On a much less melancholy note, I hope you all have a Happy New Year!

It’s not surprising that I’m happy to see the end of 2005.  It seems like such a happy number, a shiny number; satisfying, a benchmark.  But 2005 has been a beast of a year, bringing death and heartache.  While I can’t discard the man it’s helped me see in myself and the ways it’s brought […]

I love a good confessional meme. Here’s a great one, via eclecticism:

Where did you graduate from and what year?
Bellevue High School, class of 1990.
Who was your significant other?
I had a few, but my first was a crazy senior named Ginger, I was too afraid to break up with her so I just stopped talking […]

Over the past couple of years, web developers, content producers, and other people with very large brains have been talking endlessly about “Web 2.0″. Definitions of this obscure concept vary, but I it’s fair to say that it signifies two, powerful recent developments on the internet:

The shift in power from the desktop (MS Office, […]

WordPress 2.0 is out and I’m upgrading and testing as I write.
From what I’ve seen, the new admin interface is interesting, but the real improvement is the ability to upload and add categories from the “Write Post” page. It’s also simple to turn off comments for any given post. Take that spammers!
Things might […]

I’m taking a cue from the rest of the internet and taking a few days off from posting. Happy holidays everyone.

I know it’s almost Xmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or whatever flavor of yuletide glee you prefer, but step aside xmas ’cause Halloween is the true King of Holidays.
Keith Milford’s Santa and Me! is filled with season-appropriate shopping-mall Santa nostalgia, but Old Haunts, his other holiday blog, has what might be the best Halloween picture ever. […]

For those of us not living in NYC, or those of you in NYC desperately looking for a cab/bike/comfortable pair of shoes to make your way across town, MOMA has a nice, docent-led, online version of the Pixar exhibit.
MOMA - Pixar: 20 Years of Animation
(via Cartoon Brew)

Holy crap! Studio Ghibli (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Grave of the Fireflies) is adapting Ursula K. LeGuin!
Hayao Miyazaki isn’t directing, but Ghibli films are almost always great. Tales from Earthsea comes out in Japan in Summer 2006 and hopefully will erase my memories of the horrible Earthsea mini-series the Sci-fi Network aired […]

I’m firmly in the grip of Xmas hysteria, so please forgive the brevity and infrequency of Pop Astronaut posts over the next few days. However, I do have a moment to draw your attention to The Pixar exhibit at MOMA.
This post from Luxo drew my attention to the amazing zoetrope that Pixar installed and […]

As I’ve said before, Bre Pettis is fun to eat lunch with and a great creative co-conspirator. Plus, he looks so dashing in his corderoy hat, don’t you think?

Microsoft is officially ending it’s support for Internet Explorer for the Mac. On behalf of beleaguered web designers everywhere, I implore you: please switch to Firefox. Thank you.
(via /.)

Reason 1,324,000 why you should be worried about the Bush Administration and the Patriot Act.
Are you now or have you ever written a paper about communism?
(via Boing Boing)
Update:Oops…might be a hoax: Updated Boing Boing story

People who talk during movies suck.
Over the past few years, I’ve gotten better at putting up with rude, antisocial behavior in movie theaters. It still pisses me off, but I try really hard not to become apoplectic when some dipshit decides to ruin it for everyone else by talking back to the screen or […]

Saw King Kong yesterday and was totally impressed. There haven’t been many films like this since the heyday of Spielberg and Lucasfilm; I spent the whole movie giggling, screaming, and even tearing up a little in the end. While not an art film by any stretch of the imagination, King Kong is a […]