proxy70

Ok, I made this phlog to write stuff on it, and now I just need to actually write something on the damn thing. So here goes. Projects first, then I've put a story at the end. I've formatted this post so that it's readable best with Gemini (no errant line breaks), but I'll still post it to gopher.

Some stuff I'm working on:

* Gemini extension to lynx. (http://ingrix.sdf.org/lynx_gemini.patch, may be applied to the latest version of official lynx-snapshots repo as of 2024-04-15). I've got this mostly functional right now and it seems to work for me, but apparently others are having some trouble with it. It needs some improvements, and can only use an OpenSSL compatible library for SSL.

* Embedded Gemini server library. I'll name it libpolluxd. It's inspired by libmicrohttpd, which is basically a C implementation of an http server that can be embedded in other applications. I have this capable of serving basic Gemini content right now, but it is not release ready yet.

I rather like the Gemini protocol. It takes a lot of gopher's appeal and makes it just a hair more modern, flexible enough to be sort of practical, and has some kind of integrity check builtin via the encryption.

=== Story Time ===

I don't really have an agenda for what I want to talk about tonight. So, screw it, I'll do here what I do with folks in real life. I'll bullshit a bit. Here's a story about how I almost got into a fight with Florida Man. Or, really, how I avoided getting into a fight with Florida Man.

Early in March (2024, for those reading later) my family went on vacation for the first time in something like 2 years. My wife and I had kids, the 2020 pandemic happened, all kind of things put a pause on leisure activity before then. We decided to go to Florida to visit Grandma. Grandma lives north of Orlando, and we used to visit her during the summer. We decided it would be fun to get her out of the swampland and take her down to the Gulf coast and enjoy the sun, sand, and sea, so we rented a house near John's Pass for a few days.

John's Pass is a little touristy spot - think seafood restaurants, gift shops, places that sell beach umbrellas, and plenty of bars to handle the usual tourists plus with extra staff hanging around getting ready for the spring break season. Generally we had a really relaxing time, and we had some more family members, including my brother, drive in to meet us. My brother and I hadn't seen each other in quite a while too, so we had a good time catching up.

At some point on Sunday evening my brother got into an argument with some folks and ended up pretty bummed out. I decided to try to cheer him up. How would I do that at 19:30 on a Sunday evening? I know, buy him some sour patch kids! That dude loves sour patch kids. So I throw on my sandals, grab my wallet, head out the door and drive a few blocks down to the 7/11 I had seen a few days before.

Besides me there was one other car in the parking lot, and I can see that there' a guy and a gal inside the 7/11 looking like they were getting kinda handsy with each other. Weird, but it's Florida the week before spring break, and they weren't being obscene or anything. I'm in a hurry so I don't give the two weirdos much though, walk into the store, swing down the candy aisle, find the SP kids, and go stand in line for the cashier.

The counter was one of those types that are in the middle of the gas station, like a long kiosk where the attendant can go to either side if they need to. On the left stood weirdo #1, the guy of the couple. He was a hair shorter than me, probably in his late 50s, tanned, bald, and spoke with what I think was a Greek accent. He was not a lady killer. On the right was weirdo #2, the lady, and she was a pretty good looking lady in probably her late 30s. That sort of match up does happen, but it was a little puzzling. It wasn't until a few moments later that I realized it, but weirdo #1 was just some Florida Man trying to hit up a good looking tourist lady. She was in good spirits about it, but was clearly not interested.

Finally the lady decided she'd been there long enough and that it was time to leave. She said something to the effect of "sounds good, I guess I'll see in you in John's Pass, Santos," and turned around and walked out the door. Florida Man, aka Santos, decided it was time for a hail-Mary to save his evening. "Yeah alright!" he calls to her as she's walking out the door, "Nice ass!". This caused a record screech in my head, but not to worry, things got more confusing almost immediately.

After it was clear that the lady had committed to completely blowing off Santos, he whirls around to look me in the eyes and growls, "What the fuck was I supposed to say?! Don't look at me like I'm a fucking idiot."

The situation just went from 0 to 60 in a flippin' heartbeat. What the hell was this dude's problem? So far I hadn't even actually looked at him, I'd been looking at the breath mints under the cash register. "Oh," I said to myself, remembering the occasional Florida Man that I used to run into when visiting Grandma in swampland, "He's looking for an excuse to punch me in the face."

At this point my brain was kind of crawling over itself trying to find a way to keep having a normal evening despite this guy's insistence on it going awry. Am I going to get into a fight with this guy? What's he going to swing at first? Should I just gtfo if it gets to it? I probably should, but he's in the way of the door, so that'll be a problem. Has he got any weapons? I've got a pocket knife, am I going to have to stab him to get out of here? Can I even get the thing out in time if I have to do that? (I say all of these things for illustrative purposes, but I promise the thoughts were not as coherent as this and my mental dialogue sounded like a cacophony of idiocy and panic.)

Somehow amongst all of that going I remembered one of the harder lessons that I have had to learn: if you're in trouble then a good default is to keep your mouth shut. So that's what I did, I just stared at him. Santos scowled at me, I stared back at Santos, and we just stood there staring at each other. We stood there for an uncomfortable amount of time, staring at each other. It could not have been more than a few seconds, but my adrenaline was rising and my attention was getting fine enough to notice every little pore on this dude's nose, so it felt like an eternity. Eventually, though, he decided he wanted to buy his pizza instead of get in a fight and turned away.

Santos turned around, grabbed his pizza box off the counter top, and walked it over to the cashier. He was still pretty agitated, and I was pretty sure he was going to have something else to say, but he managed to pay for his pizza without incident and was getting ready to leave. That's when he decided it was time to check his pizza. As he lifted the lid of the box the cheese of his pizza stuck to it and half of his freshly-purchased pizza flopped out onto the floor. I have no idea how I didn't laugh. I laughed in my head, harder than I had all day, at the karmic justice of what had just happened. Santos hollered in anger, crammed the dirty floor pizza back in the box and whirled around red-faced to look at me again.

We stood there staring at each other again, but for a much longer time. Staring had worked the first time, and I was going to ride that winning horse as far as I could. I think I managed to keep my face about as expressionless as the first time, which was probably a blessing. After another two- to three-hundred years staring at Santos, who was still clearly looking for any excuse at all to punch me in the face, he decided it was, indeed, time to leave. I was a little worried he would try to start something outside, but ultimately that ended up not happening. I went back to our rental place and chilled out for a bit to let the adrenaline settle, and eventually just went on with my evening.

So there it is. Kind of a stupid and pointless story, but it was interesting enough at the time. It was probably a story more about luck than anything, but maybe keeping my mouth shut actually kept me out of some trouble. Ultimately the important thing is that the best-case outcome happened. I got to go about my evening without some even stupider story to tell about the whole thing (and all of my teeth), and I got to give those sour patch kids to my brother, who loved them. I'll count it as a blessing.

// ingrix