Dr. Tom

Closed by request.

With the respect of posting articles, no. It's easy to use and does what we need it to. But if you want to overhaul it, it's a fucking disaster. It's an out-of-date version, and we'd have to pay more money for a new version that might not do what we want it to do. Article Manager was one of the huge stumbling blocks in the front-page revamp we were trying to do over the summer. Scrapping it in favor of a different content system would make things easier from the administration perspective.

Probably, but I honestly wouldn't want to do it. With wrestling in decline and interest waning, putting actual show reviews on the main page is as far as I want to go. Heck, I'd love to ditch the rasslin' altogether and just be a pop culture site, but our wrestling writers are good and dedicated, and I'm not going to do that to them. (Yet.) (Muahahahaha.) So posting "shows" where people are pretending to be wrestlers -- which means they're pretending to be people who pretend to beat each other up -- is not something I want us to get into on the mainpage. I think we posted one or two before, and the reaction was not positive.

I don't know. I guess he was really "Lethargic" after all. :-/ It's hardly unique, though: we've had many mainpage writers quit over the years, most of them doing so without notice. I've been quite high on some of them, and they've just stopped writing. I guess that's inevitable when you're a small website that can't pay anyone to write for you, but it sucks nonetheless. I wish I could have done more in the proposed front-page revamp, too. We talked about it a lot, but I didn't have a wealth of time to commit to it, between work and school, and my technical knowledge of what was required was limited. I know more now, but I'm still not a code guru or anything of the sort. My share of the blame in this is at least as large as Sass', if not higher, since I was the one everyone looked to sign off on things and put it together. So I'll take my lumps from that and move on. Incidentally, I'd still like to overhaul the front page completely and get away from Article Manager, even if it means I (or just a few people) have to do all the article posting. It'd be great to find a few folks to do this for us (since trying to dump it all on Josh is both unfair and unrealistic, though I'd certainly like him to be involved), but it would obviously be pro-bono work. Edwin, if you want to submit something to me again, go ahead. I'll actually read it and get back to you this time, and my apologies for not doing so the first time. drtomfowler at yahoo dot com Like others, I tend to get excited about projects I'm involved with, and I end up biting off more than I can chew. Maybe this time, with realistic and tempered expectations, we can get the main site looking more presentable, and then we can draw in more readers, not just from the forums, but from the 'net as a whole.

Wow, we go from a bitter, quite needless anti-charity screed to an equally needless screed about Iraq. This might be the worst thread ever. Congratulations, you two. Let's try and keep this to the discussion of the various tsunami charities and their merits or demerits.

I live in MD, in the Baltimore suburbs, about 30 minutes from the PA line. In 2002, the state elected its first Republican governor in 40+ years. While MD is traditionally Democratic, that comes from the major population centers: Baltimore, Baltimore County, and Montgomery County. The rest of the state votes Republican, but since the three Democrat hotbeds have over half the state's population, that's usually enough. My county is fairly conservative, so I fit in reasonably well, though I avoid talking to random people whenever I can.

There's a simple principle in writing called the "ham sandwich rule." Always presume your reader is about to get up and get a ham sandwich. Your job is to make your writing engrossing enough to keep him in the chair until the end of your story or article. That was a tasty ham sandwich.

While prologues like that seem like a good idea, they're really not. You should begin the story like Plato said: in medias res, aka in the middle of things. Backstory like that can always be worked in thru dialog and other exposition. But a dry prologue that just recounts a few events and sets a stage is just you spinning your wheels. Get out of the mud and dive into the middle of the piece.

Another good site for hardware things of all kinds is HardOCP.

Of course you do, because you want to believe everything that's negative about America, our President, our troops, and the war effort. No thread condemning America for some imagined sin would be complete without the board's resident leftist pincushion contributing the expected response.

All recent requests have been done.

Goddamnit. You're going to make me defend Christianity, aren't you. Fuck. Here's the difference: Islam IS a religion of evil and hate. That's what it preaches. Kill the unblievers, the infidels, the Jews, the Christians, and other non-Muslims. Islam has a grip on a populous region of the world, and that region has really yet to evolve out of the Dark Ages in many respects because of the religion. Compare this to Christianity. Yes, it's had its bloody past, and the Old Testament -- which Christians are all to happy to throw under the bus -- makes reference to wonderful things like smashing your children's head against the rocks to be happy. Despite that, and perhaps because of all that, Christianity has evolved. It still has its fringes, and people like Phelps live on them, but the bulk of the religion has come out of the Dark and Middles Ages and modernized itself pretty well. Meh, I feel dirty now. Goddamnit.

Yay, someone older than me. w00t~! Have a good one, Dave.

THat's why he took the knee when he could have easily broken the record against the Ravens? I thought the Colts only tried to run up the score on Houston, passing with a big lead in the fourth quarter. Their final TD in that game, though, was a defensive one.

And to you, Witty.

Stuff like this will not be tolerated. Privacy rights and the like might not be well-defined in the age of the internet, but posting someone's personal information -- and that of their parents -- on a messageboard is beyond the pale. Even if you dislike someone, getting their parents involved is shitty, cowardly, and childish, and it is NOT going to fly around here. For the record, Chris Coey is allowed to post here again because he was a staff writer for TSM. Sass and I felt it was unfair for him to have a column, but no voice in the forums to deal with the feedback his columns would inevitably generate. Even though he doesn't write for TSM currently, I'm not going to throw him under the bus for something he said two years ago.

The lovely Kim Smith, ladies and germs. I blame Paint for the odd cropping on the right.

If it were, you know there would be some do-gooders saying that a blade wasn't sharp enough, and might cause an instant of pain before the head fell to the floor...

1996 election results: Candidate--Party--EV--Popular votes William J. Clinton --- Democratic ----379---47,402,357 Robert J. Dole ------- Republican ----159---39,198,755 H. Ross Perot ------Reform Party ----0------8,085,402 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html Perot actually had 8.5% of the vote, more than I thought he had. I still think he hurt Dole a *lot* more than Clinton, since he was basically a Republican running under a different party's banner. And he ruined any chance Bush Sr. had of getting re-elected in 1992. EDIT: The FEC puts Clinton's total at 47,401,185, Dole's at 39,197,469, and Perot's at 8,085,294. The percentages change very little. http://www.fec.gov/96fed/geresult.htm

Perot wasn't all that strong in 1996, though. He shot his load in 1992 and had lost a lot of his relevancy four years later. BTW, shouldn't your bet with kkk have ended by now? Or do you still <3 you some Rove?

Generally, yes. I don't like the Jesus Freak aspects of his agenda, obviously, and I think Iraq, while right and necessary, was understaffed and underplanned. But the thought of Kerry in the White House absolutely frightened me from a foreign policy sense. I'm not a huge Bush fan, and wasn't planning to vote for him for a while (nor Kerry, obv), but I came to find Kerry such a repugnant candidate that I ended up voting for W, anyway.

Did Clinton receive 50% of the popular vote in 1992 or 1996? Was Clinton a popular president? Is Clinton still a popular public figure? My post wasn't a shot at Clinton, but more to point out that "the people" didn't elect him with a majority of the popular vote either time, and it didn't seem to hold him back too much.

I agree. In fact, I doubt it would have been very close. Perot torpedoed Bush Sr. in 1992; his impact on the 1996 election was a lot smaller. Yes.

Except gay marriage, FCC censorship, drug legalization, abortion, anything religious, etc. What I've said is that I am not a registered Republican (which is true), and that I am a social liberal and a fiscal and foreign policy conservative. I vote Republican, and often side with the GOP on non-social issues, because I can't support the fiscal and foreign policy proposals of most Democrats. I'm also fiercely pro-American when it comes to terrorism, and I despise moral relativism and general softness in this area. I suppose that brings me in conflict with a fair number of leftists, as well. Each year, as part of security training, I have to watch footage of the 9/11 attacks, and each year, I get a little angrier while watching them. That's a fair point. Each side has a radical, vocal minority whom the other side loves to quote and ridicule. We very rarely get middle-of-the-road soundbites; they're always some radical liberal saying we need to sympathize with people who are trying to kill us, or some radical conservative who thinks the nuclear football should be punted around the Middle East.

Bush received over 50% of the popular vote in the 2004 election. I think "the people" voted for him. Now, I'm not one to name names, but a past president with the initials of William Jefferson Clinton did not receive 50% of the popular vote either time, but was (and remains) very popular. Don't be bitter that Bush did what your golden boy could not. Why am I not suprised?