The one that I want to talk about is Michael Jackson. How long do we morn for a pop star who was washed up, and at the end of his or her career? It is like every where I still turn there is still new and even old stuff being brought out on a Wal-Mart shelf about Michael.

” People I say this to all that read here! The man is dead and gone now let him lay and rest… We can’t bring him back…. “

I am not trying to say bad things about the man by no means. I am just saying let’s move on to something better. I mean for God’s sake there are other troubles in this world today than reading, watching, or hearing about a passed away pop star. I am trying to write this article the best way I know how without hurting anyone’s feelings.

But guess what! This is Pop Critics and a critic I will be. If it calls for me to be the only REDNECK writing on here then it will just have to be that way. This is my opinion and know matter how you look at it I will stand by it. There are better things that we should be looking at in today’s life going lesson. What about the BP Oil Spill? When will it get cleaned up? Uhh Never!

We hear about it everyday yet not one person can fix the solution to the problem. One man says plug the Damn Hole and so they try. For heaven’s sake the crap is still leaking.

Hey guess what I bet I can take my car to the gulf and get a car wash and a oil change all at setting. I never thought I could set in one sitting and write about two things at one time, but I guess I have at this point. If it makes one mad then I will say ahead of time I apologize but I will not sit here and tell you I am sorry. There is no way in hell that I am sorry.

It just seems like every time you turn around it’s about Michael or BP. I can’t recall reading, listening, or seeing so much about two crazy off the wall deals since the OJ trail. Now that was action to see. So I will leave you with this…What is your opinion on this?

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.

The new look of Pop Critics is finally here. I know, it took me long enough to put it together, but I wanted to make sure we had a clean site that focused on our content.

Content is what it’s all about, right?

You’ll notice that the reading area is much larger than before to give every article posted here a little more breathing room.

I don’t want you straining your eyes reading, so I focused a lot on the typography to make it as easy to read as possible.

What this site is built on

This site is running on the wonderful WordPress blogging platform.

Some of you know that I run a WordPress themes website, so I built the new design right on top of the Hybrid theme, which made it easy to customize the new look.

Some noteworthy changes

We’re still looking to bring on new writers. If you’re interested in writing about TV, movies, music, games, books, or anything else that might fall under the realm of pop culture, then head to the writing page.

There’s a new advertising system now that won’t get so much in the way of the content but will work for advertisers as well. If you’re interested in advertising, just go to the advertising page and check out our rates.

What do you think?

I know it’s a major change, and some of you may not like it at all.

There’ll probably be tweaks here and there to the design as the site grows and I get used to running things around here. After seeing how people interact and use the site, I’ll have a better idea about the direction the design should go in.

So, voice your opinions.

Today, I want to announce that Pop Critics has officially changed owners and will continue to produce quality content.

A little about me

My name is Justin Tadlock. I run an online business called Theme Hybrid, which produces just enough money to put the occasional crumb on the table but lets me keep doing the things I love.

I’m an avid lover of all things that deal with TV, movies, and books. Just to give you an idea of how much I love these things — I have over 300 movies on DVD, 100 TV series on DVD, and 400 books. Not the largest collection by a long shot, but I’d say it’s enough to warrant me the position of pop culture nerd.

My favorite movie of all time is Cruel Intentions. This was just one of those movies that resonated with me — it’s my coming-of-age film. Plus, can you name a single teenage boy that wasn’t in love with Sarah Michelle Gellar at that time? Hey, be glad I didn’t say Simply Irresistible.

Maybe that’s not enough reason to name it as my all-time favorite, so my others are Goodfellas and Cool Hand Luke. Really, any movie buff worth his or her salt doesn’t have a single favorite. We have lists of top 10s and top 100s split by genre.

You’ll learn more about my favorites in time.

Looking toward the future

It just so happened that I had to leave for vacation this week (still on vacation at the moment), so I’m a little late with this announcement post. I’ll be on top of things from now on though.

I have many plans in store for this site. The biggest is to start building an even larger community than we have now.

Over the coming weeks and months, you’ll start noticing these changes. The first should be a slightly different look for the site, which I hope to have up in the next week.

I’m also looking to bring on new writers. So, if you’re interested or know someone that might be interested, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

Don’t worry; this call for new writers doesn’t mean a complete staffing change. I’m in talks with everyone that currently writes here about continuing the great work they’ve been doing.

I’ll keep you updated as I make other changes to the site.

I’m looking forward to joining the wonderful community that Mike, Jason, and all of you have built here.

Right now, we have a topic on Graphic Novel/Comic Recommendations, and I posted one with thoughts on Burn Notice: Season 1.

There is a link to the forums in our main navigational links, so you can always find it there. Just click on it and then go to User Forums.

I don’t suspect it will take off right away, but I see it being a GREAT place for our Pop Critics community to really take off. Any questions people have on anything related to TV, movies, comics, books, etc., we can all help answer.

Hope to see you there!

Sometimes they are small changes, sometimes they are massive – like adding Disqus commenting. But whatever we do, it’s to try and make this place better and a lot more fun.

Here are a few of the most recent changes:

Not too long ago, we got an idea from someone to have a separate RSS Feed for our various categories, like Movies, TV or Comics. So as of today, we now have FOUR total feeds – Movies, TV and Comics, plus the same one we’ve had since the beginning that gives you EVERYTHING.

You can see more about our RSS feeds on our subscribe page.

We also just changed up the homepage a bit, got rid of our tabbed navigation area to the right and streamlined it a bit. Some of the extra code was slowing things down and it didn’t seem to get much use anyways. For those of you with Internet Explorer, we had some formatting issues and a constant scripting error that appeared, but that’s all fixed now!

The top navigation bar has some new links in it. We changed Books to Comics, since we really focus on comics and graphic novels more, and we added the Calendar page earlier this week.

Also, with Disqus we have a built-in forum for you guys, and so there is now a Forums link as well. I am not sure anyone will really USE the forums, but I’d love to see it happen. Sometimes there is a movie you just want to talk about that we wont be posting about, and you can just do a new thread and talk about it there.

I hope to see it take off with people posting threads and discussing their favorite movies, books or television shows.

We also have the Comments link up top, which just gives you a three-tab interface to see the latest comments, top commenters and popular posts.

On the social network front, we now have a true blog presence on Facebook, so if you are on Facebook, go here to join the our Pop Crirics Blog Network site. We already have seven readers, and once we get up to 15, it will start pulling down the RSS feed, so let’s make it happen!

That’s about it!

As always, we love feedback or ideas, so keep them coming!

We also switched to Disqus part of the way through the month, and that was a huge undertaking which has turned out awesome in my opinion.

The Trousered Ape told me at the beginning of June that he was going to destroy the previous record of 533 total comments, set by Cap’n Schwartz.

Well, that happened, but I’m not sure it was a demolition. Either way, posting over 500 comments in a month is pretty awesome and it certainly made June a heck of a lot more fun.

The Top Five

It’s hard to believe the Cap’n stumbled down to third, but I think the spanking from Ape must have discouraged him. That, or he had actual real work to do.

The Trousered Ape (593)
Princess Ana (189)
Cap’n Schwartz (176)
Richard (128)
jina (102)

The Best of the Rest

Here are the rest of the folks in double-digits this month.

nicky (54)
Dadofiandi (48)
robertb (26)
D.L. White (24)
Raven Spinner (24)
Adam (15)
Scotty Dub (13)
Robert (11)
Adrian (11)
JC John SESE Cuneta (謝施洗) (10)

If you are ever bored and looking for a new website or cool video or picture, give Stumble Upon a shot.

The reason I bring it up is that our site has been SLAMMED with Stumble traffic because of the cool Dark Knight poster that Jason showed us a few days ago. There are also a few other blog posts that have gotten hit the last few days.

Hence you may be experiencing some slow loading times and stuff like that. We apologize only slightly for the inconvenience. We love being stumbled because of all the new faces it brings to our little community here, so the more the merrier!

So just ride it out…it should die down soon.

We’ve added a new Upcoming Events Calendar to the site, straight from a Google shared system. We’ll be adding dates of things that we think are important for you to remember and keeping it as updated as humanly possible.

It should already have a bunch of stuff that’s coming up in July, so check it out. You can find it by clicking the link in the body of this post, or the link in the main navigation bar at the top of the page.

Any feedback is appreciate of course!

If you want to know more about it, read our post and go sign-up if you want, but otherwise go comment a few times below and tell us what you think!

Just a note: Older posts will still use the older commenting system, so we apologize for that. If we decide to stick with Disqus, we’ll switch it on for all of them.