Introducing BitterKittens.com!

Darlings! Kittens! Precious Unborn Fawns! We love you so much, we bought you your own house! Go take a look!

We’ll explain over there how the site works and what we expect it to become over time, but for right here, let us just say that we’re so very proud of the tight-knit community that sprung up around our little dog-and-pony show. But the front page of a daily pop culture/fashion web site isn’t always the best place for extended conversations about personal lives or even random silly side conversations. More and more, as the community of Bitter Kittens has grown and solidified, we’ve been in the uncomfortable position of having to herd or shepherd or even outright delete conversations because they were growing wildly off-topic. Understand, this isn’t because we’re control freaks, but because everything we know about maintaining and growing a site like ours tells us that the comments section below each post should be welcoming to anyone who wants to discuss whatever the topic of that post is.  When comments sections become coffee klatches, they tend to become insular, shutting out whoever came here just to rant about Rihanna’s latest outfit, or whatever.

Our weekly T Lounge posts weren’t going to cut it anymore, mainly because an unthreaded comments section becomes very difficult to keep track of after about 300 comments or so. Plus, our spam filters (which are an absolute necessity) prevent the posting of links or pictures, which, judging by the constant (hourly) need to clean out our spam filter, is something you little darlings want to do – a lot.  Instead, we’ve built a main community forum called (what else?) The T LOunge, where you get to hang out all day, every day, instead of being relegated to only chatting with each other on the weekends.

And finally – and probably most important of all – we’re just two unfrozen caveman bloggers, hanging out our little shingle and singing for our supper every day. We’re not an online magazine with a staff working under us (and we don’t want to be). We wish we could cover all the topics we’ve been asked to cover, but we’ve grown accustomed to sleeping, eating and pooping (among other things), and have found that constantly working around the clock gets in the way of that. And since our Kittens are such an articulate, intelligent, and erudite bunch, doesn’t it make the most sense to give them all the space to discuss the MANY things they want to discuss every day? Darlings, if we’re not writing a weekly recap of Scandal (which we’re not), then here’s your very own TV & Film forum where you get to be the star and write your own. And if you want to talk about makeup (a topic in which we freely admit we’re wholly under-educated) or street style or even want to ask which purse you should pair with your new shoes, doesn’t a Fashion & Beauty forum sound like just the place for it? Or a Books & Music one? Or a Food, Crafts & Decor one?

The point is, you guys are collectively producing ten times the material the two of us can manage every day. Why not organize that, give it its own space, and open things up to see how far you guys will take it? Because if you guys run with this the way we know you can, we’ll put up practically any kind of forum you ask for, within reason and as long as there’s a community big enough to support it. You want a dedicated Project Runway forum? Or an Outlander one? Or a comic book one? Or an LGBT one? Show us. Just about the only topic we don’t want discussed there is politics. You can go practically anywhere on the internet to yell at people who see the world differently than you do. Let’s not make this a space for that.

We plan on participating as much as we can, but to be perfectly honest, we have our own site to spew opinions on whatever pops into our heads. This one’s yours. Claim it, shape it, and invite all your friends to grow it. Registration takes ten seconds, or you can start commenting immediately if you’re signed into your Facebook or Twitter account. We’ve tried to make this as simple and accessible for you as we can. Now go have fun with it.

[Photo/Collage Credit: tomandlorenzo.com]