelot. He was my Celt Champion and I played the role of dps and occasional off tank. It felt fitting to recycle the character name, and since Human warriors had both mace and sword specialization I made the choice for aggro generation reasons. Leveling as a team was awesome, I learned to trust my healer because it allowed me to focus entirely on making things mad at me. I looked up to the LNR tanks at the time, especially my friends Rakrul and Giulietta and I feel like I learned tanking from the best.

It was not long before I was tanking regularly the LNR “fun” raids like Zul Gurub and AQ20. When The Burning Crusade expansion launched, I took it as my opportunity to switch to the role I felt more natural playing. The gear reset was a point of frustration with many in our raid, but for me it was a golden opportunity to switch focus to Belghast and not be years behind the curve. Switch focus I did, and I got a reputation for being willing to tank for almost anyone that I knew. I spent my evenings helping folks get the bits and baubles they needed to gear up, and eventually lead a Karazhan run. While LNR was a casualty of the expansion, I moved into a tanking role with No Such Raid another non-guild based raid on our server. When it eventually died as well I helped to found the Duranub Raiding Company that stuck around through both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, ultimately dying off when the changes coming with Cataclysm shifted the focus away from non-guild raiding.

A Fitting End

So there is something fitting that I am back playing World of Warcraft again, and playing Belghast once again. When I first set foot on Draenor, it was this grand opportunity to finally be a “real tank”, and as I set foot on Draenor again I am feeling overcome with nostalgia. While I doubt I will be a raid main tank again, I have been enjoying relearning how to tank in World of Warcraft. There was a time at which I knew all the tricks to keep mobs from doing stupid things, and much of that knowledge has faded away. However as I enter the phase of tanking Heroics I am looking forward to relearning it all. There is something sublime about returning to the warrior after tossing him aside with the release of Cataclysm. Cata was the expansion that killed World of Warcraft for me, and since then I have played for a few months at a time before fading away again. Maybe playing the character that my name comes from… will ultimately be a source of revival.

World of Warcraft

For those who might ultimately find this post through means other than my regular readers… during the month of November I have been posting something I am thankful for each day. Today I have to say that I am very thankful that World of Warcraft exists, because through it I have met so many awesome people. If I think about it, there are so many people that I love having in my life that I never would have met were it not for this game. So many of those people I talk to on a daily basis, and if not daily… weekly or monthly. My life had been enriched by hundreds upon hundreds of people that I have encountered through this game. While I have had a complicated relationship with it… going through periods of love and periods of hatred… it is much like a family member now, and I am thankful that it has existed and continues to thrive in its own way.

If you really think about it, this blog would not exist were it not for World of Warcraft. It originally started as a Warrior Tanking blog devoted to my thoughts about tanking and raiding and over the years has morphed into a blog a bout “me”. Similarly all of the people that I podcast with weekly, I would never have known were it not for World of Warcraft. Kodra and Tam were both members of the Late Night Raiders, Ashgar I met as a friend of theirs… ultimately through World of Warcraft, and Rae while she is now a co-worker of mine… I originally met her through raiding. These are all folks that are extremely important in my life and every single one of them ties a lineage back to this one game. To take a step further, I likely would have never joined twitter, or google plus, or any of the other social connections I have now… were it not for this game and the blog that I created about it. I feel like this one game has acted as a fulcrum to enable so many awesome people to meet other awesome people, and if nothing else you have to give your utmost respect to that. Thank you Blizzard for creating World of Warcraft.

Garrison Resource Drought

November 22, 2014 by Belghast

The Search for Food

This morning I really did not want to leave the bed. I was surrounded by warm and fuzzy cats, but as it got later both my wife and myself started to get hungry. My wife and I are both relatively intelligent individuals, and friends have postulated that we must have really interesting conversations. That is not entirely the case… here is a snippet from this morning

Wife:    I’m Hungry
Me:      Me too… I will go get breakfast.
Me:      I am leaving right now *staying there snuggled into covers*
Wife:   Are you there yet?
Me:      No… its a really long trip, will take awhile
Wife:    It will probably go quicker if you leave the house.
Me:      That is just a theory, there is no scientific evidence of that
Wife:   If we look at the evidence from the last fifteen years, leaving the house points to getting food.
Me:      Maybe the food just shows up on its own?
Me:      Lets test that theory.
Wife:    I’m Hungry

I did in fact have to leave the house to make food show up, but there is still no direct cause and effect evidence… other than the whole I gave someone money and they gave me food in return. How the food actually arrives at our house is a mystery because I don’t actually remember leaving the store or arriving home. I do however remember observing the feeding ritual of the cat gods upon arriving at home. Maybe the cat gods are somehow connected to the acquisition of our food…

Garrison Resource Drought

I may have made some poor choices as to the sustainability of my Garrison, as I have reached a point where I am struggling to get the resources needed to keep developing it. I finally managed to upgrade to the rank 3 Town Hall yesterday, giving me access to another small, medium and large plot. Unfortunately I lack the resources to actually fill them. Right now my Garrison has a t3 Town Hall, t2 Mines, t2 Engineer, t2 Enchanter, t2 Dwarven Bunker, t2 Inn, t1 Garden, t1 Storehouse, t1 Trading Post, and t1 Fishing Shack. I lack the pets to actually be able to get the Pet Menagerie but at some point I want to actually level some battle pets so I can get that. I have failed miserably at playing WoWKemon. It just feels so damned tedious to level your pets past a point. The one thing that would make everything better is if they would implement XP Sharing like they have in the actual Pokémon these days.

The problem I am running into however is that I am flat struggling to get the resources needed to keep developing my stuff. I have yet to plunk down a second large building, because I simply lack the resources to do so. Unfortunately as well… I have basically hit the point I am at by farming down the Garrison Resource caches in the various zones. Sure there are a few still out there but I have pretty well gathered all of the low hanging fruit. The Trading post should help out considerably but right now it keeps requesting herbs… and the only ones I can actually feed it are the ones coming from my Garrison. My hope is that soon it will want a mining resource, because I seem to have plenty of those. So I guess my question is… other than Follower missions and the slow and steady tick of resources… is there another in world renewable resource for Garrisons?

Dungeons for Gear

Last night in an attempt to get my last few points of gear needed to hit ilevel 615, and in an attempt to get Rylacus so he could actually do heroics… We ran several dungeons as a guild. I believe we ran three but at this point I have lost count. I know for certain we did the newest incarnation of Upper Blackrock Spire and we did one called the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds. I was actually pleasantly surprised at just how challenging the level 100 normal dungeons have turned out to be. Most of the mechanics are arguably pretty cheap, in that they stack dots on the players or drop damned near instant kill piles of stuff on the ground. All things considered however they were actually really fun. They are not nearly as good as the dungeon designs in Final Fantasy XIV, but I feel they are considerably better than the Pandaria dungeons at least. The reliance on crowd control reminds me more of the order of business during Wrath and Cataclysm, which is a good thing… just not something I am really used to.

It is my nature when I play a warrior to want to charge ahead into the next pack. Unfortunately I need to give my rogue time to sap things, and I need to get back into the habit of marking crowd control targets. The other thing I am struggling with is how loosey goosey mob movement is in World of Warcraft. In FFXIV mob placement is relatively predictable thing. The mobs move where I want them to… back in WoW I found it absolutely frustrating everytime Zul’jin would iceskate around me. I am going to have to relearn the tricks I have apparently forgotten for making mobs stop doing stupid shit. Moving him around felt like having a wobbly shopping cart tied to my waist that I was dragging around with me. All of this said I look forward to relearning the finer points of fighting with the system and getting it to do what I want it to do.

Drinking Water

This morning I woke up with a horrible cramp in my shin. At first I attempted to walk it out, but it didn’t seem like it was just going away. I have always struggled to some extent with dehydration, and muscle cramps are one of those early signs. So as such I got up and went to the kitchen, grabbed a huge 32 oz glass filled it at the tap and drank it all in one setting. Within a few moments the cramp seemed to be lessening so I went back to bed. At which point it struck me, just how lucky I am that I have really good tap water. In fact I greatly prefer our tap water to bottled water in almost every single case. Tulsa actually has award winningly good water, and as such we are pretty blessed. It never really hits me just how rare this is, until I go somewhere else and without thinking try and take a big drink of tap water.

So while it might sound odd to be thankful for it… I am extremely thankful I can turn on the tap and get something that actually tastes good. Speaking of which… I think I am going to go fix myself a large glass right now.

Gearing for Heroics

November 21, 2014 by Belghast

Stutter Gone

So as you know over the last several days I have been struggling with Dragon Age Inquisition. When I initially booted up the game the stuttering was so jarring that it would sound like a record skipping and freeze movement for a fraction of a section… just enough to bring you out of the game entirely mentally. Nvidia released and updated driver and this helped the stutter but it was still there, and still just as frustrating to try and play the game with. Since then I have tried what felt like every possible combination of settings, none of which removing the problem. That is except for one apparently. Last night I finally landed on the solution to the problem and the stutter is gone. For some reason my machine prefers to run games in windowed borderless, this has always been the answer to a performance boost. I thought I had tried this initially but apparently not… because the moment I shifted things into windowed borderless the hitching went completely away.

Now I feel like I can finally play the game in peace and actually experience it. Unfortunately last night I just was not in the mood for this sort of game and moved on to working on gearing my warrior in World of Warcraft. That said with the stutter gone the game is a much more enjoyable experience. There are times the game is absolutely beautiful to behold… I still feel like I need to spend some time tweaking the settings because I had fiddled with almost everything trying to get the game to function… and now I have a few strange choices picked here and there. The interface feels a bit cludgy for melee, so it is going to be one of the things that I have to get used to as I play the game. So far I am not a huge fan of my companions, and even Varrack a character I really enjoyed in Dragon Age 2 is getting on my nerves. I think maybe I just need to put this game aside and let the frustration from the back and forth with settings fade before I attempt to play it again.

Gearing for Heroics

Last night I had two goals… one of which fell by the wayside. I figured there was no real point in attempting the silver proving again until I actually had the gear level to matter. So as a result I crawled through the wowhead item listings and made an effort to complete every single quest in Nagrand that had even the slimmest chance of dropping something that would improve my ilevel. Additionally I poured the rare spawn and treasure drops to find anything that might give me a little boost. I also spent some time pouring over the auction house, which was as I would expect completely insanely overpriced for what was actually available. After hours of painstakingly trying to incrementally improve my gear score I was sitting at 609. One stinking point away from heroics.

My friend Damai asked me to do a weapon enchant for him, we ended up partied as he started pulling together a group to try and help Rylacus get some gear. A bit later I found myself tanking Skyreach since that had the lowest ilevel requirements, and the only one we were able to queue with Ry. It turns out there are two quartermasters in the Ashran Town Hall, each of which sell 615 trinkets, and both of which bumped me up just enough to get over the 610 heroic gear requirement. Running Skyreach however also allowed me to start my Legendary ring quest chain, rewarding me a 640 ilevel tanky ring that was almost twice as good as my previous best item. Now it is just down to me getting through my silver proving, so that I can be ready to tank heroics for the guild. I don’t have a lot of fear because I made it through seven of eight rounds last time, and it was really only because I got tunnel vision and stopped paying attention to my own health that I actually failed the first time. I have gotten quite a bit more gear since that point… so hopefully tonight I can knock that out first thing.

WoW Anniversary

This morning the WoW Anniversary content officially began, but if I am remembering correctly… the actual launch date was November 23rd. I remember being frustrated that it was right before the Thanksgiving Holiday… which would mean I would be tied up with family and such. A decade ago I had so many houses to visit on thanksgiving that it lent itself to being a a crazy all day occasion. We would start early in the morning and travel throughout the day, and then repeating the process to a lesser extent on Saturday. Its funny how things change in a decade, because now we only have a single house to go to, as everything is happening around the noon meal. When I logged in this morning I had a Molten Corgi pet waiting on me in my mailbox. I find it odd how Corgis have become such a video gaming mascot. The game Rift has at least half a dozen different Corgi pets in game for example.

The primary reason why I have been pushing to gear up so quickly… is that this coming Tuesday we are planning to run the Molten Core LFR as a guild, or as close to “as a guild” as we can realistically get for a 40 man. The LFR itself will have an ilevel requirement of 615 and completing the event will reward you a helm appropriate for your main spec so for plate it would be something resembling this one. Completing the event also earns you a Core Hound mount, which looks really cool. Then there are a few items that have a chance of dropping like a doodad that embues any weapon with the Flames of Ragnaros effect… at least cosmetically. I guess with this expansion they have made it so you can transmog over enchantment effects, which is cool because some enchants look way better than others. Basically I want to be able to participate in all of the Reindeer games… and Damai was gracious enough to move it to Tuesday after telling him that Monday was the FFXIV raid night.

Gladiator’s Resolve

This is absolutely the hardest part of any blog post this month, is to come up with something new that I have not already talked about on the preceding 20 days. As we near the end of the month I am pretty much going to be grasping at straws here, but I feel committed to carry out the experiment. Since this morning I am talking about World of Warcraft, I want to say how happy I am to have the Gladiator’s Resolve talent. Essentially for those who do not know what it does… it replaces battle stance for protection warriors, giving them a brand new gladiator stance. When in that stance you lose the innate survival and threat generation benefits of defensive stance… but gain a 20% damage increase. Essentially this makes you sword and board dps, and from what I have seen in my own tests I deal a TON of damage.

This is essentially what I have wanted the entire time I have played MMOs… to be able to effectively dps while using a sword and shield. I like the iconic look of the sword and board warrior, and while two handers are cool… they never really fit my personal style. I used to get frustrated that games would always make shields being entirely about defense… when in real life shields have always been extremely effective weapons. Now that I have this option… I actually want to try pvp in Ashran. In the past warrior pvp for me at least felt impotent, because I couldn’t be the badass heavily armored tank that I was in the dungeons. This one talent I think changes that. I am still extremely sturdy, and still have access to all of my protection trickery… but this time around I can simply deal some damage with my shield as well as my sword. So this morning I am thankful for someone finally giving me this talent, it makes me extremely happy.

Level 100

November 20, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling More Human

This morning I am still not feeling amazing, but I am doing sizably better than I was yesterday. At least I feel marginally human now instead of a walking malady. This is mostly due to my wife and her being able to tell me what to do… and actually have me do it. I have been feeling lousy for a bit over a week, and yesterday she exclaimed “you have to call the doctor” and then she relented and gave me a secondary line of action “or at least get some mucinex”. I called the doctors office and unsurprisingly (because I waited until like 9:30 to do so) they were already booked up for the day, and said that they would call me back if there were any openings. So in the meantime I got dressed and ready and went to Walgreens around the corner from the house. Mucinex is something that the doctor has suggested I take, so I was no stranger to it.

Actually there are many times I have had success taking a one two punch of Mucienx and Tylenol Cold and Flu to clear various issues up. It turns out that in the constantly rush to get more products to market, Mucinex has created just this thing. Granted you have to take it every four hours for optimal relief… but in any case the stuff is pretty miraculous. Within a few hours of taking it I was already feeling noticeably better and all the gunk in my chest clearing up. Granted it still has the nasty taste going down that Mucinex always does however the drug lives up to its claims, and I think I just found a new go to for these situations. This gentlemen is why we need wives… I was more than willing to muddle through without doing much to fix the root problem. My wife however got tired of me moping around and told me to do something about it. Apparently there are in fact times where I “don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain”.

Level 100

Yesterday I spoke about having a dilemma of whether or not to do Spires of Arak or just jump straight into Nagrand. Having done a little of both, I can clearly say that there are definitely some story elements and quests that make Spires of Arak worth the hassle. That said it is also the new Bladesedge Mountains, in that the terrain is a pain in the ass to move around and the quests are scattered all over the zone in small pockets. If you are wanting to jump straight into being dungeon ready however, I highly suggest going to Nagrand as soon as possible. While I was able to bump up my ilevel a bit in Spires, I did not actually hit the 600 normal mode dungeon target until I reached Nagrand and spent a bit of time questing there. As of last night I was able to push my ilevel to 603 inching me closer to the heroic starting point of 610. I completely bronze proving grounds and made it to round 7 of silver until I screwed up and did not actually pay attention to my own health. Hopefully tonight I can knock out silver proving grounds and maybe bump my ilevel a bit more with questing or dungeons.

Among the strangest quests that I completed was one for a little Goblin kid wanting you to retrieve his “treasure”. It turns out the kid is a perv and you are essentially recovering a calendar of goblin pin-up girls. I had to stop and take a screenshot when the big reveal happened. Sure I found it funny, but also at the same time super cringe worthy. I mean I get the humor in it, but just like the Granok bed in Wildstar… it feels a bit over the top for something so casually slipped in there. Throughout the night as various other members got to the quest you would see comments in guild chat like “Did I just retrieve a Goblin nudie mag?”. Yes… yes we did. What I found surprising is just how at home Nagrand still feels. This was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade, and for the most part they managed to get the look and feel just right… even without the floating rocks. Ultimately that has been the payoff with this expansion for me, being able to see things before everything fell apart. Burning Crusade was a really important expansion for me, and because of it I have so many fond memories that just keep getting refreshed as I do this content.

Nostalgia Bomb

I can’t really judge clearly how good the content in Warlords of Draenor actually is, because I cannot peel away the shiny coat of nostalgia long enough to actually evaluate it with a clear mind. We ultimate are an accumulation of our memories and emotions… and this expansion is managing to bring all of those down to bear upon me. Will the magic fade? Almost certainly it will, and probably quicker than it came on in the first place. At that point I will be able to see the flaws where they stand, but for the time being I am doing what I hope to do in any game… have fun. Ultimately this game was designed for me, and my play style specifically. There is tons of super dense content, and even though it is content with a little c… it is still cool objectives. There seems to be an endless array of little doodads to find in the world, and interesting named mobs to kill that drop interesting treasures. Thankfully I chose to level my disenchanter first, because this has been an amazing source of shards for my future enchanting endeavors.

Speaking of Enchanting… it seems exceptionally expensive this time around. Enchanting work orders give temporal shards… which you then turn around and use 10 of at a time to get a temporal crystal. I finally saved up enough daily tokens to purchase a “real” enchant, and I did so to grab the one that looks to be the new go to for tanking. As you can see it costs 15 Temporal Crystals and 10 Sorcerous Earth. Far as I know I have yet to actually get any Sorcerous Earth, but it seems to be a random drop when disenchanting or mining. Thankfully I do seem to be getting plenty of primal spirits that I can then trade for the materials I actually need with a vendor on my garrison. In any case folks will not be handing these enchants out willy nilly, because that is a lot of resources to pour into a single weapon enchant. For the time being I have the comparatively extremely cheap Mark of the Shattered Hand enchant, just to have something on my weapon.

Unfortunately engineering is an equally time consuming boondoggle, mostly because I was not really paying attention and didn’t realize that I had two daily cool downs this expansion instead of just the one. This means that I have gotten a slow start on getting my tanking helm. As of this morning I am 40 parts into my 100 total needed. That is in part because I only just started doing the more expensive 4 parts a day cooldown. I am running the maximum number of work orders allowable but unfortunately my engineer follower is not quite 100, so I can’t start getting double parts just yet. In any case it will still be awhile before I get my tanking helm, let along actually have the materials to seriously level engineering, though with the rank 2 mines I am starting to get enough spare bits to keep both cool downs and work orders in the black. I just forsee that I have a lot more daily cooldowns ahead of me before I can start doing interesting things with crafting.

Coffee

As a child one of the movies had a massive impact on me was Dune. I remember watching it in elementary school and being enthralled by the fact that the book was co complicated that it needed its own glossary of terms. I remember reading over the glossary, memorizing details of it… long before actually being able to struggle through the epic prose contained in the front part of the book. Since I watched the David Lynch movie first, before reading the book… I will always have certain visuals in my head associated with things. One of the things that stuck with me that was a complete fabrication of the Lynch movies… was the mantra that the Mentat Piter De Vries chants before taking Sapho juice.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

There is a little voice inside of me that says this every single time I drink a cup of coffee. I will always be enamored by the near instant quickening effect coffee has. I feel like a Mentat gaining focus when I sip a cup. Maybe this is the effect of the caffeine, or maybe this is just something I have built up for myself by making a little ritual of it in my head. In any case it is a magical thing. Energy drinks have a similar effect, because I think in part I have moved this same pseudo religious ritual over to them as well. Either by trick of my own mind, or by actual chemical effect… I am thankful that I live in a world where coffee exists and can do magical things.