Rick's b.log - entry 2026/01/01

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F---ing Freezing!

My days are depressingly short. I stayed in bed until noon (I blame the heated blanket) after swearing I was going to go into hibernation until March when I went to feed Anna at 7am. Her meal? A nice big one, which was warmed for thirty seconds in the microwave and stirred so there wouldn't be any hot parts. She doesn't seem to notice the cold, but she really doesn't like the wind in her ears. Me? I noticed the cold. Made a tea, got back into bed, turned the blanket up a notch.

It hasn't been this cold since it went to around -8°C on the 28^th of February 2018. There was a time when I had rather lovely pictures of a frozen world - especially the big willow - but I don't seem to be able to find them. Luckily this time it was just cold, not wet then cold, so it is just regular frozen.

I didn't lie in bed asleep. I read some stuff, and Zerosquare, I finally got around to ordering a SFH620A optocoupler. That and two resistors and I ought to be able to hook an ESP32 (or maybe flash something onto that ESP8266 I don't have any purpose for) to be able to read the TIC from the Linky. Heh, it only took me eight years to get around to ordering the part.
Though, in my defence, when I die I'll look back at the time between 2020 and 2024(ish) as "about a year passed but it felt like longer". As the top of the page says, it is the 2133^rd of March 2020 (today, as I write this).
I just hope it'll less than eight years until I do something with the optocoupler. Looks a pretty simple circuit - it and two resistors - so let's say "by January 2030"? ☺

I also spent fifty euros at Picard, a frozen parcel to arrive on Saturday morning between 8am and noon. Day after tomorrow, it'll be plenty cold in the morning...
It all started because I wanted to know if they still did that lovely raspberry pie because I didn't see it at the actual Picard store (yes, they do), and I was also upset about not having that lovely veggie Buddha bowl. Turns out they gave it what the Frenchies call a "relooking". I have one in the freezer so I'll take a side-by-side picture and you'll see what I mean. And I then noticed a nice looking slab (900g) of Mac&Cheese which would be useful for times when I really don't feel like cooking something. I also found the beef and onion Chinese meal that they definitely didn't have in the shop in Bain (I examined everything in the Asian section), plus I got a couple of individual size ready meals.
I did have some American burgers, but I felt that fifty was quite enough so I removed them from the list.
Postage, cold-store courier to my doorstep, was a fiver. That's pretty impressive when you consider that Amazon pretends like you'd be paying €6,90 per parcel if you didn't have Prime, though in reality I would imagine most non-Prime people would go for the slower €2,99 option and group their orders.
If it isn't brass monkeys, maybe I'll do an unboxing and we can all discover if they chucked stuff haphazardly into an oversized box like they did the last time.

La Poste DDOSed

What changes in France today?

Meanwhile the SMIC (minimum wage) is going up by the quasi-automatic 1,18% to be a pitiful €1823,03 (brut) per month. The government uses some weird calculation to determine that the applicable rise for the past year is only 1,18%. Maybe they ought to pass a law that things cannot go up in price any more than 1,18% for the entire year.
I am paid slightly over the SMIC, so my wage will not increase unless it has to go up to be "at least" the SMIC, but I think it's something like €12,08 and hour and I get a smidgen more. So, in effect, until our wages are renegotiated (usually sometime in the late summer), we'll all be working for less in real terms.
About a third of a million public service workers will be getting their pay adjusted so it keeps step with the minimum. So next time you get annoyed with a jobsworth, just think that being a stickler for contradictory and illogical rules may be the only satisfying thing in their lives.

They are changing the criteria of how electric heating is calculated for the energy performance rating of a property so that people who heat using electricity are screwed a little less. Every kWh of electricity used is counted as 1.9kWh (instead of 2.3kWh). Don't ask me - I thought they were trying to push everybody to using electricity...

The "MaPrimeRenov'", a funding for renovating older properties, has been suspended - again. This time the excuse is because the budget didn't get passed so there's no money. I bet when SNCF wants a few hundred million, there will be money...

And finally, everybody from outside of the EU who wants a residency permit or to apply to be naturalised will been to complete a 45 minute "civil exam" on various topics of French life and how the country works.
This counts for us Brits too, unless we were granted residency permits as a condition of the Withdrawal Agreement or they have already been granted a residency permit and they're just renewing it.
Personally, I am not against the idea as I think that some understanding of how the country works should be considered essential things to know. I just hope that they ask useful questions ("if you see somebody having a heart attack and there is nobody else nearby, what do you do?") rather than dumb things like "what did Charlemagne do?" and "how many wars did Napoleon start?" which are interesting topics for history class but aren't in any way important for day to day life. I level similar criticisms at the UK citizenship test.
I do feel, however, that there should be a simplified version for people who are only looking for a residency permit. The questions about the political system and how the government works and voters rights are largely irrelevant as residency does not confirm any voting rights whatsoever. Indeed, I had more ability to vote as an EU citizen than as a registered resident (local elections and EU elections, I can understand losing the latter by why can't a resident vote for who will be their mayor?).

Screw the rich

That's a hill I'm prepared to die on. Billionaires should be considered harmful and be first against the wall.

Stranger Things

Okay, what comes for the rest of this blog article is spoilerific. Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers.

The episode is basically split into two halves. The first hour(ish) is the action where the crew execute their plan and stuff happens.

Time must run quite differently in The Upside Down because characters kept stopping in the middle of tense scenes to give their lines of meaningful dialogue. While I can understand this, it's honestly bad writing to be like "hurry! hurry!", then two or three minutes of emotionally important dialogue, then back to "hurry! hurry!". I mean, seriously? This happened not once but multiple times.

Well, the Mind Flayer makes a return and it sort of makes sense how that was handled, but it seems weird to me that there wasn't a single demo or other creature around to deal with the gang. If they aren't resident in the Upside Down and they aren't in the... whatever the hell Vecna's world is called, then where did they come from? Just spawned when convenient to the plot?

Just hanging out on a radio tower next to a freakin' planet.
(screenshot from Stranger Things 5.8; © Netflix)

I don't want to be That Guy, but if there's this planet (of sorts) that is descending down upon the fake Hawkins, then... shouldn't there be some gravitational effects?

It probably ought not come as a surprise that the series that seems averse to killing off any of it's main characters only killed off the one recently introduced who wasn't planning on making it out anyway, though they did briefly tease getting rid of Steve.

It took Joyce how many swings of the axe to decapitate Vecna? There's also a lovely poetic justice that Vecna was finally done in by a mere mortal human with no powers other than being a mom.

At end rate, there's a sort of happy ending but the Upside Down is gone for good and the military have to leave empty handed. Unfortunately Dr. Kay appears to have survived, so this story is far from over. If she managed to scavenge enough stuff from the Upside Down, it could be recreated.

The final hour(ish) is... dumb. We catch up with everybody eighteen months later to see how they're all doing. I can understand that this is it for Stranger Things and they may have wanted to give all of the main characters a good send, off. But, seriously, this could have been done in twenty minutes and used the rest to expand upon the action. Maybe, for example, more cat and mouse with the military goons?
It is also teased that El didn't actually die but managed to sneak away and is now looking for a place with three waterfalls or something.

Everybody cried. Oh my God, so many tears I felt like I was watching one of those quirky Korean dramas.

I think the main problem with ending like that is that it's an anticlimax. We know nobody if importance died in the end and it's up to you what happened to El, so really you can stop watching at the halfway point and you'd be missing no real plot points. The story was over by the halfway point and this is......what? It's not tidying loose ends exactly.
And the problem with the episode is this final hour and the important dialogue pauses, the pacing is all over the place.

That said, Dustin did have an opportunity to deliver the most epic graduation speech ever. He was valedictorian - DDG tells me that means he graduated with the highest grades.
His speech starts off heartfelt, and then goes completely off the rails. Wait - was that the Byers' father in the audience? I thought he died when the Demo stole Holly from reality? Good grief, they couldn't even manage to bump off an annoying adult?

I think more than a few of us weird kids would have loved to flip off the headmaster...to his face.
(screenshot from Stranger Things 5.8; © Netflix)

On the plus side, the extended credits list loads of visual effects companies, and they all did some pretty impressive work. We're a far cry from the days of people acting in front of paintings and photographs. The visuals of this episode were pretty incredible.

The standout character this season is the young English girl Nell Fisher who played Holly. She pretty much stole every scene she was in, to the point where I'd argue that with her connection to Henry and trying to deal with the others who think she's tricking them, she may well be the most important character in this entire season...and this is a show with loads of main cast characters to keep track of.

The standout character this episode was Nancy (Natalia Dyer) who looked to be having a blast going full-Rambo. In fact, with her hair and behaviour and facial expressions, I would argue that this is actually an homage to Weird Al's Rambo parody in the 1989 movie UHF (YouTube link), although, Rambo III....

Scariest character on this show? Nancy Wheeler. Don't mess with her family.
(screenshot from Stranger Things 5.8; © Netflix)

Well, it took an entire decade getting here - and the flashbacks to the younger characters are really jarring because of how much the actors have changed in that time - but this story has now concluded.
Or has it? ☺

How, I guess, us sci-fi fans will need to wait to see if there's any major Netflix franchise to make itself known. They had a shot with The Witcher but they put it in the hands of somebody who screwed it up so much the lead actor walked away. Sense8, Sabrina, and I Am Not Okay With This, Warrior Nun and The OA were all cancelled (some of them due to Covid, for some reason).
That is, actually, one of the problems with Netflix. It operates on the premise of flinging stuff at the wall to see what sticks, which makes it all the harder for programming like Stranger Things to gain traction. I'm glad they, at least, saw it through to the conclusion rather than just cancelling it at the end of a season.

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