quizzical.net

George Bush is a problem.

His critics decry his assault on the environment, his overlooking of human rights issues, his partiality towards the well-off and towards those in the energy business, his Christian-state ideals, his war-mongering, and his general cynicism that he turns into public policy.

It seems he can get away with anything.

So it’s no wonder that billionnaire George Soros has dedicated tens of millions to his defeat. Or that dozens of so-called 527 organizations have popped up within the last 2 months to aid the Democrats in beating him.

Or is he?

I speculate that George Bush’s presidency is merely the reflection of a larger movement in American society. Sure, his abuses of the environment, and human rights, for instance, are unprecedented, but it seems that the importance of these issues in the American mind has been diminishing since the 70’s and 60’s, respectively.

We can also look at Christianity, a religion practiced by the majority of Americans. Christianity has Seven Deadly Sins, all equal in their evil, all of which are a one-way ticket to Hell. I’d like to focus on two of these, adultery and greed. Adultery on the part of a public figure, a neighbor, or a guest on Springer is a common source of uproar these days, and justly so, as it is in the minds of most Americans, a deadly sin. But I see the equally dangerous sin of greed being committed regularly, by these same public figures and neighbors, without the accompanying sentiment of distaste. Why? Because money and power have become a celebrated part of our culture.

So what’s your point?

My point is that societies change, and people’s ideals change. It seems that American ideals have changed over the past 30 years or so from an idealistic “let’s make everybody’s life better” perspective to a more cynical “let’s get rich” perspective. I think that Bush’s near-victory over Gore in 2000 was less the triumph of one man over another than the triumph of the new American Way over the old. This explains why Bush can get away with things that previous presidents wouldn’t have dreamed of.

It also means that defeating Bush is only a small step in reversing this trend of American cynicism.

John

If you’ve checked out the forum lately, you’ve probably noticed that some of the colors and graphics have changed, and that the little bug that used to appear in the upper-left corner is gone. Yes, it’s still kind of ugly; I still have some changes to make and some refining to do.

The front page, however, is still in disarray. While my code can currently separate news posts from non-news posts, it can’t separate non-news posts from news posts. Also, some of the “comments” links link to the wrong topic, or dont link at all.

My plan at this point is to give it a look similar to that of the forum. It will have three news items on top, five recent posts on the bottom, and extra goodies (fortunes, polls, widgets, etc.) on the right side. This involves messing around with PHP and style sheets, and I’ll get to it when I get to it.

If you have any suggestions or comments on this new design, reply to this post and let me know. Do the same if you discover any bugs that I haven’t mentioned.

John

I thought I’d give all my avid readers a little update before I went to bed. Here goes…

Having set the forums up a few days ago, I decided to screw around with the database to put a news summary on the main page.

What a waste of time. Mad

I was considering writing the thing from scratch, as I had planned before.

Luckily, before the last shred of my sanity was lost to murderous rage, I checked with the PHPBB site and found a mod that did pretty much what I was looking for.

And it was good.

I still have to separate news from chats, though. And I know it looks a bit rough right now, but a cascading style sheet or two will make it look downright spiffy.

I hate to cut this short, but I should really get to bed, lest my brain leak out through my eye sockets.

John

The basic strategy for Quizzical.net has changed a number of times over the last few months, so let me recap. The initial idea was to have a website with a forum integrated throughout.

My initial inspiration was classicgames.org, which has a forum on nearly every page. So, armed with my roommate’s PERL book, I set out to write myself a website. I had just finished the CGI that would turn posts into files, when school started kicking my ass hardcore.

A few weeks ago, I decided I was going to do the same sort of thing, but in PHP/MySQL, which would be a good deal easier than PERL, especially where maintenance is concerned.

Just today, however, I decided that I would base my site on PHPBB2, a popular, open-source forum implementation. There have been thousands of man-hours spent on this project, so it would be wasteful for me to re-invent the wheel. My plan is to write my own basic SQL accessors, to present the most recent discussion on the main page, and to make my own nifty themes. Since PHPBB2 is open-source, I can change it where I need to.

Happy posting,
John