RE: March 2023 Five Questions (from christyotwisty over at sdf)

1. If you were a potato chip (potato crisp, croustille), what flavour
   would you be? 

   Dill pickle, maybe? ...old fashioned, sour/funky, but if you are
   someone that gets the flavor, maybe just right?

2. What's the most unusual way you've made a new friend?

   I am hard pressed to come up with an unusual way that I have made
   a friend. I suppose if you count my spouse, we met first on an
   internet dating website and went on one date and then were just
   really good friends for ~9 years; then we moved in together and
   were married within a year. It is now 6 years later. The idea of
   internet dating is weird to me so I am going to call that unusual.

   I suppose meeting people on pubnix is also mildly atypical?

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 am hard pressed to come up with something here either. Maybe I
   am just not reading the right books for this? I suppose maaaybe
   Dwight Schrute on the office, or Jim Halpert. They flip flopped
   for me. When I watched the show the first time Jim is presented
   as a sort of protagonist. Or at least the cool guy you are meant
   to like. My wife and I rewatched the show and we talked a lot
   about how Dwight, while intentionally over the top odd, is really
   the person that you should be rooting for: Dwight _does things_.
   He makes things, he is engaged and interested, he wants to be
   better, more informed, skilled, good at what he does. He shows
   himself to be occasionally petty, but generally good to the
   people around him, especially those he particularly cares about.
   These exact features are things that he is ridiculed for, in
   particular by Jim. Yes the pranks are funny and in the end they
   come around in regard to each other... most of the show Dwight
   is teased for being an engaged individual with a variety of
   interests and skills, rather than a kind of generic slacker.

   I don't know that that answered the question in the way it was
   meant and TV was not listed as an option... but I suppose that
   is my answer anyway.

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?

   Depends on how much you want to do by hand. I'm sure someone has
   written a gopher to rss or atom program that you can likely just
   run or set on a cron job. Unix tools like fold and fmt can handle
   line wrapping and justification. You could, alternately, learn
   scheme (or a language of your choosing, if you do not already
   code) and start playing with things. It can be a lot of fun. That
   said, I really like gopher for not going too heavily into a bunch
   of tooling. A little ascii art here and there, sure. But mostly
   I just like reading what people write and am not really very
   picky about their formatting at all.

5. What's an entree you prepare so well at home that you don't order
   it at a restaurant?

   This is going to sound crazy, but: pizza. But not because my pizza
   is better than all others. We, my family, are vegan and the only
   vegan option on the mountain (where we live) is around $30 for a
   two topping medium vegan pizza... and it isnt very good. So I
   started making my own and we have just gotten really used to it. It
   has become my default for what pizza tastes like. It is better than
   most other vegan pizza, to me (with one exception: a place near
   where my Mom lives called 'Vegan Pizza'. They are amazing).

   All of the other things I cook a lot I love ordering out and about
   just to try out different takes on them. I guess with the exception
   of sopes. I make good sopes. I make good indian dishes too... but
   who gets tired of trying other people's indian food? I'll always
   order indian if it is an option (especially if it is Udupi cuisine,
   which I quite like).