thydungeon

[thydungeon]

The Fear Reversed: The Maw

Open up on Maryland, 2012, the season 2 premiere of The Fear in Review. It's a short bit about how mouth ulcers occasionally destroy my quality of life for a week or two.

Uh, then open up on 2025, which is when I'm writing this.

A lot of my fears have been reversed over the years by sheer time, maturation, employment, relationships, money, etc. This one was done by pharmaceuticals, baby.

A couple years back, I finally decided to purchase Orajel, an over-the-counter topical analgesic. This blunted the pain of the mouth ulcers, but it was always temporary (also it came with a huge sting), so I deployed this when eating meals.

A year later (uh, I guess a couple fewer years back), I finally brought this issue up to a therapist, who basically refused to engage with the topic and deferred to a doctor.

That was a disaster, but a few years later (I'm getting there), a doctor finally prescribed me triamcinolone acetonide in dental paste format. This doesn't do anything to really blunt the pain once it's gotten going, but it can smother mouth ulcers before they start. I apply a dab of it to the mouth ulcer and then go to sleep the first night after I bite my lip.

I pair this with rinsing my mouth with hot salt water instead of brushing my teeth at night. To be honest, I have no idea if that helps, but I'm unwilling to risk even a single instance of full power mouth ulcer to find out.

And that's all I've got! Thank you Big Pharma!

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I went to a random Thai restaurant and this was playing, and I really could not tell what year it was released for obvious reasons.

It's from 1987! They were doing throwback rock-n-roll ballads in the 80s, too.

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the year in review: 2024

We finished Baldur's Gate 3, then played it again. The third act is a mess, and it's obvious Larian should have spent more time on it. But there are still dazzling moments in the late game.

We're now playing WarCraft 3's co-op campaign mod. It's really good, but the voice acting and storytelling is really bad.

Still love my dog.

I'm all in on the Baltimore Orioles.

I bought nice wool socks.

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it appears that the old embedded (?) video (??) of The Waitresses' Christmas Wrapping has been blown away, so here's a YouTube link to the same song cryptically described as the "Long Version" (?)

put this shit on repeat

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"Hidden Music Themes"

From 2018:

Hidden Music Themes - I really only know of two examples of this: Mass Effect and Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction, where the menu theme (which you obviously hear over and over and over again) actually belongs to a specific character/moment’s theme that appears far later in the video game at a pivotal moment.

Mass Effect 1

This theme plays over the main menu, so you will hear it many many times before the first time you actually hear it in the context of the game. It's the emotional high point of the game where you learn the stakes of the series.

Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction

Again, the menu theme. If you're playing LoD from the beginning, you go through 90% of the game, hearing this theme every time you fire up the game, before you get to the theme around the time (I think after) you fight the Ancients.

Game designers have a large toolbox to enact difficulty, and I remember as a kid I was scared of this fight because, unlike every other fight in the game, if you use a town portal to heal up and restock, the Ancients reset.

You see this type of difficulty in any standard game that involves checkpoints, but at the time it was a tried and true strategy to chip away boss health, flee, and come back. Not so with this.

It's a good theme. It also bites Wagner (check out the comments), which probably helps.

These other examples are not the same thing, but they give me the same spark "oh shit!"

Once Upon a Dream / Tchaikovsky

One time in the middle of Covid, my spouse played this ridiculous song from Sleeping Beauty. But like, you know, the main hook is pretty catchy isn't it? It also has the creepy 40s/50s dreamy choir singing.

Anyway, one time while listening to classical music radio I realized it's just literally the waltz theme from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty.

Boromir/Gondor's Theme

This is literally just a leitmotif, but my understanding of it went backwards.

Gondor's theme shows up a bunch of times throughout the films, but in my memory, the most notable one is when the beacons are lit in ROTK. I don't really know why, but this scene has always made me tear up.

I rewatched LOTR a few years ago and then I realized, that theme shows up way way back in the first film at the Council of Elrond when Boromir speaks. I'm sure a lot of people rewatching the films notice this, and it's a cool rewatch bonus.

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are you okay?

I got a little anxious last night. It was nothing major. I was sad that the Orioles were being eliminated from the playoffs. I was also sad about the way it was going down, which called to mind a cartoon character being tossed face-first through a saloon door while the bartender shouts, “And stay out!” I was a little drained from making conversation at a long group dinner. And I knew this article could really use another draft, which meant getting up early before a doctor’s appointment that I was already a little nervous about. All minor things, but the result was that when I answered a question from my wife, something in my voice made her stop and ask if I was okay.

Everyone deserves to feel seen. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling lonely, and I am well aware that it’s privilege to have someone who cares enough about you to know whether you’re telling the truth when you say, “I’m fine.” But also, sometimes you really are close enough to being fine that you’d rather have your slightly sour mood slip by unnoticed. Humans are very picky creatures.

- Davy Andrews

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The Fear in Review: Panic Room

Open up on Maryland, 2012 --

That's it, I just wanted to you remember that I wrote about this 12 years ago.

I have a lot of "siege dreams" - dreams where someone or something is imminently trying to enter my home, usually my childhood home. I have to run around the house in my dream and make sure all the doors and windows are locked or boarded over. Inevitably, I miss one, and I am terrified in my dream that that the monster will get in and eat me and my family.

Now that I live in a house, I sometimes actually stay awake because I hear little bumps and noises in the middle of the night - these are noises you hear in any house. For the long period I lived in an apartment, I always felt like there's only one true point of entry, the front door, so any noises I hear at night - if they don't sound like the front door opening - I don't need to worry.

There are a ton of ways to get into my house, so now it feels like I really do need to make sure every door and window is closed and locked, and that nobody is trying to break in.

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year in review: 2023 - addenda

I also became an addict to sports again, this time because of baseball. I regularly consume FanGraphs (and its podcast Effectively Wild), Baseball Prospectus (and its podcast Five and Dive), and only through sheer will am resisting the urge to get a Baseball America subscription to huff hopium about my team's farm system. I do consume Baseball America's podcasts that are not about fantasy (I remain very contemptful of fantasy sports). This sport has turned my life into a smoldering ruin (I'm kidding, but I did have a crisis when my team lost the first of four climactic games in the division race in September (I'm not kidding (I'm kidding a little))).

---

Also, I started playing Baldur's Gate 3, we're almost at the end of act 2, and we've put 60 hours into it. How do I feel?

This game has taken a giant stinky piss on the smoldering ruins of my life because I want to play this game 2+ hours a day every day. I love it.

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year in review: 2023 - only 1 month late edition

So I'll be honest, not being on twitter anymore makes it a lot harder to do a monthly blow-by-blow, but I'll do my damnedest based on what's been uploaded to Google Photos.

After looking through my photos, it's 90%+ my dog, so I decided to reduce this to only quarterly, and yes, it is mostly just Goose.

Q1

we got rid of our gas furnace, replaced our electrical panel, and installed a heat pump.

we visited Atlanta for a wedding, went to the aquarium (sponsored by Georgia Natural Gas).

Q2

Goose ate half of a rubber ball, and we had to make him throw up at the vet. He no longer is excited to go to the vet.

He saw this dog that looks a lot like him:

went on a nice trip to the Olympic peninsula. Check out this painting of a pig that was unfortunately $350, so we did not get it (the three lights are reflections):

I also apparently went to Chicago for a wedding and took pictures of nothing except for my sister's cat:

Q3

my parents visited and they liked Goose:

I watched The Room

Q4

Goose got a coat:

I went to China and watched six episodes of 30 Rock on the way over:

look at this Christmas ornament my sister got me:

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[thydungeon]

Escapism

In the winter break of 6th grade, I spent the entire week plus not working on my biography report. I can’t remember what I did, but that 6th grade winter break is my earliest memory of basically not confronting the work that I needed to do.

The reason why that matters today is that I still put off a lot of negative feeling or anxiety that I have related to work by finding this or that to engage with. For a lot of middle school, high school, and even college, I would watch the NFL, which is a nuclear disaster zone because I used to root for Washington, and anybody who followed that teams knows that they were dog shit for the vast majority of the last 20+ years.

Nowadays, it’s a steady combination of 80% baseball (that’s right, I transitioned to a sport that is even more fundamentally unfair than football) and 20% co-op video games (Baldur’s Gate 2).

Sometime in the next couple months, I’m going to relearn the same lessons I learned when I was 20. Sports will go sideways and your team will lose, and video games are not real. And your homework and whatever you’re anxious over will still be there. I think the only true improvement here is that in high school and college, I played single player games, which truly offer nothing but temporary escapism, whereas playing co-op games is great because I get to shoot the shit with my friend.

So yeah, maybe the lesson here is for me to just consider what I’m actually nervous about, upfront, because it’s going to be upfront sooner or later.

[thydungeon]

The Fear in Review: Tax Deadline Special: Trouble Man

The other night, my niece mentioned to my MIL that she was going to steal a toy from daycare to give my baby nephew because my nephew was missing his. Nice gesture aside, my MIL suggested my niece would get in trouble, to which my nephew asked, “what’s trouble?”

This is a spiritual sequel to season 2 entry “Power Surge.”

My manager in DC always thought it was silly when I asked if any of us would get in trouble for this and that. That’s not really how real life works unless you’re violating the law, but, like my niece, I have a severe aversion to being told off.

Does this come from anywhere in particular? I don’t think so - the only thing I can think of is a couple of times when I was 5 or 6 that a teacher or friend’s parent mildly chastised me. Funny enough, I once stole a valued Pokemon card from a neighborhood friend and thought that I could literally outrun the problem by going home. Of course, my friend’s mom called my mom and I had to return the card shortly. But I don’t think this was the source of any yelling. 

Here are three funny anecdotes of parents getting in trouble:

My FIL and his ne'er-do-well friends were trying to find a bathroom, wandered into a church, and since the bathroom was locked, thought it was appropriate to pee on the door. His dad found out and made my FIL apologize to the Father and then clean up the door.

My dad once threw rocks at a visiting missionary because he thought the missionary was trying to fool his parents.

My mom once stuffed the space under the bathroom door with a towel and then ran the water until she flooded the bathroom because she wanted to make a big pool.

You know, it probably isn’t actually that hard to avoid getting in trouble. I once got a $225 ticket in NYC since I parked too close to a fire hydrant, and that still pisses me off.

And yes, I’m still mad at the high school math teacher for yelling at me.

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Stone Cold Bummer

I took a training a month ago that made me SAD.

It made me SAD because I thought about the distance between what my training taught and what I would deal with in the reality of my job.

I actually used to feel this way whenever I took a training at my old job in DC because the trainings were always at the shiny fancy headquarters instead of drab government office buildings I actually worked at. At the nice HQ, I distinctly remember wrapping up my day by catching up on emails in the umpteenth floor dining space, looking out at a sunset across town. That particular training made me really sad because that was also around the time we had decided to leave the country. Looking back, I would guess it’s because it meant that time had officially run out on that job making good on the promise it had when I had started five years earlier.

When I lived abroad, I had to change my lock screen from the default beautiful landscapes because every time I looked at them, it made me think about how I was stuck in a job that I really hated.

I’ve kind of stewed on this for the past month, but I don’t think I have that much to actually say. The real point is that I’m really happy for the most part, but every now and then I’m reminded of that particular time at HQ, and it still makes me uncomfortable.

[thydungeon]

The Fear in Review: Valentine’s Day Special: My Dog

I spent most of my life not really understanding why people loved dogs so much, and this photo below doesn’t really explain it either, but I have always loved the idea of shaking hands with a dog.

I love Goose because he is so happy to see us whenever we come home, or wake up, or otherwise see him after having not seen him for a long time. He loves being around us and hates it so much when we leave that he tries to find a window to look at us to see where we’re going. I have never interacted with another small critter that likes me as much as Goose does.

But I spend a lot of time worrying about him because he even though he can’t speak, he can emote - specifically, he can emote sadness, anxiety, and fear. I worry a lot about him because I am responsible for his well-being. This quote about Laika, the first animal (read: dog) to orbit the Earth, is very sad to me:

In 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die:

Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it ... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.

Whenever we leave him alone, I worry about his safety:

- If we leave him in the yard, will he dig his way out and escape? If he escapes, what if he is caught and abused, or killed by a passing car?

- If we leave him in the house, will he eat something that’ll get lodged in his gut, or will he choke himself to death on a small object?

- If we leave him in the crate, what if the house burns down and he’s trapped?

As I write this, he’s futzing around in the yard at night, and I know my neighbors have set out poison for rats, so for the past two weeks, we haven’t left him outside unsupervised since there are potentially dead rats around. 

I don’t think it’s the end of the world if/when Goose dies, but he’s a real nice creature and my preference is for him to live a long, happy, and healthy life. And when he does pass away I will cry like a 3 year old for weeks.

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year in review: 2022 - almost 2 months late edition

my 2022 was divided into halves

before and after I got this guy

that’s all I have to say - more on that later

also:

- Elden RIng was p good

- Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has amazing co-op content

- go O’s

- I dressed up as a cowboy for ... new year’s eve??

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fast reviews: christmas in maryland 2022

I watched 4 movies on the plane rides and finished 2 of them

spoilers obvs

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Nope - I will watch Daniel Kaluuya in almost anything // I think the final third of the film becoming a heist movie (can’t remember where I read that, but it’s a good description) makes the film far more enjoyable but probably seals its fate at being a genuinely “great” film on the level of Get Out - it’s just too scattered and messy and has too many ideas. But the ideas are great!

also I’m a sucker for orchestral cowboy cosplay

The Batman - these notes are from a chat, so they’re more extensive than the traditional fast reviews

- overall I liked it - I think DC's movie strategy being a flaming pile of garbage enables them to be more creative with the movies they make (this might also be regurgitated DC propaganda and cope for how they're so bad on average) - detective comics!!!! I liked that a lot - the movie was funnier than I expected? like not that funny, but surprisingly adequate comedic timing, like the mustache cop when Batman returns to Riddler’s apartment - pattinson's voice is better than bale's but not by that much - John Turturro national monument designation now - I thought it was really weak that Alfred walked back Falcone's reveal about Thomas Wayne - like "no no no your father actually was good, no need to grapple with your past" - I liked that they spent zero time on Batman's origin, like we don't need to see that shit, just get straight to the good part - some of Paul Dano's REEEEEing was really cringey and idk if that was on purpose - the Joker's laugh was Not Good - can we just get Mark Hamill to do the voice and dub that shit over - I also liked that they show people shooting the shit out of Batman and that it has an effect - that and him eating absolute shit while trying to land from his skyscraper jump is real Batman Year One shit

Eighth Grade - I got about 45 minutes into this and wanted to blow my brains out because of how high-fidelity it was

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Nazis! only got half an hour into it, but I’ve seen it before, and I picked it specifically because it wouldn’t take much brain power and it didn’t matter if I didn’t finish it // shout out to alfred molina

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warren what the fuck are you doing