I figured out the problem, and a temporary solution

looking through my mailbox i saw this thread:

From: lists@webservice.com.uy
Subject: php and locations with regex (round 2)
Date: October 23, 2007 6:44:21 AM EDT

which was the same issue as me.

the problem is that my macro for php is the very standard block

location ~ *.php {}

which should not have been used within a static or regex location -
only in a server
but there is a behavior where it does work on static location

so i created a temporary fix: i made another macro which was just the
contents of the php block

in the 2007 thread, igor said that it would be bad to use an if ()
match on files... is this still true?

ideally i would like to do this:

location ~ /regex/ {
if ( filename *~ *.php(\?.*)? ) {
fcgi passover
}
handle static stuff here
}