The rebirth of Pop Critics

When I originally took over this site last fall, I had high hopes and great plans for Pop Critics. As so often happens, life and work got in the way and the site died down.

The plan is to bring this site back to life. But, the entire format will be changing.

The original plan was to turn Pop Critics into more of a community-based site where we could have an open conversation on all things popular culture. This is what I’m moving toward at the moment.

The Pop Critics forums

Yesterday, I finally finished the initial design and opened the new forums. I want this to be a place where everyone is welcome to discuss what’s happening with celebrities, the hot movies of the summer, a favorite book, or the plot arc of a new television series.

I want it to be a place where you can be free to just be yourself and debate the finer points of the really important things in our culture. You know, stuff like the best science fiction show this past season. Like I said: things that really matter.

Take a moment to set up an account. It’s completely free to join and start posting.

Movie database

A little pet project we’ve been working on is the Pop Critics movie database. Mostly, we thought this would be something fun to do just to see if we can do it.

It’s far from completion, and we’ll likely take our time on building it. Right now, we’re still toying around with a lot of ideas on what it’ll look like in a few months, but it’s completely open to the public. You can rate movies, leave comments, and just browse around. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a movie you’ve never seen before.

The resident redneck

Teaming up with me at the moment is a good friend and family member: Shannon Wood. I call him The Redneck because that’s what he is (he’ll probably hurt me later for this).

He loves watching TV and movies but can’t write worth a lick. I’m using my advanced English-teaching skills to teach him things like what uppercase and lowercase letters are right now. Next week, we’ll move over to punctuation marks.

Seriously, I hope he becomes a great asset to the team here at Pop Critics. He’s definitely put in some work in these last few days helping me get things running again. Please welcome him to the site.

Anything else?

I’m always on the lookout for new writers. I was recently contacted by someone who might start a fashion column, so I’m hoping we can welcome another team member soon.

There’ll also be some changes to the site’s design in the coming days to accommodate the new site features, so be ready. Don’t forget, sign up for an account and help us get the forums going.

Oh, and if you see something wonky with the site design, it’s just me working.