Christy's Five Questions for March 2023

And it's 5Q Time again!
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/christyotwisty/phlog/2023-March-Five-Questions.txt

A little late but it's not the end of the month yet.  So let's go!

  1. If you were a potato chip (potato crisp, croustille), what
     flavour would you be? [My answer: Worcestershire Sauce, and yes
     that flavour exists, and I've eaten a bagful.]

Salt & Black Pepper!  Preferably with hot sauce to dip in, but some
ketchup or BBQ sauce mixed with a few drops of tabasco will do!

  2. What's the most unusual way you've made a new friend? [Example:
     in "Ripping Yarns" series 1, episode 2, "The Testing of Eric
     Olthwaite" he makes a friend by sharing anecdotes about his
     family while his co-robber points a gun at Eric's head, about to
     kill him to remove the risk of apprehension by police. The
     anecdotes resonates within the co-robber, he shares a similar
     anecdote, and then they learn they have a lot in common.]

I think the most unusual way was this friend I made my sophomore year
of psychology in college.  It was the start of the year and I didn't
knew nobody, neither did he.

By coincidence we found ourselves sitting next to each other on the
same bench in lecture hall.  The thing is that I have a bad habit of
moving one of my legs (you know like when one is stressed or have too
much energy), which could result in the table and/or bench vibrating. 
Aware of that and concerned that this was bothering him, I looked at
him and asked discreetly in the middle of the course: "Can you feel my
leg moving?".

Not necessarity the best way to put it, obviously, because of the
relatively sexual undertone, and the fact that I said it in a whisper. 
It made us both laugh so much and we instantly became the best friends
in the world.

Oh god!  We were together all the time.  What adventures we had!  We
were like Spiff and Hercules, a French comic strip about two best
friends; everybody was calling us that, as we became inseparable until
the end of our fifth year.  At some point, to get a job, he had to move
to Paris and we lost contact.

His name is Romain.  And if you've read this, and have by any chance
recognized yourself, just know that: I miss you a lot, bro!

  3. Tell me of a film, miniseries, play, or book wherein your
     sympathies for the protagonist shifted to the antagonist. What
     caused the sympathy shift?

I can't think of one!

  4. I wish to improve my Gopher phlog. I could justify the text, or
     add RSS functionality, or add external links of interest. What
     are your recommended resources for getting me beyond the basics?
     [If you use Gemini, share ideas for prettifying my capsule.]

Working with the plain text itself, I guess the easier way would be to
use what the editor can make.  IMHO, a good editor should be able to do
automatic justification.  I do it with Emacs for instance.

For more complex things (like playing with hyphenation for example),
something like nroff(1) or groff(1) would be more appropriate.  But
this requires a small learning curve.

For this you can use the resources provided by rfc-editor.org at
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-editor/.  In particular the
documents `2-nroff.template' and `3-nroff.template' are a good starting
point for basic things.

It doesn't have to be complicated.  For example to have a right and
left justification, with hyphenation, you just need to have in the
document header `.hy 1' and `.ad b'.  It could look like this:

---8<---
.ll 7.0i
.lt 7.0i
.nr LL 7.0i
.nr LT 7.0i
.hy 1
.ad b

.ti 0
A title

.in 3
A text with a decalage of three columns.

.nf
Something not formated at all for code or ascii-art.
.fi

And here we go for some random sample text!
--->8---

To generate the final text, I personally use the command:

$ groff -t -Dutf8 -mfr -Tutf8 file.nroff > file.txt

It would certainly be necessary to replace `-mfr' with an other macro
since it's one made for French texts.

About RSS: we had a little discussion around that on bboard(1) in SDF,
in particular with gef.  Personnaly I'm not sure that RSS is so common
with gopher (I've never seen one), and as far as I know offpunk.py is
the only client to handle RSS through gopher.

Edit: I've finally found one today at gopher://codemadness.org

But in case one would want to do it, a simple shell script could do the
trick.

For external links, I simply use a gophermap with all the good links I
want to share.

Finally, I can't talk about gemini since I'm just an occasional browser.

  5. What's an entree you prepare so well at home that you don't order
     it at a restaurant? [My examples: beef stew, chicken paprikash,
     spaghetti bolognese]

Unfortunately, I am not a good enough cook, so what I find in a (good)
restaurant is often better than what I make myself.

Oh!  And BTW, I almost forgot, personal message: Aunty Shufei, if
you're reading this, you appealed me so much with your answer on this
one.  I'd LOVE to taste one of your pizza!