I wish I never told anyone I worked or studied tech. Especially older family and friends, because their requests for help are relentless.

A lot of friends are chill with it, and I don't mind doing a little bit of help, but sometimes people are who are OFFENDED when you don't want to help. In the same way a contractor friend won't remodel your home for free, I am not going to fix every single issue you have with your computer for free. I'm happy to give advice, but i'm not going to work for hours without pay to fix everything.

I don't have a good outlook on psychology as a field. It's all influenced by people for leverage and different countries can't even agree on what qualifies as what (e.g. the definition for social anxiety in one country could be considered the definition for agoraphobia in another). But I think watching Simon Whistler give a very debunked rundown on psychology ten years into his career was the last straw for me this week. Misrepresenting psychology has very annoying implications and it gets tiring to see it done over and over.

To use one example, he mentions the former Axis Power officers in WWII saying they were "just following orders", which led to the highly rigged Stanford Prison Experiment, which has never been able to be replicated with the same results. Why? They rigged it, some say to support those officers. Here is an instance where history clashes with psychology, because near the end of WWII, German officers started recruiting and enslaving the Jews they were capturing to do the very dirty work they previously inflicted on them. Did these poor souls succumb to the wickedness like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the officers who inspired it would suggest in court? No, they were traumatized and went insane, because this was not in their nature.

Modern psychology is littered with these false rules and expectations. I'm sure many of you have heard a number of them. Maybe you remember the Milgram Experiment or Stockholm Syndrome for example. So let's play a game. Look back into your life. Think of all the things you've experienced and how it all played out. Out of all these experiences, which ones can you talk about that you can point to and say "if conventional psychology was right, this event in my life would've never happened how it did?

Example: There is a rule in the field of psychology called the Prisoner's Dilemma. It says that if you question two people a certain way, they will be incentivized to spill beans and betray each other. Me and a friend were once arrested because he got into a fight because someone cheated on his sister and I sped him away. The officers tried inflicting the Prisoner's Dilemma on us, but we're both open books, to the point where we knew the whole point was we were willing to face whatever comes. The cops had nothing. They let us free.

So saw in costco packages of "hand pulled rotisery chicken" selling for $5.5/lb ($16 per package). I guess chickens that don't sell they "disaasemble" and package it. Got me curious, Is it worth paying for hand pulled? how much meat is in a full chicken and average cost per lb?

So got one chicken, pulled myself, remove bones, skin and anything not pure meat..took about 5 minutes ...and weighted. Total Weight was 2.1 lb .. About $5 bucks/chicken.. so $2.5/lb. The labor more than doubles the price. Do you want to pay >2x per pound for pre pulled?

Note: This is completely anecdotal and not a realistic measurement of married women as a whole. This can also merit as a shitpost.

Over the past week (New Year's parties, coffee shops, passing by), if a woman said she played video games, I asked what game are they playing right now.

These were the games

• Black Ops
• Bioshock Infinite
• Halo Infinite
• Fallout 4
• Marvel Rivals

Do whatever you want with that information.

Feel free to have a look at

• !movies@lemm.ee
• !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
• !animation@lemm.ee
• !horrormovies@lemm.ee

If you sit down next to a cat, and throw your arm over the back of the sofa while someone reaches over from behind and starts to pet the cat, and then after a little bit you stand up and leave while the phantom arm is still petting the cat, the cat understands that something really freaky is happening, gets scared, and runs away.

I would have thought they'd be happy that whatever weird thing is happening is petting them, but apparently not. An arm with no human is alarming and bad. I think it's cool that their mental model is that similar to ours.

Name an animal (or several) you like and mention why you like it. No wrong answers!

(please don't tell me about how wrong it is to own pugs, he was a stray I adopted who was found on the street, not a breeder dog I bought. He has a lot of health problems and I've devoted a lot to keeping him well cared for).

My poor old puppy. The restlessness and spinning in circles, the staring off into space, the coughing fits. We are already treating the cough but started some dementia-type medicine and melatonin last night. I don't want to do extensive interventions if he's unhappy but I want to try to improve his quality of life and make his geriatric years as happy and peaceful as possible.

It's so hard to make good decisions about elderly pets isn't it? You want to do the right thing.

I was listening to the New Year's Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.

In this dream of mine, there was an issue with zombies. Not the conventional undead fare but people that carried a disease that made them attack those who didn't carried it.

The strangest part is that these zombies would attempt to season their potential meals with salt and pepper before the first bite. And it was possible to snap the potential cannibal from their frenzied state by slapping them hard enough.

I woke half terrified and half face palming, undecided if I should laugh or question my sanity.

I'm not an horror movie fan. Why would my brain come up with this sort of plot for a dream?

Fuckin love beans. Especially in a chili on a cold winter day. Hits the spot!

At work, sometimes I take a bathroom break just to escape. Don't use the bathroom, I just wanna stop looking people I don't care about around me and the noise. I'm not physically tired, since the job isn't demanding that way, but mentally I can't stand it. That's the main problem, it's a warehouse so it's inevitable. In a perfect world I would be almost completely alone and the job would be a 15 minutes from my home at walking speed...

Both of it aren't a reality.

we had an electronic toy bucket with a clown nose that shot its own balls out of its mouth and the game was you’d gather them up from around the room and shove them back in its stupid bucket head and it would suck its balls up and throw ‘em back out and you’d repeat that and pretend it was fun for more than five minutes.

what do you think made us millennials the way we are? tbh i think zoomers are cool. they’re doing alright. they’re like my younger sibling. we were raised by the same bullshit.

I spent a few years living in the international district (Chinatown, Japantown, Little Saigon) and people would set off fireworks and firecrackers in the neighborhood for days or even a couple of weeks after New Year's. And then again on Chinese New Year's. And there's also this group that likes to go and bang on drums while marching around the neighborhood at those times. It was awful and it made my dogs so stressed out.

Now that I live in a mostly Vietnamese neighborhood outside of the international district, I only hear fireworks on New Year's Eve and Chinese New Year's. It's great not having to worry about whether or not I should drug my dogs for days on end.

I personally enjoy fireworks displays, but I don't think they should be allowed by unlicensed people at their own homes.

I've always hated how alcohol commercials play up like a cool beer is the best thing in the world, or a glass of whiskey is what will put hair on your chest. It's a disgusting narrative that ruins people's lives.

On social media, there's a huge variety of it. People posting how they were sober on NYE. Folks sharing before/after as they've gone cold turkey. I see people share tips of what type of mocktails to get at bars, and alternatives to having a fun night over getting drunk.

I appreciate that.

And this is not bashing alcohol. Moderation in everything.

I took a nap after I got off work today because I had to head in at 5am today. I had a dream where I was traversing an ever burning field where werewolves lived in the not burning parts. I even conversed and broke bread with them. They even had cook fires. Like why do you need a cook fire your home is literally always on fire

And like what an absurd concept that is. How did my brain even come up with that? Dreams like that are why I don't believe that dreams have any real meaning.

Mom hung a mass produced art print on my bedroom wall when I was about 8. It's of a little girl holding her puppy.

Cute, right?

Thing is, this painting terrified me. And I was raised in the time where you just kind of swallowed any complaints and didn't bother mom or dad with kid foolishness.

Here is a copy of the thing I actually had hanging on my wall. This same frame. Probably came from Service Merchandise or some such.

What in the everloving hell is lurking just over her shoulder?!?! To me it always looked like a skull wearing a hat on the side of his head, like a little old timey jaunty hat a clown would wear.

It's a wonder I got any sleep. I was too afraid to tell mom I hated it. I never considered that I possessed the agency to take it off my wall and hide it at the bottom of the closet.

I think of this cursed painting still.

Did you ever have something in your childhood that unnecessarily scared the bejeezus out of you?

I just sold the first Harley Davidson muffler system my company has made... and I'm not in sales! I am giddy... hustled as fast as possible up the hall and told the COO and VP of Sales together. Leaving early today for the holiday, what a way to end the year! Happy New Year everyone!!!