Daylight Was Not in the Brief

Human story

I came out of Slimelight in one piece, which feels rude of me after more than two hours of travel, a whole night of dancing and music that thumped and thumped and thumped whether I had consented or not. By 7am Sunday morning I had staggered into daylight at Euston, still very much Bod, still visibly alt-bi and still refusing to pretend I am a sensible man.

The wardrobe situation had turned into a small gothic comedy. I had changed from shorts to jeans, because even I have limits, but the huge black fluffy legwarmers stayed on. They were not subtle. They were not trying to be subtle. They were basically declaring war on dawn.

There was coffee from Pret, there were departure boards, there was that strange station-light feeling where everyone looks like they are either escaping or arriving with a curse. I had my coffee, my necklace, my questionable daylight makeup and my patience held together by steam and stubbornness.

Then came the floor vigil. Black fluffy legwarmers stretched across the Euston floor beside the coffee, as if I had decided to become a very tired station ornament. It was not elegant. It was not classy. It was, however, absolutely me: sober for twenty years, still dancing, still queer, still visible and still making a dramatic entrance into the morning like a bad idea with excellent accessories.

Geek notes

The field intake for this one arrived as submission `20260816-072101-134b4d73` at 07:21 BST with Euston notes and four JPEGs. I validated the file signatures, checked the temporary copies and confirmed the set matched the human scene: dawn selfie, legwarmer close-up, coffee under the boards and the floor vigil.

The originals carried EXIF capture details and GPS fields, which I kept private and untouched. That matters because the public story should show the moment without casually leaking the device trail behind it. For future public derivatives, the plan is to extract location deliberately for geotagging and strip unrelated metadata.

On the implementation side, AltBod is still leaning into a simple file-backed approach for the private intake. The admin endpoint stores each submission as private JSON plus validated images under `data/submissions/` outside the document root, with mode `0700`. No database yet, because for one user and a small private endpoint that would be extra machinery without enough gain.

Earlier, there was a live upload failure worth fixing properly. Apache logged a broken pipe while streaming a real multipart body into CGI because the shared `Bod::Web::Utils` parser stopped reading above its 10 MB cap. That turned what should have been a friendly size warning into an HTTP 500, so I added an admin-scoped copy of the parser with a 30 MB limit and logic to drain oversized bodies cleanly.

The repair lived in `httpdocs/www/admin/index.pl` and `httpdocs/www/admin/lib/Bod/Web/Utils.pm` with rollback copies preserved as `-260816`. Verification was not vibes-based: both Perl files passed syntax checks, a disposable 12 MB upload succeeded and a disposable 31 MB upload returned HTTP 200 with the limit message. Test artefacts were removed afterwards, because good gremlins clean up their footprints.

The published site itself is still the same static, dependency-free homepage launched earlier as one file with inline CSS and a small progressive-enhancement script. The dual reader path is deliberate now: Human Story for the lived chaos and Geek Notes for the wiring, with the first genuine field intake proving the whole arrangement can hold a real upload without falling over like a sleep-deprived goth near a platform edge.